Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 12th, '11

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Plaintiffs are suggesting an award that is more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877." – U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood


"There is no realistic way to reconcile mass enforcement and due process." – Report: Media Piracy in Emerging Economies


"The point of copyright protection is to encourage people to create things that will ultimately belong to the public. While the scope and duration of copyright protection has changed over time, one aspect of the copyright system has remained consistent: once a work is placed in the public domain, it belongs to the public, and remains the property of the public – free for anyone to use for any purpose." – Anthony Falzone


"When I lowered the price of The List from $2.99 to 99 cents, I started selling 20x as many copies--about 800 a day. My loss lead became my biggest earner." – John Locke


"Came back home at 8 in the morning after the depressing night...Now, the nuclear power plant has exploded and we might already be exposed to radioactivity. I just don't know what to do, what's coming next, and will I be alive tomorrow?" – Posted on Facebook by 23-year-old female office worker from Tokyo



































March 12th, 2011





Will E-Book Prices & Restrictions Lead to E-Book Piracy?
Audrey Watters

Last week, Random House agreed to the agency price model, the last of the top six publishing companies in the world to do so. The move allowed the publisher's books entry into Apple's iBookstore, something that Steve Jobs touted on stage during the iPad 2 announcement as giving customers a better, more complete e-book catalog from which to shop.

But as many customers have noticed, that more complete e-book catalog doesn't contain a lot of price variation. Indeed, the agency price model lets the publishers set the pricing for their books (rather than allowing retailers to determine the price) and, according to a story in The Guardian, investigations are underway in Europe to determine if the agency model and its highly uniform pricing structure may actually constitute price-fixing and the work of an illegal cartel.

The Uniformly High Price of E-Books

It isn't simply the lack of differentiation between publishers that has some consumers frustrated. It's that that price for e-books - typically around $9.99 - is often a lot higher than other book formats. A thread on Reddit, now boasting almost 300 comments, makes the case:

The Book Thief
Kindle $9.99
Paperback $7.79

A Thousand Splendid Suns
Kindle $12.99
Paperback $9.40

The Kite Runner
Kindle $12.99
Paperback $7.81

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Kindle $11.99
HARDCOVER $11.89

There's no paper, no binding, no shipping, no storage necessary for an e-book. So why the higher price?

A Question of Ethics

As Reddit threads are wont to do, the discussion of spendy e-books quickly changes direction as the first commenter asks, "Is it morally wrong to purchase a paper copy of the book and torrent the ebook?"

That's a good question, I think, and one debated not just by a bevvy of Reddit users in the thread, but answered by the ethicist Randy Cohen in The New York Times last year, who (in case you were wondering) said that pirating a copy of an e-book, one that you already own in print format - was not unethical.

Illegal, yes. Unethical, no.

Before the lawyers unleash the hounds, here's Cohen's justification for his statement: "Author and publisher are entitled to be paid for their work, and by purchasing the hardcover, you did so. Your subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod. Buying a book or a piece of music should be regarded as a license to enjoy it on any platform. Sadly, the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology. Thus you've violated the publishing company's legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you've done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability."

Cohen was roundly taken to task for his response. But his sentiments seem to be echoed by many consumers who are beginning to feel as though that $9.99 price-tag for e-books may be set too high.

A Question of (Digital) History

Randy Cohen's comparison of e-books to MP3s is an interesting one as publishing companies are no doubt loathe to tread what seems to be generally accepted as the historical path that the record industry traversed, in which the move to digitized content meant a downward spiral of profitability (whether that was the result of piracy, as they'd like to have us believe, or of lousy artists signed to recording contracts or of some other factors altogether).

But as someone who owned certain records on LP, then in some cases paid for these same albums again on cassette so I could play them in my car, I admit, I do remember balking when I was expected to purchase the same music a third time around, just to have it on CD, just so I could easily convert it to MP3 or put it on my iPod. Adding to my displeasure, this new medium - the CD - was almost twice the price as the cassettes and records. That, not my wanton desire to destroy the members of Metallica's ability to earn a decent living, was what made piracy appealing.

I have to wonder if we are we headed down this same course with digital books. It isn't as though most book lovers want to deprive authors from earning their keep. "I buy the real book" say many Reddit commenters on the aforementioned thread, "but then I pirate the e-book."

But when we find ourselves, yet again, paying more for a digital copy - one that has none of the materiality of a paperback or hardback, one that has none of the benefits of being able to share this work of art freely with our friends and family - it may be no surprise that we look for other ways to read or watch or listen. When we already own a copy of a beloved book and want a digital copy to tote about on our iPads, the demand for another $9.99 seems all the more ridiculous.

Are We Buying the Content? Or the Content Delivery Mechanism?

Many of the participants in the Reddit thread on e-book pricing question whether, when we buy something, we're buying the content - the novel or the album, for example - or whether we're buying access to a sanctioned content delivery mechanism - a DRM version of that book or record. The publishing and record industry may want to keep those intertwined, but I'm not sure consumers see content the same way.

Artists and publishers are no doubt looking for new business models as we move to digital books and music. The question remains whether or not these models will meet everyone's needs - artists', publishers', consumers'. But it seems just as significant to watch whether or not these new business models work with consumers' ethical codes of conduct, for art, literature, music they feel they should be able to get for free or for cheap or that they already actually own.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...e-book_pir.php





Media Piracy in Emerging Economies

About the Report

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies is the first independent, large-scale study of music, film and software piracy in emerging economies, with a focus on Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Bolivia.

Based on three years of work by some thirty-five researchers, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies tells two overarching stories: one tracing the explosive growth of piracy as digital technologies became cheap and ubiquitous around the world, and another following the growth of industry lobbies that have reshaped laws and law enforcement around copyright protection. The report argues that these efforts have largely failed, and that the problem of piracy is better conceived as a failure of affordable access to media in legal markets.

“The choice,” said Joe Karaganis, director of the project, “isn’t between high piracy and low piracy in most media markets. The choice, rather, is between high-piracy, high-price markets and high-piracy, low price markets. Our work shows that media businesses can survive in both environments, and that developing countries have a strong interest in promoting the latter. This problem has little to do with enforcement and a lot to do with fostering competition.”

Major Findings

• Prices are too high. High prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies are the main ingredients of global media piracy. Relative to local incomes in Brazil, Russia, or South Africa, the retail price of a CD, DVD, or copy of MS Office is five to ten times higher than in the US or Europe. Legal media markets are correspondingly tiny and underdeveloped.
• Competition is good. The chief predictor of low prices in legal media markets is the presence of strong domestic companies that compete for local audiences and consumers. In the developing world, where global film, music, and software companies dominate the market, such conditions are largely absent.
• Antipiracy education has failed. The authors find no significant stigma attached to piracy in any of the countries examined. Rather, piracy is part of the daily media practices of large and growing portions of the population.
• Changing the law is easy. Changing the practice is hard. Industry lobbies have been very successful at changing laws to criminalize these practices, but largely unsuccessful at getting governments to apply them. There is, the authors argue, no realistic way to reconcile mass enforcement and due process, especially in countries with severely overburdened legal systems.
• Criminals can’t compete with free. The study finds no systematic links between media piracy and organized crime or terrorism in any of the countries examined. Today, commercial pirates and transnational smugglers face the same dilemma as the legal industry: how to compete with free.
• Enforcement hasn’t worked. After a decade of ramped up enforcement, the authors can find no impact on the overall supply of pirated goods.

http://piracy.ssrc.org/about-the-report/





Supreme Court Deciding Whether Congress May Copyright Public Domain Works
David Kravets

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether Congress may take works out of the public domain and grant them copyright status.

A federal appeals panel, reversing a lower court, ruled in July against a group of orchestra conductors, educators, performers, publishers, film archivists and motion picture distributors who have relied on artistic works in the public domain for their livelihoods. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals set aside arguments that their First Amendment rights were breached because they could no longer exploit the works without paying royalties.

For a variety of reasons, the works at issue, which are foreign and were produced decades ago, became part of the public domain in the United States but were still copyrighted overseas. In 1994, Congress adopted legislation to move the works back into copyright, so U.S. policy would comport with an international copyright treaty known as theBerne Convention.

Some of the works at issue include:

• H.G. Wells’ Things to Come
• Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
• The musical compilations of Igor Fydorovich Stravinsky

The government argued that Congress adopted what was known as “Section 514″ for its “indisputable compliance” with the convention and to remedy “historic inequities of foreign authors who lost or never obtained copyrights in the United States.”

“In other words, the United States needed to impose the same burden on American reliance parties that it sought to impose on foreign reliance parties. Thus, the benefit that the government sought to provide to American authors is congruent with the burden that Section 514 imposes on reliance parties. The burdens on speech are therefore directly focused to the harms that the government sought to alleviate,” the appeals court wrote.

Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project and Stanford University and a plaintiff’s lawyer in the case, urged the justices to take the case.

“The point of copyright protection is to encourage people to create things that will ultimately belong to the public. While the scope and duration of copyright protection has changed over time, one aspect of the copyright system has remained consistent: once a work is placed in the public domain, it belongs to the public, and remains the property of the public – free for anyone to use for any purpose,” he wrote in a blog post.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...t-recopyright/





US Proposals For Secret TPP 'Son Of ACTA' Treaty Leaked; Chock Full Of Awful Ideas
Mike Masnick

We've mentioned a couple of times that now that ACTA is "complete", if not yet approved, USTR negotiators have moved on to what many are calling the son of ACTA in the form of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). The USTR has shown what it's learned from the ACTA negotiations: which is that it can absolutely get away with unprecedented levels of secrecy. It has no problem sharing details with industry representatives, but the public and consumers who will be most impacted by the intellectual property rules found in TPP are kept completely away. However, as with ACTA, there are leaks. KEI has been able to get a leaked version of the current proposal from the USTR, and as we'd been hearing, it really is another industry wish-list of stricter anti-consumer intellectual property rules, that go well beyond current US law. This is the entertainment industry and the pharma industry trying to bypass the actual law-making process and using "friends" within the USTR to get such rules in place via secretive, non-democratic, treaty making processes. It's really a sickening display of crony capitalism and regulatory capture at work. Anyone working in the USTR should be ashamed of this document.

The early reports on TPP was that the USTR would only consider ratcheting up intellectual property laws to more draconian states. It would not even consider the idea of decreasing the already too strict levels of intellectual property laws. It also would not bother with increasing consumer protections or important exceptions to stronger intellectual property law -- even if it's been shown that those exceptions have a much greater impact on the economy than the IP laws themselves.

Some key points:

• It would require that countries participating ban parallel import for any copyright holder who wants it. That is, if a copyright holder says no, countries would have to block your ability to purchase legal and authorized products in one country and import them into another. This is the so-called "grey market" which should be perfectly legal, but which many companies would like to block so they can price things much higher in some countries.
• It would require criminal enforcement for certain cases of circumventing DRM even when there's no copyright infringement, going beyond existing treaties even when there's no copyright infringement. There are some exceptions, but rather than allow countries to determine their own exceptions, it defines the exceptions and actually says countries cannot go beyond those.
• It would impose liability on ISPs for dealing with infringing works that goes well beyond the DMCA. Yes, Hollywood may finally be able to force ISPs to act as their personal business model cops -- something they've been unable to do in the US.
• Along those lines, there would be "legal incentives" for ISPs to go above and beyond that in helping copyright holders.
• Forget privacy. ISPs would be required to identify users on request, going well beyond existing law.
• Expand what is considered patentable, going in the opposite direction of what's needed. Most troubling, it would allow patents on inventions even if the inventions do "not result in the enhancement of the known efficacy of that product." This seems to go against the very purpose of patent law, but the USTR has already shown it couldn't care much less than actually obeying the Constitutional underpinnings of patents or copyright law.
• Continues the troubling and problematic idea that patents must be assumed valid, even if they were only briefly reviewed.
• A requirement to forbid third party opposition of patent applications. This is particularly ridiculous. Allowing third parties to oppose patent applications (as is allowed with trademarks) would certainly help prevent some really bad patent applications from getting through. How can the USTR justify not allowing such a basic concept of letting third parties point out bad patents before they're approved. Especially when you combine this with the "presumption of validity" in patents once granted, it looks like the USTR is trying to increase the rubber stamping of patent approvals.

It's basically a checklist of how to make both copyright and patent law even more anti-innovation. It's pretty much a travesty. No wonder the USTR didn't want this to get out. It's a joke, and they must have known that anyone who actually understands what this really means would laugh at this. That must be why the document is declared classified until four years after the TPP is agreed upon.

Declassify on: Four years from entry into force of the TPP agreement or, if no agreement enters into force, four years from the close of the negotiations.

*This document must be protected from unauthorized disclosure, but may be mailed or transmitted over unclassified e-mail or fax, discussed over unsecured phone lines, and stored on unclassified computer systems. It must be stored in a locked or secured building, room, or container.

Oh yeah, as for things like consumer protections or safeguards for competition? KEI correctly summarizes that they are "weak, meak or missing." That's because this document isn't about enabling competition, innovation or consumer benefit. It's about helping out a few legacy companies who don't want to compete, and who have plenty of job openings ready for the folks involved in these negotiations down the road.

If you find this to be a disgusting display of regulatory capture, done in secret, for the benefit of a few companies, against the basic principles of the free market and consumer rights, you should speak up. The EFF has put together details of which elected officials should be contacted to pressure the USTR to open up these proceedings and to hear from the public on their proposal. They've also set up a form to let you contact your elected official, though I recommend you write your own version of any letter, rather than sticking with the boilerplate. None of my elected representatives are on the target list, but if yours are, please contact them.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...ul-ideas.shtml





BMI Taken Out by Anonymous

Payback is a bitch
John Leyden

Hacktivists affiliated to Anonymous have taken out the website of Broadcast Music Incorporated in a protest against its stance against file-sharing.

The denial of service attack against the US-based performing rights society began late on Wednesday and remains ongoing, leaving its main bmi.com site difficult to access.

Anonymous claimed responsibility for the attack via a notice on a news site used by the loosely-knit 4Chan-spawned hacking collective.

The attack on an entertainment industry website represents a return to the type of attacks that were commonplace last year before the group turned its intention towards financial service firms that severed links with WikiLeaks and others seen as opposed to the whistle-blowing website.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03...nonymous_ddos/





Lime Wire and Music Publishers Settle Copyright Case

The operator of LimeWire, a once-popular file-sharing service shut down last year for copyright infringement, has settled a lawsuit brought by music publishers.

The settlement with Lime Wire covers more than 30 publishers, including units of EMI, Sony and Vivendi. The terms were not disclosed.

These publishers also dismissed claims against New York-based Lime Wire's founder, Mark Gorton. The case was dismissed with prejudice, meaning it cannot be brought again.

"A settlement was reached," a spokeswoman for the National Music Publishers Association said. "The parties worked hard to achieve a settlement that is a good result for all involved."

Music publishers sued Lime Wire last June, after a U.S. judge found the New York-based company wrongfully assisted users in pirating digital recordings. Wood shut down the service in October.

Thirteen record companies are still pursuing copyright litigation against Lime Wire, seeking possible damages totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.

The companies include Arista, Atlantic, BMG Music, Capital, Elektra, Interscope, Laface, Motown, Priority, Sony BMG, UMG, Virgin and Warner Brothers, court records show. A trial in that case is scheduled for May 2.

Record companies own copyrights to recordings, while publishers can own copyrights to the songs themselves.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Andre Grenon)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...72771P20110308





As Recording Industry Gears Up for Trillion-Dollar (Yes, Trillion) Damages Trial Against Lime Wire, File Sharer Settles with Music Publishers
Nate Raymond

Last June, when a group of music publishing companies sued Lime Wire for copyright infringement, we noted that the former file sharing business had already been battered in a parallel suit by the recording industry, in which Manhattan federal district court judge Kimba Wood found the site and founder Mark Gorton liable for copyright infringement last May.

Since then, the recording industry has continued to pummel Lime Wire, winning an October 2010 court order barring the company from distributing its software. The industry's damages trial is scheduled to begin on May 2, with the recording companies asking for $150,000 per work infringed. That adds up to what Lime Wire's latest lawyers, from Willkie, Farr & Gallagher, say is the "truly staggering" sum of $75 trillion. (No, that's not a typo: $75 trillion.)

So it's easy to see why Lime Wire wanted to streamline its docket via a confidential settlement with the music publishers (the group includes EMI Music Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, and Universal Music Publishing Group). On Monday the two sides filed a stipulation of dismissal. "We are pleased that this litigation is over," a spokeswoman for National Music Publishers Association said in a statement. "The parties worked hard to achieve a settlement that is a good result for all involved."

Terms were not disclosed. Lime Wire counsel Joseph Baio of Willkie declined comment, and the publishers' lawyer, Donald Zakarin of Pryor Cashman, did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for the Recording Industry Association of America, which is championing the suit scheduled for trial in May, declined comment.

Willkie is the third firm to represent Lime Wire in the copyright litigation, replacing Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, which, in turn, replaced Fulbright & Jaworski. Willkie has a prior relationship with Tower Research--the financial services fund controlled by Lime Wire founder Gorton--dating back to 2008, according to court records.
http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticle...=1202485307815





Lime Wire Wins Limit on Damages to Record Labels
Jonathan Stempel

A federal judge limited the potential financial liability facing the operator of LimeWire, a once-popular file-sharing service found liable for copyright infringement, at an upcoming damages trial.

Rejecting an argument that could have led to "trillions" of dollars in damages, U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood agreed with Lime Group LLC that the 13 record companies whose works were infringed by LimeWire deserve one award per work infringed.

The record labels had argued they deserved one award for each infringement by individual LimeWire users. Sony Corp and Vivendi SA own various of the labels.

Wood's ruling allows the labels to recover between $7.5 million and $1.5 billion of "statutory" damages from New York-based Lime Group and other defendants, including LimeWire founder Mark Gorton.

This sum is based on $750 to $150,000 of possible damages for each of roughly 10,000 post-1972 recordings infringed through LimeWire. The labels are also entitled to "actual" damages for infringement of about 1,000 earlier works.

The 13 record companies include Arista, Atlantic, BMG Music, Capital, Elektra, Interscope, Laface, Motown, Priority, Sony BMG, UMG, Virgin and Warner Brothers, court records show.

Thomas Edison

Wood said that had she accepted the labels' theory of damages, Lime Group could have been on the hook for trillions of dollars, citing the "thousands (or even millions)" of uploads and downloads that took place over several years.

"Plaintiffs are suggesting an award that is more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison's invention of the phonograph in 1877," Wood wrote, citing a Lime Group court filing referring to the inventor Thomas Edison. She called this an "absurd result."

Wood had found last May that Lime Group wrongfully assisted users in pirating digital recordings. She shut down LimeWire in October. A trial on damages is scheduled for May 2.

A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group for the record companies, had no immediate comment on the ruling.

Joseph Baio, a partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP representing Lime Group, said: "We're pleased the court accepted the logical theory that recovery is based on infringements per work."

On Monday, Lime Group settled a separate copyright lawsuit brought by more than 30 music publishers.

Record companies own copyrights to recordings while publishers can own copyrights to the songs themselves.

The case is Arista Records LLC et al v Lime Group et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 06-05936.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Andre Grenon, Phil Berlowitz)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7274O520110310





Sean Parker, Music Mogul? Facebook Billionaire Mulling Warner Music Bid
Peter Kafka

Sean Parker helped create Napster, which kicked off the long and steep decline of the big music labels. Soon he might own part of one.

The digital entrepreneur is considering putting his money into a consortium bidding on Warner Music Group, which put itself on the block earlier this year. Sources tell me that Parker isn’t part of the formal bid, but is aligned with a group led by investors Ron Burkle and Doug Teitelbaum.

Given that Warner’s owners are expecting to fetch $2.5 billion or more for the company, Parker’s own capital wouldn’t be material to the Burkle-Teitelbaum bid. (Burkle, a billionaire who made his first fortune in the supermarket business, invests via his Yucaipa holding company; Teitelbaum helps run hedge fund Bay Harbour Management.)

But Parker’s interest in the music company, expressed in a letter Burkle’s deal team submitted to Warner’s bankers at the beginning of the bidding process, is still very interesting. Here’s a wonderkid who made his money and reputation via bits and bytes, putting his cash — and, presumably, some of his insight — in a media business that still makes most of its money selling analog goods.

Parker famously helped found Napster in 1999, moved onto address book startup Plaxo and helped guide Facebook in its early days. That move gave him an equity stake in the company, and enough money to do whatever he wants (Forbes pegs his net worth at $1.6 billion, and that estimate may be low). Most recently he’s been working, as an adviser and investor, with Spotify, the streaming music service.

Spotify is a big deal in Europe, where it has a million paying subscribers and 7 million active users. But it has yet to land in the U.S., because it hasn’t come to term with two of the big music labels — Universal Music Group and Warner.

I’ve heard a couple people suggest that Parker is trying to buy the label in order to get that deal done. But that theory doesn’t make much sense, because there are much cheaper ways to get Warner to license its music.

Easier conclusion: Parker believes that intellectual property — in this case, Warner’s catalog — is undervalued, in part because of the digital revolution he helped usher in more than a decade ago.

