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![]() ![]() "[Facebook] has really started to lose its edge over here." – Jacob Robinson, 15 "If I was a bad guy, I’d use this LG. They do a very good job of cleaning up." – Lee Reiber April 6th, 2013 ![]() Justin Timberlake Made a Fortune Giving His Album Away Claire Suddath The suit-and-tie look works for Justin Timberlake. His album The 20/20 Experience sold 980,000 copies in its first week, according to Nielsen (NLSN) SoundScan. That’s 63 percent more copies than RCA (SNE), Timberlake’s record label, expected—and a figure most artists haven’t touched in years. Even Adele’s 21, the top-selling album of the past two years, enjoyed a mere third of Timberlake’s sales during its debut week. And what’s remarkable is how much of The 20/20 Experience’s sales can be credited to one of the recording industry’s biggest bêtes noires: the free online streaming service. Many of music’s biggest acts still haven’t warmed up to streaming services such as Rdio and Spotify. The Beatles aren’t on Spotify. Neither is AC/DC. When Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto debuted in 2011, the band refused to put the album on Spotify for four months, choosing instead to work with Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes and Amazon’s (AMZN) MP3 store. But Timberlake’s 20/20 is streaming for free everywhere. This week it took up six of the top 10 most played songs on Rdio. On Spotify it was streamed nearly 7.7 million times, making it one of the most popular albums ever to appear on the service. It also became the most preordered and the fastest-selling album in iTunes’ history. That might be because a week before 20/20 was released, RCA streamed the album in its entirety on iTunes. ITunes started previewing albums in 2011 with Red Hot Chili Peppers’ I’m With You. After the free stream, digital sales of its first single, The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie, doubled. I’m With You then debuted at No. 2 on Billboard and sold more than 200,000 copies in its first week. Since then, everyone from Soundgarden to David Bowie has experimented with what’s essentially a controlled leak. “It’s sort of ironic that the company that’s streaming albums first is still a digital download site,” says Mark Mulligan, a digital-music analyst. “But that’s because iTunes has 400 million active credit-card accounts and Spotify doesn’t.” In many ways, streaming services have replaced traditional radio—they’re destinations where listeners can test an album before they buy it for their smartphone library. Free online access has become part of record companies’ marketing strategies. But there’s evidence that streaming may eventually replace MP3 downloads altogether, which has already happened in Sweden, where more than 90 percent of digital music is streamed rather than downloaded. “But that’s a long, long time from now for the U.S. and most of Europe,” says Mulligan. Regardless, album sales have remained more or less flattened over the past year, according to data released by the Recording Industry Association of America earlier this week. Meanwhile, revenue from subscription and ad-supported streaming services rose 59 percent last year, from $360 million all the way up to $571 million. If streaming services do take over, the music industry could face a major problem. So far the services generate little money for artists. Pandora (P) claims to pay major artists sizable incomes, but Spotify pays less then half a cent per listen, the New York Times reported. That means that from the 7.7 million listens of The 20/20 Experience, Timberlake will earn just $32,000. No wonder he and Jay-Z are spending their summer on a giant tour. http://www.businessweek.com/articles...his-album-away ![]() Online Music Licensing Revenues Pass Radio for First Time Google Play and Xbox licensing agreements help digital revenues jump 32.2% in 2012, from £39.1m to £51.7m Josh Halliday British songwriters, including acts such as Ed Sheeran and Calvin Harris, netted a record total of £51.7m in UK royalties from digital music services last year, as online licensing revenues eclipsed radio for the first time. New licensing agreements with Google Play, Microsoft Xbox and other online players helped UK digital revenues soar 32.2% in 2012, from £39.1m in 2011. Digital music players are now the biggest single source of income for songwriters in the UK, having overtaken radio last year after previously eclipsing live events and pubs, according to the UK royalties body PRS for Music. The advent of downloads and streaming services, such as Apple iTunes and Spotify, has more than doubled UK online licensing revenues, from £23.3m in 2008. However, the amount recouped from live events hit a bum note last year as the London Olympics stole the show. Fewer big gigs, including no Glastonbury and the Olympic takeover of London, saw royalties from live events fall 14.2% year on year, to £19.3m. The return of Glastonbury and the Rolling Stones to Hyde Park this summer is likely to boost the figures this year. The global success of British artists, including Adele and Mumford & Sons, helped recoup £180.1m in international licensing revenues last year – down 4% on 2011, but still the biggest source of income for UK music creators. In its full-year results on Thursday, PRS for Music said royalties revenue was at £641.8m in 2012, up 1.2% on the previous year. Plummeting physical sales saw royalties from DVDs fall 18.7% year on year, to £10.9m, and newspaper and physical cover mounts – popular a decade ago – down 35.7% to £0.9m. Another formerly lucrative source of royalties income, music ringtones, has evaporated since 2008. The value of revenue from music ringtones for mobile phones has fallen to £900,000 from £5.7m five years ago. Robert Ashcroft, the PRS for Music chief executive, said: "Copyright remains fundamental to the continued success of our members both at home and abroad, while the ever-increasing importance of licensed online services, such as iTunes and Spotify, underlines the value of music to the internet economy." http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...nue-pass-radio ![]() HBO: 'Game of Thrones' Piracy is a Compliment James Hibberd How does HBO feel about having the most pirated show on TV? Not too bad, apparently. HBO programming president Michael Lombardo spoke to EW about the rampant illegal downloading of the network’s fantasy hit drama Game of Thrones, which returns for its third season tonight. The show’s second season was recently released to record-setting DVD sales for the network. But in December, Thrones topped another chart that is far more dubious — Thrones ranked as the most illegally downloaded TV series for 2012. “I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it is a compliment of sorts,” Lombardo said. “The demand is there. And it certainly didn’t negatively impact the DVD sales. [Piracy is] something that comes along with having a wildly successful show on a subscription network.” The show is currently, on a per-season basis, the network’s top money-earner despite widespread piracy of the show, the executive confirmed. “If you look at aggregate of international and DVD sales — which are the two revenue streams we look at since we’re not selling it domestically on another platform — yes, absolutely, in terms of shows we have on now,” Lombardo said. In fact, one of Lombardo’s issues with piracy is a creative one. The executive expressed concern that illegal copies can be of poor quality when the Thrones team takes pride in lavishly producing the show. “One of my worries is about the copies [downloaders are] seeing,” Lombardo said. “The production values of this show are so incredible. So I’m hoping that in the purloined different generation of cuts that the show is holding up.” Still, Lombardo noted that HBO’s policy remains firmly anti-piracy — “We obviously are a subscription service so as a general proposition so we try to stop piracy when we see it happen, particularly on a systematic basis when people are selling pirated versions,” he said. But he also added, perhaps referring to casual individual-user downloading, “No, we haven’t sent out the Game of Thrones police.” According to one estimate, Thrones‘ second season finale was illegally downloaded 4.3 million times worldwide last year. That’s quite a large number considering the show averages around 10 million viewers across all HBO platforms. Heavy Thrones piracy is likely due to several factors, such as the popularity of the show among young men (the show skews 58 percent male and the average fan is 41 years old) and HBO’s current digital distribution strategy. Though HBO subscribers can watch Thrones online via the network’s HBO GO service, you can only subscribe to HBO in the first place through a traditional cable or satellite provider and many younger TV fans are opting to “cut the cord.” A top HBO executive recently hinted that the network is contemplating a digital-only subscription option, a move that would likely reduce the amount of piracy of its shows. http://insidetv.ew.com/2013/03/31/hbo-thrones-piracy/ ![]() Generation Mooch? Why 20-Somethings Have a Hard Time Paying for Content Eliza Kern Having grown up with a wealth of news and information at our fingertips for free, my generation of 20-somethings is heading into adulthood without much experience paying for that content. The question is, will content providers ever turn us into paying customers? I distinctly remember learning how to read, and it wasn’t from a book or in a kindergarten classroom. It was sitting at the breakfast table with my Dad every morning, when we would read the weather section of the Washington Post. We checked to see if it was hot in Arizona (it usually was) and cold in Canada (it always was). For this reason I’ve always felt an affection for the DC-area newspaper, and I continue to read some of its blogs and politics coverage to this day. But when the newspaper rolls out a paywall this summer, it’s doubtful I’ll start paying for access. I can still log in using my parents’ subscription, but if they stop paying? I might owe that newspaper my literacy, but with the rest of the internet at my fingertips, it’s still not enough to get me to pay. There was an excellent post on Buzzfeed earlier this week about HBO Go passwords, in which John Herrman surveyed everyone in his office and asked how most of them access HBO, a content provider that only gives digital access to cable subscribers. The responses evoked a trend I see among my own 20-something friends, which is that hardly anyone actually subscribes to HBO. The anecdote struck me as one that perfectly illustrates how much of my generation is building habits around digital content and what exactly we’re willing to pay for. We’ve grown up with a wealth of news and video available for free on the internet, and for many of us, we also have access to high-quality content through parents or friends with subscriptions to services like Netflix or the New York Times. We built media habits around this content from an early age, but we were never forced to actually pay for content. And there are a lot of us. Will those companies be able to convince my generation that their content is special or unique — and that one day, we should pay for it ourselves? Content for free, at our fingertips Online video - streaming video - people looking at computer - teens on laptopIn some ways, it’s pretty obvious why my generation is reluctant to pay for content — it’s because we’ve never had to. I’m 22, and I took typing lessons in fourth grade, had computer classes on how to do Google searches and make Powerpoints in middle school, and joined Facebook when it launched in my early days of high school. Until I left for college, my family’s desktop computer was set to open to the New York Times homepage. (At the time, it was free for everyone.) My peers and I learned how to write research papers in high school by citing sources online and by not copying things from Wikipedia, and most of us read Hamlet with the assistance of Sparknotes.com. We discovered music on YouTube, and a few lucky kids got smartphones in high school, which were ubiquitous by the time we hit college. My generation has grown up connected to the internet, and we’ve never been at a loss for finding news and information on the web — for free. Families have been sharing physical newspapers and televisions for years, of course, but when my parents’ generation left home for college and then grad school or jobs, they had to call up their local newspaper or cable or phone providers if they wanted any of these services. Now, there’s less incentive than ever to leave Mom and Dad’s family cell phone plan, and it seems that for many of my peers, the same applies to digital subscriptions to newspapers, magazines, and cable subscriptions. Out of curiosity, I asked about 15 of my friends (most of whom are recent college graduates in varying levels of employment) what content they personally pay to consume. The answer from most of them — minus a few New Yorker-subscriber outliers — was not much. But when I asked everyone what they read or watch using a parent’s (or a friend’s parent’s) subscriptions, the answers went way up. Almost everyone had access to Netflix, and a good number read the news on paywalled websites like the New York Times, and soon, The Washington Post. But when I asked if anyone would pay for this content themselves if their parents stopped paying, hardly anyone said they would. The only media that most people said they would pay for was Netflix, and a few said they would subscribe to avoid paywalls on their local newspapers. My friends of course aren’t representative of the population at large, but as mainly upper-middle class college graduates, they’re the demographic combination that’s currently most likely to pay for news online, according to a 2010 Pew study. While most of my friends said they read the news and watch video on a regular basis through their parents’ subscriptions, most said if they lost free access, they’d probably go somewhere else rather than pay. That might not be to a place that offers the same quality, but at least it would be free. As one friend told me, “If it’s online, it feels like it should be free.” Finding solutions to get us to pay — one day Girls Lena DunhamNow, it’s not necessarily surprising that 22-year olds aren’t clamoring for financial advice on retirement from the Wall Street Journal or picking up the tab on multiple subscriptions when the youth unemployment rate remains at 13.1 percent. Many people don’t have parents who subscribe to anything, and are perfectly content with the free content on the web and videos on YouTube. And for those who do, mooching a Netflix subscription still pales in comparison to the cost of cell phone plans 20-something share with families. Plus, my age group has always made up a fairly low percentage of newspaper readers anyway. Presumably the value we place on news will rise when we have kids and own houses and spend a few more years paying taxes. It’s also possible that we’ll have to look beyond just newspapers and magazines to find media services for which my generation will pay. While I personally pay for a variety of news subscriptions, Twitter remains my most valuable source of information and I would probably pay more for access to that feed than anything else. Instagram might not be the future of news and information, but it’s fair to say a lot of people would probably pay for that. HBO has clearly decided that letting us mooch off subscriptions to access Girls is worth it, since one day some of us will grow up, get jobs, and subscribe. But hoping and praying, while perhaps the defining media business strategy of this age, is not a particularly compelling long-term bet. Perhaps it should consider low-cost subscriptions meant for recent graduates, that would get us used to paying something but at rates more in line with our typical income levels. Maybe it means creating or structuring content specifically for younger readers and their digital tastes, or adopting micro-payments that remind us more of purchasing an iTunes song than a year-long subscription. But even if the content providers move in this direction, will my generation ever pay for quality media? We have grown up with the world at our fingertips on the web, mainly for free. And we’re taking those habits and assumptions with us into adulthood. http://paidcontent.org/2013/03/29/ge...g-for-content/ ![]() Employees Still Use Online File Sharing, Even if Companies Prohibit its Use Employees will often bypass a corporate firewall with a hotspot, survey finds Lucas Mearian More than 75% of corporations have policies that prohibit the use of consumer online file sharing and collaboration tools, yet employee use of the services is still rampant, according to an Enterprise Strategy Group survey. "The thing is, IT had control of the data in the past. Now, it has only been three years since this (OFS) market has taken off and now data is everywhere," said Terri McClure, who spoke at SNW here Tuesday. McClure cited an ESG survey completed late last year of 499 IT personnel throughout the U.S., all of whom had some control over corporate file management. Of those, 77% said they had a "formal" policy or "strongly discourage" or outright "prohibit" the use of online file sharing services. Only 22% said they had no formal policy against the use of such services. When asked if end users in their company are using non-IT approved OFS services, 36% said yes, 34% said they suspect they are, and 28% said they do not believe end users are using their own services. One percent said they didn't know. Even if employees are physically prohibited by a company's network from using a consumer file sharing service, McClure said it's not unusual for them to link to their favorite service via a Wi-Fi hotspot or a conference room network. "I'm not going to say everyone has violators ... but boy, this rogue use is pretty rampant," she said. "IT is really going to have to address this challenge," McClure continued. "If one of your employees leaves the company and they have a personal OFS account, the data leaves with them. It's the default solution. They don't even think about it." Once gone from the company, few end users even consider wiping corporate data from their mobile devices, online backup or file sharing services, she added. In only a few years the market for OFS services has exploded, with dozens of vendors offering their own flavor. The de facto standard for a consumer service has become Dropbox, mainly because of its ease of use, McClure said. Almost a third of the companies surveyed by ESG said they had deployed a corporate file sharing service, and another 22% said they were considering deploying one within a year in order to stem the tide of consumer product use. Eleven percent indicated they were considering deploying a corporate file sharing service in the next two years, and 17% indicated they had no interest in it. ESG last year tested 13 corporate file sharing applications, and the most common comment from the seven end users and three administrators who tested them was, "this wasn't as easy as Dropbox," McClure said. However, once the evaluators became familiar with the corporate OFS systems, they were surprised by the advanced capabilities. "They said, 'I realize how much more productive I can be because it does so much more than Dropbox does,' " McClure said. "So training is really important ... because there's so much more that can be done when it comes to workflow and security." Companies already using a business-class OFS service were asked what enterprise services they use less because of it. The top answer was their enterprise file sharing or general-purpose file servers, followed by NAS servers and then a VPN. "One of the biggest cost-savings opportunities you're looking at when deploying a private or public file sharing service is the ability to get rid of your VPN," she said. "This stuff will have a material impact on business. If you can remove friction on file sharing, you can speed collaboration." https://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...hibit_its_use_ ![]() The Hollywood Reporter Apologizes to Deadline Parent Company, Settles Lawsuit Lucas Shaw The Hollywood Reporter admitted to stealing code from Penske Media Corporation, parent company of rival publications Deadline Hollywood and Variety, as part of a recent settlement the two companies reached to end their year-and-a-half-old legal dispute. PMC sued Reporter parent company Prometheus Global Media in September of 2011, alleging that The Hollywood Reporter engaged in "outright theft of intellectual property, including but not limited to whole articles, content, software, source code and designs." When PMC filed the suit, it was seeking more than $5 million in damages, accusing THR of lifting source code from PMC's site TVLine.com. The two parties settled on $162,500 as well as some other pieces that have not been made public, according to an individual with knowledge of the suit. "The TVline.com issue was the result of an error by an outside consultant, nothing more," a spokesperson for Prometheus said in a statement to TheWrap. "As soon as Penske notified the company, the portion of site at issue was taken down. Shortly thereafter, an apology was given. The amount of the settlement speaks for itself." In a separate joint statement issued to TheWrap on Friday, Prometheus admitted to copying source code from TVLine.com and both Prometheus and The Hollywood Reporter apologized to PMC. Prometheus apologized under the Prometheus Global Media banner; parent company Guggenheim Partners, an investment bank that controls more than $160 billion in assets, recently folded Prometheus’ assets into a newly launched company, Guggenheim Digital Media. “It’s never good when you’re admitting theft,” Penske told TheWrap, declining to comment further. Penske will continue to monitor THR for signs of infringement, an individual with knowledge of the settlement told TheWrap. That same individual said the dispute lagged for more than a year because of the difficulty in litigating the “hot news doctrine,” which restricts news organizations from unconstrained lifting of reporting done by competitors. http://www.thewrap.com/media/article...