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Old 25-11-15, 08:54 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 28th, '15

Since 2002


































"Last year, I introduced the Secure Data Act to ban government-mandated backdoors into Americans technology. Strong encryption and sound computer security is the best way to keep Americans’ data safe from hackers and foreign threats." – U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Oregon


"Metadata collected by the NSA will be preserved through February 29. After that the NSA will purge all of its historic records once pending litigation is resolved." – Dustin Volz


"A unanimous District Court considers, therefore, that it is not in a position to authorize such a ban [on the Pirate Bay] as the rights holders want and therefore rejects their request." – Chief Magistrate Anders Dereborg











































November 28th, 2015




Judge Sides with Rightscorp, Says DMCA Doesn’t Protect Cox

In what could be a landmark copyright case, an ISP loses its "safe harbor."
Joe Mullin

Nearly a year after two music publishers and online copyright cop Rightscorp initiated a high-stakes lawsuit against Cox Communications, a judge has made a ruling that's potentially devastating to Cox's case.

US District Judge Liam O'Grady has ruled that Cox isn't protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbor" provisions. That's the part of the DMCA that protects "online service providers" from copyright lawsuits if they comply with various parts of the DMCA, including the obligation to terminate "repeat infringers." Now one of the music publishers, BMG Rights Management, will move toward a trial slated to start December 2.

BMG is using data from Rightscorp to make its case that Cox blew off its legal obligations to help copyright owners. In the original lawsuit, plaintiffs BMG Rights Management and Round Hill Music argued that the Rightscorp data allows them to identify "repeat infringers" that use BitTorrent to download large quantities of music. Rightscorp insists that ISPs like Cox must respond when it identifies those users and forward its notices demanding $20 per song or else face a copyright lawsuit. After a few years of such data collection, two of Rightscorp's biggest clients finally acted on that threat, filing suit against Cox in 2014.

O'Grady hasn't yet published his full opinion, but a two-page order (PDF) published Thursday makes it clear that he doesn't believe Cox is protected by the DMCA. "There is no genuine issue of material fact as to whether defendants reasonably implemented a repeat-infringer policy" as required by the law, O'Grady wrote. How the judge reached that conclusion matters a great deal. When he publishes his full opinion, it will be scrutinized closely by copyright lawyers and tech companies.

What's clear at this point is that Cox is heading into a trial in an unfriendly environment, with a judge that has already sided with the copyright holders on the key point. While judges have repeatedly shuttered file-sharing sites for aiding and abetting piracy, there's little precedent for trying to hold an ISP responsible for piracy by its users. At trial, Cox is likely to stress that the Rightscorp data represents only an accusation that particular users have broken copyright laws, not definitive proof.

A loss by Cox could have widespread effects on how piracy gets managed by US courts, since accusations of piracy—even ones with no judicial finding of infringement—could be used to haul ISPs into court. Seeking to avoid that situation, a whole lot of ISPs are likely to start marching to the beat of Rightscorp's drums. And Rightscorp has made clear that its treatment for pirates will be harsh, up to and including disconnection from the Internet.

“Reasonable” response?

In a strongly worded rebuttal (PDF) to BMG's accusations, Cox described Rightscorp as selling "shady services" to copyright owners. Rightscorp "shakes down ISP customers for money without regard to actual liability, and it tries to enlist ISPs in its scheme," Cox lawyers write. The ISP doesn't act on Rightscorp's notices because they're "wrongful" and inadequate, but Rightscorp kept dumping "thousands of notices per day" on the ISP. When Cox wouldn't get on board, Rightscorp and its biggest client sued. "This suit is Rightscorp's retribution, with Plaintiffs’ complicity, for Cox’s refusal to participate in Rightscorp’s scheme," state Cox lawyers.

Cox "works well with many copyright holders," but considered Rightscorp notices "improper, as involving extortion and blackmail." In a mostly redacted section of its legal brief, Cox describes its system of "graduated response" for responding to allegations of copyright infringement. Cox notes that account termination is "not the industry norm" but goes on to emphasize that it does, in fact, terminate some account holders because of copyright complaints. But "the decision requires discretion," since some subscribers don't understand what gave rise to copyright complaints and may need help keeping their Internet access secure, or removing malware, before the company takes the "extreme measure of termination."

On the whole, Cox argued its procedures are "reasonable" and that Rightscorp's notices were properly blacklisted because they were deceptive. "For non-blacklisted complainants, Cox takes some action, although not always a customer-facing action, on 100% of copyright complaints it receives," the company's lawyers wrote (emphasis in original.)

Clearly, those arguments didn't win over the judge's favor, although it isn't yet known exactly why not. However the trial turns out, it's hard to imagine Cox won't appeal O'Grady's decision if the litigation continues, assuming there's no settlement.

While O'Grady sided with BMG on the key DMCA point, he kicked the other plaintiff, Round Hill Music, out of the lawsuit. Round Hill didn't prove it owns exclusive rights with regard to "any of the copyrights at issue," O'Grady found, and thus doesn't have standing to bring an infringement lawsuit. As with the DMCA issue, the judge's reasoning won't be clear until his full opinion is published.

Further evidence that O'Grady isn't seeing things Cox's way comes from the fact that the judge wouldn't allow the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge to file an amicus brief supporting Cox. In fact, O'Grady went out of his way to slam that brief.

"It adds absolutely nothing helpful at all," O'Grady said of the EFF brief, according to Techdirt, based on a transcript of the October hearing. "It is a combination of describing the horrors that one endures from losing the Internet for any length of time. Frankly, it sounded like my son complaining when I took his electronics away when he watched YouTube videos instead of doing homework. And it's completely hysterical."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...y-dmca-motion/





German Court Says ISPs May Have to Block Music-Sharing Sites

Germany's highest court said Internet service providers could be made responsible for blocking websites offering illegal music downloads, but only if copyright holders showed they had first made reasonable attempts to thwart such piracy by other means.

The federal Supreme Court dismissed two cases brought by music rights society GEMA against Deutsche Telekom and music companies Universal Music, Sony and Warner Music Group against Telefonica's O2 Deutschland.

It said on Thursday the plaintiffs did not make enough effort to halt the copyright violations in the first place but it said Internet service providers could in principle be held responsible for blocking music illegally available on the Internet, even if the content remained available elsewhere.

GEMA, which acts to protect the rights of the owners of musical works, had demanded that Deutsche Telekom, Germany's largest telecoms company, block the website "3dl.am" because it offered access to copyright-protected music.

In a separate case, the music companies wanted O2 Deutschland to block access to "goldesel.to," part of the eDonkey network, a peer-to-peer file-sharing network for music.

The court said in its ruling: "The company that offers Internet access will only be held responsible for blocking the site when the copyright holder has first made reasonable efforts to take action against those who have themselves infringed their rights, like the website operators, or those who have enabled the infringement, like the Web hosting providers."

The music industry says it loses billions of dollars every year from the illegal downloading of songs, depriving it of the revenue it needs to pay songwriters, artists and talent scouts.

Courts around the world are grappling with the question of who is responsible for copyright infringement through illegal downloads. Google's YouTube, for example, has been the subject of multiple court cases.

A German court ruled in July that YouTube was only responsible for blocking copyright-infringing videos when they had been brought to its attention, and could not be expected to scan everything on the site.

Deutsche Telekom welcomed the court ruling.

"The Supreme Court has clearly stated that with regard to Internet service providers the reasonableness of a potential blocking has to be subject to strict scrutiny," the company said in a statement.

Bernhard Rohleder, director of IT industry group Bitkom, said: "The blocking of websites should remain the last resort of network policy. As a measure against copyright infringement, it is quite excessive."

(Reporting by Norbert Demuth, Peter Maushagen, writing by Kirsti Knolle, editing by David Evans)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/1...0TF1UJ20151126





Comcast Can Interrupt Your Web Browsing With Warnings About Potentially Illegal File-Sharing
Chris Morran

Did you miss last night’s episode of The Walking Dead (where they finally reveal that Glenn shot J.R., but didn’t kill Laura Palmer) because you don’t have cable and just plan on grabbing a pirated version of it from the Internet? If you’re a Comcast customer who has been flagged a potential copyright violator, your web-browsing experience may be interrupted with pop-up warnings.

Last week, a developer and Comcast user posted the above screengrab to GitHub, showing how Comcast is now injecting these warnings into customer’s web browsers when they believe that some sort of illegal file-sharing may have occurred.

The warnings appear to be an extension of the existing Copyright Alert System, better known as “Six Strikes,” that sends alleged violators a half-dozen “stop doing that” notices until eventually deciding whether to penalize the customer by throttling their data speed or terminating their access.

But rather than a letter, e-mail, or phone call, Comcast is stepping into the middle of your browsing of a non-Comcast site to communicate with you. The company tells ZDNet that it outlined its use of such alerts several years back in this white paper.

Even if you don’t do any questionable file-sharing, the developer who posted the grab to GitHub tells ZDNet that Comcast’s ability to modify content on unencrypted connections may lead to “scarier scenarios where this could be used as a tool for censorship, surveillance, [or] selling personal information.”

It appears that the notices only show up on sites with standards HTTP connections (as opposed to the more secure HTTPS) are vulnerable to these interruptions. As Neowin points out, there are ways to increase your use of HTTPS, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s HTTPS Everywhere plugin for Chrome and Firefox.
http://consumerist.com/2015/11/23/co...-file-sharing/





The Biggest Targets of Copyright Takedown Requests On Google are File Sharing Services (GOOG, GOOGL)
Alexei Oreskovic

As the world's No.1 search engine, Google gets a lot of requests to remove links to sites that are believed to host objectionable material, such as copyrighted content. According to Google's most recent transparency report, the internet company now receives 2.2 million takedown requests every day for sites with content that someone claims is pirated.

Among the most complained about sites are file hosting services, which allow users to store music and videos online and to easily share them with other users. According to the most recent data from Google, charted for us by Statista, file hosting services ranked among the top sites that were reported to Google for containing material that allegedly infringes copyrights.

If Google decides that the website does indeed contain copyright-infringing content, it removes the URL from its search results. The website itself is not affected, although it will lose an important source of traffic.
http://www.heraldnews.com/article/ZZ...ness/311239896





Thanks to the Music Industry, it is Illegal to Make Private Copies of Music—Again

You're also forbidden from format-shifting or uploading to the cloud.
Glyn Moody

The UK's 2014 private copying exception, which allowed you to make personal copies of your own music, including format-shifted versions, has now been definitively withdrawn, according to The 1709 Blog. As a result, it is once more illegal to make personal backups of your own music, videos or e-books, rip CDs and DVDs to standalone digital files, or upload your music to the cloud.

The UK's new private copying exception had been in a state of legal limbo following a judicial review of the legislation in June, which had been sought by the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, the Musicians’ Union, and UK Music. In his review, the High Court judge mostly found in favour of the UK government, except for one crucial aspect. He said the UK government's decision to bring in the new copyright exception was "flawed" because "the evidence relied upon to justify the conclusion about harm was inadequate/manifestly inadequate."

This left the UK government with three options. It could carry out further research to prove more rigorously that copyright holders would not suffer from the introduction of this personal copy exception, in which case the law could stand; it could repeal the relevant section of the law; or it could introduce a compensation scheme. In the end, it decide to throw up its hands and withdraw the private copyright exception completely.

As The 1709 Blog points out: "Those users who are aware of the changes face a difficult decision: whether to make copies for personal use in contravention of the law in the reasonably sure knowledge that they won't get caught, or abide by the law and deny themselves a degree of sensible flexibility in their viewing and listening choices." But it also notes: "One thing they will not do is go out and buy a digital replacement such as a download, for a CD or DVD they already own."
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In other words, killing the personal copying exception will bring the music industry very little financial benefit, while turning the UK public into scofflaws for making backup copies, format-shifting or uploading music to the cloud. And as The 1709 Blog points out, it's not as if the music industry is going to use the fact that the exception has been withdrawn to pursue anyone caught doing any of these things: "I think it is fair to say that they will, privately, continue with their old policy of not seeking to sue or prosecute anyone for personal format shifting. To do otherwise would undoubtedly alienate the buying public and strengthen the argument that the record labels are out of touch with what music fans want."

