Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 14th, '12 - P2P-Zone

JackSpratts · 11-01-12, 09:01 AM

Since 2002

"In exchange for mobile presence in India, RIM, Nokia and Apple have allegedly provided backdoor access for the Indian intelligence to spy on communication." – Manan Kakkar

"It is amazing to me that the [SOPA] opponents apparently don't want to protect American consumers and businesses." – Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas

"Lamar Smith's organisation did improperly use my image. So according to the SOPA bill, should it pass, maybe I could petition the court to take action against www.texansforlamarsmith.com." – D.J. Shulte

"We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet." – The White House

January 14th, 2012

File Sharing On The Increase
Maximilian Clarke

Soon after it was declared granted religious recognition in Sweden, a survey has suggested that file sharing is on the increase across Europe.

Four in five respondents to One.com’s survey of European customers share photos, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, music and videos via email, while only seven percent burn discs to share with friends and family.

Swedes emerge from the study as those who use tablets and smartphones the most, while the Europeanaverage is only one in seven respondents using mobile devices for file sharing.

The survey reveals that 82% of European respondents shared more files in 2011 than they did in 2010. This trend is being led by survey participants in the UK (92%), Belgium (83%) and Denmark (82%), while 24% of respondents in the Netherlands and 22% in Sweden are sharing fewer files in 2011 than in 2010.

The main reasons given for sharing less this year are that there are fewer opportunities to share files (40%), it is too time-consuming (13%) and concerns over privacy (13%). Interestingly security worries do not seem to concern respondents in Belgium, Netherlands or Sweden much, who did not cite this as an explanation for sharing a reduced amount of files in 2011.

Recent analyst houses including Forrester Research report that as early as next year there could be 60 million tablets and 175 million smartphones in use by mobile professionals around the world[1] <#_ftn1> . In spite of this, the survey reveals that file sharing takes place predominantly over laptops (63%) and desktop computers (22%).

Out of all respondents, the Swedes are the most active mobile users distributing files music, videos and photos to friends, family and colleagues over tablets (seven percent) and smartphones (20 percent). In contrast, Belgians (two percent for tablets and two percent for smartphones), Dutch (two percent for tablets and twelve percent for smartphones) and Danish (three percent for tablets and no smartphone usage) are at the other end of the spectrum, lowering the average of European mobile sharing to two percent for tablets and twelve percent for smartphones.
“People often think that sharing large files can be complicated and time-consuming, especially if you use ftp servers with complicated log-in procedures or need to split the data into different packages so it can fit on two or three USB sticks”, said Thomas Medard Frederiksen, Chief Operating Officer at One.com.

“It does not need to be complicated. With our Cloud Drive, part of our web hosting packages, you can store files easily and safely and create a sharable link directly on your computer, through the browser or with one of the apps for mobile devices. You can give the link to those you want to share some folder, files or pictures with and by clicking on the link, the recipient can access all the data you have chosen to share.”
http://www.freshbusinessthinking.com...n+the+increase

80% of Europeans Prefer to Share Files by Email

Just 7% burn a disc
Carrie-Ann Skinner

Email is the most popular method in Europe when it comes to sharing files with friends and family, says One.com.

Research of 272 Europeans by the web hosting firm revealed 80 percent said they prefer to share documents, photos, music and videos by email, while just seven percent burn discs to give to friends and family. Furthermore, 82 percent of Europeans admitted they shared more files in 2011 than they did in 2010. Brits were the most likely to increase their file-sharing over the past year with 92 percent saying their file sharing has surged, followed by Belguim with 83 percent and Denmark with 82 percent.

More than one in five of Sweedish residents said they shared less files last year than in 2010. Two in five said the reason behind the decrease in file-sharing was fewer opprtunities to do so, while 13 percent cited concerns over privacy.

Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of file-sharing involves laptops, while 22 percent uses desktop computers. Despite the popularity of tablet PCs and smartphones, just two percent of file-sharing uses tablet PCs and 12 percent takes place using smartphones.

Photos are the most-commonly shared files, with 79 percent of respondents admitting to distriburing these to others. Meanwhile, text documents were the next most popular at 62 percent, closely followed by PDF files at 61 percent, spreadsheets at 47 percent and music at 31 percent.

One.com also revealed file-sharing occurs the most during the second half of the day, with 47 percent saying they're more like to share files between midday and 6pm mainly, while more than a third (36 percent) file share between 6pm and midnight.

"People often think that sharing large files can be complicated and time-consuming, especially if you use ftp servers with complicated log-in procedures or need to split the data into different packages so it can fit on two or three USB sticks", said Thomas Medard Frederiksen, COO at One.com.

"It does not need to be complicated. With our Cloud Drive, part of our web hosting packages, you can store files easily and safely and create a sharable link directly on your computer, through the browser or with one of the apps for mobile devices. You can give the link to those you want to share some folder, files or pictures with and by clicking on the link, the recipient can access all the data you have chosen to share."
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/inte...iles-by-email/

How Much Does File Sharing Resemble Stealing--And Does it Matter?
Megan McArdle

Kevin Drum takes a courageous and rare stand on the internet, arguing that yes, downloading millions of files from JSTOR while evading attempts by both JSTOR, and the owner of the network you're using, to stop you, is, well, pretty close to stealing:

This affair has raised a lot of hackles among the infovore set, but I'm a little stumped about why I should be outraged. As James Joyner says, maybe this should have been a civil matter, not a criminal one (though Swartz did break into an MIT network closet to do all this), but beyond that does anyone really think JSTOR should just sit idly by as their entire archive is downloaded? Would the librarians at Stanford sit idly by if someone backed up a semi and started shoveling hundreds of thousands of books into it? Sure, there's no evidence that you're planning to steal the books. Maybe you intend to return them all in two weeks. But come on. Are we really all expected to be that stupid?

Likewise, Swartz may say that he had no intention of putting his 4.8 million documents online, but come on. It's a pretty safe assumption, no? Swartz's suggestion that he just wanted to perform a research project is a wee bit improbable.

As near as I can tell, Swartz is basically engaging in civil disobedience, publicly breaking a law that he considers unjust in order to generate publicity. Fine. But one of the tenets of civil disobedience is that you accept that you're breaking the law and accept the consequences. Now he is.

Naturally, Kevin's readers lay into him, saying that this is completely not a good analogy, because of course, when you download JSTOR's files, JSTOR still has the files.

This is a concept that economists call "non-rivalrous goods", and it's very important to file-sharing advocates. I don't think it's going to far to say that for many proponents, it's at the very heart of their case.

And yet, it's not clear to me why this is supposed to be a devastating rejoinder--why rivalrousness is so fundamental to property that we should not have property rights over non-rivalrous goods. I get the sense that people find it intuitive that many people think property is, at its heart, a system for deciding how to allocate a limited and fixed set of stuff.

And, of course, it is that. But it's not just that. Property rights serve a lot of functions in our society, and property rights can attach to things that are quite nebulous indeed, like accounting entries in computers that exist in a physical space not visible to the naked eye. They are highly contingent in ways we rarely think about. I'm not sure how we settled on "it's non-rivalrous" as the reason that file sharing is a) not stealing and b) okay.

I've asked a bunch of libertarians this question, since they usually believe in very strong property rights as both a moral and an economic imperative--but also display a somewhat disproportionate aversion to strong intellectual property protections. So far, I don't feel as if I've gotten a lot of satisfying answers as to why people who support strong real estate protections and weak IP protections think that this particular argument matters so much. I have heard a lot of restatements of the definition of non-rivalrous goods, gotten many elaborations on why rivalrousness is different from non-rivalrousity, been told what the implications are for various markets and so forth. But they haven't, to me, advanced a theory of property--either moral or economic--to which the property "rivalrous" is really so obviously fundamental that in its absence, we're no longer dealing with property.

Reading through the comments to Kevin's post, it occurred to me how many of the analogies seem to have been designed by and for college students. Which is to say, they are reasoning from a pretty simple version of property, appropriate to someone who doesn't really engage in much commerce. The important aspect of property in these arguments is personal use. And of course it is true that if I have a JSTOR article, your copying that article does not deprive me of it.

But personal use is far from the only function of property in a modern economy. If you think about uses beyond what might happen in a dorm room or professor's office, these answers to Kevin's analogy seem less apt.

Think about a bookstore, for example. Why isn't it okay to take their books?

Because, unlike with file-sharing, I haven't deprived them of the use of the book, you will say.

But in the sense that file-sharers are talking about, Barnes and Noble is not using the book. They want to make money off of it, but they are not interested in reading it, or using it to prop up a shaky table leg, or impressing people who see it left on the coffee table. In fact, holding onto that copy of the book is costing them money.

Stealing the book doesn't deprive them of the use of the item, in the primitive way that most of the analogies offered by file sharers seem to me to depend on. What it does is deprives them of one very particular use: the ability to sell the book for its set price.

But isn't this exactly the use of which you deprive musicians of when you download an album that you otherwise would have bought? Once you download it for free, they can't sell it to you.

But other people can't use that book either, you will say.

Not that particular book, no, but who cares? In all important aspects, that particular book is identical to thousands of other books with the same words on the cover. It is very unlikely that anyone who shows up at Barnes and Noble with the purchase price of a book will be denied the opportunity to walk home with all the words, illustrations, and page numbers that you "stole". Barnes and Noble stocks many, many copies of the books they sell, and if their stock dips below the amount they want to hold, they will automatically order more.

There is perhaps some hypothetical case in which someone wants a rare book you have stolen right now and cannot get a hold of it for two days because of your actions, but these cases are going to be extremely rare: by definition, if Barnes and Noble does not have extra copies of a book around, it is because almost no one buys it. We probably should not construct a whole system of property rights around extremely rare boundary cases.

Moreover, no book sells every copy that the bookstore has. They get damaged, lost, and eventually remaindered--sent back to the publisher. One could plausibly argue that an individual book-thief is simply slightly lowering the eventual supply of remaindered books. Which is to say, the supply of nothing: some of those books used to be sold in remainder bookshops, but with the economics of bookselling being what they are, these days, as I understand it, they're mostly just destroyed. So really, you're not stealing a book: you're saving it from being pulped.

But the book cost them money

That's true. But it cost them a pretty small amount of money. You probably cost them more if you leave a mess in their public bathrooms, or mumble your latte order so that the clerk gets it wrong and has to do it over, but we don't give Barnes and Noble property rights in those things.

More to the point, this doesn't have anything to do with whether a good is rivalrous or not. It has to do with whether the good has a low marginal cost. Making records costs money too.

But not for the individual copy. Electronic files have zero marginal costs.

But hotel rooms and airplane seats also have near-zero marginal costs. Is it therefore okay to sneak into a hotel room, as long as you make the bed perfectly before you leave?

This brings us to the issue of trespass, which--despite the fact that it is often, maybe even usually, non-rivalrous, most libertarians don't support. If you own a cabin in a snowy and distant mountain, and I know for a fact that you cannot leave town for the weekend, is it okay to pick the lock and use my house?

You might break things.

Is it okay if I am very careful, or only occupy a small portion of the home filled with things that are not breakable?

I might change my mind and want to come.

The partners said everyone in your group has to work all weekend. Your wife is dying in a hospital bed, surrounded by all your friends and family. For whatever reason, I can be reasonably quite sure that you are not going to use this property this weekend. Is it okay, morally, for me to use it? Should you have legal rights against me if you find out? How about camping on a part of your property that you haven't trod in ten years?

Even if you clean up, you'll change things.

Seriously? We're arguing for a system of property rights because I disturbed some leaves on your property?

You might frighten away deer I hunt. You can't know whether you're damaging my property, or whether I might want to use it, which is why I should be able to decide whether I want you to change things.

But this is the argument of publishing houses, and increasingly, artists: they should be able to decide whether you get to make non-rivalrous use of what they created, and whether your use damages them.

Also, you could make the law clear that you had to be really, really sure that they wouldn't come, or you wouldn't break things, before you could use peoples' stuff. Law makes fine distinctions like this all the time.

(For that matter, as I understand it, the law actually does give me a right to trespass if, say, I am lost in a storm and am clearly going to freeze to death unless I break into your cabin. I may have to pay you for any damage I do, but I'm not legally in the wrong simply for entering your property.)

On the other hand, there are plenty of rivalrous uses that do not have clearly defined property rights, like how loud parties can be, how much smell or visual blight can be inflicted on a neighbor, how much care I have to take to keep the rat population down, how to allocate responsibilities and rights over common resources like ponds and trees that span property lines, and so forth. These questions are adjudicated differently in different jurisdictions, or by negotiation between neighbors, because no one has a particularly well developed theory of how such rivalrous uses should be allocated.

Now go back to those accounting entries at our bank. They do not take up any meaningful physical space, and they're non-rivalrous: if I copy them and pretend they're mine, you can still use yours.

To the extent that they're rivalrous at all, it's only because--as with intellectual property!--we have a social convention, and a very strong legal regime, that makes it that way. There's nothing inherent about the computer entries that makes it so we couldn't both claim to have the money in your bank account--and both be right, if the government and our neighbors would just agree with us.

And yet most of us think that counterfeiting is a very, very bad thing to do--that it is a next door neighbor to stealing, if not living in the same house. They think this even if the counterfeiting is so good as to be undetectable. Most people support the treasury's efforts to fight counterfeiting, rather than arguing that we should simply stay with the old, easy-to-counterfeit currency so that we could all enjoy the bounty of increased money supply.

Fine, counterfeiting is bad, but it's not stealing, you may say--it's only stealing if it's rivalrous.

I think the argument about whether file sharing is "stealing" or some other word is really tedious and beside the point, and ends up in circles where you say that maybe it's wrong and it's not stealing and when your opponent concedes the point you argue that it's not wrong because after all, it's not like stealing and no one has less stuff . . .

But I digress. Let's talk about this distinction.

Why do we oppose counterfeiting, if it doesn't deprive people of anything? The answer is that it is stealing: by increasing the amount of currency in circulation, it makes everyone else's money worth just a little bit less. It's just stealing from everyone, instead of one specific person. Nor am I just playing with words; this has always been a historic justification for laws against counterfeiting, usually the most important one besides a bunch of puffery about the majesty of the state.

It's also, I'd note, the language used by a lot of libertarians about governments who print money in order to make their debts easier to pay back. And it's not really an unfair usage of the word.

It's important to note that most people who think about it agree that counterfeiting is basically like stealing even though no one counterfeiter is likely to have much impact on the money supply (with the possible exception of the government of North Korea, which was allegedly printing US bills on an industrial scale for a while). Even if you're having a tiny effect that only becomes really problematic in aggregate, I think the common intuition is that it's wrong to deprive people of even a tiny fraction of the full use of their money. If I made a perfect copy of your AT&T shares and sold them, no one would much care if I pointed out that you still had the physical certificates.

Or to take an example offered by Kevin Drum some time back:

But if he had a draft magazine article stored on his hard drive, and his girlfriend copied it and sold it somewhere without his knowledge, I'll bet he'd consider it stolen -- possibly with the word emphasized by hurled crockery and intemperate language. He'd consider it stolen even though, technically, he still has a copy too. And he'd be right to. Before the theft, he had the potential to earn a certain amount of money by selling the publishing rights to his work. Afterward, he didn't. That potential may not be a tangible physical object, but that doesn't make it a nonrival good. Once it's gone, it's gone.

We could argue about whether this is stealing or plagiarism, but who cares? We'd all agree it's really, fundamentally wrong. And not just because she's passing off someone else's work as her own, though of course that's part of it. I think most people would agree that it is much more wrong to plagiarize and publish an article that hasn't been sold yet, thereby depriving the author of the income they would earn, than to say turn in a column that was a straight lift from Montaigne.

All of which is to say that we don't, in fact, seem to think that rivalrousness is actually a fundamental property of property--we think that property rights still apply even when we're not using our property, and have no intention of doing so. We think that depriving Barnes and Noble, or the publisher, of the revenue from a book we stole is wrong--and that depriving a friend, or even a stranger, of the revenue from an article they wrote is also wrong even if no physical object is involved. We think that counterfeiting is very close to stealing, but more fundamentally, that property rights inhere in all sorts of things that are rivalrous only by the mandate of the state.

None of this establishes that we should have strong IP, of course--only that I don't think you can make a good case against strong IP by pointing out that Rihanna can still listen to "Pon the Replay" any time she wants. Or that copying is super cheap. Or that no individual file-sharer costs the owner of the rights very much money.

But of course, no system of property rights is built from first principles. Nor did property rights spring full-blown from the head of Zeus at the dawn of the universe. It's a highly contingent system that evolved over centuries, with all sorts of weird principles that we'd never have thought of if we'd been designing the thing from scratch. (For example, read the chapter in Moby Dick about the system for allocating rights over hunted whales. A lawyer once told me that in law school, his class was assigned to come up with a system to solve the problem. No one came up with anything that looked like what actually evolved; the only justification for the real system was that it worked.) That's why I don't find these heroic invocations of very simple principles nearly as convincing as, well, most of the avid file sharers I know.

As to whether we should have strong or weak IP rights, I'll leave that for another day, since I've gone on quite long enough.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...matter/251277/

What Everyone in the SOPA Debate is Missing

Underlying the debate about the so-called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is the unstated assumption that intellectual property rights have the same legal standing as other property rights. They don't, and the tacit concession of this point by opponents of SOPA is significantly weakening their position. The foundation of intellectual property (patents and copyrights) in the United States is this clause in Article 2 of the Constitution:

The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

This clause clearly establishes intellectual property as a granted right, not a recognized or fundamental right, that is, the "right" to "intellectual property" does not exist unless explicitly granted by Congress at its discretion. Furthermore, Congress is constrained to grant this right only in service of a specific purpose. namely, to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, and only "for limited times".

Notwithstanding that the Supreme Court has effectively eviscerated the "limited time" constraint in the case of copyright, "intellectual property" is clearly on a different legal footing from the "inalienable rights" to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" to which people are endowed by their Creator, as recognized in the declaration of Independence. Neither the Declaration nor the Constitution mentions "property" by name [correction: the 5th amendment does mention it. See the comments.], but it is quite clear that the right to physical property was universally considered an inalienable fundamental right by the Founders. To cite but one of many examples, the state of Rhode Island attached a signing statement to its ratification of the Constitution that reads in part:

We, the delegates of the people of the state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations... do declare and make known,—

I. That there are certain natural rights of which men, when they form a social compact, cannot deprive or divest their posterity,—among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property...

Rhode Island's signing statement is significant because it is quite lengthy. It contains 18 separate clauses explicitly recognizing a long list of fundamental rights. (It's actually worth reading in its entirety). It is reasonable to suppose that if Rhode Island took issue with the clear implication of the Constitution that "intellectual property" is not a fundamental right, they would have said so.

The arguments against SOPA are mainly based on the collateral damage that would accrue by giving content "owners" the power to indiscriminately shut down web sites without due process. But this argument tacitly concedes a much more fundamental point, which is that a grant of copyright is not a right but a privilege granted at the discretion of the People for a particular purpose. It is far from clear that the Constitutional requirement that exclusivity be granted "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" is being met.

Political arguments are often lost before they even start because one side allows the other to frame the debate. The clearest example of this is the tacit acceptance of the terms "pro abortion" and "anti abortion" in the debate on reproductive rights. In this case, the tacit acceptance of the term "intellectual property rights" concedes the fight before it starts. If there are intellectual property rights, then the debate can only be about the extent to which the state should go in order to defend those rights. But, as I have shown above, there is no legal basis for intellectual property "rights", only intellectual property "grants" (for limited times and for a specific purpose). I hope it's clear how this reframing would change the tenor of the debate.
http://rondam.blogspot.com/2012/01/w...s-missing.html

Sponsor: Protect IP Act May be Amended in Response to Concerns

The amendment would require a study of the effects of the ISP provision in the bill, Sen. Leahy says
Grant Gross

The controversial copyright enforcement bill the Protect IP Act may be amended on the Senate floor later this month in response to ongoing concerns about its provisions affecting Internet service providers and the domain-name system, the bill's chief sponsor said.

Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and chief sponsor of the Protect IP Act, or PIPA, said Thursday he plans to offer an amendment that would require a study of the impact of the ISP provisions in the bill before they are implemented.

If the study found negative impacts, it's likely the ISP provision would be killed. The Senate is scheduled to begin debate on PIPA on Jan. 24.

PIPA would allow the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders requiring U.S. ISPs to block access to foreign websites accused by the DOJ of infringing copyright. Opponents of PIPA and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a similar bill in the House of Representatives, have argued that the bills would lead to widespread cybersecurity problems as U.S. Internet users attempt to circumvent the blocks, and could lead to the blocking of legitimate speech.

Leahy defended the bill, saying the ISP provisions were developed in consultation with major service providers. Several ISPs support the bill, he said in comments on Vermont Public Radio. However, sponsors of the bill have heard concerns about its effect on the domain name system from fellow lawmakers, Internet engineers, human rights groups and "a number of Vermonters," he said.

"I remain confident that the ISPs -- including the cable industry, which is the largest association of ISPs -- would not support the legislation if its enactment created the problems that opponents of this provision suggest," Leahy said. "Nonetheless, this is in fact a highly technical issue, and I am prepared to recommend we give it more study before implementing it."

Other provisions of the bill would allow the DOJ and copyright owners to seek court orders requiring online advertising networks and payment processors to stop doing business with websites accused of infringement. Those provisions would remain in the bill.

It appears that Leahy's amendment would not strip out a provision in PIPA that would allow court orders requiring search engines to stop linking to the accused sites. Leahy did not talk about the search engine provision when talking about the amendment, a spokeswoman said.

The amendment will allow the Senate to "focus on the other important provisions in this bill, which are essential to protecting American intellectual property online, and the American jobs that are tied to intellectual property," Leahy said. "I regret that law enforcement will not have this [ISP] remedy available to it when websites operating overseas are stealing American property, threatening the safety and security of American consumers."

However, the other portions of the bill offer "a strong and balanced approach to protecting intellectual property," Leahy said.

A spokesman for Public Knowledge, a digital rights group opposed to PIPA, said the group would have to see specifics before taking a position on the amendment. The bill "would have to be watered down a lot to be acceptable," said Art Brodsky, communications director at Public Knowledge.

On Wednesday, Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican and SOPA opponent, has scheduled a hearing on the security impact of the legislation. The hearing will take place in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which Issa chairs.
Community news site Reddit.com plans to go dark on Wednesday in a protest against SOPA and PIPA.
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/...ponse_concerns

How Copyright Industries Con Congress
Julian Sanchez

I’ve yet to encounter a technically clueful person who believes the Stop Online Piracy Act will actually do anything to meaningfully reduce—let alone “stop”—online piracy, and so I haven’t bothered writing much about the absurd numbers the bill’s supporters routinely bandy about in hopes of persuading lawmakers that SOPA will be an economic boon and create zillions of jobs. If the proposed solution just won’t work, after all, why bother quibbling about the magnitude of the problem? But then I saw the very astute David Carr’s otherwise excellent column on SOPA’s pitfalls, which took those inflated numbers more or less as gospel. If only because I’m offended to see bad data invoked so routinely and brazenly, on general principle, it’s important to try to set the record straight. The movie and music recording industry have gotten away with using statistics that don’t stand up to the most minimal scrutiny, over and over, for years, to hoodwink both Congress and the general public. Wherever you come down on any particular piece of legislation, this is not how policy should get made in a democracy, and it’s high time they were shamed into cutting it out.

The bogus numbers Carr cites—which I’ll get to in a moment—actually represent a substantial retreat from even more ludicrous statistics the copyright industries long peddled. In my previous life as the Washington editor for the technology news site Ars Technica, I became curious about two implausible sounding claims I kept seeing made over and over—and repeated by prominent U.S. Senators!—in support of more aggressive antipiracy efforts. Intellectual property infringement was supposedly costing the U.S. economy $200–250 billion per year, and had killed 750,000 American jobs. That certainly sounded dire, but those numbers looked suspiciously high, and I was having trouble figuring out exactly where they had originated. I did finally run them down, and wrote up the results of my investigation in a long piece for Ars. Read the whole thing for the full, farcical story, but here’s the upshot: The $200–250 billion number had originated in a 1991 sidebar in Forbes, but it was not a measurement of the cost of “piracy” to the U.S. economy. It was an unsourced estimate of the total size of the global market in counterfeit goods. Beyond the obvious fact that these numbers are decades old, counterfeiting of physical goods imported in bulk and sold by domestic retail distributors is, rather obviously, a totally different phenomenon with different policy implications from the problem of illicit individual consumer downloads of movies, music, and software. The 750,000 jobs number had originated in a 1986 speech (yes, 1986) by the secretary of commerce estimating that counterfeiting could cost the United States “anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000″ jobs. Nobody in the Commerce Department was able to identify where those figures had come from.

These are the numbers that were driving U.S. copyright policy as recently as 2008—and I’m still seeing them repeated in “fact sheets” circulated by SOPA boosters. Finally, in 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology.” Now, if a single journalist could discover as much with a few days work, minimal due diligence should have enabled highly paid lobbyists to arrive at the same conclusion. The only way to explain the longevity of these figures, if we charitably rule out deliberate deception, is to infer that the people repeating them simply did not care whether what they were saying was true. If I were a legislator, I would find this more than a little insulting

As Carr’s piece suggests, SOPA’s corporate backers have fallen back on new numbers, but they’re still entirely bogus:

The Motion Picture Association of America cites figures saying that piracy costs the United States $58 billion annually. Mark Elliot, an executive from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a letter to The New York Times that such piracy threatened 19 million American jobs

Only $58 billion! We’re making progress! So where does that figure come from? The source here is a paper released by the Institute for Policy Innovation, and authored by one Stephen Siwek, an MBA and principal of a consulting firm called Economists Incorporated that produces economic analysis for hire on behalf of (among others) businesses seeking to influence policy makers. That does not, in itself, invalidate the research, but we should at least begin with the recognition that we are not dealing here with impartial academic studies produced by a university or government research agency.

What does invalidate the “research” is the inappropriate use of “multiplier” effects to double—and triple—count loss estimates that were dubious to begin with. As the GAO report notes in its typically understated fashion:

Most of the experts we interviewed were reluctant to use economic multipliers to calculate losses from counterfeiting because this methodology was developed to look at a one-time change in output and employment.

In other words, Siwek is taking a method that’s useful for analyzing where in the economy we will likely see the effects of demand shifts, and pretending that it somehow reflects aggregate economic losses. As my colleague Tim Lee has pointed out, this is Bastiat’s Broken Window Fallacy on steroids:

[i] n IPI-land, when a movie studio makes $10 selling a DVD to a Canadian, and then gives $7 to the company that manufactured the DVD and $2 to the guy who shipped it to Canada, society has benefited by $10+$7+$2=$19. Yet some simple math shows that this is nonsense: the studio is $1 richer, the trucker is $2, and the manufacturer is $7. Shockingly enough, that adds up to $10. What each participant cares about is his profits, not his revenues.

So, to stay focused on movies, Siwek takes an estimate of $6.1 billion in piracy losses to the U.S. movie industry, and through the magic of multipliers gets us to a more impressive sounding $20.5 billion. That original $6.1 billion figure, by the way, was produced by a study commissioned from LEK Consulting by the Motion Picture Association of America. Since even the GAO was unable to get at the underlying research or evaluate its methodology, it’s impossible to know how reliable that figure is, but given that MPAA has already had to admit significant errors in the numbers LEK generated, I’d take it with a grain of salt.

Believe it or not, though, it’s actually even worse than that. SOPA, recall, does not actually shut down foreign sites. It only requires (ineffective) blocking of foreign “rogue sites” for U.S. Internet users. It doesn’t do anything to prevent users in (say) China from downloading illicit content on a Chinese site. If we’re interested in the magnitude of the piracy harm that SOPA is aimed at addressing, then, the only relevant number is the loss attributable specifically to Internet piracy by U.S. users.

Again, we don’t have the full LEK study, but one of Siwek’s early papers does conveniently reproduce some of LEK’s PowerPoint slides, which attempt to break the data down a bit. Of the total $6.1 billion in annual losses LEK estimated to MPAA studios, the amount attributable to online piracy by users in the United States was $446 million—which, by coincidence, is roughly the amount grossed globally by Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

So in a fantasy world where U.S. movie pirates don’t just circumvent blockage with a browser plugin, and SOPA actually stops all online movie piracy by American users, we get a $446 million economic benefit to the United States in the form of movie revenues, and presumably comparable benefits in music and software revenues? Well, no. Remember our old friend the Broken Window Fallacy. It’s true that some illicit U.S. downloads displace sales of legal products. But what happens to the money the pirates would have otherwise spent on those legal copies? They don’t eat it! As that same GAO report helpfully points out:

(1) in the case that the counterfeit good has similar quality to the original, consumers have extra disposable income from purchasing a less expensive good, and (2) the extra disposable income goes back to the U.S. economy, as consumers can spend it on other goods and services.

As one expert consulted by GAO put it, “effects of piracy within the United States are mainly redistributions within the economy for other purposes and that they should not be considered as a loss to the overall economy.” In many cases—I’ve seen research suggesting it’s about 80 percent for music—a U.S. consumer would not have otherwise purchased an illicitly downloaded song or movie if piracy were not an option. Here, the result is actually pure consumer surplus: The downloader enjoys the benefit, and the producer loses nothing. In the other 20 percent of cases, the result is a loss to the content industry, but not a let loss to the economy, since the money just ends up being spent elsewhere. If you’re concerned about the overall jobs picture, as opposed to the fortunes of a specific industry, there is no good reason to think eliminating piracy by U.S. users would yield any jobs on net, though it might help boost employment in copyright-intensive sectors. (Oh, and that business about 19 million jobs? Also bogus.)

Does that mean online piracy is harmless? Of course not. But the harm is a dynamic loss in allocative efficiency, which is much harder to quantify. That is, in the cases where a consumer would have been willing to buy an illicitly downloaded movie, album, or software program, we want the market to be accurately signalling demand for the products people value, rather than whatever less-valued use that money gets spent on instead. This is, in fact, very important! It’s a good reason to look for appropriately tailored ways to reduce piracy, so that the market devotes resources to production of new creativity and innovation valued by consumers, rather than to other, less efficient purposes. Indeed, it’s a good reason to look for ways of doing this that, unlike SOPA, might actually work.