In any case, Parker’s interest may end up being academic. Burkle and Teitlebaum are one of at least five bidders trying to buy all or part of Warner. The music label, which is controlled by a consortium of private equity investors, expects to make a decision on its sale in the next few weeks.
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/2011...ner-music-bid/





Movie Studio Goes After Self-Proclaimed Pirate, His Unicorn and Leprechaun
Ernesto

After hearing about a pirate amnesty scheme offered by a movie studio, a self-proclaimed file-sharer took the opportunity to confess his crimes. The Swedish pirate wrote an email telling the US-based copyright holder that he was ready to pay, thanks to a leprechaun and despite of his unicorn. The movie studio read the email with care, and subpoenaed Google for the IP-address associated with the Gmail account.

“Despite the fact that these people are stealing from us, we wanted to give them a chance to admit their mistakes and move on,” said Brian Dunlap, COO of Liberty Media subsidiary Corbin Fisher at the time. “Therefore, we are offering this limited period where we will resolve these cases quickly and cheaply.”

The scheme, miraculously, appeared to work and random strangers reportedly started to pay up. However, Corbin Fisher also received an email of a different kind, one that needed some deeper thinking to decrypt.

After reading all the drama that had unfolded, TorrentFreak reader Ryan decided to contact Corbin Fisher to tell them what he thought of their actions.

“I have been sharing a whole load of your files… on every torrent site like PureTna, Kickasstorrents etc. I am very sorry for doing so and would like to pay you the $1000 for amnesty…,” he began in his email.

What appeared to be another $1000 in the can for the movie company turned out to be something different, something special. Ryan explained in his email that the money would come from the pot of gold he got from the leprechaun at the end of the rainbow.

And it got even weirder after that.

“I figured I would get a few laughs from it and sent them the email – I clearly mentioned I was in Europe to make them feel more frustrated,” Ryan told TorrentFreak when explaining his actions.

“I have never downloaded their ‘product’ but had I known what scum they are I would have just to seed it. I have no problem about anyone finding out I view porn and would admit it if I downloaded their product – but they produce stuff that just does not interest me in the slightest,” Ryan added.

Unfortunately for Ryan, the prank didn’t solicit the response he had hoped for. Corbin Fisher failed to reply, at least via email, but a few weeks later they responded in an altogether unexpected fashion – by instructing their legal counsel to take action.

After a month Ryan eventually received an indirect response to his email, from Google.

“Google has received a subpoena for information related to your Google account in a case entitled Corbin Fisher: Identification of Does 1-500,” Google’s legal team wrote to Ryan last week.

Corbin Fisher had demanded that Google should hand over information, including but not limited to IP-addresses associated with the account, that could identify the person linking to the Gmail account Ryan’s email was sent from.

Apparently, Corbin Fisher decided to ignore the unicorn, leprechaun and the fact that Ryan clearly stated that he lives in Sweden. They focused instead on the ‘confession’ and decided to take action and subpoena Google for the personal details.

Ryan was surprised by the response, to say the least, and decided to call Corbin Fisher’s legal counsel to find out why he was mentioned in relation to a case he had nothing to do with. To his surprise, he was told that they had taken the confession seriously and are determined to hunt him down, all the way to Sweden if need be.

Whether these threats are as serious as the lawyer says they are remains to be seen, but the personal details were handed over by Google yesterday.

Although it may seem strange that it’s so easy to ask for someone’s personal details and IP-addresses, a copyright lawyer informed TorrentFreak that it’s not uncommon.

“Discovery (evidence gathering) allows for the acquisition of literally anything relevant to the suit as long as it is not protected by some kind of privilege,” we were told. “It is often a wake-up call to people when they learn that they likely do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in e-mails or information stored on a third-party server.”

The big question is, what will Corbin Fisher do with the information received from Google?

If Corbin Fisher’s intent was to scare the sender of the email, then this tactic has failed. Ryan has little to hide, has never downloaded any of Corbin Fisher’s content, and doubts that his unicorn and leprechaun will be summoned to court. The only thing that he got out of it is that lawyers have no sense of humor, and that future pranks should not be sent via a third party’s email address.
http://torrentfreak.com/movie-studio...echaun-110310/





BitTorrent Creates User-Friendly Client Chrysalis
Angela Alcorn

BitTorrent has released a new client this week called Chrysalis in an attempt to keep novice users interested in the BitTorrent service. Chrysalis has been specially designed with new users in mind, so it’s clearly laid out with free, legal content easily accessible from the main page.

Chrysalis will eventually replace the Mainline client currently in use. The design for Chrysalis arose when BitTorrent looked at their user statistics and noted that many users downloaded and installed the client, but never became regular users. They hope that the straightforward design will encourage novice users to explore new content and use the client more frequently.

The intuitive design makes it easy to find popular content and to add it to your torrent downloads. For instance, it’s a simple one-click process to add content from TED or Zulu Music.

Once the download is in progress, there’s a very clear download management screen which focuses more on the basic details and media than the advanced torrent data. Users can easily see how much of a file has been downloaded, how long it is expected to take and what the health of the torrent file is. The advanced data is still available for experienced users who want to speed up their torrents, but in a separate panel.

Users of uTorrent have been reassured that uTorrent will not be replaced by Chrysalis and will be developed separately.

The free alpha release of Chrysalis is available to download for Windows now.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/bittorr...hrysalis-news/





Judge Eviscerates P2P Lawyer: "I Accepted You at Your Word"
Nate Anderson

As a lawyer, you know it's going to be bad when a federal judge summons you to his courtroom at nine in the morning to talk about your “ill-considered lawsuit” that has “abused the litigation system in more than one way.”

Federal judge Milton Shadur, who keeps a "Now, 3 for 10¢… Federal Judge!" sign beside him in his 23rd floor Chicago courtroom, summoned file-sharing lawyer John Steele to court this morning with those words. At issue was Steele's representation of CP Productions, an Arizona porn producer suing 300 anonymous individuals for illegally sharing a film called (ahem) Cowgirl Creampie.

Shadur had already had enough of this particular litigation and had tossed the case not once but twice within the last few weeks. The first dismissal came because Steele had not actually served all defendants in the case within 120 days of filing it (Steele pleaded that he was still waiting on ISPs to turn over the names associated with the IP addresses he had provided).

Then, after receiving an amateur motion from one of the anonymous defendants in the case, Shadur was reminded of just how much he hated the whole case and tossed it again. He also ordered Steele into his courtroom to talk about ways that CP Productions would notify anonymous defendants about the end of the case, and (more importantly) how to get those defendants to stop mailing their "motions to quash" to the judge's chambers.

With that hearing scheduled for this morning, Steele yesterday asked the judge to reconsider his two dismissals, allow Steele to add a charge of "conspiracy" against all the BitTorrent downloaders, and let the case proceed. Steele even said one anonymous defendant had committed "fraud" on the court by listing "Possible John Doe" as his name. To Steele it was "somewhat unsurprising that an individual involved in theft would be less than truthful to this Court, particularly when he is allowed to operate under the cloak of anonymity.”

"I accepted you at your word"

Steele arrived in the court room for his 9am hearing at 9:19am. When called forward, Steel identified himself and then had to stand in silence as the judge dropped his previously genial manner and proceeded to read the riot act to Steele and steamroll his case.

“I accepted you at your word,” said the judge, pointing to Steele's assertion that the case was connected to Illinois. But, after allowing Steel to take discovery and issue subpoenas to Internet providers, "I start getting motions to quash” from places like Tennessee, Texas, New Jersey, from "people that had nothing at all to do with the state of Illinois.”

CP Productions was based in Arizona and, if their intellectual property was infringed, the company's injuries "take place at law at the place of the party that's injured." The case didn't belong in Shadur's district at all, he said, calling Steele's complaint about fraudulent behavior "ironic."

Steele interrupted, pointing out that he had in fact secured some settlements from defendants located in Chicago, which showed that at least some of the alleged infringement took place here and should be actionable. The judge wasn't having any of it, and he repeatedly talked over Steele to tell him, "You chose to sue 300 anonymous people… that was your choice.” But the venue for the group was improper, he said, and if CP Productions plans to continue a mass lawsuit campaign, it can do so in Arizona.

“I don't see any justification at all for this action,” the judge concluded, and he had less-than-complimentary things to say about Steele's work. Facts in the case “were not as asserted,” said Shadur, adding that case filings “did not really comply with the subjective and objective good faith requirement."

After 10 minutes of this, in which Steele managed to speak for about 30 seconds, the judge ended the case for good. "That's it," he concluded.

Pressing on

The ruling joins similar rulings from federal judges in West Virginia and Texas, where most of these sorts of suits have already been dismissed. The various rulings don't ban file-sharing cases, but they make them harder to prosecute en masse.

In a statement afterwards, Steele told me that he respects the judge's decision even though he disagrees with it.

"Our client, CP Productions, is happy that Judge Shadur dismissed the case without prejudice and has allowed us to file against the few remaining John Does individually," Steele said. "We will certainly continue to fight on behalf of CP Productions in its war on piracy."

Steele is also confident that his Illinois porn cases can continue. "The judges in our other cases have, for the most part, sided with our clients and dismissed anonymous motions filed by non-parties," he added. "We expect to continue to have a majority of the courts find in our favor and allow us to find out who is stealing our client's content."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-your-word.ars





P2P API Discovered in Latest Builds of Chromium
Klint Finley

Something called the P2P API can be turned on through the about:flags menu in the latest builds of Chromium, the open source browser that serves as the basis for Google Chrome. The discovery was made by Daniel Cawrey at thechromesource. The description of the option reads: "Enables P2P Pepper API and P2P JavaScript API. The API is under development, and doesn't work yet."

For those not familiar, the Pepper Plugin API (PPAPI) is Google's API for its Native Client (NaCl) plugin. NaCl, which we covered last year enables developers to run native C and C++ in Chrome 10.

The trouble is that Chrome is the only browser with NaCl support, which could lead to Web fragmentation. As Sebastian Anthony writes for Switched: "If NaCl gains enough traction, Chrome could become the next IE6." But since NaCl will be available as a plugin for other browsers, perhaps it would be more fair to say that NaCl could become the next Flash or Java.

The main point, however, of NaCl is probably to enable developers to create more advanced applications, such as video editors or audio processors, for ChromeOS. Given that, it seems like the P2P API, whatever it is, will also be for ChromeOS developers. Still, we can hope that it will enable some cool distributed Web applications.

Google has introduced another interesting feature recently: the ability to run Chrome Web Store apps in the background.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/201...n-latest-b.php





House Subcommittee Votes to Kill Net Neutrality

Republicans push through a resolution of disapproval for the FCC's new rules
Grant Gross

A U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee has voted in favor of a resolution to throw out the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's recently adopted net neutrality rules.

The communications subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 15-8 along party lines for a resolution of disapproval that would overturn the FCC's rules. Those rules would prohibit broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web traffic.

The resolution would also prohibit the FCC from re-attempting to create similar net neutrality rules.

The FCC lacks legal authority to pass the rules, and government intervention would hurt the Internet, said Representative Greg Walden, the subcommittee's chairman and an Oregon Republican. "The Internet works pretty well -- it's the government that doesn't," he said.

The net neutrality rules will slow investment in broadband networks, Walden added. "These regulations will cost jobs," he said.

The resolution will next go to the full committee, and if approved there, to the full House. If the Republican-controlled House approves the resolution, it would then move to the Senate, where Democrats hold the majority. The Senate is unlikely to pass the resolution.

Subcommittee Republicans pushed through the resolution despite statements from AT&T and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association saying they could live with the rules. AT&T would prefer no net neutrality regulations, but the rules passed by the FCC Dec. 21 represent a better solution than an earlier FCC proposal to impose additional common-carrier regulations, said James Cicconi, AT&T's senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs.

The FCC's net neutrality rules are consistent with AT&T's business practices, Cicconi said. "We do think it's a reasonable middle ground," he said.

Net neutrality rules are needed to allow small businesses to use the Web without interference from broadband providers, said Robin Chase, co-founder of car-sharing service Zipcar. An open Internet was essential to Zipcar's success, she said.

"Network neutrality is not excessive regulation that will stifle innovation," she said. "Network neutrality promotes innovation and protects consumers by preventing telecommunications companies from stifling new thinking, new services and new applications."

Democratic lawmakers argued that the resolution was taking committee time away from more pressing broadband matters, including proposals to free up new spectrum and the creation of a nationwide, mobile public safety network. The resolution, given its dim chances in the Senate, is a "waste of time," said Representative Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat.

The net neutrality rules allow Web users to control their online experiences, she added. "We want the consumers to make the choice, not corporations," she said.

Democrats tried to offer seven amendments to the resolution, but Walden struck them all down. Republicans introduced the resolution under the little-used Congressional Review Act, a streamlined legislative process that makes it difficult to make amendments.

While Cicconi said AT&T can live with the net neutrality rules, Verizon Communications and mobile provider MetroPCS Wireless have filed court challenges. The rules would hurt wireless Internet service providers (WISPs) that don't have the bandwidth to deliver high-definition video and other bandwidth-intensive services, said Tom DeReggi, president of RapidDSL and Wireless, a Maryland broadband provider.

DeReggi told lawmakers he may want to block services like Netflix because they take up too much bandwidth for WiMax-based broadband. The FCC rules unfairly create the same rules for WISPs that they do for fiber-based broadband providers, he said.

"One size does not work and does not fit all," DeReggi said.

Many of his customers operate home-based businesses, but services like Netflix compromise those businesses, DeReggi said. "You block the source of the problem," he said. "Broadband provides jobs, not HD video."

Eshoo disagreed, saying Neflix has created hundreds of jobs in recent years.

But net neutrality rules will hurt both broadband providers and Web application providers, by discouraging network investment, said Anna-Maria Kovacs, an investment analyst with Strategic Choices. "Far more devastating to Google, Skype and Netflix than being charged for transport is an Internet whose evolution and capacity are flash-frozen for lack of investment," she said. "Their innovative applications can only follow a step behind the network's capacity and quality."
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/articl...et_neutrality/





UPD Broadband ISPs Thrash Out Voluntary UK Net Neutrality Commitment with the BSG
MarkJ

The Broadband Stakeholders Group (BSG), a UK government advisory think-tank on broadband internet access, has revealed that most or all of the country's largest fixed line internet providers (ISP) will next week adopt a new voluntary code of practice on Traffic Management transparency.

Most ISPs employ Traffic Management or Traffic Shaping as a means to balance the performance of their networks, which allows the majority of customers to avoid being unfairly affected by a minority of heavy users. This is often done by restricting internet traffic (speed) to busy services (e.g. P2P) or more generally at peak times of day. Many ISPs prefer this to either raising prices or being more realistic about their usage allowances.

Some providers, such as BT and TalkTalk UK, would apparently love nothing better than to start favouring content providers based on who pays them the most cash (e.g. BBC, Skype, Facebook, Google etc.). To date such a Digital Mafia style model hasn't worked because of regulatory concern and the simple fact that most content providers find such a notion to be unworkable.

The new code is likely to surface as a result of last year's Net Neutrality (the principal of treating all internet traffic as equal) consultation by Ofcom UK (here). The communications regulator, which has yet to reveal any official proposals, suggested that ISPs should make any internet traffic restrictions "transparent" to their customers (here).

BSG Statement to ZDNet UK

"The Broadband Stakeholder Group has been working with ISPs to develop a voluntary code of practice on traffic management transparency. We hope to launch this code of practice next week."

Similarly both the UK government and the European Commission (EC) have since told ISPs to ensure that consumers still had access to all "legal content [and] service[s]" (here). It also warned that any proposals, such as Ofcom's forthcoming recommendations, would need to take account of three basic requirements.

Openness – Consumers should be able to access any legal content or service. Content providers should be able to innovate and reach users.

Transparency – Providers should set out in detail the extent of their traffic management and the impact on customers.

Support for innovation and investment – ISPs should be able to manage their networks to ensure a good service and have flexibility in business models. Competition is important for ensuring continued openness and choice.

Crucially a door has been left open for internet providers to pursue new business models. It's important to stress that, 9 times out of 10, this has more to do with new commercial IPTV (internet television) services and not typical access-only solutions.

To function properly IPTV services often require new content agreements and distribution models in order to become economically viable. Giving ISPs some flexible to do this, while not impeding standard access, may be needed. However, its success still rests upon content providers wanting to play ball. Meanwhile most ISPs remain fearful of the problems that could result if they were to penalise popular internet sites or services too aggressively.

UPDATE 10:00am

A senior figure within the Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) just reminded us that they've had a similar Code of Practice in place for several years.

http://www.ispa.org.uk/home/page_327.html

UPDATE 12:43pm

The announcement should come on Wednesday 16th March, when ISPs will also reveal more about the specific measures they take to manage traffic.
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/201...h-the-bsg.html





Coming Soon: Pirated Movies in 3D
Peter Nowak

IN AN effort to keep audiences flocking to the cinemas to see the latest movies, studios and theatres are gambling on the 3D movie experience.

At first glance, the gambit makes sense - the industry needs the wow factor to woo consumers who have ready access to file-sharing websites. They can also play pirated movies on elaborate, home theatre systems that deliver high-quality thrills without the steep price of a night at the multiplex. Will opting for 3D films that require special electronics equipment and software to view properly pull in the customers and stop would-be pirates in their tracks?

Perhaps not, says Wayan Palmieri, chief technology officer of Digital Revolution Studios, a 3D production house based in Van Nuys, California. Because today's films all end up in digital format for home consumption - either as Blu-ray discs or downloadable files - he says they are all vulnerable to being hacked and pirated.

It's only a question of time.

"It's a vicious cycle right now but I don't see it stopping at any point soon," he says. "There will be pirated 3D Blu-rays, I'm 100-per-cent sure of that."

It's already happening, after a fashion. Recent films such as Piranha 3D and Jackass 3D can be found on file-sharing directories such as The Pirate Bay. But they are typically 2D files ripped from DVDs and then turned into anaglyph 3D. This 3D format requires only glasses with red and blue lenses, and can be watched on any screen - using processing software such as StereoMovie Maker and AviSynth.

It is proving difficult to copy 3D films in the format used by 3D-ready TVs, which project the same image from two slightly different angles.

"At present it seems that no [file] format can do the full 3D experience, or none that I could find anyway," says Eric, a DVD ripping enthusiast in London, Canada, who didn't want his last name used.

Pirating DVDs in new formats is about to get easier, though. In November, Chinese firm Fengtao Software released its latest DVDFab product, which claims to be the first that can fully rip and convert a 3D Blu-ray disc into a file that can be played on home systems.

Illegal 3D movies aren't yet stiff competition for cinemas because demand for 3D TVs is still low: adoption was sluggish in 2010. That will likely change as the sets become cheaper, the technology improves and more movies are available. Last year 25 3D titles hit the silver screen, and 39 more are planned for 2011. Ironically, by bringing out more 3D movies the studios will provide the incentive for pirates to hone their craft and keep cinema-goers at home.

Indeed, piracy among 3D films will soon be just as common as the 2D counterpart is today, says Sara Mora Ivicevich, also with Digital Revolution.

"It's going to be a short window where the people who are investing the money in the display tools to watch 3D are most likely to invest the money in buying the content," she says. "When it all levels out I'm sure we're going to see something different."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...ies-in-3d.html





Warner Bros. to Rent Movies Digitally on Facebook, Starting With 'Dark Knight'
Gregg Kilday

The studio, which says it is the first to offer movies directly on the social media site, aims to roll out additional titles over the coming months.

Warner Bros. is turning to Facebook, where it hopes to find an electronic audience interested in digitally renting The Dark Knight.

Warners said Monday that it is the first Hollywood studio to offer movies directly on Facebook. Friends of Christopher Nolan's Knight, the second of his two Batman movies, can rent the film by going to its official Facebook page and clicking a "rent" icon to apply Facebook Credits. The cost per rental is 30 Facebook Credits, or $3.

Viewers will have 48 hours from the purchase to watch the movie, which can be viewed full screen and also paused and resumed within that period. While watching the movie, consumers will also have full Facebook functionality, including the ability to post comments, interact with friends and update their status.

"Facebook has become a daily destination for hundreds of millions of people," said Thomas Gewecke, president of Warner Bros. Digital Distribution. "Making our films available through Facebook is a natural extension of our digital distribution efforts. It gives consumers a simple, convenient way to access and enjoy our films through the world's largest social network."

While the Knight offering is described as a test, Warners also said that additional titles for both rental and purchase will be rolled out over the coming months.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...gitally-165218





Is Cable Still Worth it?

With this week’s announcement that Warner Bros is to offer movies through Facebook, it is clear watching online is no longer the time-consuming, jittery method it once was. Here’s how you could be saving.

What’s out there

Let’s start with the free options. You can stream current TV shows on Hulu or TV networks’ own websites, available from hours to a few days after they air on television. Both also offer a sizable back catalog of older shows.

Next, low cost. Netflix used to be known primarily for DVDs that would arrive through your door -– now its service is just as geared toward watching online. It currently offers unlimited online viewing for $7.99 a month, with a free month’s trial. Less of an up-to-the-minute episode player, it’s great for watching movies and mostly previous seasons of TV shows you missed first-time round.