By insisting on a judicial review of this long-overdue and extremely limited copyright exception, which in any case only legalised what everyone was already doing, the music industry has certainly shown itself to be quite indifferent to what its customers want. But more importantly, it has confirmed that copyright itself is no longer fit for the digital age.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy...f-music-again/





FCC Proposes Millions in Fines, Collects $0

The disconnect is drawing scrutiny from members of Congress.
Alex Byers

The FCC has announced a series of eye-popping fines against companies over the past two years: Roughly $100 million against nearly a dozen firms for defrauding a phone subsidy program, $35 million against a Chinese company for selling illegal wireless jamming equipment, and $100 million against AT&T this June for throttling customers on unlimited data plans.

But how much of that money has the commission actually collected? $0.

While the FCC has always had a cumbersome process to impose penalties, the increasingly large fines proposed by the FCC are highlighting the gap between attention-grabbing press releases and slow-moving collection. The disconnect is drawing scrutiny in Congress as the FCC’s enforcement bureau – led by a former aide to California Attorney General Kamala Harris – is aggressively targeting companies on everything from their billing practices to data security to Wi-Fi blocking.

"If an enormous fine is announced and it's never prosecuted, it makes you wonder what's the purpose?" said House telecom subcommittee Chairman Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.). "The question is, are they just after headlines or some sort of performance metric? I don't know."

The FCC enforcement process has never been quick, although the agency says it’s getting faster. After the agency proposes a fine, companies have around 30 days to either pay or challenge it. The fine isn't officially due until the FCC completes its investigation — a process that can take years. Even after that review is complete, the FCC has to rely on the Justice Department to collect the money if a company doesn't agree to pay.

The commission said Wednesday, days after POLITICO published its initial story on the matter, that its enforcement bureau has collected $98 million in fines so far this year, up from $39 million in 2014. But that money came in at the end of the enforcement process. And none of the roughly $235 million in fines that the FCC proposed in those headline-grabbing phone-subsidy, jamming and AT&T-throttling cases has yet made it to the government’s coffers.

The FCC would not comment on the outstanding cases involving Lifeline, the low-income phone subsidy program, saying it can't talk about ongoing proceedings. But a spokesperson said the practice of issuing proposed fines -- technically called notices of apparent liability (NALs) -- is a major tool to protect consumers, even if companies don’t ultimately pay a full penalty. The FCC, which says it normally conducts extensive inquiries before proposing a fine, has seen instances of companies adjusting practices to comply with agency rules after an NAL is filed, said the spokesperson, who declined to be identified, saying the FCC has a policy about not speaking on the record about its enforcement bureau.

Lyft, for example, changed its terms of service just days after the FCC issued the ride-hailing app a citation in September for running afoul of the nation’s robocall laws. And AT&T, which is aggressively fighting the proposed $100 million fine issued this summer, increased its throttling threshold in September for some unlimited plan users from 5 gigabytes to 22 gigabytes of data per month.

But the FCC's propensity to tout eye-catching fines is irking key lawmakers -- as well as Republicans at the commission -- who question the agency's effectiveness since the money often goes uncollected for years.

In announcing some of the proposed Lifeline fines in 2013, the agency trumpeted, “Today's actions constitute the most recent step in the Commission's significant efforts to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in the Lifeline program and preserve the overall integrity of the Universal Service Fund (USF).”

But the FCC has yet to officially impose the penalty on those companies -- and several are still deemed eligible to receive FCC reimbursements for phone subsidies, according to data from the Universal Service Administrative Company, which runs Lifeline.

“I am beyond confused as to why not one dime of that has been collected,” Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said at FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel's renomination hearing last month. “We might as well have a big flashing sign that says, 'Doesn’t matter, do whatever you want in the Lifeline program because we're not even gonna bother to collect the money. And we're gonna keep paying you.'”

TracFone, one of the Lifeline providers targeted by the FCC, said after the hearing that no fine has been imposed by the FCC yet. They declined to comment for this story.

Like other law enforcement proceedings, the FCC spokesperson said, conducting a thorough investigation can take a long time -- a process that can become even more complicated at an independent agency run by political appointees. The FCC often tries to resolve a group of similar cases at the same time, which can also delay enforcement efforts, the spokesperson said. In October, for example, the FCC finalized multi-million dollar fines against four pre-paid calling card companies that the FCC says used deceptive marketing practices -- more than four years after the fines were proposed.

Meanwhile, telecom industry trade groups are criticizing the FCC’s approach under Enforcement Bureau Chief Travis LeBlanc, a former aide to California Attorney General Kamala Harris. Using the threat of big fines to force companies to change their practices sends the wrong message, said Micah Caldwell, vice president of regulatory affairs at ITTA, a trade group that represents medium-sized communications companies.

"Certainly the atmosphere and the environment right now is one where providers and [regulated companies] are on alert and concerned about what the future holds for them," she said.

The agency has been particularly active on consumer-friendly enforcement issues like Wi-Fi blocking under LeBlanc’s tenure, which began in March 2014. He has focused on securing explicit commitments from industry that companies will improve their behavior, and the FCC says it has collected 84 percent of the penalties it finalized over the last two years.

Consumer advocates say that FCC efforts to pressure companies to change their practices can be effective, but that the agency should use its bully pulpit judiciously. If the commission doesn't effectively penalize companies, its power is weakened in the long-term, said Mark Cooper, research director for Consumer Federation of America.

“When the lion roars, the gazelles run. The problem is that if the lion roars too much and never eats a meal, the gazelles will stop running,” he said. “You have to find the line where you elicit the behavior you want.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/1...crutiny-216121





Apple Wins Patent Trial Against Pendrell Subsidiary
Lisa Bose McDermott

A U.S. jury on Friday found Apple Inc (AAPL.O) did not infringe five antipiracy patents owned by a Pendrell Corp (PCO.O) subsidiary at trial in a Texas federal court.

The jury also found that Apple did not prove that the patents were invalid. No damages were awarded to Pendrell subsidiary ContentGuard Holdings.

An Apple attorney declined to comment. Samuel Baxter, an attorney for ContentGuard, said they are disappointed by the outcome and evaluating options.

The trial came after a jury in a separate case in the same court in September cleared Google Inc (GOOGL.O) of infringing the same five patents. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) was also cleared in that case.

ContentGuard sued Apple in 2013 and Google and Samsung in 2014 alleging infringement of several antipiracy patents that help to restrict content to authorized users.

The company claimed Apple infringed by making and selling its popular devices, which use the iTunes and iBooks applications, to distribute DRM-protected songs, movies, TV shows and books. Apple denied any infringement and said the patents are invalid.

ContentGuard emerged from a partnership in 2000 between Xerox Corp and Microsoft Corp to form a digital rights management business, according to court papers. It is now owned by Kirkland, Washington-based Pendrell Corp, a publicly traded patent management company, and Time Warner.

Through its subsidiaries, Pendrell holds about 1,200 patents worldwide.

(Writing by Dan Levine; Editing by Meredith Mazzilli, Bernard Orr)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/1...0T92UU20151120





Axel Springer Goes After iOS 9 Ad Blockers In New Legal Battle
Sarah Perez

German media giant Axel Springer, which operates top European newspapers like Bild and Die Welt, and who recently bought a controlling stake in Business Insider for $343 million, has a history of fighting back against ad-blocking software that threatens its publications’ business models. Now, it’s taking that fight to mobile ad blockers, too. According to the makers of the iOS content blocker dubbed “Blockr,” which is one of several new iOS 9 applications that allow users to block ads and other content that slows down web browsing, Axel Springer’s WELTN24 subsidiary took them to court in an attempt to stop the development and distribution of the Blockr software.

Specifically, explains the law firm representing Blockr, Axel Springer wanted to prohibit Blockr’s developers from being able to “offer, advertise, maintain and distribute the service” which can be used today to block ads on http://www.welt.de, including the website’s mobile version.

Blockr’s lawyers argued in a hearing on November 19 that its software is legal and should be allowed to continue, and that it’s the user’s choice to use an ad blocker.

In the hearing, the court seemed to agree with the startup, and pointed out that Axel Springer has other options for handling how it wants to deal with ad blockers. For example, it could re-use its prior tactics that involve locking out users from a website when it detects that the visitor is using ad blocking software.

The final ruling, however, is not until December 10.

This is not the first time Axel Springer has gone to war with ad blockers. Ad-blocking firm Eyeo, whose Adblock Plus is one of the most used ad blockers on the web, recently won its court battle with the publisher when a German court ruled that the web browser extension didn’t breach laws on competition, copyright or market dominance, according to a report from Reuters. (Axel Springer said it would appeal the ruling.)

But despite its failure to win within the court system, the publisher has found other ways of forcing readers to abandon their ad blockers when visiting its online properties.

In October, Axel Springer forced visitors to Bild to turn off their ad blockers or pay a monthly fee to continue using the site. Earlier this month, the publisher reported the success of this measure, saying that the proportion of readers using ad blockers dropped from 23% to the single digits when faced with the choice to turn off the software or pay.

“The results are beyond our expectations,” said Springer chief exec Mathias Döpfner at the time. “Over two-thirds of the users concerned switched off their adblocker.” He also noted that the Bild.de website received an additional 3 million visits from users who could now see the ads in the first two weeks of the experiment going live.

Given that the publisher has already been defeated in the courts in its fight against a similar application, and found a workaround to address its concerns about the missed advertising revenue, a win against Blockr doesn’t look promising.

Axel Springer did not yet respond to a request for comment. (We’ll update if one is provided). offered the following comment:

“Axel Springer SE is demonstrating its position regarding ad blocking in various legal initiatives: Ad blocking interferes with the constitutionally protected position of publishing houses and endangers the refinancing# – and hence, in the long run, the existence – #of professional online journalism. We are currently not commenting on the number and status of ongoing legal proceedings.”

The law firm Lampmann, Haberkamm & Rosenbaum, has also now released a statement in English, which was provided by Blockr’s co-creator Arno Appenzeller.

The lawyer explains that Axel Springer’s Die Welt tried to obtain a preliminary injuction without warning in the at the district court of Stuttgart (Landgericht Stuttgart) through the law firm Lubberger Lehment. Die Welt argued that the software was illegally obstructing its digital content and therefore had to be banned. The court said it didn’t see any legal grounds for the injunction.

“We are therefore pleased that the court followed our arguments regarding the legality of the software”, said Lawyer Dr. Niklas Haberkamm, LL.M. oec. after the hearing.

The co-founders of Blockr, Arno Appenzeller and Tim Poller, added: “our intention with Blockr is to give users a choice to what they see while browsing the web. There is a lot of stuff intruding users privacy, spaming the small size mobile screens or draining their mobile data. We think this choice matters in many ways and hope the court will consider this.”

Axel Springer is not the only publisher that’s taking a confrontational approach to dealing with ad blockers, The FT recently reported. U.K. newspaper City AM banned ad blockers from its website; U.K. broadcasters ITV and Channel 4 have now done the same; and the Washington Post redirects readers to a subscription page, or asks them to sign up to newsletters, or disable their ad-blocking software. Even Yahoo has gotten in on the action, blocking users from their email when they have AdBlock running.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/23/axe...-legal-battle/





EE Proposes Restrictions on Mobile Adverts

Chief executive Olaf Swantee launches strategic review over measure against 'intrusive or crass' ads that 'can drive people crazy'
Christopher Williams

EE, Britain’s biggest mobile operator, is considering introducing technology that will hand smartphone users the power to control the advertising they see online, in a clampdown that would cause major upheaval in the £2bn mobile advertising market.

Olaf Swantee, EE’s chief executive, has launched a strategic review that will decide whether the operator should help its 27 million customers to restrict the quantity and type of advertising that reaches their devices, amid concern over increasingly intrusive practices.

The review will look at options for creating new tools for subscribers that would allow them to block some forms of advertising on the mobile web and potentially within apps, such as banners that pop up on top of pages or videos that play automatically. EE customers could also get the ability to control the overall volume of advertising.

Mr Swantee told The Sunday Telegraph: “We think it’s important that, over time, customers start to be offered more choice and control over the level and intensity of ads on mobile.

“For EE, this is not about ad blocking, but about starting an important debate around customer choice, controls and the level of ads customers receive.

“This is an important debate that needs to happen soon. That’s why we’ve kicked off a strategic review internally to start considering our plans.”

Olaf Swantee said EE customers could get new control over mobile advertising

The move will send shock waves through the digital advertising industry, which is already battling increasing levels of blocking by consumers who download software to do it. Mr Swantee is the first chief of a British operator to suggest a intervening at the network level.

The Dutchman, who has led EE though the integration of Orange and T-Mobile and its ongoing sale to BT for £12.5bn, stressed he was not seeking to block all advertising, but to provide options for customers, unlike the Caribbean operator Digicel. It plans to install software in its network to impose a near-blanket ban on advertising in the hope of receiving a share of revenue from Google and others in exchange for allowing the traffic through.

