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Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
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![]() In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776 The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain [George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within. He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands. He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers. He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance. He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us: For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States: For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences: For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies: For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation. He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends. We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. Signed, New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton ![]() "We’ll only be able to tell in 20 years,” he said. “But I truly believe this is the dawn of a new era of artificial intelligence. It is on the vanguard of a great revolution in computer science." – Norman Winarsky "In a digital world, Do It Yourself is the mantra, with Creative Commons being one of the tools that allows artists to do so. Where does that leave middlemen like ASCAP? Nowhere. The ASCAP fundraising letter has laid bare a truth that many of us have known for a while - that some of the large wealthy organizations that claim to represent artists support policies that are more aligned with their corporate masters." – Gigi Sohn "Just please: don't call it a radio station. Radio doesn't have the guts to do this, and radio certainly won't spend the money and take the risks to do it right." – Tom Leykis "Current intellectual property policy is overwhelmingly and tragically bad." – James Boyle Fresh Prince of Darkness At first glance the news seems like welcome relief: a Republican senator from Missouri named Bond, Kit Bond, stands up to Independent Joe Lieberman and his Orwellian “Internet kill switch.” But as much as it pains me to say this, there’s no good news here, not if he’s Orrin Hatch’s latest protégé. With big copyright's reigning Prince of Darkness as his consort, Bond’s concerns about a cyber security bill can only mean he thinks it isn't harsh enough. With Bond in league with Hatch, who not too long ago wanted to scan all PCs warrantlessly and, without judicial oversight automatically destroy those found having "unauthorized content" (read: entertainment), it won’t take a degree in the dark arts to predict his response to information he defines as "threats to security." You know, there might be some good news after all: the 71 year old Bond has decided not seek a fifth term. Enjoy, Jack July 3rd, 2010 ![]() Woman Jailed 2 Days for Filming Movie Screen Sues Theater David Kravets A 22-year-old woman jailed two days in November after being arrested for filming two brief snippets of a motion picture is lashing back at the theater, claiming its manager demanded her arrest despite the police department’s reluctance. In a civil suit lodged in federal court in Illinois, Samantha Tumpach claims local police and the Motion Picture Association of American recommended against arresting her. A felony theater-filming charge that risked up to three years in prison was subsequently dropped. The woman filed suit Monday, claiming emotional distress and malicious prosecution on behalf of Muvico Theaters, whose manager allegedly demanded her arrest in a bid to win a financial reward. The MPAA, and the National Association of Theater Owners offers $500 rewards (.pdf) to movie-house workers who catch pirates. The first person arrested for filming in a U.S. theater, a federal and state crime in most states, was a 19-year-old woman who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in 2007. Jhannet Sejas paid a $71 fine for filming 20 seconds of Transformers in a Virginia theater. Regal Entertainment Group pushed for her prosecution. On Tumpach’s camera, the authorities found a host of pictures she took of her friends and sister in the theater, in addition to two clips of the motion picture Twilight: New Moon, according to the suit. One was 114 seconds long. The other was 85 seconds, the suit said. One of the snippets was captured in hopes of filming Tumpach’s “favorite actor taking his shirt off,” according to the suit. The lawsuit, which seeks $50,000 in damages, claims the woman did not film with intent to pirate the movie, that instead she was having fun with her friends and family at a birthday party at the Rosemont, Illinois, theater. The suit alleges: Quote:
Linda Colangelo, a spokeswoman for Muvico Theaters based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was not immediately prepared to comment. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...suing-theater/ ![]() New Rules Bring Online Piracy Fight to US Campuses Eric Gorski Starting this month, colleges and universities that don't do enough to combat the illegal swapping of "Avatar" or Lady Gaga over their computer networks put themselves at risk of losing federal funding. A provision of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 is making schools a reluctant ally in the entertainment industry's campaign to stamp out unauthorized distribution of copyrighted music, movies and TV shows. Colleges and universities must put in place plans "to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material by users of the institution's network" without hampering legitimate educational and research use, according to regulations that went into effect Thursday. That means goodbye to peer-to-peer file-sharing on a few campuses — with exceptions for gamers or open-source software junkies — gentle warnings on others and extensive education programs everywhere else. Despite initial angst about invading students' privacy and doing the entertainment industry's dirty work, college and university officials are largely satisfied with regulations that call for steps many of them put in place years ago. But whether the investment of time and money will make a dent in digital piracy is uncertain. "If the university is going to prohibit underage drinking, I think it ought to prohibit anything on the Internet that's illegal, too," said Alicia Richardson, an Illinois State University junior who applauds her school's restrictive policies on file-sharing. "I'm not going to mess with it. I know the consequences." Among other things, schools must educate their campus communities on the issue and offer legal alternatives to downloading "to the extent practicable." Colleges and universities that don't comply risk losing their eligibility for federal student aid. Many colleges worried they would be asked to monitor or block content. But the provision says schools can get a great deal of flexibility, as long as they use at least one "technology-based deterrent." Their options include taking steps to limit how much bandwidth can be consumed by peer-to-peer networking, monitoring traffic, using a commercial product to reduce or block illegal file sharing or "vigorously" responding to copyright infringement notices from copyright holders. Almost all campuses already manage bandwidth or vigorously process infringement, or "takedown," notices, said Steven Worona, director of policy and networking programs for Educause, a higher education tech advocacy group. While the recording industry has backed off its strategy of suing illegal file-sharers, it still sends infringement notices to colleges — a shot across the bow that urges users to delete and disable computer access to unauthorized music to avoid legal action. "The problem campuses have is that commercial network providers are not doing anything to limit the amount of infringement on their networks or educate their customers about copyright law," Worona said. "Every fall, a new cadre of students arrives on campuses who have been engaging in infringing activity since the third grade." Since October 2008, the Recording Industry Association of America said it has sent 1.8 million infringement notices to commercial internet service providers — and 269,609 to colleges and universities. RIAA, which represents the major music labels, stressed that the numbers don't necessarily reflect piracy trends, but rather the group's ability to detect it. College officials argue notices are a flawed measure of illegal activity because it's up to copyright holders whether to send them and that false positives are possible. RIAA president Cary Sherman said the group can't say whether campus programs are putting a dent in piracy. But he said the threat of a gradually tougher response to repeat violations is working, pointing to the University of California, Los Angeles, as one example. "We think we're beginning to get to a scale now where it actually can make a difference," he said. UCLA has developed a system that notifies users by e-mail when the school receives a copyright infringement notice, setting into motion a process that includes a "quarantine" on the computer's Internet access and the student's attendance at an educational workshop. Repeat offenders typically face one-semester suspensions. Since the workshops started, repeat offenders have virtually disappeared, said Kenn Heller, assistant dean of students. Earlier this year, UCLA also struck a partnership with Clicker Media Inc. to make both university-produced videos and network TV shows, music videos and movies available through its undergraduate student Internet portal. The Motion Picture Association of America, which also pressed for the legislation, is encouraged by what campuses are doing but it's too early to tell whether it will curb piracy, spokeswoman Elizabeth Kaltman said. Few campuses have gone as far as Illinois State, which raised eyebrows by seeking and accepting entertainment industry money to underwrite a now-abandoned research project on digital piracy. The university also blocked all peer-to-peer activity in residence halls and on wireless access points, said Mark Walbert, Illinois State's chief technology officer. Students who use the technology for legal means — like tapping open-source software Linux or downloading World of Warcraft game updates — can get exceptions. For students seeking legal download options, the school developed BirdTrax, a Web page with links to the free movie and music streaming websites such as Hulu and Pandora. In 2007, the University of Michigan took a different approach, launching a campus initiative called "BAYU," which stands for "Be Aware You're Uploading." At little cost, the school developed a software program that automatically notifies users of university networks when they are uploading, or sharing files from their computer with users elsewhere. The university does not look at what is being shared, and notices go out regardless of whether the activity is legal or illegal, said Jack Bernard, a university lawyer who devised the program, which Michigan offers free to other schools. As a result, the number of copyright infringement notices the university receives has slowed to a trickle, he said. "We think scare tactics and most technological means don't realize the ends we want because technological means never seem to keep up with people's ability to thwart them," Bernard said. New technologies have made it more difficult to assess how much enforcement has affected piracy, said Joe Fleischer, chief marketing officer for tracking firm BigChampagne Media Measurement. File-hosting services such as RapidShare store infringing content on distant servers, meaning uploaders' identities are difficult to track. Websites that share links to those files are searchable through Google. "It's a much more complicated battle than it was five years ago because so many new modes of infringement are emerging," Fleischer said. Associated Press Writers Ryan Nakashima in Los Angeles and Dorie Turner in Atlanta contributed to this report. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/...UWkUAD9GMG4RO0 ![]() Feds Seize Domain Names of Pirate Sites Brent Lang The war against internet piracy has stepped up a notch. The launch of “Operation in Our Sites,” a new U.S. initiative aimed at internet counterfeiting and piracy, was announced on Wednesday. But what makes this initiative different is that it partners law-enforcement officials with representatives of the entertainment industry. It also tangible evidence of the Obama administration's promises to crack down on piracy. Hollywood will provide technological advice and support, as well as helping identify the websites that provide illegal downloads. "American business is under attack from counterfeiters and pirates," Immigration and Customs’ Assistant Secretary John Morton said at the press conference. "Internet crooks threaten the U.S. economy on a grand scale." To prove the point, the announcement was made at the Disney Studios in Burbank, where Morton was joined by senior representatives from major movie studios, such as Walt Disney Studios President Alan Bergman and Paramount Chief Operating Officer Frederick Huntsberry, entertainment unions and the Motion Picture Association of America. The message stressed by all the press conferences participants was that piracy was rising and threatened the livelihoods of everyone from those in corporate boardrooms to below the line workers by depriving the U.S. economy of some $20.5 billion annually in lost output. The initiative's first action was to seize nine domain names of websites that were offering first-run movies, often within hours of their theatrical release. Among the sites targetted by the inaugural investigation were TVShack.net, Movies-links.tv, Filespump.com, Now-movies.com, PlanetMoviez.com, PirateCity.org and zml.com, NinjaVideo.net, and NinjaThis.net. Officials said Wednesday that those sites had attracted 6.7 million visitors in a single month. Officials said that those sites are no longer operating and that visitors will now encounter a banner announcing that law enforcement agencies has shut down the sites because they were trafficking in illegal downloads (as of 1:00 p.m. PST, however, some of these sites still appeared to be operational). "I don't think that these moves stopped internet piracy in a day, but this is going to be a sustained effort," Morton said. Law enforcement officials said that these investigations were targeted specifically at the people running bit torrent sites, but that indicated that in the future they may widen their gaze to include individuals who download films and television shows illegally. While the nine sites shut down on Wednesday were all operating in the United States, Morton said that the agencies involved in the new initiative had jurisdiction in 44 countries. "This battle won't be won in the United States. We'll have to wage it globally," Morton said. Seven of those sites were targeted by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. In addition, agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations seized assets associated with these sites from 15 bank, Paypal, investment and advertising accounts. It also executed four residential search warrants in several states. Officials would not say if any arrests had been made, but said that site operators could face jail time. Working undercover, investigators downloaded various newly released movies from the websites and their affiliates. Over the course of the investigation, agents observed links to more than 200 movies and more than 300 television programs on NinjaVideo. Asked about the potential problems that might arise with partnering so heavily with industry, Morton said, "This is a great national industry. When industry is victimized, they should be treated no differently than an individual who is victimized on the corner of Fourth and Main." The new initiative also represents a more comprehensive effort to prosecute downloaders or pirates, rather than the piecemeal approach to prosecution that already exists. For instance, with regards to the seizures and closures announced Wednesday, the class of sites identified were all link sites. The initiative makes good on a promise made by Vice President Joe Biden earlier this month. On June 22, Biden unveiled the White House's strategic plan to increase intellectual-property enforcement. “Piracy is theft,” he said at the time. “It is smash-and-grab, no different from smashing a window at Tiffany.” Members of the Hollywood community, naturally, applauded the new effort in statements on Wednesday. “Content theft online has become increasingly ubiquitous as technology and software improve and access to the Internet increases,” said Mike Robinson, chief of operations, content protection for the MPAA. “We are committed to working with law enforcement to get the illegal choices out of the marketplace and instead focus on continuing to offer more innovative and flexible legal options to consumers to enjoy the movies and TV shows that we all love.” “We are facing a dramatic rise in the number of foreign and domestic websites that are in the business of making films and television shows -- created by our members -- available for illegal download or streaming,” said Kathy Garmezy, associate executive director of government and international affairs for the Directors Guild of America. “If left unchecked, this illegal activity threatens the very ability of filmmakers to both earn a living and create the content that is enjoyed by billions around the world.” “We commend the action of ICE and the IPR Center in striking a significant blow against those who seek to profit from the copyrighted, intellectual property of others,” said Matthew D. Loeb, president of theInternational Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. “The stealing of digital content is not a victimless crime; it’s also the theft of tens of thousands of American jobs.” http://www.thewrap.com/movies/articl...te-sites-18895 ![]() Opposition Mounts to Anti-Counterfeiting Agreement Michael Geist Just as the G8-G20 meetings conclude in Muskoka and Toronto, another round of negotiations on the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement resumes in Switzerland. In the aftermath of the last round of discussions, a draft version of the ACTA text was publicly released, temporarily quieting criticism about the lack of transparency associated with an agreement that currently touches on all forms of intellectual property, including patents, trademark and copyright. While the transparency concerns are no longer in the spotlight, mounting opposition to the agreement from the developing world, particularly powerhouse economies such as India, China and Brazil, is attracting considerable attention. The public opposition from those countries – India has threatened to establish a coalition of countries against the treaty – dramatically raise the political stakes and place Canada between a proverbial rock and hard place, given its close ties to the U.S. and ambition to increase economic ties with India and China. India and China formally raised their complaints earlier this month at the World Trade Organization, where they identified five concerns with the agreement. First, they fear ACTA conflicts with international trade law and would create legal uncertainty. Second, they believe ACTA undermines the balance of rights, obligations and flexibilities that exists within international law. This applies to both trade issues and intellectual property matters. For example, both India and Canada are currently working to implement international intellectual property rules within their domestic laws (both countries have tabled draft copyright bills) and ACTA would create significant new restrictions that could have an immediate domestic impact. Third, there is concern that ACTA could have a dangerous effect on access to medicines by disrupting shipment of goods such as pharmaceuticals. Over the past few years, European countries have seized generic medicines traveling between India and Brazil. Stopping delivery of crucial medicines while in transit creates potential health risks for countries anxious to import them for delivery to waiting patients. The prospect of seized generic medicines – ACTA calls for increased seizure powers by customs officials – could impact Canadian pharmaceutical companies as well, given the success of several generic pharmaceutical companies in serving a global marketplace. Fourth, governments are uncomfortable with the prospect that ACTA could force them to allocate new resources toward intellectual property enforcement ahead of other important policy concerns. While safeguarding intellectual property is important, many developing countries can ill-afford to pull scarce law enforcement personnel away from investigating violent crime in order to track down purveyors of fake handbags or DVDs. Fifth, there are real concerns that ACTA establishes a dangerous precedent by brushing aside United Nations-based international arenas that offer greater transparency and consensus-driven policies in favour of a closed, non-transparent negotiation process that intentionally excludes developing countries. These concerns should resonate strongly with Canadian officials in the wake of the G20, since just as Canada tries to broaden the scope of international economic discussions to include major developed and developing countries, ACTA represents a step in the opposite direction. While some may suggest that the developing world opposition provides evidence that ACTA is actually on the right track, the reality is that it is designed to apply to the very countries that are now preparing to openly oppose it. There is no mechanism to “force” these countries to abide by ACTA standards. Just as Canada has sought to broaden participation through the G20, the best approach to gaining broader acceptance is to include developing countries in the ACTA talks, not leave them on the outside in the hope of later pressuring them to comply with an agreement from which they were deliberately excluded. http://www.thestar.com/news/sciencet...ting-agreement ![]() Sweden's Youth Back Opposition Parties: Poll A clear majority of voters aged 18 to 29-years-old support the red-green opposition coalition ahead of the autumn election, a new survey shows. At the same time, youth support for the ruling Alliance coalition is at a record low, a special survey done by Sifo for Svenska Dagbladet shows. "The government's problem regarding young people is probably that they have not come up with a vision of the future," Toivo Sjörén, who is responsible for Sifo's opinion polls, told the newspaper. The latest poll, conducted earlier this month, revealed that the centre-left red-greens have 56 percent support among 18 to 29-year-olds compared with 32 percent for the centre-right Alliance, a gap of nearly 25 percentage points. "They (the youth) do not think that taxes are important, they are interested in the bigger picture and want to talk about their future and they are mainly are attracted to the Green Party," Sjörén explained. Sjörén added that young people are more trend-sensitive and more fickle in their political allegiances. This is particularly evident among the youngest voters: about half a million are eligible to vote for the first time in September. The party with the highest youth support is the Social Democrats at 34 percent and the Green Party at 16 percent. The Left Party has the same level of support as in the regular Sifo poll at around 6 percent. Separately, the nationalist Sweden Democrats and the Pirate Party together have the backing of nearly 12 percent Sweden's youth. The centre-left parties have held the upper hand among Sweden's younger voters since the late 1990s. In the 2002 election year the gap was at its greatest, with the left-leaning coalition enjoying almost twice the support of the centre-right. High youth unemployment which persisted in the 2000s meant that support waned for the sitting Social Democrat government among the nation's younger generations and during 2005 and 2006, support was almost even. Youth unemployment remains a significant problem in Sweden's strictly regulated labour market, with the Social Democrats regularly criticising the government for not doing enough to tackle "mass unemployment." The government retorts that significant numbers of young people registered as unemployed are in fact students. Despite the low confidence shown by Sweden's youth, the same Sifo poll indicated that overall support for the centre-right coalition had eclipsed the opposition for the first time since the 2006 election. http://www.thelocal.se/27524/20100630/ ![]() Pirate Bay’s Founding Group ‘Piratbyrån’ Disbands Ernesto In 2003 a group of friends from Sweden decided to found Piratbyrån (the bureau of piracy), a lobbying organization to promote the sharing of information and culture. A few months later the group took a decision that would change the Internet – the launch of a BitTorrent tracker named ‘The Pirate Bay’. Today marks the end of an era with the announcement that Piratbyrån has disbanded. Piratbyrån had many purposes, but could be described as a pro-piracy lobbying organization. It was founded in response to Antipiratbyrån, the local anti-piracy outfit in Sweden. The goal was to start a debate on copyright issues and how they affect society. Until then, most press in Sweden would simply take everything Antipiratbyrån said for granted. Internationally, Piratbyrån is mostly known for launching The Pirate Bay in the fall of 2003, just a few months after the group itself was founded. Since there were no Swedish BitTorrent sites at the time, Piratbyrån decided to launch the first Scandinavian BitTorrent community, using the then relatively new BitTorrent protocol. By the end of 2004, a year after the site launched, the tracker was already tracking a million peers and more than 60,000 torrent files. Around the same time the founders also became aware that it wasn’t just Scandinavians showing an interest in their site. Because of increasing worldwide popularity, The Pirate Bay team completely redesigned the site, which became available in several languages from then on. Around the same time The Pirate Bay became separated from Piratbyrån, with the latter focusing more on other ‘copyfights’ that had to be won. In the years that followed Piratbyrån engaged in discussions about the role of intellectual property in the digital age, giving a voice to millions of file-sharers who believed that copying is not a crime. Now, nearly 7 years after it was founded, Piratbyrån’s role has been played out and the group has decided to disband. The discussions about file-sharing that Piratbyrån wanted to have, are already won,” former Pirate Bay spokesperson and Piratbyrån member Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak. “The projects that needed to start have already been finalized. Piratbyrån was a temporary group for a temporary reason.” The final decision to disband the group came after Ibi Kopimi Botani, a prominent member and co-founder of the group, passed away. Without one of its greatest minds, the group would never be the same again, Piratbyrån’s member felt. “The discussions about abolishing Piratbyrån have been going on for years already, but this weekend a beloved friend and member died, and we decided it was time to move on for real, since the group could not be the same without him anyhow. It felt like a good time for passing this part of life,” Peter told TorrentFreak, who added that the group was about much more than being the founders of The Pirate Bay. “Without Piratbyrån there would have been no Pirate Bay of course, but Piratbyrån has accomplished so much more than just that,” he said, a position shared by all of the group’s members. Marcin de Kaminski, who announced the end of Piratbyrån in a blog post, is proud of what they’ve accomplished in all those years. “The most longlived project which has originated from Piratbyrån is obviously The Pirate Bay, but when it comes to great accomplishments I would like to point out how Piratbyrån were forerunners in one of the most obvious clinches of our time,” Marcin told TorrentFreak. “By proudly standing up for the ideas of a whole generation of internauts and taking the fights no one else did, Piratbyrån worked as catalyzers when it came to understanding the current evolution of culture, clusters and chaos,” Marcin said. “While other actors have been trying to deliver answers, Piratbyrån has been very focused on targeting problems of the present by searching for the right questions.” All the right questions have been asked now, and the group believes it has served its purpose. File-sharers are more vocal than ever before, they can stand up for themselves now and continue to challenge the corporations that promote intellectual property abuse. Just copy what Piratbyrån did and evolve. http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bays-...sbands-100623/ ![]() Pirate Party to Run Pirate Bay from Swedish Parliament Ben Jones After their former hosting provider received an injunction telling it to stop providing bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, the worlds most resilient BitTorrent site switched to a new ISP. That host, the Swedish Pirate Party, made a stand on principle. Now they aim to take things further by running the site from inside the Swedish Parliament. When the Swedish Pirate Party announced, back in mid-May, that they were the new ISP of The Pirate Bay, it surprised a lot of people. With their latest announcement, that they will run The Pirate Bay from inside the Swedish Parliament, they hope they will surprise people again. The Pirate Parties around the world are best known for copyright activism and are often seen as a ‘one-issue party’. While they also focus on privacy, government transparency, free speech, and patent reform, it is copyright that people’s minds spring to. So, with an election coming up, the Swedish Pirate Party has decided to play to their strength. The party has announced today that they intend to use part of the Swedish Constitution to further these goals, specifically Parliamentary Immunity from prosecution or lawsuit for things done as part of their political mandate. They intend to push the non-commercial sharing part of their manifesto, by running The Pirate Bay from ‘inside’ the Parliament, by Members of Parliament. This move will certainly push the site to center-stage in Sweden. It will ensure a huge amount of scrutiny in any and all decisions made regarding the site, which is undoubtedly the intent. “Sweden has long been a nation at the forefront of IT. But we have fallen in the rankings, largely because today’s politicians do not see the connection between file-sharing culture and future industry skills. We have now moved from place three to eight in available household bandwidth,” the Pirate Party informed TorrentFreak in a statement. “There is no reason for us to accept this development – there are no technical reasons for this, only political.” “Therefore, we can never accept the copyright industry’s way of systematically and legally harassing anyone who tries to build next-generation industries. The approach is criminal in the world and should be criminal in Sweden also, professional saboteurs are professional criminals, whoever they get their money from,” the Party added. Aside from hosting The Pirate Bay in Parliament, the Pirate Party also plans to criminalize copyright lawsuits against noncommercial file-sharers and websites, as well as lawsuits against ISPs for linking to copyrighted material. “The Lobby is used to using dirty tricks. Let’s see them take on legislators under constitutional protection who aim to criminalize their entire bag of dirty tricks,” Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge told us. Of course, the plan can only take place if the Party wins some seats in the September 19th Elections, where there is a 4% barrier to overcome. However, last June they did manage 7% in the European Parliament elections, so it’s not an impossible goal by any means. We will have to wait and see what September brings. If The Pirate Party succeeds it will add some more controversy to the upcoming appeal of the ‘Pirate Bay Four’, which is currently scheduled to take place a month after the general elections. http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party...iament-010702/ ![]() Swedish ISP Blocks The Pirate Bay Following Injunction enigmax Last month one of three injunctions obtained by Hollywood lawyers required that Swedish ISP Black Internet must stop providing access to the world’s most famous BitTorrent site. The provider has just complied with the court order and in turn became the first in Sweden to cut their customers off from the site. Whether this opens the floodgates for other ISP blocks remains to be seen. Black Internet’s relationship with The Pirate Bay has been far from smooth. Last year, the Swedish ISP bravely put its head above the parapet when it became a bandwidth supplier to the site, a move which has had several knock-on effects. In August 2009, Stockholm’s district court ordered Black Internet to disconnect The Pirate Bay from the Internet or face fines of 500,000 kronor ($64,527). The ISP quickly complied with the ruling and the site temporarily went dark, but quickly reappeared with a new host. The very next day following its decision to disconnect The Pirate Bay, Black Internet’s infrastructure was sabotaged with cost implications of “millions of kronor”. Although it was never proven, many believed that the attack and the blacking out of the world’s most famous BitTorrent site were connected. After initially saying it wouldn’t appeal the district court’s decision, Black Internet changed