Then there’s Amazon Instant Video, which offers a catalog of more than 90,000 movies and TV shows. A single rental A television sits at the water's edge at the tsunami destroyed village of Saleapaga on Samoa's southern coast October 2, 2009. REUTERS/Tim Wimbornetypically costs between 99 cents and $3.99. You can also rent TV shows by season. If you’ve joined Amazon Prime, 5,000 videos in their catalog are already included with your $79 annual membership.

Apple’s iTunes has also been getting in on the act. For 99 cents per episode, you can stream episodes of current TV shows as early as a day after they air. Like Amazon, most new movies are available to stream the same day they are released on DVD.

Clicker.com is one useful search engine for finding where your favorite show is streaming.

But beware. “The cost of buying one piece at a time can get expensive,” says Schwark Satyavolu, CEO and Founder of money-saving website BillShrink, who has reduced his family’s own cable usage at home in Fremont, California.

More than just saving money

If your children are more used to watching online than you are, you may think Internet streaming means hunching over laptops and peering into your smartphone screen. Not so. Now you don’t even have to lose the TV.

The best way to stream onto your TV is to use a digital media receiver box, which offers a more stable platform and more user-friendly interface than just plugging in your laptop.

There are plenty on the market. Frontrunners include Roku ($60), which plays Netflix, Amazon Instant Video and Hulu Plus among others, and Boxee ($199), which streams a number of major programming providers. There’s also Google TV devices ($250 for the current cheapest option, Logitech Revue), and Apple TV ($99).

Computer consoles — including the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 — also double up as streaming devices, as do some internet-connected Blu-ray disc players. For example, Netflix can be watched through all of the above, as well as TiVo, the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

A self-confessed TV addict given half a chance, online streaming has prompted her to focus on quality rather than quantity. “It’s almost a good thing to have that limitation. I’m grateful for it,” she says. Sondreal can still watch all her favorite shows including 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, and guilty pleasure Glee.

Streaming offers the benefit of choosing what she wants to watch when she wants to, and fewer commercials for the most part. There are other unexpected bonuses too. “It’s definitely broadened my horizons,” Sondreal says. She’s currently watching BBC drama Downton Abbey on Netflix she says she would not have otherwise come across.

What you can’t replace

Unfortunately, there are those programs you miss watching in real time, especially sports. And if there’s one thing cable is known for, it’s non-stop sports coverage.

For Smith, it’s been her biggest adjustment. “My thing on a Saturday if I were just lying on the couch was watching ESPN for hours,” she says.

While access to the most popular games remains limited, since last year Smith has been able to watch some college basketball through her Xbox Live subscription, which costs $50 annually.

Other live streaming options include MLB.tv for baseball and NBA League One Pass for basketball, with the caveat that they currently only offer live games to out-of-market customers. The good news is Apple TV has just signed a deal with both providers for discounted game packages, according to today’s Financial Times, and YouTube is reportedly in talks on airing some NBA basketball games.

Not being able to watch TV shows in real time can also put you at risk of overhearing spoilers. “That’s happened to me a few times, particularly with reality shows,” says Smith. “I’ll be at the grocery store and they’ll say, ‘I can’t believe they kicked him off…’ and I’ll be like, noooo!”

Assess your own needs

The bottom line is there’s no one right way to go. Assess your own consuming pattern and find the solution that’s best for you. As Satyavolu points out, if you have multiple TVs at home, online streaming could end up costing more than cable. “Right now it’s all by device, not by account,” he says.

On the flip, switching to streaming can herald a whole new future. “I watch much less junk,” Smith says. “It was a bit of an adjustment, but I wouldn’t go back. I’m saving a ton of money.”
http://blogs.reuters.com/prism-money...till-worth-it/





The Four Big Steps To Cutting The Cord
Matt Burns

Do it! Cut the cord and free yourself from the tyranny of the cable mafia. The movement is slowly gaining traction but the whole task is daunting. What do you do next? Where does your TV content come from? What are the options? So many questions you need answered before you take the scissors to the coax line.

What follows are the basic steps along with the best alternative services. Follow these steps and the transition from cable to Internet streaming will be painless as possible. Still, before you proceed, you must know that there is a break-in period. Cutting cable might be hard for some. Some will go crawling back to their cable provider. But press forward and take it a day at a time. You’re going to be a better person without it.

1. Understand What You’re Getting Yourself Into

Cutting the cord isn’t for the timid. It’s serious business and the process should include at least on family meeting. There isn’t a service out there that can totally replace cable’s feature set or passive nature and everyone in the household needs to know this.

Subscription TV is a mindless activity. Click on the box and your TV blasts to life with programming. That’s not going to happen with the majority of the cable alternatives. Besides free over-the-air programming, the other options require viewers to hunt and search for programming that’s considered old compared to when it first aired on live on TV. That’s right, you’re going to be watching old TV episodes and worse yet, not all programming is available through alternative means. That’s just the way it is right now.

Perhaps your household isn’t ready to give up cable. It’s a big step to give up watching SportsCenter in the morning and The Daily Show at night. In fact, most consumers are in this boat. The cable cutting movement is considered by the industry to be nonexistent. That doesn’t mean you can’t cut the cord and save some serious money every year.

2. Understand The Alternative Service Options

Once you understand the pitfalls that are on the path to pay TV freedom, it’s time to look at the options. Some are free-ish while others charge a monthly fee. However all the options are a lot less than what Comcast or DirecTV charges hence their popularity.

Make a list of your favorite TV shows along and mark shows that you can’t live without. This little list will come in handy as you explore the options.

• Over The Air

Antennas are alive and well. In fact, they can pull in an HD signal that will make some cable HD channels look like a VHS tape. The vast majority of flat screen TVs have an ATSC tuner and many late-model tube TVs even have the right goods. Simply plug-in an antenna, tell the TV to search for OTA stations, and you’ve got crystal clear HD programming. AntennaWeb.org will help fine tune the antenna.

The United States officially switched from analog NTSC broadcasts to the all digital ATSC signal in June 2009. All TV stations are using the digital broadcast standard now with most broadcasting an HD station along with a few SD stations as the ATSC spec allows for multiple signals, 5.1 audio and various resolutions.

OTA programming can easily supply TVs with live content from local network stations. ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and PBS are the common networks. Since each local TV stations can now broadcast multiple channels, you may be surprised how many stations are available OTA. It’s a solid option by itself and as a supplement to, say, Netflix.

• Netflix

Netflix is the fan favorite partly because it’s on many TV appliances already. Many Blu-ray players, HDTVs, game systems and media streamers already support the service. Platform penetration is what lead Netflix’s explosive growth over the last few years. Some systems like the Boxee Box and PS3 allows users access to the entire Netflix streaming library where other systems require users to add videos to a queue via the website.

There’s a good deal of content available from Netflix, but like other streaming services, not everything is available and only 30% of the content features subtitles. Keep in mind that only a portion of Netflix’s catalog can be streamed. Use this page to explore the Watch Instantly titles — or instantwatcher.com maintains a great list as well.

The streaming service runs $7.99 a month and doesn’t require a contract. Netflix offers a one month trial but does require a credit card to sign up. Try it out and cancel if you’re not happy.

• Amazon

Amazon has been in the streaming game nearly as long as Netflix, but up until just a few weeks ago, offered TV shows and movies on only a pay-per-play basis. That’s still available, but the retailer just launched its Prime Instant Videos that offers 5,000 movies and TV shows available for free streaming to paying Prime subscribers. So just like Netflix, subscribers can simply select a title and watch it instantly.

Amazon followed Netflix’s strategy and embraced numerous hardware platforms over the last year. If your TV set-top box is connected to the Internet, chances are it can get Amazon content. Only Roku boxes can stream Prime Instant Videos so far, though.

Even without the Prime Instant Videos, Amazon is still an attractive choice for cord cutters. TV episodes are often only $.99 and so an entire season of one TV show will cost around $24 — or rather a fraction of a monthly cable bill. The pay-per-play service is not for the heavy TV watchers, but might fill the void for others.

• Hulu Plus

Hulu’s subscription service beta launched with much fanfare last summer, but then people used it and discovered it’s not exactly the best thing in the world. The amount of content didn’t line up with the $9.99 monthly price. Then in November the service exited beta and introduced a more competitive $7.99 monthly charge. But it was the additional content that was the biggest surprise.

Hulu Plus is positioned as a Netflix-alternative although the owners would argue it’s the other way around. While it trails behind Netflix and Amazon in library size, Hulu Plus is a good bet for those looking to watch the latest TV episodes of popular programs as soon as possible. Many episodes major network programs are available through Hulu Plus a day after they air on network TV where they might come months later on Netflix or Amazon. Still, it’s wise to look at your list of most important TV programs and peep the Hulu Plus selection before handing over your credit card.

Hulu Plus is also available on many popular devices including iOS devices, Android phones, Roku, PS3, Xbox 360, TiVo Premiere and various Internet-connected HDTVs.

But be warned, most Hulu Plus content has commercials of some sort. Sorry.

• Torrents and Usenet

Um, yeah. It’s safe to say that every TV show is downloadable in its entirety someone on Torrent sites or Usenet. It’s also safe to say that it’s a copyright violation to download this content. But it’s there and with the right amount of Google’n your Internet can automatically download all your favorite TV programs. It’s then a trivial task to hook up one of the various network streams like the Boxee Box or WD TV to watch this content on your TV.

Of course it’s between you and your lawyer if you walk this line. However, where Netflix and Amazon use highly-compressed (read: ugly and pixelated) HD streams, downloads are often perfect HD rips free from commercials and general nonsense. So it’s either beautiful and free HD content or eternal damnation at the hands of the copyright holders.

3. These Are The Hardware Options

• Boxee Box

Disclamer: I love the Boxee Box and so does my family. I needed to get that out of the way and declare my allegiance right way. I’ve tried every single media streamer on the market and this is the best one. It’s fast, supports every media file I’ve tried, but most importantly, it’s fun to use. Other boxes can get you to the same content, but the dry interface makes for a stale experience.

The Boxee Box is a great cord cutting device as it’s really a multifunction device aimed at two different demographics. One feature set serves up TV content currently available online for free from sites like ABC.com, NBC.com and the others through a clever interface. Plus, it can stream audio and video content stored anywhere on its local network. If all else fails, there’s a gigantic app library that includes Netflix, Vudu, YouTube, Pandora, Revision3, RedditTV, and over a hundred more.

It’s this triple threat approach that won me over. Average consumers should find the vast amount of free content surprisingly complete since the Boxee Box simply plays videos from their official streaming sites. Then the downloader should enjoy the robust file support and automatic genre sorting. The apps are then the icing on the cake.

The Boxee Box by D-Link retails for $199 at major retailers but can often be found for a few dollars less online.

• Roku

The Roku is a TV appliance. It works without fail. Select the Netflix app and you can stream Netflix. It’s that simple.

The Roku streamers might not be as flashy as the Boxee Box, but they work great and have a ton of content served up through Roku channels. All the major players are here with their subscription services: Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime Instant, Pandora, along with nearly a bottomless library of other channels.

The best thing about Roku boxes is they’re inexpensive with the top-tier XDS model running only $99. It’s not a bare-bones unit either: 1080p HDMI, component video, optical audio, dual-band 802.11n, USB ports for playing back pictures and videos. There are even two cheaper models if you don’t mind slumming it without a USB port or just 802.11g.

• Smart TVs

The latest trend in the HDTV market is to offer TVs with so-called apps. This started with on-screen widgets, but now smart TVs are rocking full versions of Netflix and Hulu Plus along with other services like Flickr, Pandora, and various weather services. Throw in an OTA antenna and these TVs themselves are legitimate alternatives to cable thanks to these baked-in features.

The sets cost slightly more than their “dumb” counterparts. In fact they’re kind of hard to recommend since add-on boxes like the Boxee Box and Roku XDS are so inexpensive. The set-top box route might be a more cost effective and smarter move anyway as both the Roku and Boxee Box are backed by dedicated companies with proven track record of constant updates. Still, some consumers want to rid themselves entirely of boxes and so these TVs are available. People are clearly buying them because makers are constantly rolling the feature set downmarket.

• Game Systems

That Xbox 360 sitting in your kid’s room? Yeah, it can be your ticket out of Comcastville. The Xbox 360 along with the PS3 and the Wii all stream Netflix with the former two featuring even more services. Even the original Xbox with the right mods can be an amazing streaming machine.

These game systems are computers in their purest form. Microsoft and Sony simply control the user experience so either you play by their rules and use the included systems and apps or you break the chains and jailbreak the system for even more functionality. Either way their streaming options might just be sufficient to justify canceling cable.

4. Profit!

Cable and satellite can be expensive. Here in mid-Michigan Comcast has the exclusive rights to serve me cable and this lack of competition creates crazy prices. My cable bill for just the expanded basic package and HD stations (along with 2 CableCards) runs $80 a month with my total bill including Internet services hitting nearly $120 a month. $80 a month is nearly $1,000 a year just on cable. Netflix on the other hand is just under $100 a year for a net savings of $900.

Of course cable provides infinity more options along with live news and sporting events. However, an OTA antenna paired with an ATSC tuner supplements downloads and streaming nicely. It’s important to cut the cord only after realizing that nothing will totally replicate the sheer amount of content or even cable’s user experience. Life is different without cable. But different is good.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/03/11...ting-the-cord/





Netflix Spooks Hollywood More than Ever
Greg Sandoval

Hollywood film executives want you to know that they are not at war with Netflix or the Internet.

Some of them told me over the past week that they have every intention to continue to distribute films and TV shows over the Web and at attractive prices to boot. They plan to provide viewers with a multitude of ways to access Internet content: on Web-connected handhelds and TVs, video game consoles, and iPads.

Only, don't ask them to do all this at the expense of the long-term health of their business. The general feeling with the studio executives I spoke with is that they cannot and will not throw in with Netflix and imperil other more lucrative revenue streams, such as pay TV or traditional broadcast services. They don't believe it is a forgone conclusion the Internet will become the dominant means of video distribution or that Netflix has already conquered the category.

The winds have once again changed direction in Hollywood. At a time when Netflix, the Web's top video-rental service, continues to report big growth in the number of subscribers and revenue, more and more studio decision makers are concluding that Netflix represents a serious threat if not kept in check.

On previous trips to Hollywood over the past two years, most of the studio executives I spoke with seemed to have a love-hate attitude towards Netflix. Many said they wanted to wait and see how Netflix's streaming service fared. Some were skeptical that the service could ever draw a large audience without hit films and shows, which they doubted Netflix could afford. At the same time, even Netflix's biggest critics at the studios were glad to have the company help bid up prices for content.

But since then, Netflix has proven it can acquire both sought-after content as well as a large audience. Netflix's rapid rise stunned many at the studios and now even former supporters there are wary of Netflix's growing influence. To make matters worse, Netflix is having some unanticipated impacts on the studio's businesses. Here are a few of the reasons why some film-industry execs said Netflix is raising red flags:

• Netflix siphons off sales from other important areas, such as the airlines. Since more airlines are offering in-flight Internet access, a Netflix account means fewer people may be tempted to purchase movies offered by the carrier.

• There is evidence that Netflix's streaming service discourages users from purchasing newly released DVDs. The studios see indications that for even hit films, which likely won't appear on Netflix's streaming service for years, some Netflix subscribers are satisfied to wait until they do.

• Films offered on Netflix lose value rapidly. Some cable and traditional broadcasters won't go near a title once Netflix begins streaming it. Netflix takes the scarcity out of the equation, one film industry insider said. People can watch any of the service's commercial-free films and shows anytime they want.

The prevailing feeling among the studio managers I spoke with is that Netflix's streaming service will be a good outlet for the least-valuable material. If they have their way, Netflix will be the Internet equivalent of a swap meet, where only the most dated and least popular titles are available. The studios are betting that eventually people will get bored with the service.

Netflix as disruptor

All this hand wringing about Netflix can be traced to the company's recent success. Netflix streaming has become too big too fast. The video-rental service, founded in 1997, surpassed the 20 million-subscriber mark in the quarter ended December 31. That represents a 66 percent jump in subscribers from the 12 million the company possessed a year before.

The service is also out to a big lead when it comes to building an online distribution network. Netflix is available on more than 200 Internet-enabled devices and platforms, including Xbox, PlayStation 3 and iTunes.

The studios don't want to see any service running away with Internet distribution and accumulating the kind of power that could enable it to one day dictate terms. That's how iTunes dominated the music industry during the past decade.

The Hollywood executives I spoke with said they have nothing but the highest regard for the abilities of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and his management team. Indeed, perhaps Hastings should be flattered by the roadblocks Hollywood is building for his company. The film studios and TV networks have already watched his management team grind other distribution powerhouses into dust. In the past two years, rental chains Blockbuster and Movie Gallery have each filed for bankruptcy protection.

The studios don't want to help a discounter like Netflix do the same to cable.

But at this point, you might be saying to yourself, "Too late." Consumers want to watch what they want when they want and they want it all cheap. Web services like Netflix provide that. What could big media companies possibly come up with that matches the value Netflix offers?

Collecting DVDs

For starters, the studios want to foster more competition. To do this, Hollywood is counting on UltraViolet, the name given to a set of technology standards that will enable consumers to playback digital video across a large range of devices and platforms--just like the DVD can. The standards will also enable services to come along and offer consumers a way to store their digital media on their servers. The film industry wants to see new business models grow out of UltraViolet.

The studios don't want to say goodbye just yet to physical discs but it's important to remember what their goals are and why Netflix may not fit into their plans.

Studio chiefs are eager to get consumers buying and collecting movies again. The home-video category is in decline. Disc sales are tumbling every quarter. One exec told me that 30 to 50 percent of DVDs are still in their original shrink wrap.

There are lots of different theories about why consumers have stopped collecting DVDs. Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne, a company that tracks digital-media consumption, says that the huge growth in disc sales was driven by the public's temporary gee-whiz reaction to what was then a nifty new technology.

"The medium was creating this false impression that we had a real need to curate libraries of films," Garland said. "People built film libraries because they had never been able to own movies before. Even then, most of the movies only got watched once."

The DVD helped the film industry generate huge profits for years and that's why the stakes are very high. "If we find out that people won't collect feature films anymore," Garland said, "than the business as we know it is broken beyond repair."

Netflix's streaming service, of course, provides an excellent alternative to buying movies. If Hollywood is serious about freezing the company out when it comes to popular shows and films, then it will be interesting to see whether Netflix can keep up its white-hot subscriber growth.

Keeping score will be easy. For starters, just log on to Netflix's streaming service and decide whether there's anything worth watching.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20039915-261.html





Forget Google – it's Apple that is Turning Into the Evil Empire

You may think you own your iPad or iPhone but in reality an invisible string links it back to Apple HQ
John Naughton

Once upon a time, when Apple was mainly a computer manufacturer, people used to liken it to BMW. That was because it made expensive, nicely designed products for a niche market made up of affluent, design-conscious customers who also served as enthusiastic – nay fanatical – evangelists for the brand. It was seen as innovative and quirky but not part of the industry's mainstream, which was dominated by Microsoft and the companies making the PCs that ran Windows software. This view of Apple was summed up by Jack Tramiel, the boss of Commodore, when Steve Jobs first showed him the Macintosh computer. "Very nice, Steve," growled Tramiel. "I guess you'll sell it in boutiques."

That was a long time ago. Now, with a market capitalisation of just over $331bn, Apple is the second most valuable company in the world – bigger than Microsoft ($220bn), Oracle ($167bn) or Google ($196bn). The quirky little computer company has grown into a giant. But not necessarily a giant of the Big Friendly variety, as the world's magazine publishers have recently discovered and as the music and software industries have known for some time. For Apple now controls the commanding heights of the online content business and it looks like doing the same to the mobile phone business. At the moment, it looks as though nobody has a good idea of how to stop it.

Every year, Fortune magazine polls a sample of US CEOs asking for their opinions of their competitors. The results for 2011 have just been released and they show that Apple is the "most admired" company in America. This is the sixth year in a row that it has held that title.

The reasons are obvious. On the product side, Apple creates beautifully designed, highly functional and user-friendly devices that delight customers and provide fat profit margins; it has a corporate culture that reliably delivers these products by specified dates; it's much more innovative than any of its competitors; and it has a unique mastery of both hardware and software.

On the strategic side, the company has displayed a deep understanding of technology and a shrewd appreciation of potential devices and services for which people will pay over the odds. Most CEOs would kill to run a company that possessed a quarter of these competencies. Apple appears to have them all. Its current dominance is built on three big ideas. The first is that design really matters. It's not something you can outsource to a design consultancy – which is what most companies do – and design is as much about ease of use as it is about aesthetics. The second insight was that the maelstrom of illicit music downloading triggered by Napster couldn't last and that the first company to offer a simple way of legally purchasing music (and, later, other kinds of content) online would clean up. And third – and most important – there was the insight that mobile phones are really just hand-held computers that happen to make voice calls and that it's the computing bit that really matters.

Most of the media commentary about Apple attributes all of these insights to Steve Jobs, the company's charismatic co-founder, on the grounds that Apple's renaissance began when he returned to the company in 1996.

This may well be true, though it seems unlikely that such a comprehensive corporate recovery could be the work of a single individual, no matter how charismatic. What's more plausible is that Apple's corporate culture took on some of the characteristics of its CEO's personality, much as Microsoft was once a corporate extension of Bill Gates, with all that implied in terms of aggression and drive.