Mr Swantee said: “Advertising, when done well, can be a valued part of the experience.

“Not all ads are bad. When a business gets it right, it’s appreciated and sparks a connection. But when it’s intrusive or crass it can drive people crazy.”

Ian Maude, a digital advertising specialist at Enders Analysis, said major telecoms operators such as EE were “more seeking to enforce good behaviour from advertisers than block them altogether” and gain a competitive edge. Rival operators would be likely to quickly follow suit, he suggested.

Apple iPhoneApple introduced ad blockers to Safari in the latest version of iOS Photo: Alamy

Mr Maude added: “These are the overdue growing pains for the digital advertising industry. Most advertisers and publishers are responsible but it has a dark underbelly with fraud and over-intrusive tracking and this could force it to face up to that.”

EE’s decision will be seen partly as result of the operator’s closeness to Apple. EE and the iPhone maker often work together on new technology initiatives. Apple introduced the ability to install blockers in its mobile browser software in September.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/n...e-adverts.html





With US Government as Top Donor, Tor Project Looks to Crowdfunding
Ashley Carman

Following up on goals set earlier this year, the Tor Project launched its first crowdfunding project today to expand its donor base beyond the US government and allow for spending flexibility. Although there wasn't much of an explanation in its campaign announcement, Tor could be seeking to become less reliant on the US government, which typically accounts for 80 to 90 percent of annual funding. Tor said in March it was exploring crowdfunding as a way to bring its Hidden Services to the broader internet and, more specifically, countries whose citizens might benefit from added privacy. The technology allows users to connect to blogs and chats, among other online services, while remaining anonymous.

Despite receiving significant public funding, Tor's relationship with the US government overall is complicated. Tor's creators claimed earlier this month that the FBI paid Carnegie Mellon University researchers $1 million to de-anonymize its browser, the results of which were discovered in July 2014. The university later followed up with a statement that didn't completely absolve it of any wrongdoing. Instead, it hinted at its researchers producing the work for free under a subpoena.

Tor cited the support of award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras to solicit donations. "Edward Snowden would not have been able to contact me without Tor and other free software encryption projects," Poitras said. "Journalists need Tor to protect their sources and to research freely. It is an essential tool, and it needs our support."
http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/24/9...nate-crowdfund





Drowned in Data, Whistleblowers Speak of NSA's "Largest Failure"

One former NSA official said the discontinued program he helped to build could have "absolutely prevented" some of the worst terror attacks in living memory.
Zack Whittaker

Former NSA officials turned whistleblowers say a discontinued program could have prevented some of the worst terrorist attacks in peacetime history, but agency bureaucracy and inefficiency got in the way.

Weeks prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks, a test-bed program dubbed ThinThread was shut down in favor of a more expensive, privacy-invasive program that too would see its eventual demise some three years later -- not before wasting billions of Americans' tax dollars.

Four whistleblowers, including a congressional senior staffer, came out against the intelligence community they had served, after ThinThread. designed to modernize the agency's intelligence gathering effort, was cancelled.

Speaking at the premier of a new documentary film "A Good American" in New York, which chronicles the rise and demise of the program, the whistleblowers spoke in support of the program, led by former NSA technical director William Binney.

The documentary's main charge: The program had enough metadata that could've established a relationship among the September 11 hijackers, but greed and incompetence led to the agency spending billions on a different program, said Binney. The rival program, Trailblazer, which took ThinThread's place after the attacks, was favored by the agency's leadership as it garnered more funds from Congress.

Trailblazer was sunk four years later after it was widely regarded by the Bush administration as a failure.

"It was just too cheap," said Binney, about ThinThread, which he helped to pioneer and built in the years prior. "It was just a little bit ahead of its time for NSA to accept it."

That was because the agency had more data than it knew what to do with, said Binney, a sentiment he echoed previously, saying the NSA had a "collect it all and figure it out later" mentality.

ThinThread was a program developed by a small team of people in NSA headed by Binney -- including would-be whistleblowers Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis. The program took the world's metadata -- from phone calls to geolocation, who is talking to whom and when -- and digested it to dig up connections between suspects and those on watchlists. The program, which Binney said cost a fraction of what rival programs required to build and maintain, also included legal restrictions and privacy filters that would encrypt and scramble US-related communications to prevent illegal and warrantless domestic snooping.

Despite the numerous tests showing high marks of success, the small band of analysts were unable to convince NSA administration to fund the project -- largely because they say it didn't garner enough funds from Congress.

"It cost $3.2 million to build it from scratch," said Binney. "And it was fully automated, and it didn't require people to run it. It was electronically downloadable... it wouldn't take any money to deploy it."

In its place, three weeks before the September 11 attacks in 2001, the NSA commissioned Trailblazer, a more intrusive, multi-billion dollar program that was designed to spy on cellphones and email traffic.

"[Trailblazer] was the largest failure in NSA history," said Binney. "Fundamentally they traded your security -- mine, and everybody else's -- for money. It's that simple"

Binney, Wiebe, and Loomis all left the NSA in 2001 just weeks after the attacks.

Binney said -- and the other whistleblowers agreed -- that the program could have "absolutely prevented" the attacks on New York.

An NSA spokesperson did not return a call asking for comment.

The story on its own would fall apart if it were just one lone actor, angry at the missed opportunity, knowing that one was right over another. But the three whistleblowers and a House staffer, Diane Roark -- whose job it was to oversee the NSA's account -- who came forward had little to gain but everything to lose. They would all have their houses raided in the near future for what they believe was speaking out against the waste in the wake of Trailblazer's demise.

Thomas Drake, a former NSA executive, would later be charged with espionage by the Obama administration -- a case that was largely dropped -- for helping the Dept. of Defense's inspector general with its report into Trailblazer.

The inspector general's report, released in 2004, contained significant criticisms of the program; however, many unclassified parts of the report remain redacted and unreadable.

Patrick Eddington, a former CIA analyst who now works for the Washington DC-based think-tank Cato Institute, hinted that the government may face a legal challenge over the redactions.

Since then, the NSA has continued to ramp up its intelligence gathering mission to indiscriminately collect as much as it can, as Snowden documents have shown. Snowden later said it was in part Binney and Drake's cases which inspired him to come forward.

Binney, now in his early-70s, said Snowden would be just "one head" of the hydra after the most recent round of leaks, which began in mid-2013.

The Intercept, a news and analysis online publications founded by Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, that now publishes the remains of the Snowden files, has also started publishing documents from a new whistleblower about the US drone program -- which was first hinted about at the end of Poitras' film, "Citizenfour," which documented the debut of the Snowden leaks.

The identity of the so-called "second Snowden" remains unknown to the general public. But Binney had three words of advice for them:

"Get a lawyer."
http://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-whi...n-nsa-history/





Insight - Authorities Missed Many 'Red Flags' Before Paris Shootings
John Irish, Robert-Jan Bartunek and Orhan Coskun

There were multiple chances to stop the men who attacked Paris.

In January, Turkish authorities detained one of the suicide bombers at Turkey's border and deported him to Belgium. Brahim Abdeslam, Turkish authorities told Belgian police at the time, had been "radicalised" and was suspected of wanting to join Islamic State in Syria, a Turkish security source told Reuters.

Yet during questioning in Belgium, Abdeslam denied any involvement with militants and was set free. So was his brother Salah – a decision that Belgian authorities say was based on scant evidence that either man had terrorist intentions.

On Nov. 13, Abdeslam blew himself up at Le Comptoir Voltaire bar in Paris, killing himself and wounding one other. Salah is also a suspect in the attacks, claimed by the Islamic State, and is now on the run.

In France, an "S" (State Security) file for people suspected of being a threat to national security had been issued on Ismail Omar Mostefai, who would detonate his explosive vest inside Paris' Bataclan concert hall. Mostefai, a Frenchman of Algerian descent, was placed on the list in 2010, French police sources say.

Turkish police also considered him a terror suspect with links to Islamic State. Ankara wrote to Paris about him in December 2014 and in June this year, a senior Turkish government official said. The warning went unheeded. Paris answered last week, after the attacks.

A fourth attacker missed at least four weekly check-ins with French police in 2013, before authorities issued an arrest warrant for him. By that time he had left the country.

On any one of these occasions, police, intelligence and security services had an opportunity to detain at least some of the men who launched the attacks.

That they did not, helps explain how a group of Islamist militants was able to organise even as they moved freely among countries within the open borders of Europe's passport-free Schengen area and beyond.

Taken one by one, each misstep has its own explanation, security services say. They attribute the lapses in communication, inability to keep track of suspected militants and failure to act on intelligence, to a lack of resources in some countries and a surge in the number of would-be jihadis.

But a close examination by Reuters of a series of missed red flags and miscommunications culminating in France's biggest atrocity since World War Two puts on stark display the mounting difficulties faced by anti-terrorism units across Europe and their future ability to keep the continent safe.

"We're in a situation where the services are overrun. They expect something to happen, but don't know where," said Nathalie Goulet, who heads up the French Senate's investigation committee into jihadi networks.

Many point to Belgium as a weak link in European security.

"They simply don't have the same means as Britain's MI5 or the DGSI (French intelligence agency)," said Louis Caprioli, a former head of the DST, France's former anti-terrorism unit.

Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel defended his country's security services and praised them for doing "a difficult and tough job." French President Francois Hollande also praised his country's security services, who hunted down and shot dead the man they identified as the ringleader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, five days after the attacks.

Europol, the European Union's police agency, says it has been feeding information to the Belgian and French authorities but acknowledges that some member states are better at sharing information than others.

FOCUS ON FIGHTERS RETURNING FROM SYRIA

The focus of investigators over the past few years has been men and women who have grown up in Europe, have European passports and who travel to Syria to train and fight.

As the number of those fighters has increased, authorities have struggled to keep up. The French Interior Ministry estimated about 500 French nationals had travelled to Syria and almost 300 had returned. French authorities reckon up to 1,400 people need 24-hour surveillance. Yet France has only about the same number of officers to carry out the task, a tenth of those needed.

Some 350 people from Belgium have gone to Syria to fight - the highest per capita number in Europe. A Belgian government source said Belgium has a list of 400 people who are in Syria, have returned or are believed to be about to go there. There are another 400-500 people who authorities believe have radicalised. The number of people in the Belgian security services carrying out surveillance is believed to be considerably fewer than this.

The numbers partially explain why many of the attackers in Paris were well-known faces still at large.

The attacks killed 130 people at various locations, including the Bataclan concert hall where 89 concert-goers were gunned down or blown up. Others were killed outside the Stade de France sports stadium and in bars and restaurants around central Paris.

Seven assailants died during the attacks. Abaaoud was killed in a police raid north of Paris on Wednesday along with one other suicide attacker and a woman believed to be his cousin.

Dozens of people have also been detained, some with weapons and explosives, in raids since then.

Abaaoud himself had been well-known to authorities for several years. After a raid in January in the Belgian town of Verviers, police suspected the 28-year-old of plotting to kidnap a police officer and kill him.

In February, Abaaoud said in an interview with an Islamic State magazine that he had returned to Syria after the raid in Verviers. By this time, he knew he was being sought.

If it is true that he returned to Syria from Verviers, Abaaoud made his way back into Europe at some point after January. French authorities did not know this until they were tipped off by Morocco after the attacks.

"If Abaaoud was able to go from Syria to Europe, that means there are failings in the entire European system," French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said.

WARNINGS

Mostefai, the Bataclan suicide bomber, also travelled back and forth. Although he had eight convictions as a petty criminal, he had never been in prison, a place French authorities can watch for signs of radicalisation.

Police say they suspected him of being in Syria between late 2013 and early 2014, before returning to France unnoticed.

In December of last year, Turkey contacted France about Mostefai. They raised an alarm again in June 2015 by letter.

There was no response from French authorities, according to a senior Turkish government official and a security source.

"It seemed there was a connection between this person and Daesh (Islamic State) and we reported it," the Turkish security source said. "We followed all international procedures. But they (the French) didn't display the same level of sensitivity."

French officials declined to comment on this, but say that coordination with Turkey over potential French jihadis has improved markedly in the past year.

Determining how dangerous a person is, and whether they might carry out an attack, is a key challenge for security services, experts say.

"The other difficulty is that if you have nothing concrete for several years, you can't keep either a sophisticated technical alert system or human resources on a person who makes himself forgotten for three or four years," said Arnaud Danjean, a former intelligence officer and now a member of the European Parliament.