its mind. “This is the first time in Sweden that an operator has been ordered to stop delivering Internet to someone. We want to know if it’s correct to do so,” said company boss CEO Victor Möller. The appeal was granted. Last month the Svea Court of Appeals made its decision and for Black Internet the outcome was poor. The Court ordered Black Internet to “stop providing Internet access to the TPB web site consisting of a web site including search engine and databasefunctions on which torrent files may be stored and a tracker.” Even though the ISP is no longer servicing The Pirate Bay, the scope of this injunction appears to be broader than first thought. Not only must it never host the site, it must also stop the rest of its regular customers from accessing The Pirate Bay, making it the first ISP in Sweden ordered to block the site. “We have chosen to block traffic into and out of the IP addresses that are using the Pirate Bay,” said Black Internet’s Victor Möller. “We made a decision on our assessment that this was the only way to live up to the Court of Appeal’s decision.” Although being precise is difficult, Möller estimates that the block affects many thousands of businesses and individuals, many of which are keen to reestablish links with the site. “They are looking for more tips and advice on getting past this block,” notes Möller. “There seems to be a great need to reach the Pirate Bay.” TorrentFreak is awaiting comments from both Black Internet and Hollywood lawyer Monique Wadsted and will update this article with that information as soon as it arrives. Update: Court of appeals judge Ulrika Gustavsson Stenbäck has been speaking with Swedish media and has stated that Black Internet’s interpretation of the injunction has gone too far. “The decision meant no general duty to supervise over what people do online, or a general duty to stop someone from getting into the Pirate Bay. It is clear in our decision. Our decision relates only to Black Internet not providing internet access [hosting] to The Pirate Bay.” It seems at this stage that Black Internet is blocking The Pirate Bay but doesn’t have to. http://torrentfreak.com/swedish-isp-...nction-100628/ ![]() Swedish ISP Seeks EU File Sharing Ruling Swedish broadband operator Comhem wants a district court to seek the advice of the EU Court of Justice over an anti-file sharing law (Ipred) case, after the Supreme Court indicated that a test case was destined for Luxembourg. The case dates to back to a report from the Swedish arm of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) in December 2009 calling on Comhem to reveal the identity of a "quite normal" file sharer. Comhem refused, arguing that existing EU legislation data storage legislation only obliges ISPs to divulge user information to the law enforcement agencies and not to private actors. Comhem has now cited a June ruling by the Swedish Supreme Court (Högsta Domstolen - HD) concerning a case between five audiobook publishers and the Swedish ISP ePhone, arguing that its case its identical. The court's request for the parties involved to submit their view on whether it is necessary to send the matter for a preliminary ruling to the European Court, was interpreted by experts to mean that the ePhone case was headed for the EU. This is a process that can take years and the Ifpi has now argued that Comhem is just seeking to delay the legal process. "We regret Comhem's position. We consider the legal situation to be so clear that it is unnecessary to ask the EU-Court for advice," Ifpi's CEO Lars Gustafsson told the TT news agency. The Ipred law, implemented in Sweden on April 1st 2009, gave copyright holders the right to force internet service providers to reveal details of users sharing files, paving the way for legal action that could see downloaders pay hefty damages and fines. After an initial drop in internet traffic attributed to a decline in file sharing, the practice soon bounced back and by December 2009 had returned to record levels in with up to 8 percent of the Swedish population reported to be actively partaking. http://www.thelocal.se/27532/20100630/ ![]() Dutch Court Questioning Why Police Outsourced File Sharing Evidence Collection To Industry Group from the anti-piracy-group-is-not-the-police dept We've seen numerous bad court rulings in the Netherlands when it comes to attacks on file sharing programs, and one of the big concerns was the seemingly all-too-close relationship between the anti-piracy organization BREIN and Dutch law enforcement. For example, it's still unclear how BREIN ended up with computer equipment from some of these file sharing operations. Police can confiscate equipment. Private industry groups cannot. It seems that relationship may now be creating some problems for BREIN, as a court is questioning why Dutch law enforcement brought criminal charges against a file sharing site, when it was clearly a civil issue that should have been taken up by BREIN. The specific case involves a lawsuit that was brought years back, where the owner of the site ShareConnector was eventually cleared on all charges. However, more recently, the Danish Department of Justice decided to appeal. However, TorrentFreak notes that the court has adjourned the case to ask why it's a criminal matter, and why, if it's a criminal matter, is BREIN so involved: The Court wants the prosecutor to explain why the Department of Justice decided to go through with criminal proceedings in a case where a civil one would seem to be more suited. In The Netherlands copyright infringement related offenses fall under civil law unless they are very severe, which doesn't seem to be the case here. In addition, the Court weighs in that the evidence in this case has been collected by the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN instead of the local authorities. Perhaps BREIN and Dutch law enforcement groups will be reminded that BREIN is not, in fact, part of law enforcement, but a private industry group. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...65310015.shtml ![]() File Sharer Beats 'Hurt Locker' Makers to Punch Greg Sandoval The file-sharing community has gone on the offensive in its court fight with the makers of the Oscar-winning film "The Hurt Locker." Jeff Kowalski, 28, filed an "Answer" to the complaint laid against 5,000 as yet unnamed people who the film's producers allege have shared the movie illegally via peer-to-peer services. "Defendant Mr. Kowalski requests that Plaintiff's complaint be dismissed," Kowalski wrote earlier this month to U.S. District for the District of Columbia. One of the problems with Kowalski's legal claims, however, is that he can't know whether he's a defendant because Voltage Pictures, producer of "The Hurt Locker," has yet to subpoena the names of the accused file sharers from their Internet service providers, according to court documents. For that reason, Voltage's attorneys were forced to file an eight-page motion to strike Kowalski's response on grounds that he isn't a defendant and because his "answer" doesn't comply with federal rules of civil procedure. "[Voltage] is still proceeding against all defendants as anonymous Doe Defendants," wrote Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver, the law firm handling the litigation for Voltage. "As the court has not ruled on [Voltage's] motion for expedited discovery yet, and consequently [Voltage] has not even sent subpoenas to the ISPs yet." This will undoubtedly have little bearing on the outcome of the "Hurt Locker" case but it could be a good example of the kind of opposition Voltage and Dunlap Grubb will face as they attempt to kick-start an antipiracy approach employed for five years by the top four music labels before it was abandoned in Dec. 2008. Dunlap is offering to sue individual file sharers who allegedly have pilfered the films of indie production companies. The potential revival of mass antipiracy litigation has stirred outrage in the file-sharing community and among those who oppose this kind of approach. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has offered to help anyone accused of pirating movies by Dunlap Grubb to find legal counsel. An Arizona law firm, White Berberian, will represent those accused for a $249 fee. So far, Dunlap Grubb reportedly has a dozen clients and, it's said, may file suits against 50,000 individuals. Many people who say they downloaded an unauthorized copy of "The Hurt Locker" have reached out to CNET for information about when they might be contacted by Dunlap Grubb, so news that the court hasn't given Voltage permission to subpoena ISPs will likely come be welcome. In a phone interview, Kowalski acknowledged that he filed his response to Voltage's lawsuits as a protest. He says he disagrees with the producers' copyright strategy but is sympathetic to their plight. How sympathetic? Well, he spends some of his time trying to get pirated films removed from file-sharing networks. Does he share files? "Yes," said Kowalski, who said he is running for county commissioner in Saginaw County, Mich. "I download the files but some of the movies we do buy after I download them." How is that fair? "I think it's only fair that they compensate me for helping them," he said. Is he on the level? "Yes, I wanted to take a stand against file sharing." Kowalski did not obtain a pirated copy of "The Hurt Locker" but said he did make a copy of the one he purchased legally. He claims that's fair use. [Thanks to reader Alex for a heads-up on the filing.] http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20008996-261.html ![]() Court to Consider Breaking Up Mass BitTorrent Lawsuits David Kravets If you’ve used BitTorrent to snag unauthorized copies of independent films you should be interested in the arguments unfolding in Wednesday in federal court in Washington, DC. At issue is a mass-litigation campaign, in which the fledgling US Copyright Group is suing about 15,000 users whose IP addresses were detected harvesting films like Steam Experiment, Far Cry, Uncross the Stars, Gray Man and Call of the Wild 3D. Several digital rights groups will argue Wednesday on behalf of the account holders behind the IP addresses that each defendant should be sued individually in courts near where the defendants reside. Currently, they’ve all been lumped together in handful of lawsuits filed in the nation’s capital in March. If U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer agrees with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and Public Citizen, the Copyright Group could find its legal campaign almost impossible to continue on such a grand scale. The issue is important if you live in California and have to answer to a lawsuit across the country. Copyright Act violations carry fines of up to $150,000. A similar brouhaha came up during the Recording Industry Association of America’s lawsuit campaign against file sharers using Kazaa, Limewire and other networks. The association preferred suing hundreds of alleged downloaders at once, but in many instances were forced to drop the large-scale actions and sue each defendant separately. In all, the RIAA sued thousands of individuals spread out over the past six years – and was backed by deep pockets of the nation’s recording labels. If the Copyright Group loses Wednesday’s courtroom showdown, it would be required to spend at least $350 per IP address to re-file an individual case against a sole defendant. Its lawyers likely would have to appear in courtrooms across the country, perhaps simultaneously. The RIAA’s lawsuits against 20,000 alleged music pirates were focused on old-school file sharing systems like Kazaa and Limewire. BitTorrent file sharing is more complicated, with downloaders and uploaders collecting in transient swarms of so-called seeders and leechers. The Copyright Group claims that, because of the swarming element of the BitTorrent protocol, the infringing activity of all the defendants likely had some nexus with the District of Columbia, even if a defendant’s computer was outside the district. The indie filmmakers are taking a different tactic from their commercial counterparts. The Motion Picture Association of America, for the most part, has limited its lawsuits to BitTorrent sites themselves — like The Pirate Bay, TorrentSpy and Isohunt. The allegedly offending IP address were sniffed out by Guardaley IT, a German peer-to-peer–surveillance firm. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...rent-lawsuits/ ![]() Judge "Rejected all of the EFF's Arguments" on P2P Cases Nate Anderson Can a law firm sue up to 5,000 accused P2P users from across the US at once, and in a single DC court? For now, at least, it can. In a 45-minute hearing yesterday before federal judge Rosemary Collyer of the Washington, DC District Court, lawyers from the ACLU, EFF, and Time Warner Cable squared off with Thomas Dunlap of Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver, the firm behind the "US Copyright Group." US Copyright Group has spent the last year partnering with indie film producers like German video game auteur Uwe Boll and the producers of The Hurt Locker, offering to go after P2P downloaders of their films. Those who settle for $1,500-$2,500 can avoid a threatened court case that would seek $150,000 in damages. But the EFF and ACLU argued that it just wasn't proper to sue thousands of people this way, because the people have no real connection to one another (a question of "joinder"). They also complained about suing people from Hawaii in a DC court (an issue of "jurisdiction"). And Time Warner Cable objected that it couldn't possible process thousands of IP lookup requests in a timely manner (an issue of "burden"). Judge Collyer was "very thoughtful about the issue" said EFF attorney Corynne McSherry when I spoke to her yesterday after the hearing. Collyer considered the concerns of everyone involved and eventually decided on a "creative solution," in McSherry's words: ISP subscribers will soon receive an additional notification letter agreed to by all parties. The letter will better explain their rights and the grounds on which they or their lawyers can object to the subpoena. McSherry admitted that there were "other things we would have preferred to happen"—EFF and ACLU had asked the joined cases to be "severed" and each one filed individually, while Time Warner wanted the whole subpoena limited to 28 requests a month or else be quashed altogether. While Collyer's order won't put an end to the subpoenas in process, it will call a halt to subscriber notifications in two of the main cases until all parties can agree on the notice text. Tom Dunlap tells Ars, "Until the court has approved the notice, in the two cases before Judge Collyer, the ISPs will not send notices to their subscribers." (The other cases are being heard before different judges in the same court.) And Dunlap argued that the ruling was a basic validation of his firm's P2P litigation. "I would note the court rejected all of the EFF's arguments, including the request to sever any defendant at this stage in the case," he told Ars. Those targeted by the lawsuits are still free to make their own arguments to the judge about issues like jurisdiction, but the litigation campaign is currently free to proceed. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-p2p-cases.ars ![]() An Internet 100 Times as Fast: A New Network Design Could Boost Capacity Larry Hardesty In today’s Internet, data traveling through optical fibers as beams of light have to be converted to electrical signals for processing. By dispensing with that conversion, a new network design could increase Internet speeds 100-fold. The heart of the Internet is a network of high-capacity optical fibers that spans continents. But while optical signals transmit information much more efficiently than electrical signals, they?re harder to control. The routers that direct traffic on the Internet typically convert optical signals to electrical ones for processing, then convert them back for transmission, a process that consumes time and energy. In recent years, however, a group of MIT researchers led by Vincent Chan, the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has demonstrated a new way of organizing optical networks that, in most cases, would eliminate this inefficient conversion process. As a result, it could make the Internet 100 or even 1,000 times faster while actually reducing the amount of energy it consumes. One of the reasons that optical data transmission is so efficient is that different wavelengths of light loaded with different information can travel over the same fiber. But problems arise when optical signals coming from different directions reach a router at the same time. Converting them to electrical signals allows the router to store them in memory until it can get to them. The wait may be a matter of milliseconds, but there’s no cost-effective way to hold an optical signal still for even that short a time. Chan’s approach, called “flow switching,” solves this problem in a different way. Between locations that exchange large volumes of data — say, Los Angeles and New York City — flow switching would establish a dedicated path across the network. For certain wavelengths of light, routers along that path would accept signals coming in from only one direction and send them off in only one direction. Since there’s no possibility of signals arriving from multiple directions, there’s never a need to store them in memory. Reaction time To some extent, something like this already happens in today’s Internet. A large Web company like Facebook or Google, for instance, might maintain huge banks of Web servers at a few different locations in the United States. The servers might exchange so much data that the company will simply lease a particular wavelength of light from one of the telecommunications companies that maintains the country’s fiber-optic networks. Across a designated pathway, no other Internet traffic can use that wavelength. In this case, however, the allotment of bandwidth between the two endpoints is fixed. If for some reason the company’s servers aren’t exchanging much data, the bandwidth of the dedicated wavelength is being wasted. If the servers are exchanging a lot of data, they might exceed the capacity of the link. In a flow-switching network, the allotment of bandwidth would change constantly. As traffic between New York and Los Angeles increased, new, dedicated wavelengths would be recruited to handle it; as the traffic tailed off, the wavelengths would be relinquished. Chan and his colleagues have developed network management protocols that can perform these reallocations in a matter of seconds. In a series of papers published over a span of 20 years — the latest of which will be presented at the OptoElectronics and Communications Conference in Japan next month — they’ve also performed mathematical analyses of flow-switched networks’ capacity and reported the results of extensive computer simulations. They’ve even tried out their ideas on a small experimental optical network that runs along the Eastern Seaboard. Their conclusion is that flow switching can easily increase the data rates of optical networks 100-fold and possibly 1,000-fold, with further improvements of the network management scheme. Their recent work has focused on the power savings that flow switching offers: In most applications of information technology, power can be traded for speed and vice versa, but the researchers are trying to quantify that relationship. Among other things, they’ve shown that even with a 100-fold increase in data rates, flow switching could still reduce the Internet’s power consumption. Growing appetite Ori Gerstel, a principal engineer at Cisco Systems, the largest manufacturer of network routing equipment, says that several other techniques for increasing the data rate of optical networks, with names like burst switching and optical packet switching, have been proposed, but that flow switching is “much more practical.” The chief obstacle to its adoption, he says, isn’t technical but economic. Implementing Chan’s scheme would mean replacing existing Internet routers with new ones that don’t have to convert optical signals to electrical signals. But, Gerstel says, it’s not clear that there’s currently enough demand for a faster Internet to warrant that expense. “Flow switching works fairly well for fairly large demand — if you have users who need a lot of bandwidth and want low delay through the network,” Gerstel says. “But most customers are not in that niche today.” But Chan points to the explosion of the popularity of both Internet video and high-definition television in recent years. If those two trends converge — if people begin hungering for high-definition video feeds directly to their computers — flow switching may make financial sense. Chan points at the 30-inch computer monitor atop his desk in MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics. “High resolution at 120 frames per second,” he says: “That’s a lot of data.” http://www.physorg.com/news196940134.html ![]() Broadband Availability to Expand Edward Wyatt The Obama administration is seeking to nearly double the wireless communications spectrum available for commercial use over the next 10 years, an effort that could greatly enhance the ability of consumers to send and receive video and data with smartphones and other hand-held devices. President Obama will sign a presidential memorandum on Monday that aims to make available for auction some 500 megahertz of spectrum that is now controlled by the federal government and private companies, administration officials said Sunday. Most of that would be designated for commercial use in mobile broadband and similar applications, though aspects of the plan will require Congressional approval. The effort embraces recommendations made by the Federal Communications Commission in its National Broadband Plan, which was released in March and encourages the expansion of high-speed wireless broadband services. But some aspects could be opposed by television broadcast companies, which will be asked if they want to give up some of their spectrum for auction. Cable companies that have invested heavily in wired telecommunications networks could also lose from the new direction. Proceeds from the auctions would go in part to finance the construction of improved communications systems for police, fire and other public safety agencies. Law enforcement agencies have proposed that parts of the newly available wireless spectrum be used for a dedicated broadband public safety network. Roughly 45 percent of the spectrum to be auctioned would come from federal government agencies that will be asked to give up allocations that they are not using or could share, according to administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to upstage the announcement. The remainder would come from unused spectrum already scheduled for auction or from broadcasters and other spectrum licensees who would be offered incentives to give up or share parts of their communications airwaves. Currently, the spectrum for wireless communications is about 547 megahertz. Lawrence H. Summers, the director of the National Economic Council and assistant to the president for economic policy, is expected to detail the broadband effort in a lunchtime speech in Washington to the New America Foundation, a public policy institute. “This initiative will catalyze private sector investment, contribute to economic growth, and help to create hundreds of thousands of jobs,” Mr. Summers said in a statement. “This policy is a win three times over. It creates prosperity and jobs while at the same time raising revenue for public purposes like public safety and increasing our ability to compete internationally.” While it is not unexpected that the Obama administration would embrace some of the recommendations of the National Broadband Plan, the announcement is significant because it puts momentum behind actions that the F.C.C. does not have the authority to take on its own. Specifically, the presidential memorandum will direct the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to identify federally controlled communications bands that can be made available within five years for exclusive or shared use by commercial companies. Negotiations have been continuing between the White House and federal departments including defense, justice, state, Treasury and energy, which use dedicated government spectrum for official and classified communications. The administration is expected to ask Congress to approve the use of some of the proceeds from an auction of federal spectrum to finance the upgrading of government communications equipment and systems. Congress would also need to approve the F.C.C.’s use of so-called incentive auctions of spectrum that is already allocated to private companies, including broadcast networks. Those auctions would pay broadcast networks and others to give up unused portions of the spectrum that they license from the federal government, which would then be licensed to or shared with wireless companies. Finally, Congress would have to designate how the money generated by auctions should be spent. The plan seeks to use some of the proceeds to build the public safety network that would allow police and fire departments from different jurisdictions to talk to one another in emergencies — something that generally is not possible now and that was identified as an issue on 9/11. Julius Genachowski, the chairman of the F.C.C. and an Obama appointee, welcomed the administration’s initiative on Sunday. “The administration’s strong actions on wireless broadband will move us significantly toward sustainable economic success, robust investment, and global leadership in innovation,” he said. In the long term, companies that are developing emerging wireless technologies could benefit from the greater availability of wireless spectrum, industry analysts say. Consumers also could benefit from the actions, as wireless communications continue to improve and more convenient devices are made widely available. Some spectrum also would be made available for free, unlicensed use by start-up companies and others, administration officials said. Such unlicensed spectrum has previously helped in the development of cordless phones, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth applications. Harold Feld, legal director of Public Knowledge, a consumer-oriented policy group, said the interest of consumers will be most helped by auctions that help to promote competition between wireless companies rather than entrenching the dominant providers in the market. Since the release of the F.C.C.’s broadband plan, some broadcasters have expressed doubts about the spectrum allocation recommendations. Dennis Wharton, an executive vice president at the National Association of Broadcasters, said that while expanding broadband is important, it should not be done at the expense of broadcasting, which provides free, local television service to tens of millions of Americans. “We appreciate F.C.C. assurances that further reclamation of broadcast television spectrum will be completely voluntary,” Mr. Wharton said. With the recent conversion of analog broadcast signals to digital, broadcasters returned 108 megahertz of spectrum to the government for auction. Some of the wireless companies that bought that spectrum have not developed all of it, leaving broadcasters wary of giving up more of their holdings to companies that might simply warehouse it, industry officials say. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/te...broadband.html ![]() New Broadband Projects Score $795 Million in Funding The Obama administration announces subsidies for 66 new broadband deployment projects aimed at keeping companies in rural America competitive Grant Gross U.S. President Barack Obama's administration will announce nearly $795 million in grants and loans for broadband deployment projects across the nation on Friday, officials with two federal agencies said. The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the U.S. Rural Utilities Service (RUS) will officially announce awards for 66 new broadband projects that will touch all 50 states, Obama administration officials said. The money, from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed by the U.S. Congress in early 2009, is expected to create or save about 5,000 jobs, officials said. [ Stay ahead of the key tech business news with InfoWorld's Today's Headlines: First Look newsletter. | Access InfoWorld from your iPhone or other mobile device at infoworldmobile.com. | Read Bill Snyder's Tech's Bottom Line blog for what the key business trends mean to you. ] The top goal for the grants and loans "is to put Americans back to work immediately, managing projects, digging the trenches, laying fiber-optic cable, and stringing up those utility poles," said Gary Locke, secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce, the parent agency of the NTIA. Another goal is to give an economic boost to parts of the country by providing new broadband service, Locke said during a prebriefing with reporters Thursday evening. The new broadband subsidies will bring service to 685,000 businesses, 900 health-care facilities, and 2,400 schools, he said. The new awards will enable farmers to better track crop prices, enable rural health-centers to offer telemedicine services, and allow schools to provide distance learning services, added Tom Vilsack, secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the parent agency of the RUS. "It will also allow us to keep the United States at the center of innovation, and keep the companies that are located in rural America competitive, creating more opportunity and new jobs," he said. In the Recovery Act, Congress allocated $7.2 billion to the NTIA and RUS for broadband grants and loans. The NTIA will award $404 million to 29 projects Friday, and the grants will finance 6,000 miles of new fiber-optic lines, Locke said. Most of the money will finance middle-mile broadband network projects. The NTIA has previously awarded $1.6 billion in broadband grants. The RUS will award $390.9 million on Friday, with $163 million in loans and the rest in grants. The RUS has previously awarded $1.4 billion in Recovery Act funds to broadband projects. Most of the RUS money is focused on last-mile broadband projects. Private investment of more than $200 million will help fund the projects announced Friday, the officials said. Among the new awards: -- University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development: A $62.5 million grant, with a $34.3 million match from the applicant, will connect more than 30 existing research and educational networks, creating a nation-wide high-capacity network that will enable advanced networking features for more than 100,000 community anchor institutions, such as hospitals and schools. The project will span all 50 states. -- Hardy Telecommunications: $31.6 million in grants and loans will help build a fiber network in Hardy County, West Virginia, to serve more than 14,000 people, 200 business and more than 100 community institutions. -- Wilkes Telephone & Electric: $48.1 million in grants and loans will help build a fiber network in Lincoln, Taliaferro, and Wilkes counties in Georgia. The project will bring broadband to more than 20,000 people. -- Massachusetts Technology Park: This $45.4 million grant, with an additional $26.2 million from the applicant, will lay 1,300 miles of fiber in western Massachusetts. The project will bring broadband to more than 1 million people and 44,000 businesses. http://infoworld.com/d/the-industry-...in-funding-123 ![]() Finland Makes Broadband a 'Legal Right' BBC Cables Finland argues that net access is a fundamental right Finland has become the first country in the world to make broadband a legal right for every citizen. From 1 July every Finn will have the right to access to a 1Mbps (megabit per second) broadband connection. Finland has vowed to connect everyone to a 100Mbps connection by 2015. In the UK the government has promised a minimum connection of at least 2Mbps to all homes by 2012 but has stopped short of enshrining this as a right in law. The Finnish deal means that from 1 July all telecommunicatons companies will be obliged to provide all residents with broadband lines that can run at a minimum 1Mbps speed. Broadband commitment Speaking to the BBC, Finland's communication minister Suvi Linden explained the thinking behind the legislation: "We considered the role of the internet in Finns everyday life. Internet services are no longer just for entertainment. Finland has worked hard to develop an information society and a couple of years ago we realised not everyone had access," she said. It is believed up to 96% of the population are already online. In the UK internet penetration stands at 73%. The British government has agreed to provide everyone with a minimum 2Mbps broadband connection by 2012 but it is a commitment rather than a legally binding ruling. "The UK has a universal service obligation which means virtually all communities will have broadband," said a spokesman for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Making broadband a legal right could have implications for countries that plan tough action on illegal file-sharing. Both the UK and France have said they may cut off or limit the internet connections of people who persistently download music or films for free. The Finnish government has adopted a more gentle approach. "We will have a policy where operators will send letters to illegal file-sharers but we are not planning on cutting off access," said Ms Linden. A poll conducted for the BBC World Service earlier this year found that almost four in five people around the world believed that access to the internet is a fundamental right. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10461048.stm ![]() Germany Says Apple Must Improve Data Transparency Apple Inc must "immediately make clear" what data it collects from users of its products and for what purposes, Germany's justice minister was quoted as saying by Der Spiegel magazine on Saturday. "Users of iPhones and other GPS devices must be aware of what kind of information about them is being collected," Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger told the German weekly. According to Der Spiegel, the minister's criticism was aimed at changes Apple has made in its privacy policy whereby the company can collect data on the geographic location of the users of its products -- albeit anonymously. Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said she expected Apple to "open its databases to German data protection authorities" and clarify what data it was collecting and how long it was saving the data. An Apple spokesman said he could not comment on the report. Germany has some of the toughest privacy laws in the world as a result of its experience with state surveillance systems once put in place by the Nazis and the former East German Stasi secret police. The German consumer protection minister made headlines earlier this month when she said she would quit Facebook over what she called privacy law violations. Meanwhile, after an audit requested by Germany, Google Inc in May acknowledged it had been for years mistakenly collecting personal data sent by consumers over wireless networks. The justice minister said it would be "unthinkable" for Apple to create personality- or location-based user profiles. "Apple has the obligation to properly implement the transparency so often promised by (CEO) Steve Jobs," she said. (Reporting by Sarah Marsh; Editing by Ron Askew) http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...treply&t=24955 ![]() Pakistan to Monitor Google, Others for Blasphemy Zeeshan Haider Pakistani authorities on Friday put seven major websites, including Google and YouTube, under watch for containing material deemed offensive to Muslims, officials said. The Ministry of Information Technology is also blocking at least 17 links on Youtube and other websites for showing "blasphemous material." "YouTube, Yahoo, Amazon, Bing, MSN, Hotmail and Google will be monitored with relation to anti-Islamic contents," said Khurram Mehran, spokesman for the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority. The companies that own the affected sites are Google Inc., Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon.com Inc.. But another official also made it clear the government had no intention of blocking major websites as they were important sources of education. The move to impose monitoring was undertaken three days after a court in the eastern city of Bahawalpur ordered the government to block YouTube and eight other sites in response to a petition arguing they were showing material "against the fundamental principles of Islam. The next hearing of the case is fixed for Monday. It is second time in a month that Pakistan has imposed such restrictions on internet. Last month, authorities acting on a court decision blocked social network Facebook, YouTube and others sites for almost two weeks amid anger over a page that encouraged users to post images of the Prophet Mohammad. Blasphemy A Sensitive Issue Any representation of the Prophet Mohammad is deemed un-Islamic and blasphemous by Muslims, who constitute the overwhelming majority in Pakistan. Blasphemy is a very sensitive issue in Pakistan. Five people were killed in protests in 2006 over publication of cartoons deemed blasphemous by Muslims in Danish newspapers a year earlier. However, Latif Khosa, adviser to the prime minister on information technology, said the government had already been monitoring websites for any material prejudicial to "security of Pakistan and Islamic injunctions." Khosa said the government could not block major search engines and websites as they were major sources of information and education. "The constitution of Pakistan ensures access to knowledge, information and education to all citizens of Pakistan. These are the basic rights of the people of Pakistan and Internet is a major source of it," Khosa told Reuters. Courts cannot violate those rights nor can any law be put in place to do so, he said. "Many students are calling us and saying that they could not complete their higher studies if any step is taken to block these search engines," Khosa said. (Editing by Bryson Hull and Ron Popeski) http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65O3IL20100625 ![]() Ac-shun! Now Brace for Impact A. O. Scott THIRTY-FIVE years ago last weekend Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” opened on more than 400 screens across the country, breaking box office records and inaugurating the era of the modern summer blockbuster. Whether that was a catastrophe or a boon depends on whom you ask or what mood you’re in. But ever since “Jaws” it has been a truism that, especially in the summertime, movie audiences want action. Action comedy, action adventure, intense action, cartoon action, thrill-ride blockbuster jump-out-of-your-seat action (or whatever those mysterious critics quoted in the ads are calling it). The word is ubiquitous — it’s what the director shouts at the start of each scene — but its meaning is elusive. Strictly speaking, every movie, with arguable exceptions like Andy Warhol’s magisterially static “Empire,” is an action movie, since every movie is about stuff happening, deeds getting done, people running into each other, objects moving through space. The essence of cinema — the cool thing about movies — is that the camera not only has the ability to record events in real time, but it can also conjure outright impossibilities. An ever-expanding battery of visual and temporal techniques, from simple cuts to elaborate computer-generated effects, allow filmmakers break the laws of physics with impunity. Do you want to see a tank hurtling through the sky and shooting down planes? A shark eating a boat? A high-speed freeway chase at rush hour, with bullets flying in all directions and trucks flipping over and bursting into flames? Tom Cruise landing a plane in a cornfield with an anxious and tipsy Cameron Diaz at his side? Maybe you don’t, but you certainly can. (In “The A-Team,” “Jaws,” just about any Brett Ratner movie and “Knight and Day,” in case you were wondering.) And once you have, what do you make of such spectacles? Action — as a genre, and also as a source of sensation — has, at best, a mixed critical reputation. It is often dismissed as mindless, stupid or empty, which is not always wrong but often beside the point. Action fans may crave the rush of noise, speed and hectic incident, but their appreciation is not necessarily indiscriminate. And from a director’s perspective the conception and execution of a good action sequence is among the most painstaking and complicated parts of the job. It isn’t that story, character and emotion take care of themselves, exactly. But coordinating vehicles, bodies, weapons and whatever else happens to be handy (monsters, buildings, livestock, shipping containers, kitchen utensils) into a controlled and coherent episode of chaos is a notably demanding kind of work. How do you do something that hasn’t quite been done before, and how do you make it work, so that the audience is thrilled, surprised and entertained? These are, to some degree, technical questions having to do with camera placement, editing rhythm and timing. They are also financial matters, since nothing ever crashes or blows up free. And, perhaps more than anything else, it is the pursuit of more, bigger and better action effects that has driven Hollywood’s frenetic, headlong, exhausting history of innovation. Looking at “Jaws” now you might be startled by how simple, even primitive, it is. The major special effect is that giant mechanical shark, which gave Mr. Spielberg and his crew all kinds of trouble and which, partly as a result, appears only rarely. The film, beginning with a nighttime attack that is quick and brutal and lethally effective, builds slowly toward its nerve-racking climax, using old horror-movie strategies of indirection and implication to create suspense. The final battle between Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss and their murderous quarry is certainly exciting, but it is also, by current standards, relatively small scale: three men in a boat fighting a giant fish. Because of its commercial influence we think of “Jaws” as representing something new. But in terms of its cinematic means and methods, it belongs to an older, predigital world. The earliest westerns, railroad pictures and slapstick two-reelers of the silent era set the prototype for what would follow, thrilling spectators with horses, trains and motor cars swerving and colliding in front of mostly stationary cameras. And though the delivery systems have grown larger and more sophisticated, that basic thrill has endured — the jolt of adrenaline produced by a carefully engineered dose of velocity and danger. The westerns of the 1930s, with their thundering hoofbeats and fancy equestrian stunt work, found a sturdy formula. As did the combat pictures that emerged during World War II, in which directors learned to adapt moviemaking to new forms of mechanized warfare. A little later, in the 1950s, movies responded to the threat of television by growing in scale, and the age of CinemaScope and Technicolor ushered in an aesthetic of hugeness that was a truer premonition of our time than the scrappy swashbuckling of “Jaws.” The state of the art action sequence from the ’50s is surely the chariot race in William Wyler’s “Ben Hur,” filmed on a Cinecittà back lot with thousands of extras, human and equine, on a set that took months to build. All of that time and labor — and who knows how much money — goes up on the screen in a sequence that seems at once hurtling and endless, and that builds tension through the careful alternation of perspectives. You look down at the buggies whipping around the track, and then you are right there — now close enough to see the flaring of the horses’ nostrils (and Charlton Heston’s), now down where the wheels spin in the dust. They don’t make them like that anymore. They don’t need to, now that horses and crowds can be generated by computer. And traditional editing looks almost stately compared to the disjunctive scramble of angles and points of view that define action in the Jason Bourne era. Is it worse or better? That depends on what you want. Certainly Paul Greengrass’s entries in the “Bourne” franchise have helped to extend the syntax of action in exciting and novel ways, not so much replacing the old style as making it faster, clearer and more intense. Chasing Matt Damon and his pursuers through a crowded marketplace or train station, you zip in and out, back and forth, from Google Earth’s-eye distance to disorienting intimacy, as if you were inside the character’s clothes. A different kind of sensation attends the larger-scale, more self-consciously artificial action found in the “Transformer” movies and also, to a less fantastical extent, in things like “The A-Team” and “Knight and Day.” In them the freedom offered by C.G.I. is pushed to extravagant limits, even as conventional distinctions between animation and live action are blurred beyond recognition. The thrill is amplified, but also diminished. “The A-Team” is so chockablock with big, crazy set pieces — flying tanks, a shell game played with shipping containers, a new explosion every minute — that it grows tedious long before the story has reached its foregone conclusion. But the director, Joe Carnahan, seems to have a genuine enthusiasm for what he’s doing even if his imagination sometimes outruns his skill. The more basic, ground-level action scenes, the fist-fights and shootouts, are hectic and hard to follow. They have a momentum that is almost entirely missing from “Knight and Day.” That film consists of one over-the-top, overblown blowup session after another — not one showing a scrap of wit — arranged in unvarying, hysterical rhythm. The C.G.I. looks cheap and rubbery (the two stars don’t look much better), and the illusion of watching three-dimensional objects moving in actual space is almost completely lost. Good action is harder than it looks. This remains true even as the available technology makes it look a little too easy. And as with 3-D and other fast-evolving visual tricks, the more there is — the bigger the fireballs, the more extensive the make-believe damage to architecture, machinery and virtual human bodies — the less impact it has. And impact is, ultimately what movie action aims to convey, as if sight and sound could combine into a physical experience. Which is impossible, of course, at least for now. And sometimes the acknowledgment of that impossibility reveals the real imaginative power of cinema. The most suspenseful, terrifying and intense movie of the summer so far is “Restrepo,” a documentary, filmed with a couple of video cameras, about a group of American soldiers in Afghanistan. The stuff that happens is real: the fire fights, the I.E.D.’s, all of it. And the most gripping sequence in the film confirms this. All you see are the faces of soldiers as they narrate, some months after the fact, an especially bloody and complex engagement with the enemy. What they have seen is also called action, but it has nothing to do with what the rest of us go to the movies to find. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/movies/27scott.html ![]() In Documentary, Wall of Sound Meets Wall of Law John Anderson BETWEEN recording sessions here in 1973, John Lennon called Phil Spector and told him to come back down to the studio. “Someone’s ripped you off, Phil,” Mr. Lennon said. When Mr. Spector arrived, a projector had been set up, a film began to roll, several familiar drumbeats were heard and then, the wail of the Ronettes. The song was “Be My Baby,” the movie was “Mean Streets,” and no one had told Mr. Spector anything about it. “I said, ‘Who is this guy Skeezy?’ ” Mr. Spector recalls during “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector,” which opens Wednesday at the Film Forum in Manhattan. “I called my lawyers, I said, ‘Kill it!’ ” Martin Scorsese had used his music without permission, and “I never give permission for anything.” Only Lennon’s intercession stopped Mr. Spector from seeking an injunction that could have pulled the movies out of theaters. They may not have known it at the time, but Mr. Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel came close to having their careers derailed by Mr. Spector — the creator of rock’s fabled “Wall of Sound,” the Svengali of the ’60s girl groups and the producer of the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” The anecdote is perhaps the most startling contained in “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector,” a documentary by Vikram Jayanti, and not only because it’s being told by a man who, for 50 years, has avoided the news media like the plague. Built around interviews at Mr. Spector’s home during his first murder trial in 2007 — he was convicted in the shooting death of the actress Lana Clarkson after a second trial in 2009 — the film employs a greatest-hits collection of 21 Spector songs, played or performed in their entirety. And it does so without having obtained Mr. Spector’s written permission. Thus the film could become the latest flashpoint in the debate over what’s generally known as fair use, and copyright law. (Fair use refers to the right, under certain circumstances, like criticism, to use copyrighted material without permission. But the exact amount one can legally use remains a murky proposition.) Mr. Jayanti, however, isn’t expecting any legal trouble, even though Mr. Spector twice sued his (former) friend and lawyer, Robert Shapiro, to reclaim a $1 million retainer and was appeased by Mr. Scorsese only when he promised to pay for future music use. “Phil wanted the film made, he wanted the music given freely, he was cooperative about making it,” said Mr. Jayanti, who sat with Mr. Spector during most of the 2007 trial in Los Angeles. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Spector’s wife, Rachelle, said she hadn’t seen the film and didn’t think her husband had either. (He is serving 19 years to life at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in Corcoran.) Mr. Jayanti disagrees. “Of course he’s seen the film,” he said. “We made sure he had a copy. We gave his lawyers copies of the film. And I don’t think if he looked at it in a rational state of mind, he’d have any problem with it. I think it does what he dreamed it would do.” Namely, to rewrite the lead of his obituary: from “convicted murderer” to “musical genius.” Anthony Wall has produced the documentary program “Arena” for nearly 35 years, out of the BBC offices at Bush House, and it was Mr. Wall who asked Mr. Jayanti to direct the Spector film. They’d previously made “James Ellroy’s Feast of Death” together. Separately Mr. Jayanti has directed films like "Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine" and was an executive producer on “When We Were Kings.” “Running a program like this, you have your particular heroes or favorites,” Mr. Wall said. “The Top 3 for me were always Dylan, the Beatles and Phil Spector. I thought it would be difficult to get any of them, but that we’d never get Phil, because he has so resolutely refused to even give a newspaper interview. He just doesn’t do it.” The weird thing, Mr. Wall said, was that he had so few expectations, adding, “When Vikram asked me one day whether I’d actually written to him to give him the chance to say no, I hadn’t.” Mr. Jayanti overnighted a letter to Mr. Spector and got a positive response three days later. Mr. Wall and Mr. Jayanti went to the Spectors’ home in Alhambra, Calif. — where a sign outside reads “Phil Spector’s Pyrenees Castle” — and did two days of interviews. A planned five-day shoot was interrupted by Mr. Spector’s trial preparation; a subsequent gag order on Mr. Spector ended all communication between subject and director. But Mr. Jayanti decided he had everything he needed — except, perhaps, that signed release. For safety’s sake BBC lawyers looked at a possible fair use defense and decided the film was defensible. “It was an exploratory process that we entered into quite innocently,” Mr. Wall said. “But what we’re looking at, in terms of it possibly being a precedent, is the law bending to reflect what’s really going on,” he said, meaning the Internet, the global marketplace and disparate views of copyright. “What we need is a new rule book. What it’s about is control, whether the Internet can be controlled, and the way our lives are controlled. It’s been a long time, after all, since ‘Steamboat Willie.’ ” Mr. Wall’s reference to Walt Disney’s original Mickey Mouse cartoon points up a nettlesome issue in the realm of United States copyright law: Each time the 1928 “Willie” has been poised to enter public domain, Congress has extended copyright protection. But the larger point for rights activists is whether a culture can survive without being able to feed upon itself. “Can you imagine the original guy who told the story of King Lear?” Mr. Jayanti asked. “What if he had been able to block Shakespeare, who picked up a story that was simply in the air? I’m not saying I’m Shakespeare, or that Phil Spector is doing what Shakespeare did with King Lear, but if we don’t have the ability to harvest and process and sample our own culture, then I think the culture dries up.” The fair use issue is close to the heart of Patricia Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media at American University, which has developed the Code of Best Practices in Fair-Use, a documentary-industry standard. “One of the things that is not O.K. is to use music as soundtrack, for ambience or aesthetic,” Dr. Aufderheide said. But Mr. Jayanti’s argument — that Mr. Spector’s records cannot be appreciated or assessed except in their entirety — “is a nonaesthetic, nonsoundtrack reason,” and is quite plausible, she said. There’s another side to the issue of course. “Filmmakers pay for actors, they pay for film stock, they pay for electricity,” said Robert Clarida, a partner with Cowan, Liebowitz, Latman, who is representing the recording industry in the continuing file-sharing case Arista Records et al. v. LimeWire. “Why shouldn’t they pay for music?” Mr. Clarida conceded the merits of fair use in some instances, but said the use of an entire work, like a song, has rarely held up and cited two relatively recent and disparate decisions, one involving Elvis Presley and the other a 1947 performance by the singer Lily Pons, used on the cable program “Classic Arts Showcase.” Mr. Jayanti said he hopes any discussion of copyright issues doesn’t overwhelm his motivations in making the movie in the first place, namely the celebration of what Mr. Spector achieved before calamity struck, and his directorly obsession with “geniuses under duress.” “I’ve always wanted to do two documentaries that can’t be done: Napoleon on St. Helena and the trial of Oscar Wilde,” he said. “With Phil, I got to do both.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/movies/27spector.html ![]() Tom Leykis Debuting "New Normal Music" FMQB Radio veteran Tom Leykis is launching a new online radio initiative, aimed at playing new music that isn't heard on the FM dial. Leykis is best known for his long-running syndicated Talk show, which ended in February of last year. Now he says he is focusing on new music, specifically new music from artists not heard in the Modern Rock world. Leykis will debut "New Normal Music" online at newnormalmusic.com, with a countdown clock currently running and a missive taking shots at the ages of some Modern Rock staple artists. The site says, "We are like you. We love music. We especially love new music and new artists. Yet, when Red Hot Chili Peppers release a new album, many radio stations refer to it as 'new music.' They were formed in 1983. Were you even born in 1983? Flea is 47. So is Anthony Keidis." The site also notes that Kurt Cobain and Bradley Nowell would be in their early 40s if they were alive today, and "Don't get us started on U2." New Normal Music promises to debut with 50,000 songs in a row, all of which released in the past 12 months, with a request line number as well. The site claims that its stream will be superior to FM radio and most online radio streams, "programmed by people who love truly new music and who know how to do this." The page concludes, "Just please: don't call it a radio station. Radio doesn't have the guts to do this, and radio certainly won't spend the money and take the risks to do it right." http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1854269 ![]() Mexican Singer Murdered after Denying he was Dead Mexican singer Sergio Vega was murdered while on a national tour at the weekend, just hours after denying reports of his death, local media reported. The 40-year-old singer, known as El Shaka, was driving his red Cadillac to a concert in the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa on Saturday when his car was intercepted by unidentified shooters in a truck, reports said. His murder came just hours after he told entertainment website La Oreja that online reports of his death were wrong. "It's happened to me for years now, someone tells a radio station or a newspaper I've been killed, or suffered an accident," said Vega. "And then I have to call my dear mum, who has heart trouble, to reassure her." Fans posted condolences on Twitter after they learned of the death of the singer, who recently boosted his security following the killing of several Mexican musicians. Musicians performing narcocorridos, or songs celebrating the lives of drug barons, have become the targets of rival drug gangs in Mexico with Mexican media reporting several such deaths in recent years. (Writing by Belinda Goldsmith, Editing by Dean Goodman) http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65S0WK20100629 ![]() New Tool Reveals Internet Passwords Mike Lennon Password cracking tool instantly reveals cached passwords stored in popular applications A Russian software company today released a password cracking tool that instantly reveals cached passwords to Web sites in Microsoft Internet Explorer, mailbox and identity passwords in all versions of Microsoft Outlook Express, Outlook, Windows Mail and Windows Live Mail. Moscow based ElcomSoft, developer of the new password recovery tool, “Elcomsoft Internet Password Breaker,” says the product designed as tool to provide forensics, criminal investigators, security officers and government authorities with the ability to retrieve a variety of passwords stored on a PC.Reveal Internet Passwords With a price tag of just $49, it doesn’t seem as though investigators and government authorities are the real target market. The password breaker gives users the ability to instantly retrieve the login and password information to a variety of resources such as those routinely cached by Web browsers. The tool can quickly recover cached logins and passwords to Web sites, including pre-filled forms and auto-complete information stored in the Internet Explorer cache. In addition, the tool makes it possible to instantly replace or reset IE Content Advisor passwords. New features in Internet Explorer 7 and 8 include enhanced security for storing cached password information. The browsers encrypt the information with the URL of a Web site, making it impossible to access stored information without knowing the exact Web address of a resource. Elcomsoft Internet Password Breaker claims to work around this new security model by analyzing cached URL history and identifying Web sites last visited in order to retrieve login and password information stored for those Web sites. The password cracking tool reveals passwords protecting access to email accounts, identities and Microsoft Outlook PST files. Supporting all versions of Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail and Windows Live Mail, Elcomsoft Internet Password Breaker can retrieve the original plain-text passwords protecting access to mail accounts, POP3, IMAP, SMTP and NNTP news passwords. In addition, Elcomsoft Internet Password Breaker reveals Microsoft Passport passwords stored by Windows Live Mail, user identity passwords, and passwords protecting PST files created by Microsoft Outlook up to version 2010. Elcomsoft Internet Password Breaker automatically identifies all supported products and user identities, locates all available accounts and PST files, and reveals stored password information. With tools like these available to the masses, individuals and enterprises need to further consider full disk encryption solutions and additional security measures. http://www.securityweek.com/new-tool...rnet-passwords ![]() Sen. Bond says DHS Shouldn't Oversee Cybersecurity Gautham Nagesh The Department of Homeland Security is already overburdened and shouldn't be put in charge of protecting the country's computer networks, according to Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.). "Frankly I don't think there are a lot of Senators or House members with confidence that Homeland Security is the proper organization" to oversee federal cybersecurity, Bond told Hillicon Valley. Bond's words were aimed at the cybersecurity bill approved Thursday by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and co-sponsored by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Tom Carper (D-Del.). Bond said the bill is flawed because it places DHS is charge of guarding civilian networks and places burdensome mandates on the private sector. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) expressed a similar viewpoint at Thursday's markup about the bill, which would create a cybersecurity center in DHS with authority over private sector networks deemed critical to national security. McCain said the Department's poor response to recent attempted terrorist attacks have shaken his confidence in its ability to oversee cybersecurity. Bond and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) introduced their own competing cybersecurity legislation on Thursday, an effort Bond characterized as "something clean, neat, simple and quick". The bill creates a single, presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed cybersecurity coordinator who would be housed in the Department of Defense but report directly to the president. Bond said that individual would have access to all the resources of the intelligence community as well as budget authority to ensure autonomy. "As we listened to the leading organizations under threat from cyber attacks, this is their crying need," Bond said. "They've got to be able to talk to somebody in government who can tell them what's happening, find out who else is being attacked and what can be done to respond." Unlike the Homeland Security cyber bill, under the Bond-Hatch bill there would be no White House cybersecurity coordinator. The Senators expressed concern that creating such a position would impede Congressional oversight. According to Sen. Lieberman, current White House cyber czar Howard Schmidt has repeatedly refused to testify before Congress, citing executive privilege. Bond's bill would also create a cybersecurity center housed at the Department of Energy that would allow critical private sector entities like utilities, financial services firms and power companies to meet and share information on cyber attacks and best practices. The center would not be subject to the Freedom of Information Act or antitrust challenges so companies would feel free to discuss the challenges and attacks they are facing. "They won't come in and open up with each other if they don't have that," Bond said. Bond acknowledged the existence of more than twenty competing pieces of cybersecurity legislation currently before Congress, but said unlike the other bills, his is not part of a "turf battle". He said senior intelligence officials have expressed concerns to him about some of the other bills and their potential adverse impact on network security in the intelligence community. Bond and Hatch both sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "If there are further things to do, we'll deal with those later," Bond said. "But we need a single point of contact controlling cybersecurity and a forum for the private sector to share information, threat warnings and best practices." http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...-cybersecurity ![]() With World Watching, Wikileaks Falls Into Disrepair Ryan Singel Would-be whistle-blowers hoping to leak documents to Wikileaks face a potentially frustrating surprise. Wikileaks’ submission process, which had been degraded for months, completely collapsed more than two weeks ago and remains offline, in a little-noted breakdown at the world’s most prominent secret-spilling website. Despite a surge in mostly laudatory media portraying Wikileaks as a fearless, unstoppable outlet for documents that embarrass corporations and overbearing governments, the site has published only 12 documents since the beginning of the year, the last one four months ago. And on June 12, Wikileaks’ secure submission page stopped working after the site failed to renew its SSL certificate, a basic web protection that costs less than $30 a year and takes only hours to set up. Wikileaks still prominently displays a link on its homepage to a secure submission form for whistleblowers to upload documents. But the page doesn’t load. The site’s donation page remains reliably available. Wikileaks’ head Julian Assange declined to comment. Launched in 2007, Wikileaks was thrust into renewed international prominence this month after the Army confirmed it had arrested an intelligence analyst based in Iraq on suspicion of leaking classified information. Bradley Manning, 22, has been held for five weeks without charges at an Army base in Kuwait, while officials investigate claims he made to an ex-hacker that he’d leaked two videos and several classified documents to Wikileaks, as well as an unfiltered database of 260,000 diplomatic cables. Among the documents Manning claimed to have leaked was a classified U.S. embassy cable that appeared on Wikileaks on Feb. 18. That, in fact, was the last new document to appear at Wikileaks.org, though on April 5 Wikileaks made headlines when it released a classified video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed a number of innocent civilians and injured two children. The video, which Manning took credit for in his online chats, and in discussions with a real-life friend, was published on another domain called CollateralMurder.com. Wikileaks released the Apache video during a six-month fundraising drive in which Wikileaks’ archive was unavailable. By the time the site relaunched in May, careful observers had noted that its much-hailed cryptographic security had been degraded. Wikileaks’ system to upload documents using the anonymizing service Tor had stopped working by February, though there’s no indication of that status on Wikileaks’ page explaining how to securely submit documents. Wikileaks has also stopped supporting secure downloads from the site over HTTPS, meaning users downloading from the site are vulnerable to eavesdropping. Wired.com spoke by instant messenger with Ben Laurie, a noted security expert who has served as a de facto security press person for Wikileaks, and who is listed on Wikileaks’s advisory board. When asked if it seemed odd that the most basic security features are missing from Wikileaks’ website, Laurie said, “I agree. I was not aware.” By policy, Wikileaks does not publish a PGP key that would allow people interested in leaking documents or otherwise helping the site communicate securely by e-mail. The site still offers a “secure” chat room, but that uses a security certificate that isn’t issued by a trusted third party. A May profile in the New Yorker reported that Wikileaks had been receiving about 30 document submissions a day when it was fully operational. With its Tor Hidden Service down, and now its SSL submission page missing, the average Wikileaks leaker would seem to be blocked. For his part, Manning claimed to have direct contact with Assange that allowed him priority access. “Long term sources do get preference,” he wrote in a chat with ex-hacker Adrian Lamo, who turned him in. If Wikileaks’ issues are financial, the site may yet surmount them. The organization recently announced that it has decrypted a U.S. video of the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan — another one of the leaks Manning claimed credit for in his chats with Lamo. Wikileaks has promised to release the video shortly, a move that could give its fundraising an added boost, even if it doesn’t help with Wikileaks’ lack of transparency regarding its security woes. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ks-submission/ ![]() Police Push to Continue Warrantless Cell Tracking Declan McCullagh A law requiring police to obtain a search warrant before tracking Americans' cell phones may imperil criminal investigations and endanger children's lives, a law enforcement representative told Congress this week. Obtaining a search warrant when monitoring the whereabouts of someone "who may be attempting to victimize a child over the Internet will have a significant slowing effect on the processing of child exploitation leads," said Richard Littlehale of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. "If that is acceptable, so be it, but it is a downstream effect that must be considered." Littlehale's remarks to a House of Representatives subcommittee come as an industry group called the Digital Due Process coalition is prodding politicians to update a mid-1980s federal law by inserting more privacy protections. The group includes Google, Microsoft, eBay, AT&T, the ACLU, and Americans for Tax Reform. Legislation has not yet been introduced, and coalition members have braced themselves for an extended period of negotiations among police, civil libertarians, and members of Congress that could take as long as a year or two. Meanwhile, no federal appeals court has ruled on the topic--a case is pending before one in Philadelphia--and lower courts have split over whether the U.S. Constitution requires a warrant or not. But if law enforcement defends the idea of warrantless tracking, the coalition's task will become more complicated. It took the better part of a decade for an alliance of privacy advocates and industry representatives to surmount stiff opposition from the FBI and intelligence agencies that loathed the idea of readily available strong encryption software. The Obama administration has argued that no search warrants are needed to track cell phone locations; it has told judges that a 2703(d) order, which requires law enforcement to show that the records are "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation," is sufficient. Because it's easier to obtain than a search warrant, a 2703(d) order is also less privacy-protective. A U.S. Department of Justice representative told CNET on Friday afternoon that the legislative office would not be able to answer questions until next week. Littlehale, an agent in the bureau's Technical Services Unit, told the House Judiciary subcommittee on civil liberties that a recent Tennessee case involving a kidnapped four-day-old infant would have turned out differently if police were required to request a warrant from a judge. "When you are talking about that volume of process," he said, "any change in the type of process required will have an impact on how rapidly law enforcement can process leads and resolve the case, and in a case of this type, every minute counts." "The time required to generate a search warrant and have it signed, even in cases where probable cause exists, may in and of itself hamper law enforcement's efforts to move quickly in an investigation," Littlehale said. Rep. Rick Boucher, a Democrat from rural Virginia, circulated draft legislation last month that takes a small step toward preserving location privacy. It says that call location information can be shared with police under a limited set of circumstances--but does not explicitly require a search warrant signed by a judge. CNET was the first to report on the controversy over location tracking in a 2005 news article. In a subsequent Arizona case, agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration tracked a tractor trailer with a drug shipment through a GPS-equipped Nextel phone owned by the suspect. Texas DEA agents have used cell site information in real time to locate a car driving from Rio Grande City to a ranch about 50 miles away. Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile logs showing the location of mobile phones at the time calls were made became evidence in a Los Angeles murder trial. And a case currently being argued before a Connecticut federal judge shows that the FBI monitored the whereabouts of about 180 cell phones--without a warrant--while conducting surveillance of two men suspected of robbing local banks. To locate customers, Sprint and other mobile providers that have built their networks on CDMA technology use a handset-based technique relying on GPS or assisted GPS. AT&T and other companies that have adopted GSM, on the other hand, use a network-based technique known as Uplink-Time-Difference of Arrival that estimates the device's location based on the exact moment that radio transmissions from cell towers arrive. Such pinpoint accuracy requires special hardware called a Location Measurement Unit, or LMU. Michael Amarosa, vice president of wireless location firm TruePosition, told the House panel that his company has installed more than 100,000 of them. A handset can communicate with dozens of LMUs, Amarosa said. "A minimum of three LMUs must receive the handset's signal to uniquely determine the location of it. Reception of the handset by more than three LMUs also enhances the accuracy of the location estimated," he said. Probably the most interesting testimony, though, came from U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith from Texas, who ruled in 2005 that the Fourth Amendment requires that cell tracking orders be signed by a judge who has probable cause to believe that a crime is being committed. It's unusual for a currently serving judge to show up before Congress, just as it was unusual, and perhaps even unprecedented, for five magistrate judges in Pennsylvania to jointly sign an opinion stressing a warrant was necessary for location tracking. Some ways Congress could rewrite and improve the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act include clearer standards, and notification to anyone whose location was tracked, Smith said, adding that he was not taking a position on the broader concept of ECPA reform. http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20008941-281.html ![]() Romford Coppers Try to Stopper Young Snapper 'You can't just go round taking photos' Jane Fae Ozimek Despite fine words from high-ranking police officers, an unpleasant incident in Romford last week suggests that officers on the ground are no nearer understanding or respecting photographers’ rights. This comes just a day after the Met shelled out a large wad of cash to two professional photographers for almost identical mistakes made by officers, exciting speculation that the best rates paid for photographs nowadays are those paid out of the public purse for pics the police disapprove of. Young photographer Jules Mattsson, 16, was out in Romford at the weekend intending to take photos of a cadet unit who, he blogs, were "about to march in a massive parade". A YouTube clip, containing still images and a soundtrack, allegedly documents what happened when local police officers decided they did not like this idea. According to Jules, after he attempted to take his first shot, he was "quickly and aggressively stopped by one of their adult officers asking me who I worked for". He refused to provide his personal details – and from there on, events moved swiftly downhill. In the clip, a male officer with an outwardly poor grasp of the law can be clearly heard. The entire gamut of inconsistent excuses are given for why Jules cannot take photos, ranging from the "fact” that it is illegal to photograph children without parental permission, through to breach of copyright and anti-social behaviour. When all that failed to move the young snapper, the police officer informed him that he was an "agitator" and a "threat under the terrorism act" for photographing a police officer – before removing his camera and frogmarching him away from witnesses and – Jules claimed - pushing him down some stairs. We asked the Met for comment and were told: "Although at this time we have not received a complaint about this incident and no allegations of crime have been made, we will investigate the circumstances." There followed a list of the guidelines supposedly issued to officers, which wax lyrical about "promoting the freedom of the public and the media to take and publish photographs". They also state very clearly: "Members of the public and the media do not need a permit to film or photograph in public places and police have no power to stop them filming or photographing incidents or police personnel." They add: "It would ordinarily be unlawful to use section 58A [of the Terrorism Act 2000] to arrest people photographing police officers in the course of normal policing activities". Given that such good guidelines exist – and senior police officers regularly provide stern warnings about over-stepping the mark in this area, the Romford incident must surely be just an aberration. We therefore phoned the Met’s call centre last night to inquire what the law was in relation to taking photographs on the street. The member of staff who took the call was aware that it was legal to photograph police officers – but rather less good when it comes to exercising one’s legal right to photograph other people, including children. He told us: "You can’t just go round taking photos." Worryingly, he added, in respect of photographing children: "You can understand what is going to happen." When asked why the police would not protect a photographer going about their lawful business, the call was terminated. We then asked the Met officially if they could explain this gulf between official guidelines – and the state of knowledge of police officers and other members of the police service who have contact with the public. They have promised to get back to us. In the meantime, this ignorance of the law is beginning to prove costly for the police. Comedian Mark Thomas set the standard earlier this year when his complaint about police officers stopping him unlawfully – in his case, without a camera – led to a pay-out of £1,200 by the Met. Since the incident in 2007, Mark has encouraged members of the public to bite back, any time they feel the Police have abused their rights. Meanwhile, photojournalists Marc Vallee and Jason Parkinson last week received compensation of £3,500 apiece in respect of an incident outside the Greek Embassy in December 2008. Marc told us: "This is the second time I’ve been forced to take legal action against the Metropolitan Police since 2006 and I would like it to be the last. The question to consider is, is the overall harassment of photographers by the police a deliberate policy or a series of unrelated mistakes? "You have to ask yourself is it in the DNA of Metropolitan Police to restrict and harass photographers? And if so what are we going to do about it?" The bill for the Met may be about to get a little bit higher, as Marc also informed us this morning that he has just "sorted a lawyer out for Jules". http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06...other_romford/ ![]() Reports: BlackBerry, Skype, Google Face India Data Demand John Ribeiro India's Department of Telecommunications (DOT) has been asked by the government to serve a notice to Skype and Research In Motion (RIM) to ensure that their email and other data services comply with formats that can be read by security and intelligence agencies, according to reports in two Indian newspapers. People who read this also read: Skype and the BlackBerry service could face a ban in India if they do not comply within 15 days, according to reports in The Economic Times, and The Hindu Business Line. A similar notice is also being sent to Google asking it to provide access to content on Gmail in a readable format. Both reports cite minutes of a joint meeting of the country's home ministry, the DOT, and security agencies. India's security agencies have for a long time asked for greater access to online data communications as they worry that terrorists could be planning attacks using such services. A DOT spokesman said he had no information on the order. A spokesman for the Ministry of Home Affairs also said he was not aware of the order, but added that any communication of this nature between his ministry and the DOT was unlikely to be brought to his notice. The current issue is similar to one between the government and RIM in 2008. The government had at the time threatened to discontinue BlackBerry services in India unless RIM gave Indian security agencies the means to intercept and read BlackBerry messages whenever the need arises. The BlackBerry security architecture for enterprise customers is specially designed to exclude the capability for RIM or any third party to read encrypted information under any circumstances, the company said in 2008 in a note to customers. The security architecture is based on a symmetric key system whereby the customer creates his own key, and only the customer possesses a copy of his encryption key, RIM said. The dispute between RIM and the government was resolved, but it wasn't clear whether a secret agreement has been reached by the government and RIM, or whether the government backed down rather than cut off a large number of business customers that use the BlackBerry. India's Information Technology (Amendment) Act 2008 now makes it easier for India's security agencies to demand that service providers should make decryption keys available to security agencies when required. On receipt of a decryption order, the decryption key holder concerned must within the period stated in the decryption direction disclose the decryption key, or provide the decryption assistance, according to the rules to the new Act. A Google India spokeswoman said on Thursday that the company had not received any order from the DOT. RIM India's spokesman said he could not immediately comment on the reports. http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente...ta_demand.html ![]() Are Cells the New Cigarettes? Maureen Dowd The great cosmic joke would be to find out definitively that the advances we thought were blessings — from the hormones women pump into their bodies all their lives to the fancy phones people wait in line for all night — are really time bombs. Just as parents now tell their kids that, believe it or not, there was a time when nobody knew that cigarettes and tanning were bad for you, those kids may grow up to tell their kids that, believe it or not, there was a time when nobody knew how dangerous it was to hold your phone right next to your head and chat away for hours. We don’t yet really know the physical and psychological impact of being slaves to technology. We just know that technology is a narcotic. We’re living in the cloud, in a force field, so afraid of being disconnected and plunged into a world of silence and stillness that even if scientists told us our computers would make our arms fall off, we’d probably keep typing. San Francisco just became the first city in the country to pass legislation making cellphone retailers display radiation levels. The city’s Board of Supervisors voted 10 to 1 in favor. The one against, the Democrat Sean Elsbernd, said afterward: “It’s a slippery slope. I can go on Google right now and find you a study that says there’s a problem with the Starbucks you’re drinking.” Different phone models emit anywhere from 0.2 watts per kilogram of body tissue to 1.6 watts, the legal limit. The amount of radio frequency energy seeping into the body and brain is measured by a unit called the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR). “You see all these kids literally glued to their phones,” Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, told me. “And candidly, my wife was pregnant and on her cellphone nonstop. So I dusted off some studies and started doing research. “That’s when I discovered that companies who make cellphones are already required to disclose that information to the federal government, and that it exists but somewhere on someone’s Web page on the 88th page.” Why not underscore it, he thought, by alerting consumers at the store, putting the SAR level in the same font as the phone price? His alarmed advisers, accustomed to seeing the sleek Newsom diving into bold stands without calculating the potential blowback — as with gay marriage — told him to focus on jobs and the economy. “They said: ‘There you go again. They’re going to mock you. It’s going to be another sideshow,’ ” he recalled. But stroking his baby daughter’s soft head and reading new studies on the vulnerability of children’s thinner skulls to radiation, he persevered. One Swedish study that followed young people who began using cells as teenagers for 10 years calculated a 400 percent increase in brain tumors. But as Nathaniel Rich recently pointed out in Harper’s, studies about cellphones’ carcinogenic potential all contradict one another, including those involving children. When Newsom proposed the bill, telecommunications lobbyists went to the mattresses, as did hoteliers, who feared losing convention business. He said that lobbyists from Washington made it clear that they would invoke “the nuclear option” and come down “like a ton of bricks.” “This is tobacco money, oil money,” he said. “But these guys from D.C. do not know me because that has exactly the opposite effect. Shame on them, to threaten the city. It’s about as shortsighted as one could get in terms of a brand.” Months before the bill passed, he read me part of a letter that Marriott sent him: “CTIA — The Wireless Association, which is scheduled to hold a major convention here in October 2010, has already contacted us about canceling their event if the legislation moves forward. They also have told us that they are in contact with Apple, Cisco, Oracle and others who are heavily involved in the industry, as you know, about not holding future events in your city for the same reason.” Sure enough, when the bill passed Tuesday, CTIA issued a petulant statement that after 2010, it would relocate its annual three-day fall exhibition, with 68,000 exhibitors and attendees and “$80 million” in business, away from San Francisco. “Since our bill is relatively benign,” Newsom said, “it begs the question, why did they work so hard and spend so much money to kill it? I’ve become more fearful, not less, because of their reaction. It’s like BP. Shouldn’t they be doing whatever it takes to protect their global shareholders?” So now we have Exhibit No. 1,085 illustrating the brazenness of Big Business. They should be sending Mayor Newsom a bottle of good California wine for caring about whether kids’ brains get fried, not leaving him worried about whether they’ll avenge themselves in his campaign for lieutenant governor. He’s resigned to that possibility, just as he is to his own addiction. “I love my iPhone,” he said cheerfully. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/opinion/27dowd.html ![]() Death by Gadget Nicholas D. Kristof “Blood diamonds” have faded away, but we may now be carrying “blood phones.” An ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity — smartphones, laptops and digital cameras — are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo. With throngs waiting in lines in the last few days to buy the latest iPhone, I’m thinking: What if we could harness that desperation for new technologies to the desperate need to curb the killing in central Africa? I’ve never reported on a war more barbaric than Congo’s, and it haunts me. In Congo, I’ve seen women who have been mutilated, children who have been forced to eat their parents’ flesh, girls who have been subjected to rapes that destroyed their insides. Warlords finance their predations in part through the sale of mineral ore containing tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold. For example, tantalum from Congo is used to make electrical capacitors that go into phones, computers and gaming devices. Electronics manufacturers have tried to hush all this up. They want you to look at a gadget and think “sleek,” not “blood.” Yet now there’s a grass-roots movement pressuring companies to keep these “conflict minerals” out of high-tech supply chains. Using Facebook and YouTube, activists are harassing companies like Apple, Intel and Research in Motion (which makes the BlackBerry) to get them to lean on their suppliers and ensure the use of, say, Australian tantalum rather than tantalum peddled by a Congolese militia. A humorous new video taunting Apple and PC computers alike goes online this weekend on YouTube, with hopes that it will go viral. Put together by a group of Hollywood actors, it’s a spoof on the famous “I’m a Mac”/”I’m a PC” ad and suggests that both are sometimes built from conflict minerals. “Guess we have some things in common after all,” Mac admits. Protesters demonstrated outside the grand opening of Apple’s new store in Washington, demanding that the company commit to using only clean minerals. Last month, activists blanketed Intel’s Facebook page with calls to support tough legislation to curb trade in conflict minerals. For a time, Intel disabled comments — creating a stink that called more attention to blood minerals than human rights campaigners ever could. Partly as a result, requirements that companies report on their use of conflict minerals were accepted as an amendment to financial reform legislation. A word of background: Eastern Congo is the site of the most lethal conflict since World War II, and is widely described as the rape capital of the world. The war had claimed 5.4 million deaths as of April 2007, with the toll mounting by 45,000 a month, according to a study by the International Rescue Committee. It’s not that American tech companies are responsible for the slaughter, or that eliminating conflict minerals from Americans’ phones will immediately end the war. Even the Enough Project, an anti-genocide organization that has been a leading force in the current campaign, estimates that only one-fifth of the world’s tantalum comes from Congo. “There’s no magic-bullet solution to peace in Congo,” notes David Sullivan of the Enough Project, “but this is one of the drivers of the conflict.” The economics of the war should be addressed to resolve it. The Obama administration also should put more pressure on Rwanda to play a constructive role next door in Congo (it has, inexcusably, backed one militia and bolstered others by dealing extensively in the conflict minerals trade). Impeding trade in conflict minerals is also a piece of the Congo puzzle, and because of public pressure, a group of companies led by Intel and Motorola is now developing a process to audit origins of tantalum in supply chains. Manufacturers previously settled for statements from suppliers that they do not source in eastern Congo, with no verification. Auditing the supply chains at smelters to determine whether minerals are clean or bloody would add about a penny to the price of a cellphone, according to the Enough Project, which says the figure originated with the industry. “Apple is claiming that their products don’t contain conflict minerals because their suppliers say so,” said Jonathan Hutson, of the Enough Project. “People are saying that answer is not good enough. That’s why there’s this grass-roots movement, so that we as consumers can choose to buy conflict free.” Some ideas about what consumers can do are at raisehopeforCongo.org — starting with spreading the word. We may be able to undercut some of the world’s most brutal militias simply by making it clear to electronics manufacturers that we don’t want our beloved gadgets to enrich sadistic gunmen. No phone or tablet computer can be considered “cool” if it may be helping perpetuate one of the most brutal wars on the planet. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/op...27kristof.html ![]() Fark Creator says Wisdom of Crowds is Overrated Gautham Nagesh Fark.com founder Drew Curtis thinks collecting public input on news or policy issues is vastly overrated. The chief executive of the humorous news aggregation site said there is far too much emphasis on allowing anyone to comment when most people have nothing of value to say. His remarks came Tuesday at a media conference hosted by the Poynter Institute in Washington. "The 'wisdom of the crowds' is the most ridiculous statement I've heard in my life. Crowds are dumb," Curtis said. "It takes people to move crowds in the right direction, crowds by themselves just stand around and mutter." The White House used the Web to reach out to citizens in a variety of ways, including online town halls and allowing users to vote on which questions President Obama will answer via YouTube. Curtis pointed to his own experience moderating comments on Fark, which allows users to give their often humorous take on the news of the day. He said only one percent of Web comments have any value and called the rest "garbage." As an example Curtis pointed to the America Speaking Out website recently launched by House Republicans to allow the public to weigh in on the issues and vote for policy positions they support. Curtis called the site an "absolute train wreck." "It's an absolute disaster. It's impossible to tell who was kidding and who wasn't," Curtis said. Among the most popular positions as voted by site users are increasing prosecution of illegal aliens, legalizing marijuana and making English the official language of the U.S. Other popular positions include reducing the size of government, repealing "Don't ask, don't tell" and eliminating earmarks and agricultural subsidies. “To be sure, a casual look at America Speaking Out early on could very well have turned up some of the loyal Fark commentors that Mr. Curtis is so familiar with," said a spokesman for the project. "We have a much less cynical view of the importance of open debate however. That’s why we’ve been encouraging the thoughtful, honest conversations that have come to make up the overwhelming majority of content on America Speaking Out.” Curtis acknowledged the success of other crowd-sourced endeavors like YouTube or Wikipedia, but said those sites are successful because they have strong leadership and rely on a team of editors to sift the content. "You need structure, also known as editing," he said. http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...s-is-overrated ![]() Facebook Says it Disabled "Boycott BP" Page in Error Facebook is embroiled in another controversy after the popular social networking site on Monday temporarily disabled a page that calls for a boycott of oil giant BP. Facebook officials said Tuesday the site was removed in error through a technological glitch and has been restored. The Boycott BP page aims to organize a worldwide boycott of BP stations and all its brands in response to the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It urges visitors to "Boycott BP stations until the spill is cleaned up." In addition to the station boycott, it advocates boycotting Castrol, Arco, Aral, Amoco, am/pm and even the Wild Bean Cafe. The group said it has more than 700,000 members. The site went down Monday, with visitors redirected to Facebook's home page. Facebook spokeswoman Annika Heinle said there was nothing sinister behind the move, and an automated system mistakenly flagged the page for removal. "The administrative profile of the BP Boycott page was disabled by our automated systems, therefore removing all the content that had been created by the profile," a Facebook statement said. "After a manual review, we determined the profile was removed in error, and it now has been restored along with the page." The missing page prompted a protest from Public Citizen, a nonprofit public interest group that has been promoting the boycott. It called the removal of the page irresponsible and said users should be given a better explanation. "I don't think it's much of an explanation at all," said Greg Beck, a Public Citizen attorney. "They didn't explain why their system took it down, and just the fact that a community that large -- with more than 700,000 users -- could be taken down without explanation is problem. The automated system doesn't tell us that much." He added, "Facebook and other social websites have become the public squares of the internet -- places where citizens can congregate as a community to share their opinions and voice their grievances. Facebook's ownership of this democratic forum carries great responsibility." BP said it wasn't involved. "We had absolutely nothing to do with this. When we were first asked about it we contacted Facebook, and their mistake was rectified," said Robert Wine, a BP spokesman. The controversy comes as the oil spill is in its 71st day, with BP saying it is likely to take until August before relief wells might be able to stem the flow. The Boycott BP page is filled with posts from users who decry BP's handling of the spill, as well as a few who say a boycott is not the answer. BP has more than 11,000 stations in the United States, which sell more than 42 million gallons of gas a day. Critics of the boycott note that BP doesn't own the stations -- independent franchisees do -- and they're the ones who would be hurt. Advocates said the target of the boycott is wide, and even if they can't make a dent in BP's billions of dollars in sales, they can make a moral point. http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social....rsy/index.html ![]() Facebook Status: Hosed in the Divorce It's called privacy for a reason Leanne Italie Forgot to de-friend your wife on Facebook while posting vacation shots of your mistress? Her divorce lawyer will be thrilled. Oversharing on social networks has led to an overabundance of evidence in divorce cases. The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers says 81 percent of its members have used or faced evidence plucked from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social networking sites, including YouTube and LinkedIn, over the last five years. "Oh, I've had some fun ones," said Linda Lea Viken, president-elect of the 1,600-member group. "It's very, very common in my new cases." Facebook is the unrivaled leader for turning virtual reality into real-life divorce drama, Viken said. Sixty-six percent of the lawyers surveyed cited Facebook foibles as the source of online evidence, she said. MySpace followed with 15 percent, followed by Twitter at 5 percent. About one in five adults uses Facebook for flirting, according to a 2008 report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. But it's not just kissy pix with the manstress or mistress that show up as evidence. Think of Dad forcing son to de-friend mom, bolstering her alienation of affection claim against him. "This sort of evidence has gone from nothing to a large percentage of my cases coming in, and it's pretty darn easy," Viken said. "It's like, 'Are you kidding me?'" Neither Viken, in Rapid City, S.D., nor other divorce attorneys would besmirch the attorney-client privilege by revealing the identities of clients, but they spoke in broad terms about some of the goofs they've encountered: — Husband goes on Match.com and declares his single, childless status while seeking primary custody of said nonexistent children. — Husband denies anger management issues but posts on Facebook in his "write something about yourself" section: "If you have the balls to get in my face, I'll kick your ass into submission." — Father seeks custody of the kids, claiming (among other things) that his ex-wife never attends the events of their young ones. Subpoenaed evidence from the gaming site World of Warcraft tracks her there with her boyfriend at the precise time she was supposed to be out with the children. Mom loves Facebook's Farmville, too, at all the wrong times. — Mom denies in court that she smokes marijuana but posts partying, pot-smoking photos of herself on Facebook. The disconnect between real life and online is hardly unique to partners de-coupling in the United States. A DIY divorce site in the United Kingdom, Divorce-Online, reported the word "Facebook" appeared late last year in about one in five of the petitions it was handling. (The company's caseload now amounts to about 7,000.) Divorce attorneys Ken and Leslie Matthews, a husband and wife team in Denver, Colo., don't see quite as many online gems. They estimated 1 in 10 of their cases involves such evidence, compared to a rare case or no cases at all in each of the last three years. Regardless, it's powerful evidence to plunk down before a judge, they said. "You're finding information that you just never get in the normal discovery process — ever," Leslie Matthews said. "People are just blabbing things all over Facebook. People don't yet quite connect what they're saying in their divorce cases is completely different from what they're saying on Facebook. It doesn't even occur to them that they'd be found out." Social networks are also ripe for divorce-related hate and smear campaigns among battling spousal camps, sometimes spawning legal cases of their own. "It's all pretty good evidence," Viken said. "You can't really fake a page off of Facebook. The judges don't really have any problems letting it in." The attorneys offer these tips for making sure your out-loud personal life online doesn't wind up in divorce court: What You Say Can And Will Be Held Against You If you plan on lying under oath, don't load up social networks with evidence to the contrary. "We tell our clients when they come in, 'I want to see your Facebook page. I want you to remember that the judge can read that stuff so never write anything you don't want the judge to hear,'" Viken said. Beware Your Frenemies Going through a divorce is about as emotional as it gets for many couples. The desire to talk trash is great, but so is the pull for friends to take sides. "They think these people can help get them through it," said Marlene Eskind Moses, a family law expert in Nashville, Tenn., and current president of the elite academy of divorce attorneys. "It's the worst possible time to share your feelings online." A picture may be worth ... Big bucks Grown-ups on a good day should know better than to post boozy, carousing or sexually explicit photos of themselves online, but in the middle of a contentious divorce? Ken Matthews recalls photos of a client's partially naked estranged wife alongside pictures of their kids on Facebook. "He was hearing bizarre stories from his kids. Guys around the house all the time. Men running in and out. And there were these pictures," Matthews said. Privacy, Privacy, Privacy They're called privacy settings for a reason. Find them. Get to know them. Use them. Keep up when Facebook decides to change them. Viken tells a familiar story: A client accused her spouse of adultery and he denied it in court. "The guy testified he didn't have a relationship with this woman. They were just friends. The girlfriend hadn't put security on her page and there they were. 