It is not, however, a good reason to spend $47 million in taxpayer dollars—plus untold millions more in ISP compliance costs—turning the Justice Department into a pro bono litigation service for Hollywood in hopes of generating a jobs and a revenue bonanza for the U.S. economy. Any “research” suggesting we can expect that kind of result from Internet censorship is a fiction more fanciful than singing chipmunks.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-c...-con-congress/

How the Internet Works (And How SOPA Would Break It)
Todd Mitchell

Last week, I explained SoftLayer’s stance against SOPA and mentioned that SOPA would essentially require service providers like SoftLayer to “break the Internet” in response to reports of “infringing sites.” The technical readers in our audience probably acknowledged the point and moved on, but our non-technical readers (and some representatives in Congress) might have gotten a little confused by the references to DNS, domains and IP addresses.

Given how pervasive the Internet is in our daily lives, you shouldn’t need to be “a techie” to understand the basics of what makes the Internet work … And given the significance of the SOPA legislation, you should understand where the bill would “break” the process. Let’s take a high level look at how the Internet works, and from there, we can contrast how it would work if SOPA were to pass.

The Internet: How Sites Are Delivered

1. You access a device connected in some way to the Internet. This device can be a cell phone, a computer or even a refrigerator. You are connected to the Internet through an Internet Service Provider (ISP) which recognizes that you will be accessing various sites and services hosted remotely. Your ISP manages a network connected to the other networks around the globe (“inter” “network” … “Internet”).

2. You enter a domain name or click a URL (for this example, we’ll use http://www.softlayer.com since we’re biased to that site).

3. Your ISP will see that you want to access “www.softlayer.com” and will immediately try to find someone/something that knows what “www.softlayer.com” means … This search is known as an NS (name server) lookup. In this case, it will find that “www.softlayer.com” is associated with several name servers.

4. The first of these four name servers to respond with additional information about “softlayer.com” will be used. Domains are typically required to be associated with two or three name servers to ensure if one is unreachable, requests for that domain name can be processed by another.

5. The name server has Domain Name System (DNS) information that maps “www.softlayer.com” to an Internet Protocol (IP) address. When a domain name is purchased and provisioned, the owner will associate that domain name with an authoritative DNS name server, and a DNS record will be created with that name server linking the domain to a specific IP address. Think of DNS as a phone book that translates a name into a phone number for you.

6. When the IP address you reach sees that you requested “www.softlayer.com,” it will find the files/content associated with that request. Multiple domains can be hosted on the same IP address, just as multiple people can live at the same street address and answer the phone. Each IP address only exists in a single place at a given time. (There are some complex network tricks that can negate that statement, but in the interest of simplicity, we’ll ignore them.)

7. When the requested content is located (and generated by other servers if necessary), it is returned to your browser. Depending on what content you are accessing, the response from the server can be very simple or very complex. In some cases, the request will return a single HTML document. In other cases, the content you access may require additional information from other servers (database servers, storage servers, etc.) before the request can be completely fulfilled. In this case, we get HTML code in return.

8. Your browser takes that code and translates the formatting and content to be displayed on your screen. Often, formatting and styling of pages will be generated from a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) referenced in the HTML code. The purpose of the style sheet is to streamline a given page’s code and consolidate the formatting to be used and referenced by multiple pages of a given website.

9. The HTML code will reference sources for media that may be hosted on other servers, so the browser will perform the necessary additional requests to get all of the media the website is trying to show. In this case, the most noticeable image that will get pulled is the SoftLayer logo from this location:

http://static2.softlayer.com/images/layout/logo.jpg

8. When the HTML is rendered and the media is loaded, your browser will probably note that it is “Done,” and you will have successfully navigated to SoftLayer’s homepage.

If SOPA were to pass, the process would look like this:

The Internet: Post-SOPA

1. You access a device connected in some way to the Internet.
2. You enter a domain name or click a URL (for this example, we’ll use http://www.softlayer.com since we’re biased to that site).

*The Change*

3. Before your ISP runs an NS lookup, it would have to determine whether the site you’re trying to access has been reported as an “infringing site.” If http://www.softlayer.com was reported (either legitimately or illegitimately) as an infringing site, your ISP would not process your request, and you’d proceed to an error page. If your ISP can’t find any reference to the domain an infringing site, it would start looking for the name server to deliver the IP address.
4. SOPA would also enforce filtering from all authoritative DNS provider. If an ISP sends a request for an infringing site to the name server for that site, the provider of that name server would be forced to prevent the IP address from being returned.
5. One additional method of screening domains would happen at the level of the operator of the domain’s gTLD. gTLDs (generic top-level domains) are the “.____” at the end of the domain (.com, .net, .biz, etc.). Each gTLD is managed by a large registry organization, and a gTLD’s operator would be required to prevent an infringing site’s domain from functioning properly.
6. If the gTLD registry operator, your ISP and the domain’s authoritative name server provider agree that the site you’re accessing has not been reported as an infringing site, the process would resume the pre-SOPA process.

*Back to the Pre-SOPA Process*

7. The domain’s name server responds.
8. The domain’s IP address is returned.
9. The IP address is reached to get the content for http://www.softlayer.com.
10. HTML is returned.
11. Your browser translates the HTML into a visual format.
12. External file references from the HTML are returned.
13. The site is loaded.

The proponents of SOPA are basically saying, “It’s difficult for us to keep up with and shut down all of the instances of counterfeiting and copyright infringement online, but it would be much easier to target the larger sites/providers ‘enabling’ users to access that (possible) infringement.” Right now, the DMCA process requires a formal copyright complaint to be filed for every instance of infringement, and the providers who are hosting the content on their network are responsible for having that content removed. That’s what our abuse team does full-time. It’s a relatively complex process, but it’s a process that guarantees us the ability to investigate claims for legitimacy and to hear from our customers (who hear from their customers) in response to the claims.

SOPA does not allow for due process to investigate concerns. If a site is reported to be an infringing site, service providers have to do everything in their power to prevent users from getting there.
http://blog.softlayer.com/2012/how-t...ould-break-it/

A Guide for Using SOPA & PIPA to Kill Scientific Debate -- You're Welcome
Michael Ham

Simply put, The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) currently under development in Congress will provide a rapid way to sentence websites to death without the need for pesky things like judges and juries. Much to the surprise of nobody who understands how the Internet works, these two Acts will have absolutely no effect on digital piracy, but they will create an environment where freedom of speech could be severely curtailed, large companies can execute competitors, and scientific data can be hidden from the public.

To understand these claims, we need to explore how copyright works. As I type each and every word in this column they are copyrighted the moment they appear. Although you can file official copyright forms with the government, it's not required. Pretty clever, right?

Now, because you own a copyright on everything you write or record, this makes the Internet a tricky place to set up a website like the Huffington Post. The only way to allow free expression in an online environment where millions of people leave copyrighted comments is to involve some lawyers.

For example, if you leave a message at the bottom of this page (please do by the way), you are giving the Huffington Post the right to use your magically copyrighted sentences -- do use full sentences when commenting; this isn't YouTube, we've got some standards. It's all explained right here in the Official HuffPost Terms and Conditions, which I hope you read thoroughly and memorized before entering the website.

Under the current law, if you leave a comment that contains the entire Harry Potter saga, you and you alone are responsible for infringing on that copyright... you also have too much time on your hands. As it stands, Huffington Post would have to remove the comment if the copyright holder contacts them, but it is not their fault that you posted the copyrighted work to their website. This is known as the Safe Harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It's the equivalent of saying you aren't personally responsible for murder if a random person kills someone on your property. This is a reasonably sane method of protecting copyright, which was apparently a problem that had to be rectified immediately. Enter SOPA and PIPA.

What these Acts will do is make websites liable for any content that appears on them. The bills will create a way to cut the link between the name of the website, like HuffingtonPost.com to the place where the website actually lives -- a web server with a seemingly non-connected numerical identity. The server will still exist and contain the website, but typing in the human friendly '.com' name will no longer connect it to the IP address. Don't fret though, it only took the online community a couple microseconds to create a Firefox plugin that ignores that problem. The end result? Pirates will go on their merry way and never look back, but legitimate websites will be stuck with the consequences.

As a side note, I have no idea why the SOPA supporters insist on using the term pirate. The same studios fighting against 'pirates' produced a billion dollar franchise romanticizing the idea of piracy using Johnny Depp and Keira Knightly. Torrenters of the Caribbean just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Anyhow, what these Acts will really do is kill websites that have a reputation and paid staff. In other words, websites that already comply with the DMCA. The insidious parts of SOPA and PIPA create a simple way for copyright holders, without a trial, to force payment companies and services like Paypal to stop sending money to websites accused of hosting pirated content. Ultimately they may even be able to force your Internet service provider to stop allowing you to connect to the server where the accused website lives.

This means that every single website will have to monitor every single post, looking for copyrighted content. Which is hard, because as I explained earlier, you don't have to report a copyrighted work to a central database. Everything you've ever written is technically copyrighted. This opens an unscrupulous backdoor that would allow businesses to kill off their competitors, stifle free speech and shut down scientific discussion.

For example, lets say I want to take down the Huffington Post because it competes with my website for traffic. I could reach deep into my two copyrighted books (shameless plug for Betrayal and Tails of Socrates) and pick out a couple chunks of text. Then I could use different anonymous wifi hot zones to upload passages from my books to the Huffington Post as comments. I then report HuffPost to the Justice Department. I could keep doing this until I established that the Huffinton Post has a pattern of displaying my copyrighted works without a license (I would totally make up a name to call them.... like the Pirate Post... or something way more clever). Under PIPA and SOPA, the Justice Department would then order financial institutions to stop processing payments for HuffPost, which would keep them from collecting advertising revenue. I've killed the site for my own personal gain.

Lest you think I'm engaging in hyperbole, there is strong evidence that Viacom and many other studios uploaded their own content to YouTube using public wireless networks and doctored them to look pirated. More recently, Universal Music forced YouTube to take down a song they disagreed with by apparently claiming the 'Mega Song' infringed on their copyright, even though they clearly didn't own the copyright.

Now, how does this apply to science? Let's say you are greatly displeased that a science journal posted a result that disagrees with you in some way. Maybe it's business, ideology, religious, or a personal vendetta. You could write a letter to the editor supporting or opposing some unrelated article and include a liberal sprinkling of copyrighted work within the letter. You would of course need a silent partner who owned the copyrighted work you cribbed from. The journal, in the interest of scientific discussion and openness, posts the work. Mission Accomplished! The journal's website is now responsible for publishing that copyrighted work.

Your friend can now try and use the Justice Department to financially execute the journal, which will likely result in their entire catalog (including the offending article) being thrown in disarray and possibly lost because they can no longer afford to operate. Since the journal owns the copyright to that work, the scientists cannot just reproduce the articles elsewhere. At the very least such actions would make scientific outlets rightfully suspicious of discussions that emanate from the general public.

Don't be fooled by pro-SOPA supporters who claim that these Acts will only apply to websites outside the country. The big copyright holders are trying to get laws like SOPA and PIPA passed worldwide. You can probably see where I'm going with this. For the rest of the world, U.S. websites exist outside of their country. That means that if someone in Spain can show that a U.S. website infringes on their copyright, they can demand it be taken down and financially executed. The U.S. has signed many copyright treaties and would likely be required to comply.

Make no mistake, I am a strong supporter of copyrights. They prevent others from profiting off my work without my permission. However, SOPA and PIPA will never achieve their desired goal of decreasing piracy and increasing jobs. Instead they will allow unscrupulous activities that stifle freedom of speech, throw off the balance of the free market and hide scientific results.

I urge you to do something about it. Contact your Congressional Representatives. More than 1 million people already have. You can check SOPATrack to see where your reps fall on the issue and get their phone numbers. Many have not taken a position, you can make sure they take the right one. Already Paul Ryan has been forced to back off his support for SOPA, we can make the rest of them do the same. For Science!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michae...b_1195598.html

MIT

The Media Lab is Against SOPA and PIPA

As many of you may be aware, there are two bills being considered by the US Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act - they're better known as SOPA and PIPA. While the goal to try to minimize the dissemination of copyright materials online is laudable, the bills are misguided and dangerous and could damage innovation on the Internet and free speech.

A number of organizations have spoken up publicly against the bills and a number of the Media Lab community members, including myself have been actively opposing the bill. Today the Media Lab would like to officially go on the record opposing the bill as well.

We encourage you to learn more about these bills, develop your own opinions and participate in the debate and collective action. It's a critically important moment for internet freedom and these bills could have a very negative repercussions both in the United States and globally.

You can read more about the issue on Ethan Zuckerman's blog and my blog where we have cross-posted a longer post on the topic.
http://blog.media.mit.edu/2012/01/me...-and-pipa.html

Reddit Successfully Pressures Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to Back Off Support of SOPA.

REDDIT! - Since my AMA you've generated a lot of buzz about SOPA and established yourself as a political force. After weeks of getting hammered by redditors, blogs and increasingly mainstream media for his inaction on SOPA, Paul Ryan has today reversed course and denounced SOPA:

January 9, 2012

WASHINGTON - Wisconsin’s First District Congressman Paul Ryan released the following statement regarding H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act:

"The internet is one of the most magnificent expressions of freedom and free enterprise in history. It should stay that way. While H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act, attempts to address a legitimate problem, I believe it creates the precedent and possibility for undue regulation, censorship and legal abuse. I do not support H.R. 3261 in its current form and will oppose the legislation should it come before the full House."

This is an extraordinary victory. Reddit was able to force the House Budget Chair to reverse course - shock waves will be felt throughout the establishment in Washington today - other lawmakers will take notice.

We still have much work to do. I encourage you to continuously pressure pro-SOPA/PIPA legislators and remain vigilant, this is merely the first of many battles to come.

Best,

Rob Zerban

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/com...paul_ryan_rwi/

Fighting Antipiracy Measure, Activist Group Posts Personal Information of Media Executives
Amy Chozick

The hacking group Anonymous posted online the personal details of Jeffrey L. Bewkes, left, the chairman of Time Warner, and also leaked information about the family of Sumner M. Redstone, right, who controls Viacom and the CBS Corporation.Mike Segar/ReutersThe hacking group Anonymous posted online the personal details of Jeffrey L. Bewkes, left, the chairman of Time Warner, and also leaked information about the family of Sumner M. Redstone, right, who controls Viacom and the CBS Corporation.

The online activist group known as Anonymous, which has targeted opponents of the Occupy Wall Street movement and businesses that stopped providing services to WikiLeaks, has set its sights on a new adversary: media executives.

In protest of antipiracy legislation currently being considered by Congress, the group has posted online documents that reveal personal information about Jeffrey L. Bewkes, chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, and Sumner M. Redstone, who controls Viacom and the CBS Corporation. Those companies, like almost every major company in the media and entertainment industry, have championed the Stop Online Piracy Act, the House of Representatives bill, known as SOPA, and its related Senate bill, called Protect I.P.

The documents, culled from various databases, included Mr. Bewkes’s home addresses and phone numbers, and encouraged users to bombard the company and its executives with e-mails, faxes and phone calls. Mr. Bewkes has received intimidating phone calls and a barrage of e-mails, according to supporters of the legislation who have knowledge about the matter but are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The documents also included the corporate contact information for a range of companies including NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Entertainment and the Walt Disney Company.

A Disney spokeswoman said neither the company nor its chief executive, Robert A. Iger, had received threats. Time Warner declined to comment. The file that was posted regarding Mr. Redstone has details about his family, home and career but does not include private contact information. A Viacom spokeswoman declined to comment.

Anonymous, a loosely organized collective of so-called hacktivists, has called its effort “Operation Hiroshima.” It began on Jan. 1, when the group dropped a trove of documents on Web sites that facilitate anonymous publishing, like Pastebin.com and Scribd.com. The documents included information about media executives and government figures like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, and data on corporations and government entities that the group opposes.

“They should feel threatened,” said Barrett Brown, a Dallas-based online activist who has worked with Anonymous, referring to backers of the antipiracy legislation. “The idea is to put pressure on the politicians and companies supporting it.”

The online effort underscores how heated the arguments have become over legislation that may seem like arcane government regulation. Media companies say the legislation, which has bipartisan support, will crack down on illicit downloads of movies, music and television, especially from overseas Web sites. SOPA would expand the ability of the government and private companies to hold Web sites responsible for content the companies believe infringes on their copyrights, allowing greater use of court orders and lawsuits that could ultimately shut down the sites.

The technology industry, including giants like Google and Yahoo, and advocates for Internet freedom say the bills would censor the Internet, stifle free speech and give the government too much power to regulate and shut down Web sites in the United States. Both sides have spent millions on lobbying in Washington. But at the grass-roots level, the issue has galvanized Internet activists, who lack lobbying power but have promoted the cause among the online community.

“You take our speech, you take our Internet, you take our Bill of Rights, you take our Constitution, we fight back,” said a monotone voice on a YouTube video posted by Anonymous before the Operation Hiroshima document drop.

Lawmakers and their aides have also been targets. A photograph of a 25-year-old aide for the House Judiciary Committee was superimposed into pornography by a group related to Anonymous, according to another aide who was briefed on security threats to lawmakers and their staffs. “Why can’t they just hire a lobbyist like everyone else?” this aide said.

The vast majority of SOPA opponents convey their views through legitimate means. Hundreds of Web sites have encouraged blackouts and boycotts to protest the legislation. According to BlackoutSOPA.org, nearly 12,000 users have changed their Twitter profile pictures to a “Stop SOPA” badge.

“The more outrage expressed on the Internet in the coming days, the better,” said Fred Wilson, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm and an early investor in Twitter. He said he did not condone threats or “any kind of intimidation” by hackers.

Last month Scribd.com introduced a function that made the words on documents gradually fade away. As they did, a pop-up prompted users to contact their representatives. “Don’t let the Internet vanish before your eyes,” it read.

The tactics have succeeded in some cases. Initially a supporter, the Web hosting company Go Daddy reversed its position on SOPA after Wikipedia and thousands of other Web sites said they would withdraw their domains from the service. “Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Companies like Time Warner, which owns HBO, CNN and the Warner Brothers studio, and Viacom, which owns MTV and the Paramount studio, have experienced security teams, but they are not necessarily trained to handle anonymous online threats, said Josh Shaul, chief technology officer at Application Security Inc., a New York-based provider of database security software.

“It’s easy to get something taken off a Web site, but it’s impossible to erase things off the Internet,” he said.

Less than a week after the Operation Hiroshima documents were posted, a Twitter message linking to Mr. Bewkes’s home phone numbers and addresses, his annual income and his wife’s name and age had spread across the Internet. The message included #OpHiroshima, the shortened Twitter code for the effort.

The global activists in the nebulous collection known as Anonymous often use computer skills to support political causes. For example, Anonymous demanded a full Christmas dinner for Pfc. Bradley Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who is in prison facing charges of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Last month, hackers associated with Anonymous published a trove of e-mail addresses and the personal information of subscribers of Stratfor, a security group based in Austin, Tex. Last year, a splinter group affiliated with Anonymous attacked the Sony Corporation, shutting down its PlayStation online network. The attack cost the company around $171 million, according to industry estimates. Movements like Anonymous often squabble among themselves, but SOPA is a uniquely unifying cause, said Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University and an expert on hacking. To these activists, she said, “Internet freedom is not controversial.”
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...ia-executives/

Boycott SOPA: An Android App that Terrifies Publishers and Politicians
Sebastian Anthony

Armchair activists now have a tool that can transport their SOPA protestations into the real world: Boycott SOPA, an Android app that scans barcodes and tells you whether an object’s manufacturer/publisher is a supporter of the much maligned Stop Online Piracy Act.

If you’ve ever scanned a barcode on your Android phone to look up a book or CD on Amazon, Boycott SOPA works in exactly the same way: First you have to install the ZXing Barcode Scanner app, but then you simply go around pointing your phone’s camera at product barcodes. Boycott SOPA gives you a big red cross if the product is distributed by a SOPA supporter, or a green tick if it’s “clean.” Much to my chagrin, Coca-Cola supports SOPA — but Smirnoff, on the other hand, does not. If you ever needed a sign from Above that you ought to drink more, there it is.

Scanning food isn’t really where Boycott SOPA is at, though: Really, it’s all about scanning books, CDs, movies, and games — products that are protected by massively militant groups like the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA who are spending millions on buying off Representatives to shoehorn SOPA through Congress. If you scan a random selection of media in your DVD rack or bookcase, you’ll be unsurprised to see that almost every object is produced by a company that supports SOPA. It’s worth noting that the app isn’t perfect, though: It relies on a user-curated list of SOPA supporters — a list that isn’t complete nor publicly visible. The app developer claims that the list will be regularly updated.

Boycott SOPA Android appTechnicalities aside, though, the ultimate goal of Boycott SOPA is to change your shopping habits. The idea is that you should scan everything that you buy at the supermarket, and refuse to put any SOPA-backed products into your basket. It’s a very grandiose idea, and in a day and age where shoppers regularly eschew a selection of products on principle (“damn baby-killing multinationals!”), or buy entirely local produce, Boycott SOPA fits right in.

Inadvertently, though, the developers of Boycott SOPA have given us a tantalizing hint of how technology empowers consumers. Imagine for a second if you chopped “SOPA” from the name of the app and simply called it “Boycott.” Imagine if there was an Android app that let you boycott whatever you wanted. If you had a personal beef with Coca-Cola — which has very long tendrils indeed — you could program the app to pick up anything produced by Coca-Cola and its manifold subsidiaries. Likewise, if you want to stick it to publishers or artists that refuse to make their songs available on Spotify, you could tell Boycott to block them.

You could even take it one step further and make Boycott the one-stop-shop for all of your political needs. Imagine if you could scan a cereal box and find out that the company’s CEO likes to hunt rhinos, ride elephants, and eat shark fin soup — at the same time. Imagine if you could scan a video game box and immediately see all of the active legislation, the Representative sponsors and supporters, and how much money they’ve received from industry lobbying. You could even go as far as equipping the app with facial recognition, so that you can point your phone at a Senator’s face on the TV and quickly find out whether what he’s saying actually jives with his real world behavior and voting record. This isn’t a futuristic concept; we could do this right now with the tech we have.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing...nd-politicians

SOPA Opera

The SOPA Debate and How It’s Affected by Congress’s Understanding of Child Porn
Dan Nguyen

Note: The title of this post is not salacious link-bait. It refers to specific aspects of pending Congressional legislation.

A week ago I put up SOPA Opera, a site that shows where Congressmembers stand on the much-talked about Stop Online Piracy and PROTECT-IP Acts.

I did little more than collect and present publicly available information. But the strong reaction to the site is a testament to both how difficult it is to find clear information about our legislative system and how convoluted the issues are behind SOPA.
The most common refrain I saw was: “I cannot believe that Rep/Senator [insert name] is for SOPA! [insert optional expletive].” In particular, “Al Franken” was a frequently invoked name because his fervent advocacy on net neutrality seemed to make the Minnesota senator, in many of his supporters’ opinions, an obvious enemy of SOPA. In fact, one emailer accused me of being out to slander Franken, even though the official record shows that Franken has spoken strongly for PROTECT-IP (the Senate version of SOPA) and even co-sponsored it.

One look at SOPA Opera’s front page is all that’s needed to see how wide and bipartisan SOPA’s support is. No matter what your position on SOPA is, you’re likely to find a legislator who you would otherwise strongly disagree with (the second most common reaction: “Michelle Bachmann is against SOPA?”).

So there has been a fair amount of confusion as to what mindset is responsible for SOPA. Since party lines can’t be used to determine the rightness/wrongess of SOPA, fingers have been pointed at the money trail: SOPA’s proponents reportedly receive far more money from media/entertainment-affiliated donors than they do from the tech industry. The opposite trend exists for the opponents.

It’s impossible of course to know exactly what’s in the Congressmembers’ minds. But a certain key moment during the Nov. 16 House Judiciary hearing on SOPA suggest that their opinions may be rooted less in malice/greed (if you’re of the anti-SOPA persuasion) than in something far more prosaic: their level of technological comprehension.

You can watch the entire, incredibly-inconvenient-to-access webcast at the House Judiciary’s hearing page. I’ve excerpted a specific clip in which Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA) is asking Katherine Oyama (Google’s copyright lawyer) about why Google can stop child porn but not online piracy:

REP. MARINO: I want to thank Google for what it did for child pornography – getting it off the website. I was a prosecutor for 18 years and I find it commendable and I put those people away. So if you can do that with child pornography, why can you not do it [with] these rogue websites [The Pirate Bay, et al.]? Why not hire some whiz kids out of college to come in and monitor this and work for the company to take these off?

My daughter who is 16 and my son who is 12, we love to get on the Internet and we download music and we pay for it. And I get to a site and I say this is a new one, this is good, we can get some music here. And my daughter says Dad, don’t go near that one. It’s illegal, it’s free, and given the fact that you’re on Judiciary, I don’t think you should be doing that…Maybe we need to hire her [laugh]…but, why not?

OYAMA: The two problems are similar in that they’re both very serious problems they’re both things that we all should be working to fighting against. But they’re very different in how you go about combatting it. So for child porn, we are able to design a machine that is able to detect child porn. You can detect certain colors that would show up in pornography, you can detect flesh tones. You can have manual review, where someone would look at the content and they would say this is child porn and this shouldn’t appear.

We can’t do that for copyright just on our own. Because any video, any clip of content, it’s going to appear to the user to be the same thing. So you need to know from the rights holder…have you licensed it, have you authorized it, or is this infringement?”

REP. MARINO: I only have a limited amount of time here and I appreciate your answer. But we have the technology, Google has the technology, we have the brainpower in this country, we certainly can figure it out.

The subject of child pornography is so awful that it’s little wonder that no one really thinks about how it’s actually detected and stopped. As it turns out, it’s not at all complicated.

When I was a college reporter, I had the idea to drive down to the county district attorney’s office and go through all the search warrants. Search warrants become part of the public record, but district attorneys can seal them if police worry that details in an affidavit or search warrant would jeopardize an investigation. I wanted to count how many times this was done at the county DA, because some major cases had been sealed for months. And I wondered if the DA was too overzealous in keeping private what should be the people’s business.

But there were plenty of big cases among the unsealed warrants. I went to college in a small town but there was a bizarre, seemingly constant stream of students being charged with child porn possession. Either college students were becoming particularly perverse or the campus police happened to be crack cyber-sleuths in rooting out the purveyors.

I don’t know about the former, but I learned that the police were not particularly skilled at hacking, based on their notes in the search warrants. In fact, finding the suspects was comically easy because of the unique setup of our college network. Everyone in the dorms had an ethernet hookup but there was no Google, Napster or BitTorrent at the time. So one of the students built a search engine that allowed any student to search the shared files of every other student. And since Windows apparently made this file sharing a default (and at the time, 90+ percent of students’ computers were PCs), the student population had inadvertent access to a huge breadth of files, including MP3s and copied movies and even homework papers.

So to find out if anyone had child porn, the police could just log onto the search engine and type in the appropriate search terms. But the police didn’t even have to do this. Other students would stumble upon someone’s porn collection (you had the option of exploring anyone’s entire shared folder, not just files that came up on the search) and report it. The filenames were all the sickening indication needed to suspect someone of possession.

Google’s Oyama alludes to more technically sophisticated ways of detecting it, but the concept is just as simple as it was at my college: no matter how it’s found, child pornography is easy to categorize as child porn because of its visual characteristics, whether it’s the filename or the images itself. In fact, it’s not even necessary for a human to view a suspected file to know (within a high mathematical probability) that it contains the purported illegal content.

If you’ve ever used Shazam or any of the other song-recognition services, you’ve put this concept into practice. When you hold up a phone to identify a song playing over the bar’s speakers, it’s not as if your phone dials up one of Shazam’s resident music experts who then responds with her guess of the song. The Shazam app looks for certain high points (as well as their spacing, i.e. the song’s rhythm) to generate a “fingerprint” of the song, and then compares it against Shazam’s master database of song “fingerprints”.

No human actually has to “listen” to the song. This is not a new technological concept; it’s as old as, well, the fingerprint database used by law enforcement.

So what Rep. Marino essentially wants is for Google to build a Shazam-like service that doesn’t just identify a song by “listening” to it, but also determines if whoever playing that song has the legal right to do so. Thus, this anti-pirate-Shazam would have to determine from the musical signature of a song such things as whether it came from an iTunes or Amazon MP3 or a CD. And not only that, it would have to determine whether or not the MP3 or CD is a legal or illegal copy.

In a more physical sense, this is like detecting a machine that can determine from a photograph of your handbag whether it’s a cheap knockoff and whether or not you actually own that bag – as opposed to having stolen it, or having bought it from someone who did steal it.

I’m not a particularly skilled engineer but I can’t fathom how this would be done and neither can Google, apparently. But Rep. Marino and at least a few others on the House Judiciary committee have more faith in Google’s technical prowess and they don’t believe that Google is doing enough.

And frankly, I can’t blame them.

From their apparently non-technical vantage point, what they see is that Google is an amazing company who seems to have no limit in its capabilities. It can instantly scour billions of webpages. It can plot in seconds the driving route from Des Moines ot Oaxaca, Mexico. And at some point, might even make a car that drives that route all by itself.

And Google has demonstrated the power to stop evil acts, because it has effectively prevented the spread of child porn in its search engine and other networks. Child porn is a terrible evil; software/media piracy less so. It stands to reason – in a non-technical person’s thinking – that anyone who can stop a great evil must surely be able to stop a lesser evil.

And so, to continue this line of reasoning, if Google doesn’t stop a lesser evil such as illegal MP3 distribution, then it must be because it doesn’t care enough. Or, as some House members noted, Google is loathe to take action because it makes money off of sites that trade in ill-gotten intellectual property.

So you can see how one’s position on SOPA may be inspired not as much out of devotion to an industry but more from a particular (or lack thereof) understanding of the technological tradeoffs and hurdles.

Rep. Marino et. all sees this as something within the realm of technological possibility for Google’s wizards, if only they had some legal incentive. Google and other SOPA opponents see that the problem that SOPA ostensibly tackles is not one that can be solved with any amount of technological expertise. Thus, each side can be as anti-online-piracy/pro-intellectual-property as the other and yet fight fiercely over SOPA.

—

Though SOPA has taken the spotlight, there is another Internet-related bill on the House Judiciary’s agenda. It’s H.R. 1981, a.k.a The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, which proposed a mandate that Internet service providers keep track of the sites their users visit for up to 18 months, to make it easier to investigate Internet crimes – such as downloading child pornography.