Bilal Hadfi, who blew himself up outside the Stade de France, was another of the suicide attackers under surveillance.

After visiting Syria in February, the 20-year-old French national, who was living in Belgium, returned to Europe by an unknown route and evaded police even though the Belgian Justice Ministry said microphones had been placed at the house where he was thought to be staying.

Then there's the case of Sami Amimour. French authorities had launched an official investigation into Amimour's possible terrorism-related activity in October 2012. Prosecutors suspected him of planning to join militants in Yemen.

Amimour was a bus driver who had been radicalised in a mosque near his hometown of Drancy, north of Paris. Because of the investigation, police had ordered Amimour to check in with them every week. As reported by Reuters on Nov 20, he missed four weekly checks in 2013. But it was only after nearly a month that the authorities put out an international arrest warrant.

By then Amimour was already in Syria. His tracks were picked up a year later, in December 2014, when his father gave an interview to French daily Le Monde describing how he had travelled to Syria but failed to convince his son to return.

THE MEN FROM THE BAR

Police are still looking for Salah Abdeslam, who is known to have survived the attacks.

Until six weeks before the attacks, Salah and his brother Brahim - one of the suicide bombers - were running a bar called Les Beguines on a quiet street in Molenbeek, a low-rent area of Brussels which has been linked with several attacks.

After the attacks, Salah Abdeslam went to ground. Authorities say he was stopped on his way back to Belgium after the Paris attacks, but police waved him on. It is not clear what role he played on the night of the attacks and why he managed to survive.

Two men who were arrested later, Mohamed Amri, 27, and 21-year-old Hamza Attou, said they brought Abdeslam back to Brussels after receiving a call from him saying his car had broken down. Police checks meant they were pulled over three times, including a last check around 9 a.m. near Cambrai just short of the Belgian border.

Missteps did not just happen in France and Belgium.

The Syrian passport found near one of the suicide bombers at the Stade de France had been used by a man registering himself as a refugee on the Greek island of Leros on Oct. 3. That man travelled through Macedonia and claimed asylum in Serbia, counter-intelligence and security sources said.

The French prosecutor has confirmed that fingerprints taken on arrival in Greece showed that man travelled with a second man, who also blew himself up near the Stade de France.

The pair may have reached Paris relatively easily because, at the height of the migration crisis in Europe this year, asylum seekers were rushed across some national borders without checks.

It is unclear whether the passport issued under the name of Ahmad al-Mohammad, a 25-year-old from the Syrian city of Idlib, was genuine or was stolen from a refugee. Whatever the truth, it has helped fuel right-wing criticism in Europe of the number of migrants allowed in this year.

By the time the two men were making their way up through the Balkans to western Europe, France had received more evidence an attack was imminent.

French former anti-terrorism judge Marc Trevidic says a French Islamist he questioned on his return from Syria in August said Islamic State had asked him to carry out an attack on a concert venue.

"The guy admitted that he was asked to hit a rock concert. We didn't know if it would be Bataclan or another, he didn't know the exact location that would be designated. But yes, that's what they asked him to do," Trevidic told Reuters.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari has also said that his country's intelligence services shared information indicating that France, as well as the United States and Iran, was being targeted for attack. He has not given details.

Germany's top prosecutor is also investigating allegations that an Algerian man detained at a refugee centre in the western town of Arnsberg told Syrian refugees an attack was imminent in the French capital.

Europe is scrambling to respond to the attacks.

France declared a nationwide state of emergency which will now last three months. Police now have the power to conduct searches without obtaining judicial warrants and can hold anyone suspected of posing a threat to security under house arrest for 12 hours a day. Internet sites deemed to incite or advocate "acts of terrorism" can be blocked and public demonstrations banned.

Belgium has also announced a security crackdown, saying it will spend an extra 400 million euros ($430 million) on security and take measures such as stopping the sale of mobile phone cards to anonymous buyers. Police will be allowed to conduct night searches of homes and it is now easier to ban, convict or expel hate preachers.

Whether such measures will be enough is uncertain. Brussels is on high alert this weekend because of what authorities there called the "serious and imminent" threat of attack. In a video last week, Islamic State warned it would strike again.

"When a large operation is prepared, they are told to keep a low profile in the months before. As‎ they are no longer on police radars, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack," said Roland Jacquard, president of the Paris-based International Terrorism Observatory.

(Robert-Jan Bartunek reported from Brussels and Orhan Coskun reported from Turkey; additional reporting by Nick Tattersall in Turkey, Alastair Macdonald in Brussels, Silvia Aloisi in Athens; writing by Timothy Heritage; editing by Alessandra Galloni, Simon Robinson, Janet McBride)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/1...0TB09P20151122





Paris Attacks Plot Was Hatched in Plain Sight

Terrorists used tools of everyday modern life to plan attacks on French capital undetected
Stacy Meichtry and Joshua Robinson

BOBIGNY, France—Three days before the attacks that ripped through Paris, Djazira Boulanger handed the keys to her row house, across the street from a kindergarten, to a guest who had booked it over the website Homelidays.com. His name was Brahim Abdeslam.

She didn’t know that Mr. Abdeslam was a central figure in plotting the deadly assault. As Ms. Boulanger tended to her two young children at home, authorities say Mr. Abdeslam and a band of cohorts were down the street preparing weapons for an assault on the Stade de France and Paris’s nightlife district.

“Did I suspect something was wrong? Not at all,” Ms. Boulanger said.

A day after he checked in, Mr. Abdeslam’s younger brother, Salah, pulled up to the roadside hotel Appart’City on the southern outskirts of Paris, according to staff, to claim reservations he made on Booking.com—also under his own name. The rooms were for another set of gunmen in the attacks: those assigned to mow down spectators inside the Bataclan concert hall.

Prosecutors suspect the brothers were preparing the logistics for Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the alleged architect of the massacres, to arrive in Paris and swiftly mount one of the deadliest terror attacks in French history. Brahim would later blow himself up during the attacks, while Salah is now the target of an international manhunt.

Mr. Abaaoud was the kind of adversary France had dreaded since the Syrian conflict began drawing European nationals in droves. Mr. Abaaoud—who would die several days after the Paris attacks in a police raid—drew on his experience as a battlefield logistical officer in Syria to launch a guerrilla-style ambush on unarmed civilians in the French capital.

The account emerging from French officials, witnesses and those who interacted with the suspected terrorists shows how the operation hinged on Mr. Abaaoud’s ability to use the tools of everyday modern life to lay the groundwork for the massacre. The ease with which he and his teams moved—all while avoiding detection by France’s security apparatus—suggests the challenges in identifying would-be terrorists and preventing further attacks in the fluid, digital and transnational world of today, especially when they are European citizens.

The array of car rentals, cellphones and online lodging reservations allowed Mr. Abaaoud to organize his militants as separate cells to ensure the plot wouldn’t unravel if one of the teams was compromised. Likewise, Mr. Abaaoud exploited Europe’s porous border system, sneaking stadium bombers into the continent amid the crush of Syrian refugees washing over Greece and tapping European nationals who could wield their own passports to move freely about the region.

Mr. Abaaoud was a native of Molenbeek, a heavily Muslim, working-class neighborhood of Brussels. In 2010, he and Salah Abdeslam, who had lived a few blocks away, had been convicted of breaking into a garage. The men served a prison sentence together.

By 2013, Mr. Abaaoud had become a more observant Muslim, growing out his beard, said Alexandre Chateau, his lawyer. The next January, he took off to northern Syria with his 13-year-old brother, Younes, according to his parents’ lawyer. German authorities flagged Mr. Abaaoud’s departure at Cologne-Bonn airport for Turkey, Europe’s gateway to Syria, because he was on an EU watch list. The entry, however, didn’t direct authorities to detain him.

In Syria, Mr. Abaaoud rose quickly as a recruiter of European fighters, according to French officials. He also honed a reputation for logistical prowess as the Islamic State official in charge of supplies for fighters in operations in Syria’s oil-rich province of Deir Ezzour, according to an Islamic State fighter who met Mr. Abaaoud in that role. He was in charge of procuring weapons and transport for front-line fighters, the fighter said.

In January 2015, Mr. Abaaoud surfaced in Athens, where he made a flurry of phone calls to Belgium, according to people familiar with the matter. In a purported interview with Islamic State’s in-house magazine Dabiq in February, Mr. Abaaoud said he was stockpiling a cache of automatic weapons at the time. Investigators suspect the purpose of the weaponry was to arm the crew of operatives he was assembling to carry out attacks on Europe.

Salah Abdeslam, Mr. Abaaoud’s acquaintance, handled logistics, traveling to the Italian port of Bari in early August where he and another man took a ferry to Patras, Greece, Italian officials said. “We are talking about citizens with regular European passports and with the right to travel freely,” Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said.

Mr. Abaaoud also tapped two French nationals who had both recently spent time in Syria: Samy Amimour, a former Paris bus driver, and Omar Ismail Mostefai, a petty criminal who had been on a watch list for radicalization since 2010. Both were assigned to shoot up the Bataclan concert hall.

For the planned suicide bombing at the Stade de France, Mr. Abaaoud turned to Bilal Hadfi, a French national who had run off to fight in Syria as a teenager. Mr. Hadfi had since returned to Europe without telling his parents, who wondered if he had died fighting in Syria.

The two other stadium bombers arrived in Europe taking a more clandestine route. On Oct. 3, two men arrived on the Greek island of Leros, blending in with the scores of refugees that were washing up on Greece’s shores. One of the men carried a phony passport bearing the name Ahmad Almohammad. Officials haven’t identified the two men.

Days earlier, the Abdeslam brothers had sold Les Beguines, a bar in Molenbeek known for brawling and drug use, according to public records.

The brothers, acting as the group’s bank, started spending on logistics in Brussels and Paris. With more than nine people involved in the operation, they faced a transportation and housing challenge. In addition to a Seat-brand car, Salah Abdeslam rented a Volkswagen and a Renault from two different rental agencies in Brussels. Rental companies in Belgium don’t vet clients as long as their driver’s license, government identification and credit cards are valid.

As the terrorists came together, the Abdeslam brothers arranged lodgings in the dilapidated outskirts of Paris. The brothers shuttled back and forth across a Franco-Belgian border that, under European Union treaties, is little more than a line on the map.

On Nov. 10, they arrived at Ms. Boulanger’s row house in the northeastern suburb of Bobigny, a 20-minute drive from the heart of Paris. The place came equipped with bunk-beds that easily accommodated the six operatives planning to attack the Stade de France and the capital’s busy nightlife district.

Across town, the Appart’City hotel was well-suited to allow the Bataclan team to move about without bringing attention to themselves. On Nov. 11, Salah Abdeslam checked into rooms 311 and 312 at the end of a hallway at the Appart’City hotel, where clients have access to a secondary stairwell that leads directly to a parking lot without ever passing the front desk. The two-star hotel doesn’t require guests to register their cars to use the parking lot. Nor does it have security cameras.

Salah Abdeslam didn’t stay in France for long. He raced back to Belgium to collect the attackers, according to video footage of him at a gas station outside Paris and, hours later, in Brussels. In the predawn hours of Nov. 12, a convoy of three cars left Brussels, setting a course for Paris.

On Friday, Nov. 13, Mr. Abaaoud’s terror cells launched the attacks. At 7:40 p.m. Messrs. Mostefai, Amimour and a third unidentified man steered the Volkswagen hatchback out of the Appart’City bound for the Bataclan concert hall.

On the other side of Paris, the men in Bobigny piled into two cars with different destinations. The black Seat, according to the Paris prosecutor, was carrying Mr. Abaaoud. The hatchback left the suburb at 8:38 p.m., ferrying the Belgian Islamic State operative and two other men to an area filled with restaurants and bars in the 10th and 11th districts of Paris, where they began a shooting spree.

The Renault wasn’t going nearly as far. Investigators believe Salah Abdeslam drove a team of three suicide bombers to the gates of a packed Stade de France, where French President François Hollande and 80,000 other fans were sitting down to a match between the French and German national soccer teams.

As explosions and gunfire began to ring out across the city, the Volkswagen crept up to the Bataclan. Before storming in, one militant sent a text message that investigators would later recover from a phone discarded near the theater. “We’re going for it,” the message read. “It’s starting.”

An hour after Mr. Abaaoud finished shooting up restaurants, he emerged from a metro station in the 12th district, according to data police pulled from his cellphone. He headed west toward the sound of sirens, his path zigzagging as he returned to the scene of his crimes.