'Gee judge, who lied to you?'" http://skunkpost.com/news.sp?newsId=2709 ![]() Connecticut School Board Considers Policy On Employees' Public Expression (see: Facebook) Vanessa De La Torre There is freedom of speech. And then, in the Facebook and Twitter world, there is embarrassing your employer. If you work for the West Hartford, Connecticut school system and can't resist telling (or showing) the world what a raucous time was had on Friday night, think of it this way: Under a proposed school board policy, you could be endangering your job. On the advice of the board's attorney, Thomas Mooney, board members agreed earlier this month to table a final vote on Policy 4080, "Public Communications By Employees," until after the summer so that revisions can be made. But board Vice Chairman Terry Schmitt, a member of the committee that proposed the policy, said Tuesday that even if the language is tweaked to satisfy district lawyers, the focus would be the same. Whether it's an unhinged manifesto or a scandalous, public Facebook photo, the question for employees is: "Does it have a negative, or compromising, impact on your ability to teach in the classroom?" If a middle or high school teacher is shown in a "wildly inebriated state," and students see it, that answer might be yes, Schmitt said. "It really is no different from the kinds of things that are discussed with incoming teachers and reviewed at the start of the school year," added Schmitt, who said there were no particular incidents that spurred the policy. David Dippolino, president of the teachers union, was out of state Tuesday and unavailable to comment on the proposal. The policy says, in part, that employees "shall be expected to strike an appropriate balance" between exercising their First Amendment rights and "maintaining their effectiveness and credibility as educators." The policy would also apply to non-certified staff, such as school office workers. At the board's June 1 meeting, members unanimously approved a preliminary first reading of the policy, but not before Chairwoman Clare Kindall said she was concerned about "the chilling of legitimate expression," such as strong political views. Kindall also asked whether there is too much subjectivity in deciding what is inappropriate. Assistant Superintendent Timothy Dunn stressed that the policy would only be putting on paper "what we expect now and what we've always expected." "We just want people to consider the impact of their actions," Dunn said. "When we hire you to be a teacher here, that's [a] tremendous responsibility. Confidence is placed in you. … We're not looking to abuse the rights of any employee." Board members tabled further action on the proposal when they met again June 15, the last regular meeting of the school year. Nick Caruso, a spokesman for the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education, said Tuesday that such a policy would not be uncommon in the state, as more school boards try to be "proactive" in the age of overexposure. "It's a good, common-sense discussion," Caruso said, one best to have now than after that Atlantic City bachelorette party photo makes the rounds. http://www.courant.com/community/wes...,2725882.story ![]() Pair Jailed Over Racist Messages Two white supremacists have been jailed after being convicted of posting violent and vicious racist messages on the internet. Michael Heaton, 42, and Trevor Hannington, 58, described Jews as "scum" and called for them to be "destroyed". The "proud neo-Nazis" were unanimously cleared of soliciting murder at Liverpool Crown Court but Heaton was jailed on Friday for 30 months after being convicted of four counts of using threatening, abusive or insulting words likely to stir up racial hatred. Hannington previously admitted two counts of stirring up racial hatred, two further counts of possessing information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism and disseminating a terrorist publication. He was jailed for two years. Sentencing, Mr Justice Irwin told Heaton, of Leigh in Wigan, Greater Manchester, his internet posts were "vicious and repulsive". He added: "You saw yourself as the leader of a potentially significant and active National Socialist group. Your sustained racist rants were intended to bolster that group. "You wanted to start a race war. You are clearly filled with racial hatred and also with violent and angry beliefs." The judge told Heaton his words were of the most "insulting and extreme nature" marked by "violent racism", and said only a significant jail term was acceptable. Hannington, from Hirwaun, Cardiff, was described as a loner by the judge, who told him: "You are a long standing racist who has never hidden your views, which are violent and vicious in the extreme. "You are a lonely man with little in your life. You habitually told lies about a non-existent army career and your knowledge of survival techniques in an attempt to gain status. You are, to some degree, pitiable in this, however repugnant what you said." http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standa...st-messages.do ![]() Online Bullies Pull Schools Into the Fray Jan Hoffman The girl’s parents, wild with outrage and fear, showed the principal the text messages: a dozen shocking, sexually explicit threats, sent to their daughter the previous Saturday night from the cellphone of a 12-year-old boy. Both children were sixth graders at Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, N.J. Punish him, insisted the parents. “I said, ‘This occurred out of school, on a weekend,’ ” recalled the principal, Tony Orsini. “We can’t discipline him.” Had they contacted the boy’s family, he asked. Too awkward, they replied. The fathers coach sports together. What about the police, Mr. Orsini asked. A criminal investigation would be protracted, the parents had decided, its outcome uncertain. They wanted immediate action. They pleaded: “Help us.” Schools these days are confronted with complex questions on whether and how to deal with cyberbullying, an imprecise label for online activities ranging from barrages of teasing texts to sexually harassing group sites. The extent of the phenomenon is hard to quantify. But one 2010 study by the Cyberbullying Research Center, an organization founded by two criminologists who defined bullying as "willful and repeated harm” inflicted through phones and computers, said one in five middle-school students had been affected. Affronted by cyberspace’s escalation of adolescent viciousness, many parents are looking to schools for justice, protection, even revenge. But many educators feel unprepared or unwilling to be prosecutors and judges. Often, school district discipline codes say little about educators’ authority over student cellphones, home computers and off-campus speech. Reluctant to assert an authority they are not sure they have, educators can appear indifferent to parents frantic with worry, alarmed by recent adolescent suicides linked to bullying. Whether resolving such conflicts should be the responsibility of the family, the police or the schools remains an open question, evolving along with definitions of cyberbullying itself. Nonetheless, administrators who decide they should help their cornered students often face daunting pragmatic and legal constraints. “I have parents who thank me for getting involved,” said Mike Rafferty, the middle school principal in Old Saybrook, Conn., “and parents who say, ‘It didn’t happen on school property, stay out of my life.’ ” According to the Anti-Defamation League, although 44 states have bullying statutes, fewer than half offer guidance about whether schools may intervene in bullying involving “electronic communication,” which almost always occurs outside of school and most severely on weekends, when children have more free time to socialize online. A few states say that school conduct codes must explicitly prohibit off-campus cyberbullying; others imply it; still others explicitly exclude it. Some states say that local districts should develop cyberbullying prevention programs but the states did not address the question of discipline. Judges are flummoxed, too, as they wrestle with new questions about protections on student speech and school searches. Can a student be suspended for posting a video on YouTube that cruelly demeans another student? Can a principal search a cellphone, much like a locker or a backpack? It’s unclear. These issues have begun their slow climb through state and federal courts, but so far, rulings have been contradictory, and much is still to be determined. The Cyberdetectives Benjamin Franklin Middle School conveys an earnest sweetness associated with an earlier era. Its 700 students attend classes in a low-slung building from the mid-’50s, complete with a bomb shelter and generous, shaded playing fields. During cafeteria lunch duty, a guidance counselor runs a foosball tournament, attracting a throng of laughing, shouting boys. This year’s school musical: “Guys and Dolls.” For all its charms, Benjamin Franklin, a sixth-through-eighth-grade school in a wealthy New Jersey suburb, also lives bluntly in the present. A sixth-grade girl dashes to class, wearing a turquoise T-shirt with bold sequined letters: “Texting Is My Favorite Subject.” The seventh-grade guidance counselor says she can spend up to three-fourths of her time mediating conflicts that began online or through text messages. In April, the burden of resolving these disputes had become so onerous that the principal, Mr. Orsini, sent an exasperated e-mail message to parents that made national news: “There is absolutely NO reason for any middle school student to be part of a social networking site,” he wrote. If children were attacked through sites or texting, he added, “IMMEDIATELY GO TO THE POLICE!” That was not the response that the parents of the girl who had received the foul messages had wanted to hear. Mr. Orsini sighed, relenting. After all, the texts were angry and obscene, the parents horrified, the girl badly rattled. “We can certainly talk to the boy,” the principal said. Investigating a complaint can be like stumbling into a sinkhole. Over the next few days, an assistant principal, Greg Wu; Mr. Orsini; a guidance counselor; a social worker and an elementary school principal were pulled into this one: The sixth graders had “dated” for a week, before the girl broke it off. The texts she received that Saturday night were successively more sneering, graphic and intimidating. But the exchanges shown to Mr. Orsini were incomplete. Before handing her phone to her parents, the girl erased her replies. The boy claimed he was innocent, telling Mr. Wu he had lost his cellphone that Saturday. “Yeah, right,” said Mr. Wu. The boy insisted he had dropped it while riding his bicycle that April afternoon with his brother and his brother’s friend, both fifth graders. By Wednesday, the girl’s father called Mr. Orsini. “How is this boy still in school, near my daughter? Why can’t you suspend him?” The boy was a poor student in language arts classes, yet the text messages were reasonably grammatical. Mr. Wu dictated a basic sentence for the boy to write down. It was riddled with errors. Next, an elementary school principal interviewed the fifth-grade boys separately. By Thursday, Mr. Orsini telephoned the girl’s parents with his unsettling conclusion: The boy had never sent the texts. The lost phone had been found by someone else and used to send the messages. Who wrote them? A reference or two might suggest another sixth grader. The identity would remain unknown. Mr. Orsini told the girl’s shaken parents that, aside from offering her counseling, the school, which had already devoted 10 hours to the episode, could do no more. “They were still in so much pain,” Mr. Orsini said. “They wanted us to keep investigating.” Middle School Misery Meredith Wearley, Benjamin Franklin’s seventh-grade guidance counselor, was overwhelmed this spring by dramas created on the Web: The text spats that zapped new best friendships; secrets told in confidence, then broadcast on Facebook; bullied girls and boys, retaliating online. “In seventh grade, the girls are trying to figure out where they fit in,” Mrs. Wearley said. “They have found friends but they keep regrouping. And the technology makes it harder for them to understand what’s a real friendship.” Because students prefer to use their phones for texting rather than talking, Mrs. Wearley added, they often miss cues about tone of voice. Misunderstandings proliferate: a crass joke can read as a withering attack; did that text have a buried subtext? The girls come into her office, depressed, weeping, astonished, betrayed. “A girl will get mad because her friend was friends with another girl,” Mrs. Wearley said. They show Mrs. Wearley reams of texts, the nastiness accelerating precipitously. “I’ve had to bring down five girls to my office to sort things out,” she said. “It’s middle school.” Recently, between classes, several eighth-grade girls from Benjamin Franklin reflected about their cyberdramas: “We had so many fights in seventh grade,” one girl said. “None of them were face-to-face. We were too afraid. Besides, it’s easier to say ‘sorry’ over a text.” Another concurred. “It’s easier to fight online, because you feel more brave and in control,” she said. “On Facebook, you can be as mean as you want.” Studies show that online harassment can begin in fourth grade. By high school, students inclined to be cruel in cyberspace are more technologically sophisticated, more capable of hiding their prints. But that is also when older students may be more resilient: “By high school, youths are developing more self-confidence, engaged in extracurricular activities and focusing on the future,” said Sameer Hinduja, a professor at Florida Atlantic University and an author of “Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard.” “Their identity and self-worth come from external things that don’t revolve around social relationships.” But during middle school, he said, “Peer perception largely dictates their self-worth.” With their erupting skin and morphing bodies, many seventh-grade students have a hard enough time just walking through the school doors. When dozens of kids vote online, which is not uncommon, about whether a student is fat or stupid or gay, the impact can be devastating. While research shows that traditional at-school bullying is far more pervasive than cyberbullying, each type of hostility can now blur and bleed into the other. Jeff Taylor, principal of Frank Lloyd Wright Intermediate School in West Allis, Wis., wades into cyber-related conflicts at school several times each week. Recently, a seventh-grade girl held a weekend birthday party and her jealous former friend showed up. By Tuesday night, the uninvited guest had insulted the birthday girl’s dress on Facebook, calling it and the girl’s mother cheap. The remarks were particularly wounding, because the birthday girl’s family is not well-off. By Wednesday, Mr. Taylor said, “There were rumblings about it in the cafeteria. When kids start posturing and switching lunch tables, you can tell.” He and an assistant tried to calm them. But the posturing continued online. A confrontation at school was planned, and the details were texted. On Friday, during the four minutes between seventh-grade lunch and the next period, 20 girls showed up in a hallway and began shrieking. At least four adults pulled the girls apart and talked them down. “We must have spent five or six hours on this, throughout the week,” Mr. Taylor said. “We got to the bottom of that pain and rejection. I don’t consider it a waste of time. But at 3:03 those buses were pulling out and you know that as soon as the girls got home, they’d be blasting away about it on Facebook.” Though resolving cyberwars can be slippery and time-consuming, some schools would like students to report them at the outset, before they intensify. But experts on adolescence note that teenagers are loath to tell adults much of anything. Some students think they can handle the ridicule themselves. Or are just too embarrassed to speak up. Others fear that parents will overreact. If the child is texting at school or has a Facebook page without permission, “and now they’re being bullied on it,” said Parry Aftab, executive director of WiredSafety.org, “they can’t admit it to parents. The parents will take away the technology and the kids are afraid of that. Or the parents will underreact. They’ll say: ‘Why read it? Just turn it off!’ ” The most threatening impediment to coming forward can be the cyberbully’s revenge. Graffiti on a cyberwall can’t be blacked out with a Sharpie. Mindful of risks to students who report bullies, some school districts have created anonymous tip sites. At Benjamin Franklin, the staff has many ways to give students cover. “When girls ask their friends, ‘What were you doing in the guidance counselor’s office?’ ” Mrs. Wearley said, “I tell them, just say ‘Mrs. Wearley was fixing my schedule.’ ” The Legal Battles Tony Orsini, the Ridgewood principal, learned about a devastating Facebook group last November, two months after it started. “I had a 45-year-old father crying in my office,” Mr. Orsini said. “He kept asking, ‘Why would someone do this to my son?’ ” A Facebook page had sprung up about the man’s son, who was new in town. The comments included ethnic slurs, snickers about his sexuality and an excruciating nickname. In short order, nearly 50 children piled on, many of them readily identifiable. “Kids deal with meanness all the time and many can handle it,” said Mr. Orsini, 38, a father of two children. “But it never lasts as long as it does now, online.” The boy could not escape the nickname. At soccer and basketball games around town, opposing players he’d never met would hoot: “Oh, you’re that kid.” The boy began missing school. He became ill. After weeks, he reluctantly told his parents. “We don’t always get to address these problems until the damage is done,” Mr. Orsini said. Because the comments had been made online and off-campus, Mr. Orsini believed that his ability to intervene was limited. Rulings in a handful of related cases around the country give mixed signals. A few families have successfully sued schools for failing to protect their children from bullies. But when the Beverly Vista School in Beverly Hills, Calif., disciplined Evan S. Cohen’s eighth-grade daughter for cyberbullying, he took on the school district. After school one day in May 2008, Mr. Cohen’s daughter, known in court papers as J. C., videotaped friends at a cafe, egging them on as they laughed and made mean-spirited, sexual comments about another eighth-grade girl, C. C., calling her “ugly,” “spoiled,” a “brat” and a “slut.” J. C. posted the video on YouTube. The next day, the school suspended her for two days. “What incensed me,” said Mr. Cohen, a music industry lawyer in Los Angeles, “was that these people were going to suspend my daughter for something that happened outside of school.” On behalf of his daughter, he sued. Last November, Judge Stephen V. Wilson of Federal District Court found that the off-campus video could be linked to the school: J. C. told perhaps 10 students about it; the humiliated C. C. and her mother showed it to school officials; educators watched it and investigated. But the legal test, he wrote in his 57-page decision, was whether J. C.’s video had caused the school “substantial” disruption. Judge Wilson ruled in favor of the young videographer, because the disruption was only minimal: administrators dealt with the matter quietly and before lunch recess. This legal test comes from a 1969 Supreme Court case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, in which a school suspended students for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. The court overturned the suspension, but crafted a balance between a school’s authority and a student’s freedom of expression. When a student’s speech interferes substantially with the school’s educational mission, a school can impose discipline. The district had to pay J. C.’s costs and lawyers’ fees: $107,150.80. Judge Wilson also threw in an aside that summarizes the conundrum that is adolescent development, acceptable civility and school authority. The good intentions of the school notwithstanding, he wrote, it cannot discipline a student for speech, “simply because young persons are unpredictable or immature, or because, in general, teenagers are emotionally fragile and may often fight over hurtful comments.” The lesson Mr. Cohen hopes his daughter learns from the case is about the limits on governmental intrusion. “A girl came to school who was upset by something she saw on the Internet,” Mr. Cohen said in a telephone interview, “and these people had in their mind that they were going to do something about it. The school doesn’t have that kind of power. It’s up to the parents to discipline their child.” He did chastise his daughter, saying, “That wasn’t a nice thing to do.” He describes her video as “relentlessly juvenile,” but not an example of cyberbullying, which he said he did not condone. His daughter offered to remove it from YouTube. But Mr. Cohen keeps it posted, he said, “as a public service” so viewers can see “what kids get suspended for in Beverly Hills.” The J. C. decision has ignited debate. Nancy Willard, an Oregon lawyer who consults with schools, said that the judge could have applied another, rarely cited prong of the Tinker standard: whether the student’s hurtful speech collided with “the rights of other students to be secure.” The Supreme Court has not yet addressed online student speech. Lower-court judges in some districts have sided with schools that have disciplined students for posting threatening videos about educators from their home computers. In two recent cases, students were suspended for posting parodies of their principals. Each case reached the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. But one three-judge panel sided with a school for disciplining a student whose site suggested the principal was a pedophile; another panel sided with its case’s student, whose site suggested the principal used steroids and smoked marijuana. To resolve the contradictory rulings, both cases were re-argued earlier this month before 14 judges on the Third Circuit, whose jurisdiction includes New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania and the United States Virgin Islands. Nationwide, principals have responded to students who demean others online in dramatically different ways. In January, 28 Seattle middle school students who wrote noxious comments on Facebook about one student received suspensions. The school also held assemblies about digital citizenship. But when the mother of a seventh-grade boy in Fairfax County, Va., who requested anonymity to protect her son’s identity, sent his principal the savage e-mail messages and Facebook jeers that six boys posted about her son, the principal wrote back that although the material was unacceptable, “From a school perspective this is outside the scope of our authority and not something we can monitor or issue consequences for.” Many principals hesitate to act because school discipline codes or state laws do not define cyberbullying. But Bernard James, an education law scholar at Pepperdine University, said that administrators interpreted statutes too narrowly: “Educators are empowered to maintain safe schools,” Professor James said. “The timidity of educators in this context of emerging technology is working to the advantage of bullies.” Whether suspension is appropriate is also under discussion. Elizabeth Englander, a psychology professor at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts and founder of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center, believes that automatic discipline for cyberbullies is wrong-headed. “We tend to think that if there’s no discipline, there’s no reaction,” she said. “But discipline should never be the only thing we consider in these cases. There are many things we can do with children first to guide and teach them about behavior and expectations.” Tony Orsini wanted to help his middle school student who was being teased mercilessly on Facebook. But he believed he had to catch the bullies at school. He alerted teachers. At lunch, they spotted the three ringleaders as they forced the boy from their table. “I called them into my office,” Mr. Orsini said, “and talked to them strongly about the lunchroom incident. Then I lied. I said I heard that the cops were looking at a Facebook group they had posted. “It came down the next day.” He rubbed his face in his hands. “All we are doing is reacting,” he said. “We can’t seem to get ahead of the curve.” Gathering Evidence Administrators who investigate students tangled in online disputes often resort to a deft juggle of artfulness, technology and law. First challenge: getting students to come clean. Mr. Wu, the assistant principal at Benjamin Franklin, is a former household handyman and English teacher with a fondness for scraps, gadgets and imagination. Hence his lie detector: It’s really an ancient tuner, connected to a helmet labeled “The Anti-Prevaricator” — the inner webbing from a football helmet refurbished by Mr. Wu, who glued on bells and a keypad from an old telephone. When students balk or obfuscate, Mr. Wu may suggest they don the Anti-Prevaricator. They answer questions; sparks flash from the tuner. When sixth graders realize the joke, Mr. Wu said, “they start laughing with relief and we talk about the importance of telling the truth.” He continues his cyberinvestigations the old-fashioned way, with conversations, confrontations, cajoling and copious handwritten notes. But the second challenge is gathering the evidence itself: looking at material typed on personal cellphones or online accounts. School officials have both greater and lesser investigative authority than the police have over students. Certainly they cannot use lie detectors. But though police officers need probable cause and a warrant to search a student’s locker or backpack, school administrators need only “reasonable suspicion” that a school rule has been violated. The police also need probable cause and a warrant to search social networking sites and cellphones. School officials are uncertain what they need. “I can’t look into Facebook accounts,” said Jeff Taylor, the middle school principal from West Allis, Wis. If students or parents want him to see something online, “they have to show it to me or bring me a printout.” But Deb Socia, the principal at Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Dorchester, Mass., takes a no-nonsense approach. The school gives each student a laptop to work on. But the students’ expectation of privacy is greatly diminished. “I regularly scan every computer in the building,” Ms. Socia said. “They know I’m watching. They’re using the cameras on their laptops to check their hair and I send them a message and say: ‘You look great! Now go back to work.’ It’s a powerful way to teach kids: ‘I’m paying attention, you need to do what’s right.’ ” Administrators are skittish about searching cellphones because of the increase in sexting, in which students have sent compromising photos of themselves. Principals fear being caught up in child pornography investigations. In these situations, they generally turn over cellphones to the police. “The question of searching a cellphone is a gray area,” said Mary Ann McAdam, an assistant principal at Governor Livingston High School in Berkeley Heights, N.J. “We only do it when a student says, ‘so-and-so sent threatening messages.’ Even then, they look through their phones and find it for us. If I felt there might be something on a cellphone, I’d invite parents to go through it with me.” Legal experts disagree on this issue. Professor James argues that cellphones are like backpacks: if the search’s purpose is reasonably related to a school infraction, like cheating, the principal’s search is legal. Others believe that cellphones belong in another category, protected by electronic communication privacy laws. While a cellphone search may yield an incriminating text, it may not point to the author. Last year, an eighth-grade girl at Benjamin Franklin vowed on Facebook that her boyfriend would beat up another eighth grader, a girl she had been bullying throughout middle school. Mr. Orsini called the police. Mr. Orsini ordered the girls to have no contact at school. Nonetheless, the bullied girl received veiled texted threats at school, sent from a phone owned by a friend of the bully. “Everyone knows who did it,” said Mr. Orsini, looking miserable. “But I couldn’t prove who really sent them. So I had to punish the girl whose phone was used. The bully was a masterful manipulator. Her friend took the hit for her.” By now, the targeted girl had become more self-confident. She was furious that the bully escaped punishment. When the bully began picking on a second, weaker girl, she grew further incensed. One bristling morning, the two girls came to blows, which the bully sorely came to regret. Although teachers quickly broke up the fight, word of the outcome spread more swiftly: “All the kids chanted the victim’s name,” Mr. Orsini said, “in triumph in the lunchroom.” The Cybersages What a difference a few years can make in the life of a tween. Earlier this month, a proud posse of Benjamin Franklin eighth-grade girls strode into homerooms of sixth graders: inches taller than the 12-year-olds, skin calmer, they radiated a commanding exuberance as they tossed their long, glossy manes. They wanted to offer advice about social networking sites and cyberbullying. “How many of you have discussed Mr. Orsini’s letter with your parents?” asked Annie Thurston, one of the eighth graders, referring to his admonitions about online activity. Slumped in their desks, at least a dozen students in one class glumly hoisted their hands. In April, a parent alerted Mr. Orsini about Formspring, a site on which comments can be sent anonymously to mailboxes, and posted at the mailbox owner’s discretion. Many adults seem confounded at why girls, in particular, would choose to post the leering, scabrous queries; some teenagers say they do so in order to toss back hard-shelled, tough-girl retorts. The principal found the names of some Benjamin Franklin students on Formspring. As Mr. Orsini later recounted the experience, he couldn’t bring himself to utter even a sanitized version of the obscene posts he had read. His face reddened, tears filling his eyes. “How does a 13-year-old girl recover her sexual self-esteem after reading that garbage?” he whispered. It prompted his e-mail message to parents, in which he wrote that no middle school student needed to be on social networking sites. Many parents agreed. But others said that schools and families should work harder to teach students digital responsibility. These eighth-grade girls thought Mr. Orsini was right: younger students shouldn’t be on Facebook. They grilled the sixth graders, almost all of whom said they had cellphones. Do your parents read your texts, they asked. Only a smattering of palms. “My mom keeps threatening to get software so she can monitor them,” one boy said, shrugging his shoulders. “But she never gets around to it.” What impact did Mr. Orsini’s letter have? “I lied to my parents,” another boy said. “I told them I deactivated my Facebook page. But in two days, I started it again.” The girls looked solemn. “If you’re under 13, you shouldn’t even be on Facebook,” said Maeve Cannon, 14. “We think you guys can handle it but you’re still really young. It’s not that necessary, you know. We just want you to be safe.” The sixth graders were rapt. “The Internet is a scary place,” said Sabrina Spatz, an eighth grader. “It can really hurt you. Our parents didn’t grow up with it so they don’t really understand it that well.” So if any of the sixth graders were cyberbullied, the older girls said, “Just come talk to us.” Then they hesitated. They were, after all, about to graduate. “You can tell Mr. Wu, he’s awesome!” said Maeve, bubbling over. “Tell your guidance counselor or a teacher.” The other girls nodded eagerly. “Yeah, go to the school,” Emily Cerrina chimed in. “The school will make it stop,” she said, “immediately!” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/style/28bully.html ![]() Utah Mom Accused of Doctoring Photo to Show Girl, 13, Having Sex With Dog A Utah mom allegedly doctored a pornographic photo of a woman having sex with a dog, superimposing into the picture the face of a 13-year-old girl who attends middle school with her daughter. Danette Stark, 37, appeared in court Monday to face 18 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor. Prosecutors said she created the image, put it into fliers and distributed them at Northwest Middle School in Salt Lake City. Authorities said surveillance video showed Stark entering the seventh-grade bathroom at the school on the second to the last day of classes. A custodian found the fliers in the bathroom and contacted local authorities, Salt Lake County District Attorney Lohra Miller told FoxNews.com. She said Stark admitted to making 30 fliers, but police recovered only 18 of them. “If anyone sees copies of these they need to turn them over to police immediately,” Miller said. “If they distribute it, make copies or put on the Internet, they are committing a crime of distributing pornography under Utah law. “ Stark allegedly told police that she believed the unidentified girl “wronged” her in some way. Stark has a daughter who is the same age as the girl. Attorney Steve Russell, who was standing in for her attorney, said he wouldn’t explain the relationship between the two teens, but he told the Deseret News, “I’m sure they know each other.” Police say Stark found the photos on the Internet and placed the fliers, which included derogatory comments directed toward the girl, into several students’ lockers in addition to the bathroom. Miller told FoxNews.com that this is the district's first case of social networking bullying, and they are trying to keep the 13-year-old girl’s identity as private as possible. “She is traumatized by the event,” Miller said. “We are trying to keep her privacy protected as much as possible to help keep her life as normal as possible.” Phone messages left for Stark and the Salt Lake City School District were not immediately returned. Stark’s attorney did not have an immediate comment. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/06/28...c-images-girl/ ![]() Big Brother is Watching. And Blackmailing You. Alexis Levinson Imagine waking up one morning to find that someone has emailed you a sex tape. Not just any sex tape, but a sex tape starring you. In your bedroom. Where there are no cameras. That’s what happened to the victims of a hacker arrested last week by the FBI who, among other things, is charged with remotely accessing peoples’ webcams and using the videos he obtained to blackmail his victims. According to the Department of Justice Press Release from June 22, 2010, Luis Mijangos of Santa Ana, California would hack into a victim’s computer and turn on the computer’s webcam once in awhile, hoping to film his female victims in compromising situations. If he did so, he blackmailed her with the footage, basically an involuntarily made sex tape, threatening to make it public if she did not send him more explicit videos. He also blackmailed his victims with photos or videos he found on their hardrives. According to the FBI report, he looked specifically for images of “young women and girls in various states of undress or engaged in sexual acts with their partners.” He “threaten[ed] to distribute those stolen images and videos to every addressee in the victims’ contact lists unless they made additional videos for him.” He tried to keep his victims from reporting him to the police by telling them that because he controlled their computer, he would know if they went to the authorities. Creepy doesn’t even begin to cover it. The Department of Justice Press Release explains that Mijangos was able to hack into computers using malware, which he got his victims to download by disguising the files as popular songs. Once these files were installed, Mijangos was able to control the computer. If that last part went over your head, Kevin Haley, Director of Product Management for Symantec, provided a crash course in hackers for the layman. ‘Malware’ is short for ‘malicious software,’ a general term that encompasses all sorts of things that can harm your computer: viruses, worms, Trojans, and so on. Hackers commonly get people to download malware by putting it in an mp3 file or on a bit torrent or a peer-to-peer network. In layman’s terms: when you download music illegally, you probably go to a peer-to-peer network, at which point you may potentially download an mp3 file in which a hacker has hidden malware. Haley calls this method “training wheels for bad guys.” It’s a very simple process to hide malware in an mp3: you can find an instruction book on the internet and download a program to install the malware. Another method is known as ‘social engineering,’ in which a hacker infects one victim, and then poses as that person to infect their friends. The hacker sends an mp3 file or a link to a video that contains malware. The friend opens the file assuming it is from his or her friend, and inadvertently downloads the malware. Sometimes, a hacker will simply send an email with an attachment that is infected with malware. A slightly scarier method is what is called ‘drive by downloads,’ where a computer user will go to a website, and while there, a piece of malware is downloaded, unbeknownst to the user. An alternative strategy is for the hacker to create malware that will automatically copy itself onto any thumb drive inserted into the computer. When the thumb drive is inserted into another computer, the malware jumps onto that new hardrive. Haley says this is a method typically used at corporations, where there is more sharing of thumb drives. It’s easy to imagine this as the work of some super genius using his superior technological intelligence for diabolical ends. But as it turns out, making malware is simple: like every other kind of DIY project, you just have to buy a toolkit. A variety of toolkits are available in the underground economy, and with the click of a few buttons, anyone can build their own malware and target it for specific purposes. “It’s just like any other service industry,” says David Marcus, Director of Security Research at McAfee Labs. If you know where to look, or even just with a well-worded google search, you can find people who will build malware for you, or get the instructions to do it yourself. Like the latest security software, these toolkits get updated on a regular basis, so at this point, Haley says, it’s possible to create a piece of malware that can do pretty much anything. For instance, remotely activate someone’s webcam. Freaky. Of course, being blackmailed by a hacker who has remotely activated your webcam at the exact same time that you happened to be getting down and dirty seems like the kind of thing that only happens in splashy articles like this one. We read them, shudder, and then go back to doing things exactly as we did before. But what if the person using your webcam to spy on you isn’t a bad guy? What if it’s, say, your school? That’s allegedly what happened to Blake Robbins, a student at Harriton High School. Lower Merion School district, to which Harriton High belongs, loans each student a laptop for school use. Unbeknownst to the students, security software called LANRev TheftTrack was installed on the laptops. The purpose of the software was to track lost or stolen computers, and one of the methods employed allowed the network tech to remotely activate the webcam and take a still photo. Robbins is suing the school district, after a picture taken of him using the computer in the privacy of his own home was used by the school as grounds for disciplinary action against him. There are legitimate uses for this kind of software, but this doesn’t seem to be one of them. Stryde Hax blog reports that students were not only required to have and use a school loaned laptop, they were punished for using personal laptops for school assignments. Students were not informed that this software was installed on the computers. Stryde Hax posted comments from students at Harriton High, many of which say that they noted the green light next to the camera turning on, but assumed that it was a computer malfunction. One student said he or she even reported it to the school and was told that it was a just a “malfunction,” though that was obviously not the case. The software lent itself to a being abused, as it gave school administrators the power to activate the webcam. Other software only allows the software company to activate these features. For instance, Absolute Software, which bought LANRev in December, has an anti-theft software called Lojack for Laptops, in which the tracking features can only be activated by the company when the owner reports it stolen. The company’s FAQ section on Lojack explains that the Absolute works closely with law enforcement to recover the computers, making the process a whole lot less invasive than a software that let’s school administrators snap pictures of students in their bedrooms. At other schools, administrators openly admit to having this type of surveillance on their students. In a New York Times article on cyberbullying, the principle of a Massachusetts school where students are loaned computers with similar security software installed is quoted as saying “I regularly scan every computer in the building. They know I’m watching. They’re using the cameras on their laptops to check their hair and I send them a message and say: ‘You look great! Now go back to work.’ It’s a powerful way to teach kids: ‘I’m paying attention, you need to do what’s right.’ ” But unlike students at Harriton, these students are aware that administrators are watching, and they can adjust their behavior accordingly. Students at schools that monitor computers may just have to stick it out, but when it comes to hackers, there are ways to protect yourself. Both Marcus and Haley stress the importance of having security software on your computer, and running it often. Marcus is adamant that users should be updating their software and scanning their computers every single day because the threats change on a daily basis. Moreover, he notes, “the bad guys are all over the internet, and they use the same tools and read the same news as the good guys.” Which means that websites like Google News and Twitter, things people use on a daily basis, can also be abused by hackers. Haley notes that users should be suspicious of any attachment or video or song link that they receive, as those are the most common ways that hackers install malware. The first thing to do if you think your computer has been hacked, Haley says, is install security software and run it. A hacker who notices this may try to stop you from installing it, but good security software should be able to counteract that. If you are as technologically challenged as this writer, never fear, security software is designed to save us from ourselves. If it finds a piece of malware, it destroys it without asking, an important feature for anyone who has ever gotten a pop-up window saying that your computer may be at risk, and then simply ignored it, having no idea what that might means or how to stop it. As Haley points out, a good indicator that someone is spying on you through your webcam is if the green light next to the camera goes on when you aren’t using it. But a good hacker, Marcus says, can activate the camera without turning on the light. In fact, he says, “if the person knows what they’re doing…you’ll have absolutely no idea” that they’re there. He suggests, however, that you can turn off the functionality of the camera by unplugging it, if it’s an external camera, or by setting up your own controls or security software that disables remote access of a webcam. Again though, if the bad guy is sophisticated enough, odds are that he can get in and change all those settings. Using a Mac may lower your odds of downloading malware, but the idea that Mac’s don’t get viruses is a myth. There is plenty of malware available that targets Macs, and everyone is going to the same internet sites, so it’s just as possible for a Mac to pick up malware online as it is that a PC will. That said, Marcus calls the amount of Malware available for Macs just “a drop in the bucket” compared to the amount of malware that exploits Windows operating systems. New malware comes out every single day, and it’s possible that your security software will come across something that it can’t fix. In the worst case scenario, the only solution may be to wipe the hardrive. Also, security software messes up sometimes. McAfee got in trouble in April when an update to its security software caused it to attack a critical Windows file, preventing computers from booting up. This, Marcus tells me, is called a false positive, and it happens every once in awhile. The bad news is, your computer may not be able to start up for a few hours. The good news, he says, it’s not something hackers are able to foresee or exploit. As for whether or not there’s a hacker using your webcam to spy on you while you read this article, both Marcus and Haley agree that it’s not too likely. Haley tells me that more often, a hacker will remotely activate a webcam to see if there’s anyone in front of the computer who might notice that it’s being tampered with. Most hackers are in it for profit, which means they’ll look for bank account numbers or credit card information, sources of profit that are less labor intensive than blackmail. The problem is, if a hacker has installed something that enables him or her to do that, then he or she can just as easily turn on your webcam and take a look around. Take away lesson: if you’re about to do something you’d never want your mother to see, much less millions of people on the internet, close your laptop. If it seems unrealistic to be expected to remember to do that in the heat of the moment, your best bet might be the low tech solution employed by some students at Harriton: just put a piece of tape over the video camera. James Brown did not allow computers in the James Brown Enterprises offices because, Maria Moon, a staffer, explained in a 2002 New Yorker profile, “He’s got this strange notion that they can see back at you.” Chalk it up to PSP induced paranoia, but the godfather of soul may have had a point. http://dailycaller.com/2010/06/30/bi...ckmailing-you/ ![]() Elena Kagan and the Porn Wars Josh Gerstein A 1993 conference at the University of Chicago Law School on the subject of pornography and hate crimes wasn’t your typical legal seminar. The gathering of nearly 700 lawyers, scholars and activists sometimes seemed more like a revival meeting for anti-pornography forces than an academic symposium, journalists observed. Protesters beset the event, complaining that it was one-sided and threatened to trample free speech. Amid that tumult, future Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, then a junior Chicago law professor, gave a well-received, relatively-subdued presentation that would become one of her first and few published law review articles. During a panel discussion, Kagan presented the group with what she portrayed as promising legal strategies to combat the scourge of pornography. “We should be looking for new approaches, devising new arguments,” Kagan declared, according to video of the event reviewed by POLITICO. She seemed to count herself among “those of us who favor some form of pornography and hate speech regulation” and told participants that “a great deal can be done very usefully” to crack down on such evils. “Statutes may be crafted in ways that prohibit the worst of hate speech and pornography, language that goes to sexual violence. Such statutes may still be constitutional,” Kagan assured the meeting. She pressed for “new and harsher penalties against the kinds of violence against women that takes place in producing pornography, the use of pandering statutes and pimp statutes against pornographers…perhaps the initiation—the enactment of new statutes prohibiting the hiring of women for commercial purposes to engage in sexual activities.” A review of Kagan’s writings, public comments, and legal briefs offers a series of indications that she stands in the camp of left-leaning legal academics who view pornography as a social evil that the government should be taking more action to control. Some of Kagan’s proposals, particularly her call for more prosecutions under the largely dormant obscenity laws, are highly controversial among civil libertarians and First Amendment advocates. Yet this aspect of her legal thinking has received almost no attention in the run-up to her confirmation hearings, starting Monday. In fact, advocates simply may not know Kagan’s positions on the issue. The nominating materials Kagan submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee last month include the article she published based on her presentation at the 1993 conference, but she did not submit the text of her remarks or any recording of her comments. However, conference organizers sold videotapes of the event to the public and law schools around the country; POLITICO screened the tape this week at the Georgetown University law library. For Democrats fighting the GOP line of attack – that she’s an out-of-the-mainstream liberal – Kagan’s anti-pornography views could be a perfect retort: she seems as offended by certain kinds of pornography as anyone who finds the material reprehensible. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/39034.html ![]() Name and Shame Library Porn Viewers, Pol Says Massachusetts City Councilmember Wants List of Pornography Viewers Made Public A city councilor in Massachusetts thinks he's come up with a way to stop people looking at pornography on public library computers - name them and shame them. Quincy Councilor Daniel Raymondi has asked Mayor Thomas Koch to make public a list of people who have viewed pornography on library computers within the past year. The council unanimously approved a resolution on the idea last week. Library director Ann McLaughlin tells The Patriot Ledger that using library computers to access porn is against policy, and violators are given two warnings before they are banned. She says she's not sure publicly naming violators would work. A spokesman for the mayor says the city's legal department is reviewing Raymondi's request. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/...n6629651.shtml ![]() Regular Domains Beat Smut Sites at Hosting Malware John Leyden New research pours scorn on the comforting but erroneous belief that Windows surfers who avoid smut and wares on the web are likely to avoid exposure to malware. A study by free anti-virus firm Avast found 99 infected legitimate domains for every infected adult web site. In the UK, Avast found that more infected domains contained the word "London" (such as the blog section of http://kensington-london-hotels.co.uk) than the word "sex". Among the domains labelled as infected by Avast was the smart phones section of the Vodafone UK website. The mobile phone operator's site contained a malicious JavaScript redirect script that attempted to take advantage of an unpatched Windows Help and Support Centre flaw (CVE-2010-1885) to infect the machines of visiting surfers. HTML files from sub-domain blackberry.vodafone.co.uk still contain malicious code at the time of writing but point to a site containing the attack payload site that has been pulled offline. "Users browsing Vodafone domain should be safe - until new hack/updated hack will be performed," Avast researcher Miloslav Korenko told The Reg. "This may happen in the same way as the first hack. "Of course, the Blackberry section of Vodafone.co.uk website needs to be cleaned as well - to prevent future attack similar to this one." We have passed on details of the problem to Vodafone and will update this story as and when we get a response. The type of attack against Vodafone is typical of one in five of the website infections identified by Avast. The anti-virus firm's results were culled from anonymous security incident logs submitted by users of its security software since the middle of last year. Data submitted includes information on the malware type and visited website, from which Avast draws its conclusions that infection of regular legitimate websites is a far more common cause of problems than visits to smut sites. Infected sites recorded by the study include Brazilian software download site Baixaki and a variety of small business websites in Germany. Avast said a declining rate of the infections on ‘adult’ websites during its study emerged as a clear trend. "We are not recommending people to start searching for erotic content but the statistics are clear - for every infected adult domain we identify there are 99 others with perfectly legitimate content that are also infected," commented Avast CTO Ondrej Vlcek. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/30/unsafe_surfing/ ![]() An Unexpected Apple Ally: Porn Industry to Drop Flash Wolfgang Gruener It may seem that Steve Jobs is on a lonely crusade against Adobe’s Flash format with the rest of the industry simply waiting who this battle will turn out. While Adobe is rallying support for Flash, Apple receives support from a rather unexpected ally, the adult film industry. The founder of Digital Playground, one of the porn heavyweights in the U.S., told ConceivablyTech that it will abandon Flash as soon as the desktop browsers fully support HTML 5. We also learned that 3D is just not there yet and that online movie streaming is unlikely to replace Blu-ray discs anytime soon. It may seem that Steve Jobs is on a lonely crusade against Adobe’s Flash format with the rest of the industry simply waiting who this battle will turn out. While Adobe is rallying support for Flash, Apple receives support from a rather unexpected ally, the adult film industry. The founder of Digital Playground, one of the porn heavyweights in the U.S., told ConceivablyTech that it will abandon Flash as soon as the desktop browsers fully support HTML 5. We also learned that 3D is just not there yet and that online movie streaming is unlikely to replace Blu-ray discs anytime soon. Is Flash dead yet? If you ask Apple, Flash is not worth the effort anymore. If you ask Nvidia, Flash is still a huge business opportunity. And Google might agree (or not. I will get to that a bit further down.) Who is right? Critics of Flash typically claim that Adobe’s technology comes with plenty of bugs and a huge overhead that takes a toll on hardware performance, which is especially painful in devices with limited processing horsepower. I have always been careful with those claims as Adobe may be able to fix Flash problems and it clearly sees enough pressure to make Flash a much better platform that can survive. “Survive” may be a strong word, but if you think about it, the current debate has turned into a format war. We have HTML 5, which is generally praised as the next major evolutionary step for HTML that automatically questions the future of Flash. Conceivably, Flash could co-exist next to HTML 5, but if we look at the possibilities that are provided by HTML 5, it is entirely possible that Flash will be obsolete in the not distant future. It is what Steve Jobs said. Flash was great, but it’s really on its way out and it’s time to look for, in Jobs’ words, the next horse to ride. It is a no-brainer to predict that Flash will live and die with content. If Adobe can provide compelling reasons for developers to build Flash apps, Flash may stay with us for a long time. But if Apple is able to ignite a format war that turns into an either-or decision for developers (no developer will voluntarily develop for more platforms than absolutely necessary), which is the format that is likely to win? The adult film industry was able to influence and help win format wars in the past. It was the critical factor when VHS won over Beta and it is an open secret that Blu-ray also gained an advantage over HD-DVD because of porn – as the Playstation 3 indirectly promoted sales of high-res adult movies in much greater volumes than the HD DVD. All major adult film studios in the U.S. stopped producing HD DVDs more than three months before Toshiba announced that it would halt the format. There is a good chance that the adult film industry will have a say in the HTML 5-Flash battle as well. While the industry suffers because of the emergence of tube-websites, it is still estimated that the industry rakes in a combined $13 billion in online revenues every year. Porn remains very popular. According to Alexa.com, among the 100 most popular websites in the U.S., seven are porn-related. International estimates claim that roughly 12% of all websites carry pornographic content. It was natural thought to ask Ali Joone, founder and director of Digital Playground (DP), one of the leading adult film studios in the U.S. for his thoughts on the format debate. Not surprisingly, while many of us are still trying to figure out which way we should go, Joone has already a clear direction for his company: “HTML 5 is the future,” he said. For Joone, it is a simple matter of exposure why HTML 5 will win over Flash. More than two years ago, he began offering content for the iPhone. Since Apple does not allow pornographic content in its App Store and since Safari does not run Flash, DP began taking the HTML 5 route. DP’s HTML 5 streams for mobile devices have been available for more than a year now. Joone said that he is following the Flash integration in Android, but he indicated that it is rather irrelevant to him whether Android will support Flash or not: “Mobile browsers run HTML 5 very well. Flash brings everything to a crawl and has an impact on battery life. With HTML 5, there is no reason to show our content in Flash.” DP is still publishing content in Flash online, since desktop browsers, especially IE8, aren’t ready for HTML 5 yet. “We are waiting for browsers to catch up. As soon as they are ready, we will move everything to HTML 5,” Joone said. He noted that he was grateful for what Flash has delivered, but said that it was “just a matter of time” until Flash disappears. “It’s the next passing of the torch.” Joone’s thoughts add more and possibly unbiased perspective to the Flash-HTML 5 discussion. It would be foolish to underestimate the influence of the adult film industry and I wonder how Adobe will react to this trend. And interesting side aspect is, by the way, Google. Google has voiced its support for Flash, even if it has remained unclear whether there was a business reason behind that decision or whether Eric Schmidt simply wants to annoy Steve Jobs. However, it is a fact that Google Chrome has become a bulky browser due to the integration of Flash (and Adobe PDF in its latest Chrome developer version) and this may be a very high price to pay for the benefit to be able patch Flash security issues with universal Chrome updates. Perhaps too high. Adobe should not feel too comfortable about Google’s opinion on Flash, as the company is already enthusiastically promoting HTML 5 to developers and its YouTube division an HTML 5 player already out in the market. Online video distribution will not replace Blu-ray There is also a huge debate about the opportunity of online video distribution and a trend that could eliminate Blu-ray before it can surpass the DVD. Joone believes that there is no reason to believe that the Blu-ray disc will die anytime soon. While he said that the adoption of Blu-ray is somewhat slower than he initially expected, he noted that Blu-ray sales are increasing steadily. The DVD is still outselling Blu-ray media by at least 2:1, but Joone said that big-budget titles “do very well” on Blu-ray, while mainstream titles cannot convince people to shell out the extra money for a Blu-ray disc. The DVD is still important, but “it’s still pretty expensive to playback Blu-ray media and not a lot of PCs come with Blu-ray drives,” Joone said. DP found that a customer who downloads movies is a very different customer than someone who buys physical media. The company has been offering digital downloads for about five years and is now selling about half of its content online and half on “finished” media. Online distribution is especially used by people who want immediate access to content, those who do not want the discs mailed to them because of privacy reasons and those who simply can’t get the media because of legal restrictions in their country. But you can’t share downloads, which is why Joone believes optical media are here to stay and why digital and physical media are complementary for now. “It’s just like a book. You can give it to a friend. You can’t do that with a digital version.” Personal space: The iPhone There is an interesting implication of the iPhone. Apple likes to see the iPhone “clean”. But DP in fact sees quite some demand for its content on the iPhone – and the iPad. “There is an instant gratification involved when you download content to the iPhone. We were surprised how loyal iPhone and especially iPad owners are. 70% of our customers are returning customers. They spend a lot of money,” Joone said. Some may argue how much gratification is possible on a 3.5” screen. But Joone argues that the reason why people like to watch adult content on a phone ahs to do with personal space. “First there was the TV. Then there was the PC, which is now shared by the entire family and it’s not personal anymore. The phone is very personal to us, which is why our content works on this platform.” 