-lawsuit-83241 ![]() Prenda Law's Attorneys Take The Fifth Rather Than Answer Judge Wright's Questions Ken. Today the Prenda Law enterprise encountered an extinction-level event. Faced with a federal judge's demand that they explain their litigation conduct, Prenda Law's attorney principals — and one paralegal — invoked their right to remain silent under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. As a matter of individual prudence, that may have been the right decision. But for the nationwide Prenda Law enterprise, under whatever name or guise or glamour, it spelled doom. Hail, Hail, The Gang's All Here The crowd gathered early outside of the courtroom of United States District Judge Otis D. Wright II. As before, the spectators included journalists, former Prenda defendants and their lawyers, law clerks and externs, interested citizens, and Electronic Frontier Foundation activists. The little crowd went awkward-party-foul silent when a team of lawyers and nervous-looking men in suits filed into the courtroom. Some of us glanced at the chart that attorney Morgan Pietz created to see if we could match faces. We soon saw that we could. Bets regarding who would show up in response to Judge Wright's Order to Show Cause were won and lost with some good-natured cursing. A swarm of attorneys quickly checked in with the court clerk and took their places. On one side, attorneys Morgan Pietz and Nicholas Ranallo looked calm. They had boxes of materials they wouldn't need, and notes they wouldn't have to consult. On the other side of the room, eight attorneys prepared to answer Judge Wright's questions, mostly for naught. In the gallery, Brett Gibbs — unhappy witness at the last hearing before Judge Wright — sat looking sallow and grim. Paul and Peter, the Hansmeier brothers, sat together, looking ridiculously young and out-of-place. Paul Hansmeier's face was beefy-red. John Steele looked conspicuously slick and immaculate in an impeccable suit, like a corporate executive in a bad Robocop sequel. Paul Duffy, Mark Lutz, and Angela Van Den Hemel stared straight ahead. Not With A Whimper, But A Bang At a few minutes past the hour the door to chambers slammed open and Judge Wright marched out and took the bench. Before he sat he strode back and forth once behind his chair, surveying the gallery and running his tongue over his teeth. Then he sat, and called the case. Attorneys announced their appearances — Brett Gibbs, Paul Hansmeier, John Steele, Paul Duffy, Angela Van Den Hemel, and Prenda Law all had counsel, but Peter Hansmeier and Mark Lutz did not. When Paul Hansmeier's attorney announced Mr. Hansmeier was present, Judge Wright asked where he was. Paul Hansmeier stood. "Front row," ordered Judge Wright, stabbing a finger at the first row of benches behind Hansmeier's attorney. John Steele received the same treatment, and sat next to Hansmeier. One of the attorneys pointed out that Peter Hansmeier and Mark Lutz were present but not represented. "Welcome, sir," Judge Wright said to Peter Hansmeier, not entirely convincingly. "Is there an Alan Cooper — any Alan Cooper present?" asked Judge Wright, referring to allegations that Prenda Law had stolen the identity of a Minnesota caretaker to serve as an officer of dummy clients. No such person was present. Judge Wright wasted no time. He announced that he was "pleasantly surprised" that the people he had summoned had arrived. "It should be clear this court's focus has shifted dramatically from litigation of intellectual property rights to attorney misconduct — such misconduct as brings discredit to the profession," he began sternly. "I have questions for those present — including Mr. Steele. Mr. Steele can choose to answer those questions, or not." Steele's attorney rose and said, in light of the "concerns" that Judge Wright had raised at the March 11 hearing, and "serious allegations" made by Judge Wright, Mr. Steele would be invoking his Fifth Amendment right to decline to answer questions. I expected a murmur in the courtroom, but there was a silence like after a thunderclap. "The word fraud was used," said Steele's lawyer. "It should have been," shot back Judge Wright. Steele's lawyer gamely continued, saying that Steele was also precluded from answering by the attorney-client privilege. "You think there is a difference between these clients and Mr. Steele?" demanded Judge Wright, referring to allegations that the Prenda Law plaintiffs were mere dummy entities concealing attorney interests in the cases. Steele's lawyer said there was a real difference, but Judge Wright was clearly unconvinced. He made it clear, though, that Steele didn't have to answer questions. "He doesn't have to answer if he thinks it may incriminate him," said Judge Wright. "I'm not saying that the answers would incriminate him," protested Steele's lawyer, thus muddying the question of whether his client was entitled to take the Fifth, "but you leave my client with no choice." Judge Wright grew steadily and visibly more outraged. "I want to know if some of my conjecture is accurate — and the only way to know is to have the principals here and ask them questions. This is an opportunity for them to protect themselves," he said. But Steele's lawyer confirmed his client would exercise his right to remain silent. Attorneys for Paul Hansmeier, Paul Duffy, and Angela Van Den Hemel confirmed their clients, too, would invoke their rights to remain silent. Judge Wright did not — unless I missed it — confirm whether Peter Hansmeier or Mark Lutz would answer questions. An Opportunity To Be Heard Heather Rosing, appearing for Paul Duffy, Angela Van Den Hemel, and Prenda Law, rose and asked Judge Wright for an opportunity to present "about a half hour" of argument on the points in his Order to Show Cause. Look: when you are a lawyer, representing a client, you have to stand up. You have to hold your ground even in the face of a furious federal judge. When a judge is yelling at you, however unsettling it is, you have to hold fast and remember you are there to represent the interests of your client against the terrible power of the court. Heather Rosing stood up, and has my admiration, whatever I think of her clients. Judge Wright was uninterested in hearing legal argument, as opposed to testimony or evidence. "My clients have a right to a reasonable opportunity to be heard," Ms. Rosing protested. "Excuse me?" thundered Judge Wright, probably thinking — not unreasonably — that Ms. Rosing's clients could have filed briefs in advance to address any legal arguments they had, and that Ms. Rosing's clients have been evading questions for months. Judge Wright began to count off the questions he wanted answered. "I'm looking for facts," he said. He wanted to know who directs Prenda Law's litigation efforts, who makes its decisions, whether there is another Alan Cooper, and what happens with the money Prenda Law makes from settlements. Ms. Rosing answered (wisely, and properly) that she could not personally testify to those things. Why, Judge Wright demanded, did Prenda Law conceal its attorneys' financial interest in the cases? "There's no evidence that they have an interest," Ms. Rosing protested. "Excuse me?" Judge Wright boomed even louder. Were there windows, they would have rattled. "Have you read Paul Hansmeier's deposition?" he demanded, referring to the bizarre deposition in which Paul Hansmeier failed to explain Prenda Law's shadowy owners or flow of funds. "I have," Ms. Rosing said, but stood her ground. Ms. Rosing suggested that she might file a brief addressing her arguments. "Do so," said Judge Wright acidly. "We're done," he said abruptly, and stormed off the bench. The whole hearing took about fifteen minutes. Death Comes For Prenda Law The significance of today's hearing cannot be overstated. Yesterday I wrote about the tools Judge Wright had at his disposal to sanction or otherwise punish Prenda Law's principals. It appears to me he likely won't invoke his contempt power, but the other remedies — his inherent sanctions power, and referrals to state bars and to the U.S. Attorney's Office for criminal investigation — remain available. I expect a detailed written order. By invoking their Fifth Amendment rights, Prenda Law principals John Steele, Paul Hansmeier, Paul Duffy, and paralegal Angela Van Den Hemel have avoided incriminating themselves. In light of the evidence adduced — evidence that Prenda Law may have created sham entities to conceal its lawyers' interest in litigation, and may have misled courts across the country — that was very likely the smart thing to do. I might have advised it myself if I were representing them. With respect to their individual exposure to potential criminal consequences, it stops things from getting worse, which is often an attorney's first task. I'm a criminal defense attorney. I cherish and support the Fifth Amendment. Its invocation here was completely lawful. But its invocation will have catastrophic consequences for the Prenda Law enterprise, which cannot possibly continue. When they appeared today, John Steele, Paul Hansmeier, and Paul Duffy were not merely individuals facing the overwhelming power of the state. They were also officers of the court and, according to the testimony of Brett Gibbs, the very attorneys who directed nationwide litigation for the Prenda Law enterprise. Judge Wright ordered them to answer for the conduct of that enterprise in his court, as he had the right and power to do. Their invocation of their Fifth Amendment rights in the face of that order is utterly unprecedented in my experience as a lawyer. In effect, the responsible lawyers for a law firm conducting litigation before a court have refused to explain that litigation to the court on the grounds that doing so could expose them to criminal prosecution. However well grounded in the individual rights of Steele, Hansmeier, and Duffy, the invocation eviscerates their credibility as lawyers and the credibility of Prenda Law as an enterprise in every court across the country. I expect that defense attorneys will file notice of if in every state and federal case Prenda Law has brought, through whatever guise or cutout. The message will be stark: the attorneys directing this litigation just took the Fifth rather than answer another judge's questions about their conduct in this litigation campaign. I expect federal and state judges across the country will take notice and begin their own inquiries. Moreover, Prenda's lawyers may face adverse consequences from the invocation in Alan Cooper's counterclaim against them. A defendant's exercise of the right to remain silent can't be used against him or her in a criminal case, but it often can in a civil case. Some inquiries will come quite quickly. In the Northern District of California, where Prenda Law's Paul Duffy is fighting Morgan Pietz's demand for attorney fees in a case Prenda Law tried to dismiss, Paul Duffy has asked to appear by telephone, but Judge Edward Chen has rejected the request and ordered Duffy to appear in person on April 18, 2013. Duffy will once again have to decide whether to assert his Fifth Amendment rights. Moreover, he likely now has an irreconcilable conflict with his putative client. He may seek to withdraw before April 18. The consequences for the individuals behind Prenda Law may arrive slowly — particularly by the standards of Twitter and anxious blogs. But they will come — and they may come from many directions at once. Prenda Law may still be standing. But it's dead. http://www.popehat.com/2013/04/02/pr...hts-questions/ ![]() BitTorrent Site IsoHunt Demands Jury Trial David Kravets The operator of the popular file-sharing service isoHunt is demanding a federal appeals court grant it a jury trial, two weeks after the court declared it a massive copyright scofflaw and said it’s on the hook for what could be millions of dollars in damages payable to Hollywood studios. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Gary Fung and said the Motion Picture Association of America automatically won on the merits of the case, without a trial. The decision marked the first time a federal appeals court had ruled against a BitTorrent search engine. “Fung submits that, in a serious miscarriage of justice in a landmark case, he has been wrongfully denied trial by jury and found liable by judges on disputed facts through application of erroneous legal standards,” Fung’s attorney, Ira Rothken, wrote the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals late Wednesday. In a bid to acquire a jury trial, Rothken asked the appeals court to rehear the case with a larger panel of judges, in what is known as an en banc panel. The appeals court had ruled that isoHunt, and Fung’s related sites, TorrenTBox and Podtropolis, unlawfully pointed the way to free movies, music, videogames and software that were copyrighted and not authorized for Fung to help distribute. The court said Fung had so-called “red-flag” knowledge of the infringement, and didn’t take enough steps to rectify it. Rothken demanded a trial, saying Fung’s activities are no different than Google, for example, which also hosts links to infringing material. “No infringing materials touch Fung’s websites; he has no capacity to investigate or to police the internet,” Rothken wrote. Programmer Bram Cohen released the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol in 2001, and its efficient way of transferring files has become the method of choice for illicit, peer-to-peer sharing of copyright-protected content that sites like Canada’s isoHunt and Europe’s The Pirate Bay have capitalized upon. The San Francisco-based appeals court ruled that, unlike the search engine Google, Fung does not deserve protection under U.S. copyright laws for hosting links to pirated content. That’s because Fung’s business model, the court said, was designed for the primary purpose of copyright infringement, with the majority of links on his search engines pointing to unauthorized, copyright-protected content. Fung claimed it was not he, but his millions of users, who fed his sites with links and were redistributing them without authorization from the rights holders. Fung asserted that he was merely a search engine, like Google, that was protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s so-called safe-harbor provision that permits internet companies to escape liability for illegal content posted by their users if it is promptly removed at the request of the rights holder. Fung claimed he removed files upon request. The appeals court did not see it his way, ruling the safe harbor under the DMCA does not exist for sites that “induce” unlawful file sharing. The court noted that isoHunt had prominently featured a list of “Box Office Movies” of the 20 highest-grossing movies in U.S. theaters, and also hosted links to where the movies were being seeded by BitTorrent users. Once somebody begins downloading the link, they also begin seeding the file to others in what is known as a “swarm.” The court said that Fung also posted messages on the site asking users to upload torrents of copyright-protected films, and he urged file-sharers to download files when visiting his site — which profits via advertising. Fung’s attorneys suggested that some of his speech was taken out of context, and wants a jury to decide. “Liability based on messages culled from digital storage that are remote from any specific infringements at issue will severely chill free speech. The effect of decisions herein is to make sarcasm directed at copyright enforcement or statements in support of file-sharing a reason for later imposition of liability,” Rothken wrote. Links to unauthorized content can still be acquired via Fung’s websites, despite a lower court judge having ordered Fung to filter out copyrighted content via keywords. Absent a trial, Fung is likely to face harsh monetary damages when the case returns to Los Angeles federal court, where Fung was initially found liable in 2009. The U.S. Copyright Act allows damages of up to $150,000 per infringement. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...demands-trial/ ![]() Announcing Nightweb What is it? Nightweb connects your Android device to an anonymous, peer-to-peer social network. You can write posts and share photos, and your followers will retrieve them using BitTorrent running over the I2P anonymous network. It is still experimental and not well-tested, but the goal is to have uncensorable, untraceable communication and file-sharing on mobile devices. How does it work? When you launch the app, it starts up I2P in the background and creates your user account, which is simply a key stored on your device. When you edit your profile or write a post, it saves them and begins sharing them in a torrent. Anyone following you will join the swarm to download your content. When you update anything, they are notified and grab whatever is new. Read more about the Nightweb protocol. How does it avoid spam? You only retrieve content from users you favorite, as well as users they favorite. This "friends-of-friends" model helps you find new content, but avoids the chaos of a completely free-for-all metadata system like Gnutella's. By sharing your metadata in a torrent, it also avoids BitTorrent's weakest link -- the need to have a central server to search and browse content. How do I get followers? For users to find you initially, you will need to give them a link to your page. To get your link, just go to your user page and hit the familiar Android share button. It looks like a normal HTTP link so it will be easier to share on the web, but when a user with Nightweb installed tries to tap it, they'll be able to open it in the app and retrieve your content anonymously. Here's what the links look like: http://nightweb.net/#type=user&userh...fnypyzbo53qtzb Why Android? The goal of Nightweb is to be a "killer app" for anonymous networking; to make it a more mainstream technology. With this in mind, it is important to go where the users are going, which is mobile. Android is the best mobile OS for this, because (1) it allows generic, long-running background services, (2) it is API-compatible with Java so I2P runs on it perfectly, and (3) it allows sideloading apps, so the app can always be distributed. Why Clojure? Clojure is more fun to code in than Java, which is an important quality for projects I am not paid to work on. The Android API and the I2P project are written in Java, but Clojure interops with them easily. Its biggest pragmatic benefit is that it simplifies concurrency. This isn't a big deal right now, since Clojure is primarily being used on the frontend, but it will pay big dividends later if I need to rewrite parts of the I2P backend. http://nightweb.net/ ![]() How U.S. Copyright Law Holds Back Tech Researchers Aja Romano Last week, the Daily Dot and the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture explored the detrimental effects of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) on artists, creators, teachers, fans and other participants of online media. Hard on the heels of that discussion, Slate draws attention to another chilling effect of the restrictive U.S. copyright law: abiding by the DMCA could be actively harming your computer. Let's say the CD you just bought has interactive computer content. You put it in your computer, the software installs... and you suddenly have a computer full of security flaws and invisible malware. In order for the average computer user to know about the existence of a security issue with their hardware or software, like CDs that install spyware on your computer, someone has to research that issue, discover the security flaw and make the public aware of it. But what if the research itself is rendered illegal because that CD you bought was copyright-protected? Under the current protections afforded by the DMCA, researchers and technicians can break into and decrypt the data stored on otherwise copyrighted media, but only if the hardware contains encrypted, secure data, and the methods for extracting it also involve encryption. It's an allowance so narrow as to be useless for most technological researchers—at least according to Princeton computer science professor Edward Felten. Felten is also the Chief Technologist for the Federal Trade Commission, and he's not happy that confusing DMCA restrictions once waylaid him and a sharp-eyed grad student from publishing their findings about Sony's spyware-ridden software. In his Slate column, Felten describes numerous instances where the DMCA significantly hampered research publication efforts, either through the overreaching of companies who wanted to use the DMCA as "a go-to strategy" for dealing with "embarrassing revelations about their products," or through judicial confusion surrounding the law itself. It's not the research itself that's hard; it's the fact that publishing the research usually requires confessing to having thoroughly explored and experimented with copyright-protected equipment—methods that the DMCA deems illegal because they could hypothetically be used for acts of copyright infringement. The DMCA attempts to curtail the "circumvention" of copyright management by preventing people from tampering with technology, digital services, hardware and other media formats. It restricts what you can do with the DVDs, smart phones, CDs and other digitally formatted media that you purchase. For example, you might want to take your new iPhone and switch it to another service provider; but even though you've purchased it, you can't "unlock" most phones, tablets, e-readers or other devices in order to transfer service to them without breaking your contract—and the law. As for ripping your newly-minted Blu-ray and burning a copy for a friend? Don't even think about it. Ripping your DVD is generally illegal under the DMCA unless you're using a clip for your academic work, remixes or fanvids, educational purposes, nonprofit work, law enforcement, documentary filmmaking or other fair-use activities. Every two years the Library of Congress grants or renews a limited number of exemptions to the anti-circumvention clauses of the DMCA, but the law is applied unevenly across the board. For instance, in 2012, the Library granted an exemption for "jailbreaking" phones—installing software from sources outside the approved stores for your devices. However the exemption, bizarrely, only applies to phones, not tablets, video game consoles or other devices, and "unlocking" them is still illegal. Felten similarly describes the narrowly applied exemption for technological research as "so narrowly defined as to be all but useless:" [T]here is a 116-word section of the Act titled “Permissible Acts of Encryption Research,” and it appears to have been written without consulting any researchers. There may be someone, somewhere, who has benefited from this exemption, but it fails to protect almost all of the relevant research. It didn’t protect Alex and me, because we were investigating spyware that didn’t rely on the mathematical operations involved in encryption. Because of legal fears about the scope of the DMCA, Felten and student Alex Halderman delayed publishing their research until they were scooped by a bolder researcher. Of course, this was in 2005, and exemptions have since been evaluated and renewed four times over; but the narrow scope of "encryption research" as defined by use of mathematical algorithms has yet to be expanded as of 2012—even though the scope of what falls under illegal "circumvention" of technology is quite broad, encompassing "avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating or otherwise impairing a technological measure." In other words, all the things a savvy researcher might need to do to discover invasive code or otherwise harmful computer software. Felten implies that the DMCA has discouraged his peers from researching proprietary software and other copyrighted technology. If true, it implies a decreased level of supervision over copyright holders due to a lack of researchers who can face down the DMCA in order to be watchdogs. Indeed, in 2000, Felten had to sue for the right to publish his research after DMCA restrictions initially prevented him. Not everyone has the money to brave an expensive legal battle in order to hold corporations accountable for the code they create. Felten urges for the lifting of restrictions for researchers along with other much-needed exemptions like the ability to unlock cell phones: While we’re tinkering with [exemptions], let’s create a safe harbor for the researchers who can be our early warning system against unpleasant surprises in the next generation of technologies. Felten describes this as an easy thing to do. But even if the Library of Congress is ready to listen to advocates for broader exemptions, they won't decide whether to expand the provisions until late 2014—at which point, the debate will begin all over again in preparation for the next set of exemption renewals in 2016. https://mashable.com/2013/04/03/dmca...tech-research/ ![]() A Setback for Resellers of Digital Products Ben Sisario A federal judge in New York has dealt a blow to the nascent business of reselling digital goods like music and e-books, ruling that a small company’s secondary market for digital music infringes on the copyrights controlled by record companies. The company, ReDigi, opened an online platform in late 2011 that allowed people to upload and resell songs they had bought from online retailers like Apple’s iTunes. ReDigi said its technology deleted the original file once a copy was put up for sale, but the major record labels were skeptical, and Capitol Records sued in early 2012. The case has been closely watched as a test of whether the first sale doctrine — the legal principle that someone who owns a copy of a copyrighted work, like a book or album, is free to resell it — can be applied to digital goods. In an order dated Saturday, Judge Richard J. Sullivan of United States District Court in Manhattan ruled that ReDigi was liable for copyright infringement, and seemed entirely unmoved by ReDigi’s arguments. “The first sale defense does not cover this any more than it covered the sale of cassette recordings of vinyl records in a bygone era,” he wrote. In sometimes wry language — one footnote mentions that ReDigi compared its system to the “Star Trek” transporter and “Willy Wonka’s teleportation device, Wonkavision” — Judge Sullivan ruled that ReDigi’s system infringed on Capitol’s reproduction rights because it transmitted an unauthorized copy of the file over the Internet. In a statement, ReDigi said it was “disappointed” by the ruling and would appeal it, but noted that the decision applied to its original technology, not its updated version, ReDigi 2.0. “While ReDigi 2.0, 3.0, or 4.0 may ultimately be deemed to comply with copyright law,” the judge wrote, “it is clear that ReDigi 1.0 does not.” Damages for the infringement will be considered at a later date. Capitol Records did not respond to a request for comment. Although ReDigi is a small player in the world of digital media, the case has been watched for the effect it may have on two giants, Apple and Amazon, which have applied for patents for secondary digital markets but have not put them in place. In addition to record companies, book authors have spoken out against the idea of a digital secondary market, saying that the presence of a “used” but perfect digital copy of a book would cause prices to crash. Among those supporting reselling digital goods are libraries, because it could make more material publicly available. The decision came less than two weeks after the Supreme Court upheld the first sale doctrine in the case of Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, about a student who was importing and selling textbooks that he had bought at a lower price overseas. That case concerned different aspects of the rule, and legal experts said it did not apply strictly in the ReDigi case. But digital rights advocates worried the decision effectively banned an online secondary market. “The decision was very one-sided,” said Jason M. Schultz, an assistant clinical professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. “There needs to be some way to resell if we believe the Supreme Court that first sale is important.” https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/b...tal-music.html ![]() Not Even 6-Second Vine Videos Are Safe From The Copyright Police John Paul Titlow Well, that didn't take long. Two months after its launch, the social video-sharing app Vine has received its first copyright takedown notices. The complaints were sent by NPG, the record label owned by Prince, whose music appeared in a few six-second videos on Vine. This is absurd. Uploading an entire Prince album to YouTube is one thing. But six disjointed seconds in smartphone camera quality? Something tells me four clips of that nature aren't going to eat into Prince's album sales. Prince, who three years ago declared the Internet to be "completely over," is known as a stalwart, sometimes overzealous defender of his intellectual property online. In fact, it was the use of a Prince song in a YouTube video that led to Lenz v. Universal, an often-cited 2008 court decision dealing with copyright and fair use. In that case, the court ruled in favor of Stephanie Lenz, whose video of her baby dancing to Prince's song "Let's Go Crazy" was the target of a copyright infringement claim by Universal Music. Lenz argued that video constituted fair use and the court agreed that Universal didn't adequately weigh the fair use principle when issuing takedown notices, something it has a reputation for doing rather aggressively. Let's (Not) Go Crazy Whether or not six seconds of a Prince song in a user-generated video constitutes fair use is something for a court to decide. If it's not, though — if uploading a crappy, six-second video that contains someone's song turns out to be illegal — we have to ask ourselves some pretty fundamental questions about copyright and what it's for. Of course, that there's a need to rethink copyright in the 21st century is hardly breaking news. The original framework doesn't work that well for anybody, as has been evident for at least a decade. Last month, the U.S. Copyright Office itself called for a dramatic overhaul of copyright law, with Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante saying "it is time for a new law." Whatever replaces the current copyright framework will need to balance the rights and financial interests of creators with the fact that we have a completely new way of creating and sharing culture and media than we did a few decades ago. That will mean changes in how creative works are distributed and monetized, sure, but it also opens up a whole universe of new cultural possibilities, which shouldn't be squashed without a very good justification. To say that things have changed since Prince recorded "Let's Go Crazy" in 1984 is an understatement. When you consider how dramatically (and mostly for the better) the Internet has changed how we live, work and yes, create and experience culture, the idea of waging an all-out war against tiny pieces of content like this seems, well, kind of crazy. http://readwrite.com/2013/04/02/not-...pyright-police ![]() Boston Punk Zombies Are Watching You! The Boston police go undercover on the Internet to stop the city’s most dreaded scourge: DIY indie-rock shows. Luke O'Neil| As anyone who's watched a single crime story on TV or film knows, undercover detective work is dangerous business. There inevitably comes a moment when the crime boss gets suspicious. Scary, sure, but at least police officers have a working knowledge of the rules of the crime game. They’ve trained their whole lives to pull off this deception. Passing yourself off as a credible music scenester, on the other hand, is an order of magnitude more difficult. Never mind drug lords—no one can identify a poseur more quickly than a hipster; sniffing out fakes is essentially the entire job description. That's what Boston police are finding out as their bungling efforts to infiltrate the underground rock scene online are being exposed. A recently passed nuisance control ordinance has spurred a citywide crackdown on house shows—concerts played in private homes, rather than in clubs. The police, it appears, are taking a particularly modern approach to address the issue: They're posing as music fans online to ferret out intel on where these DIY shows are going to take place. While police departments have been using social media to investigate for years, its use in such seemingly trivial crimes would be rather chilling, if these efforts didn’t seem so laughably inept. It's a law enforcement technique seemingly cribbed from MTV’s Catfish—but instead of creating a fake persona to ensnare the marks in a romantic internet scam, it's music fandom that's being feigned. Almost everyone in the DIY scene has had an experience with phony police emails, direct messages on Twitter, and interactions on social media. For some it's become just another part of the promotion business—a game of spot-the-narc in which the loser gets his show shut down. According to one local musician who asked not to be named, the day before a show this past weekend, police showed up at a house in the Allston neighborhood, home of many of these house shows, claiming that they already knew the bands scheduled to play. The cops told the residents of the house that they found out about the show through email, and they bragged about their phony Facebook accounts. This week the St. Louis band Spelling Bee posted a screencap of emails from an account that they believe was used by the police in a sting before their recent Boston show. It reads like an amazing parody of what you might imagine a cop trying to pose as a young punk would look like. “Boston Punk Zombie,” reads the crudely-scrawled avatar of a green-mohawked punk with the address bostonbeatgang@gmail.com. That name is apparently a generic-brand knockoff of an infamous Boston hardcore gang. Cred achieved. “What's the point” reads the tagline under the profile pic. “Too bad you were not here this weekend,” “Joe Sly” wrote. “Patty's day is a mad house I am still pissing green beer. The cops do break balls something wicked here. What's the address for Saturday Night, love DIY concerts.” He might as well have written “Just got an 8 ball of beer and I’m ready to party.” Is it possible that Joe Sly is a real Boston punk? Sure, though if so he’s the first Boston punk in history to brag about drinking lame St. Patrick’s Day green beer. As one of the many amused music fans who scoffed at the screencap as it was shared around on Tumblr pointed out, “he/she said concerts ... concerts.” Anyone who's ever been to a concert like this knows that it's not called a concert. It’s a show. The Massachusetts band Do No Harm also tweeted about receiving an email from Joe this month. “whats the 411 for the show saturday?” he asked, apparently using some sort of slang-filter translator from the turn of the century. Then there’s the case of Donna Giordano, a hip youth who’s recently been reaching out to local show promoters from her Facebook account. “Is the show still going on Friday in JP? If so where. Thnxs,” she wrote in a Facebook message to another local promoter, who also asked to remain anonymous. When he asked her to make him feel comfortable that she wasn't a cop, she replied, “that's a new one. How? Flash a boob Ha Ha Ha how do I know your not some sketchy creep who lures girls to your basement for some Hostel like horror show on the guise of a music show” That's exactly the point, Donna. No one knows if anyone is real online anymore. Is she an actual 21-year-old herself? Administrators at Regis College told me that the school “has NO current or recent student named Donna Giordano.” Maybe we can ask the people Donna tagged in her casual photo of friends hanging out—the drummer for Slipknot and Bollywood actress Trisha Krishnan. Details like that are among the typical warning signs you might find when dealing with an online scam—it’s a recently created account with very few friends, almost no interaction with anyone, and generic-looking pictures. Her cover photos include a snapshot of the No. 66 bus in Allston (so you know she's repping Allston hard), and a generic Boston skyline photo, you know, like most twentysomething girls into the punk scene will always post on their walls. In this light, her “I love the pit!” photo of a mosh pit, obviously taken from an Internet thumbnail, looks like one of the saddest feints ever. Cops have also infiltrated local music message boards. One frequent poster on the popular Lemmingtrail boards who tried to ingratiate himself into the conversation was later discovered to be police. “At that time Lemmingtrail as a community had an unusual sense of self,” Matt Sisto, who runs Lemmingtrail, told me. “It's like that scene in The Matrix when all the Agent Smith characters can tell when there's an intruder by some sort of sixth sense.” You don’t have to be a local-music Agent Smith, though, to tell that some of these emails smell pretty fishy. “Hey there, local P native here,” wrote one probable imposter to a local band, (who probably meant to type JP, slang for Jamaica Plain). “What is the Address for the local music show tonight?" The local music show tonight? Who talks like that about a DIY show? Someone not used to talking about music, that’s who. Another message: “Is there any chance I can get the address for this party you are playing tonight? I believe I was once driven to the Drive-In by a friend, (all I know is that it was a JP party space that wasn't Whitehaus), but it's all very foggy.” Yes, all very foggy indeed. “In this day and age of Catfish,” one scene veteran told me, “you've watched a couple episodes of that show, you know what you're looking for in a fake account.” It's hard to confirm whether these accounts and ones like them are in fact failed traps—the Boston Police did not respond to multiple requests for comment on these investigations. But the fact that the promoters are on such high alert for show-narcs illustrates how paranoid this game of indie-rock cat-and-mouse has become. Whether or not any of this is a worthwhile use of police resources is open for debate. Using Facebook as a crime-fighting resource has become exceptionally common around the country. A survey last year found that 80 percent of 1,221 law-enforcement agencies asked use social media as part of their investigations, and many admit to creating fake profiles to work their way into a suspect's social circle. That's typically for more serious crimes than music, however. Still, loud rock shows can, in fact, be a nuisance to neighbors, as many of the people who put the shows on will admit. But are they worth the man-hours the Boston Police have put into them? And are they worth the distrust such tactics create within a community that, loud music aside, are certainly no worse, and in many cases a lot more respectful, than typical twentysomethings partying in any city? Apparently so, if you base it on the number of venues and shows in Allston alone that have been shut down or raided this past year. The Spelling Bee/Do No Harm Show was forced to reschedule and move on the night in question. Another venue known as the Butcher Shoppe was forced to close when it was contacted ahead of time by police who found reference to the location of a planned show online. Matt Altieri, who ran the popular venue Wacky Kastle out of his home until November, said toward the end police began showing up ahead of time knowing all of the details of the show. He's since stopped throwing shows there— -- the heat got to be too much. As a result of efforts like this, promoters and houses have become much more cautious when they receive requests out of the blue for information about shows. And this kind of caution may be, in its way, a kind of success for the BPD initiative. It's kind of hard to put on a show when you can't tell anyone ahead of time where it's going to be. In that sense, the cops seem to be succeeding through another tried-and-true Internet tradition. Trolling is almost always transparently obvious, but when it's unflagging and endlessly annoying, it can be extremely discouraging. Troll a group of people hard enough, and they may end up saying, like famed Boston Beat Gang punk Joe Sly, “What's the point?” http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...et.single.html ![]() Warner Bros. Launches its Own Streaming Video Subscription Sevice Tom Cheredar The movie studios certainly get an A for thinking outside the box, or at least Warner Brothers does. the studio’s online archive site, Warner Archive, has just launched a new streaming service that gives people access to old movies and TV shows from its large library of content. The move is interesting because it’s basically taking the opposite stance from Warner’s primary business of creating new original content, yet it isn’t taking away from the lucrative business of selling rights to that old content to third-party services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. The new service is offering a free two-week trial, but normally charges $10 per month for access to its content library, which includes stuff like the old ’50s Superman show, the original Jericho, Tarzan, and loads of other stuff you’re likely only to find in the $1 bin of DVDs at Walmart. Right now, the service is only supported by one TV streaming set-top box, the Roku, but it does offer 1080p quality video on some movies. The price is definitely more than you’d pay for most of the other streaming services ($8 per month), but it does offer content that caters to a very specific audience. Also, Warner has all this content just laying around, so it makes sense to do something with it. http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/02/wa...iption-sevice/ ![]() Paramount Refunds Fan’s Ticket Over Missing Jack Reacher Explosion Graeme McMillan We’ve all been there: The slow, sad realization that that awesome scene in the trailer that convinced you to go and see a movie isn’t actually in the movie itself. It’s far from an uncommon occurrence, but a New Zealand man decided to take the matter to the next level when he realized that recent Tom Cruise actioner Jack Reacher was lacking one particular (but extremely brief) explosion promised by the trailer, complaining to the Advertising Standards Authority about the omission. The result? Paramount Pictures, which made the movie, is offering to repay the cost of his ticket. Calling the missing explosion “the defining part of the ad that made me really want to go see the movie … aside from having Tom Cruise in it,” the anonymous moviegoer — identified by the New Zealand ASA only as J. Congdon — took Paramount to task for removing “the defining part of the ad that made me really want to go see the movie.” The studio responded that the trailer was released before the movie was completed, adding that “despite our best intentions, it is always possible that certain scenes appearing in an advertisement or trailer may not appear in the final version of a film.” To avoid any potential bad publicity, Paramount independently offered Congdon his money back, leading to the ASA dropping the case. But the precedent set by this offer is a dangerous one. Does this mean, for example, I can now complain to Disney because The Muppets didn’t feature Danny Trejo? http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/...losion-refund/ ![]() It’s Big TV vs. Big Telecom Over Broadcast Spectrum The government embarks on an ambitious plan to entice flailing stations to put their spectrum up for auction Ted Johnson The government’s plan to auction off broadcast spectrum to expand wireless services has pitted Big TV against Big Telecom at the FCC and in the halls of Congress. Some say the nation is facing an apocalyptic capacity crunch due to the proliferation of mobile devices, while others insist those fears are overblown. The chaos has opened the door for profiteering by TV station owners who suddenly find themselves sitting on valuable real estate. There’s a buying spree going on in the upper reaches of the TV dial, the largely forgotten universe of UHF stations made up of many mom-and-pop owners who long ago gave up ambition in favor of a mix of home-shopping and reruns like Matlock. KTLN channel 47, which runs religious programming from a business park in San Rafael, Calif., sold for $8 million in 2011. In Boston, WMFP channel 18 (the call-letters stand for “We’re Media for the People”) sold in late 2010, along with another San Francisco UHF station, for a reported $20 million. The transactions have one thing in common: The stations are being scooped up by private equity and investment firms that are widely believed to have designs not on their assets but their airspace. They are speculators in spectrum — the slice of the nation’s airwaves allocated by the federal government to individual broadcast entities in order to avoid massive signal interference for TV and radio stations, as well as emergency communications services. The sales bounty is coming as the government embarks on an ambitious but untested plan to entice flailing stations to call it quits, put their spectrum up for auction and share in the proceeds from the sale to wireless firms; stations also have the option to share spectrum or move to another part of the band. Congress cleared the outline of the plan last year. An enticement is the potential for an auction to raise as much as $20 billion, with proceeds used to pay for a new wireless public safety network and for deficit reduction. That’s a politically fireproof way to raise revenue without raising taxes. The impetus for the auctions comes in part from the fear that the U.S. is on the verge of maxing out its broadband capabilities — or the apocalyptic horror that one day our smartphones and iPads will go dark. Outgoing FCC chairman Julius Genachowski has been warning of a “looming spectrum crisis” ever since he took the job in 2009. The incentive auctions are so complicated in design that the FCC has enlisted Nobel Prize winners to help create the models. But the complexity seems to have only added to a Washington scramble to influence how the plan is ultimately carried out, with wireless firms and many telecom companies anxious to see a quick transfer of spectrum, while broadcasters take umbrage at what they see as a land-grab that will benefit their media and entertainment competitors, being engineered by the federal government. The plan may very well jumble the channel lineup in many markets. It also marks a symbolic shift from mass communication to one-to-one digital. “The FCC is saying, ‘We like your service. There is something novel about broadcast services with local programming that are serving a critical public interest. But people are getting your product in alternative ways, and that trend is not reversing,’ ” asserts Rick Joyce, a veteran D.C.