For two hours after the massacre ended, prosecutors say, Mr. Abaaoud surveyed his handiwork, at one point blending in with panicked crowds and bloodied victims streaming from the Bataclan. Then, at 12:28 a.m., he went dark.

—Matthew Dalton, Inti Landauro, Noemie Bisserbe, Mohammad Nour Alakraa, Matt Bradley, Dana Ballout, Giada Zampano and Anton Troianovski contributed to this article.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/paris-at...ght-1448587309





Encryption is Not the Enemy
Ron Wyden

In the wake of the cowardly terrorist attacks in Paris, many politicians, intelligence officials and pundits are predictably calling for a return to discredited policies of the past that would weaken Americans’ security, violate their privacy and do little or nothing to protect us from terrorists.

I am standing up against these dangerous proposals to ensure we act based on the facts, not fear, in the days ahead.

Some are calling for the United States to weaken Americans’ cybersecurity by undermining strong encryption with backdoors for the government. But security experts have shown again and again that weakening encryption will make it easier for foreign hackers, criminals and spies to break into Americans’ bank accounts, health records and phones, without preventing terrorists from “going dark.”

Last year, I introduced the Secure Data Act to ban government-mandated backdoors into Americans technology. Strong encryption and sound computer security is the best way to keep Americans’ data safe from hackers and foreign threats.

What experts are saying:

Jason Healy, Christian Science Monitor –Poisoning the Internet won’t stop more Paris attacks: “But if the terrorists are clever enough to avoid NSA-monitored technology, won’t they be smart enough to avoid future NSA-backdoored cryptography and devices? They will simply switch to non-US software that has more privacy safeguards or is difficult to monitor.”

Wired — After Paris Attacks, Here’s What the CIA Director Gets Wrong About Encryption: “While [weakening encryption] would no doubt make things easier for the intelligence and law enforcement communities, it would come at a grave societal cost — and a different security cost — and still fail to solve some of the problems intelligence agencies say they have with surveillance.”

Passcode — Influencers: Paris attacks don’t justify government access to encryption: “Law enforcement will still have no way to monitor the bad guys and the public will be left with weakened security.”

Slate — There is No good Argument for Encryption Backdoors: “Anti-terrorism ought to demand that we secure our own sensitive digital assets through encryption and that law enforcement do the targeted human policing that time and again has proved far more effective at foiling terror plots than indiscriminate and ineffective surveillance.”

Dean Garfield, Information Technology Industry Council: “Encryption is a security tool we rely on every day to stop criminals from draining our bank accounts, to shield our cars and airplanes from being taken over by malicious hacks,” Garfield said in his statement.”

Others have argued for expanding mass surveillance of Americans’ phone calls or online activity. But there is no evidence that the mass surveillance of Americans has ever stopped a terrorist attack:

Pro Publica — What’s the Evidence Mass Surveillance Works? Not much: “The [Bush administration warrantless wiretapping program] was generating numerous tips to the FBI about suspicious phone numbers and e-mail addresses, and it was the job of the FBI field offices to pursue those leads and scrutinize the people behind them. (The tips were so frequent and such a waste of time that the field offices reported back, in frustration, ‘You’re sending us garbage.’)”

New York Times — Mass Surveillance Isn’t the Answer to Fighting Terrorism: “There is no dispute that they and law enforcement agencies should have the necessary powers to detect and stop attacks before they happen. But that does not mean unquestioning acceptance of ineffective and very likely unconstitutional tactics that reduce civil liberties without making the public safer.”

Electronic Frontier Foundation — Baseless Calls to Expand Surveillance Fit Familiar, Cynical Pattern: “The attack on strong, non-backdoored encryption would make Americans, and people all over the world, less secure.”

Marcy Wheeler — Metadata Surveillance Didn’t Stop the Paris Attacks: “And yet intelligence officials and politicians are now saying it could have. They’re wrong.”

Washington Post — If government surveillance expands after Paris the media will be partly to blame: “It seems like the media was just led around by the nose by law enforcement,” said a senior government official.
https://medium.com/@RonWyden/encrypt...0b8#.mb2zh7ca0





Op-Ed Glenn Greenwald: Why the CIA is Smearing Edward Snowden after the Paris Attacks
Glenn Greenwald

Decent people see tragedy and barbarism when viewing a terrorism attack. American politicians and intelligence officials see something else: opportunity.

Bodies were still lying in the streets of Paris when CIA operatives began exploiting the resulting fear and anger to advance long-standing political agendas. They and their congressional allies instantly attempted to heap blame for the atrocity not on Islamic State but on several preexisting adversaries: Internet encryption, Silicon Valley's privacy policies and Edward Snowden.

The CIA's former acting director, Michael Morell, blamed the Paris attack on Internet companies "building encryption without keys," which, he said, was caused by the debate over surveillance prompted by Snowden's disclosures. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) blamed Silicon Valley's privacy safeguards, claiming: "I have asked for help. And I haven't gotten any help."

Former CIA chief James Woolsey said Snowden "has blood on his hands" because, he asserted, the Paris attackers learned from his disclosures how to hide their communications behind encryption. Woolsey thus decreed on CNN that the NSA whistleblower should be "hanged by the neck until he's dead, rather than merely electrocuted."

In one sense, this blame-shifting tactic is understandable. After all, the CIA, the NSA and similar agencies receive billions of dollars annually from Congress and have been vested by their Senate overseers with virtually unlimited spying power. They have one paramount mission: find and stop people who are plotting terrorist attacks. When they fail, of course they are desperate to blame others.

The CIA's blame-shifting game, aside from being self-serving, was deceitful in the extreme. To begin with, there still is no evidence that the perpetrators in Paris used the Internet to plot their attacks, let alone used encryption technology.

CIA officials simply made that up. It is at least equally likely that the attackers formulated their plans in face-to-face meetings. The central premise of the CIA's campaign — encryption enabled the attackers to evade our detection — is baseless.

Even if they had used encryption, what would that prove? Are we ready to endorse the precept that no human communication can ever take place without the U.S. government being able to monitor it? To prevent the CIA and FBI from "going dark" on terrorism plots that are planned in person, should we put Orwellian surveillance monitors in every room of every home that can be activated whenever someone is suspected of plotting?

The claim that the Paris attackers learned to use encryption from Snowden is even more misleading. For many years before anyone heard of Snowden, the U.S. government repeatedly warned that terrorists were using highly advanced means of evading American surveillance.

Then-FBI Director Louis Freeh told a Senate panel in March 2000 that "uncrackable encryption is allowing terrorists — Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and others — to communicate about their criminal intentions without fear of outside intrusion."

Or consider a USA Today article dated Feb. 5, 2001, eight months before the 9/11 attack. The headline warned "Terror groups hide behind Web encryption." That 14-year-old article cited "officials" who claimed that "encryption has become the everyday tool of Muslim extremists."

Even the official version of how the CIA found Osama bin Laden features the claim that the Al Qaeda leader only used personal couriers to communicate, never the Internet or telephone.

Within the Snowden archive itself, one finds a 2003 document that a British spy agency called "the Jihadist Handbook." That 12-year-old document, widely published on the Internet, contains instructions for how terrorist operatives should evade U.S. electronic surveillance.

In sum, Snowden did not tell the terrorists anything they did not already know. The terrorists have known for years that the U.S. government is trying to monitor their communications.

What the Snowden disclosures actually revealed to the world was that the U.S. government is monitoring the Internet communications and activities of everyone else: hundreds of millions of innocent people under the largest program of suspicionless mass surveillance ever created, a program that multiple federal judges have ruled is illegal and unconstitutional.

That is why intelligence officials are so eager to demonize Snowden: rage that he exposed their secret, unconstitutional schemes.

But their ultimate goal is not to smear Snowden. That's just a side benefit. The real objective is to depict Silicon Valley as terrorist-helpers for the crime of offering privacy protections to Internet users, in order to force those companies to give the U.S. government "backdoor" access into everyone's communications. American intelligence agencies have been demanding "backdoor" access to encryption since the mid-1990s. They view exploitation of the outrage and fear resulting from the Paris attacks as their best opportunity yet to achieve this access.

The key lesson of the post-9/11 abuses — from Guantanamo to torture to the invasion of Iraq — is that we must not allow military and intelligence officials to exploit the fear of terrorism to manipulate public opinion. Rather than blindly believe their assertions, we must test those claims for accuracy. In the wake of the Paris attacks, that lesson is more urgent than ever.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed...126-story.html





NSA to Shut Down Bulk Phone Surveillance Program by Sunday
Dustin Volz

The U.S. National Security Agency will end its daily vacuuming of millions of Americans' phone records by Sunday and replace the practice with more tightly targeted surveillance methods, the Obama administration said on Friday.

As required by law, the NSA will end its wide-ranging surveillance program by 11:59 p.m. EST Saturday (4:59 a.m. GMT Sunday) and expects to have the new, scaled-back system in place by then, the White House said.

The transition is a long-awaited victory for privacy advocates and tech companies wary of broad government surveillance at a time when national security concerns are heightened in the wake of the Paris attacks earlier this month.

It comes two and a half years after the controversial program was exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The move, mandated by a law passed six months ago, represents the greatest reduction of U.S. spying capabilities since they expanded dramatically after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Under the Freedom Act, the NSA and law enforcement agencies can no longer collect telephone calling records in bulk in an effort to sniff out suspicious activity. Such records, known as "metadata," reveal which numbers Americans are calling and what time they place those calls, but not the content of the conversations.

Instead analysts must now get a court order to ask telecommunications companies like Verizon Communications to enable monitoring of call records of specific people or groups for up to six months.

"The act struck a reasonable compromise which allows us to continue to protect the country while implementing various reforms," National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said.

Some Republican lawmakers want to preserve bulk collection until 2017, citing the Nov. 13 Paris attacks in which 130 people died. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the killings.

But any new surveillance measures are unlikely to become law ahead of the November 2016 presidential elections.

A presidential review committee concluded the surveillance regime did not lead to a single clear counter terrorism breakthrough that could be directly attributed to the program.

Metadata collected by the NSA over the past five years will be preserved for "data integrity purposes" through February 29, the White House said.

After that the NSA will purge all of its historic records once pending litigation is resolved.

(Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball; Editing by Andy Sullivan and Andrew Hay)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/...0TG27120151127





BlackBerry Offers Lawful Interception for Devices, But No Backdoors

Wants to differentiate from rivals offering end-to-end encryption.
Juha Saarinen

Mobile device maker BlackBerry is taking a different tack in the encryption debate, saying its smartphones have lawful interception capabilities for government surveillance purposes.

BlackBerry chief operating officer Marty Beard told the FedTalks government information technology summit in the United States that the company takes a balanced approach on interception.

According to Fedscoop, which first reported Beard's remarks, this approach differentiates Blackberry from its competitors, who are "all about encryption all the way."

When asked if Beard's comments meant the company's devices would contain backdoors, a BlackBerry Australia spokesperson said encryption was very important to protect governments, business and individuals from hacking.

"That’s why so many world leaders and CEOs rely on BlackBerry to protect their data," the spokesperson said.

"At the same time, no one wants to see terrorists and criminals taking advantage of encryption to evade detection.

"That’s why we have always strongly supported law enforcement around the world when they need our help."

The spokesperson said the company did not support backdoors, but BlackBerry and "every other tech company bears a responsibility to do all we can to help governments protect their citizens.".

The nature of the interception capability in BlackBerry phones was not disclosed.

Western security agencies and governments have increasingly started to demand that device vendors weaken or break encryption to allow for surveillance and interception.

The demands have fallen on deaf ears with large parts of the tech industry, which is concerned about losing customer trust following former United States National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden's revelations of automated mass surveillance by spy organisations.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook has dug his heels in on encryption, saying the company would never pander to security agencies.

"I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services," he said.

"We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will."

BlackBerry has over recent years lost significant market share to Apple and smartphone vendors using Google's Android platform.

The company is attempting to stage a comeback, releasing the Priv smartphone running Android in September this year. Priv emphasises privacy and security, which have been historical areas of strength for the Canadian smart device maker.
http://www.itnews.com.au/news/blackb...ckdoors-412028





Microsoft Makes Windows 10 Automatic Spying Worse
Gordon Kelly

Microsoft MSFT +0.00% has been on a roll lately. Its massive Windows 10 update ‘Threshold 2’ has far more good features than bad ones, the ‘free upgrade’ rules have been improved and even Microsoft’s Black Friday 2015 deals are surprisingly great. But a new discovery has been made which isn’t good news – at all…

Earlier this month Microsoft finally went on record admitting that automatic spying within Windows 10 cannot be stopped. This sparked a lot of outrage and with ‘Threshold 2’ it appeared Microsoft had done a sharp U-turn because the background service at the heart tracking (the ‘Diagnostics Tracking Service’ aka ‘DiagTrack’) appeared to have been removed. Critics celebrated and it was another well deserved pat on the back for Microsoft.