Whatever the explanation, the fact is that Apple now has a dominant position in several key businesses (content distribution and mobile computing) and is having a seriously disruptive impact on the mobile phone industry. In particular, its iTunes Store gives it control of the tollgate through which billions of paid-for music tracks and albums, videos and apps cascade down to millions of customers worldwide. It levies a commission on everything that passes through that gate. And every Apple mobile device sold can only be activated by hooking up to the gate.

This gives Apple unparalleled power. Lots of other organisations offer paid-for downloads, but none has the credit card details of so many internet users who are accustomed to paying for stuff online. This was one reason why proprietors of print magazines began to slaver when the iPad appeared. Here at last was a way of getting people to pay for online content: just make it available on iTunes and let Apple collect the money. Sure, it rankled that Apple took 30%, but – hey – at least it would bring to an end the parasitic free riding that was endemic on the web. Henceforth, the web was dead: publishing magazines as iPad apps was the future.

Then Apple abruptly changed the rules, stipulating that any publisher selling a digital subscription on a website must also make the same subscription offer within the app, from which Apple would take a 30% cut. Publishers have been furious about this, but there's nothing they can do about it. If they want to do business on the iTunes store, then they have to do it Apple's way.

In itself, this was just an example of the Big Unfriendly Giant flexing its muscles, but it could be a harbinger of things to come.

Umberto Eco once wrote a memorable essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven.

Eco's metaphor applies with a vengeance to the new generations of Apple iDevices, which are rigidly controlled appliances. You may think you own your lovely, shiny new iPhone or iPad, but in reality an invisible virtual string links it back to Apple HQ at One Infinite Loop, Cupertino.

You can't install anything on it that hasn't had the prior approval of Mr Jobs and his subordinates. And if you are foolish enough to break the rules and seek your own route to salvation, then you may find when you next try to sync it with iTunes that it has turned into an expensive, beautifully designed paperweight. If that isn't power, then I don't know what is.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...minates-market





The Holy War:

Mac vs. DOS
Umberto Eco

The following excerpts are from an English translation of Umberto Eco's back-page column, La bustina di Minerva, in the Italian news weekly Espresso, September 30, 1994.

A French translation may be seen here.

Friends, Italians, countrymen, I ask that a Committee for Public Health be set up, whose task would be to censor (by violent means, if necessary) discussion of the following topics in the Italian press. Each censored topic is followed by an alternative in brackets which is just as futile, but rich with the potential for polemic. Whether Joyce is boring (whether reading Thomas Mann gives one erections). Whether Heidegger is responsible for the crisis of the Left (whether Ariosto provoked the revocation of the Edict of Nantes). Whether semiotics has blurred the difference between Walt Disney and Dante (whether De Agostini does the right thing in putting Vimercate and the Sahara in the same atlas). Whether Italy boycotted quantum physics (whether France plots against the subjunctive). Whether new technologies kill books and cinemas (whether zeppelins made bicycles redundant). Whether computers kill inspiration (whether fountain pens are Protestant).

One can continue with: whether Moses was anti-semitic; whether Leon Bloy liked Calasso; whether Rousseau was responsible for the atomic bomb; whether Homer approved of investments in Treasury stocks; whether the Sacred Heart is monarchist or republican.

I asked above whether fountain pens were Protestant. Insufficient consideration has been given to the new underground religious war which is modifying the modern world. It's an old idea of mine, but I find that whenever I tell people about it they immediately agree with me.

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach -- if not the kingdom of Heaven -- the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It's true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions: When it comes down to it, you can decide to ordain women and gays if you want to.

Naturally, the Catholicism and Protestantism of the two systems have nothing to do with the cultural and religious positions of their users. One may wonder whether, as time goes by, the use of one system rather than another leads to profound inner changes. Can you use DOS and be a Vande supporter? And more: Would Celine have written using Word, WordPerfect, or Wordstar? Would Descartes have programmed in Pascal?

And machine code, which lies beneath and decides the destiny of both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that belongs to the Old Testament, and is talmudic and cabalistic. The Jewish lobby, as always....
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_mac_vs_pc.html





The Echo Nest Makes Pandora Look Like a Transistor Radio
David Zax

More cowbell! Everyone from Christopher Walken enthusiasts to major record labels to Columbia University is excited about The Echo Nest. The many uses, frivolous and non-, of Echo Nest's massive 30-million-song dataset.

You music lovers out there probably think we're living in a Golden Age. iTunes, Pandora, Rhapsody, music distribution and discovery couldn't get any better, right? With the proliferation of music sites and apps, we must be at some sort of saturation point, after all, the telos of digital music technology.

But spend a bit of time talking to Brian Whitman, cofounder of The Echo Nest, and you realize that we're really in a digital music Stone Age. Sure, we've come a long way, but there's still plenty we can't do--our recommendation engines are limited, as is our ability to sift information automatically from songs (to tell the sex of a singer just from his or her voice, for instance). The Echo Nest, a five-year-old company devoted to aggregating, indexing, using, and sharing vast troves of music data, just announced a collaboration with Columbia University's LabROSA (Laboratory for the Recognition and Organization of Speech and Audio) on something called the Million Song Dataset, free to use for non-commercial music researchers.

Let's begin with music recommendation. What's wrong with Pandora? Repetition. Even cofounder and Chief Strategy Officer Tim Westergren admitted recently that they're working on the repetition. Pandora's site declares that there are 800,000 songs and counting in its database. Not a negligible number, by any means. But Echo Nest has 30 million. "It's great for a top 40 radio experience," Whitman tells Fast Company, giving Pandora credit where due. "But if you want to dig deep down into a lot more music, you need some automated discovery platform." Whereas Pandora proudly employs people to manually go through music and classify it, The Echo Nest, says Whitman, "understands the world of music automatically." And not just how it sounds.

The Echo Nest crawls the web in search of music and writing about music; it also partners with major labels like Universal and aggregators like 7Digital. It then devours data about the music, on both the "acoustic side"--tempo, key, etc. (Echo Nest's system crunches that sort of data in about 10 seconds for a song)--and the "cultural side"--what reviewers are saying about the music for instance. It crawls the web, Google-style, ravenous for new musical information. If you tweet about the band you saw last night, "we have that in our databases within the hour," says Whitman.

What are the uses of data on 30 million songs? Broadly, there are two categories: commercial and academic.

On the commercial side, one of the most exciting uses of Echo Nest is that its data will empower the next generation of app-makers to make apps we can't even imagine yet. About 150 apps have already been made using the application; they're listed here. Some highlights include last week's launch, "Pocket Hipster," in which a mustachioed jerk with an ironic bowtie, suspenders, and a fixed gear bike scrutinizes your playlist, tells you how horrible it is, and recommends little-known gems. The Echo Nest has also partnered with MTV to power its Music Meter, which updates every 15 minutes or so with information about which bands are most talked about on the Internet. Music Meter just launched in mobile app form yesterday. The Echo Nest's massive database makes it better at understanding "the long tail of music," says Whitman, "stuff waiting out there to be discovered, but no one knows about it."

One of the first fun apps that came out using The Echo Nest's data was inspired by the Saturday Night Live sketch in which Christopher Walken urges Blue Oyster Cult's percussionist to go nuts on the cowbell.

"It was a crazy thing I never would have imagined," says a bemused Whitman. "This was my dissertation work, and people are now making joke apps from it."

The other use category is academia, and that's where the free-to-use Million Song Dataset comes in. Researchers in, say, physics, share the same reality, so they can replicate each other's experiments and advance the science. But researchers in music information retrieval haven't had the same reality to share, so to speak--they haven't had a large shared data set. Until now. "This is me giving a gift to my graduate school doppelganger, 10 years younger than me," says Whitman, a PhD graduate of MIT's Media Lab.

The world of academic digital music research is one many of us haven't considered. Whitman identifies a few major research problems. Though the human ear can easily separate the sound of a guitar from the sound of drums from the sound of a voice, computers can't do that yet, making full transcription of songs a hugely labor-intensive task. A program that can listen to a song and transcribe each instrument's role would be a major leap forward. Others are trying to devise a program that could identify the year or decade a song was made, just from listening to it (sifting things like production values, whether the song's in mono or stereo, and so on). There are already programs that are very good at identifying the genre of a song.

We can't know yet what the full fruits of Echo Nest's datasets will be. "Surprise us," says The Echo Nest's site, in a challenge to researchers and developers everywhere. In the meantime, crank up the cowbell.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1734773/e...ansistor-radio





Radio Daze

This week’s parasha introduces a medium for distinguishing truth from falsehood. On the radio, where actors are hired to read scripts and pretend to be real people, things aren’t so simple.
Liel Leibovitz

Last year, a young man called in to a radio station with a problem. He’d recently attended a bachelor party, he said, and a friend of the groom-to-be, clueless of the unwritten etiquette of maledom, brought his girlfriend along, derailing what was supposed to be a weekend of gambling, girls, and general debauchery. The caller told his story with passion and verve, and then asked the station’s listeners for their advice on how to treat his clueless pal.

Or at least he would have, had this been a real conversation. The young man—who asked to remain nameless in order to protect his chances for future employment—was an actor, and the staged call an audition. A short while later, he received the following email: “Thank you for auditioning for Premiere On Call,” it said. “Your audition was great! We’d like to invite you to join our official roster of ‘ready-to-work’ actors.” The job, the email indicated, paid $40 an hour, with one hour guaranteed per day.

But what exactly was the work? The question popped up during the audition and was explained, the actor said, clearly and simply: If he passed the audition, he would be invited periodically to call in to various talk shows and recite various scenarios that made for interesting radio. He would never be identified as an actor, and his scenarios would never be identified as fabricated—which they always were.

“I was surprised that it seemed so open,” the actor told me in an interview. “There was really no pretense of covering it up.”

Curious, the actor did some snooping and learned that Premiere On Call was a service offered by Premiere Radio Networks, the largest syndication company in the United States and a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications, the entertainment and advertising giant. Premiere syndicates some of the more sterling names in radio, including Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity. But a great radio show depends as much on great callers as it does on great hosts: Enter Premiere On Call.

“Premiere On Call is our new custom caller service,” read the service’s website, which disappeared as this story was being reported (for a cached version of the site click here). “We supply voice talent to take/make your on-air calls, improvise your scenes or deliver your scripts. Using our simple online booking tool, specify the kind of voice you need, and we’ll get your the right person fast. Unless you request it, you won’t hear that same voice again for at least two months, ensuring the authenticity of your programming for avid listeners.”

The actors hired by Premiere to provide the aforementioned voice talents sign confidentiality agreements and so would not go on the record. But their accounts leave little room for doubt. All of the actors I questioned reported receiving scripts, calling in to real shows, pretending to be real people. Frequently, one actor said, the calls were live, sometimes recorded in advance, but never presented on-air as anything but real.

Michael Harrison, the editor of Talkers Magazine, the talk-radio world’s leading trade publication, said he knew nothing of this particular service but was not altogether surprised to hear that it was in place. There was, he said, a tradition of “creating fake phone calls for the sake of entertainment on some of the funny shows, shock jocks shows, the kind of shows you hear on FM music stations in the morning, they would regularly have scenarios, crazy scenarios of people calling up and doing pranks.”

Rachel Nelson, a Premiere Radio Networks spokesperson, defended the Premiere on Call service and said that responsibility for how it is employed falls ultimately to those who use it.

“Premiere provides a wide variety of audio services for radio stations across the country, one of which is connecting local stations in major markets with great voice talent to supplement their programming needs,” Nelson wrote in an email. “Voice actors know this service as Premiere On Call. Premiere, like many other content providers, facilitates casting—while character and script development, and how the talent’s contribution is integrated into programs, are handled by the varied stations.”

***

In a strange way, this week’s Torah portion anticipates the state of affairs brought about by Premiere On Call. The parasha discusses a priestly vestment known as the hoshen. It’s a breastplate worn by the high priest, fitted with 12 jewels and looking a bit like a telephone keypad. And, like a telephone, it was an instrument of communication: The hoshen housed the urim and thummim, mysterious holy objects that, most scholars believe, were used for divination. In particularly fraught times, when truth and lies had to be sorted apart, the hoshen was called into service. It was, in a way, one of our earliest pieces of technology, a man-made object used to communicate, in this case, with the divine.

We’ve come a long way. Far from harbingers of truth, our media are now increasingly used to shake the foundations of the real. We know this to be the case with television, where the stars of reality programming are frequently found to follow the blueprints of writers and producers. And we know it to be the case online, where identity has become a playground and masquerading the norm. But radio seemed different. We listen to radio because the voice, we think, doesn’t lie. The voice is immediate and intimate and present. We attach ourselves to radio personalities with an intensity we’d never dream to extend to, say, television hosts—just look at the fierce and unparalleled devotion to Howard Stern—and this is because we feel as if we know them and trust them.

It is time to question this notion as well. The next caller you hear, the next personal story that makes you sniffle or shout with rage, may be the doing of someone at some faceless casting agency, hiring actors and writing scripts designed to titillate. The point is, without something like the hoshen, an object capable of channeling the celestial spirit and telling truth from lie, we’ll never know.
http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-re...59/radio-daze/





When the Boy Next Door Was Evil
Neil Genzlinger

NO one likes to argue that the world needs more wickedness. What with despots, Charlie Sheen and rail riders who feel that quiet-car restrictions apply to everyone but them, it seems we already have plenty to go around. And yet advocating for more wickedness is exactly what I am forced to do after watching Season 1 of “Dennis the Menace,” which is being released this month on DVD by Shout! Factory.

Dennis, who arrived on television screens on Oct. 4, 1959, and stayed for 146 episodes over four seasons, was evil incarnate, and he worked hard at it. He wasn’t bad just once an episode so that he could receive some tidy life lesson in the final five minutes. He crammed as much wrongdoing into a half-hour as Lindsay Lohan manages in a year. Watching him in action, all I could think was: “This kid is way more entertaining than the small fry on TV today. Nothing around in the last few decades but cutesy quip spewers like the Olsen twins. What the heck happened?” The television “Dennis the Menace,” of course, was based on the comic strip by Hank Ketcham, and young Jay North, who had just turned 8 when the show had its premiere, memorably brought the character to life. Mischief making, it turns out, is something that needs to be heard and felt, not just sketched. Forget the comics-art purists; this was a television adaptation that ended up being far spunkier than its print-medium inspiration.

The television Dennis was chirpy and cute and had a voice just right for that grating signature line, “Hell-oooo Mr. Wilson,” aimed several times per episode at his unfortunate neighbor (played with wonderful grumpiness by Joseph Kearns). So apparently lovable was Dennis that the show’s fans are probably complaining already about my characterization of him as evil. “You’re confusing ‘evil’ with ‘adorable scamp,’ ” these fans are saying. “‘Dennis didn’t deliberately cause trouble; trouble just had a way of finding him.’”

Yeah, that’s what I thought too, at first. But one of the things about DVD collections is that they enable you to watch a lot of episodes in the space of a few days. And when you do that with this show, you notice an apparent contradiction: Dennis was one precocious kid, and yet he never seemed to get any smarter.

You would think that when, in Episode 2, he causes havoc with the apparently good deed of sticking a fallen street sign back up (turned 90 degrees, so that it misidentifies the two roads), he would learn something about his problem-solving limitations, so that in Episode 18 he might think twice about trying to alleviate Mr. Wilson’s infestation of starlings by putting pieces of liver in a tree. But he doesn’t; he seeks no adult guidance, does no research. The liver ends up attracting cats, which are even noisier than the starlings.

Dennis’s wide-eyed innocence and apparent remorse are, I’ve concluded, ruses. When, for instance, he moves a paint bucket closer to Mr. Wilson’s ladder to “help,” he has already run the algorithms in his cowlicked little head and determined there is a high probability that Mr. Wilson will, when descending the ladder, step in said bucket. I’m telling you, the kid was evil incarnate.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. These shows were fun to watch then and still are, and they gave both the children and the adults in the audience a sort of hope. For the youngsters Dennis’s level of badness was something to aspire to yet always out of reach; just knowing that somewhere in the world there was a kid who could repeatedly vex his entire neighborhood gave them strength to carry on with their own drab lives of obedience. For the adults, though none would admit it, Dennis was what all parents want their child to be: a worthy rival. Raising children is like a chess match extended over 18 years or so. Sure you want obedience, but you also want constant resistance; otherwise you’ve just got a boring lump on your hands who expects to be fed and sent to an expensive college. No entertainment value there.

So television gave us Dennis, and then — well, it gave us Opie. “The Andy Griffith Show,” with its Dennis-size character, Opie Taylor, arrived just a year after “Dennis the Menace,” but it was the beginning of a decades-long effort to shove the Pandora’s hoard represented by Dennis back in the box.

Opie (played by Ron Howard, who turns up as a playmate in several Season 1 episodes of “Dennis the Menace”) starts out with Dennisesque potential. The first episode of “Andy Griffith” begins with a wedding ceremony in which Opie’s father, Sheriff Andy Taylor, is presiding over the marriage of his housekeeper. Opie doesn’t want her to leave their household, so when Andy gets to “Does anybody here know why these two should not be wed?,” the kid speaks up. Repeatedly and insistently.

This goes on for some time, and it seems as if, Dennis-like, Opie may single-handedly disrupt the carefully laid plans of these grown-ups. But then, at the 2 minute 54 second mark, Deputy Barney Fife reaches over and covers Opie’s mouth with his hand. It is, in effect, the muzzling of 50 years’ worth of television boys and girls.

Opie’s misdeeds over the many ensuing seasons were few and mild, and almost none of the other pre-tweener youngsters who came along after ever really terrorized their neighborhood the way Dennis did. Sure, an occasional little rotter got on the air, but in general this has been a species bound for extinction. Even those pee-wee stars who seemed born for hard-core mischief were, like Opie, neutered right from the get-go.

In the series premiere of “Diff’rent Strokes” in November 1978, Gary Coleman, seemingly a natural havoc wreaker, was reduced to delivering a few wisecracks. (Most pungent: He greets his new guardian’s braces-wearing daughter with, “Hi, metal mouth.”) It took Emmanuel Lewis in “Webster” (premiere: September 1983) an episode and a half before he got around to putting a staple into a grown-up’s toe, and even then the injury didn’t result in an ambulance call or gangrene, as it would have on “Dennis.” In the premiere of “Mr. Belvedere” in March 1985, Brice Beckham, playing the youngest member of a family with a butlerlike housekeeper, shows a flash of Dennisness early, turning up the volume on his sister’s Walkman until she shrieks in pain. But by the third season premiere Mr. Belvedere is shoving the boy’s face into a freshly iced chocolate marble fudge cake. Kids no longer rule, as in Dennis’s world; they’ve become a punch line.

Partly this transformation reflects a shift in sitcoms, or at least network sitcoms, away from shows focused almost entirely on a child to ones focused on the family as a whole, or on adults who happen to have children. But there’s also a Ritalin effect at work here. Certainly the hyperactive Dennis, were he to turn up on TV today, would immediately be drugged into a more restrained behavior pattern. “Dennis the Menace” would be “Dennis the Docile” within a few episodes. There’s no room for the rambunctious in the American household today.

Which explains Brick, the kid on ABC’s current sitcom “The Middle.” Brick (played by Atticus Shaffer), the youngest child in a nutty Midwestern family, isn’t mischievous; he’s odd. He whispers to himself for no apparent reason. His best friend, as a teacher pointed out in the series premiere in 2009, is his backpack. He is, in short, the anti-Dennis: not a child who is allowed to run unfettered, and thus run amok, but a child who needs to be studied and treated. That’s the reigning view of childhood today: it’s an aberration that, with enough testing and scheduling and pharmacological intervention, can be managed. Like a chronic disease.

Television needs fewer little kids who behave psychotically and toss off preternaturally witty remarks, and more little kids who do what little kids are supposed to do: put paint buckets where adults will step in them, cause grumpy neighbors to be mistakenly hauled off to jail (as happens to Mr. Wilson at the end of Episode 1) and in general drive adults crazy. Wicked is better than wimpy any day.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/a.../06menace.html





Anonymous Makes a Laughing Stock of HBGary
Jürgen Schmidt

Trying to explain Anonymous is a hopeless undertaking – as a first approximation you can view them as a group of anonymous internet activists. Anonymous has recently come to the public's attention through its support for WikilLeaks, which resulted in it overloading and bringing down the main web sites of PayPal, MasterCard and Swiss bank Postfinanz.

Operation Payback involved thousands of sympathisers transforming their computers into remotely-controlled bots using a modified version of the load-testing tool Low Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC), which then targeted particular web sites. LOIC was previously used in Anonymous' campaigns against Scientology.

In early February, the head of US security firm HBGary Federal told the Financial Times that, as part of a project to research the risks posed by social networks, he had infiltrated Anonymous and uncovered the identity of leading figures within the organisation. "As 1337 as these guys are supposed to be they don't get it. I have pwned them! :)," boasted Aaron Barr in an email to a member of the company's PR department.

The Twitter account had the same password as Barr's email access. Vergrößern He did not publish the names of the alleged anonymous activists at this point – he had assembled a dossier of online IDs, names and in some cases addresses and was saving these for a planned meeting with the FBI. A blog entry and press release had even been prepared, which boasted, "HBGary Federal […] flexes it's muscle today by revealing the identities of all the top management within the group Anonymous."