-based communications attorney with Venable. Joyce says the FCC is trying to get ahead of future needs. “Rather than wait for all the water to run out of the tub, (the FCC is) saying, ‘Let’s see if we can do ome thing now. … Let’s be honest about an exit strategy for some folks who have been in this industry for a while.’ ” The fight over spectrum auctions has been heating up for the past few years, pitting the lobbying orgs of Big Media against Big Telecom in the halls of Congress. Of course, it has also opened doors for savvy entrepreneurs who find opportunities amid the upheaval. Station owners have the choice in some cases of selling off all of their spectrum allotment — which means shutting down a station entirely and selling off their airspace — or of sharing spectrum with another station. Broadcasters are worried that giving up hunks of their spectrum will hamper efforts to develop their own next-generation offerings such as mobile services and signal streaming. NAB president Gordon Smith once even called the idea a “spectrum grab.” Says Rick Kaplan, a former chief of the FCC’s wireless bureau who is now exec VP of strategic planning for the National Assn. of Broadcasters: “We want this to be over; I think there is no win for the broadcast industry in this auction. At the same time, we know if this gets rushed, the first under the bus are the broadcasters. We want a balanced process.” The sale of certain stations aside, broadcasters really don’t like the FCC effort and its implication that they are on the backside of old vs. new. Sure, there are stations that have suddenly seen their values escalate, like a dilapidated home in a gentrifying neighborhood, but many of those who choose to stay in the game will be forced to move. This “repacking” is needed for the FCC’s plan to work, as the UHF spectrum is much more prized for the wireless business than the lower-rung VHF channels. That may very well mean that a UHF channel from 32 to 51 will be impacted in some way, although the FCC has not finalized how it plans to configure the spectrum and which channels will have to be cleared and which stations face moving elsewhere. It’s a process that is not as simple as changing a logo; in some cases, stations would need to physically remove antennas and place them elsewhere. The FCC is still devising an auction plan, but the complexity comes from divergent demand for wireless spectrum in different markets, and disparate supply on the channel lineup based on which stations want to sell and which do not. There’s a host of other concerns that the broadcast lobby and station groups have been vocal about, flooding the FCC with comments. They range from fears that stations along the borders of Canada and Mexico will not have the same reach, to worries that a $1.75 billion fund that Congress set up for relocation costs won’t suffice, to warnings that the “repacking” will diminish a signal or even result in interference. Even as the FCC and Congress are adamant that participation in the auction is voluntary, stations also dangle the prospect of the steps the feds might take if not enough stations agree to sell. “It is not preordained by any means that this is going to be a roaring success,” Joyce says. The NAB’s Kaplan, in fact, believes that the marketplace is solving the problem, pointing to a spate of recent mergers and acquisitions among telecom players and others that give them access to caches of spectrum. Underlying all of the wrangling over spectrum is the prospect of a shift in the balance of power among media lobbies. The NAB is one of Washington’s largest trade groups, but the tech sector’s growth is putting it in ever greater positions of influence, making a convincing case for Congress last year to approve the auction plan, even as so much other legislation was stuck in gridlock. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the NAB spent $14.5 million on lobbying in 2012, compared with $12.4 million spent by the Cellular Telecom and Internet Assn. The issue of spectrum was undoubtedly a big part of that spending. Going through the extensive files of comments to the FCC, it seems that everyone has an opinion on how to re-slice the spectrum pie. Performers, represented by SAG-AFTRA, argued for the continued dedication of two channels in major markets for the use of wireless microphones; Google, on the other hand, is seemingly in conflict, asking that such channels be unlicensed, and therefore available for such services as Wi-Fi. A side issue is over the size of “guard bands,” the spectrum allocated to prevent interference between the station spectrum and the new space for wireless services. Genachowski is big on the idea of finding more airwaves that can be dedicated to Wi-Fi, the unlicensed parts of the spectrum that are used for all sorts of devices. But dedicating too much to guard bands, some orgs argue, will be a giveaway that can otherwise be auctioned off. At the center of all of this is Genachowski, who from the start has made broadband, and wireless in particular, his top agenda item — which naturally put him at odds with broadcasters and certain other “old” media lobbies. Genachowski recently announced plans to step down, but is leaving little doubt as to his legacy. Throughout his tenure, he has tirelessly promoted the idea of wireless as a centerpiece of the country’s communications future. This was apparent in one of his initial moves, to create a National Broadband Plan. Released in 2010, the plan envisioned a connected future, but also a spectrum crunch, a sense of urgency in finding space if the country is to stay competitive and meet the demand for mobile. The plan called for reallocating some 120 MHz of broadcast spectrum space, and proposed the idea of incentive auctions, rooted in market forces. The framework almost immediately met with skepticism from broadcasters. After howls from the NAB and others, that plan was never pursued. What gained traction in Congress was the idea that proceeds from the auction would be used to create a broadband public safety network, unprecedented in scope. But the broadcast lobby, as if to show its relevance as well as its efficiency, frequently reminds journalists of the role of stations in covering and alerting the public of natural disasters. NAB noted that during Hurricane Sandy, some mobile networks went dark, but broadcasters were uninterrupted. Genachowski says the FCC’s role is to ensure the infrastructure to support a new economy. “There was a time when people thought that spectrum wasn’t scarce, and we would have all we ever need,” he said at a recent congressional hearing. “Now we know that the opposite is the case, and we have some real challenges.” The plan is to proceed with the auctions next year, even as broadcasters warn that the timetable is too ambitious. But many are betting that the auctions will happen, which is why investors like computer mogul Michael Dell are believed to be taking a sudden interest in stations. He backs a group called OTA Broadcasting that has been snatching up channels. LocusPoint Networks, backed by telecom pros, also is seeking stations, broker Patrick says, and recently put in a bid for a San Mateo, Calif., public TV station. Preston Padden, former chief lobbyist for Disney-ABC and News Corp., is leading a coalition of owners interested in selling — dubbed “the coalition of the willing” — but he declines to identify who they are, except to say they have more than 40 stations in major markets. “The goal, ultimately, is to surrender (the station) for a lot more than you paid for it,” Patrick says, adding there’s hope of selling for two or three times the purchase price. For some stations, the offer for money right now is too attractive to pass up. Others are willing to cash in later. Patrick mentions a station (which he won’t identify) in one of the top three markets that doesn’t even get a half million dollars in revenue, which is “turning down offers of 50 to 60 million. … They want to play the auction. They know what it is worth.” The owners believe they can get well over $100 million, he adds. “It is like a gold fever and it is like a huge rush, and it will probably end later this year,” he says. No one is exactly sure how many stations will choose to go dark, but many predict that few if any will be major network affiliates. Moreover, the demand for the airwaves is not monolithic: A station giving up spectrum in a rural area is not as prized as one in a major market, where the growth in wireless demand is much greater. Given the political will on both sides of the aisle to implement big changes in regards to spectrum, there’s little doubt such changes are on the horizon for the TV dial as more consumers embrace broadband options. “The broader concept here is that without this, consumers are making decisions on their own to get their broadcast product through alternative means rather than through over-the air,” Joyce says. “There is a march of technology that is hard to ignore.” Spectrum Crisis: Real or exaggerated? Depending on who you ask, there’s either a looming spectrum shortage or more than enough airspace to meet the demand Sounding the Alarm › FCC chief Julius Genachowski › Wireless trade org CTIA › Cisco Systems Skeptics › National Assn. of Broadcasters › Microsoft Spectrum Observatory Studying the Issue › Rutgers U. › MIT › Virginia Tech http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/its...um-1200329490/ ![]() Appeals Court Denies Broadcaster Request to Shut Aereo Erin Geiger Smith and Ronald Grover An appeals court on Monday declined to temporarily shut down Aereo Inc, an online television venture backed by billionaire Barry Diller that broadcasters say is infringing their copyrights. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed with the broadcasters, including Walt Disney Co's ABC and Comcast Corp's NBCUniversal, that Aereo should discontinue its service until litigation between the companies is resolved. The television industry is closely watching the case to see whether it could disrupt the traditional TV model. The industry sees Aereo and other similar services as a threat to its ability to control subscription fees and generate advertising income, its two main sources of revenue. Aereo does not pay licensing fees to the broadcasters, while paid TV operators, such Comcast and Time Warner Cable, shell out billions in retransmission consent fees to broadcasters. "I can see cable operators trying to stretch out their retransmission negotiations as long as they can to see how this case is finally decided," said Alan Gould, an analyst with Evercore Partners who follows CBS Corp, Walt Disney and other large media companies that own TV stations. Gould said analysts have modeled a large increase for networks "retransmission fees" - monthly fees based on how many subscribers each network reaches. "Now it will depend on what happens when the trial begins," Gould said. Retransmission fees make up a very small portion of a TV station's revenue stream, which is still heavily dependent on advertising sales. Subscribers to Aereo can stream live broadcasts of TV channels on mobile devices using miniature antennas, each assigned to one subscriber. The service was launched in March 2012 in the New York area at a cost to subscribers of $12 a month. The company in January announced plans to expand to 22 U.S. cities. Under U.S. law, copyright owners have the exclusive right to publicly perform their work, and broadcasters argue that Aereo's transmissions of television programs while the programs are airing is a public performance of the broadcasters' copyrighted works. UPHOLDING LOWER COURT The appeals court, upholding a lower court ruling, concluded that the broadcasters had not shown they were likely to prove their claims of copyright infringement because Aereo's transmissions are "unique copies" and are not "public performances" of the broadcaster's copyrighted works. Aereo's technology consists of thousands of antennas housed in a facility in Brooklyn, New York, that are individually assigned to users so that no two of them share the same antenna at the same time. In determining whether a performance is "public," it is important to determine who is capable of receiving the performance being transmitted, the court said. Aereo's system creates a "unique copy" of a program and, when a user chooses to watch it, the transmission sent by Aereo is of that unique copy, the court said. In a joint statement, News Corp's Fox, the Public Broadcasting Service and its New York station WNET, also plaintiffs in the litigation, called the decision "a loss for the entire creative community." The "court has ruled that it is OK to steal copyrighted material and retransmit it without compensation," they said. CBS, another plaintiff, said in a statement, "As the courts continue to consider this case and others like it, we are confident that the rights of content owners will be recognized, and that we will prevail." ABC and NBCUniversal issued a joint statement noting the case is still in its early stages and that they are "confident" the "rights of content owners will be protected." Shares of CBS, Comcast, Disney and News Corp were all lower in afternoon trading on Monday. CBS was down 2.2 percent and Comcast was down 1.25 percent, while News Corp was down 0.8 percent and Disney was down 0.4 percent. Aereo's chief executive, Chet Kanojia, said in a statement that the appeals court decision "validates that Aereo's technology falls square within the law" and called it "a great thing for consumers." Aereo had argued that its technology was designed to conform to court precedent, specifically a 2008 2nd Circuit decision in favor of Cablevision Systems Corp for its remote-storage digital video recorder (RS-DVR) system. Two of the three judges on the appeals court panel that heard the case agreed with Aereo that its system conforms to the Cablevision ruling. Appeals court Judge Denny Chin dissented, writing that he believes Aereo's transmissions constitute copyright infringement. Aereo's technology platform is "a sham," Chin wrote, saying there is "no technologically sound reason" to use a multitude of antennas other than to take advantage of "a perceived loophole in the law." The cases are CBS Broadcasting Inc., et al v. AEREO, Inc. and WNET, et al v. AEREO, Inc, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Nos. 12-2807 and 12-2786. (Reporting By Erin Geiger Smith; Additional reporting by Ronald Grover and Liana Baker; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Leslie Adler) http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9300B020130401 ![]() Youth Flock to Mobile Messaging Apps, May Be Threat to Facebook Gerry Shih and Alexei Oreskovic Create personal profiles. Build networks of friends. Share photos, videos and music. That might sound precisely like Facebook, but hundreds of millions of tech-savvy young people have instead turned to a wave of smartphone-based messaging apps that are now sweeping across North America, Asia and Europe. The hot apps include Kik and Whatsapp, both products of North American startups, as well as Kakao Inc's KakaoTalk, NHN Corp's LINE and Tencent Holdings Ltd's WeChat, which have blossomed in Asian markets. Combining elements of text messaging and social networking, the apps provide a quick-fire way for smartphone users to trade everything from brief texts to flirtatious pictures to YouTube clips — bypassing both the SMS plans offered by wireless carriers and established social networks originally designed as websites. Facebook Inc, with 1 billion users, remains by far the world's most popular website, and its stepped-up focus on mobile has made it the most-used smartphone app as well. Still, across Silicon Valley, investors and industry insiders say there is a possibility that the messaging apps could threaten Facebook's dominance over the next few years. The larger ones are even starting to emerge as full-blown "platforms" that can support third-party applications such as games. To be sure, many of those who are using the new messaging apps remain on Facebook, indicating there is little immediate sign of the giant social media company losing its lock on the market. And at a press event this week, the company will unveil news relating to Android, the world's most popular smartphone operating system, which could include a new version of Android with deeper integration of Facebook messaging tools - or possibly even a Facebook-branded phone. But the firms that can take over the messaging world should be able to make some big inroads, investors say. "True interactions are conversational in nature," says Rich Miner, a partner at Google Ventures who invested in San Francisco-based MessageMe, a new entrant in the messaging market. "More people text and make phone calls than get on to social networks. If one company dominates the replacement of that traffic, then by definition that's very big." Facebook spokespeople declined to comment for this article, citing this Thursday's planned announcement. Facebook's big challenge is reeling back users like Jacob Robinson, a 15-year old high school student in Newcastle upon Tyne in the U.K., who said the Kik messaging app "blew up" among his friends about six months ago. It has remained the most-used app on his Android phone because it is the easiest way for him to send different kinds of multimedia for free, which he estimated he does about 200 times a day. Robinson said he trades snapshots of his homework with friends while they stay up late studying for their exams — or not. "We also stay up in bed with our phone all night, just on YouTube searching for funny videos, then you quickly share it with your friends," he added. "It's easy. You can flip in and out of Kik." Facebook "has really started to lose its edge over here," said Robinson, who found his interactions on Facebook less interesting than his real-time chats. Waterloo, Ontario-based Kik has racked up 40 million users since launching in 2010. Silicon Valley entrants in the race include Whatsapp, funded by Sequoia Capital, and MessageMe, launched earlier this month by a group of viral game makers. MessageMe has received seed-stage funding from True Ventures and First Round Capital, among others, and claimed 1 million downloads in its first week. Meanwhile, Asian companies are producing some of the fastest-growing apps in history. Tencent's WeChat boasts 400 million users - far more than Twitter, by way of comparison - while LINE and KakaoTalk claim 120 million and 80 million users, respectively. Both have laid the groundwork to expand into the U.S. market. MOBILE WAVE The growth in the messaging apps reflect the dramatic shift in Internet usage in recent years, as Web visits via desktop computers have stagnated while smartphone ownership and app downloads have skyrocketed. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has publicly called Facebook a "mobile company" to emphasize the company's priorities. Last year, he splashed $1 billion for photo-sharing app Instagram, which has remained red hot, while Facebook also launched its own Messenger app, offering a suite of smartphone communication tools. Still, Facebook has also been forced to play defense. Earlier this year, the company cut off its data integration with a young startup called Snapchat and then mimicked its feature with a new messaging tool called Poke, which sends messages that self-destruct. It has also shut off its integration with messaging apps like MessageMe and Voxer. At the same time, Facebook has also hired graphic artists to draw emoticons and graphics for Messenger that emulate features of the wildly popular Asian apps like LINE, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Dave Morin, an early Facebook employee who left to found the "private" social network Path in 2010, said he recognized last summer the critical role of messaging functions in smartphone apps, and quickly began working to incorporate them. Since Path released a new version of its app earlier this month, the number of Path's daily users has risen 15 percent, which Morin attributed to the new messaging features. "What's the number one reason why people have this thing?" said Morin, holding up his iPhone. "It's to call, to text, to communicate." Messaging, Morin added, is "the basis for the mobile social network." PLATFORM THREAT While established social networks move to incorporate messaging features, the new-wave messaging apps are looking to grow into social networking platforms that support a variety of features and enable innovations from outside developers. "The tried and true approach for a social network is first you build a network, then you build apps on your own, then you open it up to third party developers," said Charles Hudson, a partner at early stage venture capital firm SoftTech VC. The moves mirror Facebook's younger days, when its user growth and revenues were boosted by game publishers like Zynga Inc, which made popular games like FarmVille for the Facebook platform. In the South Korean market, for instance, eight of the top ten highest grossing Android apps are games built on top of KakaoTalk. Tencent announced in November that it would introduce a mobile wallet feature enabling payment for goods with WeChat. And Tencent also makes money in China by using the app's location data to displaying nearby merchants' deals to potential customers. If the messaging apps reach a certain scale, they could form networks that rival Facebook's "social graph," the network of user connections and activities that enable highly targeted delivery of content and advertising. "The folks on your address book are very different from your Facebook friends and your LinkedIn contacts, and that's a natural place for a very powerful graph to be created," said Jim Goetz, a partner at Sequoia Capital. Ted Livingston, the 25-year old chief executive of Kik, said he developed the capability for his service to support external features in November, and he plans to open the platform to outside developers in the near future. Livingston said Kik and Whatsapp were "in a race to see who's the first to build a platform." Whatsapp, which has been the most widely downloaded communication app for both iOS and Android in recent months, according to analysis firm App Annie, has been profitable by selling subscriptions to its service for $1 a year. Although it has remained mum about its platform plans, the company has been rumored to be in talks with Asian game publishers about hosting games, according to news reports in South Korea. Goetz declined to address the reports, saying only that because it relied on a subscription business model, Whatsapp did not need to sell games or ads to make money. Still, he said, the Whatsapp team "spends a lot of time thinking about the developer community." DEAL POTENTIAL Established social networking giants could also swoop in for the upstarts - and Facebook has demonstrated its appetite for acquisitions. Indeed, investors are eyeing a round of potentially lucrative buyouts resembling the series of deals involving group messaging applications in 2011. Facebook acquired group messaging app Beluga in March of that year, enlisting its founders to help build its own stand alone app, Messenger, which launched six months later. In late 2010, First Round Capital, an early stage venture capital firm, invested in GroupMe, a group messaging startup that was sold to Skype just fifteen months after it launched. Kent Goldman, a First Round partner who has backed MessageMe, said it was unlikely that the market in the long term could support numerous independent messaging startups, which by their nature become more powerful as they grow larger. "You don't want to be the smallest one when the music stops," he said. (Editing by Jonathan Weber, Martin Howell and Chris Reese) http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...92U09C20130331 ![]() CFAA 2013: Congress’ New Draft Could Incarcerate Teenagers That Read News Online Dave Smith Reading the news should be an essential habit, especially for students and children, yet anyone under 18 found browsing through the news online could hypothetically face jail time under the latest draft of proposed changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is supposed to be “rushed” to Congress during its “cyber week” in the middle of April. You can read these proposed alterations to the bill in its entirety here. According to the new proposal floated by the House Judiciary Committee, the CFAA, which was originally passed in 1984 as a measure to thwart hacking, would be amended to treat any violation of a website’s Terms of Service – or an employer’s Terms of Use policy – as a criminal act. Under the proposed changes, users could be punished and possibly even prosecuted for accessing a website in a way it wasn’t meant to be used. Applied to the world of online publications, this could be a dangerous notion: For example, many news websites’ Terms of Use warn against any users under a certain age using their site. In fact, the Hearst Corporation’s entire family of publications, which includes Popular Mechanics, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle, all include this language, written in all caps: “YOU MAY NOT ACCESS OR USE THE COVERED SITES OR ACCEPT THE AGREEMENT IF YOU ARE NOT AT LEAST 18 YEARS OLD. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE WITH ALL OF THE PROVISIONS OF THIS AGREEMENT, DO NOT ACCESS AND/OR USE THE COVERED SITES.” Hearst isn’t alone. Many publications, including organizations that institute paywalls to access their site, warn against children and teenagers accessing their “services.” The Miami Herald and U-T San Diego disallow users under 18 – even NPR doesn’t allow teenagers to access its “services” without legal consent, and even after that, don’t allow them to “submit any User Materials.” According to the Department of Justice, this would mean anyone under 18 found accessing these sites -- either to read or comment on a story -- could, at least in theory, face criminal charges. Several news sites like the New York Times, Boston Globe and NBCNews have loosened their policy restrictions, only forbidding users under the age of 13. However, this would mean that curious 12-year-olds that misrepresent their ages by accessing these news sites would be "criminals," according to the DOJ’s take on the new CFAA draft. Last year, the Ninth Circuit of Appeals issued an important decision in the case of the United States v. Nosal, finding that employees who access workplace computers in violation of corporate policy aren’t breaking federal anti-hacking laws. “Basing criminal liability on violations of private computer use policies can transform whole categories of otherwise innocuous behavior into federal crimes simply because a computer is involved,” Judge Alex Kozinski warned at the time. “Employees who call family members from their work phones will become criminals if they send an email instead. Employees can sneak in the sports section of the New York Times to read at work, but they’d better not visit ESPN.com. And Sudoku enthusiasts should stick to the printed puzzles, because visiting www.dailysudoku.com from their work computers might give them more than enough time to hone their Sudoku skills behind bars.” Though the Justice Department could argue that the vast majority of cases against minors may never be prosecuted, the Ninth Circuit warned at the time that “seldom-prosecuted crimes invite arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement,” which means there’s nothing stopping a prosecutor from singling out CFAA violators, just as Internet activist Aaron Swartz was singled out and hounded under the same law for years, up into his suicide on Jan. 11. With the House Judiciary Committee ready to introduce its proposed changes to the CFAA, many organizations are speaking out against the law. On Wednesday, the hacktivist collective known as Anonymous started the “#ReformCFAA” trend on Twitter, spreading news about the potential consequences of an expanded CFAA to its thousands of followers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is tackling the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act with its own alternative proposals, which include eliminating duplicative penalties and reducing some computer crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. The organization also offers ways to contact your congressman about "fixing" the CFAA. http://www.ibtimes.com/cfaa-2013-con...online-1171871 ![]() Russians Selectively Blocking Internet Andrew E. Kramer The Russian government in recent weeks has been making use of a new law that gives it the power to block Internet content that it deems illegal or harmful to children. The country’s communications regulators have required Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to remove material that the officials determined was objectionable, with only YouTube, owned by Google, resisting. The video-sharing site complied with a Russian agency’s order to block a video that officials said promoted suicide. But YouTube filed a lawsuit in Russian court in February saying the video, showing how to make a fake wound with makeup materials and a razor blade, was intended for entertainment and should not be restricted. Supporters of the law, which took effect in November, say it is a narrowly focused way of controlling child pornography and content that promotes drug use and suicide. But opposition leaders have railed against the law as a crack in the doorway to broader Internet censorship. They say they worry that social networks, which have been used to arrange protests against President Vladimir V. Putin, will be stifled. The child protection law, they say, builds a system for government officials to demand that companies selectively block individual postings, so that contentious material can be removed without resorting to a countrywide ban on, for example, Facebook or YouTube, which would reflect poorly on Russia’s image abroad and anger Internet users at home. So far at least, the Russians have been mostly singling out not political content but genuinely distressing material posted by Russian-speaking users. On Friday, Facebook took down a page globally that was connected to suicide after it was flagged by the Russian regulatory agency, called the Federal Service for Supervision in Telecommunications, Information Technology and Mass Communications, known by its acronym Roskomnadzor. A spokesman for the agency had told Facebook it had until Sunday to comply or risk being blocked in Russia. For Facebook, the response turned out to be an easy decision. Everybody concerned — the company, the government and opposition figures — agreed the suicide-themed user group was not a friendly page. The group, called “Club Suicid,” was deemed serious enough not to be sheltered by Facebook’s criteria for “controversial humor.” “We reviewed the content and it was removed because it violated our terms of use,” the company said in a statement. Facebook says it also complies with local legislation to ban content in certain countries, though that was not the reason for removing the page in this case. “Notable examples of where most services, including ours, will I.P.-restrict access for certain counties are in Germany” and in France, where it blocks content related to Holocaust denial, and in Turkey, where content defaming the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is blocked, Facebook said in its statement. The spokesman for the Roskomnadzor agency, Vladimir Pikov, said that a separate government agency, Rospotrebnadzor, a consumer-protection organization intended to ensure the safety of food and consumer goods, had made a determination that the Facebook post promoted suicide, and was thus a public health threat. Twitter, the microblogging site, in March began complying with Russian requests to remove posts — two because they appeared to be related to an attempt to deal in illegal drugs and three posts for “promoting suicidal thoughts,” according to a statement issued March 15 by Roskomnadzor. Twitter has been “actively engaged in cooperation,” the statement said. Izvestia, a Russian newspaper, reported that Twitter and the Russian agencies’ officials had been in negotiations since November to create a mechanism for selectively blocking Twitter posts inside Russia. Anton Nosik, a blogger and journalist in Russia, called the law in a telephone interview “absurd, harmful and absolutely unnecessary.” But, he said, so long as regulators focus on genuinely macabre material like sites visited by people fascinated by suicide, he is not overly concerned about a crackdown on the videos and Web pages in the Russian blogosphere. “The track record of the authorities shows they are not going to enforce it strictly.” https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/t...t-content.html ![]() The Real Limitless Drug Isn’t Just for Lifehackers Anymore Modafinil’s moment. Robert Kolker It took Peter Borden a while to come around to modafinil. He never takes prescription drugs. He doesn’t drink to excess. He’s into acupuncture and alternative medicine. But he was working two jobs—by day, he does quantitative analysis and project management for a venture-capital-backed B2B start-up; by night, he’s developing a proprietary high-#frequency trading system for a Wall Street start-up of his own—and what he needed was more time to work. So a few months ago, Borden ordered a three-week supply by mail. (“It was a piece of cake,” he says.) He popped his first pill—“the maximum suggested dose”—as soon as the package arrived, and within a few hours he started feeling a pleasant fuzziness. “Not fuzzy-headed,” he says, “but crisp. A crisp softness to it.” Soon he was experiencing a level of concentration he’d never imagined. “My senses sort of shifted to the visual, and my auditory sense went down. Sounds didn’t even register. It was like walking around on a winter day when it just snowed. It was very easy to stay visually focused.” Next came a head rush. “I sensed it was blood actually moving to the optic nerve. Your eyes start to feel very sort of engorged, and your awareness comes to the front of your face, which is kind of a freaky sensation. I would describe it as being very much like Adderall, but without the speediness.” Tasks that were usually soul-crushing now had his undivided attention. He spent hours fine-tuning ad campaigns for his new business, and his output wasn’t just faster and longer—it was better. “I didn’t take as many breaks; I didn’t get as frustrated; the stuff came out with fewer errors,” he says. “I never felt, Oh, let’s just get it done. I polished things.” As long as he kept taking the pill, his focus never wavered. “Time took on an entirely different sort of quality.” He was even happier. “There were some very potent anti-anxiety effects. Which was strange. I didn’t think I was an anxious person, but I guess I was.” Modafinil, which is marketed as Provigil in the United States, was first approved by the FDA in 1998 for the treatment of narcolepsy, but since then it’s become better known as a nootropic, a “smart drug,” especially among entrepreneurs. More recently, it has attracted traders like Borden who don’t just need a pick-me-up to get through a deadline; they need to be on, without a break, for months, even years at a time. And that’s modafinil’s reputation. It is rumored to be the model for the fictional pills in the movie Limitless that allowed Bradley Cooper’s character to use 100 percent of his brain. Timothy Ferriss, author of the best-selling The 4-Hour Work Week, recently dished about its effects with modafinil fan Joe Rogan, the former host of Fear Factor, on Rogan’s popular podcast. Probably its biggest booster is Dave Asprey, founder of the Bulletproof Executive web forum, where he blogged about the drug’s powers (headline: “Why You Are Suffering From a Modafinil Deficiency”). Last summer, ABC News did a segment on Asprey in which he compared taking it to the scene in The Wizard of Oz where everything blossoms from black-and-white to color. Last month, modafinil’s penetration into the culture was confirmed by the American Medical Association’s journal Internal Medicine, which published a University of California, San Francisco, study reporting that U.S. prescriptions increased almost tenfold over the past decade. Far and away, most of those were for off-label use. In New York, Borden is hearing more chatter about it among traders and hedge-funders, though they don’t tend to boast about it in the same way as the tech guys. “There’s something, I think, about guys who write code for a living that makes them very interested in hacking things—finding shortcuts, stuff like that,” he says. “Whereas with guys on Wall Street, it’s more testosterone-fueled; it’s more just power through it.” In a conversation on WallStreet#Oasis.com titled “Viagra for the Brain,” one commenter gushed, “This is not like #caffeine or 5 Hour Energy. This is the big leagues.” Unlike Ritalin or Adderall, modafinil isn’t an amphetamine and doesn’t flood the body with dopamine in the same way. For this reason, scientists originally believed it to be non-habit-forming, though some are beginning to doubt this claim. Users on message boards talk about how modafinil doesn’t so much speed them up as clear their minds. “Most of the drugs that people do in our society are things like alcohol that make you stupider instead of smarter,” mobile-software entrepreneur Jesse Law#ler said in a recent podcast about modafinil for his website SmartDrugSmarts.com. The entrepreneur Daniel Tenner used modafinil to launch his first company while still working for the consulting firm Accenture. “Every day,” he wrote on swombat.com, a site for entrepreneurs, “I would sleep at 11 p.m. sharp. I would then wake up at 4 a.m., work until 7 a.m., then nap for an hour before going to work at my day job. I then also worked weekends.” Of course, its ascendancy is also cause for some alarm. No scientist has conducted a study of its long-term effects on healthy brains yet. At the very least, doctors have warned that modafinil can bring about sleep deprivation (or, in the words of the Internal Medicine paper, “hypersensitivity reactions and neuropsychiatric adverse effects”). The modafinil moment has even prompted a secondary conversation among sociologists and economists about the anxiety of staying ahead in today’s competitive economy, and microeconomic predictions about a future in which everyone sleeps less: fewer mattress sales, more dollars spent at bars and nightclubs, more sex, and more children. For Borden, life on modafinil really did feel like a real-life (if somewhat toned-down) Limitless. Things get hairy for the character in the movie—there’s addiction and withdrawal and tragedy before the tidy Hollywood ending. The first downside Borden noticed was in line with the film: He couldn’t drink. “I went out for a drink, and then I had another drink. And because I was so energized and focused, I got drunk faster. It kind of freaked me out, because time would sort of fly by. I’d be here, and then I’d be here. Almost like mini-#blackouts. I very quickly cut out alcohol.” Then he ran into an even bigger problem: Skip a dose, and there would be hell to pay. “I really would feel it. It was sort of like being thrust into dirty, messy reality, as opposed to a clean, neatly organized place. It was like crashing, and I actually found what would happen is the anxiety that got dialed down on the way in, when you were coming off it, all of a sudden you went through the reverse. So I got incredibly anxious. Eventually that concerned me.” He stopped after three weeks. He says he’s more comfortable trying to get the same effect through meditation and, of all things, getting a good night’s sleep. He remains a little in awe of the pill, though. “It’s a great hack.” http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/modafinil-2013-4/ ![]() E-bleeder: Is Nook On Its Deathbed? Barnes & Noble's once-promising digital business needs to turn a page to compete with Amazon and Apple Carl Franzen The ending has yet to be written for Barnes & Noble's Nook story, which began with the surprise debut of the original Nook e-reader back in late 2009. But recent plot twists don't appear to bode well for the subsidiary known as "Nook Media," which contains the company's e-reader, tablet, and digital content businesses, and which two other companies — Microsoft and publisher Pearson — have bought into. Over the past few weeks, Barnes & Noble has announced fire sale after fire sale for Nook products: Buy a Nook HD+ tablet and get a Nook Simple Touch free! Download the Nook app for Windows 8 and get free bestselling digital book and magazine titles! The latest deal, which was just announced last week, targets teachers as part of Barnes & Noble's annual "Educator Appreciation Days," offering a variety of discounts — including $20 off the Nook HD and HD+ — between April 13 and 21. "Fire sale after fire sale" The discounts on Nook Media hardware and content, coming as they do the month after Barnes & Noble reported an 8.8 percent revenue drop and 2.2 percent decline in sales of Nook products from last year, doesn't seem to be a show of faith in Nook's future prospects. Meanwhile, parent company Barnes & Noble, which still owns the majority stake in the subsidiary (78.2 percent), also saw its retail sales drop even more precipitously and is also moving to close more stores, the latter which it says is simply business as usual. That hasn't stopped a flurry of reports speculating that a major shakeup is looming for Barnes & Noble and Nook in the near future, perhaps that the parent company could go out of business or sell itself to another chain such as Walmart. ""you have two businesses that have different goals that are now separated."" Barnes & Noble's founder and chairman Leonard Riggio quietly indicated in a regulatory filing in February that he wanted to buy only the company's brick and mortar business, not Nook Media, effectively splitting the two for good. A split is something that other shareholders and analysts have suggested would be a wise move, too. A questioner on Barnes & Noble's latest earnings call pointed out in February "you have two businesses that have different goals that are now separated... they appeal to different investor sets. You're clearly getting penalized for the fact that they live together," and went on to ask about "how to ultimately separate these businesses." In response, Barnes & Noble's chief financial officer Michael Huseby said "we've consistently disclosed that we're looking at strategic alternatives and will continue to do that, but we don't have anything further to announce at this time." Asked again more recently, Barnes & Noble did not respond to The Verge in time for this article's publication. Others have suggested that Microsoft, which invested $300 million to acquire what ended up being a 16.8 percent stake in Nook Media, should go ahead and buy that whole subsidiary from Barnes & Noble. Microsoft declined to comment when asked by The Verge about its investment in Nook, but sources close to both companies who wished to remain anonymous said that Microsoft has the option to ramp up or decrease its stake in Nook at any time. Microsoft, it should also be noted, has almost nothing to lose from its Nook investment as it stands now. The company has almost $70 billion in cash on hand. "The question is whether Microsoft would make a move to save Nook" The question is whether Microsoft would make a move to save Nook if Barnes & Noble collapsed or tried to offload it. There's a good argument to made that Microsoft should do just that: Barnes & Noble still claims it has one of the largest digital content libraries in the world, and sales in that area were actually up 6.8 percent last quarter. Even just to get that content — which includes many ebooks and magazines Microsoft doesn't have — could be worth nearly any possible fair price for Nook. Plus, when Microsoft first announced it would be investing in the subsidiary that would become Nook Media almost a year ago (the deal closed in October), it pointed out that content was one of the reasons. Even if Microsoft doesn't buy Nook, look for it to take a more active role in providing more overlapping experiences between products. Sources close to Microsoft who declined to speak on the record said to envision a scenario in which Microsoft would allow users of Office to self-publish manuscripts straight from Word to the Barnes & Noble digital publishing store, giving the two companies more of a fighting chance against Amazon and Apple. The sources said that for Microsoft, Nook was a long term play. Despite it now being six months since the companies closed the deal, it would take longer — perhaps years — for Microsoft's ebook plans to fully materialize in the hands of consumers. "Nook has become a book in the 'Choose Your Own Adventure' series" How many consumers actually stick around for that long is an open question, of course. In fact, whether Nook sticks around in its current form is something of a question, too: for Barnes & Noble and its partners, the platform itself has become a book in the Choose Your Own Adventure series. Not all decisions lead to success. http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/1/415...n-its-deathbed ![]() BlackBerry 10 Can BBM Anything You’re Watching, Even If It’s Porn Dave Smith BlackBerry released its BlackBerry Z10 smartphone at the end of March, and within just one week of availability in the United States, customers have discovered (the hard way) that the new BlackBerry 10 operating system has some sharing features that private users may want to toggle "off." For example, BlackBerry’s new Messenger Service (BBM) in BlackBerry 10 has the option to share what music you’re listening to as one’s status update. As it turns out, this BBM feature in BlackBerry 10 can actually share anything you’re listening to with your BBM network, including videos. Therefore, any videos viewed in the BlackBerry Z10 browser or media player will be displayed for all of one’s BlackBerry contacts to see, even if you don’t want your network to know you’re watching certain videos. In a CrackBerry forum thread , BlackBerry Z10 users uploaded screenshots of their recent BBM updates, showing users that were found “listening to ‘tube8.com’” or “listening to ‘pornhub.com,’” both pornographic sites. If you own a BlackBerry Z10 and you want to keep your video-browsing habits to yourself, make sure you complete the following steps to ensure your music updates in BBM are disabled: 1. First, swipe down from the top bezel in the BBM application and choose “Settings.” 