H.R. 1981 was introduced by House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) who is, of course, the legislator who introduced SOPA. And like SOPA, the support for H.R. 1981 is non-partisan because child pornography is neither a Republican or Democratic cause.

And also like SOPA, the opposition to H.R. 1981 is along non-partisan lines. Among the most vocal opponents to the child porn bill is the Judiciary committee’s ranking member Rep. John Conyers (D-MI). Is it because he is in the pocket of the child porn lobby? No; Conyers argues that even though child porn is bad, H.R. 1981 relies on using technology in a way that is neither practical nor ethical. From CNET:

The bill is mislabeled,” said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the panel. “This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.”

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI)

Rep. Conyers apparently understands that just because a law purports to fight something as evil (and, of course, politically unpopular) as child pornography doesn’t mean that the law’s actual implementation will be sound.

So when the wrong-to-be-righted is online piracy – i.e. SOPA – what is Conyers’ stance? He is one of its most vocal supporters:

The Internet has regrettably become a cash-cow for the criminals and organized crime cartels who profit from digital piracy and counterfeit products. Millions of American jobs are at stake because of these crimes.

Is it because Conyers is in the pocket of big media? Or that he hates the First Amendment? That’s not an easily apparent conclusion judging from his past votes and legislative history.

It’s of course possible that Conyers takes this particular stance on SOPA because SOPA, all things considered, happens to be a practical and fair law in the way that H.R. 1981 isn’t.

But a more cynical viewpoint is that Conyer’s technological understanding for one bill does not apply to the other. Everyone has been screwed over at some point by a massive, faceless database so it’s easy to be fearful of online databases – in fact, the less you know about computers, the more concerned you’ll be of the misuse of databases.

The technological issues underlying SOPA are arguably far more complex, though, and it’s not clear – as evidenced by Rep. Marino’s line of questioning – that Congressmembers, whether they support or oppose SOPA, have a full understanding of them.
http://danwin.com/2012/01/the-sopa-d...of-child-porn/

Tim O’Reilly: Why I’m Fighting SOPA
Colleen Taylor

As the debate about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) rages on from Silicon Valley to Washington DC, a number of the technology industry’s most influential leaders have come out against the proposed legislation, which would give the government and private corporations unprecedented powers to remove websites from the internet for any alleged copyright infringement.

On Thursday, I interviewed Tim O’Reilly about why he believes SOPA is wrong and what the tech industry can do to stop it. His concerns fell into five main categories:

Piracy is not a real problem

The way I see it, there’s a lack of need for any legislation at all. As a publisher, I have a very deep experience here, and the fact is that piracy is not a significant problem. Yes, there are people who are pirating my books, there are people who are sharing links to places where they can be downloaded. But the vast majority of customers are willing to pay if the product is widely available and the price is fair. If you have a relationship with your customers, and they know you’re doing the right thing, they will support you.

The people who are pirating are most likely the people who would never give you a nickel to begin with. Piracy serves people on the fringes who are not being served adequately by legitimate markets. Frankly, if people in Romania can download my books and enjoy them, more power to them. They weren’t going to pay me anyway.

SOPA protects the wrong people

I talked with Nancy Pelosi about SOPA the other day, and she said that the experience with piracy is different for people in the movie industry. Maybe — I’m not a movie producer. But I do know that right now the entire content industry is facing massive systemic changes, and to claim that declining sales are because of piracy is so over the top. Any company that is providing great content online in a way that’s easy to use with a fair price has a booming business right now. The people who don’t are trying to fight that future.

So here we have this legislation, with all of these possible harms, to solve a problem that only exists in the minds of people who are afraid of the future. Why should the government be intervening on behalf of the people who aren’t getting with the program?

SOPA ignores history

If you look at it from a historical perspective, the American book publishing industry as a whole began with piracy; there are lots of documents of Charles Dickens and the like taking a stand against these American pirates who were stealing their work. But America went on to become the largest publishing and copyright market in the world. Once the market matures, the pirates go away. They always do. Legitimate markets work better than pirate markets.

More recently you can see this in what happened with the music industry. For a while, music companies were fighting peer-to-peer file sharing. But once Apple came out with iTunes, which was an alternative that was easy to use and fairly priced, it became a huge business. Our policy makers need to encourage the people who get it right, not protect people who clearly didn’t get it right. They need to protect our future.

Tech and lobbying don’t mix

Certainly, the tech industry needs to do a lot more lobbying in Washington, DC. But the whole notion of lobbying is anathema to so many tech people, and for good reason. We’re used to a world in which people design products that have a purpose, where your work speaks for itself. So yes, the tech industry should try to communicate more with the people in DC, but at the same time, congresspeople need to use more of their own independent judgement.

The US needs tech innovation

Laws like SOPA make us sclerotic as a country, where we have all these extra burdens that provide little benefit. In general it makes America less competitive. If SOPA goes through, it could very well force certain innovative companies to go offshore. There are incumbent industries that will always protest every new technology; but any forward-looking country needs to protect its emerging industries.
http://gigaom.com/2012/01/13/tim-ore...fighting-sopa/

Reddit to 'Black Out' for 12 Hours to Protest SOPA, PIPA

Sounds weird -- not to mention self-defeating -- but the social news website has a plan
Chris Nerney

The reddit community has been one of the most vocal and effective online critics of the Stop Online Piracy Act, with its December 22 call to punish GoDaddy forcing the domain registrar just one day later to publicly disavow its support of SOPA after losing tens of thousands of domains.

Now reddit plans to black itself out for 12 hours on January 18 from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST to underscore its opposition to the SOPA bill currently in the House as well as the Senate's Protect IP Act (PIPA).

At first glance this seems like an odd, even dumb, strategy. How can a site essentially shutting itself down for a half-day help in the fight against legislation that opponents (including myself) believe would allow the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright holders, through court orders, to punish foreign and domestic sites accused of copyright infringement by having them 1) removed from search engine results 2) prohibited from generating revenue through online advertising networks, and 3) cut off from online payment processing networks?

It can't. But reddit's doing more than that. It's using the site during those 12 hours not to literally go dark, but to educate and, hopefully, build public opposition to the proposed legislation.

Here's how reddit explains it in a blog post:

Instead of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action. We will showcase the live video stream of the House hearing where Internet entrepreneurs and technical experts (including reddit co-founder Alexis “kn0thing” Ohanian) will be testifying. We will also spotlight community initiatives like meetups to visit Congressional offices, campaigns to contact companies supporting PIPA/SOPA, and other tactics.

Reddit acknowledges that while "support for a blackout isn’t unanimous" among redditors (when is anything unanimous among redditors?), "we feel focusing on a day of action is the best way we can amplify the voice of the community."

It strikes me as a pretty clever way for a site to leverage its large readership (nearly 35 million unique visitors and 2 billion page views in December alone) in a political battle. Redditors less aware of the potential ramifications of SOPA and PIPA who visit the site during the 12-hour "blackout" will get an education and be provided with ways to take action against these two bills.

So maybe the "blackout" should be called a "learn-in." Feel free to run with that, reddit.
http://www.itworld.com/internet/2407...test-sopa-pipa

Why Google And Facebook Need To Go Dark To Protest SOPA

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas and Senate Judiciary Committee Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. are the men behind the latest attempt to stamp down on piracy – and free speech – online.
E.D. Kain

The Stop Online Piracy Act and its counterpart in the Senate, the Protect IP Act, represent the greatest threat to a free internet we’ve seen from the US government yet. So far, the internet remains a frontier of innovation, the sharing of ideas, and free-wheeling communities. In many ways its the last unregulated bastion of free commerce in the world. And now it’s under attack.

Like David Carr in the New York Times, I do think online piracy is a real problem despite what web-evangelists may say. However, as Carr notes these laws would do little to stop piracy and even if they “made some progress toward reining in rogue sites, the collateral damage would be significant.”

Censorship would break the internet and toss free speech out the window. When you look at exactly what these bills do you can see just how pernicious the legislation really is – and how unnecessary. Piracy is a problem but there are better, more constitutional ways to help fight against it.

Groups like Reddit and other online communities and internet companies are up in arms about the legislation and a few good congressmen are on the case but so far the outcry has only slowed the progress of the bills and most of the mainstream media remains glaringly silent on the laws (perhaps because the laws are being pushed by various parent companies who support the legislation.)

As a fervent opponent of both SOPA and PIPA I wholeheartedly second Paul Tassi‘s call for an internet blackout. Noting that Reddit will go dark next week, Tassi says it’s just not enough and may be preaching to the choir:

That’s where a Google/Facebook blackout would have the power to instantly crush SOPA. If the sites went dark and instead linked to pages explaining the problems with SOPA, and then had links for people to contact Congress, I guarantee it would be the killing blow for the bill. National news agencies which have largely been avoiding covering SOPA because their parent companies support it would be forced to report on the topic, as Facebook and Google going offline would undoubtedly be the biggest tech story of the day, week, month, or possibly the year.

Paul is fairly sanguine about all of this, however. He argues that the leaders of the internet industry will be able to dissuade clueless lawmakers and push them toward better rules. I’m not so sure. Politics is hardly the realm of the rational.

The entertainment industry is behind the current bills and they’re pushing as hard as they ever have figuring that every penny spent lobbying for SOPA will pay off big-time when they have the power to shut down so-called “rogue” websites.

The bipartisan support for the bills is what makes me nervous. The fact that the lawmakers in question have a very poor understanding of the bills and the technology they’re attempting to regulate is hardly comforting. Obama’s signature on the National Defense Authorization Act convinces me that he’d sidestep a veto on SOPA as well.

My only comfort is with the courts. The Supreme Court has already shot down legislation aimed at censoring violent video games. And while the current court is hardly a civil libertarian’s dream-team it’s still a more likely graveyard for SOPA than Congress. It’s not hard to imagine the court declaring these laws unconstitutional breaches of free speech. But it’s a gamble.

So let’s blacken the internet. Google and Facebook are in the unique position of making this happen.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain...-protest-sopa/

Time Is Running Out For SOPA Opponents Congressmen Warn At CES 2012
E.D. Kain

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) showed up at CES 2012 in Las Vegas to issue a stark warning: we’re running out of time to stop legislation aimed at cracking down on copyright infringement.

That legislation – the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate – is intended to clamp down on piracy but is widely believed to go much further, with free speech and censorship ramifications that could have profound consequences on the way the internet works.

“This is a crucial window here for those who want to see the Net come out of this debate without this enormous collateral damage” caused by the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, Wyden told conference-goers. “We are not prepared to say that this juggernaut for innovation and freedom and citizen empowerment, the Internet, ought to be dealt such a serious body blow in the name of copyright.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Issa warned that the bills have had little or no discussion in any committees, saying “This should have been widely involved at every committee that looks at the Internet or commerce or trade.” The only hearing held so far on the legislation was conducted by the bill’s author, Lamar Smith of Texas. Few, if any, experts have been called in front of congress to discuss the bills.

Thanks to a filibuster from Wyden, PIPA is currently held in check in the Senate. But it’s not inconceivable that the bipartisan legislation could find the 60 votes needed to sidestep Wyden and move on to the president’s desk where it’s almost certain the legislation would become law.

A number of websites and web companies are protesting or opposing the legislation, with communities like Reddit staging various protests and an upcoming blackout. Wikipedia has also come out in opposition to the bills and has floated the idea of a blackout of the online encyclopedia. Groups like the Consumer Electronic Association have backed Wyden and Issa’s OPEN Act, a much milder alternative to the SOPA/PIPA bills.

Wyden, however, remains dour. “I believe we could have SOPA passing in the House and OPEN passing in the Senate – and I don’t even want to think about what kind of conference committee there would be,” he told the IBTimes.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain...n-at-ces-2012/

SOPA Sponsor Rep. Lamar Smith to SOPA Opponents: You Don’t Matter
Andrew Couts

Rep. Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor of the 'Stop Online Piracy Act' (SOPA), has dismissed the opposition to SOPA as illegitimate and of minor importance.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the chief sponsor of the ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ (SOPA), says that criticisms of the controversial legislation are entirely unfounded, and that the online communities that oppose the bill are illegitimate.

“The criticism of this bill is completely hypothetical; none of it is based in reality. Not one of the critics was able to point to any language in the bill that would in any way harm the Internet. Their accusations are simply not supported by any facts,” said Smith in a statement, quoted by Roll Call.

When asked about the burgeoning opposition to the bill from online communities like Reddit.com, Smith added: “It’s a vocal minority. Because they’re strident doesn’t mean they’re either legitimate or large in number. One, they need to read the language. Show me the language. There’s nothing they can point to that does what they say it does do. I think their fears are unfounded.”

There are so many things just factually wrong about Rep. Smith’s statement that it’s hard to know where to begin. So let’s just take his asinine dismissal from the top, shall we?

First, Rep. Smith says that “not one of the critics” could point to specific language in the bill that would “in any way harm the Internet.” No? What about the 83 Internet pioneers — we’re talking people like Vint Cerf, co-designer of TCP/IP; Jim Gettys, editor of the HTTP/1.1 protocol standards; Leonard Kleinrock, a key developer of the ARPANET; in other words, the very people who built the Internet — who say that SOPA (and the Protect IP Act, PIPA), “will risk fragmenting the Internet’s global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious technical consequences” because of the bills’ requirement that Internet service providers block domain names of infringing sites.

In their letter to Congress, this group of Internet founders also argues that SOPA “will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure.” If that’s not damaging to the Internet, what is it? To Rep. Smith, it’s nothing, apparently. Hyperbole.

Rep. Smith’s own hyperbole goes against the opinion of former Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Stewart Baker, who agrees with the Internet founders when he says that SOPA will “do great damage to Internet security, mainly by putting obstacles in the way of DNSSEC, a protocol designed to limit certain kinds of Internet crime,” among other repercussions.

Now, in terms of Rep. Smith’s statement that the anti-SOPA crowd is neither “legitimate” nor “large in number,” well, that’s so obviously false, it would be laughable if it weren’t so infuriating.

As we have mentioned before, the list of vocal SOPA opponents includes more than 850 companies, organizations and individual experts who are adamantly against the legislation’s passage — far more than appear on the House Judiciary Committee’s list of SOPA supporters. This includes the Internet’s largest companies: Google, AOL, Facebook, eBay, LinkedIn, Mozilla, PayPal, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Tumblr (to name only a few).

The list of SOPA opponents also includes 425 venture capitalists and entrepreneurs — i.e. job creators. The editorial boards of The New York Times and Los Angeles Times are on the list, as are 39 public advocacy groups, nonprofits and think tanks who believe that SOPA will stifle freedom of speech. These are joined by 61 international human rights groups, and 116 academics and law experts from the nation’s top law schools. In short: The list of SOPA critics could not be any more legitimate.

In addition to these industry, human rights, and law experts, the anti-SOPA faction includes countless individuals — voters, as they’re called in Washington, who have sent hundreds of thousands of letters to Congress, and made nearly 90,000 calls in one day to their representatives, as Tech Dirt’s Mike Masnick reports, urging them to denounce SOPA.

For the sake of brevity, we won’t go into detail about Reddit’s apparently successful GoDaddy boycott over the company’s SOPA support, or the countless other less-public actions concerned citizens are taking to fight this bill. But it’s important for those of you on the sidelines to know that when Rep. Smith questions the legitimacy of those who oppose SOPA, he’s questioning the legitimacy of the American people, and damaging the democratic principles upon which this country relies.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/opinion...u-dont-matter/

Author of U.S. Online Piracy Bill Vows Not to Buckle
Jim Forsyth

The lawmaker behind a bill to combat online piracy vowed on Thursday to press ahead in the face of fierce criticism from Internet giants such as Google and Facebook.

"It is amazing to me that the opponents apparently don't want to protect American consumers and businesses," Republican Representative Lamar Smith told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"Are they somehow benefitting by directing customers to these foreign websites? Do they profit from selling advertising to these foreign websites? And if they do, they need to be stopped. And I don't mind taking that on."

The Stop Online Piracy Act, which is before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee chaired by Smith, aims to fight online piracy of pharmaceuticals, music and other consumer products by allowing the Department of Justice to seek federal court injunctions against foreign-based websites.

Smith said Internet counterfeiters cost American consumers, businesses, inventors and workers some $100 billion a year, though critics accuse him of exaggerating.

Under the bill, if a judge agrees that websites offer material that violates U.S. copyright laws, Internet service providers could be required to block access to foreign sites and U.S. online ad networks could be required to stop ads and search engines barred from directly linking to them.

Heavyweights such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit oppose the bill, which came under fire at this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Reddit chief executive Alexis Ohanian has said it would "cripple the Internet" and pledged to take his social media site dark for one day next week to protest the bill.

"This (SOPA) could potentially obliterate the entire tech industry - a job-creating industry," Ohanian wrote on his blog.

Smith stressed the bill would only affect websites based outside the United States and criticized opponents for failing to cite specific sections, saying many have failed to read it and were disguising their economic interests with rhetoric about Internet freedom.

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt told the Economic Club of Washington last month that the bill would "effectively break the Internet" and he compared Smith's efforts to the same type of censorship that Google has experienced in China.

"There are some companies like Google that make money by directing consumers to these illegal websites," Smith said. "So I don't think they have any real credibility to complain even though they are the primary opponent."

Smith has received numerous awards from conservative organizations for his opposition to efforts to expand the federal government's power.

But the Texas representative says giving Washington sweeping powers over the Internet is necessary to protect free enterprise.

Smith predicted the bill would pass the House. It was about halfway through the process of committee hearings and could go to the House floor in a matter a weeks, he said. The Senate was considering a similar measure.

(Editing by Daniel Trotta and Xavier Briand)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80C04T20120113

The Author of SOPA Is a Copyright Violator
Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

Wanna spend your Thursday night looking for hypocrites on the internet? Help us expose other SOPA-supporting, copyright-flaunting hypocrites here.

US Congressman and poor-toupee-colour-chooser Lamar Smith is the guy who authored the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA, as I'm sure you know, is the shady bill that will introduce way harsher penalties for companies and individuals caught violating copyright online (including making the unauthorised streaming of copyrighted content a crime which you could actually go to jail for). If the bill passes, it will destroy the internet and, ultimately, turn the world into Mad Max (for more info, go here).

I decided to check that everything on Lamar's official campaign website was copyright-cleared and above board. Lamar is using several stock images on his site, two of which I tracked back to the same photographic agency. I contacted the agency to make sure he was paying to use them, but was told that it's very difficult for them to actually check to see if someone has permission to use their images. (Great news, copyright violators!) However, seeing as they're both from the same agency and are unwatermarked, it seems fairly likely that he is the only person on the entire internet who is actually paying to use a stock image (and he'd be an idiot not to).

So I took a look back at an archived, pre-SOPA version of his site.

And this is the background image Lamar was using. I managed to track that picture back to DJ Schulte, the photographer who took it.

And whaddya know? Looks like someone forgot to credit him.

I contacted DJ, to find out if Lamar had asked permission to use the image and he told me that he had no record of Lamar, or anyone from his organisation, requesting permission to use it: "I switched my images from traditional copyright protection to be protected under the Creative Commons license a few years ago, which simply states that they can use my images as long as they attribute the image to me and do not use it for commercial purposes.

"I do not see anywhere on the screen capture that you have provided that the image was attributed to the source (me). So my conclusion would be that Lamar Smith's organisation did improperly use my image. So according to the SOPA bill, should it pass, maybe I could petition the court to take action against www.texansforlamarsmith.com."

Oh dear. Luckily for DJ, there are people out there like Lamar making new laws to protect the little guy against online copyright theft. Keep fighting that good fight, Lamar!

We've contacted the office of Lamar Smith and are waiting on a response.
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/lamar...pyright-whoops

Comcast -- Owner Of NBC Universal -- Admits That DNS Redirects Are Incompatible With DNSSEC
Mike Masnick

Well, well, well. Here's something interesting. Comcast, who owns NBC Universal (one of the main forces behind SOPA/PIPA), is officially a SOPA/PIPA supporter. However, yesterday, Comcast put up a post congratulating itself (deservedly so!) for completing its DNSSEC deployment, making it "the first large ISP in the North America to have fully implemented" DNSSEC across the board. That's huge, and a clear vote of confidence for DNSSEC, obviously. They also urge others to use DNSSEC:

Now that nearly 20 million households in the U.S. are able to use DNSSEC, we feel it is an important time to urge major domain owners, especially commerce and banking-related sites, to begin signing their domain names. While in the past those domains may have wanted to do so but felt it would have limited effect, they now can work on signing their domains knowing that the largest ISP in the U.S. can validate those signatures on behalf of our customers.

All of this is good... but what may be much more interesting is that, along with this announcement, Comcast has also mentioned that it is shutting down its Domain Helper service. Domain Helper was a somewhat controversial DNS-redirect system, so that when you mistyped something, it would suggest the proper page or alternatives. Many in the internet community complained that these types of redirects mess with the underlying DNS system (which they do). But, as the DNS experts have been saying all along (and NBC Universal has been trying to play down), DNSSEC is incompatible with such DNS redirects. So... that makes this next part a little awkward. Comcast is now admitting, indeed, that DNS redirects, such as Domain Helper, are incompatible with DNSSEC:

When we launched the Domain Helper service, we also set in motion its eventual shutdown due to our plans to launch DNSSEC. Domain Helper has been turned off since DNS response modification tactics, including DNS redirect services, are technically incompatible with DNSSEC and/or create conditions that can be indistinguishable from malicious modifications of DNS traffic (including DNS cache poisoning attacks). Since we want to ensure our customers have the most secure Internet experience, and that if they detect any DNSSEC breakage or error messages that they know to be concerned (rather than not knowing if the breakage/error was "official" and caused by our redirect service or "unofficial" and caused by an attacker), our priority has been placed on DNSSEC deployment -- now automatically protecting our customers...

Let's be doubly clear about this, because it's important. Just as NBC Universal and other SOPA supporters continue to insist that DNS redirect is completely compatible with DNSSEC... Comcast (and official SOPA/PIPA supporter) has rolled out DNSSEC, urged others to roll out DNSSEC and turned off its own DNS redirect system, stating clearly that DNS redirect is incompatible with DNSSEC, if you want to keep people secure. In the end, this certainly appears to suggest that Comcast is admitting that it cannot comply with SOPA/PIPA, even as the very same company is advocating for those laws.

It would appear that the left hand (people who actually understand technology) isn't speaking to the right hand (lawyers/lobbyists) within the Comcast family. But, I think that NBC Universal and anyone else insisting that DNS redirects are fine in DNSSEC owe everyone else a pretty big apology... when their own company's experts are admitting that the two are incompatible.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...h-dnssec.shtml

If SOPA's Main Target Is The Pirate Bay, It's Worth Pointing Out That ThePirateBay.org Is Immune From SOPA
Mike Masnick

In looking over Eric Goldman's excellent "linkwrap" of a bunch of recent SOPA/PIPA stories, it pointed me to a News.com article from last month, about how SOPA was really about going after one single site: The Pirate Bay. I've actually heard this repeatedly -- and from folks heavily involved with the bill itself. The whole point of the bill is to try to take down The Pirate Bay. Now, we can argue back and forth about how pointless that is... but there's something else that seems important:

As written, nothing in SOPA can touch ThePirateBay's main website, ThePirateBay.org

That's because the current version of the bill excludes any .com or .org. from being a target (though, they can be required to take action against other sites). This has caused some confusion, mainly because of the changes between the original version of SOPA and the "manager's amendment," which is the current version of the bill. The manager's amendment makes you jump through some hoops to understand this, but the key point is that a "U.S.-directed site" is defined to be a "foreign internet site" in the bill (in the original SOPA, a U.S.-directed site could be any site). Then, a foreign domain name is listed as not a "domestic domain" (keep hopping!), which itself is defined as "a domain name that is registered or assigned by a domain name registrar, domain name registry or other domain name registration authority that is located within a judicial district of the United States."

This means that all .com or .org domains are domestic, since they're assigned by a registry that is located within the US (for those confused, a domain registry is a company like VeriSign that runs the master database of all domains under a single top level domain). The thinking here is that (as ICE and the Justice Department have claimed) any website that has a TLD that is controlled by an American company can be dealt with via existing laws, such as the one that ICE uses to seize websites. .com is run by VeriSign, which is based in the US. And .org is run by the Public Interest Registry, which is also based in the US (Virginia, specifically).

That means that thepiratebay.org -- the main website for The Pirate Bay... is actually immune from the two key parts of SOPA (sections 102 and 103, since both clearly state that they only cover "U.S.-directed sites").

So, based on the law as written... The Pirate Bay is immune from SOPA (though, potentially not from ICE just seizing the domain). It's worth noting the same is true of both RapidShare and Megaupload -- two other sites frequently cited by the MPAA and the US Chamber of Commerce as the types of awful, evil sites that these bills are targeted to take down. In fact, remember that "53 billion visits to rogue websites" claim that the US Chamber of Commerce loves to repeat? Nearly half of that is from RapidShare and Megavideo/Megaupload. And yet, those sites are clearly excluded from SOPA based on the definitions. So why would they still be trotting them out as examples?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...une-sopa.shtml

Finnish Operator Required To Block Access To ThePirateBay, Among Others
Antti Vilpponen

Elisa, one of the largest internet service providers in Finland, has been forced to block access to The PirateBay for its customers. Elisa issued a press release (in Finnish) on the matter moments ago. The decision was given by a local district court in Helsinki. Elisa has stated that they will seek correction to the decision in supreme court. As of today, all Elisa and Saunalahti (part of the same group) customers will be denied access to ThePirateBay on an operator level, meaning they have denied access to the servers in their name servers.

TTVK, the anti-piracy organisation put forth by IFPI Finland, is opposing Elisa in the case. They have also sought a similar decision for other operators and internet service providers in Finland.

While the case is far from clear, this is not a healthy road to go down. It has a very bad ring to it, especially after it comes out just following our guest post regarding issues in Hungary.

Bad business models and industries under disruption should under no circumstance be protected by law this extensively that seriously deteriorate citizens right to information. While ThePirateBay shares illegal material, uploaded by its users, there is a ton of legal material as well. In addition to blocking access to ThePirateBay, Elisa has been forced to block access to all of the following addresses:

thepiratebay.org, www.thepiratebay.org, depiraatbaai.be, www.depiraatbaai.be, piratebay.am, www.piratebay.am, piratebay.net, www.piratebay.net, www.piratebay.no, piratebay.no, piratebay.se, www.piratebay.se, suprnova.com, www.suprnova.com, themusicbay.com, www.themusicbay.com, themusicbay.net, www.themusicbay.net, themusicbay.org, www.themusicbay.org, thepiratebay.am,www.thepiratebay.am, www.thepiratebay.com, thepiratebay.com, thepiratebay.gl, www.thepiratebay.gl, thepiratebay.net, www.thepiratebay.net, www.thepiratebay.se, thepiratebay.se, www.piraattilahti.fi, piraattilahti.fi, thepiratepay.org.nyud.net

This also raises an interesting question: what rights do we as ArcticStartup have in asking operators to block access to news sites that take our content without proper accreditation? What rights do any other companies have? As you give it more thought, you begin to realise how dangerous this turn of events can really be.

Update: Also, Piraattilahti.fi -address currently hosts just a video file casting criticism against the SOPA legislation in the US. How does this promote copyright infringement?

Update 2: In response to the blocking of ThePirateBay, the Finnish branch of the Anonymous hacker group has taken down the anti-filesharing website Antipiracy.fi. Furthermore, they demand Elisa restore access, threatening "This is only the beginning."
http://www.arcticstartup.com/2012/01...y-among-others

Anonymous Targets Finland Over Anti-Piracy Efforts
AFP

Cyber-activists attacked the websites of Finnish anti-piracy groups after a local Internet service provider was forced to block access to a popular file-sharing website, officials said Tuesday.

Antti Kotilainen, a spokesman for the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC), told AFP that websites run by his organisation and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) had been "down since Monday".

"It isn't the first time this has happened ... We have no precise information who is behind this," he added.

Meanwhile a group of hacker activists, or "hacktivists," known as Anonymous Finland claimed responsibility on the microblogging site Twitter for the attacks, insisting about the CIAPC site: "We'll keep it down as long as we want".

In May 2011, the CIAPC and IFPI brought a case against Elisa, a major Finnish Internet service provider, seeking to block its customers from accessing the Swedish file sharing website The Pirate Bay.

Following a ruling by the Helsinki District Court last October ordering Elisa to block access to Pirate Bay or face a 100,000-euro ($130,000) fine, the service provider announced Monday it would temporarily block access to the site. The websites of both plaintiffs in the anti-piracy case later became inaccessible, apparently due to the "Elisagate" campaign launched by the cyber-activists claiming an anti-censorhip agenda.

"We know about it ... We are following what's happening," police investigator Timo Piiroinen told AFP, adding that such cases are "extremely challenging."

Elisa meanwhile indicated in a customer statement Monday that it intended to appeal the October court ruling.

Founded in 2003, The Pirate Bay makes it possible to skirt copyright fees and share music, film and computer game files using bit torrent technology, or peer-to-peer links offered on the site.

The site has been involved in numerous lawsuits concerning copyright infringement, and Finland is just one of several countries that have attempted to block access to the site.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp...d8739775a81.71

Dutch Cabler Appeals Order to Ban File-Sharing Site

Dutch MSO Ziggo has appealed a court order that it restricts access to the Pirate Bay website, which facilitates file-sharing of TV and movie content. The cabler was told this week that if it did not block users from the site within ten days, it faced a fine of up to €250,000. 

Ziggo said that it opposed the illegal downloading of content, but that restricting access to certain websites was potentially the start of a slippery slope. ISP XS4All is also subject to the court ruling and is appealing alongside Ziggo.
http://www.digitaltveurope.net/19418...-sharing-site/

The Best 3 Private Torrent Trackers That You Should Be Invited To
Craig Snyder

With Napster, WinMX, LimeWire, and Kazaa mostly in their graves (SoulSeek is still around, I guess), the world of filesharing has made a swift transition to torrents. Just like the good old Napster days though, public torrent sites and trackers are riddled with trojans and other garbage. The best way to enjoy your filesharing experience is getting an invite to one of the many (but few illustrious) private trackers.

While invite-only web is becoming a slight trend, I’m here to share three niche-specific and very reliable private sites that I use to get my complete media fix. Let’s get started.

PassThePopcorn

PTP has been around for quite a while, and through a legacy of staff drama and domain name changes, it still stands today as the best private torrent site for movies.