Except it turns out Microsoft had just been very sneaky. What Tweakhound discovered and was subsequently confirmed by BetaNews, is Microsoft simply renamed DiagTrack. It is now called the ‘Connected User Experiences and Telemetry Service’ – which is both a) deliberately vague, and b) misleading (don’t ‘Connected User Experiences’ sound great).

Even sneakier is, in being renamed, Microsoft also reset users preferences. Those who dug deep into the Windows 10 registry to disable DiagTrack will find it has been re-enabled now it is called the Connected User Experiences and Telemetry Service. Yes, tracking is back and without any warning and your preferences were irrelevant.

The good news is you can disable the Connected User Experiences and Telemetry Service the same way as DiagTrack:

Hold down the Windows key and tap the R key

Recommended by Forbes

1. In the box that opens type ‘services.msc’ and press the Enter key
2. In the ‘Services (Local)’ section locate ‘Connected User Experiences and Telemetry’ and double-click it
3. In the ‘Service status’ section click ‘Stop’
4. Under the ‘Startup type’ drop down menu select ‘Disabled’ and then confirm this and close the window by clicking ‘OK’

Note: it is advisable to disable Not delete the service. Deleting it can cause problems

So what is Microsoft thinking here? I’ve reached out to the company but, despite recognising my enquiry, it has yet to issue a statement. I’ll update this post when it does.

While Microsoft thinks about what to say, I’d say the problem with the DiagTrack rebrand is the company wasn’t thinking. Subtle under the hood changes will always be picked up for such a high profile product. That said such a move is consistent with the negatives in Threshold 2 namely: it resets many user preferences (including basics like your preferred web browser) if they weren’t Microsoft product/services as well as silently deleting third party system monitoring apps like: CPU-Z, speccy, 8gadgetpack, SpyBot, HWMonitor and more.

In my opinion it is this kind of overriding desire for control and a disregard for user choices which is harming Windows 10. At its core Windows 10 is a modern and highly capable platform, but it has been buried under ludicrous layers of control. Worst still it has created a two tier customer base where consumers are forced to take updates which businesses can delay, effectively turning everyday users into bug testers for corporations.

It all feels unsavoury and unnecessary and (while it could be coincidence) there has been a dramatic slowdown in Windows 10 growth after an explosive beginning. For the first ever Free version of Windows, that’s not great.

How can Microsoft reignite the love for Windows 10? I’d say a good start would be to stop doing daft things like this…
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonke...-begins-again/





UK ISP Boss Points Out Massive Technical Flaws in Investigatory Powers Bill

Supporters of new Snooper's Charter "do not understand how the Internet works."
Glyn Moody

The head of the UK ISP Andrews & Arnold, Adrian Kennard, has pointed out a number of major technical issues with the proposed Investigatory Powers Bill (aka the Snooper's Charter). Kennard and other representatives of the UK Internet Service Provider’s Association (ISPA) met with the Home Office on Tuesday, where they presented a number of ethical, technical, and privacy related issues with the incoming new law. These issues, plus some of the Home Office's responses, can be found in written evidence (PDF) penned by Kennard.

Kennard's key point is that the Internet Connection Records, which lie at the heart of the UK government's proposals, are largely meaningless for most modern online services. He recounts that, in the Home Office briefing this week, the example of a girl going missing was used once more to illustrate why the authorities want to be able to see which services she accessed just before disappearing, in the same way that they can track her phone calls. But Kennard and the other ISPA members pointed out this example betrayed a lack of understanding of how the Internet works today:

"If the mobile provider was even able to tell that she had used twitter at all (which is not as easy as it sounds), it would show that the phone had been connected to twitter 24 hours a day, and probably Facebook as well. This is because the very nature of messaging and social media applications is that they stay connected so that they can quickly alert you to messages, calls, or amusing cat videos, without any delay."

He also pointed out that the main protocol used online, TCP, can maintain a connection for hours or even days at a time, and that others such as SCTP and MOSH are designed to keep a single connection active indefinitely even with changes to IP addresses at each end,

Kennard discusses several other technical problems, for example the widespread use of encrypted connections, concluding with this zinger:

"It seems clear that the retention of any sort of 'Internet connection record' is of very limited use at present. The current proponents of this logging do not understand how the Internet works. Experience of Denmark for 10 years suggests that it is not useful. It is also clear that over time the availability of such logs and usefulness of the logs will diminish."

New details emerge

Kennard's notes on the Home Office meeting provide some important new details about how the UK government is planning to implement the Investigatory Powers Bill. For example, "[the Home Office] have indicated that they are not intending to target smaller ISPs, and even if they did, that ISPs would not be expected to log and retain data for which they simply do not have such a capability." That's obviously sensible—smaller ISPs don't have the resources to track and store all this information. But it does suggest that criminals could minimise surveillance by moving to smaller ISPs, which rather undermines the point of the whole Bill.

Another surprise revealed by Kennard concerns the proposed gag orders, which forbid ISPs from revealing what snooping is being carried out on their systems. As he says, that's reasonable for targeted surveillance, but not for a general data retention order that does not relate to a specific person or case. The Home Office revealed that it was the larger telecom companies that asked for gag orders to be imposed. Kennard points out: "This makes no sense. If an operator wants to keep a notice secret they can simply do so. If an operator wants to discuss the notice with equipment vendors, technical working groups and forums with other ISPs or even their customers they are prohibited from doing so."

Finally, as part of his discussion of the Investigatory Powers Bill's disproportionate impact on privacy, and the vulnerability of databases holding complete records of all websites visited, Kennard makes an important observation. Such data is valuable not just for blackmail or identity theft, but also for common thieves, since Web access records would reveal when people routinely leave their houses, making the risk of being caught during a burglary much lower.

Kennard's written evidence is extremely valuable for providing detailed, expert commentary on the Investigatory Powers Bill's measures. It confirms that the UK government literally does not understand how the Internet works, and that its latest attempt to bring in a Snooper's Charter is not just dangerous and misguided but fundamentally unworkable.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy...y-powers-bill/





This is the Group that’s Surprisingly Prone to Violent Extremism
Henry Farrell

In the last 24 hours many prominent politicians and pundits have said that they don’t want Syrian refugees to enter the United States. For example, Gov. Chris Christie has said that he doesn’t even want 5-year-old Syrian orphans to come into the country. Almost half of the country’s governors have said that they will refuse to allow Syrian refugees to come to their states. The same pattern applies in Europe where, for example, members of the new Polish government are threatening to break European law by turning away refugees.

Many of these people claim that they don’t want to admit refugees because they fear some of them will commit violent terrorist crimes, like those that just took place in Paris.

Yet there’s a different group of people which also appears to be highly prone to violent extremism, which isn’t getting nearly as much attention. In a forthcoming book published by Princeton University Press, Diego Gambetta, a renowned sociologist at the European University Institute in Italy, and Steffen Hertog, an associate professor, provide a new theory for why it is that engineers seem unusually prone to become involved in terrorist organizations. The following post is based on their earlier article for the European Journal of Sociology.

Engineers are much more likely to become fundamentalist terrorists

Gambetta and Hertog painstakingly gather together data on individuals belonging to a variety of terrorist groups in the Muslim world. Where they are able to get the data, it displays a compelling pattern – engineers are much more prone to become members of violent terrorist organizations.

More than twice as many members of violent Islamist organizations have engineering degrees as have degrees in Islamic studies. Nearly half of those terrorists who had degrees had degrees in engineering. Even if you make extremely generous assumptions, nine times as many terrorists were engineers as you would expect by chance. They find a similar pattern among Islamist terrorists who grew up in the West – fewer of these terrorists had college degrees, but even more of those who had degrees were engineers.

Significantly, Gambetta and Hertog find the opposite pattern among non-violent Islamic groups. In these groups, people with other degrees than engineering were over-represented.

Gambetta and Hertog also examine non-Islamic terrorist organizations, where they find that left-wing terrorists are likely to be humanities graduates rather than engineers, except in movements in Turkey and Iran. However, there is weak evidence that leaders of extreme right-wing groups in the U.S. may be more prone to be engineers than chance would predict.

This isn’t because engineers are technically skilled or belong to certain social networks

Gambetta and Hertog find that two possible explanations for why engineers are more likely to become terrorists don’t work. Some people might argue that terrorist groups want to recruit engineers because engineers have valuable technical skills that might be helpful, such as in making bombs. This seems plausible – but it doesn’t seem to be true.

Terrorist organizations don’t seem to recruit people because of their technical skills, but because they seem trustworthy. They don’t actually need many people with engineering skills. Many of the engineers in Hamas, for example, play administrative roles. Nor is the abundance of engineers explained by social networks (in which, for example, a couple of engineers might have been recruited initially, who would then recruit friends who would also be more likely to be engineers).

It seems that engineers are common in clusters of terrorists that sprang up independently from each other, suggesting that there is some underlying factor that makes engineers more likely to be militants.

Engineers are more likely to become terrorists because of mindset and lack of opportunity

Gambetta and Hertog find strongly suggestive evidence that engineers are more likely to become terrorists because of the way that they think about the world.

Survey data indicates that engineering faculty at universities are far more likely to be conservative than people with other degrees, and far more likely to be religious. They are seven times as likely to be both religious and conservative as social scientists.

Gambetta and Hertog speculate that engineers combine these political predilections with a marked preference towards finding clearcut answers. This preference has affinities with the clear answer that radical Islamist groups propose for dealing with the complexities of modernity: Get rid of it. They quote the famous right-wing economist Friedrich von Hayek, who argues that people with engineering training “react violently against the deficiencies of their education and develop a passion for imposing on society the order which they are unable to detect by the means with which they are familiar.”

Gambetta and Hertog suggest that this mindset combines with frustrated expectations in many Middle Eastern and North African countries, and among many migrant populations, where people with engineering backgrounds have difficulty in realizing their ambitions for good and socially valued jobs.

This explains why there are relatively few radical Islamists with engineering backgrounds in Saudi Arabia (where they can easily find good employment) and why engineers were more prone to become left-wing radicals in Turkey and Iran. A particular religiously fundamentalist ideology gives engineers a philosophy that is in tune with their mindset and an understanding of the world that helps make sense of their poor economic prospects.

Not all engineers are prone to become terrorists

If Gambetta and Hertog are right, they have found a reason why many more terrorists are engineers than one might expect based on chance. They have also identified a propensity that doesn’t rely on Islamist extremism. The combination of mindset and lack of opportunity might easily occur in other societies than the Middle East and North Africa.

Obviously, even if all Gambetta and Hertog’s arguments hold, only a tiny, tiny minority of engineers are likely to become radicalized terrorists.

In nearly all cases, engineers are ordinary people. Perhaps they are more likely to be conservative and religiously devout than people in other professions, but this is hardly cause for condemnation.

This logic, however, applies to other people than engineers. If we shouldn’t draw problematic generalizations about engineers based on a tiny minority, we plausibly shouldn’t be drawing problematic generalizations about refugees, or for that matter about Muslim residents of the U.S. or Europe.

It’s hard to imagine prominent politicians or pundits making frightening sounding warnings about the dangers of letting engineers walk among us. Yet it’s no more ridiculous, given the evidence, than their fearful statements about Syrian refugees.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ent-extremism/





How to Fix Everything
Jason Koebler

It happened suddenly, like most of these stories do. My alarm went off. I kicked my leg out as I jolted awake, making solid contact with my new laptop, which was innocently lying at the foot of my hotel bed for some reason. It landed on a chair leg; the crash was loud. The aluminum next to the Apple logo was visibly, obviously dented. I flipped it open and was greeted with a large blob of dead pixels radiating outward from the dent.

My options were few. $600 for an LCD replacement at the Apple store. $500 to get an independent repairman to do it. On a whim, I searched eBay and was shocked to see that I could get a new LCD for $50, if I was willing to find out whatever the inside of a MacBook Pro looked like. I pressed buy.

And then I saw the screw.

***

If you’ve tried to open any iDevice—iPad, iPhone, iMac, any of them—within the last four years, you've come face-to-face with Apple’s very small, five-pointed Do Not Enter sign. It's an overt declaration that your phone, or your computer, or your tablet is not really yours to tamper with, a public statement that you are not qualified to fix your own things.