2. Find the option that reads “Show What I’m Listening To,” and toggle it “off.” 3. Tap the “Back” button to save your changes About The BlackBerry Z10 BlackBerry took a big leap of faith with its BlackBerry 10 operating system and BlackBerry Z10 smartphone. Unlike previously released BlackBerry phones, the Z10 features no physical keyboard or any physical buttons, setting it apart from other smartphones and all previous BlackBerry devices. For comparison’s sake, the BlackBerry Z10 is longer, wider and slightly thicker than the iPhone 5 (exact dimensions are 5.12" x 2.58" x 0.35"), but the BlackBerry Z10 is nowhere near as gargantuan as the Android-based smartphones available on the market, including Samsung's best-selling Galaxy Note 2. The BlackBerry Z10 has a brilliant 4.2-inch 1280 x 768 display, which actually has a higher pixel density than the iPhone 5's Retina display, and only weighs 4.78 ounces. The BlackBerry Z10 is powered by Qualcomm’s latest dual-core 1.5 GHz Snapdragon processor and a 1800mAH removable battery that can achieve 10 hours of 3G talk time and 305 hours of standby time; comparatively, the iPhone 5 can muster only eight hours of talk time and 225 hours of standby time. As for its "smart" features, the BlackBerry Z10 boasts an 8-megapixel rear camera with 1080p HD video recording, and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, but within its operating system lies an even more powerful camera feature called "TimeShift ," which allows users to adjust individual faces within a group shot to get different views of them by capturing multiple shots of their face before and after the actual snapshot is taken. Users will find it easy to scroll back and replace any individual's face with a different shot, taken either seconds before or after the group shot was taken. Of course, no phone experience is complete without third-party applications. BlackBerry boasted at its January event that it will have roughly 70,000 apps available to download at launch, with more promised to release shortly thereafter. It isn't much compared to the 700,000 apps available on Google Play or the 800,000 apps on the iOS App Store, but it's a start. BlackBerry sells the Z10 in black through a variety of retailers, including AT&T, T-Mobile, Best Buy and Radio Shack. The company will release an exclusive white version of the BlackBerry Z10 through Verizon Wireless later this year. http://www.ibtimes.com/print/blackbe...s-porn-1166817 ![]() Break Out a Hammer: You’ll Never Believe the Data ‘Wiped’ Smartphones Store Mat Honan Few things are more precious, intimate and personal than the data on your smartphone. It tracks your location and logs your calls. It’s your camera and your mobile banking device; in some cases it is a payment system in and of itself that knows what you bought and when and where and for how much. All of which explains why you wipe it before sending it off to a recycler or selling it on eBay, right? Problem is, even if you do everything right, there can still be lots of personal data left behind. Simply restoring a phone to its factory settings won’t completely clear it of data. Even if you use the built-in tools to wipe it, when you go to sell your phone on Craigslist you may be selling all sorts of things along with it that are far more valuable — your name, birth date, Social Security number and home address, for example. You may inadvertently sell your old photos, nudes and all. The bottom line is, the stuff you thought you had gotten rid of is still there, if someone knows how to look. “There are always artifacts left behind,” explains Lee Reiber, who runs mobile forensics for AccessData. We wanted to see what kind of data was lurking on our devices, so we rounded up every old phone we could scrounge up from around the office and asked the owners to wipe them. Our stash consisted of two iPhone 3G models, two Motorola Droids, an LG Dare and an LG Optimus. (We had hoped for a BlackBerry, but nobody had one.) Then, we shipped the phones to Reiber, who examined them to see what he could salvage from the phones’ memory. Reiber and AccessData use customized hardware and software to retrieve data. But it also sells a rig that will let anyone do the same, and phone forensics are increasingly commonplace. Courts can certainly get the data from your phone, and with the right gear, bad guys can too. So what did we find? The results ranged from not much to quite a lot. Take the two Motorola devices. Both were wiped, and neither had much to speak of stored in their built-in memory, just some application data with no personally identifiable fingerprints. But one user left his micro SD card in the phone. Although the contents of the card were deleted, the card had not been formatted. This, apparently, meant the files were recoverable. And because Android cached application data to this SD card, Reiber could recover e-mail data as well — enough that we could positively identify the phone’s owner via his e-mail address. But the real treasure trove was the photos and documents. The photos still had metadata, including the dates, times and locations in which the photos were shot. And while the documents were benign, if the phone’s owner had stored sensitive information on his phone — think a tax return with a Social Security number, or a .pdf bank statement — we would have had that, too. There were similar discrepancies in what Reiber found on the two iPhones, although both were 3G models running iOS 4. On one, he recovered a few cached website images, some music and media files, application preference files and a phone number in a user library. Overall, there was not much user data, although we could trace the phone to its owner thanks to that number. On the other, however, Reiber found a large amount of deleted personal data that he recovered because it had not been overwritten. He was able to find hundreds of phone numbers from a contacts database. Worse, he found a list of nearly every Wi-Fi and cellular access point the phone had ever come across — 68,390 Wi-Fi points and 61,202 cell sites. (This was the same location data tracking that landed Apple in a privacy flap a few years ago, and caused it to change its collection methods.) Even if the phone had never connected to any of the Wi-Fi access points, iOS was still logging them, and Reiber was able to grab them and piece together a trail of where the phone had been turned on. “This person travels a bit and probably travels United,” he theorized, based on the number of airports he found where he was able to pin down information on the specific terminal where the phone had connected. “You can watch this person go using the Wi-Fi hotspots.” (Interestingly, many of the locations found in the database were places the phone’s owner had never been — most in southeast Asia. Reiber says this suggests the phone or its memory had been refurbished.) It’s worth noting that the iPhone 3GS and newer versions use a hardware encryption key which is deleted when the phone is wiped, but data was easily recovered from these older models. The LG Dare was particularly interesting to us in advance because it’s a feature phone that wasn’t running Android or iOS. Because it didn’t have the wealth of apps to choose from, we had assumed it might have had less data than the other devices. That wasn’t the case. Reiber uncovered text messages, e-mails and lists of websites visited, as well as EXIF data from photos — ghosts of files past that left descriptions, if not the files themselves. There was enough personal information left behind to positively identify the owner’s first and last name, e-mail address and phone number. So not only was the data recoverable, it was connectable. In short, the phone was full of evidence. An investigator would be able to positively establish that its owner had visited certain websites, and had been in certain places at certain times. One could even read the messages that had been sent. As it turns out, the Dare stored far more data after a wipe than another phone from the company, the LG Optimus, another Android phone. “If I was a bad guy, I’d use this LG,” says Reiber. “They do a very good job of cleaning up.” Reiber only managed to recover a few image files from the browser’s cache and the device’s phone number. The phone number is tricky, because it means you can connect the phone with the owner. But even those cached images can be used to compile a data trail. For example, one recovered image was a photo of a woman. We dropped this in Google’s reverse image search, and found a match. Turns out, the photo is someone’s YouTube profile picture. Which means that in a very roundabout way, we were able to learn that the phone’s owner had either seen one of this person’s videos, or had some other sort of interaction online. In this specific case it’s only YouTube. But if it was an image from a jihadist website, or a photo from a dating site, we would have been able to find that out, too, both of which could be trouble in a court case. So what can you do about all this the next time you’re ready to upgrade phones? The alarming answer is not much. According to Reiber, all of our volunteers did the right thing. They used the software tools available to restore each phone to its factory settings. But that didn’t matter. The data is still there, if you have the means to recover it. In fact, Reiber says there’s only one surefire way to make sure someone isn’t going to come along behind you and scarf up your old bits: Take a hammer to it. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/...ata-trail/all/ ![]() Google Glass and Surveillance Culture If Google Glass becomes as ubiquitous as the iPhone, will Google attempt to abuse its remarkable power? Milo Yiannopoulos Google’s April Fool spoofs have never been particularly funny, but it was only this year that they became slightly sinister: Google Nose, a satirically imagined search service for smells, reminded us that the company has graduated beyond the intellect and is now moving in on the senses. Consumer hardware may not yet have the power to capture and process olfactory search terms, but it is more than capable of augmenting sight. Thus we have been gifted Google’s latest, most horrendous idea: a wearable, Internet-enabled computer it has christened “Glass,” but whose inelegant aesthetic is better represented by the product’s goofy unofficial moniker, “Google Goggles.” It’s an audacious product for a company no one trusts to behave responsibly with our data: a pair of glasses that can monitor and record the world around you. But they do so much more than that. Let’s not beat about the bush here: these specs are a thing of wonder. They can email, take pictures, record video, provide walking or driving directions, conduct searches, translate signs… the possibilities are endless. But if Glass becomes as ubiquitous as the iPhone, are we truly to believe that Google will not attempt to abuse that remarkable power? To do so, we would have to accept that Google, to select just three examples from just one recent New York Times report, only collected passwords, emails and data from private WiFi networks “accidentally”; that the company meant well when it deliberately bypassed security protocols in the Safari browser in 2012; and that the FTC was wrong to call its Buzz launch tactics “deceptive” and impose a twenty year audit ruling thereafter. Journalists privately remark that Google, like Facebook, has become practically impossible to libel when it comes to privacy, and that the company has only itself to blame, for two reasons. Firstly, we are moving toward a world in which technology corporations have at least as much influence over the average person as national governments do. That may sound daft, but ask yourself whether a few dollars off your tax bill would really make as much difference to your life as the withdrawal of Gmail, or the disappearance of all your Apple products. (Oh, and pause for a moment, before you answer, to remember that Facebook is now cited in a third of all divorces.) Google is both the originator and the archetype of the invasive-tech-firm cliché. It has done more to bring shame on the technology industry than the most feverish imaginings of dedicated Microsoft haters and has been caught with its hand in the privacy till many times. It is also terrifically rich and considerably globally powerful, thanks both to its lobbying efforts and its peerless in-house engineering talent. It is also one of the leading lights of the cloud revolution, with all the concomitant privacy assaults, data centralization and ready access to data for law enforcement agencies that go with it. Secondly, in the real world, Google regularly goes rogue, like a vigilante ideologue armed with every possible technological advantage: more power, in fact, than it can safely or maturely handle. Depressingly, the only war this outlaw sees fit to wage is against citizens who refuse to share their toilet habits with the Kimberly-Clark Corporation. That’s to say, Google isn’t fighting organised crime with its unprecedented power; it’s peering into your downstairs lavatory so it can sell you the right toilet paper. To assist in its disquieting mission to “organise the world’s information,” Google is recruiting an army. Not a real one, of course: the idea of Google mercenaries is far-fetched, albeit only slightly. Instead, it’s recruiting members of the public to spy for it, simply by wearing its new specs. Google Glass doesn’t represent militarism so much as espionage on a colossal scale. According to the Economist, technology has already forced state-sponsored spycraft to morph from a profession into a set of freelance job postings. Mountain View looks on and laughs, applying research dollars and Internet-scale economics to the trend, turning its customers and acolytes into a private army of eavesdroppers by releasing irresistibly alluring new ways to explore our world and ourselves that somehow always get busted for phoning home and blabbing a bit more than they should to the mother ship. Does that sound hysterical? It shouldn’t. With each new eyebrow-raising court judgment and federal fine levied against Google, it becomes ever more clear that this is a company hell-bent on innovating first and asking questions later, if ever. And its vision, shared with other California technology companies, is of corporate America redefining societal privacy norms in the service of advertising companies and their clients. It’s important not to slide into conspiracy theorising when discussing Google, however tempting it might be. Nor should we scapegoat the company out of fear of the unknown. So it’s worth reminding ourselves that the dangers arising from the concentration of influence by companies such as Google are inherent and structural. In other words, Google need not be an evil corporation for us to have justified concerns about the power it wields. We should be concerned about what happens when the mounting social pressure of consumer temptations meets the economic imperatives of a multinational corporation, whoever that corporation is. Yet there can be little doubt that Google will eventually be hauled in front of a judge for illicitly collecting data from its Glass products. No sane analyst or commentator would bet against it. As ever, corporate America’s imagination and daring puts the hubris of nosey civil servants to shame. And that’s why it’s fair to subject Glass to extra scrutiny: because it’s Google we’re talking about here. No other company has so consistently proven itself deserving of scrupulous attention. The Moral Side The treatment of technology in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 Batman movie The Dark Knight struck just one bum note, and that was the creepy, Gotham-wide sonar system created by tapping into private citizens’ mobile phones. For one thing, fans didn’t like Batman’s wacky, glowing eyes whenever the system piped information to his cowl, but they also, and more vociferously, objected to the invention itself. Fans didn’t react badly because the idea of turning “every cell phone in Gotham into a microphone” was absurd and impossible. No: it was that, for a movie franchise crammed with outlandish, barely-possible gadgets, the hijacking of mobile phones for surveillance seemed… well, unambitious. Moviegoers accustomed to having their email scanned for advertising keywords, their mobile app data tracked and stored and their houses photographed for public consumption on the Internet were hardly going to be blown away by the idea of someone listening in on their conversations. To put it bluntly: consumers already know their devices are spying on them. But even this unarresting stab at private sector prying gave pause to one of the two moral guardians of the story—Morgan Freeman’s avuncular Wayne Enterprises chief executive, Lucius Fox. Fox, if you recall, threatened to resign should the sonar device remain active after the Joker’s capture. The scene in question is charmingly naïve. “This is too much power for one person,” intones Freeman, shortly before delivering a line that must have had tech executives everywhere sniggering into their lattes with derision: “Spying on 30 million people isn’t part of my job description.” You can almost hear the giggles from Palo Alto. Only 30 million? Tech execs would have snickered, too, at a redemptive slow-motion sequence in which the machine is destroyed after serving its function. This is an act of conscience entirely alien to Silicon Valley. Typing LARRY PAGE into Google’s mainframe isn’t ever going to precipitate the destruction of the company’s Street View or search data, the same way typing LUCIUS FOX wiped out the sonar system in The Dark Knight—even though the data mined from any one of Google’s battery of products is far more valuable, and dangerous, than Batman’s kooky gizmo. Wising Up A Pulitzer is on ice, waiting for the reporter who can demonstrate why human rights violations originating in Mountain View matter to all of us. Yet coverage of Google’s perpetual privacy infractions is often limited to under-staffed Left-wing newspapers, self-righteous, illiterate fulminators on tech blogs and clunking European courtrooms. The public may be wising up, but all things considered there are surprisingly few professional reporters willing or able to put in the legwork, given how important tech giants are, not just for the global economy but for the future of society and culture. It’s instead left to Luddites in cumbersome national judiciaries and to the whipped-up opprobrium of the masses, instead of the fourth estate, to enforce propriety on the private sector. Perhaps it’s just as well that the Internet is doing the policing. The software component to Glass means that the devices can be extended and upgraded in ways even Google hasn’t thought of yet. On the one hand, that’s toxic: they’re in a class of devices, like smartphones, vulnerable to insidious, creeping changes, like the Facebook platform. So they need to be watched. But it’s also Glass’s genius: in wafting the prospect of augmented reality for all before our noses, the spectacles do what Gmail did to email eight years ago: they take an essential daily task or tool (in this case, one of the very most basic) and make it rich, joyful, liberating—and easily upgradeable. Apple creates sexy but static objects in new verticals; Google makes the pedestrian both personal and delightful, and iterates rapidly. A relatively common, if overwrought, view is that Glass is only the latest in a decade and half’s worth of Machiavellian plays for advertising data, in which Google dreams up an irresistible product, gives it away cheaply or for free, and in return garners a vast, unprecedented catalogue of personal data to resell to its advertising partners. Perhaps that’s because Google is a company that often seems bewildered by its own creations, and which struggles to establish appropriate ethical standards even for itself. Growing Unease There’s a growing sense of unease inside Mountain View about the monstering Glass is receiving in some parts of the press. And that’s before the goggles, which promise to bring Minority Report#-style interactivity to everyday life, are even on general sale. “Stop the cyborgs” is one phrase being used by privacy campaigners terrified about what might happen when Google Glass hits Main Street. The mainstream reaction to Glass has been—how should we put it charitably?