High-quality rips are added to PTP faster than almost anywhere else on the net, and speeds are generally top notch. PTP is at around 23,000 (of 25,000) users with a daily activity rate that hangs around 40%. Monthly, it’s at more than 90%. PTP is hanging right under the 100,000 total torrents mark. They’ve got over 53,000 individual movies, more than 80,000 subtitles, 533,000+ user ratings, 3.5 million total snatches, and a seeder/leecher ratio of 85.49. That’s impressive. The site is very smooth and easy to navigate, also.

As a little added bonus, PTP has some of the most active forums I’ve seen across private trackers. The community is very involved. This is where I go when I want movies. If you’re fortunate enough to be an active, invited member than you can tag along with me. My username there is Craig.

What.CD

What.CD is the premiere private tracker for music. Even their splash page is mysterious and makes you want to join up. Like PTP, What.CD has been going strong forever. The site has not changed much over the years, and that’s a good thing. It’s here to stay.

Here are the current stats that What.CD boasts:

Maximum Users: 200,000
Enabled Users: 147,441
Users active today: 31,864 (21.61%)
Users active this week: 75,651 (51.31%)
Users active this month: 120,045 (81.42%)
Torrents: 1,274,496
Releases: 588,517
Artists: 442,475
“Perfect” FLACs: 298,750
Requests: 158,012 (70.30% filled)
Snatches: 66,631,197
Peers: 8,836,049
Seeders: 8,687,317
Leechers: 148,732
Seeder/Leecher Ratio: 58.40

Those numbers are completely insane! If you’re an audiophile and love your FLACs, this is the place to be. I’ve never gone to What.CD and left without finding what I wanted. I’m CSS over at that tracker.

TvTorrents.COM

TvT is the up-and-comer of this list. It’s much different from PTP and What.CD. It doesn’t run on Project Gazelle like those two, the tracker software that What.CD made famous. The invitation and credits system is completely different also.

Again, just like the others, this is absolutely at the top of its class. Sometimes shows are uploaded as briefly as 15 minutes after their live airing. They’ve even got sections of the website that shows recently aired episodes of the most popular TV series’, complete with the matching user-contributed torrents (if there).

These guys are really doing it right, and their approach is definitely changing the way a lot of people watch “TV”. No more sitting and waiting, you don’t even have to set the TiVo. TvTorrents.com has everything you want, from Dexter to the most obscure foreign sitcoms. I’m over there too, self-named.

Now how do you get an invite to these awesome trackers? That’s on you. Just know that they are out there and hold all of your cravings and desires! In the event that you do get invited, you’ll want one of these clients to speed up your downloads. Might also want to check this article out too, it could save you some worry.

Don’t Forget: The Free A-Z Torent Guide

If you know any other quality sites, get at me in the comments. No begging for invites, either!
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3-priva...ckers-invited/

The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents
Ernesto

In a month The Pirate Bay will no longer offer downloads of .torrent files. Instead, the largest torrent site on the Internet will only provide so-called magnet links to its visitors. The first step in this direction was made today with The Pirate Bay replacing the current default torrent download links with magnets. Could this be the end of an era?

After half a decade of loyal service, The Pirate Bay shut down its tracker in November 2009.

The Pirate Bay argued that BitTorrent trackers have been made redundant by technologies such as DHT and PEX. In addition, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering magnet links instead.

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT and PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time.

Now, two years later, that date is coming soon.

Today, The Pirate Bay made the first step towards this new future by making magnets the default download links instead of torrents. TorrentFreak was further informed that in “a month or so” the largest torrent site on the Internet will stop serving torrent files indefinitely.

The announcement is bound to lead to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users, but in reality very little will change for the average Pirate Bay visitor. Users will still be able to download files, but these will now be started through a magnet link instead of a .torrent file.

The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that one of the advantages of the transition to a “magnet site” is that it requires relatively little bandwidth to host a proxy. This is topical, since this week courts in both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local Internet providers to block the torrent site.

Perhaps even better, without the torrent files everyone can soon host a full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future.

Unlike the site’s users, existing torrent sites that scrape .torrent files from The Pirate Bay will have to make some drastic changes. If they want to continue serving .torrent files they will have to fetch them from DHT. Also, hotlinks to .torrent files will stop working and will soon redirect to The Pirate Bay’s detail page for the files in question.

One of the potential downsides of using magnets is that it could take a bit longer for downloads to start, especially if there are relatively few people sharing a file. This is because the .torrent file has to be fetched from other users instead of being downloaded directly from the site. More background on these and other technicalities can be found here.

The good news is that all mainstream BitTorrent clients support magnet links. This wasn’t the case back in 2009, but when The Pirate Bay hinted that in the future they could become a magnet-only site, all developers quickly made their clients fully compatible.

There’s no doubt that a torrent-less Pirate Bay will certainly mark the end of an era. At the moment it’s hard to predict what the impact of The Pirate Bay’s decision will be on the BitTorrent community. But torrents, however, will never disappear completely.
https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-...rrents-120112/

Bulgarian Police Raid Two Filesharing Web Sites

Arrest 17 year old web site admin
Kate O'Flaherty

TWO BULGARIAN filesharing web sites have been raided by the country's organised crime unit.

According to Torrent Freak, three locations were raided and two web site admins were arrested, one of whom was only 17 years old.

The web sites served in excess of three quarters of a million members and had been established for several years.

Bulgaria's organised crime unit targeted the two web sites over the weekend as part of an ongoing campaign to crack down on internet based copyright infringement.

The National Directorate for Combating Organized Crime said it had raided three locations in the western city of Pernik, the central northern city of Gabrovo and the capital Sofia.

Computer equipment and other hardware was seized, but both web sites remain up on the same host located outside the country in Germany. Meanwhile, access to their Bittorrent trackers has been disabled.

The Bulgarian Interior Ministry described the raids as "another successful operation" as the country's Ministry of Culture continues to crack down on copyright infringement.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...ring-web-sites

'Piracy' Student Richard O'Dwyer Loses Extradition Case
BBC

A Sheffield student can be extradited to the US to face copyright infringement allegations, a judge has ruled.

Richard O'Dwyer, 23, set up the TVShack website which US authorities say hosts links to pirated copyrighted films and television programmes.

The Sheffield Hallam University student lost his case in a hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court.

If found guilty in a US court he could face up to five years in jail.

Mr O'Dwyer's lawyer, Ben Cooper, indicated during the hearing that he would appeal against the ruling.

Mr Cooper said the website did not store copyright material itself and merely directed users to other sites, making it similar to Google.

He also argued that his client, who would be the first British citizen to be extradited for such an offence, was being used as a "guinea pig" for copyright law in the US.

But District Judge Quentin Purdy ruled the extradition could go ahead.

Mr O'Dwyer's mother, Julia O'Dwyer, from Chesterfield, has described the moves by US authorities as "beyond belief" and described Britain's extradition treaty with the United States as "rotten".

Speaking before the hearing, Mr O'Dwyer said he was "surprised" when police officers from the UK and America seized equipment at his home in South Yorkshire in November 2010.

However, no criminal charges followed from the UK authorities.

The case was brought by the US Customs and Border Protection agency, which claims that the TVShack.net website earned "over $230,000 in advertising revenue" before US authorities obtained a warrant and seized the domain name.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england...shire-16544335

NinjaVideo "Queen" Gets 22 Months in Jail, Owes $200,000 to Hollywood
Nate Anderson

NinjaVideo.net's "queen" is going to jail—and paying the MPAA over $200,000.

A federal judge today sentenced Hana Amal "Queen Phara" Beshara to 22 months in a West Virginia prison and enrolled her (at her request) in a drug rehab program there. Beshara was the public face of NinjaVideo, a major US-based movie download site trafficking in hot Hollywood movies, sometimes before they were released.

Beshara, now 29, had her condo raided in 2010 by the feds, who seized her gear and eventually charged her with criminal copyright infringement. Last year, Beshara issued a YouTube video to the NinjaVideo community in which she suggested that she hadn't known her actions were wrong. "We weave and we bob through these grey areas of laws not yet written," she said.

But after pleading guilty, she changed her tune. Her plea agreement with the government admits that she said, "we are extremely illegal" during an Internet chat and later that "my best work… is my illegal website moderation and uploading."

My mind on my money

The site managed to rake in $505,000 between 2008 and 2010, and money was on the mind of people like Beshara. "You're so helpless when you're limited to so few ad companies to choose from being a pirate site," she complained in an online chat. And when it came to DMCA takedowns, she admitted that NinjaVideo would "leave some content specifically listed in the DMCA takedown notices on the NinjaVideo.net website, based primarily on the volume of user hits/requests and the amount of revenue."

Beshara personally received $260,246 over the course of the site's existence, but she paid $50,420 to other NinjaVideo workers. The remaining $209,826.95 went into accounts at TD Ameritrade, Chase, and Paypal—all of which are now forfeit. The government will also keep her Seagate external hard drives, three laptops, an iPod touch, a Motorola Droid, 11 DVDs, and $1,000 cash seized during the raid on her home.

Where the money goes

Beshara was ordered to repay the full amount of money, but not to the government—checks are to go straight to the Motion Picture Association of America. Beshara's lawyer says that she has no cash left, however.

"This restitution amount should not obscure the fact that Ms. Beshara did not make a lot of money from her participation in NinjaVideo," her attorney wrote to the court. "She was only able to support herself through her position at NinjaVideo during the final 6 months of its operation. For most of her time at NinjaVideo, she also worked as a dentist's receptionist, earning $1,100 to $1,200 a month."

He also noted that Beshara was an "emotional and high strung woman" who "used up many Kleenexes crying in counsel's office, at the arraignment and afterwards."

Character reference

A letter on her character arrived from her brother, an Air Force captain. "Watching my mom and dad cry every day during Christmas break is heart wrenching and they question whether it was their fault that Hana got caught up in all this," he wrote.

"We understand that Hana has made mistakes and must pay your debt, but we do ask for leniency since she is a significant part of our very small family. Since all of this has unraveled our family has been torn apart emotionally and we all eagerly look forward to putting this behind us and helping Hana get back on her feet."

Her best friend also wrote a letter about meeting Beshara through the NinjaVideo.net forums. "I attended a Church retreat with her and her parents in July 2011," runs the letter. "I find her the most considerate friend that I have… I even got a tattoo of her favorite flower because I truly know that she is someone I will keep in touch with always.”

The judge did provide a more lenient sentence than called for in sentencing guidelines, but it was more than Beshara requested. For the next 22 months, she will call a federal prison her home. When she emerges on probation, she will have to pay a minimum of $150 per month toward her restitution.

After that, who knows? Her brother notes that she was valedictorian of her high school class and holds a degree from NYU. Recently, he says, she's been talking about "turning her life around" and heading off to graduate school when she leaves prison.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-hollywood.ars

All Four Major Record Labels Are Now Suing Grooveshark
Andrew Couts

Grooveshark is now being sued by EMI for allegedly failing to pay royalties. This follows a lawsuit served by Universal, Sony and Warner.

Things are not looking good for music streaming service Grooveshark. After getting hit with lawsuits from Universal Music, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment, EMI — the only company with whom Grooveshark actually had a licensing deal — has now filed suit against Escape Media Group, Grooveshark’s parent company, claiming that Escape has failed to make a single royalty payment.

While the lawsuit, filed in the New York State Supreme Court, does not specify the amount in damages EMI is seeking from Grooveshark, reports The New York Times, correspondence between the two companies show that EMI has requested Grooveshark pay it $150,000 in royalties. Grooveshark said in a statement that the matter is simply a “contact dispute,” which the company expects to “resolve.”

Grooveshark currently boasts 35 million members, who are able to upload their own tracks to Grooveshark’s music library. Because of this legally dubious practice, Grooveshark is often hit with take-down orders specified under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA), which requires Internet companies to remove infringing content within a specified amount of time, but protects these companies from being sued if they comply with the order.

Unfortunately for Grooveshark, someone claiming to be an employee of the company posted a detailed comment on industry publication Digital Music News, claiming that Grooveshark employees regularly uploaded music to the service — a move not protected by the DCMA. This led to an investigation by Universal, which concluded that Grooveshark employees — including its CEO and several vice presidents — had together uploaded more than 113,000 songs.

Universal is seeking damages of $150,000 per song (the maximum allowed by law), which equals out to about $17.1 billion in total. This lawsuit was later joined by Warner and Sony.

Grooveshark claims that the allegations of employee wrongdoing are “blatantly false.”

With EMI now bearing down on Grooveshark with a gavel of its own, the company is now being sued by all four of the major record labels.

Unlike most of the other streaming services, Grooveshark is more or less cost-free, and makes money from advertisers, including big names like Mercedes-Benz. But unless Grooveshark can swim its way out of these legal troubles, it would appear that the whole endeavor is far from cost-free, at least for Escape Media and its employees.

If you’re a user of Grooveshark, now might be a good time to start migrating to another service. Spotify, anyone?
http://www.digitaltrends.com/music/a...g-grooveshark/

Music Industry v. Ireland
TJ McIntyre

The long suffering Irish taxpayer will be delighted to learn that the music industry has joined the queue of those seeking a payout and yesterday issued a plenary summons against the State in the High Court for alleged failure to implement aspects of EU copyright law.

The background to this case lies in the October 2010 judgment of Charleton J. in EMI v. UPC where he held that Irish law did not permit an order to be made against an ISP requiring blocking of websites and went on to say that: "In failing to provide legislative provisions for blocking, diverting and interrupting internet [filesharing] Ireland is not yet fully in compliance with its obligations under European law." Immediately after that decision there was some sabre-rattling from the music industry which threatened to sue the State for damages caused by filesharing, on the theory that if blocking laws were in place then filesharing would go away. (Ignoring research such as that from Ofcom which has found that site blocking is easily evaded.)

Since then, however, the music industry appears to have fallen silent on this threat, presumably on the basis that it would get what it wanted through a statutory instrument which would permit blocking. This statutory instrument isn't yet in place but has been promised by mid January 2012, making the timing of this case all the more interesting - on the face of it, the music industry seems to have jumped the gun by bringing an action before that legislation is in place. Curiously, the normally vocal IRMA have nothing on their website and no press release seems to have been put out - perhaps this was intended as a shot across the bow of the State in case the statutory instrument doesn't meet music industry demands? Or perhaps the music industry feels the need to ramp up the pressure in light of the Data Protection Commissioner's ruling against Eircom's three strikes system?

As to the legal basis for the action, the music industry will presumably be relying on the well-known principle in Francovich v. Italy under which damages are possible against a state for failure to transpose a directive if three conditions are met:

first, that the result prescribed by the directive should entail the grant of rights to individuals; secondly, that it should be possible to identify the content of those rights on the basis of the provisions of the directive; and thirdly, that there should be a causal link between the breach of the State's obligation and the loss and damage suffered by the injured parties.

While I'm not aware of any other action of this sort being brought against a country for failure to implement copyright law, the third element would seem to be problematic for the music industry - establishing a causal link between Irish law and filesharing will be difficult, particularly given the evidence from elsewhere that blocking is ineffective.
http://activepolitic.com:82/Outside_News/11623.html

MPAA Attacks Ars for "Challenging Efforts to Curb Content Theft"
Nate Anderson

The Motion Picture Association of America doesn't like us. According to the MPAA blog on Tuesday, "Arts Technica" is a "tech blog with a long history of challenging efforts to curb content theft." (If so, we're the only such tech blog that actually encouraged a now-current MPAA lawyer to do copyright coverage for our site and that recommended the pro-rightsholder book Free Ride in this year's holiday guide.)

One can see why MPAA staffers might think this way. "Ars Technica opposes our attempt to gain 'broadcast flag' control over people's digital devices," they might say. "And it doesn't appreciate our plan to censor the Internet. And for some reason they'd like to rip copies of their DVDs to watch on the airplane, even though we managed to write anti-DRM cracking provisions into law. Man, these guys really love piracy!"

Put this way, the problem becomes clear: it's a simple conflation of our opposition to absolutely freaking insane (you'll forgive the slight hyperbole) approaches to copyright enforcement with opposition to enforcement of any kind.

It's a lot like saying, thirty years ago, that anyone who supported the VCR and its nefarious, time-shifting ways was to copyright holders what the Boston Strangler was to women home alone. (Not that any MPAA official would say anything so ridiculous.)

Not quite notorious enough for the MPAA to get our name right

Let's run down just a short list of the highest-profile copyright-related ideas we've opposed in the last few years. In parentheses are the, err, crazy freetards who came to the same conclusions we did on enforcement overreach.

• Broadcast flag (US Court of Appeals, DC)
• $1.92 million in damages against Jammie Thomas for P2P use (Federal judge Michael Davis)
• $675,000 award against Joel Tenenbaum (Federal judge Nancy Gertner)
• DRM is needed on purchased music (all RIAA members, iTunes, Amazon)
• YouTube and Veoh don't qualify for safe harbors (US District Court, Southern District of New York; federal judge A. Howard Matz)
• SOPA/PIPA Internet blacklisting (Sen. Ron Wyden, Rep. Darrell Issa, Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, GoDaddy, the Internet)

That's a long list of federal judges, official, and companies who came around on copyright. Perhaps they likewise can't stand anyone who tries to stop content theft?

As for the argument about economics that the post goes on to make, we'll just note that MPAA's own track record on the issue of piracy and money is so bad that, as Robert Levine notes in Free Ride, "The exaggerations of most Hollywood-funded studies have become a running joke." Even the MPAA had to admit that a 2008 study it was using to push a law was off by a factor of 3 in the key metric.

Regarding Julian Sanchez, the former Ars editor who is the main subject of the MPAA blog post, he committed a serious act of journalism for us back in 2008 when he showed conclusively just how bogus some of the central antipiracy figures were. His new post on the subject for Cato is also well worth a read.

Intervention

The thing is, we're really on the MPAA's side; they just don't realize it. We're both content creators who support copyright and want to see creators get paid for their efforts. But copyright maximalism is the wrong way forward. Like an addict who can't help himself, though, major copyright holders are so used to stanching their piratical worries with just one more hit on that sweet, sweet bottle of 120-proof distilled Essence of Enforcement that they can't stop the impulse any longer; it has become reflex. Those who ask them to have a calming cup of tea instead go on the "enemies list."

"Good copyright policy" doesn't necessarily mean "stronger copyright policy." Thinking that it does has caused a long litany of problems over the last century as copyright holders have sought to throttle the photocopier, the VCR, digital audio tape, MP3 players, and the DVR. Indeed, the industry's record on this score is downright shocking. But most of the people who backed those devices—like Mr. Rogers did with the VCR—weren't out to screw creative professionals. Neither are we. But sometimes, you need to stage an intervention, and you need to do so for the good of the addict... and the health of the community around him.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...tent-theft.ars

U.S. Trade Judge: Motorola Does Not Infringe Apple

Motorola Mobility Inc did not violate Apple's patented technology in making its Droid, Cliq, BackFlip and other smartphones, a judge at the U.S. International Trade Commission said in a preliminary decision issued on Friday.

The full ITC will issue a final decision in March.

Apple had filed a complaint with the ITC in October of 2010, accusing Motorola Mobility of infringing three Apple patents to make its smartphones.

Two of the patents have to do with how the devices accept manual input when users type or handwrite on them while the third relates to ways for consumers to add applications without jumping through hoops like rebooting the smartphone.

The complaint, like many patent battles focusing on smartphones, is part of a larger fight between Apple and Google Inc's fast-growing Android operating system, which Motorola uses.

The ITC is a popular venue for patent disputes because it can order devices made with infringing technology barred from importation.

Google has reached an agreement to buy Motorola Mobility, and is seeking the antitrust approval needed to close the sale.

(Reporting By Diane Bartz; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80C2IA20120113

Chinese Authors Sue Apple for Copyright Infringement: Report

A group of Chinese authors has sued Apple Inc for 11.9 million yuan ($1.9 million) in compensation for allegedly providing copyright-infringing books for download through its online store, Chinese financial magazine Caixin reported.

The group behind the lawsuit has been lobbying Apple for months to remove copyright-infringing books from its App Store.

The group of nine authors, under the mantle of the China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS), sued Apple in Beijing's No. 2 Intermediate People's Court for copyright infringement of 37 works, Caixin reported on Friday.

Over the years, the lobby group has waged similar high-profile battles with Baidu Inc and Google Inc over their online book products.

The CWWCS said no one was available to comment for this article. An Apple spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment. Calls to the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court were not answered. ($1 = 6.3095 Chinese yuan)

(Reporting by Melanie Lee; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Muralikumar Anantharaman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8080B020120109

Amazon's Plagiarism Problem
Adam Penenberg

Amazon's erotica section isn't just rife with tales of lust, incest, violence, and straight-up kink. It's also a hotbed of masked merchants profiting from copyright infringement. And even with anti-piracy legislation looming, Amazon doesn't appear too eager to stop the forbidden author-on-author action.

After publishing 20 non-fiction books with mainstream publishers, Sharazade (her pen name) decided to try her hand at erotica, and over the past year has published two sex- and fantasy-themed ebooks, both of which are available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords (Warning: Linked pages may contain explicit content.) Her stories often involve travel--a passion of hers--and are set in exotic locales. Recently she began publishing other authors through 1001 Nights Press, a small house she founded, and last month she learned that Amazon was letting indie publishers and self-published authors into its Kindle Select program.

Sharazade, who requested anonymity because she also works as a freelance writer, editor, and teacher and doesn't want clients or students to know about her erotica exploits, recognized several benefits to working with Amazon. She could offer a title free for up to five days, and that's great publicity since her book would inevitably shoot up in the rankings. If any Kindle Select members borrowed her book--they are entitled to one title per month--she would receive a proportional sliver of the $500,000 Amazon set aside in December to pay publishers and authors. Then, once her book wasn't free anymore, it would be tied to things like "Customers who bought X also bought Y," plus readers might post glowing reviews and buy backlist books.

She decided to test drive the service with Erotic Stories of Domination and Submission: Taking Jennifer, a book by one of her authors, then watched it climb the rankings in "gratifying leaps." But Sharazade was dismayed that a number of books, a few with nonsensical titles, were beating hers, even though they were hamstrung by twisted grammar and perverse punctuation. Some sported covers comprised of low-resolution images with no lettering. One author managed to misspell her own name. "Even in porn, customers come down on books that are totally incompetent," Sharazade says, "but this wasn't happening with these."

After checking the author page for Maria Cruz, who that day had the top-selling erotica book in Amazon's U.K. Kindle store, she counted 40 erotica ebook titles, including Sister Pretty Little Mouth, My Step Mom and Me, Wicked Desires Steamy Stories and Domenating [sic] Her, plus one called Dracula's Amazing Adventure. Most erotica authors stay within the genre, so Sharazade was surprised Cruz had ventured into horror. Amazon lets customers click inside a book for a sample of text and Sharazade was impressed with how literate it was. She extracted a sentence fragment, googled it, and found that Cruz had copy and pasted the text from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Curious, Sharazade keyed in phrases from other Cruz ebooks and discovered that every book she checked was stolen.

Here's Maria Cruz on Amazon...

Compare with the earlier story, published on Literotica...

It turns out Cruz isn't the only self-published plagiarist. Amazon is rife with fake authors selling erotica ripped word-for-word from stories posted on Literotica, a popular and free erotic fiction site that according to Quantcast attracts more than 4.5 million users a month, as well as from other free online story troves. As recently as early January, Robin Scott had 31 books in the Kindle store, and a down-and-dirty textual analysis revealed that each one was plagiarized. Rachel M. Haven, a purveyor of incest, group sex, and cheating bride stories, was selling 11 pilfered tales from a variety of story sites. Eve Welliver had eight titles in the Kindle store copied from Literotica and elsewhere, and she had even thought to plagiarize some five-star reviews. Luke Ethan's author page listed four works with titles like My Step Mom Loves Me and OMG My Step-Brother in Bisexual, and it doesn't appear he wrote any of them. Maria Cruz had 19 ebooks and two paperbacks, all of which were created by other authors and republished without their consent, while her typo-addled alter ego Mariz Cruz was hawking Wicked Desire: Steamy bondage picture volume 1.

Writers I contacted through Literotica, who do not profit from the stories they post, expressed different reactions to being plagiarized, ranging from abject anger to flattery that someone thought their work worth stealing to fear I might reveal their real identity. A highly prolific scribe with the pen name Boston Fiction Writer, whose story, "Boston Halloween Massacre" had been transposed into an ebook titled Massacre on Halloween and sold under Robin Scott's name, threatened to hurt the person who stole her work, "even more than they hurt me, so that they'd think twice about stealing another story from me. I dare say, she'd have no more fingers left to steal anyone's stories, ever again." David Springer, a security guard whose "nom de naughty" is Oediplex, recently learned that his story, "I Remember Mother" was repackaged for the Kindle as My Step Mom Loves Me by Luke Ethan, and wondered how well the book was selling.

"I never did expect to get wealthy from writing," he says, "though I wish I had a penny for every orgasm my stories have produced."

Luke Ethan's story on Amazon...

And now here's the original, by Oediplex, on Literotica...

David Weaver, a 52-year-old math teacher whose story "Galactic Slave" was being sold for Kindle as Slave of the Galaxies, also by Robin Scott, doesn't have the resources to engage in a spat over copyright. "What makes this kind of theft so insidious is how easy it is to get away with and avoid getting caught," he says.   

Naturally erotica isn't the only category ebook pirates have set their sights on. Manuel Ortiz Braschi has published thousands of ebooks on Amazon, often claiming as his own works in the public domain, including Alice in Wonderland. Amazon has pulled most of them, but Braschi continues to peddle an advice book for senior citizens and a plagiarized cookbook Amazon previously removed when it was sold under a different author's name.   Mike Essex, a search specialist at U.K. digital marketing agency Koozai, identified several how-to books on procuring health insurance that were plagiarized, sometimes sold under three or more different author's names with slightly different titles but identical content (like this one). Fan fiction abounds with plagiarized titles, as does fantasy. Last year Canadian novelist S.K.S. Perry learned that an imposter was selling his novel Darkside for $2.99 as a Kindle ebook without his knowledge. He wrote on his blog: "All I can assume is that someone convinced Amazon that they were S.K.S. Perry, and submitted my book for sale." The same happened to Steve Karmazenuk, whose fantasy novel, The Unearthing, was co-opted by another Amazon seller.

Amazon's policy is to remove offending content when it receives complaints of plagiarism. Erotica author Elizabeth Summers had at least 65 titles expunged when plagiarism allegations surfaced. Recently Robin Scott's books also disappeared from Amazon when writers complained. (Scott, which is almost assuredly not her--his?--real name, did not respond to requests for an interview over Twitter.) But this reactive approach isn't entirely effective. After users in a Kindle forum griped about Maria Cruz, her entire cache of ebooks--all 51 of them--were deleted, but in the days that followed she posted a whole new set of material, mostly collections of porn pictures although there were a few traditional text-based works, too. And it usually takes Amazon time to act. "Galactic Slave" writer David Weaver told me he contacted Amazon weeks ago to request the stolen work be removed from the site and all proceeds forwarded to him, but Amazon has not yet complied.

To be fair, Amazon isn't the only ebook store grappling with plagiarism. In addition to her collection of Kindle ebooks, Eve Welliver offers five plagiarized works through Apple's iBookstore. "Supposedly Apple hand-checks all the erotica, which is why it takes forever for your books to show up there, but somehow she got through," Sharazade says.

This penchant for plagiarism shouldn't surprise us. Self-publishing has become the latest vehicle for spammers and content farms, with the sheer volume of self-published books making it difficult, if not impossible, for e-stores like Amazon to vet works before they go on sale. In 2006, 51,000 self-published titles were released; last year there were 133,036 self-published books, and that number is destined to climb. Writing a book is hard. All those torturous hours an author has to spend creating, crafting, culling until nonsensical words are transformed into engaging prose. It's a whole lot easier to copy and paste someone else's work, slap your name on top, and wait for the money to roll in. This creates a strong economic incentive, with fake authors--Sharazade thinks it's possible they are organized gangs based in Asia--earning 70% royalty rates on every sale, earning far more than a spammer could with click fraud. The new self-publishing platforms are easy to use and make it possible to publish a title in as little as 24 hours. There's no vetting, editing, or oversight, and if your work is taken down you can always throw up more titles or simply concoct a new pen name and start over. There's even a viral ebook generator that comes packed with 149,000 articles that makes it possible to create an ebook in minutes.

Legislation has been proposed that would give content holders more leverage in dealing with etailers: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). It would award copyright holders wide-ranging powers to run websites that host infringing material off the Internet without needing to acquire a court order. If it becomes law credit card companies could be forced to suspend financial transactions, search engines required to de-link ecommerce sites, and DNS providers made to hobble access. It's the kind of law, well-intentioned as it might be, that could have serious negative repercussions, opponents say. No wonder Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo! have reportedly been considering a coordinated protest against it in the form of a blackout day.

There is, I believe, a simpler solution. Why not require an author to submit a valid credit card before she can self-publish her works on the Kindle? If an author, who could still publish under a pen name, were found to have violated someone else's copyright Amazon could charge that card $2,000 and ban her from selling again. Amazon could also run content through one of the many plagiarism detectors that are available--such as Turnitin or iThenticate--before an ebook is put on sale.

Perhaps, though, Amazon doesn't care if it sells plagiarized works; it benefits from the sale whether it holds back an author's royalties or not.

A company spokesperson responded to my requests for comment with the following statement:

We take violations of laws and proprietary rights very seriously. More information about eBooks rights can be found in Sections 5.7 and 5.8 of the Kindle Direct Publishing Terms and Conditions. If a copyright holder believes that their work has been copied in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, they can write to copyright@amazon.com. More information on Amazon's notice and procedure for making claims of copyright infringement can be found here.

[Ed note: typed out links were converted to hyperlinks]

Sharazade, for her part, says, "I have no problem competing against legitimate writers and publishers. That's all part of the deal. But I am irritated by competing with cheaters. That kills the fun of it."

And she adds: "It's lying, cheating, money, and sex. Might make a nice story?"
http://www.fastcompany.com/1807211/a...iarism-problem

News in Slovakia: No Copyright in Newspaper News

"No copyright in journalists' writings! Read all about it!"
Jeremy Phillips

From Zuzana Hecko (Allen & Overy, Bratislava) comes some pretty hot news about the battle in Slovakia over whether articles by journalists are deserving of copyright protection. The latest salvo in the battle, contested by press publishers and their new-found foes the monitoring agencies (think Meltwater), comes with a decision of the Bratislava Regional Court which, says Zuzana, creates quite a dangerous precedent. She explains:

"Yet another 'word of wisdom' has been delivered by a Slovak Regional Court in the recent Ecopress v Storin decision. This, the first decision in the war between the press publishers and the media monitoring agencies in Slovakia, dealt with the question whether media monitoring agencies need to conclude a licensing agreement with publishers in order to use their works (or extracts from them).