If you’re reading this on your iPhone or have one nearby, look at either side of the charging port and you’ll seem them: two tiny, star-shaped screw heads that, outside of an obscure wheelchair manufacturer, do not otherwise exist in the wild.

There is a solution to this “pentalobe” screw, however. A screwdriver engineered by iFixit, a California startup that has been simultaneously antagonizing Apple and making sure that, as electronics get more and more complicated, the layperson will still be able to learn how to fix them. (Other companies have since begun offering pentalobe screwdrivers.)

I spent a few days with iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens and professional repair experts at the Electronics Reuse Conference in New Orleans earlier this month to learn more about how your right to open, tinker with, and repair devices that you own is under attack from the very companies that make them.

Manufacturers have attempted to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to claim that they own the software that makes an electronic an electronic, and tampering with that software is a copyright violation. There's the fact that Apple quietly stopped accepting applications for "Authorized Service Provider" designations in 2010. There are the seizures of "counterfeit" parts being imported from China that may be legally legitimate. There are the lease programs carriers and Apple have started that ensure you won't ever actually "own" a phone ever again.

“Normally if I purchase a hammer, if the head of the hammer falls off, I'm allowed to repair it and fix it. I can use the hammer again,” Charles Duan, director of Public Knowledge’s Patent Reform Project, told me. “For a lot of these newer devices, manufacturers want to say ‘We want to be the only ones to repair it’ because they make more profits off the repairs. They've found lots and lots of way to do this. Intellectual property law, contracts, end user license agreements, lots and lots of ways to try to make sure you can't do what you want with your stuff.”

So, Apple has lots of ways to keep you out of your devices. But the screw is a good place to start.

The iPhone 4 shipped with standard, Phillips head screws. Sometime in late 2010, however, the company began ordering its Apple Store Geniuses to replace standard screws with pentalobe ones on any iPhone 4 devices that were brought in for repair. Reuters reported on January 20, 2011 that employees were instructed to not tell customers that they had made the switch. The switch should have, in theory, made it impossible for anyone except for Apple to open the device.

Wiens had expected this, however. Wiens originally tipped Reuters on the story and then, the day after the article was published, iFixit released an "iPhone Liberation Kit" that consists of a pentalobe screwdriver and two replacement Phillips head screws. While on a trip to Japan, Wiens learned that the Japanese iPhone 4 had shipped with pentalobe screws. Using a microscope and a file, a fellow repair-minded man there managed to whittle down a flathead screwdriver into the pentalobe shape, granting him access to the device.

“That was the first screwdriver in the world outside of Apple that would remove the pentalobe screw,” Wiens told me. “Apple was literally screwing their customers, and because we had a heads up, we were able to sell a screwdriver as soon as it came to the United States.”

***

I learned about iFixit soon after I learned about the screw. A few quick Google searches took me to the San Luis Obispo, California-based company's website. After buying a pentalobe screwdriver, I spent a few minutes clicking around, which opened my eyes to an entire thriving community of DIY repairmen and women.

Want to know how to fix the "Red Ring of Death" issue that affects Xbox 360s? iFixit provides step-by-step instructions on how to break into the device, and also sells the parts and tools you'll need to complete the repair. Want to disassemble a DSLR camera lens? Replace the screen on your iPhone (or any other phone)? Install more RAM on your PC? Fix the "alarm" on your alarm clock? iFixit has you covered. Want to see what the inside of a clothes iron looks like? How about a washing machine or a Speak & Spell toy? You got it. Need to learn to sew a replacement button onto a Patagonia shirt? The company can teach you to do that, too.

Though I'll mention Apple over and over again throughout this story, the company isn't alone in trying to make it difficult or potentially illegal for you or anyone else to fix your broken stuff. Most manufacturers are terrible at providing service manuals; Apple is notable simply because the repair market for the iPhone is larger than that of any specific Android phone.

John Deere told the copyright office that allowing farmers and mechanics to repair their own tractors would “make it possible for pirates, third-party developers, and less innovative competitors to free-ride off the creativity, unique expression and ingenuity of vehicle software.” Lexmark has been long-embroiled in a copyright case against a company that reverse-engineered its printers to create and sell aftermarket ink cartridges. The HTC One is basically impossible for a consumer to open, and so on and so forth.

The Electronics Reuse Conference was full of people who reject the idea that manufacturers should have control over consumer devices. And, though there are industry secrets and advanced repair strategies that some don't share, they're here primarily to learn how to convince consumers that repairing your electronics is often superior to replacing them.

"Your competition is not each other," Wiens tells the 100-or-so repairmen and women (though it's mostly middle-aged white men) who showed up to his introductory talk at the conference in New Orleans. "We're competing with the garbage dump."

When the iFixit crew pulled out the microscopes and soldering irons for a session about repairing and replacing transistors and capacitors, which are a hundred times smaller than a dime, on an iPad logic board, it became obvious that these professionals take the art of repair much more seriously than any electronics manufacturer.

“There are people here doing repairs Apple would never dream of,” Chris Collins, a Texas-based repairman, told me. Collins repairs Apple devices, game consoles, old stereos and turntables, and even has a contract with local cities to repair cameras that survey sewer systems. “The best repair professionals in the world don’t work for Apple.”

Jessa Jones, a former microbiologist-turned iPad repairwoman, is widely considered in the profession to be among the best repair professionals in the world. In between taking care of her four kids as a stay-at-home mother, she spends her days casually recovering priceless data from water-damaged iPads that would no one else would ever bother touching, or fixing short circuits that cause the iPad LCD backlight to burn out. She’s so good that, if she can’t fix a device, she doesn’t charge her customers.

“Even in our community of repair people, people think that [logic] board repair died out when things started getting microscopic,” Jones, who has started a logic board repair school, said. “It’s just not true. The more we have people doing higher-level repairs, the more devices we can save, the more data we can recover, the more we can be ambassadors of repair to the public.”

***

Later, over a beer in the French Quarter, Wiens waxes nostalgic about a time when washing machines lasted 50 years instead of five, notes that larger smartphone screens have led to more broken smartphones—"Have you ever seen a Galaxy Note without a broken screen?" he asks me—and goes on frustrated rants about the fact that his company even has to exist in the first place.

That Apple and other electronics manufacturers don't sell repair parts to consumers or write service manuals for them isn't just annoying, it's an environmental disaster, he says. Recent shifts to proprietary screws, the ever-present threat of legal action under a trainwreck of a copyright law, and an antagonistic relationship with third-party repair shops shows that the anti-repair culture at major manufacturers isn't based on negligence or naiveté, it's malicious.

Leaving your broken phone or computer in a drawer or throwing it in the garbage are the two worst things you can do with electronics, Wiens said. Recycling isn't much better.

"When it comes to electronics, recycling should be the last option," Wiens once wrote in a blog post called "Happy Earth Day, Don't Recycle."

In a perfect world, you would get your stuff fixed and keep using it. Repairing it and selling it or making sure it gets repaired and reused is just as good.

"Mining and manufacturing are, in that order, the worst things we do in the world," he told me.

Agbogbloshie, Ghana. Image: Agbogbloshie Makerspace Project/Flickr

There are roughly 50 periodic table elements used in the manufacture of a smartphone, many of them in trace amounts. Most of them are not recoverable by recycling.

“The plastic in your iPhone will be made into a low grade plastic and will be made into a park bench, which is a shame because it's a high-grade plastic that may be worth $30 a pound,” he said. “After it's recycled, it might be worth ten cents a pound because you can't separate them out."

If we're not willing to use our electronics well into their usable life cycle, the answer, he says, is to find a way to keep them working and get them into the hands of people who can use them.

"Everyone in the world should have a cell phone, but we need to find a way to do it reasonably," he said.

Much of Wiens's environmentalism comes from several trips he's made to developing countries. In our conversations, he gets most excited talking about the water pump repairmen he's met in Kenya, Cairo’s best mechanics, or people in Delhi who cut open old CRT televisions and monitors to make new ones. (This is extremely dangerous; each CRT television has roughly 10 pounds of lead in it.)

"We had heard about e-waste, and so I decided to see it for myself," he said.

And so he visited Agbogbloshie, Ghana, commonly referred to as "the world's biggest e-waste dump," as well as a handful of other cities in the developing world. (He filmed a yet-to-be-released documentary during his trip.) It's true that Agbogbloshie is an environmental disaster, but the story isn’t so simple.

"The story is that we're dumping our stuff on Africa. That's not what happens," Wiens said. "What happens is they buy electronics from us because they want them, they stop working, and so they junk it, and they don't have good recycling or waste facilities."

In Wiens's opinion, Agbogbloshie and many other places in the world are lacking access to parts and repair manuals that could prevent devices from being discarded in the first place.

"What’s really the problem is there are products that are complex and the manufacturers are sharing none of the information on how to fix them," he said. "You make a million printers, they’re used in a million different ways. At the end of their life, they also get thrown away or discarded in a million different ways. That’s the lever we can pull by teaching people to fix things. We had accidentally stumbled across the solution to a really big problem. That’s why I keep doing this."

***

When I ordered the LCD screen for my MacBook, I didn’t even think about where it came from. The truth is, I have no idea. But it didn't come from Apple. Go on eBay now, or do a Google search looking for components to a computer or smartphone. You'll find tiny camera replacements, headphone jacks, LCD screens and entire iPhone front panel displays (it is much easier to simply replace the entire thing, including the camera, rather than just the glass). You'll also see that parts have wildly different prices and wildly different names. You'll see "authentic" parts and "OEM" parts and "certified" parts and "used" parts and "salvaged" parts.

What do these words mean? It's unclear, even for many people who repair things for a living.

This is by design. Americans spent more than $23.5 billion repairing and replacing broken smartphones between 2007 and 2014. In 2013, an analyst reported that Apple hoped to save $1 billion by repairing broken iPhones instead of replacing them, which gives you an idea of just how big the repair market is for the world's most popular phone. Apple wants as large a share of that as possible. Because it controls the hardware, it's also trying as best as it can to control the parts market.

It's not illegal to sell or manufacture an LCD screen that fits on an iPhone, but it is illegal to make a back panel that has the Apple logo on it. Apple has trademarks on certain designs, such as a square on the home button casing from a few years back, and even puts logos on some internal cables.

So what is a "counterfeit" part, really? Who knows!

"Apple and Samsung don't like the grey market, and this is very much a grey market," iFixit's Scott Head told conference goers. "There's a difference between what customs thinks is a good argument as to authenticity and what the manufacturers do."

Most repair professionals I spoke to at the conference said they try to do their best to source legal parts from China. But is that order of 500 Sony-branded Xperia backplates overrun from the original manufacturing process? Did they fall off a truck somewhere? Or were they made without Sony's permission? It all matters, and much confusion could be avoided if electronics manufacturers simply sold the parts to consumers and repair shops themselves.

Such questions are how you end up with federal customs agents raiding 25 smartphone repair shops in Miami and seizing $300,000 worth of "counterfeit" iPhone parts. From a local news story published in 2013 shortly after the raids:

"Abel Abella claims there were 20 ICE agents and two people from Apple in his small Bird Road store.
'We got the parts from a company in California. To this day that vendor is still selling parts,' Abella said. 'Why did the come after me?'"

Abella did not want to be extensively interviewed for this article, but told me the raid was devastating.

“Ever since then I haven’t fixed iPhones,” he told me in a text message. “I went out of business because of it.”

Last year, Customs and Border Patrol seized $162 million worth of consumer electronics in 6,612 separate raids as part of a program called “Operation Chain Reaction” that 16 separate government agencies are involved in. Spend some time searching the internet, and you’ll find forum posts written by people who say their businesses or livelihoods were destroyed because of a CBP seizure.

"We got really scared, legitimately. We pulled all our parts out of our stores and we kept them at my house," Ivan Mladenovic, who runs two TechBar repair shops in South Florida, told me about the months following the federal raids in Miami. "We would shuttle parts to the store 2-3 at a time. I’m under the impression that the business of repairing iPhones could just go away one day. Apple could vanish an industry if it really wants to go after us."

***

One thing that’s getting lost as electronics become more complex, harder to open, and more disposable is that we even can repair our stuff. Most modern-day DIY repair advocates had a “eureka moment” that inspired them to pursue the practice. Mine was the laptop.

Wiens listens intently when I tell him about how I used his website to break into my MacBook Pro and, because I was cheap and didn't buy all the proper tools, used the edge of a box cutter to pry the glass away from the broken LCD. I had little idea what I was doing and, after about six hours of problem solving, prying, keeping track of barely-visible screws, it was 4 AM and I was left with a bunch of parts laying on my kitchen table and a frustration-induced headache.