This was a press release Barr never got to send. One day after the Financial Times interview, Anonymous ran its own exposé of the security company and what it revealed was more than just a little embarrassing.
The hack

Unknown assailants were able to rapidly penetrate the security company's computer systems, from where they were able to access around 60,000 emails. Access was gained via HBGary Federal's public web site. The web site was managed using a proprietary content management system specially developed for the company and only the company's most senior employees had access to this CMS.

The CMS generated URLs such as /pages.php?pageNav=2&page=27. But – mistake number one – it failed to properly check the parameters fed into it, allowing injection of commands which the CMS passed on to the database. This SQL injection attack allowed the attackers to access the password hashes stored in the database.

The hashes were generated using the MD5 cryptographic hash function, but did not use any additional security. In particular, standard techniques for password strengthening, such as adding a random salt or using multiple iterations of the hash function, were not used. This second mistake made it easy to work back to plain text passwords by using rainbow tables.

The third mistake was the re-use of the same password for the CMS as for many other accounts – including email, Twitter and LinkedIn. This gave attackers access to several email accounts, including those of Barr and his Chief Operations Officer, Ted Vera.
Vera also had an account on support.hbgary.com which was accessible via SSH, which Anonymous was able to access using the same password. It ran a Linux system which – mistake number four – still contained a security vulnerability in the GNU-C loader, first disclosed back in October. This presented uninvited guests with root privileges, allowing them access to many gigabytes of backups and research data.

Because Barr was also an administrator on HBGary's Google Apps account, he had the rights to change other employees' email passwords. This gave Anonymous access to Greg Hoglund's inbox. Hoglund is a well-known rootkit expert and co-founder of parent company HBGary. Mistake number five was that Hoglund's inbox contained the root password for his rootkit.com security web site. With the help of this password, Anonymous was able to persuade another administrator to open a tunnel through the firewall to change Hoglund's supposedly forgotten user password. This was mistake number five and a half (only half a mistake as the emails were sent from the correct email address and the sender apparently already knew the root password). Using this SSH access, Anonymous was able to gain access to the server and to data in forum accounts, where once again unsalted and therefore rapidly crackable MD5 hashes were used.

All in all, for a security firm the level of security was shockingly low. Easy to avoid errors, such as obvious SQL injection vulnerabilities on the web site, unsalted passwords used for a number of different services and unpatched servers, shine a harsh light on a company which earns its bucks selling security software and consultancy. But it gets worse.

Following a failed attempt at mediation on IRC, Anonymous published both the alleged identities of its leading figures and HBGary's entire email archive online. And whilst the allegedly explosive data on Anonymous proved to be almost entirely without substance, the email archive painted a very detailed picture of the US security company's leading figures and their business dealings. Whilst it's worth bearing in mind that these emails could have been 'interfered with', plausibility checks offer no indication that this is the case.

Hot air

It's important to note that there are two companies involved here: HBGary and HBGary Federal. They have very close ties but also major differences. Under the direction of Aaron Barr, the subsidiary company – HBGary Federal – has specialised in analysing social networks. As it has few tangibles to show to potential customers, Barr appears to have no objections to pumping out hot air to try and move the company forward.

He has recently been on the hunt for a client with (financial) muscle to bankroll a system for managing online satellite IDs ('personas') and collecting and analysing data. He quoted US company Mantech around $100,000 to design a prototype for generating and managing these personas. Mantech describes itself as a supplier of technology to the US secret services, military and law enforcement agencies. Its list of customers includes the US navy, air force, FBI, NSA and the Department of Homeland Security.

Barr outlined how such personas could be established in a "small side project". He planned to use a persona to amend and distribute the Low Orbit Ion Canon. A second persona would then be used to find and "call out" this trojan-infected version. This would kill the credibility of the first persona, but give plenty of kudos to the 'finder'. The email exchange on the project ended when Barr's developer robustly declined to be involved, mailing, "I’m not compiling that shit on my box!"

Barr's absence of reticence in his choice of methods is further illustrated by a paper entitled "The WikiLeaks Threat", published by HBGary in conjunction with US companies Palantir and Berico. On journalists filing positive reports on WikiLeaks, the report recommends, "It is this level of support that needs to be disrupted." It goes on to explain how it believes this can be achieved – although professionals like Glenn Greenwald (named in the report) often have liberal tendencies, given the choice between their career and the cause, most will, opines the paper, ultimately choose career.
Rootkits, trojans and 0 days

It is equally uncommon to hear the word 'scruples' in the same sentence as parent company HBGary, where the shots are called by Greg Hoglund. HBGary at least has actual products and genuine know-how, which it employs to bring in revenues. Its best known product is the HBGary Responder, which can be used to analyse memory on Windows systems. It is often used as a forensic tool by criminal investigation agencies, but can also be used to detect malware.

A successor is already in progress for the rootkit licenced at approximately $60,000. Vergrößern Privately, however, Hoglund & Co apparently also sell tailor-made trojans, rootkits and other spyware. HBGary has offered $60,000 licenses for the "HBGary Rootkit Keylogger Platform", a custom-built kernel rootkit which spies on Windows systems whilst evading detection by anti-virus software, rootkit tools and personal firewalls. The price includes the source code, allowing customers to make their own adaptations.

Hoglund does not hesitate to describe himself as a "serious bad ass"; his current pet project is a novel kind of rootkit codenamed 12 Monkeys / Magenta. It aims to evade all and any software protection through not being associated with specific processes or data structures, instead constantly hopping around in memory. HBGary quoted $280,000 to develop a prototype. One product which is almost finished is a framework going by the name of Task B, which allows computers to be compromised by brief USB, FireWire or PCMCIA card access. An iPod version is still under discussion.

0-Days - exploits for security vulnerabilities for which there is currently no patch from the manufacturer - are code-named "Juicy fruit". Vergrößern HBGary is also pleased to offer '0 days' – exploits for security vulnerabilities for which no patch is yet available. Just like your friendly neighbourhood drug dealer, initiates avoid the tell-tale term '0 day', preferring instead to refer to them as 'juicy fruits'. Items for VMware, Java and Flash are among the 'fruits' available.

Whilst its Responder tool is also used,. for example, by German state criminal investigation agencies, HBGary largely limits its unofficial activities to the US market. The company particularly enjoys doing business with defence contractor General Dynamics, which resells to US military and secret service agencies. The emails do not record any contacts which might suggest collaboration on federal or state trojans with government agencies of other nations.
We are Anonymous

The break-in at HBGary illustrates a new facet of internet phenomenon Anonymous' amorphous existence. Although the hack did not turn out to be black magic, it is nonetheless the work of experts with very strong security skills.

The defense contractor General Dynamics buys HBGary espionage equipment. Vergrößern This makes it a completely different kettle of fish from DDoS attacks on web sites and is in a completely different ballpark to the offbeat humour found on 4chan. In conversation with heise Security, two Anonymous activists apparently involved in the HBGary incident recounted that they had nothing to do with 4chan, which was, they explained, before their time. Although for them the break-in was also about the 'lulz' (laughter frequently blended with schadenfreude), they explain that the emails were only published once they came to the conclusion that they had a duty to bring the company's activities to public attention.

Anonymous should not be viewed as a disordered mass more or less blindly following a few leader figures. Like amorphous materials in chemistry, Anonymous forms an irregular pattern in which there is no apparent large scale order, but where smaller scale order is certainly discernible. The active parts are organised into groups which make their own rules. During Operation Payback, votes were taken to determine suitable objectives; other campaigns operate on a consensus basis.

The WikiLeaks campaign and the support it has provided to uprisings in the Arab world have given Anonymous more than just a growing community of fans. They have also resulted in the internet phenomenon receiving a greater influx from the classical hacker community, which was relatively unimpressed by the cheap jokes of the 4chan days, and is rather indifferent to Scientology and views DDoS attacks as vandalism.

Indeed one of the HBGary activists told heise Security that he first became involved in Anonymous just four months ago in the context of OpTunisia and OpEgypt. During our conversation, he proved to be an amiable, open-minded person who had been involved with the internet from the days of networked bulletin boards and Gopher. Of course, this is just one face behind the Anonymous mask. As an entity Anonymous remains unpredictable – at the end of the day anyone can be Anonymous.
http://www.h-online.com/security/fea...y-1198176.html





Sites Like Twitter Absent From Free Speech Pact
Verne G. Kopytoff

When Google, Yahoo and Microsoft signed a code of conduct intended to protect online free speech and privacy in restrictive countries, the debate over censorship by China was raging, and Internet companies operating there were under fire for putting profit ahead of principle.

It seemed the perfect rallying moment for a core cause, and the companies hoped that other technology firms would follow their lead.

But three years later, the effort known as the Global Network Initiative has failed to attract any corporate members beyond the original three, limiting its impact and raising questions about its potential as a viable force for change.

At the same time, the recent Middle East uprisings have highlighted the crucial role technology can play in the world’s most closed societies, which leaders of the initiative say makes their efforts even more important.

“Recent events really show that the issues of freedom of expression and privacy are relevant to companies across the board in the technology sector,” said Susan Morgan, executive director of the initiative. “Things really seem to be accelerating.”

But the global initiative is not. All of the participating companies are American. Also, Facebook and Twitter are notably absent despite their large audience and wide use by activists, in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Bennett Freeman, senior vice president of the mutual fund company Calvert Investments and a G.N.I. board member, pointed out that the three current members were among the biggest Internet companies, but acknowledged that “we are going to have to add some new companies soon to be truly influential.”

The biggest test yet for the initiative comes later this year, when member companies are judged on whether they have adequate policies in place to address privacy and free speech issues. Independent auditors will issue a report after examining whether the companies narrowly interpret government demands for user information and whether they store users’ data in countries where free speech is protected, for example.

Next year, the companies are to undergo a more thorough review of whether they lived up to code of conduct’s principles.

The initiative was created in 2008 after human rights groups and politicians condemned the top Internet companies for complying with China’s restrictive laws rather than jeopardizing their business interests by challenging them.

Yahoo had turned over data that led to the imprisonment of several Chinese activists. Microsoft had shut down a blog by a Chinese journalist who worked for The New York Times. Meanwhile, Google had introduced a censored search engine in China (although the company has since shut down that site).

The initiative is modeled on previous voluntary efforts aimed at eradicating sweatshops in the apparel industry and stopping corruption in the oil, natural gas and mining industries. As with those efforts at self-regulation, this one came at a time when Internet companies were seeking to polish their image and potentially ward off legislation.

The code of conduct says that companies must try “to avoid or minimize the impact of government restrictions on freedom of expression” and protect user privacy when demands by government “compromise privacy in a manner inconsistent with internationally recognized laws and standards.”

In practice, however, the code offers flexibility. Companies that go along with a country’s censorship requirements can remain in compliance as long as they disclose it, as Microsoft does with its censored search results in China.

A number of participants, which also include human rights groups, academics and firms specializing in socially responsible investing, agree that the initiative started slowly. Much of the focus since its founding has been on getting organized and hiring.

Originally, the membership was supposed to include the entire spectrum of software, hardware and telecommunications firms along with Internet companies. The idea was that a bigger roster would mean greater influence and credibility.

But recruiting efforts have been fruitless. Some companies have cited the auditing process as being too onerous, according to Global Network Initiative participants who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to discourage companies from joining in the future. Other companies do not see any financial benefit or think they can do it alone.

Andrew Noyes, a spokesman for Facebook, declined to address why Facebook had not joined. But he said that his company took seriously the issue of user trust and was in regular contact with governments and human rights groups.

“As Facebook grows, we’ll continue to expand our outreach and participation, but it’s important to remember that our global operations are still small, with offices in only a handful of countries,” Mr. Noyes said.

Twitter declined to comment.

Where the initiative has been most effective so far is in creating a forum for companies to easily get advice and share ideas. For instance, as the initiative’s participants were creating the code of conduct, human rights groups contacted Google after it removed videos in 2007 from YouTube showing police abuse in Egypt because of guidelines prohibiting violence. Google ultimately decided to restore the videos and adjust its policy to allow such clips.

Some human rights groups said the initiative’s code of conduct was weaker than they would have liked. Getting companies to sign on would have been impossible otherwise, they acknowledged, describing the code’s final version as the best that could be hoped for at the time.

Even with the code of conduct to help guide them, companies will inevitably come across issues that have no easy answers, said Rebecca MacKinnon, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation who specializes in online privacy and is a participant in the initiative.

“Most of these issues aren’t black and white,” Ms. MacKinnon said. “The idea is to help them do the right thing rather than play ‘gotcha’ after they mess up.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/t.../07rights.html





Western Digital to Buy Hitachi Unit for $4.3 Billion

Western Digital announced on Monday that it would buy Hitachi Global Storage Technologies for $4.3 billion, in a deal that will further expand the company’s reach in data storage.

The acquisition, which has been approved by the boards of both companies, is expected to be completed during the third quarter, and is expected to immediately increase earnings per share, excluding certain deal-related costs.

“We believe this step will result in several key benefits — enhanced R.&D. capabilities, innovation and expansion of a rich product portfolio, comprehensive market coverage and scale that will enhance our cost structure and ability to compete in a dynamic marketplace,” John F. Coyne, president and chief executive of Western Digital, said in a statement. “The skills and contributions of both workforces were key considerations in assessing this compelling opportunity.”

The combined company will maintain the Western Digital name and be headquartered in Irvine, Calif. Mr. Coyne will remain the chief executive. The current chief of Hitachi Global Storage, Steve Milligan, will be the president.

“This brings together two industry leaders with consistent track records of strong execution and industry outperformance,” Mr. Milligan said in a statement. “Together we can provide customers worldwide with the industry’s most compelling and diverse set of products and services, from innovative personal storage to solid state drives for the enterprise.”

Western Digital’s financial adviser was Bank of America Merrill Lynch and its main legal adviser was O’Melveny & Myers. Hitachi was represented by Goldman Sachs and the law firms Morrison Foerster and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/03/...r-4-3-billion/





Samsung Hits 1TB Per Platter – 4TB Desktop & 1TB Notebook Drives Shipping Soon
Justin Kerr

Remember when the hard drive industry tried to convince us they would never be able to pump out hard drives bigger than 100GB? Well according to Samsung the platter density war is still alive and well, and a new breakthrough has allowed them to hit 1TB per platter densities well ahead of schedule. What does this mean for us as enthusiasts? Lower cost high-speed 3TB drives, along with 4TB versions in the not too distant future.

A bump in platter densities isn’t just for desktop class hard drives however, and Samsung was eager to show off its new standard height 2 platter 1TB 2.5-inch notebook drives as well. 1TB notebook drives have been on the market for almost a year now, but the 12.5MM height of last years models made them incompatible with an average laptop.

Samsung didn’t announce when the drives would be officially released, however they did clarify that the first shipping models will be part of the Spinpoint EcoGreen (5400 RPM) series, will contain 32MB of cache, and will be SATA 6 Gb compatible.

The advancement of hard drive densities seemed to come to a scratching halt when the industry hit 2TB (for oblivious reasons), but with EFI and software workarounds now shipping in bulk, lets hope we are back on the fast track. For its part, Samsung claims the current process technology should allow them to start cranking out 10TB drives without too much trouble, and I for one can’t wait.
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/new..._shipping_soon





Mog, the Digital Music Service, Takes Aim at the TV and the Car
Ben Sisario

The next frontier for digital music is not a tablet or a smartphone, but two items that have been part of everyday life for decades: the car and the television set.

For years, digital music has been confined mostly to traditional computers and phones. But that limitation is slowly disappearing as the market shifts toward cloud services, which stream content from remote servers, allowing anything with an Internet connection — like smart TVs or Blu-ray players — to become portals for vast libraries of entertainment.

One music streaming service, Mog, is counting on this change to draw new subscribers and help it stand out in a crowded field. On Tuesday, the company will announce a string of deals that could introduce it to millions of potential new customers. LG, Samsung and Vizio will incorporate Mog into their Internet-ready televisions and other devices, and the service will become available on Sonos, a wireless system for managing music throughout the house.

And in what the company calls the first integration of an on-demand music service into a car, Mog will also become part of BMW’s Mini line. (On-demand streaming, unlike radio, lets you pick the songs you listen to.) More such deals are on the way, said David Hyman, Mog’s founder.

“When you are thinking about buying into a cloud-based music service,” Mr. Hyman said, “I imagine you asking yourself, ‘Can I use this on my phone? Can I use it in my car? Will it work in my new TV?’ The value of these services goes up the more places consumers can access you.”

Mog, based in Berkeley, Calif., was founded in 2005 as a social networking site. It changed in late 2009 into a subscription streaming service, offering 10 million songs at rates of $5 a month for music on PCs alone, or $10 for additional access through mobile devices. On new TVs and home theater systems, Mog will be a preinstalled feature, and in the Mini it can be activated by plugging in a smartphone. (Mog users paying $5 will get access through their TVs, but the $10 subscription is needed for Sonos and the Mini.)

Unlike MP3s, which a customer buys once and then possesses, music accessed through the cloud needs constant contact with the service that provides it, which means the service must be available everywhere its customers spend their time. And if you’re looking for ubiquity, the first places to go are the living room and the car — both of which, analysts say, represent huge untapped markets for digital music.

“I don’t think anybody in the music industry quite grasps how much of an important opportunity lies in the living room,” said Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Forrester Research. “And the window for that opportunity is closing ever more as every year goes by.”

In many homes, the Internet-ready television, preloaded with streaming services like Netflix and Pandora, is fast becoming a multipurpose entertainment hub. Sony has recently introduced its Qriocity service, which offers streaming music and movie subscriptions through Sony’s connected devices like televisions and PlayStations.

“Home theaters and Blu-ray get a lot of attention when it comes to playing movies or TV shows, but music is a critical feature for those devices too,” said Matthew Durgin, the head of smart TV for LG Electronics in the United States. “In a lot of cases we put the highest-quality speakers in the living room.”

For subscription music services, the competition is intense and the rewards so far have been small. In addition to Mog, the field includes Rhapsody, Rdio and the remade Napster. Spotify, a European service, is expected to enter the American market this year. But relatively few customers have been willing to pay for streaming music. Rhapsody, online since 2001, has 750,000 users; Mog does not report its subscription numbers, but analysts estimate that they are much lower.

Apple and Google are also working on cloud-based music services, but they have been mum about their exact plans.

Mr. Hyman says he believes that the car, where people do a majority of their listening, could be digital music’s biggest opportunity by far, capable of attracting millions of new subscribers. Pandora, the Internet radio service, is already in many cars, including the Mini, and 20 million subscribers pay for satellite radio from Sirius XM. But so far on-demand music has been unavailable.

“The car is the holy grail,” said Mr. Hyman. “I look at the satellite-radio market in America, with 20 million subscribers, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t be 20 million subscribers.”

Mog’s controls on the Mini are integrated into the dashboard’s digital display, and activated by hooking up a smartphone through the car’s Mini Connected system. The program connects to the Internet through the phone, but otherwise it is handled entirely through the standard dashboard controls. Only recently have car manufacturers been able to incorporate such new features, said Rob Passaro, a senior project manager at the BMW Group.

“We interact with lots of cool technology companies, and the conversations we’ve always had over the years is: ‘Hey, awesome service, we want to get it into the car. When can it happen?’ ‘Oh, in about five years,’ ” Mr. Passaro said. “Now we can move as quickly as the consumer tech industry on these things.”

To attract listeners who enjoy the sense of serendipity they get with Pandora, which creates custom music streams based on users’ tastes, Mog has developed a feature that combines on-demand and radiolike service; when a digital slider is moved to one side, a stream of one artist’s music will gradually filter in similar music.

“We want to be in all these places where consumers listen to music,” Mr. Hyman said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/b...dia/08mog.html





Researchers Show How a Car’s Electronics Can Be Taken Over Remotely
John Markoff

With a modest amount of expertise, computer hackers could gain remote access to someone’s car — just as they do to people’s personal computers — and take over the vehicle’s basic functions, including control of its engine, according to a report by computer scientists from the University of California, San Diego and the University of Washington.

Although no such takeovers have been reported in the real world, the scientists were able to do exactly this in an experiment conducted on a car they bought for the purpose of trying to hack it. Their report, delivered last Friday to the National Academy of Sciences’ Transportation Research Board, described how such unauthorized intrusions could theoretically take place.

Because many of today’s cars contain cellular connections and Bluetooth wireless technology, it is possible for a hacker, working from a remote location, to take control of various features — like the car locks and brakes — as well as to track the vehicle’s location, eavesdrop on its cabin and steal vehicle data, the researchers said. They described a range of potential compromises of car security and safety.

“This report explores how hard it is to compromise a car’s computers without having any direct physical access to the car,” said Stefan Savage of the University of California, San Diego, who is one of the leaders of the research effort.

Given that the researchers were able to do it, they are now trying to pinpoint just how hard it might be for others, he said.

The car security study is one of a growing array of safety concerns that are emerging as the Internet comes in contact with almost every aspect of daily life, be it through financial systems or industrial controls. Computer security researchers have long argued that wholesale computerization and Internet connectivity of complex systems present new risks that are frequently exploited first by vandals with malicious intent.