While in other jurisdictions the debate on this point has somehow matured and it is generally not disputed that newspaper articles are authors' own intellectual creations (which was also clearly confirmed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in Case C-5/08 Infopaq, the Slovak court ruled that newspaper articles constitute "mere information" and therefore are excluded from the scope of the Slovak Copyright Act. Unfortunately, neither Infopaq nor any decisions from other jurisdictions seem to have been pleaded by the publishers. This is quite disappointing since Infopaq expressly states that

"as regards newspaper articles, their author’s own intellectual creation … is evidenced clearly from the form, the manner in which the subject is presented and the linguistic expression. In the main proceedings, moreover, it is common ground that newspaper articles, as such, are literary works covered by Directive 2001/29/EC".

The court has provided a long and detailed reasoning of how it came to this conclusion by stating that none of the articles which were submitted as evidence by the publishers is "original enough" and that the articles have the character of "daily reports". Ignoring the wording of the Slovak Copyright Act and Infopaq, the court stated that, apart from the requirements of (1) original and (2) author's own intellectual creation, there is yet another condition which is required for the work to enjoy copyright protection: the work needs to be "unique". The court, clearly being aware of the fact that the addition of such requirement goes beyond the current legislation, stated that the condition of "uniqueness", even if not embedded in the Copyright Act "expressis verbis", is inherent in the purpose of the Slovak Copyright Act. Such argumentation is clearly in conflict with Infopaq, which confirmed that Directive 2001/29/EC also harmonised the originality principle by stating clearly that

"where provisions of Community law make no express reference to the law of the Member States … they must be normally given an autonomous and uniform interpretation throughout the Community".

The criterion of uniqueness for a work to enjoy copyright protection is certainly not part of the acquis communautaire.

The court has effectively concluded that there are no literary works published in the press which would be protected by copyright and that editors are not authors. Accordingly, media monitoring agencies do not require a licence from the authors. While in other jurisdictions licences seem to be required even for end users of the monitoring services (Court of Appeal for England and Wales, NLA and others v Meltwater), the Slovak court says it is permissible to copy someone else's work without obtaining a licence.

The decision is rather disappointing. If court decisions constituted "works" which could be protected by copyright, this decision would certainly qualify, as it is truly "unique" ..."

Thanks, Zuzana. This is quite an astonishing decision. We shall watch for further developments.
http://the1709blog.blogspot.com/2012...yright-in.html

Three Attorneys Face Righthaven Inquiry by State Bar
Steve Green

Copyright lawsuit filer Righthaven LLC of Las Vegas was hit with a new problem Thursday when the State Bar of Nevada said it’s launching formal proceedings to deal with grievances involving Righthaven CEO Steven Gibson and two former Righthaven attorneys.
The State Bar, which regulates attorneys, has since as early as the Fall of 2010 received complaints from unidentified parties about Righthaven and has been watching Righthaven’s litigation campaign work its way through the courts.

The Bar this week opened grievance files concerning Gibson, an attorney, and former Righthaven attorneys Jodi Donetta Lowry and J. Charles Coons. The attorneys have been asked to respond to the grievance issues by Jan. 31.

Gibson and Lowry now work for the Las Vegas office of the Detroit law firm Dickinson Wright PLLC. Coons is with a Las Vegas firm called Cooper Coons Ltd.

Phil Pattee, assistant Bar counsel, said the agency couldn’t disclose the nature of the grievances against the attorneys or whether they relate to complaints from outside parties or the Bar’s own review of the Righthaven cases or both. But he confirmed the grievances relate to the attorneys’ work for Righthaven.

“We’ll be asking them about Righthaven,” he said.

This week’s development may answer a question Righthaven observers have been asking for months: whether any of its attorneys would be formally questioned about charges by a federal judge that the company made “inaccurate and likely dishonest” statements to the court as it pursued its copyright infringement lawsuits.

Observers also have asked whether anyone individually would be penalized after the company was fined $5,000 for violating local federal court rules requiring disclosure of all parties with a financial interest in its lawsuits, as well as charges Righthaven ran a shakedown operation in which defendants were coerced into settling by what critics called Righthaven’s false lawsuit claims of copyright ownership and the authority to seize defendants’ website domain names.

On top of that, the federal judge in Las Vegas who fined Righthaven and suggested it made misrepresentations, Roger Hunt, has also commented that it appears Righthaven, as a company, has been engaged in the unauthorized practice of law.

The attorneys named in the grievance files were all involved in some of Righthaven’s early cases in which Righthaven failed to disclose that Stephens Media LLC, owner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, received a cut of lawsuit revenue.

Righthaven is half owned by the same Arkansas investors who own Stephens Media.

Righthaven operated by obtaining copyright assignments from Stephens Media as well as the owner of the Denver Post.

Righthaven used the copyrights to file 275 no-warning lawsuits since March 2010, claiming websites and website users infringed on copyrights by posting material from those newspapers without authorization.

After initially winning what are believed to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuit settlements, Righthaven is now in financial distress after judges ruled it lacked standing to sue because of flawed copyright assignments and that some defendants were protected by fair use.

Judges have awarded defendants $216,335 in legal fees after they defeated Righthaven in court, and a defendant collecting on his judgment convinced a judge to appoint a receiver, who has auctioned Righthaven’s website and is trying to seize its copyrights for auction.

Despite the complaints about Righthaven and its attorneys, the three attorneys named Thursday will likely dispute any allegations of wrongdoing. Righthaven and Stephens Media have argued the lawsuits were necessary to crack down on rampant online infringement of news content, and Righthaven is appealing key court rulings against it.

“I will be responding to the informational requests of the Bar and believe that after such responses and clarifications, the matter will be properly addressed. Miss Lowry indicates her concurrence,” Gibson said Thursday.

Coons couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

Creating grievance files does not suggest the Office of Bar Counsel at the State Bar has filed complaints against the attorneys. Rather, it means the office has determined there is sufficient information to warrant a review of the matter by a screening panel of the Bar’s Southern Nevada Disciplinary Board.

The opening of the files sets in motion a process in which the Office of Bar Counsel will present the cases to the screening panel.

The panel has several options, including dismissing the matter, issuing a “letter of caution” or issuing a “letter of reprimand.”

If the screening panel believes the conduct in question potentially may merit more severe professional discipline, it refers the matter to a formal hearing, after which the State Bar prepares a complaint and the attorney is required to file an answer.

Potential penalties at that stage range as high as the panel recommending to the Nevada Supreme Court that an attorney receive a public reprimand, suspension or disbarment. The Supreme Court then decides what to do.
http://m.vegasinc.com/news/2012/jan/...iry-state-bar/

The Songs Remain the Same, But Broadway Heirs Call the Shots
Patrick Healy

By all accounts George and Ira Gershwin never considered making the family name part of the title of their most famous work, the 1935 opera “Porgy & Bess.”

But their heirs wield enormous power, and in the 1990s they re-branded it as “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” as they sought business partners to adapt this four-hour opera into a perennial musical moneymaker the way shows like “Oklahoma!” have been under the careful management of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization. On Thursday, after years of fits and starts, “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” will open on Broadway, updated and streamlined, part of a spate of unusually aggressive undertakings by musical-theater estates.

Few recent Broadway seasons have had as much estate-driven handiwork as this one, a reflection of the rising entrepreneurship of heirs and the affection of audiences for song standards. Heirs are increasingly hands-on in trying to wrest moneymaking shows out of their ancestral trunks: another current example is the producer Liza Lerner’s overhaul this winter of a musical by her father, Alan Jay Lerner, “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” for modern Broadway. (It drew mostly negative reviews.) The organization that represents the estates of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II recently authorized a stage version of the duo’s TV musical “Cinderella,” which is aiming for Broadway next season.

And the Gershwin estates have another musical coming to Broadway in March, “Nice Work if You Can Get It” starring Matthew Broderick, which is an attempt to take characters and songs from an old show (the Gershwins’ 1920s bootlegger musical, “Oh, Kay!”) and refashion them into a better musical that includes additional Gershwin tunes. The estates tried a similar reworking of “Oh, Kay!” in 2001 with the pastiche “They All Laughed,” but it hit a dead end after mixed reviews at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut.

The newly adapted book for the Broadway version of “Porgy and Bess” — but not the songs — will likely gain a new copyright that could be licensed. The estates’ trustees say the moneymaking potential of the new copyright depends on the Broadway musical becoming a hit that producers will want to license in the future.

Since “Nice Work” is a new show, the Gershwin estates will have a long new copyright to enjoy, whereas the rights for the original 1926 show, “Oh, Kay!” expire at the end of 2021. (The Gershwin estates now earn a few million dollars a year, according to the trustees.)

The Gershwin heirs have created pastiche shows before that have gone on to earn millions, like “My One and Only” (1983) and “Crazy for You” (1992), which won a Tony Award for best musical. They also recently authorized a new musical revue of Gershwin songs, “ ’S Wonderful,” which ran at a theater in Queens in November.

But estate decision making has been most controversial in the case of “Porgy and Bess.” The Gershwin heirs — chiefly nephews and grand-nephews of George and Ira, who had no children of their own — sought a Broadway-suitable “Porgy” to license to other musical producers worldwide with the hopes of earning millions of dollars before the right to the famous songs expire in 2030.

With that in mind they encouraged the trimming of the opera nearly by half, and approved some updating, including a reconciliation scene at the end. (The goat-pulled cart of the disabled Porgy is out; a cane and leg braces are in.) If all goes well, they may pursue a movie.

“Our responsibilities are to not have ‘Porgy and Bess’ stuck in an attic, to open up the property to younger generations, and to make money for the families,” said Jonathan Keidan, a 38-year-old digital media executive whose grandmother was George and Ira’s sister and who is now a trustee of George’s estate.

In August, Stephen Sondheim attacked some of the artistic changes, and recently has narrowed his invective to “the greedy Gershwin estate” — apparently referring to the collaborative efforts of the George and Ira estates. Mr. Sondheim declined to comment for this article, but other theater artists said that estate management was a major concern given that artists’ legacies would be at stake.

“I do think that, as composers and writers, we should leave pretty specific instructions to our estates about how we want our work to be protected,” said John Kander, the 84-year-old composer who, with Fred Ebb, wrote the scores for hits like “Cabaret” and “Chicago.”

Several of the Gershwins’ trustees — as well as those of Lerner and Burton Lane, the “Clear Day” composer — dismissed the idea that money was their primary motivator. But they were also not bashful in saying that money was one factor and described themselves as business-minded stewards more than as artistic tastemakers.

“I never felt we were capable producers, but we have similar impulses to producers in the sense that I want to get these shows performed and I’m driven to try to make money,” said Michael Strunsky, a former construction-firm executive and the trustee of Ira Gershwin’s estate. (His father was the brother of Ira’s wife.)

Executors can decide to withhold rights altogether or else demand contractual approvals over actors, directors, orchestrations and other artistic elements. More and more estates seek as many approvals as possible, given the rise of experimental theater that stresses auteur visions, and producers grant as few approvals as they can in the interest of artistic control. Estates do not have to disclose finances publically, and the structure of musical-theater estates vary, as does the size of the periodic checks cut to the heirs.

If the executors sour on a revival, they can rarely close it outright; instead, they deny an extension of the rights, so the show has a limited run. For instance, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization — which became part of a Dutch conglomerate in 2009 — refused an extension to Anne Bogart’s memorable student production of “South Pacific” at New York University in 1984, which was set in a rehab ward for psychologically damaged war veterans.

“Her concept was intriguing when it was presented to the estate,” recalled the organization’s president, Theodore S. Chapin, “but the production ended up with Nellie Forbush in a straitjacket repeating, ‘I’m in love,’ for practically a half hour.”

In the Broadway “Cinderella” project the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization hopes for a new, revenue-generating hit to add to the songwriters’ catalog decades after their deaths. (The pair’s musicals now earn more than $10 million a year.) Mr. Chapin said he authorized a revisionist updating of the “Cinderella” book, with a more assertive heroine, to be done by Douglas Carter Beane, because he had faith in Mr. Beane and the producers.

“An old show that feels familiar can turn off Broadway audiences,” Mr. Chapin said. “But you can’t go so far that you totally undermine the spirit and soul of the original.”

Marc G. Gershwin, son of George and Ira’s brother, Arthur, and a stockbroker by training, said he took an “entrepreneurial approach” to the brothers’ works, allowing experimental productions of “Porgy and Bess” like one set in Los Angeles after an earthquake (with Porgy on a motorcycle, no less). He said he would draw the line somewhere, for example if someone proposed an all-white production of the opera.

He and his fellow trustees worked for years to try to create a musical-theater version of “Porgy and Bess,” with the director Trevor Nunn’s production in London in 2006 coming close to success. But that outing lacked star power and used dialogue from the earlier novel and stage play about Porgy by DuBose Heyward, who wrote the book for the opera as well as the lyrics with Ira Gershwin. The new Broadway version, by contrast, includes new dialogue by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and stars a four-time Tony winner, Audra McDonald, as Bess.

The original will always remain available for opera companies, Marc Gershwin noted, “but that doesn’t mean it has to be a museum piece.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/t...ir-rights.html

Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad, Book Apps, and Toronto: a Q & A
The TRB

Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad, Book Apps, and Toronto: a Q & A

TRB: Released in the spring of 2010, Alice for the iPad became a huge, Oprah-featured hit that is credited with convincing reading publics of how book apps could be even more fun and engaging than paper books. How many times has Alice been downloaded by now? Were you surprised by its reception? How have traditional book publishers and book reviewers reacted to it?

CS: Alice is installed on over 500,000 iPads. The reception was a surprise, especially since most of the design work was done out of my bedroom in London. The initial reaction from traditional book publishers was one of awe and confusion. Alice was only out a few days before I found myself in a boardroom at HarperCollins explaining to a bunch of people in suits how we’d managed to beat them to the top of the book charts on the iPad. For a while they thought I had the key to the future of publishing—they thought that if they could extract the secret to what made Alice a success, they could revitalize the market. The excitement surrounding the iPad led a lot of publishers to suspect that Apple might be able to bolster the industry, but—just as it always is—great content, not technology makes a popular app. I told them what I did, but they didn’t seem to get it.

Book reviewers were generally positive about Alice, although The New York Times wrote a scathing piece about how the massive popularity of Alice for the iPad would lead to the extinction of the careful-reader, reducing our attention spans and quiet engagement with literature. The NYT wrote of Alice: “The question is what will become of the readers we’ve been—quiet, thoughtful, patient, abstracted—in a world where interactive can be too tempting to ignore.”

But they forgot to actually put a question mark at the end of that question, so perhaps all hope of “thoughtful” readers is already lost – for the NYT at least.

TRB: You’ve been a journalist, a writer for CNET, and a graphic designer—a perfect background for making book apps—but where did the Alice app idea itself come from? Eureka moment or series of conversations?

CS: Alice was the result of a lot of lucky events. Only they didn’t seem lucky at the time. First, I lost my job. I was fired from The Times newspaper in London by an editor who claimed that they had been overpaying me by 50%. To deliver this news he put his foot on my desk, which I stared at for a very long time in confusion.He then turned and left in a hurry—presumably to hack a few phones. A friend of mine also lost his job around the same time and we teamed up. I took care of the graphics and design, and my friend took care of the programming. We launched a couple of relatively unknown apps, but I became interested in the idea of applying simulated physics to objects in the original Sir John Tenniel-illustrated edition of Alice in Wonderland. The result was a kind of digital pop-up book. The book was out of copyright, therefore in the public domain—another appealing aspect.
I had no idea that it would become a success on this scale, but I remember being very engrossed in the design process. It took about 3 months of solid work to complete—15 hour days.

TRB: Tell us about the process of making Alice into an app. What aspects of the original book were more or less conducive to being made interactive?
392px Alice par John Tenniel 02 196x300 Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad, Book Apps, and Toronto: a Q & A

CS: The original Sir John Tenniel illustrations were carved out of wood block before being printed onto the page—as a fortunate result of that, they have a thick outlined style to them. Each page of the original Lewis Carroll book jumped out at me and elements seemed to beg to spring to life. It was supernatural really; this imperative to create movement in the pages. Almost as if Tenniel somehow anticipated me using Photoshop and an iPad to adapt his work over 100 years later.

TRB: Besides Alice, what are some of your favourite book apps? Any lesser known app publishers you think TRB readers should check out?

CS: I’m desperate for the book industry to produce some work that blows me away, but for now there’s a few Alice clones and not much else. I can see exactly why this is happening. The major publishers have completely abdicated responsibility for producing the digital versions of their catalogues: it’s all handed over to amateurs. You see it throughout the industry. From the typographical horror of most eBooks, through to the lacklustre iPad titles being produced. The big problem is that most publishers don’t care about the iPad or eBooks very much, whether this is an aesthetic rejection based on the publisher’s historical reverence for the printed page, or a reflection of the relatively small profits to be made on the iPad so far, it’s hard to know.

What’s happening at the moment is that most publishers are handing their major titles over to app developers who are ruining these titles with rushed, unprofessional layout and design. There is this weird situation where programmers are suddenly being given free reign to design books. We watch as publishers like Random House outsource the design of cherished titles to programmers who—despite their excellence at programming—are not designers. The complete lack of care and attention paid to the production of digital books is genuinely mystifying.

Having said that, the McSweeney’s app is pretty inspiring at times. The new Chris Ware book graphic story inside that McSweeney’s app is particularly great—though very short. Nursery Rhymes with Storytime is great and the new ustwo app Papercut is interesting. Aside from that, nothing has jumped out at me yet.

TRB: What do you like to read on a day-to-day basis? Would you ever make a book app out of a novel or work of nonfiction, or are you interested in sticking to illustrated work?

CS: Generally I enjoy modern fiction: Michel Houellebecq and Milan Kundera stand out for me. I’m also a big fan of Yevgeny Zamyatin—a Russian sci-fi writer from the 20s who is like Orwell, but much more disturbing and brilliant—his best book is We. I’ve also just finished The Brain that Changes Itself which is a fascinating non-fiction book about neuroplasticity. I was reading it in the cafe of the Drake Hotel the other day and one of the staff came over to explain that the author was her family doctor. Wonderful.

At the moment, making books for the iPad remains a risky business. I was lucky enough to have such a huge success with Alice that it has allowed me to produce other books that have seen only moderate success, like Alice in New York—which takes the illustrations from Alice Through The Looking Glass and re-situates them in New York City. This was a huge project, a real labour of love, and has barely recouped its investment. Bizarrely, I am now considering heading the other way, and I’m working on a traditional paperback novel.

TRB: Tell us about your new book.

Appilionaires 197x300 Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad, Book Apps, and Toronto: a Q & A CS: Alongside Alice for the iPad and Alice in New York, I’ve also written two non-fiction books. The latest is called Appillionaires and it tells the stories of those small teams that have made millions of dollars on the App Store. It’s a rags-to-riches multi-biography of many different people, including a submarine captain who made a small fortune with an iPhone game called Stickwars, two brothers who have sold over 10 million copies of Doodle Jump and the family who made the immensely popular Angry Birds game. Their stories are bizarre and inspiring.

TRB: What brings you to Toronto? We hear you like this city better than anywhere else.Why? (We’re chuffed—and also concur.) You mentioned the recently released Alice in New York. Any chance she’ll be coming to Toronto?

CS: I visited Toronto last year to give a talk about the future of the book and fell completely in love with the city. It has a creative energy that propels me. I’ve had the good fortune to run into so many fantastic and intriguing people here, including Professor Robert K. Logan from the University of Toronto. I’m planning to co-author a title with him called Alice in the Atom—which teaches kids key ideas in physics using the Alice in Wonderland characters.

As for Alice coming to Toronto, I think she’d like it here. Professor Logan features as a character in the new book, and he lives in Toronto, so there will be a Torontonian edge to the next Alice book.

Alice for the iPad is available in the App Store.
http://www.torontoreviewofbooks.com/...vens-on-alice/

The Critics Rave ... for Microsoft?
Nick Wingfield

“GORGEOUS,” raves The Huffington Post.

“Best-looking smartphone operating system in the industry,” gushes Slate.

“Far superior to most if not all the Android smartphones,” says TechCrunch.

Sounds like the usual adulation for a gadget from Apple. In fact, they’re actually accolades for a new product from Microsoft.

Microsoft?

Exactly. Long ridiculed as the tech industry dullard, Microsoft actually has a hit, at least with the technorati. It’s cellphone software called Windows Phone — and they need it to be a blockbuster here at Microsoft Central.

Yes, Windows and Office products are ubiquitous and highly profitable. But they’re about as inspirational as a stapler. While the likes of Apple have captured our imaginations with nifty products like the iPhone, Microsoft has produced a long list of flops, from smart wristwatches to the Zune music player to the Kin phones. Steve Jobs used to deride Microsoft for a lack of originality. In his opinion, the company didn’t bring “much culture” to its products. With Windows Phone, though, Microsoft is finally getting some buzz.

“I am a devoted Apple fan — I was in line for the iPhone,” said Axel Roesler, assistant professor for interaction design at the University of Washington in Seattle, but Windows Phone “strikes me as quite different and an advance.”

Windows Phone, which began appearing in devices last fall, certainly stands out visually. It has bold, on-screen typography and a mosaic of animated tiles on the home screen — a stark departure from the neat grid of icons made popular by the iPhone. While most phones force users to open stand-alone apps to get into social networks, Facebook and Twitter are wired into Windows Phone. The tiles spring to life as friends or family post fresh pictures, text messages and status updates.

Even so, relatively few consumers have been tempted, and sales have been lackluster. A big problem is that, initially, the handsets running Microsoft’s software, made by companies like HTC and Samsung, were unexceptional. Even more important, wireless carriers, the gatekeepers for nearly all mobile phones, have not been aggressively selling Windows phones in their stores. Most promote the iPhone and devices running Google’s Android operating system.

And so Microsoft has struck a partnership with Nokia, and executives at both companies have high hopes that their handsets will catch on with consumers. On Monday at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nokia plans to introduce a sleek metallic Windows Phone called the Lumia 900 that will be sold by AT&T in the United States, according to two people with knowledge of its plans who spoke on condition of anonymity because the product has not yet been announced. Unlike other handset makers creating devices with Microsoft’s software, Nokia is not also developing Android phones.

“We are doing our best work for Windows Phone,” said Stephen Elop, the chief executive of Nokia and a former Microsoft executive.

While the customers’ verdict is still unknown, the group that developed Windows Phone has already profoundly affected Microsoft itself, influencing work on other consumer products. The next major version of software for PC’s, Windows 8, will look a lot like Windows Phone, which Microsoft hopes will help it work better on tablet devices. A Windows Phone-like makeover was also part of the new software update for Xbox, which along with Kinect is one of Microsoft’s few consumer hits.

Bill Flora, one of the designers of Windows Phone, said the care that Microsoft took in designing its products had changed vastly since he joined the company out of art school in the early 1990s.

“Now, instead of 80 percent of its efforts being unenlightened, just 20 percent are unenlightened,” said Mr. Flora, who recently left Microsoft to form his own design firm in Seattle.

THE tale of how Microsoft created Windows Phone starts with the introduction of the iPhone, in 2007. To Joe Belfiore, now 43, an engineer who oversees software design for Windows Phone, that was the spark.

“Apple created a sea change in the industry in terms of the kinds of things they did that were unique and highly appealing to consumers,” Mr. Belfiore said in an interview at Microsoft’s campus here. “We wanted to respond with something that would be competitive, but not the same.”

Microsoft had been an early player in smartphones with Windows Mobile, software that ran on devices made by Samsung, Motorola and others. But one word describes its early effort: complicated. Windows Mobile had a complex array of on-screen menus, including a start button for applications that was borrowed from Windows PCs. The software ran on sluggish devices that had physical keyboards and, in some cases, styluses.

Once the iPhone exploded into the marketplace, Microsoft executives knew that their software, as designed, could never compete. So in December 2008, Terry Myerson, who had just taken over engineering for the mobile group, convened a meeting that members of his management team came to call the “cage match.”

With a prototype of a new Windows Mobile phone on a table, Mr. Myerson, a no-nonsense engineer , led a heated debate over whether any of the software could be salvaged. No one was leaving the room until the issue was resolved, he said.

Seven hours later, the meeting finally adjourned, after Mr. Myerson got a call from his wife saying a pipe had frozen at his home. By then, a consensus had emerged that there wasn’t much technology worth saving. “We had hit bottom,” Mr. Myerson, who is now 39.

“That frankly gives you the freedom to try new things, build a new team and set a new path,” he added.

The decision was to start from scratch, a move that had serious consequences. Not only did it delay a Windows phone, it gave Google an opening to woo Microsoft handset partners to Android.

Charlie Kindel, a longtime Microsoft manager who joined its mobile team in early 2009, compared the pain caused by starting over to the predicament of Aron Ralston, the hiker who amputated his own arm in 2003 after it was it pinned under a boulder in the Utah desert.

“This boulder comprised of Apple and Blackberry rolled on our arm,” said Mr. Kindel, who left Microsoft last summer. “Microsoft sat there for three or four years struggling to get out.”

Mr. Myerson also had to rebuild the mobile team — and Mr. Belfiore was his first major hire.

Mr. Belfiore is a rare breed of Microsoft executive: he joined the company in 1990 fresh out of college and stayed, even as others fled to work for companies with more pizazz.

For much of his career, Mr. Belfiore worked on the design of Windows and Internet Explorer, the kind of Microsoft software that is everywhere but not always admired for innovation. But he was also known for spending hours testing Microsoft technologies outside the office to see how they could be simplified.

In recent years, Mr. Belfiore earned a reputation in the company for working on more adventurous projects, even if they sometimes bombed in the market. Before he joined the mobile group, for instance, he oversaw design of Zune, Microsoft’s ill-fated answer to the iPod. A version of the product released in 2009, the Zune HD, was praised by reviewers for its spare design that featured elegant typography and snappy, animated screen transitions as users flipped around music collections. But the Zune HD came out years too late, well after the iPod had cemented its lead.

Mr. Belfiore took over the mobile group in early 2009, just as designers were finishing up the earliest prototypes for Windows Phone. In those prototypes, Mr. Flora drew inspiration from the signs in airports and other transportation hubs. He borrowed the emphasis on clarity, clean typography and broadcast-quality transitions between screens from Zune, which he had worked on with Mr. Belfiore. The ideas gradually gelled into a software design language that Microsoft calls Metro.

But there were challenges beyond design. Microsoft had to take a fresh approach to working with phone makers so it could have its slick new software function properly. Unlike Apple, Microsoft doesn’t make its own hardware. Before it restarted its mobile strategy, Microsoft did little to ensure that its handset partners were putting its software on devices that could run it well.

No longer would that be tolerated. Microsoft gave its handset partners detailed specifications of the types of technical innards required, including processors with certain amounts of power and screen technologies. Handset makers grumbled about the rules, but the result was phones that ran better.

“It’s not just about software,” said Albert Shum, general manager of the design studio for Windows Phone. “It’s about the whole end-to-end experience.”

When senior executives got their first look at the software, Mr. Myerson said, there was “some hesitancy.” Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, didn’t like that the first screen that appeared after turning on the device contained oversized type that cut off the day of the week. (Wednesday showed up as Wed.) Revisions were made.

But the group was given its creative freedom. And the critics, at least, have approved the final results.

“It looks like nothing we’ve seen before from Microsoft,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner, the technology research firm. “The company is being somewhat bold and saying what worked for them in 1992 won’t work now.”

Still, last summer, Mr. Ballmer told Microsoft investors that he was disappointed with Windows Phone sales. In mid-December, he named Mr. Myerson, the engineering head, to take full control of the group. He charged Mr. Myerson with improving the Windows Phone advertising campaign and relationships with wireless carriers. A software update for Windows Phones in the fall added a number of improvements to the product, including basic editing functions like copy and paste.

BUT this year is crucial; it will show whether a respected product is enough to help Microsoft make up for lost time. Even if it feels good to be a favorite of tech critics for a change, Microsoft needs a blockbuster in the mobile business, not a cult hit.

“Entering the market so late with this experience has created some special challenges for us,” Mr. Myerson said. “I think if we were there earlier it would be different.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/t...ows-phone.html

Microsoft Confirms UEFI Fears, Locks Down ARM Devices
Aaron Williamson

At the beginning of December, we warned the Copyright Office that operating system vendors would use UEFI secure boot anticompetitively, by colluding with hardware partners to exclude alternative operating systems. As Glyn Moody points out, Microsoft has wasted no time in revising its Windows Hardware Certification Requirements to effectively ban most alternative operating systems on ARM-based devices that ship with Windows 8.

The Certification Requirements define (on page 116) a "custom" secure boot mode, in which a physically present user can add signatures for alternative operating systems to the system's signature database, allowing the system to boot those operating systems. But for ARM devices, Custom Mode is prohibited: "On an ARM system, it is forbidden to enable Custom Mode. Only Standard Mode may be enable." [sic] Nor will users have the choice to simply disable secure boot, as they will on non-ARM systems: "Disabling Secure [Boot] MUST NOT be possible on ARM systems." [sic] Between these two requirements, any ARM device that ships with Windows 8 will never run another operating system, unless it is signed with a preloaded key or a security exploit is found that enables users to circumvent secure boot.

While UEFI secure boot is ostensibly about protecting user security, these non-standard restrictions have nothing to do with security. For non-ARM systems, Microsoft requires that Custom Mode be enabled—a perverse demand if Custom Mode is a security threat. But the ARM market is different for Microsoft in three important respects:

• Microsoft's hardware partners are different for ARM. ARM is of interest to Microsoft primarily for one reason: all of the handsets running the Windows Phone operating system are ARM-based. By contrast, Intel rules the PC world. There, Microsoft's secure boot requirements—which allow users to add signatures in Custom Mode or disable secure boot entirely—track very closely to the recommendations of the UEFI Forum, of which Intel is a founding member.
• Microsoft doesn't need to support legacy Windows versions on ARM. If Microsoft locked unsigned operating systems out of new PCs, it would risk angering its own customers who prefer Windows XP or Windows 7 (or, hypothetically, Vista). With no legacy versions to support on ARM, Microsoft is eager to lock users out.
• Microsoft doesn't control sufficient market share on mobile devices to raise antitrust concerns. While Microsoft doesn't command quite the monopoly on PCs that it did in 1998, when it was prosecuted for antitrust violations, it still controls around 90% of the PC operating system market—enough to be concerned that banning non-Windows operating systems from Windows 8 PCs will bring regulators knocking. Its tiny stake in the mobile market may not be a business strategy, but for now it may provide a buffer for its anticompetitive behavior there. (However, as ARM-based "ultrabooks" gain market share, this may change.)