3D: Not yet When HD was the hot topic, some of us were wondering whether there are things you really don’t want to see in HD. That question may come back for 3D. However, it may be a bit early to ask that question now. Joone said that DP has been playing with 3D content – there has been “R&D” and some scenes were shot in 3D. “It looks cool,” he said. “But we watched it on a $5000 TV and were wearing $100 glasses.” He compared the experience with a move from “stereo sound to Dolby 5.1” and said that 3D “enhances voyeurism.” However, he wonders whether there is really a market at this time: “People just bought HDTVs. Will they buy now a 3D TV? No. 3D will see a slow adoption. We will support it, but we are at least 2 to 3 years away from mass adoption,” Joone believes. And then there is the question whether people will want to wear glasses while they are watching TV. “In 5 years, we will be able to watch 3D without the need of $100-a-pair glasses. And 3D TVs will cost less than $1000. When that happens, 3D will be a mass experience.” http://www.conceivablytech.com/1553/...to-drop-flash/ ![]() Apple Hopes to Re-enter the Living Room Nick Bilton Knock, Knock. Who’s there? Apple TV? Apple TV who? In September 2006, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, announced news of the company’s latest offering: the Apple TV. Mr. Jobs had high hopes for his latest creation, so high that he told his audience that he hoped the Apple TV would be a fourth leg to the Apple business among PCs and iPods. When the Apple TV was unveiled a few months later in early 2007, Mr. Jobs reiterated these comments in an interview with USA Today: We’ve got two strong legs on our chair today — we have the Mac business, which is a $10 billion business, and music, our iPod and iTunes business, which is $10 billion. We hope the iPhone is the third leg on our chair, and maybe one day Apple TV will be the fourth leg. Yet it wasn’t long before Apple downgraded its hopes of a living room accessory and fourth leg to its business, and Mr. Jobs started referring to the the poor Apple TV as a “hobby.” Now that “hobby” might be heading for a major overhaul. According to several people familiar with Apple’s television-related efforts, the company is working on an update to its television software, and will offer a completely redesigned interface for it. These people refused to be identified because they are not authorized to speak publicly about Apple’s upcoming products. And company officials declined to comment about any plans for the Apple TV or for other television-related products. But the people familiar with Apple’s television efforts offered some details. They said it was not clear whether the company would create an entirely new product as well as updating the software. They also said Apple might base a new television design on its iOS operating system, which is on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. One person familiar with the company’s newly hired employees said Apple has recently hired several user interface and graphics designers who have a background in broadcast design for television. Another person, who recently left Apple and was involved with the company’s television group, said some of the more advanced work on the next version of the TV is not taking place within the Apple TV group, but within another design group in the company—this could signal an entirely new product. If Apple does use the iOS software, it would allow people to download applications like the NetFlix app, which allows streaming movies and TV shows; the ABC TV player; or Hulu’s latest video streaming application. Michael Gartenberg, a partner with the consulting firm Altimeter Group, said he suspects it’s only a matter of time before Apple tries to get back into the living room. “Right now, Apple TV is much more of an extension of iTunes in the sense that one of its sole purposes is to either buy or rent from the iTunes store,” he said. The people familiar with the company’s plans also said that Apple executives are well aware that the battle for the living room is going to be arduous, and that the company must get it right the next time. In 2008, when Mr. Jobs re-launched the failed Apple TV at another Apple event, he said: “All of us have tried. We have, Microsoft, Amazon, TiVo, Netflix, Blockbuster. We’ve all tried to figure out how to get movies, over the internet onto a widescreen TV, and you know what, we’ve all missed. No one has succeeded yet.” Since then, there is even more competition in the living room. Google is readying its latest product, the Google TV, which promises better search and access to the Web on a television. “I suspect it’s only a matter of time before this hobby gets turned into a business, the TV space is too important to ignore,” Mr. Gartenberg said. ”The TV remains one of the last disconnected devices in the household and everyone is trying to figure it out.” http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...e-living-room/ ![]() Hulu Starts Paid Subscription TV Service Jennifer Saba Hulu introduced a new paid subscription service for watching TV shows and movies on mobile devices, game consoles, television sets and computers, and joined other media companies trying to strike a balance between paid and ad supported models. Until now, Hulu has been free over the web supported by advertisements, but offered only selected TV shows and movies. That service will continue to exist after the launch of Hulu Plus. Hulu's subscription service, called Hulu Plus, gives users access to more than 45 full programs of everything from "Glee" to "The Office" for $9.99 a month. Like all media companies, Hulu has its work cut out in trying to get people to pay for programing they are used to watching for free from the broadcast networks. Hulu Plus is hoping to lure consumers to pay a monthly fee for the convenience of watching shows whenever they want. Hulu has the backing of some of the most powerful media brands, with Fox owner News Corp, General Electric Co's NBC Universal, ABC owner Walt Disney Co holding equity stakes in the company. Providence Equity Partners also is a stakeholder. Hulu said it is making its service available on Apple Inc's iPhone, iPad and iTouch, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd's television sets and Blu-ray players. Soon, Hulu Plus will be available on Sony Corp's PlayStation 3. Next year, the service will be available on Microsoft Corp's Xbox 360, Hulu said in its announcement on Tuesday. Netflix Inc already runs a subscription service, while Comcast Corp and Time Warner Inc are developing "TV Everywhere," which will allow people to watch shows on demand for free and on any device provided they are already paying customers. In another case, Time Warner's HBO service Go lets subscribers download episodes of "True Blood" or "Big Love" as a free ad-on. The Hulu subscription plan and partnership with device makers was a widely anticipated move, reported by Reuters and others earlier this month. In a blog post, Hulu chief executive Jason Kilar described Hulu Plus as "incremental and complementary" to the existing Hulu service. He said the subscription plan would make available full seasons of current TV shows, as well as back seasons of hit programs like "Arrested Development" and "The X-Files." "We believe that any lasting solution to the challenge of making TV show discovery and viewing dramatically easier has to work for all three of our customers, and those are our end users, our advertisers, and our content suppliers," Kilar wrote. CBS Corp is the only major broadcast network without an ownership stake in Hulu and currently does not make any of its programs available on the video website. The company declined to comment on whether it would participate in the paid service. (Reporting by Jennifer Saba, editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Carol Bishopric) http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65S5LQ20100629 ![]() How People Watch Movies And TV Online After The Huge Bust On Pirate Sites Nick Saint Earlier this week, the U.S. government struck the first blow in a new campaign against online video piracy, taking down 7 websites that allowed users to stream or download copyrighted content. Despite the rhetoric that came with the announcement, this campaign is not going to have a major impact on the volume of online video piracy. Content creators looking to make money online are always going to be in competition with pirates. Enforcement can swing the equation in their favor, making high quality pirated material a little harder to find, but that's about it. The best way for media companies to fight piracy is to offer attractive ways to pay a reasonable price for online video content. It took a while, but some media companies are finally doing a pretty good job of this. There is also a lot of ad-supported television and film available legally. And, of course, there are still any number of ways for pirates to steal content. Here's an overview. Clicker is a Great Way to Search for Legal Video Content Lots of episodes of television shows are offered up for free on their own websites, or the websites of the channels that air them. Others are available on Hulu or similar web television sites. If you watch much television online, Googling around for it quickly becomes a drag. Clicker is a great one-stop shop for finding this content. You can also search for movies here, but more often than not, there won't be any free options. Paying Up: iTunes and Amazon VOD If you're looking to buy movies and tv shows that have already been released to DVD, the obvious answer is to go to iTunes. There's not much to complain about as far as the depth of offerings and ease of navigation are concerned, and if you have an iPhone or iPad you watch video on, you're saving yourself a step by buying content here. Apple also offers "rentals" -- videos that expire after a limited time -- but the prices don't make much sense unless you never, ever rewatch anything. Amazon, the default choice for buying movies on physical media online, also offers a video-on-demand service. Paying Up: Hulu+ Premium Streaming Hulu has been the dominant destination site for online television for some time, so with the introduction of a premium service, Hulu Plus, this is the service to watch in paid online television. We haven't spent any time with the brand new service yet, but early reviews are glowing. Paying up: Netflix Netflix is a paid media service that even media thieves can get behind. Unlimited streaming comes free with your monthly fee for DVDs in the mail, and the company has added an even cheaper, streaming-only option. The streaming library isn't anywhere near as deep as Netflix's DVD collection, but it's still pretty terrific. It also works on your iPad and on your television through gaming consoles. Stealing: Standalone Bittorrent Clients The bittorrent protocol has been the best thing going for media thieves for a few years now. Bittorrents allow huge files to be distributed between peers without putting heavy strain on uploaders or downloaders, and without the need for heavy duty centralized servers. With bittorrent, you can download a full season of a television show in a matter of hours, and movies in the blink of an eye. With a client like Vuze, downloading and sharing torrents is as user-friendly as older theft-mechanisms like Napster and Kazaa. Stealing: Searching For Torrents Standalone torrent clients are great, but there are more torrents out there than any one of them can find. Sometimes, to find more obscure shows and movies, you need to go out and hunt for them. You can try destination sites like Demonoid, use browser plug-in search tools like Torrent Search Bar, or fall back on good old fashioned Googling. For actually downloading the media from .torrent files you'll still need a client. We like uTorrent. Stealing: File Hosting Sites Websites that provide free storage of uploaded files -- like Megaupload, MediaFire, and RapidShare -- often double as clearinghouses for pirated content. These sites are designed for people to upload large files that would be difficult to send out through email or otherwise, so that they can share them with friend. They generally don't have built-in search engines -- instead, you email the link to those you want to share with. Pirates upload media files, label them clearly, and make them publicly accessible. If you perform a Google search for the movie or show you want to see, and limit it to the domain of one of these services, you're likely to strike gold. The search sounds like a lot of trouble, but download times would obviously be much faster than with torrents or other peer-to-peer formats. Stealing: Live Television A handful of services, such as Justin.tv, let you livestream user-generated video to other users. A lot of people take advantage of this to broadcast television channels live. Channelsurfing.net, among other sites, checks for and links to operational streams for a wide range of channels from all of these services. Sites like this get shut down fairly frequently, but more always spring up. Stealing: Basic Streaming and Download Sites The feds took down seven sites that stream or download movies and television, or link to places that do. But that is merely a drop in the bucket. If you don't want to install a torrent client, can't be bothered searching for more reliable downloads, aren't willing to limit yourself to free legal content, and aren't willing to pay for what you watch, then there are still zillions of these sites out there; we asked around and were directed to Fast Pass TV, Channel 131, and Project Free TV, among many others. The quality is often poor, the pornographic advertising is rampant, and the virus-risk is no doubt high, but the simplest solution still holds a lot of appeal, and we suspect that law enforcement won't be able to keep up with these guys however hard they try. The bottom line: * There is a lot of free, quality television online. Clicker is our favorite tool for navigating it all. Free movies are relatively scarce. * If you're willing to pay, you can easily stream just about anything that has been released to DVD on iTunes, and many things that haven't been, which you can find, again, on Clicker. * If you must steal video online, we highly recommend bittorrent. We happen to use Vuze, but there is no shortage of reviews and comparisons of all the bittorrent solutions out there. * There are plenty of other options out there for thieves, but you should be very careful using any of them. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...ree-2010-6.DTL ![]() 'David After Dentist's Family Made $150,000 Off Their Viral Video 'David After Dentist's Family Made 0,000 Off Their Viral VideoSometimes, drugging children pays off. David Devore—whose laughing gas YouTube video went viral—earned his family $150,000 from his fleeting internet fame. The Business Insider breaks down where the money came from, and how the DeVores spent it. 'David After Dentist's Family Made 0,000 Off Their Viral Video Young 7-year old David DeVore just came out of dental surgery and was sitting in the backseat of his father's car. "Is... is this real life?" David asks his father. The existential question was one of many posed by David in a state of delirium, and his father happened to be recording it all on a Flip camera. Today, the DeVores are asking themselves that same question after raking in close to $150,000 since January 30, 2009 when young David's father—also named David—uploaded the video of his son onto YouTube. "I'd say about $100,000 of that (is from YouTube)," the elder David DeVore tells us over the phone. "The rest is licensing and merchandise." 'David After Dentist's Family Made 0,000 Off Their Viral VideoWhile they weren't too creative with the title of the video, "David After Dentist," the DeVores have been innovative in turning their once-in-a-lifetime viral video into a money-machine. Initially, the video was meant to be shared amongst friends and family. At the time, however, YouTube's only alternative to sharing a video with the world was to share it with just 25 people. So, instead of setting "David After Dentist" as "Private," the video went "Public" for everyone to see. The one seemingly minor decision to make the video available all over the Internet set off a whirlwind of changes for the DeVore family. Within just four days, "David After Dentist" received 3 million views on YouTube and the younger David quickly became an Internet celebrity. His father quit his job in residential real estate (did we mention they live in Florida?), and the family started selling t-shirts featuring cartoon drawings of their son post-dental surgery. The DeVores, however, say the licensing deals for their video fell right into their laps. Their largest deal came from a Vizio Super Bowl ad featuring several other Internet celebrities, such as the "Numa Numa Guy." In total, they received around $8,000 and young David DeVore, already used to the on-screen exposure, was seen by millions during the biggest game of the year. The DeVores revealed to us that they just signed a deal to make medical scrubs for dentists, and they're also looking for deals with other dental products in the future. "We'd love it if Crest or Colgate would sponsor the website," David tells us. While his family is busy finding ways to monetize off the video's success, the younger David is just trying to live like a normal 9-year old kid. After finishing the 3rd grade on the honor roll, David is on summer break and just attended football camp in Tampa Bay. He is also taking guitar lessons though that doesn't necessarily translate to more on-camera time for the young viral star. "He's not interested in becoming a TV star, he's just a regular kid," his father tells us. "He's got other things that interest him." The father speaks very highly of his wife and two sons, and he is extremely grateful for the video's wild success. "We do look at it as a blessing, in a crazy 21st century way," says David. "It's allowed me to have the flexibility and freedom to be with my family." In addition, the DeVores have donated close to a total of $7,000 to their church, David's school, a local dentist, and Operation Smile—an NGO dedicated to healing facial deformities such as cleft lip. They're also open to posting videos of aspiring musicians or performers looking for exposure onto their YouTube channel which, according to David, still attracts 100,000 - 125,000 views a day. http://gawker.com/5575665/david-afte...ir-viral-video ![]() Technology Innovator’s Mobile Move Jenna Wortham The film “2001: A Space Odyssey” presents a dramatic vision of the future, where sentient robots double as secretaries, performing daily tasks and simple services for their human masters. Now, SRI International, the research institute, is hoping to bring the concept of virtual personal assistants closer to reality — without the malevolent malfunctions, of course. “We are looking to augment human capability,” said Norman Winarsky, vice president for licensing and strategic programs at SRI. “But with artificial intelligence.” Established in 1946 by Stanford University, SRI created early prototypes of the computer mouse and the technologies involved in ultrasound and HDTV. Although SRI does roughly 80 percent of its work for the federal government, many of its technologies have been adapted for commercial purposes. Recently, the institute has set its sights on the mobile phone and Web market, especially on creating applications that perform personal functions. “We have companies in every space: drug discovery, flexible circuits, new medical devices, solar, clean tech,” said Mr. Winarsky, who oversees the establishment of new companies that are spun off from SRI. “But right now, half of the companies we’re thinking of creating are strongly related to virtual personal assistants.” SRI’s newest venture is a Web-based personalized news feed, Chattertrap, that monitors what people are reading to learn what they like, and then serves up articles and links that suit their interests. Another recent project is a mobile application, Siri, that allows people to perform Web searches by voice on a cellphone. Siri users can speak commands like “find a table at an Italian restaurant for six at 8 tonight,” and the application can translate the request and use GPS functions and search algorithms to find an answer. Siri’s software is sophisticated enough that over time, it can even remember if someone prefers places that serve Northern Italian cuisine, rather than Sicilian, and make recommendations around that preference. The application has already been a big hit; in April, Apple acquired Siri for a price said to be as high as $200 million. But some analysts wonder whether SRI will be able to duplicate this kind of success. Variations on the virtual personal assistant concept have been around for a while. Two services, for example — Remember the Milk and Jott — are types of electronic crutches intended to help users be more efficient at ticking off items in their daily to-do lists. But SRI is betting that its expertise in artificial intelligence will help make software that can break away from the pack. And it has high hopes that Chattertrap will be as successful as Siri. “The popular news sites aren’t always the most interesting,” said Gary Griffiths, one of the two entrepreneurs SRI recruited to guide Chattertrap. “But by using technology to evolve with you as you use it, watching what you’re doing and giving more of what you like and less of what you’re ignoring, we can create a very personal information service.” Although Chattertrap is in a limited test period right now, the company hopes to allow more users later this summer and release the product in its entirety by the end of the year. Chattertrap has already caught the eye of Li Ka-shing, a Chinese billionaire who has invested in Facebook and the music-streaming service Spotify. Mr. Li recently led a $1.5 million round of venture financing in the Chattertrap project. SRI’s newfound interest in mobile and Web applications was born, in part, from a research project commissioned by the Defense Department to develop software that can learn, in an effort to create a more efficient way for the military to communicate and stay organized in the field. The project’s underlying technology, a combination of adaptive machine learning and natural-language processing, has spawned several offshoots. Each year, SRI tests the marketability of roughly 2,000 technology ventures, but typically only three or four are ever established as independent businesses. Charles S. Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research who follows the mobile industry, said SRI was tapping into the mobile market at a time when the need to simplify searching is greater than ever. “The old paradigm of having a desktop computer in front of you with a large screen to search around for what you want is going away,” Mr. Golvin said. “More and more, the information you want online is coming from the palm of your hand.” Since most mobile phones have small, cramped screens and tiny keyboards, voice-activated search and speech recognition become much more powerful, Mr. Golvin said. “It’s a very compelling offer for a mobile company,” he said. In addition, companies like Apple and Google are sizing up the market opportunity for location-based search and the potential advertising opportunities that come with it, said Brent Iadarola, director of mobile research at Frost & Sullivan. “The acquisition that Apple has made provides powerful clues as to what the mobile landscape will look like in the future,” Mr. Iadarola said. “When you’re in a mobile environment there’s a higher propensity to spend, and tying that into mobile advertising could be lucrative.” Still, he said, it’s not clear yet whether SRI can recreate the same type of successes it had with Siri with its future virtual personal assistants. “That was hitting it out of the ballpark, in my opinion,” he said. “I don’t know if they can replicate that.” Mr. Winarsky said the intellectual property licensed to Apple as part of the acquisition of Siri is a fraction of what has been generated by the institute. “Siri is the first and in some cases, the simplest, of what we’ll do,” he said. Mr. Winarsky said SRI was in the early stages of determining what will be the next start-up to become an independent company. One area he is particularly excited about is translation, he said. “Virtually every industry and platform has a need for translation services,” he said. In addition, he said, a virtual personal assistant could be of great use to the health industry and patients, by helping figure out which procedures are covered by insurance or quickly finding and booking a doctor’s appointment. “We’ll only be able to tell in 20 years,” he said. “But I truly believe this is the dawn of a new era of artificial intelligence. It is on the vanguard of a great revolution in computer science.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/technology/28sri.html ![]() Justices Take Broad View of Business Method Patents John Schwartz The door to the patent office should remain open to those who create methods of doing business, the Supreme Court said in a long-awaited decision released on Monday. The plaintiffs in the case, Bernard L. Bilski and Rand A. Warsaw, tried to patent a system that institutions like businesses and schools could use to hedge the seasonal risks of buying energy. The United States Patent and Trademark Office denied their 1997 application for a patent, and they filed suit. The narrow question at issue in Bilski, et al., v. Kappos, No. 08-964, was whether a patent should be granted on processes that do not meet what is known as the “machine-or-transformation” test — that is, the process is not tied to a particular machine or does not change a particular article into a different state or thing. The suit names David Kappos, the director of the Patent and Trademark Office when their application was denied. But the questions during oral arguments in November made it clear that several justices were skeptical not only of the specific question at issue, but of many elements of modern patent law that dealt with business methods and other intangible things. Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked whether there could be a patent on a method of speed dating, while Justice Stephen G. Breyer asked whether he should be able to obtain a patent for his “great, wonderful, really original method of teaching antitrust law” that “kept 80 percent of the students awake.” By the end of the oral arguments, it seemed clear that the court would be narrowing patent law in its final decision — the only question was how much. The answer was long in coming. The case, argued on November 9, was among the last decisions released in the term. The delay so vexed the patent bar that it became a running joke among court watchers. Last Thursday, when the decision still had not appeared, the SCOTUSblog, a leading chronicler of Supreme Court activities, joked that “The court has voted unanimously to drive patent lawyers crazy.” Those who studied the oral arguments may have expected the court to take a broad view and even knock down the notion of patents on business methods and similarly intangible things — perhaps even stating that computer software could not be patented. The decision did not go nearly so far. The court determined that the patent office was right in denying the Bilski patent application, which it referred to as “an unpatentable abstract idea." The justices differed somewhat in their view of the legal reasoning to justify that decision. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the author of the majority opinion, was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito Jr. in saying that the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was wrong to say in 2008 that the “machine or transformation” test was the only appropriate test for patenting a process like the one in Bilski, and the justices did not take on the broad concept of whether business methods could be patented. The majority opinion stated that “a business method is simply one kind of ‘method’ that is, at least in some circumstances, eligible for patenting,” while adding that the law “does not suggest broad patentability of such claimed inventions.” Justice Antonin Scalia joined in most of the opinion, and four other justices — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, John Paul Stevens and Justice Sotomayor — joined in the result, with a concurrence written by Justice Stevens. Justice Scalia joined in a separate concurrence written by Justice Breyer. The majority opinion was just 16 pages, while Justice Stevens’ concurrence ran 47 pages. Many court analysts had suggested that Justice Stevens had written his opinion as the majority opinion with the intent of causing a more sweeping change to the law, but had lost votes to those who favored a narrower result. He wrote that “the court is quite wrong, in my view, to suggest that any series of steps that is not itself an abstract idea or law of nature may constitute a ‘process’ ” under the law that may be patentable. The court’s logic, he said, “can only cause mischief.” The better result, he said would have been to declare flatly that “business methods are not patentable.” The lawyer who represented Mr. Bilski and Mr. Warsaw, J. Michael Jakes, said that he and his clients were “disappointed by today’s decision” because they believed that the hedging method should have been patentable. “We are pleased,” he continued, with the broader message of the case — that business methods could be patented, and that process patents would not be limited to the machine-or-transformation test. He said that the Bilski/Warsaw patent application would be resubmitted. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/bu.../29patent.html ![]() Google Tweaks Rerouting in Fight for China Business Melanie Lee and Emma Graham-Harrison Google Inc said it will stop automatically redirecting Web searchers in China to an uncensored portal in Hong Kong as it hopes to convince Beijing to renew its operating license in the world's largest Internet market. Google's unexpected announcement comes ahead of Wednesday's deadline when the Internet giant's license is up for renewal. "It's clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable, and that if we continue redirecting users, our Internet Content Provider license will not be renewed," Chief Legal Officer David Drummond wrote in a blog, posted late on Monday night in the United States. "Without an ICP license, we can't operate a commercial website like Google.cn so Google would effectively go dark in China." Users are now required to click anywhere on the Google.cn page in order to get redirected to the Google Hong Kong search site, instead of being automatically rerouted. Three months ago, Google closed its China-based search service and began rerouting traffic to an unfiltered search site in Hong Kong, drawing harsh comments from Beijing that raised doubts about the company's future in China. Google, which battles Baidu in China's 380 million user strong Internet market, said in January it might quit the country over censorship and after it was hit by a sophisticated hacking attack that it said came from within China. "China, with its business potential, is a hard market to give up," said Cao Jun Bo, chief analyst at Beijing-based technology research firm iResearch. The ICP license is needed by every China-based website to operate in China. It is renewed every year by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, although industry sources said the process is largely procedural and it is very rare for an ICP license be to revoked at the point of renewal. Google has already started taking a small number of users to a Google.cn site that offers a link to Google.com.hk, rather than directly to the Hong Kong page. The new Google page is extremely simple, with an image of the Google logo and a non-functioning search box. Below are short messages saying "We have already moved to google.com.hk" and "Please save our new website." Clicking on much of the page redirects users to the Hong Kong site. The Hong Kong search engine does not however offer users inside China unfettered access to information the government wants blocked, as domestic firewalls prevent connections to many websites that Beijing objects to. The Google.hk.com site is also periodically unavailable from mainland China, and searches can be unstable. Google's mobile operating system, Android, which is gaining traction, is among Google's high potential operations in China. China Mobile has released smartphones into the China market using Android, and Credit Suisse analyst Wallace Cheung expects it to one day become the most popular mobile operating system in China. On Tuesday, China's Foreign Ministry declined comment on Google's decision to end automatic rerouting, but Drummond said he hoped it would be acceptable to the Chinese government. It is unlikely Google would have moved without some blessing from Beijing, and there certainly would have been negotiations about the change, said iResearch analyst Cao. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in March, Google's co-founder, Sergey Brin, had said the original decision to reroute users to the Hong Kong site was a solution indirectly proposed to the firm by the Chinese government. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment further on the details of the negotiations with Beijing. But Google, which runs two research centers and has several hundred employees in China, may already have paid a price, in lost talent, for its spat with the government. It has seen an exodus of executives at its China operations since the dispute flared up, as well as from partners collected under the umbrella of its advertising AdSense program. "It seems clear they want to have some engagement or business in China. But they are at a point right now where an increasing number of partners and AdSense partners are leaving Google," said Mark Natkin, managing director of Marbridge Consulting. Natkin said at least 3 other licenses for Google business units in China are due for renewal in June. Its wide range of services could also bring other challenges in dealing with China's authorities, who are tightly focused on control. (Additional reporting by Michael Wei; Editing by Anshuman Daga) http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65S1IQ20100629 ![]() Google's China Troubles Continue; Congress Examines U.S. Investment in Chinese Censorship In his latest blog post, Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond reports that Chinese authorities aren't happy with the automatic redirection of Google.cn to Hong Kong. They are threatening not to renew Google's Internet Content Provider license, which is required to legally operate any kind of Internet business in China. In an attempt to thread the legal needle, Drummond says Google.cn will now lead to a landing page which - if you click anywhere on that page - takes the user to the uncensored Google.com.hk. This is Google's convoluted way of adjusting Google.cn so that it remains technically in compliance with Chinese law while still sending Chinese users to an uncensored site. Now they just have to click through an extra page to get to the results. It's unclear whether this will be acceptable to the Chinese authorities. It really depends on how secure or insecure they're feeling these days. In the meantime, the new landing page is a signal to Chinese users that they may want to remember Google.com.hk just in case Google.cn ceases to work, or update their browser bookmark. What will happen next? Any one of four scenarios is possible: 1. The Chinese government renews Google's ICP license and Google.com.hk remains unblocked. Google.cn remains just a landing page which sends users to Google.com.hk when they click anywhere on the page. While Google.com.hk remains unblocked, though specific searches containing sensitive words will continue to be blocked. Nothing has changed except that users have to click through an extra page before they can start searching. 2. The Chinese government renews Google's ICP license but blocks Google.com.hk. People can get to the landing page via Google.cn, but after clicking on it they get an error message in their browser. Users who don't know how to use circumvention tools will no longer be able to continue accessing Google's uncensored search (unless they know to go to Google.com which as of now, I believe, remains unblocked). 3. The Chinese government does not renew Google's ICP license but does not block Google.com.hk. Google.cn will no longer work. Chinese Internet users will be able to access Google.com.hk if they happen know enough to type a different URL into their browser. 4. The Chinese government does not renew Google's ICP license and also blocks Google.com.hk. In this case, users will only be able to access the Hong Kong-based uncensored search if a) they know about the Google.com.hk URL and b) know how to use proxy servers or circumvention tools. Which one do you predict? Let me know in the comments section if you'd like. Meanwhile, it just so happens that tomorrow the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission will be holding a hearing on "China's Information Control Practices and the Implications for the United States." I've been asked to testify on Baidu's role in China's Internet censorship system and the role played by U.S. investment in Chinese Internet censorship. My written testimony can be downloaded here (PDF). I begin by describing China's recent political innovation which I call networked authoritarianism. I then explain how the private sector in general - and Baidu in particular - fits into this system. I discuss the impact of Google's withdrawal from China, then conclude with some comments about the role of U.S. investment. Here is my conclusion: Quote:
![]() In Faulty-Computer Suit, Window to Dell Decline Ashlee Vance After the math department at the University of Texas noticed some of its Dell computers failing, Dell examined the machines. The company came up with an unusual reason for the computers’ demise: the school had overtaxed the machines by making them perform difficult math calculations. Dell, however, had actually sent the university, in Austin, desktop PCs riddled with faulty electrical components that were leaking chemicals and causing the malfunctions. Dell sold millions of these computers from 2003 to 2005 to major companies like Wal-Mart and Wells Fargo, institutions like the Mayo Clinic and small businesses. “The funny thing was that every one of them went bad at the same time,” said Greg Barry, the president of PointSolve, a technology services company near Philadelphia that had bought dozens. “It’s unheard-of, but Dell didn’t seem to recognize this as a problem at the time.” Documents recently unsealed in a three-year-old lawsuit against Dell show that the company’s employees were actually aware that the computers were likely to break. Still, the employees tried to play down the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at risk. Even the firm defending Dell in the lawsuit was affected when Dell balked at fixing 1,000 suspect computers, according to e-mail messages revealed in the dispute. The documents chronicling the failure of the PCs also help explain the decline of one of America’s most celebrated and admired companies. Perhaps more than any other company, Dell fought to lower the price of computers. Its “Dell model” became synonymous with efficiency, outsourcing and tight inventories, and was taught at the Harvard Business School and other top-notch management schools as a paragon of business smarts and outthinking the competition. “Dell, as a company, was the model everyone focused on 10 years ago,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor of international business administration at Harvard. “But when you combine missing a variety of shifts in the industry with management turmoil, it’s hard not to have the shine come off your reputation.” For the last seven years, the company has been plagued by serious problems, including misreading the desires of its customers, poor customer service, suspect product quality and improper accounting. Dell has tried to put those problems behind it. In 2005, it announced it was taking a $300 million charge related, in part, to fixing and replacing the troubled computers. Dell set aside $100 million this month to handle a potential settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over a five-year-old investigation into its books, which will most likely result in federal accusations of fraud and misconduct against the company’s founder, Michael S. Dell. The problems affecting the Dell computers stemmed from an industrywide encounter with bad capacitors produced by Asian PC component suppliers. Capacitors are found on computer motherboards, playing a crucial role in the flow of current across the hardware. They are not meant to pop and leak fluid, but that is exactly what was happening earlier this decade, causing computers made by Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Apple and others to break. According to company memorandums and other documents recently unsealed in a civil case against Dell in Federal District Court in North Carolina, Dell appears to have suffered from the bad capacitors, made by a company called Nichicon, far more than its rivals. Internal documents show that Dell shipped at least 11.8 million computers from May 2003 to July 2005 that were at risk of failing because of the faulty components. These were Dell’s OptiPlex desktop computers — the company’s mainstream products sold to business and government customers. A study by Dell found that OptiPlex computers affected by the bad capacitors were expected to cause problems up to 97 percent of the time over a three-year period, according to the lawsuit. As complaints mounted, Dell hired a contractor to investigate the situation. According to a Dell filing in the lawsuit, which has not yet gone to trial, the contractor found that 10 times more computers were at risk of failing than Dell had estimated. Making problems worse, Dell replaced faulty motherboards with other faulty motherboards, according to the contractor’s findings. But Dell employees went out of their way to conceal these problems. In one e-mail exchange between Dell customer support employees concerning computers at the Simpson Thacher & Bartlett law firm, a Dell worker states, “We need to avoid all language indicating the boards were bad or had ‘issues’ per our discussion this morning.” In other documents about how to handle questions around the faulty OptiPlex systems, Dell salespeople were told, “Don’t bring this to customer’s attention proactively” and “Emphasize uncertainty.” “They were fixing bad computers with bad computers and were misleading customers at the same time,” said Ira Winkler, a former computer analyst for the National Security Agency and a technology consultant. “They knew millions of computers would be out there causing inevitable damage and were not giving people an opportunity to fix that damage.” Mr. Winkler served as the expert witness for Advanced Internet Technologies, which filed the lawsuit in 2007, saying that Dell had refused to take responsibility for 2,000 computers it sold A.I.T., an Internet services company. A.I.T. said that it had lost millions of dollars in business as a result. Clarence E. Briggs, the chief executive of A.I.T., declined to comment on the lawsuit. Some of the documents in the case that were sealed under a protective order became public this month. Those documents show that after A.I.T. complained, Dell representatives looked at the failed computers and contended that A.I.T. had driven many of the computers too hard in a hot, confined space. Dell’s sales representatives discussed trying to sell A.I.T. more expensive computers as a resolution. Jess Blackburn, a Dell spokesman, said the company would not comment on pending litigation. Lawyers for Dell deny A.I.T.’s claims, and contend that A.I.T. has cherrypicked and misinterpreted documents in the case. Dell’s lawyers wrote in a response to A.I.T.: “There was a Nichicon problem, and it affected different customers in different ways.” In addition to the charge, Dell extended its warranty on the systems and often replaced computers when customers complained. (In 2007, Dell restated its earnings for 2003 to 2006, as well as the first quarter of 2007, and lowered its sales and net income totals for that period. An audit revealed that Dell employees had manipulated financial results to meet growth targets.) But, as Dell did not recall the computers, many of Dell’s OptiPlex customers may be unaware that they had problematic computers or realize why their computers broke. A.I.T. says in court documents that the faulty capacitors touched off a variety of other problems that were often misdiagnosed. Dell could potentially face a raft of new complaints from some of its biggest customers. Crucially, in their complaints to Dell in the lawsuit, customers describe losing valuable information when their computers malfunctioned. Dell, by contrast, denied that that the capacitor issue had caused data loss. Dell’s supply chain had always stood out as one of its important assets. The company kept costs low by limiting its inventory and squeezing suppliers. If prices for components changed, Dell could react more quickly than its competitors, offering customers the latest parts at the lowest cost. But the hundreds of Dell internal documents produced in the lawsuit show a company whose supply chain had collapsed as it failed to find working motherboards for its customers, including the firm representing Dell in the lawsuit, Alston & Bird. According to a person who saw Dell’s 2005 internal communications, company executives carefully devised a public relations policy around the OptiPlex situation. Mr. Dell and Kevin B. Rollins, then Dell’s chief executive, were told that the news media would be informed of Dell’s commitment to fix any systems that failed, that Dell was working with customers to resolve problems in the most effective manner possible and that the problems posed no safety or data loss risk. Carey Holzman, a computer expert who investigated the capacitor problems and collected photos from people with broken motherboards, had a different take on the safety situation. “Of course it’s dangerous,” Mr. Holzman said. “Having leaking capacitors is a huge problem.” He found that the capacitor problems could cause computers to catch fire. As late as 2008, after Mr. Dell had replaced Mr. Rollins and returned as chief executive, Dell continued to circulate internal memorandums trying to deal with the fallout from the capacitor situation. Dell salespeople, according to the lawsuit, fretted that technology directors at companies who used to buy from Dell could “justify their job” by advising their companies of Dell’s PC failures and recommending the purchase of H.P. and Lenovo computers. To counter such lingering bad impressions, Dell salespeople were told to emphasize that the company’s direct model allowed it to identify and fix problems faster than competitors. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/te...gy/29dell.html ![]() Cisco Plans an Android-Based Business Tablet The Cius will sport more networking capabilities than the iPad, plus videoconferencing and keyboard/mouse support Agam Shah Cisco Systems has announced the Cius tablet, a handheld device designed to help users run business applications and communicate in real time. It will use the Google Android OS, feature a 7-inch touch screen and 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, weighs just over 1.5 pounds, and provide about eight hours of battery life, according to Cisco. Cisco calls the Cius a "business tablet," and also a virtual desktop designed to access cloud computing services. Pricing is not yet final but should be under $1,000, the company said. Some units will be available this fall, though general availability is not expected until early 2011. The Cius will sport 802.11a/b/g/n (Wi-Fi) and Bluetooth wireless networking capabilities. It will be able to connect to 3G mobile broadband networks, and support for 4G will be available at a later date, Cisco said. The device will include a Micro-USB port, as well as 32GB of flash storage and support for Secure Digital cards. The tablet also will come with advanced communication capabilities that work with Cisco's unified communications and collaboration tools. It will be able to quickly establish instant-message sessions, voice calls, and videoconferencing sessions, Cisco claimed. The device will interoperate with Cisco's TelePresence videoconferencing system and work with Cisco applications including Cisco Quad, Cisco Show, and WebEx tools. On campuses, the tablet will be dockable into the HD Soundstation, which provides wired networking connectivity for a full desktop experience, according to Cisco's Web site. The docking station can also display high-definition content from the tablet on a connected monitor. Users will also be able to connect USB or Bluetooth keyboards and mice to the docking station for a traditional desktop experience. The Cius will come with a front-facing high-definition video camera that can record 720p video at 30 frames per second and a 5-megapixel camera at the back that can capture high-quality video and still images. Users will be able to engage in live video calls when the tablet is docked or being held, the company said. http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/...ess-tablet-755 ![]() Stores See Google as Ally in E-Book Market Brad Stone Independent bookstores were battered first by discount chains like Barnes & Noble, then by superefficient Web retailers like Amazon.com. Now the electronic book age is dawning. With this latest challenge, these stores will soon have a new ally: the search giant Google. Later this summer, Google plans to introduce its long-awaited push into electronic books, called Google Editions. The company has revealed little about the venture thus far, describing it generally as an effort to sell digital books that will be readable within a Web browser and accessible from any Internet-connected computing device. Now one element of Google Editions is coming into sharper focus. Google is on the verge of completing a deal with the American Booksellers Association, the trade group for independent bookstores, to make Google Editions the primary source of e-books on the Web sites of hundreds of independent booksellers around the country, according to representatives of Google and the association. The partnership could help beloved bookstores like Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore.; Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, Calif.; and St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York. To court the growing audience of people who prefer reading on screens rather than paper, these small stores have until now been forced to compete against the likes of Amazon, Apple and Sony. The Google deal could give them a foothold in this fast-growing market and help them keep devoted customers from migrating elsewhere. “Google has shown a real interest in our market,” said Len Vlahos, chief operating officer of the booksellers association, which has over 1,400 member bookstores. “For a lot of reasons, it’s a very good fit.” Google will probably face an uphill battle in its effort to enter the already crowded e-books field. The company has little experience as a retailer. It also has far fewer consumer credit card numbers in its database than either Amazon or Apple, and its online payment system, Google Checkout, has not been widely adopted. Nevertheless, Google is promoting its e-book plan as a fundamentally different and more “open” alternative to its rivals’ stores. Though it will act as a retailer and sell books from its own site, it will also behave like a wholesaler and allow independent bookstores and other partners to sell its e-books on their own sites. People who buy Google e-books will not be locked into any particular reading devices or book formats, the company said. Books bought from Apple’s iBookstore, by contrast, can be read only on Apple devices. “I don’t think anyone who has bought an e-reader in the last several years has really intended to only buy their digital books from one provider for life,” said Tom Turvey, Google’s director of strategic partnerships, who heads the Google Editions project. Mr. Turvey said that customers would be able to get access their books, or buy new ones, from anywhere in the world by entering their Google credentials. And he said Google would introduce the service with a broad selection of hundreds of thousands of books, including trade fiction, nonfiction and professional, scholarly and academic titles, including textbooks. Google already has two million books that publishers have made available as part of its Partner Program, which allows Web users to sample lengthy previews of books on Google’s site and other sites. A separate project to scan millions of out of print or hard-to-find library books has been tied up in litigation since 2005. As a wholesaler, Google will play a role similar to that of offline distributors like Ingram Book and Baker & Taylor, which buy books from publishers and resell them to bookstores. Those companies generally keep a single-digit percentage of each sale, and Mr. Turvey said Google would operate along similar lines. Independent bookstores seem to believe that Google is more interested in working through them than being a direct retailer. In fact, they are banking on it. The e-book wave has forced such bookstores to confront a complex and rapidly changing field. Back in 1999, Powell’s in Portland, for example, made a bet on selling e-books for the pioneering e-book company Rocket Book, only to see it go out of business. More recently, with the help of Ingram Digital, Powell’s has tried selling e-books on its Web site in a jumble of formats provided by the likes of Adobe, Microsoft and Palm. These efforts have yielded little in return, and devices like the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook and Apple iPad have captured readers’ attention. “Google would allow us to play completely outside the device-centric game,” said Darin Sennett, the director of Web development at Powell’s. Mr. Sennett acknowledged that Google would also be a competitor, since it would also sell books from its Web site. But he seemed to believe that Google would favor its smaller partners. “I don’t see Google directly working to undermine or outsell their retail partners,” he said. “I doubt they are going to be editorially recommending books and making choices about what people should read, which is what bookstores do.” He added, “I wonder how naïve that is at this point. We’ll have to see.” Google’s move toward selling digital books coincides with its broader overall shift into selling digital media. Since its inception, Google has made money almost exclusively by placing text advertisements alongside search results and on Web pages. But now rivals like Amazon and, increasingly, Apple are trying to ensconce themselves in people’s lives, and wallets, by storing customers’ movies, TV shows, music and books on their own servers. The companies hope that storing people’s media collections will generate further digital sales while also locking customers into the devices they sell, like the Kindle and iPad. Google has one advantage in these nascent media wars. It can count on a large number of people entering media-related search queries into its search engine — looking for John Irving’s latest novel, for example — and reflexively clicking on the first buying option that is presented. In an interview last week, Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said Google Editions was a “natural outgrowth of us being interested in books and information and working with publishers.” Asked about digital music, he said Google had long avoided the music business because it did not want to enable piracy. But more recently, as Google looks to offer customers more of what they are searching for without having to click elsewhere, he said, “it makes sense to have some sort of facility with music.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/business/30books.html ![]() What ASCAP Doesn't Understand Gigi Sohn For the past several days, we here at Public Knowledge have been sitting back being mildly amused by the dust-up over an ASCAP fundraising letter that sought to demonize Public Knowledge, Creative Commons and EFF as “Copyleft” organizations that want to undermine their “Copyright,” and want “music to be free.” Now the President of the National Music Publishers Association is getting into the fray, giving a speech about 10 reasons why “enemies” like PK have a “extremist, radical anti-copyright agenda.” How very subtle. Of course, anybody who has spent more than 5 minutes on our website or talking to our staff knows that these things are not true - Public Knowledge advocates for balanced copyright and an open Internet that empowers creators and the public. What we oppose are overreaching policies proposed by large corporate copyright holders that punish lawful users of technology and copyrighted works. We have taken artist-centric positions on a number of critical copyright issues which have put us at odds with some of our copyright reform colleagues. For example, PK has supported a level-playing field in the payment of performance royalties and called for copyright holders to sue large scale peer-to-peer infringers directly, as opposed to holding innovators liable for the infringement of others. We have also advocated for changes to the law that would make it easier for online music services to license content from music publishers, leading to greater legal use of music and greater compensation for artists. Finally, and oddly enough, we have emphasized the central role that performance rights organizations like ASCAP could play in a digital world and have praised them for their ability to keep accurate records of who owns what copyright. So frankly, we’re more puzzled by this attack than anything. But the purpose of this post is not to defend ourselves - and thanks to those of you in the blogosphere and elsewhere who have already done so. Instead, I’d like to highlight what I have been hearing from artists big and small over the past several months (including during two trips to Los Angeles) and what ASCAP most certainly knows by now as many of its members rebel against its appeal: despite artists’ legitimate concerns about how much easier it is for their works to be infringed in an Internet age, they are uncomfortable with the constant drive by the movie studios, record studios and music publishers to find new and better ways to punish people and limit their access to copyrighted works. Artists just want to be compensated. Period. They want an open Internet, and believe (as we do) that network-level copyright filtering and throwing people off the Internet based on 3 allegations of copyright infringement (“3 strikes”) are antithetical to this goal. They don’t like digital rights management or other technological locks, either in software or hardware, that limit their fans enjoyment of their works. But despite the clear preference for compensation over punishment, groups that claim to represent artists like ASCAP continue, like their big corporate colleagues, to advocate for the latter, and seem completely bereft of ideas for promoting the former. Why? Probably because the old business model suits them just fine: they collect millions of dollars of royalties on behalf of captive musicians and (mostly) pay them. In a digital world, Do It Yourself is the mantra, with Creative Commons being one of the tools that allows artists to do so. Where does that leave middlemen like ASCAP? Nowhere. The ASCAP fundraising letter has laid bare a truth that many of us have known for a while - that some of the large wealthy organizations that claim to represent artists support policies that are more aligned with their corporate masters. They fear the freedom the Internet brings to artists and are advocating copyright and broadband policies that would tame and enclose the Internet. Of course there are many organizations representing artists who get it: I’m thinking of the Future of Music Coalition, Writers’ Guild of America, West, and the Independent Film and Television Alliance to name a few. They are protective of their members’ copyrights, but are not willing to sacrifice an open Internet or creative culture by proposing scorched earth copyright policies. They are valuable allies who more than ASCAP and their ilk, deserve artists’ support. http://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/...snt-understand ![]() Shorten Copyright and Make it Stick John Gapper When writers, musicians, artists and publishers survey the wreckage of copyright enforcement, they can blame plenty of people - internet service providers (ISPs), companies such as Google and its YouTube arm, peer-to-peer file-sharers - but they are also guilty. Last week's US court ruling striking down Viacom's challenge to YouTube for having hosted hundreds of thousands of copyright-breaching video clips from its properties such as MTV and Comedy Central is further evidence of the weakness of copyright enforcement. Apart from the legal climate, publishers, music companies and Hollywood studios face the bleak reality that they have lost the ethical high ground. Many people now regard it as acceptable to make and publish illegal digital copies, believing the law to be an ass. Even publishers do so. When Rolling Stone magazine obtained its interview with Stanley McChrystal that made him step down as head of US forces in Afghanistan, both Time and Politico published a samizdat copy online before Rolling Stone made it available itself. As David Carr noted in The New York Times, it "amounted to taking money out of a competitor's pocket". Part of the blame for this sorry state of affairs can be pinned on the copyright owners' moment of hubris 12 years ago - the Sonny Bono Act passed by Congress to extend copyright protection (yet again) to a maximum of 95 years. Under US law, Rolling Stone had nearly a century to determine how and where its article was copied; in practice, it got about five minutes. The act - the latest in a long line of copyright term extensions since the US constitution enshrined patent and copyright protection "for limited times" - was passed after heavy lobbying from media companies such as Walt Disney. It saw the danger of characters such as Mickey Mouse falling out of copyright. That law was correctly ridiculed by scholars such as Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University and James Boyle of Duke for overextending monopoly rights and barring swathes of works from the public domain for decades. In contrast, US patents expire 20 years after they are filed. "Current intellectual property policy is overwhelmingly and tragically bad," Prof Boyle wrote in his book The Public Domain , arguing that most holders of copyright gain all the money from a work they will ever do within five or 10 years and the rest of the term is like a one-in-a-million lottery ticket for the rare artist such as J.K. Rowling. Copyright was originally highly circumscribed. The 1710 Statute of Anne gave British writers rights for 14 years (admittedly they tended to die younger in the 18th century). The House of Lords decided in 1774 that perpetual copyright was illegal, later followed by the US constitution. As well as being lengthened, copyright protection has been broadened. US holders used to have to apply for copyright extension but it is often granted automatically now. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, under which Viacom sued YouTube, enshrined digital rights management and copy protection technology. In practice, however, copyright has become a chimera for many artists and publishers since the Sonny Bono Act because it is hard to enforce and unpopular. Efforts to crack down on file-sharing sites through ISPs, for example in the UK Digital Economy Act passed in April, face huge practical difficulties. Last week's ruling by Louis Stanton, a New York judge, that YouTube was not required by the DCMA to do more than take down copyright-infringing clips when alerted to them by Viacom and others, is part of this pattern of copyright leakage. He declared that "the mere knowledge of [infringing] activity in general" did not put YouTube in breach of law. As it happens, I think the judge was wrong and the appeals court is likely to reverse his ruling. It is hard to believe that the Supreme Court, which cracked down on the file-sharing service Grokster in 2005 - and this week declined to narrow the notoriously broad scope of business method patents - would accept that a site can passively await objections to mass copyright infringement. But it leaves us with the absurdity of copyright holders being given ever greater theoretical rights while losing their practical ones. As Prof Lessig wrote in his book Free Culture of commercial piracy: "Despite the many justifications that are offered in its defence, this taking is wrong. No one should condone it and the law should stop it." This remains true, and most artists would, I suspect, take a 20-year copyright term that was rigorously enforced and gave them the rights the law is supposed to grant, in exchange for an imaginary century of ineffective protection. In contrast to the contested nature of copyright, patent law has become less fraught. Patents are limited in length and the drugs industry - at one time under constant attack - not only has generic competition but has found ways to sell drugs cheaply in developing countries. Copyright owners show signs of responding to legal and commercial pressures. Hulu, the US video site run by several television networks, this week unveiled a $10-a-month subscription scheme, part of the industry's effort to give digital consumers what they want. There is no grand bargain on offer to publishers but they should be willing to offer shorter, narrower terms to regain legitimacy. That was the approach they ignored a dozen years ago and it was a terrible strategic blunder. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c446aa38-8...44feabdc0.html ![]() Analysis: Why Silicon Valley Should Fear ACTA Brett Winterford Legal experts mark up "red-lined" suggestions for draft treaty. A group of intellectual property experts have warned that search engines, web hosts and e-commerce sites will be stripped of protections if the proposed draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is endorsed. The ACTA is a trade agreement being forged between the United States and 26 allies including Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and nations within the European Union, which seeks to impose universal obligations around the protection of copyright and other intellectual property rights. The latest round of talks began today in Lucerne, Switzerland. Intellectual property figures in Canada, Europe, New Zealand and Australia have for several years expressed concerns about provisions within the treaty that would make Internet Service Providers liable for the actions of their subscribers, and netizens subject to criminal penalties for the sharing of pirated material. Now, academics and IP experts in America have joined the protest, taking the most recent draft text of the treaty released by ACTA negotiators and "redlining" or "marking up" suggested changes to the document that would make it a better deal for the technology industry and consumers. The group of academics - led by several library groups and IT industry lobby groups, has published the document [PDF] and will provide a draft to the Office of the US Trade Representative - America's team at the ACTA negotiating table. In an interview with iTnews.com.au, prominent intellectual property law expert and co-author of the redline document Jonathan Band told iTnews that Silicon Valley has much to fear from ACTA. "Our high level concern is that ACTA does not reflect the balance in US IP law," he said. "US IP law contains strong protections and strong exceptions. ACTA exports only the strong protections, but not the strong exceptions." Technology companies based in America, he said, rely heavily on exceptions in US law such as "fair use". "For example, search engines copy the entire World Wide Web into their search databases on an ongoing basis," he said. "That copying is permitted in the U.S. under the fair use doctrine. "ACTA would increase the penalties without providing exceptions such as fair use. So, a U.S. search engine could face more exposure overseas than it already does." In some countries, he noted, U.S. search engines have already been found liable for copyright infringement for conduct that would have been deemed lawful in the U.S. To date, damages claims in these cases have been very small. But ACTA seeks to impose statutory damages for breaches of copyright on a global level. Statutory damages are a set, pre-established punishment or fine for any infringement. If a search engine were to be found to have infringed copying an entire database of the World Wide Web for example, with pre-established fines per infringement set in law, the bill could be enormous. Google has already been targeted in copyright infringement suits from news agency Agence France Presse, Belgian newspapers, French filmmakers, photographers and record labels, Web hosts, Band said, would also be in danger as ACTA requires countries to adopt 'third party liability provisions'. These organisations would be responsible, as would an ISP, for the actions of their customers. In the U.S., third party liability is balanced out with 'fair use' such that third party activity is not necessarily considered an infringement. "Put statutory damages together with secondary liability without fair use, and you have a toxic environment for technology companies," Band said. "This ironically can lead to increased liability for US technology companies operating abroad." Band said that while the redline document "reflects the concerns of American entities", he believes the suggested changes "would benefit all technology companies and consumers. "We seek to promote the interests of technology companies and consumers everywhere," he said. Australian legal academic Kimberlee Weatherall has laid out her concerns for how ACTA would impact Australian law for both ISPs and citizens. http://www.itnews.com.au/News/218275...fear-acta.aspx ![]() Until next week, - js. ![]() Current Week In Review ![]() Recent WiRs - June 26th, June 19th, June 12th, June 5th Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved. "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black |
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