The new report is a follow-on to similar research these experts conducted last year, which showed that cars were increasingly indistinguishable from Internet-connected computers in terms of vulnerability to outside intrusion and control. That project tried to show that the internal networks used to control systems in today’s cars are not secure in the face of a potential attacker who has physical access to the vehicle.

Their latest study was the first time that independent computer security researchers have tried to show how potential attackers could hack into a car from a remote location.

As in their first experiment, the research teams bought a car they described as a representative example of a moderately priced sedan. (They declined to identify the brand, saying that advanced telematics are rapidly becoming commonplace within the automotive industry.)

“In the case of every major manufacturer, if they do not have this capacity in their mainstream products, they’re about to,” said Tadayoshi Kohno, an assistant professor in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington.

For example, services like General Motors’ OnStar system, Toyota’s Safety Connect, Lexus’s Enform, Ford’s Sync, BMW’s Assist and Mercedes Benz’s Mbrace all use a cellular connection embedded in the vehicle to provide a variety of automated and call center support services to a driver. These subscription services make it possible to track a car’s location, unlock doors remotely and control other functions.

In their remote experiment, the researchers were able to undermine the security protecting the cellular phone in the vehicle they bought and then insert malicious software. This allowed them to send commands to the car’s electronic control unit — the nerve center of a vehicle’s electronics system — which in turn made it possible to override various vehicle controls.

“These cellular channels offer many advantages for attackers,” the report said. “They can be accessed over arbitrary distance (due to the wide coverage of cellular data infrastructure) in a largely anonymous fashion, typically have relatively high bandwidth, are two-way channels (supporting interactive control and data exfiltration), and are individually addressable.”

The researchers declined to speculate about the worse situations, such as interfering with a vehicle’s control system to make it crash. However, they noted that their research showed how a next-generation car thief might operate: instead of using today’s so-called smash and grab tactics, the thief might be able to simply dial up a parked car, unlock its doors and turn on the engine, then arrive on the scene and drive off.

In addition to the cellular telephone vulnerability, the report details similar weaknesses in other systems that allow remote access, including short range wireless networks like Bluetooth, network ports used for car maintenance and even internal CD players.

The researchers noted that their report was about potential vulnerabilities and said there was no evidence that the safety loopholes they discovered had been used by criminals. They also said they believed that the automotive industry was treating the threats responsibly and working to improve the security of modern automobiles.

“Everyone has taken this extremely seriously,” said Dr. Savage.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/business/10hack.html





Report: Society Too Reliant On GPS Systems
Gabriel Perna

A new report from the Royal Academy of Engineering in London suggests developed nations have become too reliant on GPS systems.

The report from the Academy focuses on global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) and their vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities include deliberate or accidental interference, both man-made (such as jamming) and natural (such as solar flares). While most people equate GPS systems with the tiny screens which get drivers from point A to point B, the report says society's reliance on the technology goes well beyond that. The Academy says the range of applications using the technology is so vast that without adequate independent backup, signal failure or interference could potentially affect safety systems and other critical parts of the economy.

In the U.K., on top of satellite navigation, GNSS is used for data networks, financial systems, shipping and air transport, agriculture, railways and emergency services. The European Commission recently estimated an €800 billion ($1.1 trillion US) chunk of the European economy is already dependent on GNSS.

The vulnerabilities in these systems, the Academy says, could have dire consequences if exposed. The Academy says a ship, for example, directed slightly off course by faulty data could be steered into danger. This kind of error from a GNSS is what the Academy calls a "dangerously misleading" mistake. While some GNSS issues are obvious, and can be corrected quickly, these types of mistakes are hard to catch on at first glance, but still can lead to bad outcomes.

"GPS and other GNSS are so useful and so cheap to build into equipment that we have become almost blindly reliant on the data they give us," said Dr. Martyn Thomas, chairman of the Academy's GNSS working group, in a statement. "A significant failure of GPS could cause lots of services to fail at the same time, including many that are thought to be completely independent of each other. The use of non-GNSS back ups is important across all critical uses of GNSS."

The report also mentions criminal use of jamming equipment to bypass GNSS systems. This kind of illegal activity would allow criminals to block tracking of consignments of goods or to defraud systems that collect revenue using GNSS. All told, Dr. Thomas says even if the Academy's recommendations on how to improve GNSS vulernabilities, the technology comes with a lot of unanswered questions.

"No one has a complete picture of the many ways in which we have become dependent on weak signals 12,000 miles above us," he said.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/1206...ngineering.htm





GPS Chaos: How a $30 Box Can Jam Your Life
David Hambling

Signals from GPS satellites now help you to call your mother, power your home, and even land your plane – but a cheap plastic box can jam it all

IT WAS just after midday in San Diego, California, when the disruption started. In the tower at the airport, air-traffic controllers peered at their monitors only to find that their system for tracking incoming planes was malfunctioning. At the Naval Medical Center, emergency pagers used for summoning doctors stopped working. Chaos threatened in the busy harbour, too, after the traffic-management system used for guiding boats failed. On the streets, people reaching for their cellphones found they had no signal and bank customers trying to withdraw cash from local ATMs were refused. Problems persisted for another 2 hours.

It took three days to find an explanation for this mysterious event in January 2007. Two navy ships in the San Diego harbour had been conducting a training exercise. To test procedures when communications were lost, technicians jammed radio signals. Unwittingly, they also blocked radio signals from GPS satellites across a swathe of the city.

Why would a GPS outage cause such disruption? These satellite signals now do a lot more than inform your car's satnav. GPS has become an "invisible utility" that we rely on without realising. Cellphone companies use GPS time signals to coordinate how your phone talks to their towers. Energy suppliers turn to GPS for synchronising electricity grids when connecting them together. And banks and stock exchanges use the satellites for time-stamps that prevent fraud. Meanwhile, our societies' reliance on GPS navigation is growing by the year.

Some are worried that we are now leaning too heavily on a technology that can all too easily fail – and it doesn't need a freak navy training exercise to cause havoc. Their biggest concern is a GPS jammer – a plastic device that can sit on car dashboards. These can be bought on the internet, and tend to be used by say, truckers who don't want their bosses to know where they are. Their increasing use has already caused problems at airports and blocked cellphone coverage in several cities. One jammer can take out GPS from several kilometres away, if unobstructed. No surprise, then, that researchers across the world are scrambling to find ways to prevent disastrous GPS outages happening.

Weak signal

GPS works thanks to radio signals from satellites. The dominant provider is still the US military's NavStar network, with at least 24 satellites operating at any given time, positioned so that you can always see four of them from anywhere on the planet's surface.

Each satellite continually broadcasts its location and the time as measured by its on-board atomic clock. A GPS receiver compares the time with its own clock, and then calculates how far it must be from each satellite. Once it locks on to at least four satellites and has accounted for errors, it will discover its precise location (see graphic). Nowadays, many receivers also use GPS for cheap and convenient access to the accurate time given by the satellites' clocks.

"The problem is that the GPS signal is very weak. It's like a car headlight 20,000 kilometres away," says consultant David Last, former president of the UK's Royal Institute of Navigation. You can't boost the signal any further because of the limited power supply on a satellite.

Last has first-hand experience of how easy it is to block a GPS signal, and the effects it can have on modern technology. In 2010, he conducted an experiment in the North Sea, aboard the THV Galatea, a 500-tonne ship. The Galatea is the pride of its fleet, with all the latest navigation equipment. Last wanted to find out how it would cope without GPS. So he used a simple jamming device that overwhelmed the GPS signal by broadcasting noise on the same frequency as the satellites.

When Last activated the jammer, the ship went haywire. According to the electronic display on the ship's bridge, the Galatea was suddenly flying at Mach speeds over northern Europe and Ireland. Then alarms sounded. The ship's navigation backup – its gyrocompass – crashed, because it uses GPS to provide corrections. The radar did the same. Even the ship's satellite communications failed, because GPS points the antenna in the right direction. "The crew were well trained and briefed, so they knew what was going on," says Last. "But, like us, they were surprised."

Truck cheats

Last deliberately simulated a simple, commercially available jammer. Though illegal to use in the US, UK and many other countries, these low-tech devices can be bought on the internet for as little as $30. Sellers claim they're for protecting privacy. Since they can block devices that record a vehicle's movements, they're popular with truck drivers who don't want an electronic spy in their cabs. They can also block GPS-based road tolls that are levied via an on-board receiver. Some criminals use them to beat trackers inside stolen cargo. "We originally expected that jammers might be assembled by spotty youths in their bedrooms," says Last. "But now they're made in factories in China."

Last is worried that jammers could cause as much havoc on land as he discovered on the Galatea, and he's not alone. In November 2010, a NASA-appointed executive committee for "space-based positioning, navigation and timing" warned that jamming devices could cause disaster if activated in cities. It is not known how many are out there, but the panel is concerned that the risk of interference is growing fast. And in future, devices called "spoofers" – which subtly trick GPS receivers into giving false readings – may make the problem even worse (see "Faking it").

An event last year at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey showed that it only takes one jammer to cause disruption. Airport controllers had installed a new GPS-based landing system, so that aircraft could approach in bad visibility. But it was shutting itself down once or twice a day. It took several months to find the culprit: a driver on the nearby New Jersey Turnpike using a portable GPS jammer to avoid paying the highway toll. This trucker was cruising past twice a day, crippling an airport as he went.

Future generations of air-traffic control won't work without GPS – nor will train routing. The US Federal Railroad Administration has GPS at the heart of its plan for smart management of rail traffic. GPS is also increasingly relied upon for guiding emergency services to the scene.

Invisible utility

What's more, a lot more than navigation ability is lost when GPS fails today. "We rely upon GPS without even being aware of it," says Donald Jewell, who helped to establish GPS from its inception in the US air force, and is now editor of GPS World magazine. It is estimated that more that a billion GPS receivers are now in operation, he says, and more than 90 per cent use the signals only for the accurate time provided by the satellites.

Cellphones are a key user of this invisible utility. Towers must synchronise with each other to pass calls to other towers as you move – a GPS time signal offers a cheap and accurate way to do this. The timing offset for each tower is also used to identify it. In fact, many wireless communication technologies use GPS timing for synchronisation. That's probably why the harbour traffic control and emergency pagers failed in San Diego in 2007.

Time is money

GPS timing can time-stamp financial transactions, such as stock-market trading. And ATMs sometimes communicate wirelessly, using a time-based encrypted code that requires synchronisation. Though it is not known why the cash machines stopped working during the San Diego event, this might have something to do with it.

Energy suppliers use GPS time to keep alternating current from various power plants in phase across the grid. If frequency cycles are not matched, two supplies will partially cancel each other out, creating inefficiency. A precise time signal allows operators to pinpoint the start of each cycle. The US power grid, for instance, requires synchronisation between the supplies of over 5000 companies. Yet in 2006, a temporary GPS outage due to sunspot activity meant that energy companies were not able to see where the power was going, which resulted in false billing. Blackouts due to GPS failure are not out of the question.

Given the potential for disruption, law-enforcers are trying to crack down on GPS jamming. In February, the US Federal Communications Commission announced a new effort to fine jammer sellers and owners. The problem for western authorities is that most sellers are in east Asia and laws tend only to cover the use of a jammer, not its ownership.

Safety net

That's part of the reason why navigation researchers are calling for a back-up. To discuss what to do next, many of them will gather for a meeting next week at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, UK.

Fortunately, there's a backup right under our noses, and the idea been around since the 1940s. Just like GPS, it provides navigation and accurate timing. It's called Enhanced LORAN (eLORAN).

Basic LORAN (for long range navigation) is similar to GPS but uses ground-based radio signals rather than from satellites. It doesn't have global coverage, but does beat GPS on some things. LORAN operates at a far longer wavelength than GPS signals and is more powerful. Both of these features make it virtually impossible to jam.

A new version, eLORAN, uses more reliable transmitters and features improved caesium atomic clocks. With software modifications, it is accurate to about 10 metres, as well as providing a time signal of similar accuracy to GPS. It would be easy to modify future receivers to switch over to eLORAN without the user even noticing, says Last.

In Europe, a team at the UK's General Lighthouse Authorities has been testing eLORAN, and is now recommending that the UK government rolls it out. Across the Atlantic, however, the US government is taking its current LORAN out of service. And it has so far rejected all advice to fund eLORAN: which would cost about $20 million per year – less than it costs to launch one GPS satellite. "We still hold out hope that someone with some foresight and technical know-how in our government will see the light," says Jewell.

Happily, a few decades from now a GPS signal might not be required at all for many things. If atomic clocks get cheaper, then they could be built into everything that needs accurate time. And eventually you'll be able to navigate without any external signals, thanks to devices called "inertial measurement units", which track your movements from a known start point. Today, these IMUs use gyroscopes to measure orientation, plus accelerometers to tell how fast it is accelerating. Using this information, plus time, the acceleration is converted into speed and distance to reveal relative location.

Today, IMUs drift about 1.5 kilometres per hour of travel, and are large and expensive. Yet the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency plans to improve performance with a microchip-sized atomic clock and an equally diminutive, accurate acceleration sensor.

In the meantime, however, a generation is growing up that has never known life without GPS. As jammers proliferate, GPS outages like San Diego are likely to become more common. So next time you lose your cellphone signal, blame the little black box on a car dashboard a few kilometres away.

Get there in a flash

Your satnav might one day find its route thanks to the faint flashes of distant lightning.

Both GPS and LORAN (see main story, above) are navigation techniques that rely on radio signals to pinpoint your location, but these signals can't penetrate underground or deep inside buildings.

Now the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is testing the idea of using radio pulses from lightning instead. These natural atmospheric radio sources – or "sferics" – have a very low frequency, so can penetrate deep underground and even underwater. The military is interested because it would improve navigation in caves and tunnels or for submarines.

DARPA's S-BUG receivers detect radio waves emitted by lightning thousands of kilometres away – at any given moment there are around 2000 storms active on the planet. Another device feeds the receiver the exact location and emission time of the sferic so that it can calculate how far away it is. Once several sferics are recorded, the receiver can then use this to discover its location.

DARPA is still testing S-BUG. But once a lightning receiver network is fully in place, existing GPS users should require nothing more than an antenna and a software upgrade to use the system, says programme manager Stephanie Tomkins.

Faking it

Todd Humphreys can trick you into thinking you are somewhere else. He uses a "spoofer" device that causes a GPS receiver to give an inaccurate reading.

Humphreys, at the University of Texas at Austin, has no mischief in mind, but built the device to demonstrate how straightforward it is to do. Such spoofers are not on the market yet, but when they are, could cause all sorts of havoc.

Unlike a GPS jammer, which has fairly obvious effects, the spoofer's impact is slow and subtle. "The victim usually won't realise they're being spoofed," says Humphreys. "It leaves no trace."

Humphrey's GPS spoofer looks like a wireless internet router. It picks up genuine GPS signals and synchronises its output to resemble them. Any nearby receiver will treat this output as a genuine signal from a GPS satellite. The spoofer then gradually alters its time output, changing from the true value by, say, 3 nanoseconds per second. Since GPS receivers use the time signature in a signal to find location or as an easily accessible clock, the error builds up.

"The biggest risk is probably complicit spoofing, where someone deliberately misleads their own GPS," says Humphreys. For example, unscrupulous fishing boat captains could spoof GPS to fake their location and fish in forbidden waters. "If mass-produced, they could be made for perhaps $400 to $500," says Humphreys. Such a spoofer could push another ship off course, just as ship-wreckers used to lure vessels onto rocks with false lighthouse lights.

Criminals could also spoof GPS timing for profit. The US National Association of Securities Dealers requires financial traders to time-stamp transactions with an accuracy of within 3 seconds. "The bad guys would spoof the timing at their preferred site and, watching an upward trend, buy stock a few seconds in arrears," says Humpreys. "Those three seconds could be worth a lot of money."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...your-life.html





The Emergency Internet Bunkers
Nik Rawlinson

The Doomsday Clock shows 23:54. If it ever reaches midnight, mankind’s survival will be on the brink.

Since 1947, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has used the face of this fictional clock to plot our race towards destruction. In 1949, the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb, and they pushed the clock to 23:57. A year later, the US did the same – so the clock ticked on to 23:58.

The clock has never been any further back than 23:43; it happened only once, in 1991. The Berlin Wall had just come tumbling down; Gorbachev and Bush Senior had signed up to Start, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

The world breathed a sigh of relief, but not for long. Twenty years have passed since then, and things have taken a turn for the worse. Pakistan and India both hold nuclear weapons. North Korea, too, almost certainly has its own, and Iran’s motives are causing the West some sleepless nights.

All-out war remains a fairly unlikely scenario, but should the clock ever strike midnight we may well discover, finally, whether or not the internet really could survive a nuclear conflict.

If it could, then a handful of datacenters dotted around the world would likely to be all that remains of the multi-billion-pound hosting industry.

These secretive, high-security sites, tunnelled out of mountains or housed behind the blast-proof doors of one-time Nato bunkers, are home to the planet’s most secure hosting providers.

The US Secure Hosting Center

A high point on the Iowa plains is home to a handful of buildings.

Whitewashed and nondescript, only the mast beside them hints at their former use. Built at the height of the Cold War, these are the access points to a hardened underground bunker; a hidden world of reinforced doors, concrete floors 5ft thick and walls lined with welded-seam steel to reflect the electromagnetic pulse of a thermonuclear explosion.

Once a critical hub in the US Government’s communications network, the bunker formed part of a chain of underground transmission sites. Now it’s home to the USSHC, also known as the US Secure Hosting Center.

“A lot of these Cold War sites were destroyed or abandoned,” explained the Center’s Isaac Helgens. “Since this campus was operated from the outset by a telco acting for the Government, we were able to purchase it directly from them without any issues. Occasionally, even today, we run into a Government entity that isn’t aware the site is privately owned, but that’s usually the extent of the confusion.”

The vault doors that seal off the silo were built to withstand the blast effects, heat and 800mph-plus winds of a 20-megaton nuclear blast, but the technology they now protect was barely dreamt of when they first swung open.

“The biggest things we’ve had to adjust in our infrastructure were cooling and power utilisation,” said Helgens. “Wherever possible, we simply updated and maintained the original technology. As this was designed for emergency use, most systems are 2N+ redundant [have two or more stages of redundancy].”

Man-made conflict is only one of the risks against which USSHC considers itself immune. The site where it sits is more than two miles from – and 200m above – the nearest flood plain.

It has two wells and a large enough water-storage facility to keep running water for a fortnight in the unlikely event they should both run dry. With no other tenants on its plot and located well away from population centres or terrorist targets, its clients (“technology directors at the forefront of their fields”) are attracted by an environment so stable and secure that they’re willing to host their sites wholesale with USSHC, rather than spread their servers across multiple datacenters.

With a sub-micron air-filtration plant, USSHC’s facility is well equipped to cope with physical viruses, but what of their digital equivalent, and DDoS attacks or trojan incursion? Helgens assures us that his team goes “to great effort” with its clients to prevent them.

USSHC employs customised intrusion detection for its clients and monitors its network for any such issues. “In the event of a DoS or DDoS, we attempt to isolate the threat and use creative routing and other techniques to make sure our clients remain unaffected,” Helgens said.

The Cyberbunker

USSHC isn’t unique. Europe is dotted with similar sites, each of which could withstand a nuclear blast.

Netherlands-based CyberBunker is housed inside a hardened concrete silo. Built by Nato in 1955, it was designed to outlast a nuclear war and keep those inside safe for up to a decade.

Visitors aren’t welcome, clients can’t visit, and even the authorities are kept at bay; it’s as close to impregnable as any hosting facility is likely to get. It’s even been put to the test.

“City Hall wanted, for some reason beyond our understanding, to prevent us from having a datacenter in the bunker,” CyberBunker’s Jordan Robson told us. “According to them we were using the bunker in violation of the zoning, which is military. After we dragged City Hall to court and won the trial, it attempted – without much success – to break down our first set of blast doors. After several hours of futile attempts we decided to ask what it was they actually wanted. It appeared they came to inspect the bunker in order to see if there was anything else besides servers, in order to prevent us from having a datacenter.

“For obvious reasons, we’ve adopted a policy not to let anyone in. However, we decided to make an exception and showed them around. Besides our humming servers, there wasn’t much else to discover. City Hall has paid for the damages they inflicted on our blast doors and haven’t bothered us again.”

Such security doesn’t come cheap. Hosting accounts start at €100 or €125 a month for Linux or Windows servers respectively, and attracts a €200 setup fee, but those fees buy you peace of mind, and anonymity.

“Most customers desire to stay anonymous,” said Robson. “In some cases, we don’t even know who our customers are. We simply don’t care. Whoever the customers are, it’s our business to keep them online.”

The CyberBunker Foundation is as strong a shield for its customers’ interests as the bunker itself is for its servers. “CyberBunker doesn’t respond to threats by anyone,” Robson said, outlining how it protects its customers from others who’d like to take servers down, such as the DMCA, competitors, authorities, burglars, governments, terrorists – and how it even offers protection against civil war.

CyberBunker’s mailing address is a postal box in Goes, a town in the south-western Netherlands that gives away little about the bunker’s physical location.

Although some servers are present on-site, it’s by no means clear that all of its clients are hosted within the bunker, as CyberBunker’s proprietary routing system disguises a site’s actual physical location.