The new policy betrays the cynicism of Microsoft's initial response to concerns over Windows 8's secure boot requirement. When kernel hacker Matthew Garrett expressed his concern that PCs shipped with Windows 8 might prevent the installation of GNU/Linux and other free operating systems, Microsoft's Tony Mangefeste replied, "Microsoft’s philosophy is to provide customers with the best experience first, and allow them to make decisions themselves." It is clear now that opportunism, not philosophy, is guiding Microsoft's secure boot policy.

Before this week, this policy might have concerned only Windows Phone customers. But just yesterday, Qualcomm announced plans to produce Windows 8 tablets and ultrabook-style laptops built around its ARM-based Snapdragon processors. Unless Microsoft changes its policy, these may be the first PCs ever produced that can never run anything but Windows, no matter how Qualcomm feels about limiting its customers' choices. SFLC predicted in our comments to the Copyright Office that misuse of UEFI secure boot would bring such restrictions, already common on smartphones, to PCs. Between Microsoft's new ARM secure boot policy and Qualcomm's announcement, this worst-case scenario is beginning to look inevitable.
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/...ocks-down-ARM/

Government Engineers Actively Plan for Cyberwar

Governments are arming themselves to their cyber-teeth with offensive and counter-defense cyber weapons, and there's little enterprises can do to avoid the fray.
George V. Hulme

A decade ago, most viruses and worms were unleashed by curious students, pranksters and punks wanting to see what kind of damage they could inflict. That quickly evolved into criminals and thieves writing most of the malware once they realized money could be made.

Now, governments have arrived for the party. State-sponsored cyberwar is an increasing concern as more and more nations arm themselves with cyber-weapons.

Japanese defense engineers, for example, announced that they've developed a digital virus that can track down, identify, and disable attacking systems. Development of the virus began three years ago, and has only been tested on a closed network so far, the Daily Yomiuri reported.

The idea of digital viruses being used to thwart ongoing attacks isn't new. Following the infamous Code Red worm in 2001, a number of worms -- Code Blue and Code Green among them -- were released to patch systems that were vulnerable to Code Red infections. Code Green even tried to clean Code Red infected systems.

Around 2005, according to reports from experts close to the military, the U.S. government began to significantly invest in the development of programs and exploits robust enough to wage cyberwarfare. The tools range from botnets to software exploits to powerful worms. Today, most large governments are suspected of or have stated that they have put into place offensive cyber-warfare capabilities.

Many have speculated that Stuxnet, with or without help from Israel, was a U.S. government creation.

"When it comes to nation-on-nation war, automated counter-defenses makes sense," says Pete Lindstrom, research director at Spire Security. "Humans can't match the scaled response computers can achieve."

However, if governments start launching large-scale electronic responses to attacks, such as unleashing viruses and worms meant to neutralize an attack, or conducting denial-of-service attacks designed to knock adversaries offline, enterprises had better brace for the potential for collateral damage. "Once released, no one really knows what the impact could have on certain systems and networks."

David Mortman, an analyst with the security research firm Securosis, says enterprise security managers need to brace for all of the same types of attacks that we've seen across the past two decades. "It's unlikely you are going to see anything new from viruses, worms, denial-of-service, botnets, software exploits, social engineering," says Mortman. "But you could very well see increased scale. Essentially, to protect yourself from these kinds of attacks, you need to be doing all of the stuff that you should already be doing, and that's to have the right defenses and plans in place for traditional attacks and disasters."
http://www.csoonline.com/article/697...n-for-cyberwar

Have RIM, Nokia & Apple Provided Indian Military with Backdoor Access to Cellular Comm?
Manan Kakkar

Summary: In exchange for mobile presence in India, RIM, Nokia and Apple have allegedly provided backdoor access for the Indian intelligence to spy on communication.

On January 6th reports of Symantec (makers of Norton Anitvirus) being hacked surfaced. The group of hackers behind the attack behind the attack were from India. In a statement issued by a member from the Lords of Dharamraja group (badass name!), the guys said:

As of now we start sharing with all our brothers and followers information from the Indian Militaty (sic) Intelligence servers, so far we have discovered within the Indian Spy Programme (sic) source codes of a dozen software companies which have signed agreements with Indian TANCS programme (sic) and CBI

Ignoring the typing error, gaining access to Indian Military’s Intelligence servers is pretty damning for the agency. The hack got covered since the hackers claimed to have acces to Norton’s source code. Earlier today I came across scans of a set of documents that are internal communications between the Indian Military. The documents claim the existence of a system known as RINOA SUR. While I did not find what SUR stands for but RINOA is RIM, NOkia and Apple. And this is where things start to get very interesting, according to the set of documents, the RINOA SUR platform was used to spy on the USCC—the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Let’s take a moment for that to digest. Here’s an image from the documents underlining the relevant part:

The documents contain snippets of emails sent by members of the USCC. Apparently, RINOA SUR platform has been declared a success and the Indian Navy has shown interest in the same. The leaked military documents suggest, RINOA were arm twisted into providing backdoor access in exchange for operating in India:

While the Indian government recently gave the nation’s premiere spy agency—RAW—permission to access any citizen’s electronic communication, the Department of Telecommunications has reached out to the Interpol for help in decrypting communication via services like RIM’s BlackBerry. The set of leaked images:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/india/have...lular-comm/838

Fake Memo But Real Code? India-U.S. Hacking Mystery Deepens
Frank Jack Daniel

A memo that triggered a U.S. investigation into a possible cyber-attack by Indian military intelligence is probably a fake, but it is clear from leaked documents that serious security breaches did take place.

A little-known hacker group, 'Lords of Dharmaraja', began posting the documents last year, but only drew widespread attention after the anti-virus software firm Symantec confirmed on Saturday that a segment of its source code had been accessed by the group.

Reuters has obtained a large digital cache appearing to contain emails that were posted by the group but were quickly blocked by file-sharing sites.

Dated between April and October last year, many of the emails were addressed to Bill Reinsch, a member of an official U.S. commission monitoring economic and security ties between the United States and China, including cyber-security issues.

Military and cyber-security experts in India say the hackers may have created the purported military intelligence memo simply to draw attention to their work, or to taint relations between close allies India and the United States.

"There is some malicious intent, but to try and work out who has done it, given the current nature of the Internet, is an exercise in futility," said Cherian Samuel, a specialist on cyber-security and Indo-U.S. relations at India's Defense Ministry-funded Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses.

Speculation has focused on India's neighbors, arch-rival Pakistan and China, both of which are active in cyber-operations.

"It's also possible that Pakistan's hackers have done it, or China's hackers," said Mukesh Saini, an expert on cyber-security who served on the secretariat of India's national security council, an intelligence agency, until 2006.

But if that were the case, he said, the attackers could be acting without state sponsorship.

"Pro-Indian and pro-Pakistan individuals and small hacker groups have been attacking each other's government and non-government websites, with or without the consent of their government, for a very long time," he said.

INCONSISTENCIES

Two Washington sources close to the U.S. China Commission said that while they were positive the commission was a target for Chinese intelligence, they found it hard to believe its activities were of any interest to Indian intelligence.

They said it was possible that Chinese operatives forged the document to embarrass both the commission and the Indians.

Other Washington officials, however, said it was equally possible, if not more plausible, that the alleged Indian intelligence document was genuine and that the Indians were spying on the commission out of their own interest in learning about Washington's attitudes to China.

Genuine or not, the sophisticated language the document was written in suggests it was created by someone with a clear grasp of India's bureaucratic style.

Technology blog Infosec Island said on Wednesday it had seen more data obtained by the Lords of Dharmaraja, including dozens of usernames and passwords for compromised U.S. government network accounts.

Infosec Island blogger Anthony Freed said the hacker group claimed to have taken the data from servers belonging to India's Ministry of External Affairs and the Indian government's IT organization, among others.

Officials in India declined to comment on the document's content or authenticity.

The alleged memo (http://bit.ly/zYze7w), which had a number of inconsistencies, including the letterhead of a military intelligence unit not involved in surveillance, claimed India had been spying on the USCC using know-how provided by Western mobile phone manufacturers.

While the memo looks dubious, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission has not denied the veracity of the email cache, and U.S. authorities are investigating the matter.

The emails include conversations between U.S. embassy officials in Tripoli, DHL and General Electric about delivering medical equipment to Libya, as well as concerns that GE was helping China improve its jet engine industry.

"ANONYMOUS"

It is unclear whether Lords of Dharmaraja got the emails from Indian military intelligence servers, as they claim, but they first mentioned the documents in November, at the same time as they announced they hacked India's embassy server in Paris.

That breach was confirmed at the time by India's foreign ministry, and some experts believe the cache of U.S. emails was taken from the same source, raising the question of how they ended up there in the first place.

"An individual could have hacked someone's personal computer and handed it over to the embassy. There are so many means and measures," said Saini, who himself was charged with leaking secrets to Washington in 2006. He proclaims his innocence.

"There may be cooperation between India and the United States, the United States may have shared them, or India could have done the hack ... or a third country may have handed it to India," said Saini.

It is also unclear how Symantec's source code ended up with the Lords of Dharmaraja, whose public face goes by the name Yamatough on a Twitter feed.

Yamatough, whose profile picture shows a Tibetan painting of Dharmaraja, the Hindu god of death and justice, follows many members of the "Anonymous" hacking collective, and Symantec attributes the hack to that group.

"We are still investigating exactly where or how Anonymous accessed the code, but to date we have found no evidence that we shared any information with the Indian government," Symantec said in a statement.

"If the Indian government was indeed in possession of the code - as Anonymous claims and which has not yet been verified - we have no indication that it came from Symantec or as a result of our software assurance processes."

(Additional reporting by Paul Eckert in WASHINGTON; Editing by John Chalmers and Ian Geoghegan)
http://news.yahoo.com/fake-memo-real...175519916.html

India OKs Censoring Facebook, Google, Microsoft, YouTube
Emil Protalinski

Summary: The Indian government has sanctioned the prosecution of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, YouTube, and 16 others. India warned these websites it can block them just like China can.

The Indian government has given the green light for the prosecution of “21 social networking sites.” The list features 10 foreign-based companies, and could affect websites provided by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and YouTube. The recent development is part of an ongoing argument between the companies and India over whether content should be regulated (read: censored) in the country. The approval was actually made on December 23, 2011, but was only revealed today.

Earlier this week, Delhi’s High Court warned various companies they will be blocked in India if they fail to check and censor content. When counsel for Facebook and Google pointed to their global policy of non-interference even if contents posted on their webpages are found to be obscene or objectionable, the court told the Internet firms that this policy won’t work in India. “Like China, we too can block such websites,” said Justice Suresh Kait.

Before today’s news, I got in touch with Manan Kakkar, ZDNet’s journalist for all things related to India, and he told me he wasn’t interested in the story. “But just as a side note, it’s not India that’s made the threat but a high court judge in a city,” Kakkar told me “Then there’s the Supreme Court above this so I’m not giving much credence to this.” He then pointed out Google said it can’t censor such content and I remembered Facebook also said it won’t help India censor the Web.

This all changed, however, when Kakkar followed up to tell me the Indian government today sanctioned the court’s stance. “The sanctioning authority has personally gone through the entire records and materials produced before him and after considering and examining the same, he is satisfied that there is sufficient material to proceed against the accused persons under section 153-A, 153-B and 295-A of the IPC,” the report said according to IBN Live.

Earlier in the day, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo India, and others had sought exemption from the Delhi court because they argued the matter is still pending before the High Court. After the counsel said over 10 out of 21 companies named as accused in the case were foreign-based, the court agreed it had to it had to serve the summons on them, which came in the form of a two-page report from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).

That’s when the approval from the Indian government was revealed. While this is a big deal, the case is far from over. “Let the process (to serve the summons) on (foreign- based) accused be sent through the MEA as per the process,” Metropolitan Magistrate Sudesh Kumar said. “The accused are allowed exemption for today only but are directed to appear in person on the next date of hearing without fail.” The next hearing is scheduled for March 13, 2012.

The case first began with a private complaint filed by journalist Vinay Rai against these firms for allegedly webcasting objectionable content. Representatives of the 21 companies were thus summoned to court and a long proceeding began. Despite the statement about China, I hope India won’t go down the same path.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/i...t-youtube/7308

Biometrics in Argentina: Mass Surveillance as a State Policy

Two years ago, the UK dismantled their national ID scheme and shredded their National Identity Registry in response to great public outcry over the privacy-invasive program. Unfortunately privacy protections have been less rosy elsewhere. In Argentina, the national ID fight was lost some time ago. A law enacted during the military dictatorship forced all individuals to obtain a government-mandated ID. Now, they are in the process of enhancing its mandatory National Registry of Persons (RENAPER) with biometric data such as fingerprints and digitized faces. The government plans to repurpose this database in order to facilitate “easy access” to law enforcement by merging this data into a new, security-focused integrated system. This raises the specter of mass surveillance, as Argentinean law enforcement will have access to mass repositories of citizen information and be able to leverage existing facial recognition and fingerprint matching technologies in order to identify any citizen anywhere.

In the waning days of 2011, Argentinean President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner issued an executive decree ordering the creation of the Federal System of Biometric Identification (SIBIOS), a new centralized, nation-wide biometric ID service that will allow law enforcement to “cross-reference” information with biometric and other data initially collected for the purpose of operating a general national ID registry. Historically, police fingerprint databases were limited to those suspected or convicted of criminal offences. Recently, however, the Argentinean Federal Police (Policía Federal Argentina – PFA) was given a large database holding digital fingerprints collected from random Argentineans as part of the national ID and passport application process. Since March 2011, this database has been fed by data collected through the RENAPER national ID application process. The PFA has managed to amass a database of about 8 million fingerprints, yet this process appears to have been too slow for the Argentinean government. Further to the new decree, the SIBIOS initiative will give PFA access to RENAPER’s database (and vice versa), doubling PFA’s reach to approximately 14 million digitized fingerprints. Starting with the first New Year’s baby of 2012, Argentina has even begun registering newborn biometric information with the SIBIOS. Argentina projects that, as national IDs and passports expire and are renewed (and new babies are born), the SIBIOS database will grow to over 40 million within the next two years.

But the SIBIOS initiative will do far more than expand the number of digitized fingerprints the FPA will have ready access to. According to President Fernández de Kirchner, the SIBIOS will be fully “integrated” with existing ID card databases, which, aside from biometric identifiers, include an individuals’ digital image, civil status, blood type, and key background information collected since her birth and across the various life stages. Further, it is not just the FPA that will have access to this new information sharing system. SIBIOS is designated for use by other federal security forces, including the National Directorate of Immigration, the Airport Security Police, and the National Gendarmerie, and is even available to Provincial enforcement entities, upon agreement with the National State. However, there has been no public discussion about the conditions under which public officials will have access to the data. Supporters of the SIBIOS program tout that it would give law enforcement easy, real-time access to individuals’ data, but whether any of the safeguards typically used to put checks on state surveillance will limit access remains an open question.

Perhaps the most troubling part of this new SIBIOS initiative is the technologies Argentinean law enforcement intends to leverage in order to exploit these databases. The FPA, for example, will be able to use its new facial recognition capacities to search the immense RENAPER digital image repository in order to identify people in photos, and maybe even on surveillance cameras! Argentinean police are also equipping themselves with mobile fingerprinting devices that will allow them to check the fingerprints of any passing Argentinean against the database itself.

The Dangers of Surveillance Society

National IDs and similar methods of data centralization increase state capacity for intrusive surveillance. Coupled with the simultaneous collection of biometric identifiers, such as digitized faces, it creates an additional layer of tracking that is even more pervasive and dangerous. As is the case in Argentina, biometrics are inherently individuating and interfaces easily with database technology, making widespread privacy violations easier and more harmful.

To our alarm, President Fernández de Kirchner has gone so far as to embrace the potential to link unidentified faces obtained through surveillance cameras with identified images through the SIBIOS system. Due to the technology’s relative affordability, street cameras and video-surveillance are now everywhere. Therefore this functionality is especially dangerous with the potential to lead to mass political surveillance. (This visualization shows how there are over 1,000 cameras installed in the Argentinian capital of Buenos Aires alone.)

Given the prevalence of street cameras and how easy it has become to identify one unnamed face amidst thousands, individuals who care about their privacy and anonymity will have a very difficult time protecting their identity from biometrics databases in the imminent future. There are extreme unforeseen risks in a world where an individual’s photo, taken from a street camera or a social network, can be linked to their national ID card. Additionally, matching technologies will only improve with time. (Check here and here to learn more about facial recognition). EFF has long argued that perfect tracking is inimical to a free and democratic society. Citizens have a reasonable expectation of privacy and anonymity, particularly with regard to profiling. A combination of government-run biometric ID systems and facial recognition violates core elements of freedom by making it easy to locate and track people, and dangerously centralizing this data makes it ripe for state exploitation.

As Beatriz Busaniche of Fundacion Via Libre notes, this type of mass surveillance can have serious repercussions for those who are willing to voice political dissent:

“In the name of public security, Argentina has pushed for mass surveillance policies, including the heightened monitoring of public spaces. Privacy is particularly crucial for our country since throughout our long history of social and political movements, calls for action have often taken to the streets. It is of higher importance for activists to remain anonymous in their demonstrations, especially when they are at odds with the government itself. In this way, SIBIOS not only challenges their privacy and data protection rights, but also poses serious threats to their civil and political rights.”

Mora Arqueta, Director of RENAPER, noted in an interview that the current purpose of the national ID scheme is to retain the “maximum amount of personal data, and treat the citizen as an individual who interacts with the State in many places.” Her comments admit to a direct perversion of the existing national identification system, from one that has simply assigned an ID number to an individual, to one that outright violates personal data minimization principles through massive and unnecessary collection of sensitive personal information. The problem with allowing the government to retain so much sensitive data is that it gives it too much unchecked concentrated power. One wonders, for example, whether those who enacted the decree considered what would have occurred if Argentina's military dictatorship had access to such an expansive database. The public debate in Argentina should therefore be about power and the possible limits of actors in society to know. A healthy amount of distrust is necessary to sustain an open, democratic society.

Fernández de Kirchner’s arguments that SIBIOS provides “a major qualitative leap in security, in the fight against crime” are troubling and represent a further deviation from the purpose for which the RENAPER databases were first created. This argument is misleading, and fails to analyze SIBIOS’ risks and limitations as well as its impact on civil liberties and data protection. Time and again, we have heard the dubious rhetorical argument that biometrics are needed to fight against crime and increase security. In fact, these massive biometrics databases are a honeypot of sensitive data that remains extremely vulnerable for exploitation by criminals and identity thieves themselves.

The rights to privacy and data protection are enshrined in international law and the Argentinean Constitution. Given the long list of privacy concerns surrounding biometrics, and the plausibility of future security breaches, it is irrationally excessive to collect biometric data in a nation-wide ID scheme. The Argentinean government needs to limit the unnecessary collection, processing, retention, and sharing of this very sensitive data. EFF and Fundacion Via Libre in Argentina will work together to fight against these intrusive measures.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/0...e-state-policy

EPIC v. Department of Homeland Security: Media Monitoring

Seeking Disclosure of Records Detailing the Department of Homeland Security's Media Monitoring Activities

Background

EPIC is pursuing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security for information about the agency's surveillance of social networks and news organizations.

In February 2011, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the agency planned to implement a program that would monitor media content, including social media data. The proposed initiatives would gather information from "online forums, blogs, public websites, and messages boards" and disseminate information to "federal, state, local, and foreign government and private sector partners." The program would be executed, in part, by individuals who established fictitious usernames and passwords to create covert social media profiles to spy on other users. The agency stated it would store personal information for up to five years.

Top News

• EPIC Sues DHS Over Covert Surveillance of Facebook and Twitter : EPIC has filed a Freedom of information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to force disclosure of the details of the agency's social network monitoring program. In news reports and a Federal Register notice, the DHS has stated that it will routinely monitor the public postings of users on Twitter and Facebook. The agency plans to create fictitious user accounts and scan posts of users for key terms. User data will be stored for five years and shared with other government agencies.The legal authority for the DHS program remains unclear. EPIC filed the lawsuit after the DHS failed to reply to an April 2011 FOIA request. For more information, see EPIC: Social Networking Privacy. (Dec. 20, 2011)

EPIC's FOIA Request

In April 12, 2011, EPIC submitted a FOIA request to the DHS seeking agency records detailing the media monitoring program.The request sought the following documents:

• All contracts, proposals, and communications between the federal government and third parties, including, but not limited to, H.B. Gary Federal, Palantir Technologies, and/or Berico Technologies, and/or parent or subsidiary companies, that include provisions concerning the capability of social media monitoring technology to capture, store, aggregate, analyze, and/or match personally-identifiable information.
• All contracts, proposals, and communications between DHS and any states, localities, tribes, territories, and foreign governments, and/or their agencies or subsidiaries, and/or any corporate entities, including but not limited to H.B. Gary Federal, Palantir Technologies, and/or Berico Technologies, regarding the implementation of any social media monitoring initiative.
• All documents used by DHS for internal training of staff and personnel regarding social media monitoring, including any correspondence and communications between DHS, internal staff and personnel, and/or privacy officers, regarding the receipt, use, and/or implementation of training and evaluation documents.
• All documents detailing the technical specifications of social media monitoring software and analytic tools, including any security measures to protect records of collected information and analysis.
• All documents concerning data breaches of records generated by social media monitoring technology.

Noting the extraordinary public interest in the plan and the public's right to comment on the measures, EPIC asked the DHS to expedite the processing of its request.

On April 28, 2011, the agency acknowledged receipt of EPIC's FOIA request, but denied the request for expedited processing and did not make any substantive determination regarding the FOIA request. The DHS did not disclose any records in response to EPIC's FOIA request. On May 18, 2011, EPIC appealed the DHS's failure to make a timely substantive determination as well as the agency's denial of EPIC's expedited processing request. The DHS failed to respond to EPIC's administrative appeal and failed to disclose any records.

EPIC's FOIA Lawsuit

On December 20, 2011, EPIC filed a lawsuit against the DHS to compel the disclosure of documents relating to the agency's media monitoring program.

In January 2012, the DHS disclosed 285 pages of agency records in response to EPIC's FOIA lawsuit.

FOIA Documents

EPIC's FOIA request and lawsuit forced disclosure of the following records concerning the DHS's media monitoring program:

January 2012 Disclosure - 285 pages (including contracts, price estimates, Privacy Impact Assessment, and communications concerning DHS Media Monitoring program)

EPIC's FOIA lawsuit forced the DHS to disclose 285 pages of records. The documents include contracts, price estimates, Privacy Impact Assessment, and communications concerning DHS Media Monitoring program. These records make public, for the first time, details of the DHS's efforts to spy on social network users and journalists.

The records reveal that the DHS is paying General Dynamics to monitor the news. The agency instructed the company to monitor for "[media] reports that reflect adversely on the U.S. Government, DHS, or prevent, protect, respond government activities."

The DHS is attempting to "capture public reaction to major government proposals."

The DHS instructed the social media monitoring company to generate "reports on DHS, Components, and other Federal Agencies: positive and negative reports on FEMA, CIA, CBP, ICE, etc. as well as organizations outside the DHS."

One of the example social network monitoring summaries is titled "Residents Voice Opposition Over Possible Plan to Bring Guantanamo Detainees to Local Prison-Standish MI." The report summarizes dissent on blogs and social networking cites, quoting commenters.

The DHS instructed the company to "Monitor public social communications on the Internet." The records list the websites that will be monitored, including the comments sections of [The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, Wired, and ABC News.]"
https://epic.org/foia/epic-v-dhs-media-monitoring/

Stuxnet Cyberweapon Looks to be One on a Production Line, Researchers Say

Evidence is rising that Stuxnet, a cyberweapon that attacked Iran's nuclear facilities in 2009, is part of a supersophisticated manufacturing process for malicious software, two antivirus companies tell the Monitor.
Mark Clayton

Somewhere in the world, the creators of the Stuxnet worm are involved in a cyberweapon manufacturing operation that can pump out supersophisticated malicious software tweaked for specific missions, new targets, and detection evasion.

Stuxnet, the first military-grade cyberweapon known to the world, has been called a digital missile and a cyber-Hiroshima bomb. But it was not a one-shot blast, new research shows. Rather, Stuxnet is part of a bigger cyberweapons system – a software platform, or framework – that can modify already-operational malicious software, researchers at two leading antivirus companies told the Monitor.

The platform appears to be able to fire and reload – again and again – to recalibrate for different targets and to bolt on different payloads, but with minimal added cost and effort, say researchers at Kaspersky Labs and at Symantec.

Kaspersky, based in Moscow, and Symantec, in Sunnyvale, Calif., are antivirus companies, competitors in fact. Each has had teams laboring independently for more than a year to decipher Stuxnet. Both are amazed to have discovered digital fingerprints of a much larger family of weaponized software.

What each has uncovered are at least seven cyberweapon "launcher" files created from a common software platform. A launcher file is needed to stealthily insert the malicious payload (Stuxnet, for instance) onto a computer, as well as carrying the payload files and encryption keys needed to unfurl them and make them function.

All seven launcher files contain chunks of identical source code, yet differ in small but important ways, according to a Kaspersky Labs study released last week. Just two of those files are known to be used by the Stuxnet program. Two others are related to an espionage software program called Duqu, discovered last fall.

That leaves three launcher files with no known affiliations. While those three could be affiliated with as-yet-undetected variants of Stuxnet or Duqu, they are more likely to be affiliated with undiscovered cyberweapons operating "in the wild" somewhere in cyberspace, researchers say.

Kaspersky's findings are buttressed by researchers at Symantec, which led the deciphering effort on Stuxnet in 2010. The companies' findings imply that Stuxnet's creators are not resting on past deeds, such as the attack on Iran's nuclear fuel manufacturing facilities. Instead, they are apparently churning out new cyberweapons for new missions from that same common software platform, researchers from both firms told the Monitor.

"Stuxnet's creators used a [software] platform to package and deliver it, because they wanted to be able to make many cyberweapons easily and be able to change them rapidly for targeting and attack," says Costin Raiu, director of the global research and analysis team at Kaspersky Labs, in a phone interview from Romania.

"What's going on seems not so much like a weapons factory as much as a super-secret lab that creates experimental cyberweapons," he adds. "It's more like they're making ion cannons or something – but for cyberwar. These are not normal line weapons, but the highest tech possible to wage cyberwar and cybersabotage."

First signs that Stuxnet was part of a larger family of malicious software, or malware, came with the discovery in September 2010 of Duqu, a specialized espionage program. Duqu appears to be designed to zero in on industrial secrets related to Stuxnet's target, and its code contains digital fingerprints akin to some in Stuxnet, indicating it was created with some of the same source code. Stuxnet's mission, much of it now decoded, was to wreak havoc on Iran's ability to refine nuclear fuel using centrifuges.

"We've done the same analysis Kaspersky has, and seen the same timelines, dates, encryption keys," says Liam O Murchu, manager of operations for Symantec Security Response, in a phone interview. "We think Stuxnet and Duqu are made by the same team, with the same goal.... They can change [the software weapon produced on the common platform], manipulate it, have different payloads."

Using a common malware "platform," or "framework," system can be likened to an auto factory building an exotic car, like a Lamborghini. There are a lot of common parts, but also a bit of artistry. There may be a common frame and engine, but other code has been hand-tooled by expert engineers, Mr. Raiu and Mr. O Murchu agree.

That common platform – for Stuxnet, Duqu, and the rest – is a way to reuse software that was expensive to develop. But it also allows for faster assembly of existing modules into full-blown cyberweapons, which can then be tweaked to sabotage a new industrial control system target or to evade detection.

"Let's imagine you want to steal documents," Raiu adds. "You don't need the sort of sabotage capability built into Stuxnet, so you take that off. Instead, you use the same platform to create targeted malware, but perhaps focusing on espionage instead. That's Duqu."

A light bulb went on last October when Kaspersky researchers looking at Duqu downloaded a different piece of malware that had been on a Chinese computer that also had Duqu on it. At first, the file was misidentified as Stuxnet. But a closer examination showed it was something new and slightly different. So Kaspersky began reexamining its own archive of malware again to see what files might have been missed, dredging up seven in all.

Duqu used two files. Stuxnet used two files. Three others had no affiliated programs. But all of the files shared a common characteristic: They carried a "~d" symbol in their names. That led Kaspersky's researchers to dub the common platform used to create all the files for Duqu, Stuxnet, and the others the Tilde-d, or "Tilded," platform.

"There were a number of projects involving programs based on the “Tilded” platform throughout the period 2007-2011," Kaspersky's report concludes. "Stuxnet and Duqu are two of them – there could have been others, which for now remain unknown. The platform continues to develop, which can only mean one thing – we’re likely to see more modifications in the future."

Some experts agree that Duqu and Stuxnet share code, but strongly disagree on what that implies. It could mean that different entities, working toward their own ends, used the same "kit." Despite the common code, "many other dimensions of the separate attacks indicate no common authorship or attribution," writes Don Jackson, a senior security researcher with the Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit research team, in an e-mail. Still others say the Kaspersky findings are telling.

"It makes tremendous sense," says Ed Skoudis, cofounder of Inguardians, a cybersecurity firm based in Washington, D.C. "Look at the effort needed to produce Stuxnet. You wouldn't want to do it in a way that was one-off. You would want to produce a process that could reuse the parts, not shoot your entire cache of weapons in one attack."

He likens it to the US system for building atom bombs after World War II.

"When the US built the atom bomb. it wasn't just the one. We had an infrastructure and platform for building additional weapons," Mr. Skoudis says. "Whoever built Stuxnet got a lot of money and a lot of smart people working on it. It just makes sense that creating these kinds of weapons be repeatable –and that some set of fingerprints are left behind that shows that."