—mixed, prompting some to speculate that the product may arrive stillborn. “It’s not,” one well-known Silicon Valley analyst, who preferred not to be named, told me, “that these glasses are ahead of their time. It’s actually that they’re too late: tech writers and even the public are terrified by what they represent because Google has proven itself so untrustworthy. “What I mean is, we’ve got Google’s number.” We shouldn’t get carried away imagining Google is waging some sort of war against the public. After all, it’s the company’s tech industry stablemates that stand to lose from Glass, should it prove commercially successful. Why? Because despite the reservations of the Wall Street Journal and seasoned Google-watchers, there’s an irritating digital-era learned behaviour that these glasses might just help us to overcome. It’s a familiar scene. Two young professionals meet for coffee, yet beyond the air kisses and shallow, fashion-forward affirmations as they greet one another, half the time they spend together isn’t dedicated to real interpersonal communication at all: instead, they are checking in, Tweeting, surfing, sharing and even, occasionally, sending each other messages, despite the fact that they are sitting opposite one another. Academic Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together, says that young people aren’t learning basic body language any more, primarily thanks to their connected devices. The art of subtle cues that express a paragraph’s worth of intimate expression is being lost. We don’t make eye contact with each other any longer. We don’t touch. In a world in which young are under pressure to be visibly connected, they’re in fact lonelier and more isolated than ever. Until now? At the TED conference earlier this year, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, wearing a pair of his company’s internet-enabled spectacles, described the act of swiping and tapping on a touchscreen as “emasculating.” It was a poor choice of words, but it revealed Google’s dissatisfaction with the touchscreen as a primary interface method for mobile devices. And it affirmed the company’s commitment to the heads-up, voice-controlled way of doing things. Glass might be plugged into all the same services as your iPhone—Twitter, email, Foursquare and Google itself—but you interact with the platforms very differently: by using, as you do in real life, your eyes, mouth and ears. You are forced to acknowledge the primacy of what’s around you and recognise the potential technology has to augment those things, but also the limitations inherent in it. Encouragingly, journalists and Valley A-listers who have trialled Glass report that they spend less time on social networks, even when the amount of content they post goes up. Generally, they’re querying other platforms for other kinds of data. That ought to worry social networks that rely on eyeballs and screen time for their revenue. We should sound one note of caution here before celebrating the speculative demise of the social network: the data in this area are very mixed. It’s unarguably true that people are beastly on the internet, but there’s just as much evidence to suggest that young people use social media to supplement and not to replace their real-world relationships, which would appear to be no bad thing, if true. Whether online friendships are as good as “the real thing” would appear at this stage to be a matter of individual parental choice. As for the effect of introducing Glass into the playground, no one yet has any idea about it. It’s possible that Google might even reboot interpersonal etiquette. Surfing Twitter on an iPhone, it’s easy to forget there’s a world out there. That’s why people are so gruesome to one another online, after all: the screen provides a mediating layer between reality and us. We forget that the person at the other end is a human being too. Glass’s layer is thinner, more translucent—and not just literally. By removing some of the distance between us and other people, could Glass usher in more humane, healthier relationship architectures—models in which technology sticks to doing what it is good at and doesn’t overreach itself, suffocating the message with the medium? There are hurdles—perhaps insurmountable ones—that must be cleared before Google can be permitted to unleash Glass to the mass market. If that sounds like a call for regulation, perhaps it is. Already there are suggestions that the headsets will be illegal to wear in some countries under existing laws. Restaurants, we can only hope, are already planning ban them from being worn over supper. That said, if Glass, or some other, similar wearable device, does manage to ingratiate itself sufficiently safely to welcome in ubiquitous, connected computing, dare we imagine an end to the pathological, Twitter-driven rudeness of anyone in public under 30 years old? Who Watches the Watchmen? There’s one final consideration, when we look ahead to what many would describe as a classic dystopia—a future in which Glass and wearable computers like it are omnipresent—and that’s the psychological effect of being surrounded, even more than is already the case, by recording devices. Already the “surveillance state” is contributing to widespread fear and loathing for the Establishment in western democracies. (It’s by no means the only factor, of course.) Governments, anxious about their declining influence in the age of the Internet, runaway capitalism and, even worse, runaway Internet capitalism, are engorging themselves, compulsively rummaging through their citizens’ drawers and generally poking their noses where they don’t belong. That’s bad enough. What happens, though, when it’s not just governments but your friends, neighbours and colleagues who might, at any moment, be subjecting you to unwanted and unauthorised supervision? When the threat of censure from the state for putting trash in a wrongly-coloured sack becomes the threat of public ridicule from a friend who uploads a video of an unfortunate trip down the stairs? For many people, the latter could be a great deal more traumatic. In the UK, a television show called You’ve Been Framed once held something of a monopoly on public embarrassment: viewers would send in home-made videotapes of their friends and relatives in “hilarious” accidents. (Some were faked; most were not.) Today, thanks to YouTube, Jackass culture is everywhere; cruelty and voyeurism are de rigueur. There’s even a social network start-up in Germany dedicated to sharing “stunts” and practical jokes; inevitably, it descends into barbarism. The potential for social disaster would appear to be tremendous. As tech journalist and political blogger Greg Stevens put it to me this week, “The vector that is traced out by Google Glass could be called ‘the technological globalization of private experience.’” If that doesn’t send chills down your spine… And it’s not just the potential for mean-spirited public shaming. There’s also the more unpleasant temptations inherent in spying on one’s own community: the opportunity to take the law into one’s own hands, or simply to enforce one’s own, morally superior ethical systems. Imagine it: the stuff of dreams for big government cronies. Social engineering democratized out to the lowest possible level, with citizens transformed into clipboard-waving busybodies, terrorising one another with the threat of prosecution for recycling infractions, newspaper thefts or violations of summer hose-pipe bans. It’s those Internet-scale economics again—this time leveraged by the grassroots activists of the global guilt industry. At the heart of privacy campaigners’ fears about Glass is that potential for social destructiveness; the power of always-on surveillance, storage and sharing to turn people against one another. We have learned the hard way, primarily thanks to Facebook, that the efficiencies and opportunities created by technology come with social consequences. The question is: will the fun and utility of Glass come at too great a societal cost? More Like Botox In evolutionary terms, Google Glass represents a tentative step toward the artificial augmentation of our sensory apparatus. So it’s not ridiculous to speak about it in the same breath as genetic engineering. There’s a view that the human race modifying itself is inevitable, and even natural: Stephen Hawking has said that while genetic engineering “may not be in accord with democratic or egalitarian principles,” nor has Darwinian evolution ever been “politically correct.” But Glass is, in its present incarnation, little more than an accessory that hints at things to come. In fact, Glass is very unlike the invasive body modification experiments and genetic tampering that some scientists claim are inevitable. It’s more like Botox than plastic surgery: a temporary, cosmetic upgrade. And because it’s a consumer product, everyone is free to discuss it—and decline to buy it. As a result, it is subject to the demands of moral argument in a way that some scientists claim that genetic engineering isn’t or shouldn’t be. The community-based political activism Glass will encourage will undoubtedly be deeply annoying. But there’s little to suggest an apocalyptic societal breakdown just because a few hipster tech execs want the ability to tweet hands-free from their scooters. We may not be able to resist the allure of modding our bodies and even our species, we do have a defence against the charms of Glass, supposing we’ve been tempted into a purchase. Version 1.0 of Glass isn’t an inevitability of evolution: it’s a rich kid’s toy. For now, at least, we can simply take the damn things off. https://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/goo...lance-culture/ ![]() New California "Right to Know" Act Would Let Consumers Find Out Who Has Their Personal Data -- And Get a Copy of It Rainey Reitman Let’s face it: most of us have no idea how companies are gathering and sharing our personal data. Colossal data brokers are sucking up personal facts about Americans from sources they refuse to disclose. Digital giants like Facebook are teaming up with data brokers in unsettling new ways. Privacy policies for companies are difficult to read at best and can change in a heartbeat. And even savvy users are unlikely to fend off the snooping eyes of online trackers working to build profiles of our interests and web histories. So what can we do about it? A new proposal in California, supported by a diverse coalition including EFF and the ACLU of Northern California, is fighting to bring transparency and access to the seedy underbelly of digital data exchanges. The Right to Know Act (AB 1291) would require a company to give users access to the personal data the company has stored on them—as well as a list of all the other companies with whom that original company has shared the users' personal data—when a user requests it. It would cover California residents and would apply to both offline and online companies. If you live in California, click here to support this bill. Under current California law, customers can contact companies and ask for an accounting of disclosures for direct marketing purposes—basically, a list of what companies got your personal data for them to send you junk mail, spam, or call you on the phone—and general facts about what types of data were disclosed. For example, if you went to PetSilly and bought dog bones, and then PetSilly sold your data to 17 companies that were using it for direct marketing, you could ask PetSilly for an accounting of disclosures. PetSilly would have to provide you with the names of those 17 companies as well as what categories of information were disclosed (name, address, phone number, etc). The new proposal brings California's outdated transparency law into the digital age, making it possible for California consumers to request an accounting of all the ways their personal information is being trafficked—including with online advertisers, data brokers, and third-party apps. So while current law provides information about data exchanged for direct marketing, the Right to Know Act would update existing transparency law to ensure that users could track the flow of their data from online interactions. It also updates the definitions in the law in important ways, including adding location data—a sensitive data set not adequately protected by current law. It's not just about knowing what a company is sharing, it’s about knowing what a company is storing. The new proposal would require companies to make available, free of charge, access to or a copy of the customer's personal information. That means you the consumer will really know what information a company has about you. Lots of people around the world already enjoy these rights. This law mimics the rights of data access already available to users in Europe, which means that most of the big tech companies should already have systems in place to facilitate user access. This law is about transparency and access, not new restrictions on data sharing. The proposed law wouldn't limit or restrict sales of data, and it wouldn't provide additional security measures for how data is stored or new requirements for anonymization. While those are all important issues to consider, the law is actually far more basic. It helps consumers, regulators, policymakers, and the world at large shine a light onto the largely hidden, highly lucrative world of the personal data economy. The Right to Know Act is written specifically to ensure that companies big and small will be able to tell Californians how they’re collecting and sharing your personal data. You ask and they tell you what they have collected, the list of companies they gave your data to, and general facts about what kind of data was handed over (like “sexual information ” and "address"). However, the law has three important safeguards to make sure that even little startups with limited resources will be able to comply: 1. Companies can choose to not store unnecessary data. Or, if they must retain information, they could take protective measures to de-identify user data before retaining or disclosing it. Taking such measures would mean companies would not have to respond to data disclosure requests. 2. If a company doesn't want to respond to individual requests for data disclosures, it can provide you with a notice about what data will be disclosed and to whom—just before or after it happens. 3. Companies only have to provide each user an accounting once every 12 months. This safeguards against any repetitive requests. California has a reputation for passing important laws around consumer protection. We're fortunate to be paving the way when it comes to issues like data breach notification, medical privacy rights, online privacy policy notices, and employment law. But what happens in California can prove to have positive benefits for users all over the country (and sometimes the world). We see this, for example, with privacy policies. The California Online Privacy Protection Act requires websites to conspicuously show a privacy policy that provides general information about data collection and use. Though this is a California law, privacy policies have become a norm and they are helpful to users all over the web. Hopefully, as companies put efficient systems into place to enable Californians to learn what is happening to their data, it will be easy for the companies to make those systems available to people outside of California. And like California’s model for data breach notification laws, (first enacted in California in 2002 and now integrated into law in 46 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands), transparency will become the default, helping consumers while saving companies money down the line. California’s Right to Know Act is supported by a diverse coalition of civil liberties groups, domestic violence advocates, consumer protection groups, sexual health, and women’s rights groups. And EFF recently sent a letter to Assemblymember Bonnie Lowenthal, the bill’s author, to affirm our strong support of this bill. Please help us pass this important transparency law. If you are a California resident, click here. If you are not a California resident, send this article to friends of yours who are. Files ab1201-support.eff_.pdf https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/0...their-personal ![]() Bill Would Allow Bosses to Seek Facebook Passwords Manuel Valdes A bill amendment proposed Tuesday could allow employers to ask for a worker's Facebook or other social media password during company investigations. The provision was proposed for a bill that safeguards social network passwords of workers and job applicants. The measure bars employers from asking for social media credentials during job interviews. The amendment was introduced at the House Labor Committee at the request of business groups. The Associated Press reported last year that some employers around the country were asking applicants for their social media information. In 2012 and this year, seven states banned employers from asking job applicants and employees for their social network passwords, with some exceptions. Another 33 states are considering similar laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Proponents say that the original bill would open an avenue for possible illegal activity by employees, such as divulging proprietary or consumer information to outsiders through social networks. The amendment says that an employer conducting an investigation may require or demand access to a personal account if an employee or prospective employee has allegations of work-place misconduct or giving away an employer's proprietary information. The amendment would require an investigation to ensure compliance with applicable laws or regulatory requirements. Under the amendment, employees would be present when their social network profiles are searched and whatever information found is kept confidential, unless it is relevant to a criminal investigation. "Rather than just referring everything to law enforcement, we have the opportunity to work with the employee and to investigate," said Denny Eliason, who is representing the banking industry. He said his clients have had cases where employees transferred sensitive information via email. He was not sure if Facebook or other social networks have been used. Pam Greenberg of the National Conference of State Legislatures says similar bills being considered around the country have similar provisions allowing for disclosure of passwords during investigations. California's law allows "requests" of passwords during investigations. But Washington amendment goes beyond that, said Dave Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based online privacy advocacy group. This amendment "says they have a right to enter your digital home," Maass said. "It's astounding that they would try to codify this and that all employers could do this... the national trend is to move away from this. It's shocking that the amendment is going in the right opposite direction." Maass said it's not only an employee's privacy that is violated, but also those he has connections with in a social network site. The amendment "would turn this bill into a privacy bill into an employer fishing expedition," said Shankar Narayan of the Washington chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. "That's the not the bill we signed up for." The bill's sponsor, Democrat Sen. Steve Hobbs of Lake Stevens, said Tuesday that he had not read the amendment, but he was aware of concerns from high-tech industries. University of Washington law professor Ryan Calo, who studies emerging technologies, said companies have federal, state and common laws that protect proprietary information. "At first blush, it looks pretty common sense. If you're trying to investigate what happened and you suspect one of your employees, it seems like common sense you should be able to do this, however, there are legal mechanisms," he said. Cole said the amendment has broad language, such as "work-related misconduct." "It's up to the employer to define what that constitutes," he said. http://www.komonews.com/news/local/B...201151951.html ![]() Retailers Track Employee Thefts in Vast Databases Stephanie Clifford and Jessica Silver-Greenberg Facing a wave of employee theft, retailers across the country have helped amass vast databases of workers accused of stealing and are using that information to keep employees from working again in the industry. The repositories of information, like First Advantage Corporation’s Esteem database, often contain scant details about suspected thefts and routinely do not involve criminal charges. Still, the information can be enough to scuttle a job candidate’s chances. Some of the employees, who submit written statements after being questioned by store security officers, have no idea that they admitted committing a theft or that the information will remain in databases, according to interviews with consumer lawyers, regulators and employees. The databases, which have tens of thousands of subscribers and are used by major retailers like Target, CVS and Family Dollar, are aimed at combating employee theft, which accounts for a large swath of missing merchandise. The latest figures available, from 2011, put the loss at about 44 percent of missing merchandise, valued at about $15 billion, according to a trade group, the National Retail Federation. Retailers “don’t want to take a chance on hiring somebody that they might have a problem with,” said Richard Mellor, the federation’s vice president for loss prevention. But the databases, which are legal, are facing scrutiny from labor lawyers and federal regulators, who worry they are so sweeping that innocent employees can be harmed. The lawyers say workers are often coerced into confessing, sometimes when they have done nothing wrong, without understanding that they will be branded as thieves. The Federal Trade Commission has fielded complaints about the databases and is examining whether they comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a federal law aimed at curbing inaccurate consumer information and giving consumers more control, said Anthony Rodriguez, a staff lawyer at the agency. Screening for suspected episodes of shoplifting is one part of a background check, as companies scour for evidence of criminal convictions or sex-offender registration. Almost all retailers perform background checks, according to a 2011 survey from the federation. But some background-check companies are wary of the theft admissions, which retailers submit to the databases. “That is not a product that we sell, because I think it’s a product fraught with risk and inefficiency,” said William Greenblatt, the chief executive of the background-check company Sterling Infosystems. Federal authorities have zeroed in on background-check data. Last summer, the F.T.C. settled charges with HireRight, which provides a retail-theft database along with other types of screenings. Among the accusations, the agency said that some records were inaccurate and that the firm made it too difficult for consumers to dispute claims. LexisNexis agreed last week to pay $13.5 million to settle a class-action suit on behalf of 31,000 people that accused the firm of violating consumer protection laws by selling background checks to debt collectors. The company did not admit wrongdoing. As the economic recovery limps forward, consumer lawyers say, the consequences of the retail theft databases’ can be particularly devastating. With so many job applicants, employers have little incentive to hire someone with a tarnished background. Since the recession, lawsuits have proliferated against the companies that operate retail theft databases, like LexisNexis, which owned Esteem until this year, HireRight and GIS, according to a review of court records. In the last year, the nature of the lawsuits has