1&1, Baden Airpark

Step across Netherlands’ eastern border and you’ll find yourself in a country dominated by one provider: 1&1.

Hosting a third of all German websites and half of the country’s email, 1&1 maintains servers in Karlsruhe and at a former NATO base at Baden Airpark, the one-time home of a nuclear weapons cache.

The Karlsruhe building could easily pass for a government ministry, with concrete slabs concealing some impressive technology. Biometric detectors, motion sensors and a hypersensitive laser particle detection system monitor the air in its server rooms.

A series of batteries and five 16-cylinder back-up diesel engines mounted on its roof guarantee continuation of service, and even if a strike should take out the building – including its 25,000 servers – a geo-redundancy system would pick up the pieces. Karlsruhe is part of a global RAID, whose servers are mirrored around the world.

In the event of a nuclear strike, though, it’s the Baden Airpark installation – 25 miles south west of the city – that would likely emerge unscathed. 1&1’s Richard Stevenson explained to us the boxy building’s unusual charms.

With walls several feet thick, he said, “the structure itself can withstand bomb blasts from the side and from above”, while “two fibre-optic backbones that run along the adjacent autobahn and the Rhine river provide both connectivity and redundancy”.

Service provider 1&1 has occupied the building since 2006, and as other bunker dwellers have found, its physical form was well-suited to its requirements.

“Due to its central location and secure and easily adaptable structure, Baden Airpark was ideal for use as a datacenter,” said Stevenson. “It could be realised in a short timeframe, and as part of 1&1’s Green initiatives, it’s also fitting that the project has recycled an empty and unwanted structure.”

So, how important are looks when building a data fortress? Clearly, that depends on who you ask...

White Mountain

Take Pionen, for example. When Bahnhof, Sweden’s longest-established web host, took over the Pionen bunker it made some changes. Pionen had been dug from the White Mountain bedrock in 1943, fitted with bio-filters, air locks and even a radio station.

It could house up to 400 people, yet when Bahnhof moved in it blasted away even more of the bedrock to house more than 200 servers, slung a glass walkway from the rocky ceiling, and installed a pair of submarine engines for power – the same models as used in the North Korean fleet.

Besides its physical strength, 30m below the centre of Stockholm, Pionen also benefits from Sweden’s robust privacy laws. Although the country is bound to enforce the European Parliament’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED), which requires web hosts to hand over whatever records they hold on rights infringers, there’s no requirement within Swedish law to retain such information – and thus Bahnhof opts not to.

“It’s about the freedom to choose,” Bahnhof CEO Jon Karlung told Swedish agency TT. “The law makes it possible to retain details. We’re not acting in breach of IPRED; we’re following the law and choosing to destroy the details.”

We perhaps shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that Pionen is home to two of WikiLeaks’ servers, but Bahnhof is keen to point out that it provides no more than power, cooling and internet access.

“We don’t control how and when the servers are used. We treat WikiLeaks just as any other customer… we’ll only shut down the servers if WikiLeaks doesn’t pay its bills, or if we get a Swedish court order that demands we shut it down,” the company said in a statement. The servers are isolated from the rest of the racks to prevent an attack from affecting other customers.

The Bunker

Successive British governments have been quick to follow their neighbours’ leads: they’ve sold off several nuclear bunkers, including the most notorious nuclear installation in the British Isles – the airbase at Greenham Common.

Web-hosting company The Bunker acquired a 15-year lease on the site, which was rarely out of the headlines through the 1980s when 96 Tomahawk cruise missiles were stationed there. That drew the interest of up to 70,000 protestors, who set up camp and formed a human chain through the so-called Nuclear Valley from Greenham to Burghfield and Aldermaston.

The missiles – and the camp – have now gone and the site is one of three out-of-London hosting and co-location facilities in The Bunker’s arsenal. With steel-reinforced blast-proof walls, solid steel doors and electromagnetic pulse protection, it was specifically designed to protect data in the event of a nuclear strike.

Since taking it over, The Bunker has increased its total incoming power, added redundant generators, and installed two independent cooling systems across each of its data floors. The original Faraday cages installed by the US Strategic Air Command to protect equipment from an electromagnetic pulse now provide protection for The Bunker’s server installations.

“Total security is in The Bunker’s DNA,” explained chief operating officer Simon Neal. In part that’s why the company has chosen hosting locations outside the M25 or any major British city.

“It might feel convenient having a datacenter in the heart of London, but think about this in a security context,” he said. “The capital is an obvious target for terrorism, while mega-events such as the 2012 Olympics could result in power fluctuations or interruptions. Similarly, other locations might be increasingly prone to flooding or subsidence, or even physical attacks such as ram-raiding.”

Surrounded by the fences that kept Peace comp at bay, The Bunker is well protected from potential ram-raiders, leaving digital attacks as its biggest potential threat. “The Bunker has developed its own Hardened Source software to wrap around and ‘harden’ the standard Windows, Unix and Linux hosting environments,” Neal claimed.

Such low-level engineering is hardly surprising when you consider that Ben Laurie, The Bunker’s director of security, created Apache-SSL, the web’s de facto secure web server application.

The Bunker’s customers are the big business names that “require complete peace of mind that their data is as secure as possible, with regulatory compliance, consumer confidence and corporate reputation being prime considerations,” Neal said.

Most prefer to remain anonymous, but their numbers include Scottish Widows, Capita and Nominet, the world’s fourth largest internet registry and controller of all things .uk.

How much would it cost if you wanted to join them? That, said Neal, is tough to answer. “Our job is to treat each case differently, examine a company’s actual needs and decide what services we’re going to provide. Prices depend on many variables, so it’s difficult to generalise a cost for hosting a site for all customers.”

The End Game

None of us wants to know whether the internet could survive a nuclear conflict. When Clinton was president, he lost the US missiles’ launch codes.

“We started a search around the White House, and he said that he’d misplaced them,” said Lt Col Patterson, the man who looked after the briefcase from which the launch order would be sent. Clinton, he said, “couldn’t recall when he’d last seen them”.

Russia, meanwhile, is said to maintain a system called Dead Hand or Perimeter. A 25-year-old series of bunkers and command missiles, this relic of the Cold War is set to unleash the nation’s weapons should its leaders be killed.

It relies on signals sent by cable to commanders cut off from the outside world. How secure might such a system be in the face of trojans and viruses such as Stuxnet, which last year infected more than 45,000 computers?

A study commissioned by the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, published in 2009, suggested that hackers could use the internet to initiate a full-scale nuclear war.

“Despite claims that nuclear launch orders can come only from the highest authorities, many examples point towards an ability to insert orders at lower levels,” said the paper’s author, Jason Fritz, quoted in The Guardian. “Cyber-terrorists could also provoke a nuclear launch by spoofing early warning and identification systems, or by degrading certain crucial communications networks.”

If that spoof data were aimed at the Dead Hand controllers, the stroke of midnight on the Doomsday Clock may come sooner than we imagine.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/3658...ternet-bunkers





Tokyo Earthquake, Tsunami Puts Data Centers, Cloud Services at Risk
Larry Dignan

Japan was reeling after an 8.9 magnitude earthquake and tsunami hit the Northeast coast and also impacted Tokyo. As a result, much of the Pacific Ocean is under a tsunami warning. The disaster comes as many tech giants were setting up data centers in Tokyo to meet demand for cloud computing services.

It’s unclear how data centers are holding up. TV reports indicate that mobile services are up in Tokyo, but spotty.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the quake hit:

• 130 km (80 miles) E of Sendai, Honshu, Japan
• 178 km (110 miles) E of Yamagata, Honshu, Japan
• 178 km (110 miles) ENE of Fukushima, Honshu, Japan
• 373 km (231 miles) NE of Tokyo, Japan

ZDNet Japan has been posting the data center availability (Google Translation version). So far, NTT Communications appears to be the hardest hit. The company has lost its IP-VPN connection and was evaluating the building holding the data center.

NTT said in a statement:

March 11, 2011 (Friday) due to earthquakes in the Tohoku region around 46 minutes at 14, NTT Communications (abbreviation: NTT Com) has failed in some of our services. The current situation is as follows at 17. To our customers, we have to put you to trouble and inconvenience, I apologize.

Amazon Web Services indicated that services are continuing. Amazon just launched its data center in Tokyo.

Salesforce.com is also indicating that its Japan and Asia Pacific instances are up. Salesforce expects to complete its Tokyo data center this year.

ZDNet Japan has rounded up various disaster recovery issues resulting from the earthquake (translation). CNET Japan also has links to resources (translation).

This recap is just the IT side of the equation. The far larger issue is securing a nuclear reactor at the moment. We’ll update as needed from ZDNet Japan, CNN, BBC and CBS News.

In addition tsunami warnings have been issued for the Pacific coast. The first waves are expected to reach San Francisco about 8 a.m. local time.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/tokyo-...-at-risk/45955





Will I Be Alive Tomorrow, Asks Japanese Woman on Internet
Yoko Kubota and Antoni Slodkowski

Thousands of people in tech-savvy Japan swamped the Internet in the hours after a devastating earthquake and tsunami to tell loved ones they were safe, but social networking sites were also flooded with worries about an explosion at a nuclear plant.

At least 1,300 people were killed, media said, and thousands of homes flattened as a huge deluge of seawater swept inland in the north of Japan, engulfing roads, farmland and villages.

When news spread on Saturday of a radiation leak at a nuclear power plant run by Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), after an explosion at the facility, many messages on social networking sites were panic-stricken.

"Came back home at 8 in the morning after the depressing night...Now, the nuclear power plant has exploded and we might already be exposed to radioactivity," said a 23-year-old female office worker from Tokyo on a Facebook page.

"I just don't know what to do, what's coming next, and will I be alive tomorrow?" she asked.

Elsewhere in the world, from the foothills of northern India to crowded cities in the United States, Japanese on vacation used Twitter, Facebook and the Japanese service mixi to get in touch with family after the disaster knocked out phone lines.

"Can't get through via fone.. but Toru got through Facebook. Thank God for Facebook!" read a status message of a Tokyo resident.

"Yep! It brings down dictators, it reunites loved ones," was one of the comments. Others were not so lucky.

"I still cannot contact with my family and friends after the tsunami," posted a female student from Sophia University in Tokyo. "Information is necessary for me."

Many had reservations about the ability of authorities to deal with the disaster.

"I can't trust TEPCO," said a person with the handlename Tanuki Atsushi on mixi, the Japanese social networking site.

"They should not stop working to limit damage to the public even if this is not going to be a big accident like Chernobyl," said another user named papa.

The nervous reaction online was a response to the firm's chequered past. In 2002, the president of the country's largest power utility was forced to resign along with four other senior executives, taking responsibility for suspected falsification of nuclear plant safety records.

The company was suspected of 29 cases involving falsified repair records at nuclear reactors. It had to stop operations at five reactors, including two damaged in the latest tremor, for safety inspections.

Some vented their anger over the disaster on the government of unpopular Prime Minister Naoto Kan.

"I don't think the shaky DPJ deserve to be called politicians," said one Twitter user referring to the ruling Democratic Party of Japan. "Do you think I will ever support them? No never."

(Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...72B1WW20110312





The ‘Godzilla’ Incident: Did Twitter Users Gang Up on CNN Earthquake Anchor?
Chris Taylor

To hear Twitter users tell it, last night on CNN was one of the most disreputable in the network’s history. “You might prefer streaming Al-Jazeera to watching CNN anchor giggle about Godzilla,” wrote blogger and NPR contributor Maud Newton, in a widely retweeted statement. “Disgusting,” chimed in hundreds of tweets. “F– you @CNN your anchor is giggling & talking about monster movies while you’re showing waves sweep entire homes away,” read another widespread retweet, originating from filmmaker and writer Aaron Stewart-Ahn. Many others called for the anchor to be fired.

In its defense, CNN tweeted today: “RE: questions about a CNN anchor laughing while covering the Japan earthquake, we checked. It appears it was a false post.” Moments later, the network’s Twitter feed added, “We checked on the Godzilla references too. That also appears to be a false post.”

So who is correct — CNN or the Twittersphere? An analysis of the transcript and the Twitter record by Mashable brings us to the following conclusions:

1) The anchor in question, Rosemary Church of CNN’s International Center in Atlanta, did not make any “Godzilla jokes.” One of her guests, an American eyewitness named Matt Alt, describing the video footage, said “these waves of debris, it is almost like a monster movie.”

Tweets at around this time slammed Alt, misidentified as a CNN reporter or anchor, for making a “Godzilla-esque” reference. Later retweets removed the “-esque.”

2) Church’s words could not be accurately described as “joking”. Her tone, clearly irksome to many viewers, is another question. An anchor with some serious news chops — she covered 9/11 and the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, among other major events — Church also has a bubbly, Australian-accented voice. Some of her statements around 2:15am ET, according to the Twitter stream, may have sounded inappropriately jovial. That’s when the earliest cluster of results for “CNN laughing” appear:

It was around this time that Church paraphrased Alt’s comment about his Japanese wife being used to earthquakes and issuing orders. “She made a small joke about a caller’s Japanese wife being calm,” tweets journalist Michael Corey. “The joke wasn’t offensive, just a joke in that situation was weird … But live TV is hard, so I cut her a little slack. Not much.” A CNN spokesperson admits that Alt “lightly chuckled,” but that there was no laughter.

Some minutes later, Church interrupted a reporter on the scene to say that she was being “flooded with tweets.” That set off another mini-firestorm on Twitter. Given the scenes of devastation on screen at the time, it was clearly a poor choice of words, but it does not appear to be an intentional joke.

3) In ascribing the criticism to “a false post,” CNN is incorrect. That suggests a single influential Twitter user was behind the criticism. In fact, as the screen above shows, it emerged spontaneously from multiple independent sources at the same time.

Granted, Twitter is something of a digital echo chamber. Stewart-Ahn’s tweet is still being retweeted, even after he admitted the misattribution (though he still believes Church covered the story “rudely and ignorantly” and still swears he heard her laughing.)

But pressed to locate the “false post” it tweeted about, even CNN itself admits there’s no single source. “I don’t know if anyone could point specifically to the flash point on social media that started the rumors,” says Bridget Leininger, a spokeswoman for CNN. “All I can say is that no one at CNN joked, laughed or made a Godzilla reference on our live coverage.”
http://mashable.com/2011/03/11/the-g...hquake-anchor/





DOJ Wins Access to WikiLeaks-Related Twitter Accounts
Declan McCullagh

A federal judge in Virginia today granted federal prosecutors access to WikiLeaks-related Twitter accounts, including information about what Internet and e-mail addresses are associated with them.

The 20-page ruling represents a clear victory for the U.S. Department of Justice, which sought the court order as part of a grand jury probe that appears to be investigating whether WikiLeaks principals, including editor Julian Assange, violated American criminal laws.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan rejected arguments raised by the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a host of private attorneys representing the Twitter account holders, who had asserted that their privacy was protected by federal law, the First Amendment, and the Fourth Amendment.

Buchanan rejected each of the arguments in quick succession, saying that there was no First Amendment issue because activists "have already made their Twitter posts and associations publicly available." The account holders have "no Fourth Amendment privacy interest in their IP addresses," she said, and federal privacy law did not apply because prosecutors were not seeking contents of the communications.

Cindy Cohn, legal director of the EFF, told CNET this afternoon that her group and the other attorneys involved in this case plan an appeal, probably "to a district judge next," and then likely to an appeals court if necessary.

A representative for the U.S. Attorney's office involved in this case declined to comment on today's ruling.

The accounts at issue include those of Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament who helped with Wikileaks' release of a classified U.S. military video; Seattle-based Wikileaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum; and Dutch hacker and XS4ALL Internet provider co-founder Rop Gonggrijp. The order also sought records relating to Assange and suspected WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, who appear not to have contested it (prosecutors say nobody "associated with" WikiLeaks has filed an objection).

This case came to light in January, when Twitter notified the subscribers that prosecutors had obtained a court order for their "account information." That led Jónsdóttir, Appelbaum, and Gonggrijp to retain their own attorneys, who filed motions asking the judge to overturn her earlier decision. As of last month, at least, Twitter has not yet divulged any nonpublic data.

A second portion of Buchanan's ruling unsealed previously nonpublic documents and revealed the following:

• A court filing shows that Twitter undertook a pro-privacy move that few Internet companies would have chosen. It filed a motion on February 8 asking for permission not to turn over data from the WikiLeaks account, even though WikiLeaks itself had not retained counsel and objected.

• The Geneva-based Inter-Parliamentary Union adopted a confidential motion in January on behalf of Jónsdóttir. It says that members of parliaments "benefit from" the right to privacy and the right to free speech and "expresses deep concern" that the Justice Department's request violates those rights. It requests that IPU Secretary General Anders Johnsson "communicate these concerns" to the United States and says that the case will be brought up again during its April 2011 assembly.

• Another IPU document submitted to the court in Alexandria, Va., argues that the order "should be vacated" because there is no "pressing need for state inspection of [Jónsdóttir's] private communication," which could interfere with her ability to use social media to do her job as a member of parliament.

• A motion from the Justice Department, with some pages partly blacked out, argues that: "The subscribers' request would identify other witnesses, if any, who the government or the grand jury had requested to provide evidence. The chilling effect on potential witnesses of such a disclosure would undermine a fundamental government interest."

The U.S. government began a criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Assange last July after the Web site began releasing what would become a deluge of confidential military and State Department files. In November, Attorney General Eric Holder said that the probe is "ongoing," and a few weeks later an attorney for Assange said he had been told that a grand jury had been empaneled in Alexandria, Va.

The Twitter account holders were more successful in their second request to Buchanan. That request asked her to unseal the documents in this case, which have--in an unusual move--been kept hidden from public view.

Buchanan today partially granted the request to make the documents public. She did, however, rule that certain documents related to the grand jury probe will remain sealed. "The sealed documents at issue set forth sensitive nonpublic facts, including the identity of targets and witnesses in an ongoing criminal investigation," she wrote.

Aden Fine, ACLU staff attorney, said: "While we disagree with the court's decision, the court did the right thing in making sure that all of the documents associated with this legal challenge are now publicly available."

Buchanan's order isn't a traditional subpoena. Rather, it's what's known as a 2703(d) order, which allows police to obtain certain records from a Web site or Internet provider if they are "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation."

The 2703(d) order is broad. It requests any "contact information" associated with the accounts from November 1, 2009, to the present, "connection records, or records of session times and durations," and "records of user activity for any connections made to or from the account," including Internet addresses used.

It also covers "all records" and "correspondence" relating to those accounts, which appears to be broad enough to sweep in the content of messages such as direct messages sent through Twitter or tweets from a nonpublic account. That would have allowed the account holders to cite a nonbinding but influential opinion from a federal appeals court, which concluded that a 2703(d) order is insufficient for content data and a search warrant is necessary.

The EFF's Cohn said, however, that Justice Department attorneys effectively narrowed their request to avoid asking for content, even though "it sure seemed like the order sought" it.

Jónsdóttir was a close ally of Assange and supported efforts to turn her small north Atlantic nation into a virtual data haven. A New Yorker profile last year, for instance, depicted Jónsdóttir as almost an accidental politician whose self-described political views are mostly anarchist and who volunteered with Wikileaks.

But after Assange became embroiled in allegations of sexual assault, which have led to the Swedish government attempting to extradite him from the U.K., Jónsdóttir said the organization should find a spokesman who's not such a controversial figure.

Jónsdóttir said in a Twitter message after the ruling that it's now "time to apply pressure on social media to move their servers out of the U.S." Appelbaum, who gave a speech at a hacker conference in New York last year on behalf of WikiLeaks, sent out a note saying: "Bad news is exhausting."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20042277-281.html





Safari/MacBook First to Fall at Pwn2Own 2011
Ryan Naraine

A team of security researchers from the French pen-testing firm VUPEN successfully exploited a zero-day flaw in Apple’s Safari browser to win this year’s Pwn2Own hacker challenge.

VUPEN co-founder Chaouki Bekrar (right) lured a target MacBook to a specially rigged website and successfully launched a calculator on the compromised machine.

The hijacked machine was running a fully patched version of Mac OS X (64-bit).

In an interview with ZDNet, Bekrar said the vulnerability exists in WebKit, the open-source browser rendering engine. A three-man team of researchers spent about two weeks to find the vulnerability (using fuzzers) and writing a reliable exploit.

VUPEN won a $15,000 cash prize and an Apple MacBook Air 13″ running Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

Bekrar said the Safari exploit was “somewhat difficult” because of the lack of documentation regarding 64-bit Mac OS X exploitation. ”We had to do everything from scratch. We had to create a debugging tool, create the shellcode and create the ROP (return oriented programming) technique,” he explained.

“The main difficulty was doing this on our own, without the help of any documentation,” he said.

He said the creation of a reliable exploit was “much more difficult” than finding the vulnerability.

“There are many WebKit vulnerabilities. You can run a fuzzer and get lots of good results. But it’s much more difficult to exploit it on x64 and to make your exploit very reliable,” he said.

Bekrar’s winning exploit did not even crash the browser after exploitation. Within five seconds of surfing to the rigged site, he successfully launched the calculator app and wrote a file on the disk without crashing the browser.

The exploit bypassed ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) and DEP (Data Execution Prevention), two key anti-exploit mitigations built into Mac OS X.