But what neither he nor any expert interviewed for this article believes is that identifying the software platform used to build Stuxnet and Duqu will lead to the identity of whomever built those weapons.

"I don't think it will help much," he says. "But this finding does indicate that we'll see more of these kinds of weapons when a definite military objective that suits whoever created these things appears. We now know there is a production facility for these types of things – and that it is operational and releasing things. I'm sure we'll see more."
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2012/01...esearchers-say

Hacker Says to Release Full Norton Antivirus Code on Tuesday

A hacker who goes by the name of 'Yama Tough' threatened Saturday to release next week the full source code for Symantec Corp's flagship Norton Antivirus software.

"This coming Tuesday behold the full Norton Antivirus 1,7Gb src, the rest will follow," Yama Tough posted via Twitter.

In the past week Yama Tough has released fragments of source code from Symantec products along with a cache of emails. The hacker says all the data was taken from Indian government servers.

(Reporting By Frank Jack Daniel)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80C1QW20120114

Lockdown

The coming war on general-purpose computing
Cory Doctorow

This article is based on a keynote speech to the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, Dec. 2011.

General-purpose computers are astounding. They're so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they're for, how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. This brings us back to something you might be sick of reading about: copyright.

But bear with me, because this is about something more important. The shape of the copyright wars clues us into an upcoming fight over the destiny of the general-purpose computer itself.

In the beginning, we had packaged software and we had sneakernet. We had floppy disks in ziplock bags, in cardboard boxes, hung on pegs in shops, and sold like candy bars and magazines. They were eminently susceptible to duplication, were duplicated quickly, and widely, and this was to the great chagrin of people who made and sold software.

Enter Digital Rights Management in its most primitive forms: let's call it DRM 0.96. They introduced physical indicia which the software checked for—deliberate damage, dongles, hidden sectors—and challenge-response protocols that required possession of large, unwieldy manuals that were difficult to copy.

These failed for two reasons. First, they were commercially unpopular, because they reduced the usefulness of the software to the legitimate purchasers. Honest buyers resented the non-functionality of their backups, they hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles, and they chafed at the inconvenience of having to lug around large manuals when they wanted to run their software. Second, these didn't stop pirates, who found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication. People who took the software without paying for it were untouched.

Typically, the way this happened is a programmer, with possession of technology and expertise of equivalent sophistication to the software vendor itself, would reverse-engineer the software and circulate cracked versions. While this sounds highly specialized, it really wasn't. Figuring out what recalcitrant programs were doing and routing around media defects were core skills for computer programmers, especially in the era of fragile floppy disks and the rough-and-ready early days of software development. Anti-copying strategies only became more fraught as networks spread; once we had bulletin boards, online services, USENET newsgroups and mailing lists, the expertise of people who figured out how to defeat these authentication systems could be packaged up in software as little crack files. As network capacity increased, the cracked disk images or executables themselves could be spread on their own.

This gave us DRM 1.0. By 1996, it became clear to everyone in the halls of power that there was something important about to happen. We were about to have an information economy, whatever the Hell that was. They assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information. Information technology improves efficiency, so imagine the markets that an information economy would have! You could buy a book for a day, you could sell the right to watch the movie for a Euro, and then you could rent out the pause button for a penny per second. You could sell movies for one price in one country, at another price in another, and so on. The fantasies of those days were like a boring science fiction adaptation of the Old Testament Book of Numbers, a tedious enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information—and what might be charged for each.

Unfortunately for them, none of this would be possible unless they could control how people use their computers and the files we transfer to them. After all, it was easy to talk about selling someone a tune to download to their MP3 player, but not so easy to talk about the the right to move music from the player to another device. But how the Hell could you stop that once you'd given them the file? In order to do so, you needed to figure out how to stop computers from running certain programs and inspecting certain files and processes. For example, you could encrypt the file, and then require the user to run a program that only unlocked the file under certain circumstances.

But, as they say on the Internet, now you have two problems.

You must now also stop the user from saving the file while it's unencrypted—which must happen eventually— and you must stop the user from figuring out where the unlocking program stores its keys, enabling them to permanently decrypt the media and ditch the stupid player app entirely.

Now you have three problems: you must stop the users who figure out how to decrypt from sharing it with other users. Now you've got four problems, because you must stop the users who figure out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs from telling other users how to do it too. And now you've got five problems, because you must stop users who figure out how to extract these secrets from telling other users what the secrets were!

That's a lot of problems. But by 1996, we had a solution. We had the WIPO Copyright Treaty, passed by the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization. This created laws that made it illegal to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and it created laws that made it illegal to extract media (such as songs and movies) from the unlocking programs while they were running. It created laws that made it illegal to tell people how to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and it created laws that made it illegal to host copyrighted works or the secrets. It also established a handy streamlined process that let you remove stuff from the Internet without having to screw around with lawyers, and judges, and all that crap.

And with that, illegal copying ended forever, the information economy blossomed into a beautiful flower that brought prosperity to the whole wide world; as they say on the aircraft carriers, "Mission Accomplished".

That's not how the story ends, of course, because pretty much anyone who understood computers and networks understood that these laws would create more problems than they could possibly solve. After all, these laws made it illegal to look inside your computer when it was running certain programs. They made it illegal to tell people what you found when you looked inside your computer, and they made it easy to censor material on the internet without having to prove that anything wrong had happened.

In short, they made unrealistic demands on reality and reality did not oblige them. Copying only got easier following the passage of these laws—copying will only ever get easier. Right now is as hard as copying will get. Your grandchildren will turn to you and say "Tell me again, Grandpa, about when it was hard to copy things in 2012, when you couldn't get a drive the size of your fingernail that could hold every song ever recorded, every movie ever made, every word ever spoken, every picture ever taken, everything, and transfer it in such a short period of time you didn't even notice it was doing it."

Reality asserts itself. Like the nursery rhyme lady who swallows a spider to catch a fly, and has to swallow a bird to catch the spider, and a cat to catch the bird, so must these regulations, which have broad general appeal but are disastrous in their implementation. Each regulation begets a new one, aimed at shoring up its own failures.

It's tempting to stop the story here and conclude that the problem is that lawmakers are either clueless or evil, or possibly evilly clueless. This is not a very satisfying place to go, because it's fundamentally a counsel of despair; it suggests that our problems cannot be solved for so long as stupidity and evilness are present in the halls of power, which is to say they will never be solved. But I have another theory about what's happened.

It's not that regulators don't understand information technology, because it should be possible to be a non-expert and still make a good law. MPs and Congressmen and so on are elected to represent districts and people, not disciplines and issues. We don't have a Member of Parliament for biochemistry, and we don't have a Senator from the great state of urban planning. And yet those people who are experts in policy and politics, not technical disciplines, still manage to pass good rules that make sense. That's because government relies on heuristics: rules of thumb about how to balance expert input from different sides of an issue.

Unfortunately, information technology confounds these heuristics—it kicks the crap out of them—in one important way.

The important tests of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose are first whether it will work, and second whether or not it will, in the course of doing its work, have effects on everything else. If I wanted Congress, Parliament, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it's unlikely I'd succeed. If I turned up, pointed out that bank robbers always make their escape on wheeled vehicles, and asked, "Can't we do something about this?", the answer would be "No". This is because we don't know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications, but useless to bad guys. We can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we'd be foolish to risk changing them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberies—even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies—no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.

However, if I were to show up in that same body to say that I had absolute proof that hands-free phones were making cars dangerous, and I requested a law prohibiting hands-free phones in cars, the regulator might say "Yeah, I'd take your point, we'd do that."

We might disagree about whether or not this is a good idea, or whether or not my evidence made sense, but very few of us would say that once you take the hands-free phones out of the car, they stop being cars.

We understand that cars remain cars even if we remove features from them. Cars are special-purpose, at least in comparison to wheels, and all that the addition of a hands-free phone does is add one more feature to an already-specialized technology. There's a heuristic for this: special-purpose technologies are complex, and you can remove features from them without doing fundamental, disfiguring violence to their underlying utility.

This rule of thumb serves regulators well, by and large, but it is rendered null and void by the general-purpose computer and the general-purpose network—the PC and the Internet. If you think of computer software as a feature, a computer with spreadsheets running on it has a spreadsheet feature, and one that's running World of Warcraft has an MMORPG feature. The heuristic would lead you to think that a computer unable to run spreadsheets or games would be no more of an attack on computing than a ban on car-phones would be an attack on cars.

And, if you think of protocols and websites as features of the network, then saying "fix the Internet so that it doesn't run BitTorrent", or "fix the Internet so that thepiratebay.org no longer resolves," sounds a lot like "change the sound of busy signals," or "take that pizzeria on the corner off the phone network," and not like an attack on the fundamental principles of internetworking.

The rule of thumb works for cars, for houses, and for every other substantial area of technological regulation. Not realizing that it fails for the Internet does not make you evil, and it does not make you an ignoramus. It just makes you part of that vast majority of the world, for whom ideas like Turing completeness and end-to-end are meaningless.

So, our regulators go off, they blithely pass these laws, and they become part of the reality of our technological world. There are, suddenly, numbers that we aren't allowed to write down on the Internet, programs we're not allowed to publish, and all it takes to make legitimate material disappear from the Internet is there mere accusation of copyright infringement. It fails to attain the goal of the regulation, because it doesn't stop people from violating copyright, but it bears a kind of superficial resemblance to copyright enforcement—it satisfies the security syllogism: "something must be done, I am doing something, something has been done." As a result, any failures that arise can be blamed on the idea that the regulation doesn't go far enough, rather than the idea that it was flawed from the outset.

This kind of superficial resemblance and underlying divergence happens in other engineering contexts. I've a friend, who was once a senior executive at a big consumer packaged goods company, who told me what happened when the marketing department told the engineers that they'd thought up a great idea for detergent: from now on, they were going to make detergent that made your clothes newer every time you washed them!

After the engineers had tried unsuccessfully to convey the concept of entropy to the marketing department, they arrived at another solution: they'd develop a detergent that used enzymes that attacked loose fiber ends, the kind that you get with broken fibers that make your clothes look old. So every time you washed your clothes in the detergent, they would look newer. Unfortunately, that was because the detergent was digesting your clothes. Using it would literally cause your clothes to dissolve in the washing machine.

This was, needless to say, the opposite of making clothes newer. Instead, you were artificially aging them every time you washed them, and as the user, the more you deployed the "solution", the more drastic your measures had to be to keep your clothes up to date. Eventually, you would have to buy new clothes because the old ones fell apart.

Today we have marketing departments that say things such as "we don't need computers, we need appliances. Make me a computer that doesn't run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn't run programs that I haven't authorized that might undermine our profits."

On the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea: a program that does one specialized task. After all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we don't worry if it's still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that's not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance. We're not making a computer that runs only the "appliance" app; we're taking a computer that can run every program, then using a combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn't want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer—it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box.

We don't know how to build a general-purpose computer that is capable of running any program except for some program that we don't like, are prohibited by law, or which loses us money. The closest approximation that we have to this is a computer with spyware: a computer on which remote parties set policies without the computer user's knowledge, or over the objection of the computer's owner. Digital rights management always converges on malware.

In one famous incident—a gift to people who share this hypothesis—Sony loaded covert rootkit installers on 6 million audio CDs, which secretly executed programs that watched for attempts to read the sound files on CDs and terminated them. It also hid the rootkit's existence by causing the computer operating system's kernel to lie about which processes were running, and which files were present on the drive. But that's not the only example. Nintendo's 3DS opportunistically updates its firmware, and does an integrity check to make sure that you haven't altered the old firmware in any way. If it detects signs of tampering, it turns itself into a brick.

Human rights activists have raised alarms over U-EFI, the new PC bootloader, which restricts your computer so it only runs "signed" operating systems, noting that repressive governments will likely withhold signatures from operating systems unless they allow for covert surveillance operations.

On the network side, attempts to make a network that can't be used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance measures that we know from repressive governments. Consider SOPA, the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act, which bans innocuous tools such as DNSSec—a security suite that authenticates domain name information— because they might be used to defeat DNS blocking measures. It blocks Tor, an online anonymity tool sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and used by dissidents in oppressive regimes, because it can be used to circumvent IP blocking measures.

In fact, the Motion Picture Association of America, a SOPA proponent, circulated a memo citing research that SOPA might work because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan. It argued that because these measures are effective in those countries, they would work in America, too!

It may seem like SOPA is the endgame in a long fight over copyright and the Internet, and it may seem that if we defeat SOPA, we'll be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But as I said at the beginning of this talk, this isn't about copyright.

The copyright wars are just the beta version of a long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry is just the first belligerents to take up arms, and we tend to think of them as particularly successful. After all, here is SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage, ready to break the Internet on a fundamental level— all in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies.

But the reality is that copyright legislation gets as far as it does precisely because it's not taken seriously by politicians. This is why, on one hand, Canada has had Parliament after Parliament introduce one awful copyright bill after another, but on the other hand, Parliament after Parliament has failed to actually vote on each bill. It's why SOPA, a bill composed of pure stupid and pieced together molecule-by-molecule into a kind of "Stupidite 250" normally only found in the heart of newborn star, had its rushed-through SOPA hearings adjourned midway through the Christmas break: so that lawmakers could get into a vicious national debate over an important issue, unemployment insurance.

It's why the World Intellectual Property Organization is gulled time and again into enacting crazed, pig-ignorant copyright proposals: because when the nations of the world send their U.N. missions to Geneva, they send water experts, not copyright experts. They send health experts, not copyright experts. They send agriculture experts, not copyright experts, because copyright is just not as important.

Canada's Parliament didn't vote on its copyright bills because, of all the things that Canada needs to do, fixing copyright ranks well below health emergencies on First Nations reservations, exploiting the oil patch in Alberta, interceding in sectarian resentments among French- and English-speakers, solving resources crises in the nation's fisheries, and a thousand other issues. The triviality of copyright tells you that when other sectors of the economy start to evince concerns about the Internet and the PC, copyright will be revealed for a minor skirmish—not a war.

Why might other sectors come to nurse grudges against computers in the way the entertainment business already has? The world we live in today is made of computers. We don't have cars anymore; we have computers we ride in. We don't have airplanes anymore; we have flying Solaris boxes attached to bucketfuls of industrial control systems. A 3D printer is not a device, it's a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer. A radio is no longer a crystal: it's a general-purpose computer, running software. The grievances that arise from unauthorized copies of Snooki's Confessions of a Guidette are trivial when compared to the calls-to-action that our computer-embroidered reality will soon create.

Consider radio. Radio regulation until today was based on the idea that the properties of a radio are fixed at the time of manufacture, and can't be easily altered. You can't just flip a switch on your baby monitor and interfere with other signals. But powerful software-defined radios (SDRs) can change from baby monitor to emergency services dispatcher or air traffic controller, just by loading and executing different software. This is why the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) considered what would happen when we put SDRs in the field, and asked for comment on whether it should mandate that all software-defined radios should be embedded in "trusted computing" machines. Ultimately, the question is whether every PC should be locked, so that their programs could be strictly regulated by central authorities.

Even this is a shadow of what is to come. After all, this was the year in which we saw the debut of open source shape files for converting AR-15 rifles to full-automatic. This was the year of crowd-funded open-sourced hardware for genetic sequencing. And while 3D printing will give rise to plenty of trivial complaints, there will be judges in the American South and mullahs in Iran who will lose their minds over people in their jurisdictions printing out sex toys. The trajectory of 3D printing will raise real grievances, from solid-state meth labs to ceramic knives.

It doesn't take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers. Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it's really important to make sure that computers can't execute programs which cause specialized peripherals to output custom organisms which literally eat their lunch.

Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or hysterical fears, they are, nevertheless, the political currency of lobbies and interest groups far more influential than Hollywood and big content. Every one of them will arrive at the same place: "Can't you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can't you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?"

There will be programs that run on general-purpose computers, and peripherals, that will freak even me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general-purpose computers will find a receptive audience. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, protocols or messages will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy. As we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits, and all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship. This stuff matters because we've spent the last decade sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it's just been an end-level guardian. The stakes are only going to get higher.

As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die. It won't be a hearing aid, though; it will really be a computer. So when I get into a car—a computer that I put my body into—with my hearing aid—a computer I put inside my body—I want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me, or to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests.

Last year, the Lower Merion School District, in a middle-class, affluent suburb of Philadelphia, found itself in a great deal of trouble. It was caught distributing, to its students, rootkitted laptops that allowed remote covert surveillance through the computer's camera and network connection. They photographed students thousands of times, at home and at school, awake and asleep, dressed and naked. Meanwhile, the latest generation of lawful intercept technology can covertly operate cameras, microphones, and GPS tranceivers on PCs, tablets, and mobile devices.

We haven't lost yet, but we have to win the copyright war first if we want to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policies for them; to examine and terminate the software processes that runs on them; and to maintain them as honest servants to our will, not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks.
http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

Using Open Source to Build the Ultimate Walled Garden

AT&T moving to dominate user experience?
Brian Proffitt

Much has been made about AT&T's surprise entry into the OpenStack project earlier this week. Most notably, why the major U.S. carrier decided to sign up for OpenStack in the first place.

That's no slam on OpenStack, mind you: the Rackspace-owned cloud computing project is much-beloved in the open source community for the technology and the Apache license that covers the project. The fact that governance will be shifting from Rackspace proper to a planned OpenStack Foundation definitely helps, too.

But why would a carrier want to make use of OpenStack? There are some clues, most notably AT&T's planned AT&T Cloud Architect program, a service that will provide "public, private, and bare metal cloud servers or choose dedicated options."

In other words, AT&T is about to take on Amazon's EC2 and S2 cloud services, and OpenStack's technology is going to be the engine that drives it.

It's not going to be a straight head-to-head match-up, either; AT&T appears to be sweetening the pot by announcing HTML5 support as well as enhancing its API platform to provide such things as in-app billing.

For me, this is an important clue in itself: by trying to attract developers, it looks like the AT&T--the carrier--is trying to move up and down the stack to capture the servers on the back-end with OpenStack and the user space with some sort of Web-based interface. If this is so, that would represent a huge move: because it would be the first time a network provider would theoretically own the user's eyeballs from the desktop/device all the way to the servers.

It won't be 100 percent, of course, since users will be able to zip around the Internet at will. But imagine this: AT&T providing customers with an interactive interface on their TVs, devices, or desktops that has apps (free or fee-based) provided by AT&T and running through AT&T's mobile and land-based networks. There'll be a browser, too, so users can surf; perhaps set up like Amazon's Kindle Fire browser Silk, which will handily pre-load pages for users. All of this will run quite well on OpenStack-managed cloud servers, and provide AT&T with a gold mine of user-generated surfing, commerce, and other data.

An analogy for old folks like me: it would be like CompuServe, if CompuServe owned the phone company.

Leaving aside the potential problems for user privacy here--and oh, there are many to be addressed to be sure--a plan such as this would represent a stunning coup for AT&T, since they would be able to provide the one thing Apple and Google have not been able to have in their respective plans to own the entire stack: the network on which all communications must flow.

It would also be a huge validation for open source, because every single level of such an offering would be driven by open source software: from the interface and the browser to the bazillions of Linux-based servers managed by AT&T's OpenStack-based cloud.

As a starry-eyed geek, such an offering intrigues me, because it may mean that AT&T might be able to provide users with a la carte programming… something that it doesn't do now and is driving users like me to devices like Roku that enable my family and me to purchase and subscribe to only the entertainment content we want.

As a more savvy consumer, the thought of AT&T or any one network having that much involvement in my online experience is more than a little problematic.

There is a lot of work out about AT&T's plans, since I am offering little more than speculation. But I offer you this: AT&T's desire to have a hand in all levels of the user stack could be reflected in Google's own plans to own the part of the stack they're missing: the network. For this, I give you Google's pilot fiber program in Kansas City, KS.

If Google wants the whole stack, you can bet your bippy that others will want it, too. AT&T already has the hard part, if you'll pardon the pun: the wires. Thanks to open source, moving up and down the stack is a much easier and cheaper proposition than Google wiring the country.

Let's see if this call goes through as dialed.
http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wirele...-walled-garden

Knock Knock Knockin' on Bridges' Doors
twilde

Greetings! My name is Tim Wilde, Software Engineer at Team Cymru, Inc., and a big fan of the Tor Project and everything that they do. We've helped out the Tor Project with a few investigations into probing/blocking of Tor by oppressive regimes, and the guys asked me to write this one up for the Tor Blog, so here I am! Note: any opinions expressed here are mine, nor those of Team Cymru or the Tor Project.

In October 2011, ticket #4185 was filed in the Tor bug tracker by a user in China who found that their connections to US-based Tor bridge relays were being regularly cut off after a very short period of time. At the time we performed some basic experimentation and discovered that Chinese IPs (presumably at the behest of the Great Firewall of China, or GFW) would reach out to the US-based bridge and connect to it shortly after the Tor user in China connected, and, if successful, shortly thereafter the connection would be blocked by the GFW. There wasn't time for a detailed investigation and analysis at the time, but that kernel eventually grew into the investigation detailed below. We were, however, able to determine that limiting connections to the bridge relay to only the single IP expected to be its client would, in fact, block the probes and allow the connection to remain open for an extended period (>48 hours in our testing).

Between 05 DEC and 09 DEC 2011, we undertook a detailed and methodical investigation into probing and blocking of Tor connections originating within China. Unfortunately for our analysis, it appears that the GFW's active blocking of connections to Tor bridges had stopped, but we were still able to gather valuable data about the probing performed by the GFW, which previously led directly and verifiably to blocking.

To this end we discovered two types of probing. First, "garbage binary" probes, containing nothing more than arbitrary (but sometimes repeated in later probes) binary data, were experienced by the non-China side of any connection that originated from China to TCP port 443 (HTTPS) in which an SSL negotiation was performed. This probe was performed in near-real-time after the connection was established, implying near-line-rate deep packet inspection (DPI) capabilities. TCP/443 connections not performing an SSL handshake, such as using the obfsproxy obfs2 protocol or a plain-text protocol, did not provoke probing. The purpose of these probes is unknown, and further investigation is difficult to justify when it seems relatively clear that these probes are not aimed at Tor.

The second type of probe, on the other hand, is aimed quite directly at Tor. When a Tor client within China connected to a US-based bridge relay, we consistently found that at the next round 15 minute interval (HH:00, HH:15, HH:30, HH:45), the bridge relay would receive a probe from hosts within China that not only established a TCP connection, but performed an SSL negotiation, an SSL renegotiation, and then spoke the Tor protocol sufficiently to build a one-hop circuit and send a BEGIN_DIR cell. No matter what TCP port the bridge was listening on, once a Tor client from China connected, within 3 minutes of the next 15 minute interval we saw a series of probes including at least one connection speaking the Tor protocol.

The good news is, we were able to isolate which characteristic of the Tor handshake the GFW was using to decide whether or not to initiate these probes. By making a simple change to the list of supported SSL ciphers in the "hello" packet sent by the Tor client within China, we were able to prevent the probes from taking place. This has been documented and is being discussed in ticket #4744. This differs slightly from the method used by Iran to block Tor in September 2011, using the client-side of the SSL negotiation as its trigger rather than the server-side. It is likely, however, that technology capable of targeting either side of the connection to this degree could also target the other side, so it remains important to consider both the server and client sides of the Tor connection when attempting to blend in with normal, benign traffic.

The bad news, however, is that this is happening at all. This probe again implies sophisticated near-line-rate DPI technology, coupled with a system that is aimed directly at Tor, using code that actually speaks the Tor protocol. Clearly there is a target painted firmly on Tor, and it is quite likely that the Chinese will continue to adapt their censorship technology as the Tor Project adapts to them.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, though. A number of ideas have been put forward about new protocols, handshakes, and extensions to the Tor protocol that could be used to combat this type of censorship technology in a more long-term-sustainable way. Proposal 190 provides for password authorization for bridge relays. obfsproxy provides an extra layer on top of a Tor connection that makes it look like generic binary data. The Tor v3 link protocol/handshake, currently available and in testing in the 0.2.3.x-alpha series of Tor releases, eliminates SSL renegotiation in Tor session establishment, removing one of Tor's current "sore thumbs" that stick out from normal HTTPS SSL traffic.

You're welcome to check out my full report on this investigation for more detail than I could provide in the blog post here. Thanks very much to everyone who assisted with the investigation and the report! It was fun to investigate and report on this, and I hope to have the opportunity to help out with similar adventures in the future.
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/kno...-bridges-doors

Delaware Student Takes Top Prize at Annual Cyber Competition

The U.S. Cyber Challenge recently announced the results of its annual Fall Cyber Foundations competition with the top honors going to Gavy Aggrawal, a sophomore at Delaware’s Charter School of Wilmington

The U.S. Cyber Challenge recently announced the results of its annual Fall Cyber Foundations competition with the top honors going to Gavy Aggrawal, a sophomore at Delaware’s Charter School of Wilmington.

The competition is designed to spark interest among high school students in cybersecurity and is a feeder program for other U.S. Cyber Challenge events like the collegiate level competitions.

The challenge tests participants on several basic elements of cybersecurity including networking, operating systems, and system administration.

More than 2,000 students from across the United States participated in the challenge which took place online. Ultimately Aggrawal walked away with the highest score of 28,008 points and a $2,500 scholarship.

Aggrawal credits his success with his careful preparation for the event following last spring’s competition. In particular Aggrawal said he focused on security problems with smartphone applications.

Following Aggrawal, Ryan Foster of Ohio ranked second, trailed by Andrey Kuklev of Michigan, Jade Mollard of Maryland, and Jeffrey Yuan of California.

The top five finishers in the nation each received scholarships courtesy of ISC2, the event’s sponsors.
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire....er-competition

Barnes and Nobel is Legally Obligated to Release Source
AdamOutler

It would seem that Barnes and Nobel is betraying the most sacred of things in the open-source world, The General Public License(GPL). As open source programmers we all use the GPL daily. The GPL is what keeps Open-Source work like the Linux kernel free, modifiable and re-distributable. I tried to compile the sources provided by Barnes and Nobel, but they are incomplete. They will not compile.. I'm not the only one, others have tried and failed as well.

So, I made a post on the Barnes and Nobel website. Last time I checked, at about 1PM today, the post had received about 20 responses and 38 "laurels" (their version of thanks). Each response was positive and that is an extraordinary amount of support, considering some of their "top laurled posts" have received 35 Laurels in 4 weeks.

Barnes and Nobel deleted my request for source code granted by the GPL.

These screen-shots were cached on my home computer before I went to sleep last night.
Cached screenshot1:http://i41.tinypic.com/szy847.png
Cached Screenshot2:http://i43.tinypic.com/2vsm7v9.png

Text in case something happens to the images or the host is blocked in your country:

Barnes and Noble, you have a legal obligation to release full, compilable source. I have tried to compile the provided sources here to no avail. The provided sources are incomplete.

1.4.0 source: http://images.barnesandnoble.com/PRe...let_1-4.tar.gz

1.4.1 source: http://images.barnesandnoble.com/PRe...t_1-4-1.tar.gz

The following quotes are from GPL-Violations.org http://gpl-violations.org/faq/sourcecode-faq.html

What kind of source code do I have to publish under the GNU GPL?
The GNU GPL demands that as soon as you distribute GPL licensed software in executable format you make available the "complete corresponding source code". The GNU GPL also contains a definition of this term:

“ The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. ”
How can I verify that my source code release is complete? This is quite easy. If you only use source code provided in that release, and you can use this source code to produce a working form of the executable code, then the source code release seems complete.

If the build process fails, or you end up with a non-working executable, or you have no way to install the resulting executable, then clearly something is missing.

By releasing uncompilable source, you are not only making yourself look bad... You're violating the terms of service you agreed to by using the Linux kernel in the first place... You're loosing footholes in the open-source community.. You're also putting yourself up for legal action.

As a book seller, you should respect the fact that Open-Source work falls into the same category as a classic novel. It is a public treasure and should be treated as such. Your failure to abide by the rules is not only offensive, but it is illegal. Using Linux is not a free cash cow. Linux is free as in "freedom of speech", not free as in "free beer". You have a duty to release full kernel and U-Boot sources.

I've requested sources, now please provide full, compilable, executable source.

They DELETED my request for corresponding source code because it does not comply with their terms of service agreement. This is unacceptable by the licensing they agreed upon in the GPL:

Code:

3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

    a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, 
    b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, 
    c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)

• Barnes and Nobel sold the device with side-loading enabled, let the tech sites review it, then locked out that feature.
• Barnes and Nobel is refusing applications for those without Tax ID numbers or business licenses to develop Open-Source Android apps on the Open-Source Android platform.
• Barnes and Nobel is in a state of non-compliance with the GPL.

I recommend contacting Barnes and Noblel about these in the following ways:

Customer Service: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/customerservice/contactus
Device Support: https://nookdeveloper.barnesandnoble...t/support.html
Direct Email: service@barnesandnoble.com and support@book.com

This site is called XDA-Developers because of the GPL. Without the GPL, we would not be conducting legitimate development, it would be something else like XDA-Hackers. As DEVELOPERS, we need to stand up for our rights and get the tools we need to develop. Please take action, in a professional manner XDA-Developers. Every e-mail and support request counts.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/show....php?t=1432003

Pseudonyms Drive Communities!

TiVo: Recorded and Internet-Delivered Content Surpasses Live TV Viewership

The DVR company’s audience research unit found that only 38 percent of viewing is live, or 27 percent among users of Netflix, YouTube, Hulu Plus and other Web video options.
Georg Szalai

DVR pioneer TiVo on Wednesday said its latest research shows that viewership of recorded TV programs and Internet-delivered content is surpassing live TV viewership.

Looking at Web-connected TiVo devices, nearly two thirds of viewing on them is now driven by delayed TV or online on-demand content, it said. TiVo's audience research division, which tracks anonymous usage across 2 million TiVo devices on a second-by-second basis, said that only 38 percent of viewing is live.

Among users of so-called broadband over-the-top access to Netflix, YouTube, Hulu Plus and other online video options, live viewership amounts to only 27 percent, according to the DVR company.

"This new second-by-second data shows that on demand viewing though a combination of time shifting on the DVR and broadband OTT has become a huge part of the consumer's entertainment mix," said Tara Maitra, senior vp and general manager of content and media sales for TiVo. "It really has become all about whatever they want to watch, whenever they want to watch it."