Wiens knows the feeling. A similarly difficult laptop repair he did in college was the genesis of iFixit.

As a student at Cal Poly, he managed to save enough to buy a brand new, $1,800 iBook. Like me, Wiens had a moment of clumsiness and broke his laptop soon after he bought it. Unlike me, he had nowhere to turn to to figure out how to fix it.

He looked for service manuals online, but couldn't find any. He took it apart anyway.

"It was 2 AM and I decided, well, 'I'll leave it in pieces and put it back together in the morning.' That was a really bad idea," he said. "The next day, I had no idea what anything was. I finally jammed it back together and the computer worked but was never quite the same."

Wiens did some more research and found that Apple had filed Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown orders against the few websites that had put Apple's official repair manuals online.

"I thought, 'Wow, they're using copyright notices to prevent people from fixing things.' I thought that was kind of fucked up," he said.

Wiens and his partner, Luke Soules, decided to find every iBook and PowerBook, write repair manuals for them, and sell them for $15 a piece. It didn't go too well—they never sold out of their original 50 manuals. But then they put them online for free, got picked up by a few Apple news blogs, and suddenly became the go-to source for this type of information.

"This whole thing is an end around copyright. We decided as a result of our research in developing world that what the world needed was an open source repair manual for everything," he said. "There's two ways of doing that—you get the manufacturers to open source their documents, or you write a new one. We have not given up on the first one, but we have focused our efforts on the second."

To that first point, iFixit has become one of the most outspoken companies advocating for DMCA reform, and won a small victory earlier this month when the Librarian of Congress granted several exceptions to the law that protect "the right to repair." iFixit specifically defeated the copyright use case that John Deere was lobbying for—farmers can now fiddle with their tractors without fear of being sued. Now, the company is pushing for state-level legislation that would require manufacturers to sell repair parts and provide service manuals.

Few small companies whose business model is to directly antagonize the world's largest companies have done very well. Even fewer have thrived.

iFixit, however, seems to have found a niche throwing stones at Apple’s goliath. First came the service manuals. Then came the pentalobe screwdriver. By the iPhone 4S release, iFixit was flying at least one of its techs out to Australia so it could be the first in the world to purchase new devices—and the first to take it apart. The company is profitable, though Wiens won’t disclose how much revenue it brings in. A separate spinoff company, called Dozuki, sells iFixit’s wiki technology to corporate clients around the world.

With every new iPhone, MacBook, or iPad release, iFixit finds itself hacking new tools to open and repair them. Within a week of the Apple Watch release, it had custom-manufactured adhesive strips to put it back together.

"There's this pizza cutter-like thing that's good at opening new iMacs, so we've gone into the pizza cutter business," Wiens said. "We're now a suction cup manufacturer, which I never expected to be, because you need a suction cup to open iPhones."

"We've been poking at them a long time," he added. "Apple deals with things by ignoring people."

Apple did not respond to three separate requests for comment on this story.

The cold war between Apple and iFixit has become more heated lately, however. Apple recently deleted the iFixit app from the App Store for breach-of-contract, because Apple sent iFixit the new Apple TV and iFixit does what it always does, which is tear it to pieces.

There was also a curious change between the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 6. Repairs on the 5S are particularly perilous; the wire that connects the home button to the logic board is easily severable when you're opening the phone. (I did this on a phone I fixed.) As a security feature, breaking that wire makes TouchID stop working on that device, forever. On the iPhone 6, this wire is specifically routed so as to be unobtrusive and less likely to break.

"Apple makes over a billion dollars a year fixing iPhones, which is enough that they can tell Jonathan Ive that he's got to design the iPhone to be repairable," Wiens said. "That change took time, it took thought, and it's more expensive to design the phone like that, and it's all in service of it being a more repairable device."

After being slammed by Wiens and by the press over the design of the MacBook Pro Retina, which uses a ton of glue to keep the battery in place, Apple has taken to using more easily removable adhesive strips to hold down the battery in the iPad Pro. This sounds like a small change, but it's not. Apple temporarily lost its "green" status from EPEAT, an organization started by the Environmental Protection Agency, because the MacBook Pro Retina with glued batteries was not recyclable—batteries left in electronics recycling plants regularly start fires if they're not removed from the device.

"The Apple folks came in, used a sledgehammer and a crowbar and got the battery out," Wiens said (I have not been able to confirm this story). Apple regained its certification and has used adhesive strips instead of glue on several products since then. "It's been things like that—we've been fighting this proxy war over some of these green standards."

"I've been at these sessions with their lobbyists," he added. "Their job is to say 'no' to anything that would give their designers less freedom."

iFixit announced this month that it will do what Apple will not. iFixit is going to start selling bulk parts to repair shops, and it just launched a certification program for repair stores that pass an online test.

Most importantly, however, is that iFixit makes it clear to anyone who is brave enough to open their devices that they’re not alone. Most of the repair manuals are written by users of the site, and DIYers regularly discuss little hacks or modifications that will make any given repair easier in the comments or on the forums.

“Our mission is to teach everyone how to repair everything,” Wiens said. “We can’t do that without the community.”

***

I fiddled with my MacBook until the sun came up. The screen made a weird clicking noise when I opened or lowered it, but all the little cables were plugged back in, at least. I hit the power button and… it worked.

As someone who pretty much avoided any sort of manual labor—precise or otherwise—my entire life, the feeling was unexpected and foreign. I, myself, fixed something. Somewhere, maybe, I had a small feeling of sticking it to the man. But mostly, I was just proud of myself.

"The first time you open an electronic, it stops being a magical black box and you see it's just a bunch of things plugged together," Wiens said. "A plumber is not necessarily better at plumbing than me, he's just faster and more consistent. That's the case with a lot of this stuff."

At home in central California, he fixes broken lawn sprinklers, chairs, toilets, and whatever else may break. He's replaced the transmission on his truck, attempted to put a chainsaw back together, and has been chastised by a buck knife manufacturer for trying to replace its spring-loaded mechanism. His nightmare repair is replacing the zipper on a jacket ("An all-day affair with a high likelihood of failure").

The repair industry's bible is Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford's 2010 book about quitting his high-paying think tank job to become a motorcycle repairman—a job he says is both more rewarding and more intellectually stimulating.

"The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit," Crawford wrote in the book. "And, in fact, an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to 'hide the works,' rendering many of the devices we depend on every day unintelligible to direct inspection."

That train of thought is found in most everyone who works at the company. When the company moved into its current offices in a redone car dealer in San Luis Obispo, California, the staff spent weeks customizing it.

"We left it unfinished on purpose. We would spend Saturdays planing wood planks we had bought. The tool team is in these shipping containers. They took plasma cutters and layered off these doors and put them on sliders," Scott Dingle, who has been with iFixit for four years, told me. "If we could have built that building ourselves, we would have because that's our mentality."

"It's a bunch of do-it-yourselfers, everyone has had the mentality of build your own thing, make your own mods," Jake Devincenzi, an ex-iFixit employee who now works for an electronics recycler, told me.

"If Kyle could have his way, everyone would live together in one compound and we would be this one harmonious group," Dingle added.

This isn't all about pushing back against Apple or any other company. It's not all about saving the environment, either. Fixing things feels good.

And that's why it wasn't surprising to find a contingent of iFixit employees and repair professionals drinking beer and whiskey as they huddled around microscopes one night long after the conference was over.

iPhone and iPad parts littered the floor and table. Someone was showing off the custom back they had made for their phone. Jessa Jones was fixing iPad backlights and teaching others what each little electrical component does. Wiens and his staff were talking about sci fi books and discussing what toppings of pizza to order and were geeking out over their most recent repairs. Several separate beer runs were made.

At one point, Wiens poured himself a room-temperature whiskey. He grabbed a pressurized can of freeze spray—used to find hot chips on broken logic boards—stuck it into his whiskey, and sprayed. It splashed all over the place, but the drink was colder.

It occurred to me around that time that Wiens spends much of his time fighting to make his company obsolete. I asked him what would happen if Apple and other manufacturers decided to one day teach people how to repair their devices, if they decided to offer "official" parts.

"iFixit is a hack. The manufacturers should be doing this,” he said. “You know, I'd love to do something else.”

I don't think I believe him.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-fix-everything





Pirate Avoids Lawsuit after Hitting 200,000 Video Views
Kevin Rawlinson

A convicted software pirate has been handed an unusual punishment.

The man, named only as Jakub F, was told he would be spared having to pay hefty damages as long as a film denouncing piracy he was made to produce got 200,000 views.

He reached his target within days, and now has over 400,000 hits on YouTube.

He came to the out-of-court settlement with a host of firms whose software he pirated after being convicted by a Czech court.

In return, they agreed not to sue him.

The 30-year-old was also given a three-year suspended sentence.

The criminal court decided that any financial penalty would have to be decided either in civil proceedings or out of court.

The firms, which included Microsoft, HBO Europe, Sony Music and 20th Century Fox, estimated that the financial damage amounted to thousands of pounds, with Microsoft alone valuing its losses at 5.7m Czech Crowns (£148,000).

But the Business Software Alliance (BSA), which represented Microsoft, acknowledged that Jakub could not pay that sum.

Instead, the companies said they would be happy to receive only a small payment and his co-operation in the production of the video.

In order for the firms' promise not to sue to be valid, they said, the video would have to be viewed at least 200,000 times within two months of its publication this week. A spokesman for the BSA told the BBC that the stipulation was to ensure that Jakub would help share it as widely as possible.

But, if the video had not reached the target, the spokesman said that - "in theory" - the firms would have grounds to bring a civil case for damages.

A Czech public relations firm, working for the BSA, set up a website in Jakub's name to host the video. A message from Jakub on the site, written in Czech, read: "I thought I was not doing anything wrong. I thought it did not hurt the big companies… I was convinced that I was too small a fish."

In the video, Jakub, who, the BSA accepted, did not pirate the software for financial gain, warned other small-time pirates they too could be caught. Jakub reportedly put copies of Microsoft Windows 7 and 8, as well as other content, on filesharing sites.

The film, in which Jakub plays himself, has so far been watched more than 400,000 times.

The video - The Story of my Piracy - is, the message reads, a faithful depiction of how Jakub initially enjoyed pirating the software, before being tracked down and receiving a visit from the police.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34932628





Swedish Court: 'We Cannot Ban Pirate Bay'

In a landmark decision, a Swedish court on Friday ruled that the country's internet service providers cannot be forced to block controversial Swedish file-sharing site Pirate Bay.

After considering the case for almost a month, the District Court of Stockholm ruled that copyright holders could not make Swedish ISP Bredbandsbolaget block Pirate Bay.

The court found that Bredbandsbolaget's operations do not amount to participation in the copyright infringement offences carried out by some of its 'pirate' subscribers.

Pirate Bay is blocked by many European ISPs but anti-piracy outfits have always hoped that one day the notorious site would be restricted in Sweden.

The action was brought by Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, Nordisk Film and the Swedish Film Industry, who teamed up in a lawsuit last year designed to force Bredbandsbolaget to block the site.

They claimed that, unless it blocks Pirate Bay, Bredbandsbolaget should be held responsible for the copyright infringements of its customers.

Bredbandsbolaget refused to comply, stating that its only role is to provide customers with internet access and ensuring the free-flow of information.

In the ruling the court said that it considers that the actions of Bredbandsbolaget do not constitute participation in crimes in accordance with Swedish law.

“A unanimous District Court considers, therefore, that it is not in a position to authorize such a ban as the rights holders want and therefore rejects their request,” said presiding Chief Magistrate Anders Dereborg.

Daniel Westman, an IT researcher at Stockholm University told the Swedish news agency TT, “It was a little unexpected, but it is not unlikely that a higher court may judge differently. Most countries where this thing has been tried the courts ruled in favour of blocking. The only EU country that has not done so has been the Netherlands.”

The Pirate Bay, which grew into an international phenomenon after it was founded in Sweden in 2003, allows users to dodge copyright fees and share music, film and other files using bit torrent technology, or peer-to-peer links offered on the site – resulting in huge losses for music and movie makers.

In 2009 Fredrik Neij and three other Swedes connected with The Pirate Bay were found guilty of being accessories to copyright infringement by a Swedish court.

They were each given one-year jail terms and ordered to pay 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) in compensation.
http://www.thelocal.se/20151127/swed...ban-pirate-bay

















Until next week,

- js.



















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