“The victim visits a web page, he gets owned. No other interaction is needed.”

Bekrar said VUPEN plans to hit Internet Explorer 8 on 64-bit Windows 7 (SP1) later in the contest.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/s...2own-2011/8358





Ex-UK Spy Boss Says WikiLeaks Sparked Egyptian Revolution

Dearlove gets schooled on radical transparency
Dan Goodin

The former head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service has credited WikiLeaks and other secret-spilling sites with sparking the revolutions sweeping the Middle East.

At what was supposed to be an off-the-record appearance last month at the Cambridge Union Society, Former MI6 Chief Richard Dearlove said that the technology WikiLeaks harnesses is fundamentally strengthening the hand of the individual as he goes up against powerful organizations.

“I would definitely draw parallels at the moment between the wave of political unrest which is sweeping through the Middle East in a very exciting and rather extraordinary fashion and also the WikiLeaks phenomenon,” Dearlove said. “Really, what ties these two events together, and of course a number of other events, is the diffusion of power, away from the states and the empowerment of individuals, and small groups of individuals, by technology.”

The former spy didn't know just how prophetic his words would be: much of the talk was captured on video, including an exchange with a critic. She cited a leaked document from 2002 that has come to be known as the Downing Street Memo, which appeared to show him as saying that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” of then US President George W Bush of removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.

“I find that a terrible betrayal of everything democracy is supposed to stand for and that the intelligence service is supposed to provide,” the unidentified woman told Dearlove. She went on to challenge his assertion that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is an “undignified flag-carrier” who has yet to justify his zeal for radical transparency.

“To find out information like that, and that's what public servants are actually doing, and that's how intelligence is being used, I think the most dignified way we can recover from that is to find out that information and move forward from there,” she continued.

Dearlove first said he wouldn't comment, but couldn't help adding: “The Downing Street Memo, which you just read, is a misquotation of what I said, and what I said is not in the public record.”

Elsewhere in the 20-minute video, Dearlove said: “I think it would be generally accepted that most organizations large and small also require moments in their existence for the benefit of their members of confidentiality. However, there's absolutely no question that technology is significantly shifting these domains and altering the relationship quite fundamentally between the citizen and government.”

Following the exchange with the critic, Dearlove quickly took a question from what what is assumed to be a more sympathetic audience member. But the leaked comments and conversation are now a permanent part of the internet record. Ah, the irony.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03...ove_wikileaks/





Julian Assange Police Investigator a Friend of Sex Assault Accuser

Officer and Miss A met through political party and corresponded over internet months before WikiLeaks chief was accused
Esther Addley

Julian Assange used the link between the police officer and Miss A to argue against his extradition Julian Assange's lawyers used the link between the police investigator and one of the sexual assault accusers to argue against his extradition to Sweden.

The police investigator who first interviewed two Swedish women about allegations of rape and sexual assault against Julian Assange is a friend and political associate of one of the women, a Swedish newspaper has claimed.

The female officer became friends with the woman referred to in court as Miss A through Sweden's Social Democratic party, in which both are involved, according to Expressen. The pair corresponded on the internet 16 months before the allegations were made against Assange.

Miss A commented on a Facebook update on the police officer's page as recently as 10 February, the paper said, and Miss A links to the officer's private blog from her personal page.

The paper said the officer had made anti-Assange comments on the internet.

The WikiLeaks founder is appealing against a British magistrate's decision last month to extradite him to Sweden to answer the accusations, which include an allegation of rape against another woman, Miss B. Miss A alleges Assange had sex with her without a condom, against her wishes. He has not been charged with any offence.

His legal team has argued that the Swedish judicial process is unfair and a number of those involved in the prosecution are politically motivated.

According to Expressen, Miss A and the police interrogator had internet contact in April 2009, when Miss A wrote a blog about white men "who take the right to decide what is not abusive". The officer commented that the author "puts her finger on the bottom line and speaks out", to which Miss A replied: "Hello! Thanks for the compliment. And like you say, white men must always defend the right to use abusive words. Then they of course deny that these very words are part of a system that keeps their group at the top of the social ladder."

The paper said that when another newspaper, Aftonbladet, hosted a recent webchat with Assange, the officer commented "What the heck is this! Judgment zero!" The previous day she had commented on the same page: "Way to go, Claes Borgstrom!" Borgstrom is the lawyer representing the women and a former SDP politician, who Assange's team has argued is acting from political motives.

The paper says the officer had just started her shift at Klara police station in Stockholm on 20 August when Miss A and Miss B arrived to make a complaint against Assange. It says she did not declare a conflict of interest. The police say that the officer in question did not interview Miss A and she played no further part in the investigation. On the basis of the interrogations, duty prosecutor Maria Häljebo Kjellstrand ordered Assange's arrest, a decision overturned by a more senior prosecutor. Borgstrom appealed against that decision and the case was reinstated by prosecutor Marianne Ny.Mark Stephens, Assange's lawyer, said they had been aware of the relationship, which had informed their arguments in court last month that the Swedish judicial process had been improper.

"There are a whole raft of issues like this which should cause reasonable people a bit of concern," he said. "I'm delighted that the Swedes, who objected so strongly to our criticisms of the case, have started to acknowledge that there are systemic problems in their judicial process which allow this sort of thing to happen."

Police superintendent Ulf Göranzon told Expressen he was not aware of any relationship between the two women, and would not comment on rumours.

The Swedish prosecutor's office also declined to comment, citing the ongoing extradition process in the UK.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011...ssault-accuser





New Net Rules Set to Make Cookies Crumble
BBC

The way websites track visitors and tailor ads to their behaviour is about to undergo a big shake-up.

From 25 May, European laws dictate that "explicit consent" must be gathered from web users who are being tracked via text files called "cookies".

These files are widely used to help users navigate faster around sites they visit regularly.

Businesses are being urged to sort out how they get consent so they can keep on using cookies.

Track changes

The changes are demanded by the European e-Privacy directive which comes into force in the UK in late May.

The section of the directive dealing with cookies was drawn up in an attempt to protect privacy and, in particular, limit how much use could be made of behavioural advertising.

This form of marketing involves people being tracked across websites, with their behaviour used to create a profile that dictates the type of adverts they see.

As part of its work to comply with the directive, the IAB - an industry body that represents web ad firms - created a site that explains how behavioural advertising works and lets people opt out of it.

The directive demands that users be fully informed about the information being stored in cookies and told why they see particular adverts.

Specifically excluded by the directive are cookies that log what people have put in online shopping baskets.

However, the directive is likely to have an impact on the more general use of cookies that remember login details and enable people to speed up their use of sites they visit regularly.

It could mean that after 25 May, users see many more pop-up windows and dialogue boxes asking them to let sites gather data.

Data delay

The exact steps that businesses have to go through to comply with the law and gain consent from customers and users are being drawn up by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

A spokesman for the DCMS said that work on the regulations was "ongoing" but that the technique solutions would not be complete by 25 May.

In a statement, Ed Vaizey, minister for Culture, Communications and the Creative Industries, said he recognised that the delay would "cause uncertainty for businesses and consumers".

Cookies list Cookies are used by websites to save user preferences between visits.

"Therefore we do not expect the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to take enforcement action in the short term against businesses and organisations as they work out how to address their use of cookies," he added.

Information Commissioner Christopher Graham said: "I cannot bark at the industry at the moment because I have not got the regulations."

However, Mr Graham stressed that the government's confession that the regulations will be delayed should not be a spur to inaction.

"My message is that this is not your 'get out of jail free' card," he said.

The response to complaints about firms that flout the directive will be viewed in light of what they have done to prepare for it, continued Mr Graham.

Businesses should be considering how they will communicate with customers to get consent and look at the technical steps that might make that process easier, he explained.

Early work by the ICO suggests that gathering consent by changing settings on browsers may not be sophisticated enough for the demands of the directive.

"They have to think seriously about this," said Mr Graham. "It's going to happen and it's the law."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12668552





Google Unleashes Kill Switch for Android Malware
Charlie White

Remember those 21 malware-infested applications Google removed from its Android Market last week? Google now says there were actually 58 malicious apps downloaded to 260,000 Android smartphones, and late Saturday night, Google remotely turned on its kill switch, which is able to remove those errant applications from the phones.

The kill switch is actually software that’s downloaded onto an Android smartphone and installed automatically, removing the apps in question with no user action required. In its Google Mobile Blog, the company announced:

“We are pushing an Android Market security update to all affected devices that undoes the exploits to prevent the attacker(s) from accessing any more information from affected devices. If your device has been affected, you will receive an email from android-market-support@google.com over the next 72 hours. You will also receive a notification on your device that “Android Market Security Tool March 2011” has been installed. You may also receive notification(s) on your device that an application has been removed. You are not required to take any action from there; the update will automatically undo the exploit. Within 24 hours of the exploit being undone, you will receive a second email.”

Google’s had this kill switch in place since 2008, and it used the remote application removal capability for the first time in June, 2010.

Google downplayed the harm caused by these malware apps, assuring users that none of their personal data has been compromised:

“For affected devices, we believe that the only information the attacker(s) were able to gather was device-specific (IMEI/IMSI, unique codes which are used to identify mobile devices, and the version of Android running on your device). But given the nature of the exploits, the attacker(s) could access other data.”

The kill switch is not going to completely fix this problem. TechCrunch points out that Android devices are still vulnerable because of existing security holes at the system level, which must be fixed by cellular carriers and hardware manufacturers. The problem is made worse by cellular providers sticking with older versions of Android, unfortunate because the security exploit only affects Android versions 2.2.1 and older. The good news is, if an Android phone is running the latest software, that security hole has already been patched.
http://mashable.com/2011/03/06/android-kill-switch/





Android Beats Blackberry to Become the Most Used OS in America

Android is now officially the most used smartphone operating system in America. The growth of this platform is really stunning considering that it didn’t even exist about 27 months ago. Our sources say that about 31.2% or one third users in US were using Android OS in the month of January. This is more than 30.4% of the US smartphone users who were using BlackBerry devices made by RIM or Research in Motion, in January.

The astonishing rise of Android started in late October 2008 when G1 phone from HTC came in to the market from T-Mobile. Android as a platform, started to take off seriously when Motorola Droid arrived in November 2009. This OS had just seven percent share in the smartphone market and then it started growing at an increment of two percent per month.

By May 2010, Android was sitting on the fourth place and it outpaced Windows Mobile (from Microsoft) in June. Android also went past Apple’s iOS which is seen on the iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone. Now it has finally conquered the huge BlackBerry OS in January this year. About one year ago RIM had a share of 42 percent in the US smartphone market.

Our sources further say that about 350,000 Android gadgets are activated per day. Right now, there are 170 Android tablets and smartphones. Android’s stunning success can be attributed to their open business model. The mobile OS is licensed for free by Google and manufacturers can load this ready made application on their products instead of paying money to a team of engineers to make a separate platform. The Android OS can also be customized according to the requirements.

Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG and a lot of other cellphone makers have jumped on the Android bandwagon. These manufacturers have now shifted their focus on just the hardware and can bring the phones to the market quickly. A lot of time is saved and the whole time saving concept has been given a discrete name – ‘Android’s law’.

In the international markets, Android went past Blackberry last year but it is still behind Nokia’s Symbian OS. The Finnish cell phone giant said that they would be ditching Symbian for Microsoft’s Windows OS with a hope to get back the lost market share.
Stephen Elop, the Nokia CEO recently acknowledged that they had considered partnering with Google but in the end they went for Microsoft as there were already a lot of Android phones in the market.
http://www.etechreviews.net/android-...os-in-america/





Android Now More Profitable than iOS for Well-Known Game Developer
JR Raphael

Lately, there's been a lot of talk about how Google's Android Market compares with Apple's App Store in terms of developer potential -- specifically, the ability for app developers to make money on the platform. It's an important issue: As users, after all, we may be more focused on our experience than any developer's income, but if developers aren't able to make a living from their efforts, they won't keep investing the time and energy to give us good content.

Traditionally, Apple has been viewed as the top dog when it comes to pure app dollars; love it or hate it, the company's App Store generates plenty of dough and thus plenty of income for third-party programmers. Even so, Android is increasingly becoming a prominent part of the equation for many well-known developers -- and for some, it's actually starting to surpass Apple by a significant margin.

Today, we hear one such developer's story.

Spacetime Studios Pocket Legends

Spacetime Studios makes the popular Pocket Legends 3D MMO game for both iOS and Android. The game has gotten rave reviews on both platforms, being named one of the top five "groundbreaking" iOS games of 2010 by Mashable and one of the 10 best Android games available by MSNBC.com.

Here's where things get interesting: Spacetime says its daily user activity on Android is more than double its level on iOS in practically every measure. On Android, the game is downloaded about 9,000 times a day, according to Spacetime; on iOS, daily downloads are in the 3,000 to 4,000 range. Perhaps even more significant, Android users who have the app use it about three times more than their Apple counterparts.

Altogether, that translates into a big difference in revenue: Spacetime, which is supported largely by in-app purchases, says its Android users generate 30 to 50 percent more revenue than its iOS users do. This is despite the fact that Apple has a seamless in-app purchasing interface, whereas Android's built-in purchasing system isn't set to debut until sometime this spring.

"We've just been blown away," says Spacetime CEO Gary Gattis. "Android has become our primary interest."

Spacetime App Sales: Android vs. iOS(The chart at right shows revenue from the game's first 30 and 60 days in the Apple App Store compared with its first 30 and 60 days in the Android Market.)

Pocket Legends also utilizes advertising to generate revenue, and Spacetime has seen the same effect there: Android users click ads about three times as much as iOS users, according to Spacetime's measurements. What's more, they end up making purchases as a result of ad clickthroughs twice as often as iOS users.

"This led us to stop advertising on Apple and throw all of our marketing dollars onto Android," Gattis says. "It really just makes sense from a financial point of view."

Analyzing the Android App Effect

So what explains this discrepency? Gauging by common logic (or perhaps just widely accepted Jobsian logic), it seems almost counterintuitive. But Gattis has some theories.

"Android's a smaller pond for apps right now," he says. "The support on the Google side has been much more tangible -- they're really trying to nurture the gaming community."

Indeed, in terms of sheer application numbers, Apple is still the dominant player. Android, however, is catching up: Google's Eric Schmidt recently said the official Market is up to 150,000 total applications -- a number that has tripled over the past nine months. According to independent metrics firm AndroLib, 32,323 new apps appeared in the Android Market in February. That's up from 29,293 new apps in January, 27,227 new apps in December, and 24,040 new apps in November. The rate of growth has been on a nonstop rollercoaster ride upward for months, and -- correlating with the overall growth of the platform -- it shows no signs of slowing down.

Android Power TwitterThe Android Market and App Store, of course, take drastically different approaches to the app approval process: While Apple is notorious for its tightly controlled shelves and sometimes arbitrary-seeming rejections, Google lets any registered developer publish apps immediately. Both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks, but for Spacetime, Android's open strategy has more than paid off.

"In some ways, it's kind of like the wild, wild West," Gattis says, "but that's where the gold rush people made their claim. For us, the challenges have become opportunities."
http://blogs.computerworld.com/17941...ios_app_profit





Making Magic
Joe Konrath

If you're paying any attention to the Amazon Top 100, you'll know that my ebook, The List, is currently ranked #35.

You'll also know that out of the Top 100, twenty-six of those spots belong to indie authors. Seven of those are occupied by wunderkind Amanda Hocking.

But six of them, including the coveted #1 spot, are from a writer named John Locke.

So who is John Locke?

I caught up with John while we were both in the Swiss Alps, at a secret bestselling author chalet where we heat our jacuzzis by burning stacks of hundred dollar bills.

Naturally, I had questions. In between throwing greenbacks on the fire, he graciously answered.

Joe: You seem to have come out of nowhere. What's the story?

John: My background is niche marketing, where I built a successful business selling specialty insurance, and then another one, investing in specialty real estate. So the first time I saw the business model for selling eBooks on Kindle, my eyes lit up like a kid at Christmas. Why? Because Kindle doesn’t just level the playing field for self-published authors, it actually slants it in our favor.

Specifically, I saw that a self-published book could be offered on Kindle for 99 cents, and still turn a 35 cent profit. I was stunned! I walked around in a daze for, well, days, trying to explain to people what that meant. No one seemed impressed. To me it was like receiving the keys to the kingdom, and I immediately set a goal to become the world’s greatest 99-cent author.

Joe: Which, at this moment, you are. This fascinates me, because when Amazon began offering 70% to ebooks priced $2.99 and up, a lot of people considered staying at 99 cents to be slumming.

Which was naive. Coming from a legacy publishing background, I knew that 35% royalties were much better than anything the Big 6 offered. Even so, when I first got into this, I thought that cheap ebooks would be a loss lead, that would get people to read my more expensive books.

And yet, when I lowered the price of The List from $2.99 to 99 cents, I started selling 20x as many copies--about 800 a day. My loss lead became my biggest earner.

I guess there's something about 99 cents...

John: In February, 1963, I was twelve years old, living in Shreveport, Louisiana. One Saturday I walked a couple of blocks, caught a bus and took it downtown, walked another block to 728 Texas Street, and entered Stan’s Record Shop to buy a recording of “Walk Like A Man,” by the Four Seasons. It was two minutes and seventeen seconds long, cost a dollar, and I still had to catch a bus ride home.

Now, 48 years later, you can buy one of my books for only 99 cents! You don’t have to walk a step, catch a bus, drive a car, fight the traffic, find a parking space, wait in line, or cut down a single tree. You press a button, and within a couple of effortless seconds, you get four or five hours of entertainment.

Joe: For years, I've been trying to tell other authors that ebooks are a game changer. Some are listening...

John: For the first time in history, there's an advantage to being an independent author!

It wasn’t so long ago that an aspiring author would complete his or her manuscript, only to don a pair of knee pads and assume a supplicating posture in order to beg agents to beg publishers to read their work. And from way on high, the publishers would bestow favor upon this one or that, and those who failed to get the nod were out of the game.

No more.

These days the buying public looks at a $9.95 eBook and pauses. It’s not an automatic sale. And the reason it’s not is because the buyer knows when an eBook is priced ten times higher than it has to be. And so the buyer pauses. And it is in this pause—this golden, sweet-scented pause—that we independent authors gain the advantage, because we offer incredible value.

Joe: You're getting great reviews, so people are obviously enjoying your work. Plus, you're outselling every other book on Amazon, including some name brand authors.

John: I’m new to the writing game. But if I’d started self-publishing even three years ago, I would have spent all my time trying to prove to the public I’m just as good as the top authors in America. These days, the burden of proof is on them. Now the best authors in America have to prove they’re ten times better than me. And in a game like that, I like my chances.

Joe: Do you have any traditional publishing experience? An agent?

John: I've never had an agent or publisher, and have never sent a manuscript or query letter to anyone. I always intended to self-publish my work, without representation, and figured my time would be better spent writing books than query letters.

Joe: So, you're the first indie writer to hit #1 on the Amazon Top 100. You also currently hold the #4 spot, and #10 spot. Three in the Top 10. How does it feel?

John: I've thought all day how to express the way it feels to have all 6 books in the top 40, including #1 and #2, but I couldn't come up with the proper adjectives! Today I was contacted about selling the movie rights to my Donovan Creed novels. I was also contacted by a literary agent for representation. On the other hand, I feel weird because I'm the same guy no one paid any attention to last year. The books they want to represent were written a year ago, and when I sent out press releases, no one cared. Now that these same books are selling, I'm what, suddenly good? Doesn't make sense. But yeah, it feels great, of course.

Joe: Congrats on your success. And you really should consider an agent. Even though I'm keeping my print and erights, my agent has been great in selling audio, foreign, and film rights.

Who does your cover art? How much does it cost to self-publish?

John: Claudia Jackson, of Telemachus Press, does all my cover design. She charges $995 to publish an eBook, including cover creation, and distribution to multiple ebook formats. Any art work she purchases for the projects are extra, but reasonable. It's nice to be able to write the book, send it to her, and not have to fool with the process. And Telemachus puts the Ebook accounts in the author's name, so I get all the profits. To me, it's a no-brainer.

Joe: Readers of my blog love numbers, so here's the big question. How many books have you sold so far?

John: As I answer this question, it is March 8th. I have sold just over 350,000 downloads on Kindle since January 1st of this year.

Joe: That's incredible.

John: Kindle is great because you get the sales numbers in real time. I don't have current sales figures for the other eBook formats.

Joe: What advice can you give your fellow authors?

John: I always give authors the same advice: don't take yourself too seriously. Write the types of books you like to read. I offer my readers a fun, breezy read. If I can give them some chuckles and hold their interest for a few hours, I feel I've earned my 99 cents. I know I'm on the right track if I laugh out loud when I'm writing a scene. And if I don't laugh out loud several times while writing a book, I don't publish it.

----------------------------

Joe sez: One thing that strikes me, and strikes me hard, is how outside-the-box Locke's approach has been. He didn't even bother with the query-go-round. He marched boldly into self-publishing, recognizing it for the potential goldmine it could be, and wound up hitting it big.

I'm thrilled for his success, and I invited John to hang out on my blog for a bit to answer any questions that my readers might have.
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/0...ohn-locke.html
















Until next week,

- js.



















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