changed, too, as lawyers try to build class-action cases. HireRight did not return calls for comment, and the other firms declined to comment. Stores carefully train loss-prevention officers to ensure the admissions are accurate, Mr. Mellor said, and the databases reverify information. But with an inaccurate statement, he said, “your options for getting it out of a database are slim.” Some retailers are moving away from the databases. Home Depot, which just stopped using Esteem, said the decision followed a general review of “systems and services.” For Keesha Goode, $34.97 in missing merchandise was enough to destroy her future in retailing. Ms. Goode, 28, was a clerk at the discount store Forman Mills in 2008, when she was accused of not ringing up a former employee’s purchases. During a nearly two-hour examination, Ms. Goode, who maintains her innocence, said she had agreed to write out a statement because she worried she would be sent to jail. In looping cursive, she said her accusers were trying to make her out as a liar, adding, “I was just doing my job.” Ms. Goode was immediately fired, and was asked to pay back the $34.97. She had no idea, she said, that the statement would go into a shared database. She received a letter from Dollar General alerting her that she had been turned down for a job partly because of her listing in Esteem, and a copy of the report showed that she had a “verified admission” for “theft of merchandise.” She wrote LexisNexis, “I was accused of not reporting on a former employee who was stealing merchandise, but I did not steal anything myself.” The company responded that it had reinvestigated and “verified” the accuracy of the information. Ms. Goode, who now works at a halfway house, has a lawsuit pending against LexisNexis, accusing the company of violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Forman Mills and Dollar General did not respond to requests for comment. LexisNexis has moved to toss out the lawsuit, arguing that the company abided by the law, according to court filings. As in Ms. Goode’s case, the admission statements are typically obtained by a store’s security force. Employees are often willing to say anything to ward off what can feel like an interrogation, the lawyers say. Another problem: the employee is informally accused and ultimately deprived of the protections, like due process, that a suspect would receive in a police precinct, for example. Lawyers also say that admission forms do not typically warn employees that it will go on their record. “We’re not talking about a criminal record, which either is there or is not there — it’s an admission statement which is being provided by an employer,” said Irv Ackelsberg, a lawyer at Langer, Grogan & Diver who represents Ms. Goode. Such statements may contain no outright admission of guilt, like one submitted after Kyra Moore, then a CVS employee, was accused of stealing: “picked up socks left them at the checkout and never came back to buy them,” it read. When Ms. Moore later applied for a job at Rite Aid, she was deemed “noncompetitive.” She is suing Esteem. CVS, noting that it is not a defendant in this lawsuit, said that many retail companies used Esteem “to report and share information about employees who have admitted to theft from their employers,” and that CVS only sent written theft admissions to Esteem. Still, lawyers say those admissions can be problematic. The database is “a secret blacklist,” Mr. Ackelsberg said. “The employees don’t know about it until they have already been hurt.” https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/b...er-thefts.html ![]() Google Fights U.S. National Security Probe Data Demand Karen Gullo Google Inc (GOOG)., operator of the world’s largest search engine, is challenging a demand by the U.S. government for private user information in a national security probe, according to a court filing. It “appears” to be the first time a major communications company is pushing back after getting a so-called National Security Letter, said the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet privacy group. The challenge comes three weeks after a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that NSLs, which are issued without a warrant, are unconstitutional. “The people who are in the best position to challenge the practice are people like Google,” said EFF attorney Matt Zimmerman, who represented an unidentified service provider that won the March 14 ruling. “So far no one has really stood up for their users” among large Internet service providers. The government has issued 300,000 NSLs since 2000, and only four or five recipients have challenged the letters, Zimmerman said. Civil-rights groups say NSLs give federal agents unchecked powers to spy on people while the government says they’re a crucial tool in the fight against terrorism and threats to national security. Google, in its first public disclosure about national security letters, said in a March 5 report that it received in the range of zero to 999 NSLs annually starting in 2009 affecting more than 1,000 accounts. In a company blog post, Richard Salgado, Google’s legal director for law enforcement and information security, thanked U.S. government officials “for working with us to provide greater insight into the use of NSLs.” ‘Legal Process’ Google filed a petition to set aside a “legal process” pursuant “to 18 U.S.C. Section 3511 (a) and (b),” according to a March 29 filing in federal court in San Francisco seeking a court order to seal its request. Petitions “filed under Section 3511 of Title 18 to set aside legal process issued under Section 2709 of Title 18 must be filed under seal because Section 2709 prohibits disclosure of the legal process,” Kevan Fornasero, Google’s lawyer, said in the filing. The petition itself was lodged under seal with the court. No details of the government’s demand for records were disclosed in the filing. Section 2709 is a federal law authorizing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to issue NSLs requiring wire and electronic communication service providers to turn over subscriber information and other records that the agency certifies are relevant to an investigation of international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities. The law prohibits NSL recipients from disclosing they’ve received one. ‘Unreasonable, Oppressive’ Section 3511 (a) allows recipients of NSLs to petition a federal judge to set aside the request and allows judges to modify or set aside the request if complying with it would be “unreasonable, oppressive or otherwise unlawful.” Section 3511 (b) allows NSL recipients to ask a court to lift the gag order. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston yesterday granted Google’s request to seal documents in the case. Illston ruled March 14 that the gag order section of the NSL law was unconstitutional and rendered the entire statute illegal. Illston said the NSL statutes violated free speech and separation of power principles because the government failed to show that, to protect national security, it needs to always bar people from disclosing the mere fact they’ve received an NSL and the law impermissibly restricted courts from reviewing the need for nondisclosure. She ordered the FBI to stop issuing NSLs and put her ruling on hold for 90 days to allow the government time to appeal. “We are in this interesting in-between moment in which the government is still able to enforce its authority,” said Marc Rotenberg, president and executive director of the Washington- based Electronic Privacy Information Center. “I suspect that this filing is an effort to push the issue further.” Chris Gaither, a spokesman for Mountain View, California- based Google, declined to comment on the filing. Chris Allen, an FBI spokesman in Washington, also declined to comment. The case is In Re Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Petition to Set Aside Legal Process, 13-80063, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco). http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-0...ta-demand.html ![]() Police Surveillance May Earn Money for City Sam Roberts A unique public-private partnership that joined gut-level police acumen with advanced computer algorithms is proceeding toward two goals that rarely coincide: The policing system is making New York safer and it will also make money for the city, which is marketing it to other jurisdictions. In the six months since the Domain Awareness System was unveiled, officials of Microsoft, which designed the system with the New York Police Department, said they have been surprised by the response and are actively negotiating with a number of prospective buyers, whom Microsoft declined to identify. “The interest from the United States has come from smaller municipalities, from sheriff’s departments, and police chiefs from several major cities,” said Dave Mosher, vice president of Microsoft Services. “Outside the U.S., large sporting events have approached us, and also law enforcement — people who are interested in providing public security.” Buyers would pay to access the software (at least several million dollars and more depending on the size of the jurisdiction and whether specifications have to be customized). New York City will receive 30 percent of the gross revenues from the sale of the system and access to any innovations developed for new customers. The revenue will be directed to counterterrorism and crime prevention programs. The new system incorporates more than 3,500 cameras in public places, license-plate readers at every major Manhattan entry point, fixed and portable radiation detectors, real-time alerts transmitted from the 911 emergency system and a trove of Police Department data, including arrests and parking summonses. The system cost about $30 million and took several years to put into effect. Since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced in August that the system would be marketed elsewhere, it has figured in a number of investigative coups that went beyond the system’s original purpose of counterterrorism in Lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11 attack. Surveillance footage fed to a windowless suite on Lower Broadway tracked a 20-year-old Bangladeshi man in the fall as he scoped out the fortresslike Federal Reserve Bank downtown, his target for a car-bomb attack (the videotaped evidence led to his guilty plea in February). Officers responding to reports of shots fired outside the Empire State Building in August were immediately alerted that the victim had been felled by a single gunman and that there was no apparent terrorist threat. While the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, has hailed the innovative software as “a transformative tool” for law enforcement, it has also raised privacy concerns. Amitai Etzioni, a sociologist at George Washington University, warned on The Huffington Post in January that the system was so encompassing that even with built-in legal and technological constraints, it subjected the public to a potential invasion of privacy “much greater than anything we have seen so far.” The Police Department says it is scrupulous about ensuring the system is not misused. Richard Daddario, the department’s deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, said that the system had been developed after “we looked at the software that was available and didn’t find anything that met our needs. “In 2006,” he said, “we hired Microsoft to build a customized application and by 2010 we developed a product that is head and shoulders above anything on the market, for the reason alone that it was developed by cops for cops after thousands of hours of focus groups about what they do and how they do it to help them do it better.” Mr. Mosher of Microsoft said that while “the scale of what the N.Y.P.D. does is unmatched by most places in the world,” the design goal was applicable everywhere, “for the technical complexities to melt away so the cops can focus on doing their job and less about navigating 17 screens.” Mr. Daddario said, “The more quality information you get to act on intelligently, the more efficient you are and the fewer mistakes you make.” https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/n...-in-money.html ![]() Cyber Criminals Tying Up Emergency Phone Lines Through TDoS Attacks Similar to DDoS attacks, TDoS also used to extort cash from targets, including businesses and public service agencies Ted Samson Emergency-service providers and other organizations are being targeted with TDoS (telephony denial of service) attacks, according to a security alert from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI obtained by security expert Brian Krebs. TDoS attacks use high volumes of automated calls to tie up target phone systems, halting incoming and outgoing calls. "Dozens of such attacks have targeted the administrative PSAP [public safety answering point] lines (not the 911 emergency line)," according to the alert. "It is speculated that government offices/emergency services are being 'targeted' because of the necessity of functional phone lines." Emergency service providers aren't the only organizations being targeted: "Many similar attacks have occurred targeting various businesses and public entities, including the financial sector and other public emergency operations interests, including air ambulance, ambulance and hospital communications." Perpetrators are using the attacks to extort cash from target organizations, according to the alert. They start with the organizations receiving a call from a representative from a purported payday loan company, during which a caller -- usually speaking in a "strong accent" -- demands payment of $5,000 for an outstanding debt, according to the alert. Failing to get payment from an individual or organization, the perpetrator launches a TDoS attack. The attacks can last for several hours. They may stop for a period of time, then resume -- and once an organization is attacked, it may suffer random attacks over weeks or months. "According to a recent report from SecureLogix, a company that sells security services to call centers, free IP-PBX software such as Asterisk, as well as computer-based call-generation tools and easy-to-access SIP services, are greatly lowering the barrier-to-entry for voice network attackers," Krebs wrote. https://www.infoworld.com/t/cyber-cr...attacks-215585 ![]() Untappable Apple or DEA Disinformation? Julian Sanchez Tech news site CNET has an interesting, but I suspect somewhat misleading, story today suggesting that text messages sent via Apple’s iMessage service—an Internet-based alternative to traditional cell phone SMS text messages—are “impossible to intercept” by law enforcement. Yet that is not quite what the document on which the story is based—an “intelligence note” distributed to law enforcement by the Drug Enfrocement Administration—actually says. The DEA memo simply observes that, because iMessages are encrypted and sent via the Internet through Apple’s servers, a conventional wiretap installed at the cellular carrier’s facility isn’t going to catch those iMessages along with conventional text messages. Which shouldn’t exactly be surprising: A search of your postal mail isn’t going to capture your phone calls either; they’re just different communications channels. But the CNET article strongly implies that this means encrypted iMessages cannot be accessed by law enforcement at all. That is almost certainly false. As cryptographer and computer scientist Matthew Green observes, there is a simple and intuitive way to test whether Apple (or any cloud storage provider) has the capability to access a user’s encrypted content stored in the cloud—as Apple’s iMessages are: The “mud puddle test.” If you slip in a mud puddle, destroying your iPhone (along with any locally stored encryption keys) and forgetting your passwords as a result of the bump on the head, can you still recover your data? Can you, for instance, log in from a Web browser, reset your password, and then restore your content to a new device? If you can—and with Apple’s iCloud services, you can—then the cloud provider must itself hold the keys to unlock that data. So iMessages may not be interceptable from a suspect’s cell carrier, but Apple has to be capable of handing them over when the authorities come knocking with a warrant. In fact, all Apple has to do is provide the cops with an appropriate authentication token and they should, in principle, be able to turn an ordinary iPhone into a de facto clone of the suspect’s own device—so that iMessages show up on the police phone in realtime just as the suspect receives or sends them. In fact, there’s another big way in which iMessages should be much more convenient and useful to police than conventional text messages. As law enforcement has long complained, most cell carriers store ordinary SMS messages for a few days after they’re sent at most—and some don’t retain message content at all. That means police aren’t able to read through a suspect’s historical messages even if they obtain a search warrant—only new ones. Apple’s iMessages, however, are stored indefinitely—which is a lot more useful if you’re trying to investigate a crime that’s already occurred. That means cops should be absolutely overjoyed if drug dealers or other criminals start using iMessage instead of SMS. Which brings us to the question of why, exactly, this sensitive law enforcement document leaked to a news outlet in the first place. It would be very strange, after all, for a cop to deliberately pass along information that could help drug dealers shield their communications from police. One reason might be to create support for the Justice Department’s longstanding campaign for legislation to require Interent providers to create backdoors ensuring police can read encrypted communications—even though in this case, the backdoor would appear to already exist. The CNET article itself discusses this so-called “Going Dark” initiative. But another possible motive is to spread the very false impression that the article creates: That iMessages are somehow more difficult, if not impossible, for law enforcement to intercept. Criminals might then switch to using the iMessage service, which is no more immune to interception in reality, and actually provides police with far more useful data than traditional text messages can. If that’s what happened here, you have to admire the leaker’s ingenuity—but I’m inclined to think people are entitled to accurate information about the real level of security their communication enjoy. http://www.cato.org/blog/untappable-...disinformation ![]() French Intelligence Agency Forces Removal of Wikipedia Entry saibot834 The French domestic intelligence agency DCRI has forced a Wikipedia administrator to delete an article about a local military base. The administrator, who is also the president of Wikimédia France, has been threatened by the agency with immediate reprisals after his initial refusal to comply. Following a discussion on the administrator's noticeboard, the article (which is said to violate a law on the secrecy of the national defense) has been reinstated by a foreign user. Prior to pressuring the admin, DCRI contacted the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), which refused to remove the article. WMF claimed the article only contained publicly available information, in accordance with Wikipedia's verifiability policy. While the consequences for Wikimedia's community remain unclear, one thing is certain: The military base article – now available in English – will get more public awareness than ever before. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/04/...ikipedia-entry ![]() The Pirate Bay Becomes #1 File-Sharing Site as Cyberlockers Collapse Ernesto The Pirate Bay is now the most-visited file-sharing site on the Internet, taking over the lead from prominent one-click hosting sites such as 4Shared and Mediafire. After a spectacular rise in the early years of this decade cyberlockers are quickly losing ground, while BitTorrent sites continue to grow. This shift in balance can be attributed to the Megaupload shutdown, and the changes in the cyberlocker market that followed. Less than two years ago we published an overview of the most used file-sharing sites, covering both BitTorrent and traditional cyberlockers. At the time one-click download sites were beating BitTorrent sites by a landslide. However, the cyberlocker business changed dramatically following the Megaupload shutdown last year and now the tables have turned. The Pirate Bay, ranked sixth last time, has become the most-used file-sharing site. While the infamous BitTorrent site certainly gained some new visitors in recent months, it mostly owes its number one spot to the traffic decline of several major cyberlockers. The most likely explanation for the traffic drop at these sites is the Megaupload shutdown. As covered extensively in the past, many cyberlockers removed their affiliate plans, disabled public sharing or implemented other measures to keep pirates at bay. The result is a major shift in traffic patterns, with both winners and losers. Quite a few familiar names have fallen from the list, including RapidShare, FileServe and Hotfile. Others such as Uploaded and Putlocker picked up new visitors. The overall pattern seems to be that BitTorrent sites have regained some of the “market share” they lost earlier. Half of all sites in the file-sharing top 10 are BitTorrent related, compared to only two in 2011. With six newcomers in the list, it’s clear that the file-sharing ecosystem has been shaken up quite a bit. Below is the full top 10 of the most-visited general purpose file-sharing sites that are available in English. We used several traffic comparison and analytic tools to compile this list, including Compete, Quantcast and Alexa. The alexa rank is shown in the table below, as well as the # in the 2011 list. http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-b...llapse-130330/ Until next week, - js. ![]() Current Week In Review ![]() Recent WiRs - March 30th, March 23rd, March 16th, March 9th, March 2nd Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved. "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black |
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Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 30th, '11 | JackSpratts | Peer to Peer | 0 | 27-07-11 06:58 AM |
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 16th, '11 | JackSpratts | Peer to Peer | 0 | 13-07-11 06:43 AM |
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 30th, '10 | JackSpratts | Peer to Peer | 0 | 27-01-10 07:49 AM |
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 16th, '10 | JackSpratts | Peer to Peer | 0 | 13-01-10 09:02 AM |
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 5th, '09 | JackSpratts | Peer to Peer | 0 | 02-12-09 08:32 AM |