Said TiVo president and CEO Tom Rogers: "As people watch less live TV, the television industry is being challenged like never before to meet the needs of viewers. For the cable industry, TiVo is the leading provider of advanced television solutions that deliver seamless access to four forms of content - traditional live TV, recordings from TV linear channels, operator video-on-demand, and broadband-delivered video.”
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...live-tv-280469

'Data Hog' Study Hypocritically Blames Customer For 1% of Phones that Eat 25% of Bandwidth

New study blames iPhone, Android users to sucking up more than fair share of cell bandwidth
Kevin Fogarty

Most people know – thanks to relentless, pepper-spray-flavored attempts the OccupyWallStreet movement spent months reminding us during 2011 – that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans took in a quarter of all the income available to individuals last year. They also own 40 percent of everything there is to own, according to Census and U.S. Treasury figures

That inequity prompted enough Occupations that defenders of or aspirants to the 1 percent worried aloud that the various Occupations would turn into an American version of the revolutions dubbed "Arab Spring" earlier in the year.

That was alarmist hyperbole, of course, painting the protesters as dangerously unstable, potentially violent criminals intent on destroying all the things that made America great just to satisfy their own self-obsessed senses of entitlement.

"Blame the Victim" is a really good game if you're the one being accused and can't come up with any plausible reasons to explain why a decades-long obsessive, pathological selfishness is not only legal(ish), but more Constitutional than allowing the victims to stand up and complain about being dismissed, marginalized and robbed of what used to be called the American Dream, and permanently relegated to lower socio-economic classes no matter how great their talents or ambitions.

That's all about life, liberty and pursuing happiness, though – issues about which people tend to be sensitive because all three got a passing reference in some archaic, handwritten notes that are obviously irrelevant in the 21st century except the parts that allow the owning of guns, slaves and monopolies.

Warning to Congress: Give carriers a break before iPhoners eat us all!

Will anyone get anywhere near that upset following revelations that users of the iPhone 4S are nearly as blatant hogs of cellular bandwidth as "the 1 percent" are of the income, property and civil rights titularly available to every American?

iPhone 4S smartphones use twice as much bandwidth as iPhone 4s, and three times the bandwidth of iPhone 3G users, possibly due to the relentless self-querying, web-surfing digital personal assistant Siri that comes with Apple's newest phones.

Just 1 percent (we have heard that number before) – 1 percent of all wireless users consume half of all the data downloaded across cellular networks every day, according to a new study from cellular-network management vendor Arieso.

ManyAndroid users also qualify as what Arieso calls "extreme" users – uploading three times as much data as iPhone 3G users and making far more data calls per subscriber – though both other iPhone versions are ahead even of the top Androids in most usage metrics.

In one portion of Arieso's writeup the company becomes blatantly self-serving: it warns that that carriers don't know enough about who the data hogs are and what do to about them. Arieso sells software claiming to be able to fix that problem.

Carriers on guard against 'extreme users' who use and buy services the carriers promote relentlessly

The more insidious part of the writeup is the one in which Arieso stops talking about which devices use the most data and switches directly to a blatantly sycophantic, contextually inaccurate claim that "extreme users" are to blame for overloaded mobile networks.

“The introduction of increasingly sophisticated devices, coupled with growing consumer demand, is creating unrelenting pressure on mobile networks. The capacity crunch is still a very real threat for mobile operators, and it looks set to only get harder in 2012,” commented Dr. Michael Flanagan, CTO, Arieso and study author. “The mobile industry needs new investment and new approaches to boost network performance and manage the customer experience”. – Arieso CTO Michael Flanagan, Jan. 6, 2012, announcing the study “Recent Smartphone Trends & the Extreme Data User”

That all sounds dire enough to prompt some serious action. The first time you hear them so do the over-parodied local-news promos that ask "Is your shampoo killing you? Tune in at 11 for the answer," (which is 'no').

The carriers' version of killer shampoo is the extreme user who is selfishly eating up so much wireless bandwidth that carriers are helpless to provide even adequate levels of service to everyone else with a smartphone.

Carriers complain that the FCC is shackling them with oppressive regulation, preventing them from properly managing their networks and allowing them to be victimized by anarchic, patchouli-smelling, financial-district-camping subversive bandwidth pirates whose reigns of terror the carriers did nothing to promote and whose outrages damage the Economy and Moral Fabric of these United States.

Relentless competition for data hogs

That's good political theater for people who still believe anything carriers say about their intentions for net neutrality, the technical capabilities and bandwidth of their networks or the degree to which they are involved in the technologies they claim will be their downfall without radical deregulation.

AT&T, for example, consistently sits at the bottom of the performance- and customer-service-rating scale.

Consumer Reports rated AT&T service the worst of all the major carriers at the end of 2010. During the following quarter, the first of 2011, its rating dropped even further. AT&T finished 2011 still at the bottom of the list in quality of service and satisfaction of its customers.

Higher-rated carriers spent most of 2010 and 2011 chasing what AT&T had, though – the iPhone and its data-hogging customers.

Verizon eventually managed to get iPhones to sell and, along with them, another reason to complain that it should be exempt from net neutrality regulations because all the new iPhone customers were hogging all its bandwidth.

(It definitely helped attract the "hogs" that Verizon offered unlimited-data plans for the iPhone at first, though it quickly nixed that in favor of bandwidth-use-limiting data caps and higher fees for every byte a user downloads beyond 2GB/month.)

It may be my fevered imagination from my relatively ancient and superficial training in economics in college, but cutting off a plan to offer unlimited amounts of anything for a flat fee and charging usurous fees for the same service seems to qualify as a cost/benefit-based control of usage.

That is, it's an approach that pays not only for the service itself, but pays for the abuse of the system by a few bad apples by making them pay for disproportionate use with disproportionate fees.

Verizon had its problems getting even a vaguely accurate idea of how much data people were using, of course. That's just incompetence and a refusal to instrument your network to the point that you can actually control it.

I can't imagine any network manager getting an unlimited upgrade budget justified by his or her failure to figure out ahead of time how heavily the network was already being used.

That's what Verizon and AT&T are doing, though. And they're blaming the "extreme users" for putting them in an untenable position.
Is there a tech-industry TLA for hypocrisy, calumny and highway robbery?

Every year the managers of state turnpikes and stat-road-maintenance bureaus make the same argument, by the way: there are too many cars; they're doing too much damage to my roads for me to fix; I need more money for roads.

Those claims are almost always over blown and under-supported by data, too. They have one thing going for them the carriers don't though: Civil engineers responsible for maintaining state highways have no real control over how many people live in the state, travel through it, own cars, drove on highways, or drive on highways a LOT.

Carriers have almost total control over everyone of those things.

The services like Siri, auto-download, auto-updata apps Android users are unable to delete from their phones, and the increasing volume of web traffic coming from smartphones are all growing because the carriers add those services to their networks without upgrading the networks enough to support them.

That's not the fault of people who buy the data-hog phones or use the data-hog services.

It's the fault of the cell-network engineers (actually their boss's boss's bosses) who didn't add a few extra subnets or a few upgraded routers to data bottlenecks.

It's even more the fault of the carriers' financial policies, which charge sky-high fees for every service or move online through a smartphone – money that could easily be used to upgrade the networks supposedly being swamped by extreme-user data-hogging iPhone 4S and Android users.

If the problem exists at all – and it largely does not – it's more the fault of the carriers' decision to oversell the network, not the decision of extreme users to overuse it.

"Extreme" users are doing exactly what the carriers worked so hard to sell them on: a ubiquitous voice-and-data service rich enough to provide directions, communications, recommendations, shopping, advice and information piped directly into the hand of the subscriber wherever he or she is.

Users don't really want to pay the inflated data-plan fees most carriers charge. They do it anyway, but realize they're being overcharged.

Even at those rates the data fees don't cover the need to expand networks and services as quickly as carriers need to do.

That's why concepts like return-on-investment and risk-analysis entered the business world: There are times, frequent ones, during which businesses have to invest in themselves in order to be able to reap greater profits afterward.

It's a well established principle, with well-documented metrics to define how well it's working.

It doesn't include the need to villify the leading-edge customers willing to pay a premium to get the first, unreliable versions of the service and help offset some of the investment with those higher fees, their de facto role as test dummies for new technology and the example they set to more prudent users who would prefer to wait for prices to come down and quality to come up before buying new, expensive services.

Don't spend all day hard-selling me a Cadillac and then call me a gas guzzler!

'Data Hogs' and 'Extreme Users' aren't deadbeats; they're good customers who caved in to the hard sell on devices that are expensive both to buy and to use.

They're not deadbeats.

So why do carriers keep claiming they are?

Same reason "the 1 percent" complain that OccupyWallStreet people are anarchists intent on destroying our economy and society: if they can't demonize someone else they can't trade on fear of a demon to get what they want.

And, if there weren't a demon – or a scapegoat, if you prefer a less colorful metaphor – on which to blame both existing problems and those the carriers intend to create with the next set of expensive services they add to the net, they might have to take the blame themselves for creating networks without enough bandwidth, flexibility or cost-effectiveness to provide the level of service they promise without grossly overcharging the exact customers they pursued most ardently.

There are specific characteristics required for anyone cynical enough to sell premium services and then complain that they're being used, though they're more common in politics than technology:

1. Hypocrisy.

2. Constant self-serving restatements of the 'truth.' (Called 'lies' in person and 'rhetoric' on the campaign trail.)

3. A shameless and unethical willingness to manipulate and exploit customers, lawmakers, the economy and smartphone service providers in order to let carriers promise the moon and bill for it, but deliver only the image of a cable guy, pants around his ankles, facing away from us, bowing politely to deliver the right spin on the message the carriers are delivering.
http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wirele...t-25-bandwidth

How France’s Free Will Reinvent Mobile
Om Malik

Xavier Niel, the maverick founder of Iliad, the company behind Free.fr broadband service is about to redefine the mobile landscape, perhaps as early as tomorrow when he launches the much-talked about Free Mobile. In doing so, he will redefine what is the idea of a carrier in the 21st century thanks to a radical new approach. Utilizing a blend of Wifi, HSPA+ 3G, Femto cells and its all-fiber backbone, Free will offer unlimited voice, texting and data over the mobile networks. Just bring your own iPhone. But before I get into the details of his new company, let me back up and tell you about Iliad and Free.fr.

Set it Free.fr

In December 2007, while attending Le Web in Paris, I snuck out to visit Niel, the man behind Iliad, a Paris-based phone service that owned many entities including its most well known offering: Free.fr, a broadband service that offered phone (VoIP), video (IPTV) and broadband for a simple flat monthly fee. A simple low monthly rate was possible because of the network he owned and the technologies he used. Here is what I wrote then:

By offering a flat-rate, high-speed Internet connection for 30 euros ($43) a month. That gives Free.fr’s three million subscribers a connection speed of roughly 28 megabits per second over DSL, free IPTV (and a free set-top box), a free Wi-Fi hub, and unlimited voice calls to some 70 countries.

“We are a broadband service provider,” was his matter-of-fact reply. “Everything else — from voice to IPTV to storage – is just a feature that rides on this data service.” For the rest of the telecom industry, long addicted to metered minutes and billable items, this is rebellious thinking.

Niel, who had started Free in 1999, bought a lot of dark fiber from carriers who had gone bust around the turn of the century and built an IP-only network that snaked across France. The unbundling of the telecom loops had given the necessary push to offer fast DSL and use the broadband pipes to offer different services. The flat fee model would force the incumbents – France Telecom (now Orange) and other competitors to follow suit. They too started offering simpler rate plans.

Going Mobile

In the four years since I first met him, Niel who is now 44 years old, is much more wealthier than he was in 2007. The number of subscribers on his Free.fr service have grown to five million. But his big bet on fiber hasn’t paid off — just yet. With the wireline market saturated, Niel started eyeing more opportunities – especially in the mobile arena.

Free.fr is under pressure from the quad-play offerings – broadband, mobile, VoIP and video – from three of its major rivals France Telecom, Vivendi’s SFR and Bouygues Telecom. The company needs to respond by its own quad-play offering. To be fair, Niel saw it coming a long time ago and had applied for mobile licenses back in 2007. and Free Mobile was awarded a license in December 2009 at the cost of 240 million euros. The company also signed up a roaming agreement with Orange to cover most of the service.

And now the mobile service is ready. There are few details available and Niel is keeping his cards close to the chest. In December 2011, once again I ducked out of Le Web and visited Niel in his offices in the 8th Arrondissement, a chic business district. He has moved next door from his old office having taken over a massive building with a lovely rotunda. It is befitting the growing stature of his company and the main himself. However, inside his offices, nothing much as changed.

About three dozen engineers form the brain trust of Free.fr, inventing new features for the service. Five guys who built the software and a few others who hacked together the hardware are standing by the side as the boss man gives the demo. It was just like 2007 — as if nothing had changed.

For about 45 minutes Niel gave me demo of his set-top box: which is everything a modern connected home needs- broadband modem, wifi router, storage center, a blue-ray player, web-surfing device and a game machine. And while it might not have the Apple brand, you could see who had inspired the Free’s set-top box. Why it was even able to playback music from my iPhone using AirPlay.

Set-top Box = Stealth Weapon

“Since it is our own set-top box, we can innovate around it,” he says. “In the US, they buy their set-top boxes from other providers.” And that is a mistake and lost opportunity, Niel says and proceeds to outline how pivotal these set-top boxes are for his company and its future.

For example, Free.fr used the set-top box for automatically sharing a portion of one’s broadband connection via WiFi with other Free.fr customers. Over five million set-top boxes means that Free.fr has a a free WiFi cloud enveloping major cities such as Paris. Even when away from home, you can easily get broadband while resorting to expensive 3G network.

This Free.Fr free wifi network is going to play a pivotal role in the soon to be launched service, which will be using 42 Mbps HSPA+ technology. The company has built a network of 15,000 macrocells, but those 5 million “nano cells” are going to be the key difference maker, Niel points out.

Free.fr’s newer set-top boxes will have built-in femto cells. On top of that, Free is going to be beefing up its macrocells with high-capacity fiber connections being fed by Iliad’s dark fiber. And when time comes, he is going to embrace LTE and include that into his network as well. “We will go to wide area network (3G and 2.5 G) when we are not in WiFi coverage,” he tells me. (I got a sneaking suspicion that Free would be pushing iPhones into the market pretty heavily.) If they pull it off, it is going to be pretty spectacular and once again show what telecom of tomorrow looks like.

I couldn’t help but notice that in 2000, he roped in Cisco, then desperately trying to get a toe-hold in the broadband market to help him with the network buildout. This time, he got an equally desperate Nokia Siemens Networks on the hook.

Mobile Money

When I ask him about the price, he demurs. “It will be cheaper than the current market price,” he adds. So how is he going to make money? The answer comes in a throwaway comment he made when we are sitting around talking. “In your pocket you have three things – your keys, your phone and your wallet,” he says. “I think of those three only one will remain – your phone.”

He believes telecoms should charge for access and make money by selling the ID and payment services, not voice and SMS. It is one of the reasons he loves Square, Jack Dorsey’s payment company where he is an angel investor. “It is crazy to pay for voice by the minute as voice is so cheap,” he says. Even SMS texting is a lot of money and he finds that crazy. “We are trying to be the cheapest mobile service in France,” he adds. Don’t be surprised to see Google Voice type services built into the service itself.

“Free has had a reputation as a trendsetter who understands the clarity consumers demand,” adds Rudolf van der Berg of OECD, an international treaty organisation, like the United Nations or the World Health Organisation that advises 34 countries (including France) on policies ranging from finances to telecoms.a global telecom group. ”Splitting the cost of the phone from the subscription simplifies things greatly for the consumer and might be a trend worth following. Certainly from a consumer rights perspective this is to be applauded as many offers from mobile phone company.”

According to some rumors the service is said to cost 30 Euros a month with unlimited calls to 100 countries, unlimited data and unlimited SMS (20 euro if you also have broadband.) “What it really does is make both data and voice usage completely irrelevant to consumers. How much do you call per month will be as interesting a question for your bill as, how many e-mails do you send per month,” says van der Berg.

“We have a different view of things because we are telecom with an Internet startup’s model,” Niel says. So far it is working. The company has sales of $2.8 billion and makes nearly a billion dollars in profits. For now it might seem good, but Niel knows that he has to continue out-innovating his rivals.

So what comes next?

For now his boffins are working on new 10 Gbps gear so that he can support the network upgrades he envisions. In three years from now, as network starts to support HD and 3D video streams, the pipes to our homes would need to have connections of around 1 Gbps. Niel points to the growing quality of televisions and points out that HD streams are going to have to get better. “We as a company have to begin now,” Niel says. “You don’t stand still and sell a product after the fact. We want to get people to use it.”

For now, Niel wants to get 20 million folks to use his mobile service.
http://gigaom.com/2012/01/09/how-fra...invent-mobile/

ViaSat Residential Satellite Broadband Internet Hands-On (Video)
Zach Honig

Last Thursday, ViaSat announced pricing for its new home broadband service, which is set to deliver 12 Mbps+ download speeds (3 Mbps+ up) beginning next week for $50 per month. We just dropped by the company's demo home just a few feet from the Engadget trailer at the Las Vegas Convention Center parking lot to try it out, and were quite impressed with the speeds we saw, especially considering that data was passing through the ViaSat-1 satellite thousands of miles above the Earth. We've used other satellite internet services before, and while there's still just over a half-second of latency, bandwidth speeds were significantly faster than what we've experienced with other services in the past.

HD YouTube videos loaded very quickly, after a brief delay, as did Engadget and many other media-rich news websites. We performed a speed test and registered ping speeds of about 600ms, download speeds of about 30 Mbps and upload speeds of about 2 Mbps, but results aren't as accurate as they would be with a land-based connection because of latency and the way packet data is handled. We also placed a VOIP call, and while the delay was noticeable there, it was still usable. Want to see for yourself? Jump past the break as we step through ViaSat's front door to hop online.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/08/v...ands-on-video/

With Enough Bandwidth, Many Join the Band
Catherine Saint Louis

When Dr. John McClure, a pathologist in Edina, Minn., was pondering his wish list several years ago, he added something a little out of the ordinary: learn to play the bagpipes. But his goal seemed like a long shot after a friend who had been teaching him moved away.

Now he is getting lessons from a top-tier teacher — Jori Chisholm, whose résumé includes a first-place award at the 2010 Cowal Highland Gathering in Dunoon, Scotland. Mr. Chisholm lives in Seattle, but distance is no longer a problem — Dr. McClure now takes lessons over Skype.

They even squeeze in a lesson sometimes when Dr. McClure, 50, is at work, though he keeps the noise down by using a practice chanter, essentially a pipe without a bag. “I’ve been on call, waiting for a specimen from the O.R., and I’ll do a lesson with Jori,” Dr. McClure said.

Skype and other videochat programs have transformed the simple phone call, but the technology is venturing into a new frontier: it is upending and democratizing the world of music lessons.

Students who used to limit the pool of potential teachers to those within a 20-mile radius from their homes now take lessons from teachers — some with world-class credentials — on other coasts or continents. The list of benefits is long: Players of niche instruments now have more access to teachers. Parents can simply send their child down the hall for lessons rather than driving them. And teachers now have a new way to build their business.

“I’ve seen videos of individuals teaching students all over the world,” said Gary Ingle, chief executive of the Music Teachers National Association. “There will be people who would never take a music lesson unless it’s done online. As music teachers, we should be willing to meet students where they are.”

There is no data on the number of video music lessons, and many people certainly will prefer face-to-face lessons. But many music teachers said in interviews that they were conducting more lessons over broadband connections.

Jeffrey Thomas, who has taught in music stores near Seattle for 22 years, now teaches guitar, bass and ukulele to 30 students over Skype and other webcam programs. If he gets 10 more students, he said, he will teach entirely from home, saving the money he now pays to rent studio space. “If you have a lesson at 4, and traffic won’t let you make it until 4:10, you just lost 10 minutes,” Mr. Thomas said. “Having to get to this location to be in a lesson is now obsolete. There’s no need for it.”

Parents are also driving the shift to webcam music lessons. After Susan Patterson grew tired of taking her 13-year-old daughter, Taylor, 45 minutes each way for violin lessons, she e-mailed 15 violin teachers with Web sites.

“There were some that were not advertising for Skype, but I proposed it to them,” said Mrs. Patterson, who was homeschooling her three children in Jane Lew, W. Va., before a recent move to Boykins, Va. “Out of the 15, 5 were willing and able to do the lessons.”

“It’s accessibility with quality,” she said.

Videochat has created new opportunities for older students, too. Ken Tucker, 67, a retired lawyer in Simsbury, Conn., figured he might have a hard time finding someone to teach him the bagpipes. “It used to be an adult learner couldn’t get a teacher, because people didn’t want to bother with someone who didn’t have a future,” he said. Now he has a lesson every Wednesday morning with Donald F. Lindsay, a professional piper in Petersburgh, N.Y., who also has a few students in their late 70s, including a 79-year-old student in Islip, N.Y.

The convenience of online learning means fewer missed lessons, said Nick Antonaccio, the owner of Rockfactory, a 10-room music studio in Newtown, Pa., that has 200 students, 25 of whom do some lessons remotely.

“People who do online lessons end up doing a more consistent lesson schedule,” he said. “They don’t have to fight snowstorms. They don’t have to take an hour a day to get to us. Other things don’t conflict, like baseball games.” And most lessons are recorded so students can play them back while practicing, Mr. Antonaccio said.

However, many parents remain wary of laptop lessons. Their chief reservation is that teachers can’t manipulate a student’s fingers to fine-tune the subtleties of playing a string instrument. “A lot of people don’t trust that the experience is the same,” said Mr. Antonaccio, who’s offered online lessons in violin, piano, and guitar since 2004. Even so, he said, “We have had kids that have grown up and learned to play entirely on camera.”

Lessons over the home computer can create headaches of their own, though. Joey Potuzak, 17, a guitarist in Mountlake Terrace, Wash., occasionally yelled at his family because the webcam connection required so much bandwidth. “I’d tell everyone in my house, ‘I’m having a guitar lesson. Everyone off the computers!’ ” Mr. Potuzak said. “They were annoyed.” His family has since upgraded the Internet connection in their home.

Music teachers are finding that video lessons offer them some more stability for a profession that is known for its ups and downs. Laurel Thomsen, a violin and viola instructor, held on to all of her Skype students when she moved recently from Monterey, Calif., to Santa Cruz. “Less and less are in-person people, and more and more are Skype people contacting me,” she said.

Video is also creating new opportunities for tech-savvy teachers to build a business in this struggling economy. This year, after Matt Dahlberg, 22, a student at Edmonds Community College known as the Jumping Flea, graduates, he hopes he will be able to support himself and his fiancée, a nursing student, mostly by teaching ukulele via Skype.

“I’m constantly turning people down, because I can’t give as many lessons as I’d like to give because I’m still in school,” said Mr. Dahlberg, whose nickname is the literal translation of ukulele, a Hawaiian word.

He has 18 students, ranging in age from 6 to 50-something, including Karen Siebert, 57, a software developer from Cedar Grove, N.J., who discovered Mr. Dahlberg on YouTube, where thousands of people have viewed his videos, including his cover of Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.”

“He’s a baby, but he plays phenomenal,” Ms. Siebert said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/u...opularity.html

The Dumbest Attack on the Netflix "Free Ride" You Have Ever Read
Nate Anderson

I've just about managed to stuff all those gloopy spare bits of brain back into my skull, but it took a while. I blame Harold Ford Jr. and John Sununu, the ex-politicians now shilling for the ISP-backed Broadband for America, for blowing my mind. Their most recent op-ed, which takes shaky aim at Netflix, must be one of the dumbest such pieces I have ever read—and I have read a lot of them.

I would not absolutely swear that their Mercury News piece makes any coherent points, though vestigial traces of argument run through the post, going nowhere. The overriding idea is that Netflix must hand over wads of cash to Internet providers—$83 million a year being a nice round number.

Netflix didn't get where it is today by handing out $83 million checks to anyone who asks, but the argument—such as it is—says that we need a new payment scheme that's "socially responsible and fair." Translation: Netflix is a dirty freeloader that quite possibly reeks of marijuana smoke.

"The reality is that Netflix and similar services want a free ride on the networks built with more than $250 billion in design, engineering, manufacturing, construction and maintenance," says the op-ed, giving its angle away. That sweet Netflix cash needs to flow to the small cartel of broadband operators who aren't making any money are hugely profitable, so that they can keep building out their networks.

"But," I hear you asking, "doesn't Netflix somehow pay for its bandwidth already? And if not, how do I get a piece of that free Internet action?"
The economics of "freeriding"

Netflix does pay. The company's 2010 annual report (PDF) notes that it uses the "services of third-party cloud computing providers, more specifically, Amazon Web Services, as well as content delivery networks such as Level 3 Communications, to help us efficiently stream TV shows and movies." Neither Amazon nor

Level 3 works for free.

If Netflix received a free ride, then ISPs would have no way to increase the company's costs. As it is, however, "to the extent that network operators implement usage based pricing, including meaningful bandwidth caps, or otherwise try to monetize access to their networks by data providers, we could incur greater operating expenses."

In the Internet ecosystem, money flows in multiple directions, but no one works for free. Your home Internet fee pays your own ISP for its network, but portions of your bill are paid out by your ISP for "transit" onto other networks. In other cases, ISPs connect directly to networks with similar traffic volumes, called "peering," and the sides simply agree to call things even rather than send nearly identical checks back and forth. Newer arrangements like "paid peering" use the same direct connections but charge a fee, usually because one side is sending far more traffic than the other. Netflix also pays from its end, and its fee also propagates through the Internet thanks to peering and transit agreements.

Internet distribution is certainly cheap—Netflix estimates streaming costs about a penny per hour—but it's not free.

The Ford/Sununu op-ed then makes a totally different argument, that the Netflix calculation "ignores the hundreds of billions of dollars in sunken network investments needed to create that one-penny marginal cost efficiency at the customer's end." True, but that's because Netflix is only talking about streaming. Ford and Sununu make it sound like the content is being freely acquired and then transmitted at almost no cost.

This is patently absurd. To get streaming content, the Netflix annual report points out that "we typically enter into multi-year, fixed-fee licenses with studios and other distributors. As of December 31, 2010, we had over $1.2 billion in such contractual commitments covering payments due over the next several years. Furthermore, we plan on increasing the level of committed content licensing in anticipation of our service and subscriber base continuing to grow." And, as Netflix grows in popularity, those fees are going up.

So Netflix pays to acquire the content, then again to stream the content, and consumers pay both their ISP and Netflix to view the content. This is so far from a free ride that Netflix spent $1.15 billion, or 53.4 percent of its 2010 revenues, to acquire its video content and distribute it on DVDs and over the Internet. Its streaming bill in particular increased in 2010 "due to higher costs associated with our use of third-party delivery networks resulting from an increase in the total number of hours of streaming content viewed by our subscribers."

Then the Ford/Sununu piece careens again. Suddenly, the issue isn't about what Netflix pays, it's about what consumers pay. "Broadband networks are delivering more than just the latest sitcom episodes and hottest movies," says the piece. "They facilitate telemedicine, education, job training, telecommuting and many other functions. It hardly seems fair to make users of these services pay more in order to subsidize Netflix's costs of delivering their videos online."

The thinking here isn't really explained, but it seems to be that Netflix streaming uses tons of bandwidth; grandma just uses the Internet for e-mail; ergo, grandma should pay less for her Internet connection than those Internet-hogging hippies next door. To which the only real answer is: ISPs can certainly try this pricing model if they want! (It has not proven popular in the past.)

Indeed, Ford and Sununu then note that the FCC has no problem with ISPs "asking subscribers who use the network less to pay less, and subscribers who use the network more to pay more." US ISPs actually do this already, especially on smartphones, where extra fees kick in once users exceed a certain monthly data allowance.

"Ham-fisted analogies"

The op-ed ends with the line, "But many increasingly question a service that forces tens of millions of non-customers to pay for something they never use." Netflix doesn't do this, of course; ISPs do, and they are free to alter their pricing schemes in a non-discriminatory manner and see how the market responds. The exact same argument could be deployed against any higher-than-average-bandwidth Internet service; what it has to do with Netflix is unclear—and my overtaxed brain simply exploded.

I wasn't the only one. Comments on the piece are utterly negative. The very first one says, "With all due respect, this has to be one of the most poorly written or thought out articles I've come across in some time."

Trashing the piece is almost too easy; it's become something of a sporting event in wonkish circles this week. Matt Yglesias, from the Center for American Progress, concluded, "Indeed, it’s difficult to see what the policy issue here is supposed to be. Do they want regulators to create a cartel? Why?"

Liberal media watchdog Media Matters said, "It's possible that there is a point buried somewhere in its ham-fisted analogies and confused understanding of how broadband services work, but I'm struggling to see it."

Target acquired

So what was the target of the op-ed? "Data transfer" is one of the top issues on the Broadband for American website, which describes the "challenge" before us as: "how can we best ensure ongoing investment in robust broadband networks, let networks continue to work out their traffic exchanges by contract, and permit any disputes to be resolved without involving the courts or the regulators?"

This is aimed at Level 3, the huge transit provider that more recently got into the content delivery business and now hosts much of Netflix's data. Last year, Level 3 and Comcast got into a nasty spat over peering arrangements. Comcast wanted Level 3 to start paying to deliver traffic, while Level 3 retorted that its Netflix traffic in particular had been requested by Comcast users and it was really doing Comcast a favor. The dispute then migrated to the FCC.

Comcast and its fellow ISPs want to charge more to content providers, and they don't want the government mucking about with these contracts. Separately, many would also like to lower data caps and institute overage charges under out of "fairness," but consumers have rebelled against low caps (higher caps have passed without too much resistance).

The op-ed seems like an effort to tie both of these ISP concerns to the "Red Menace" that is Netflix. Instead, it manages the impressive feat of making both ideas look just about bankrupt.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-ever-read.ars

Woman Wins Court Order to Stop Explicit Photos Being Shared Online

A University student has won a High Court order to stop explicit photographs of her taken from her mobile phone from being shared online.
Martin Beckford

The female university student had taken the sexual images for her boyfriend, but after her phone was lost or stolen she found that they were being circulated on the internet together with her name and Facebook profile.

She was contacted online by someone who threatened to tell her friends about the pictures, while an alleged attempt was made to blackmail her father about them.

The images were uploaded to file-sharing websites and came up as the top result for internet searches of her name.

As a result she began a novel legal attempt to stop the intimate photos being uploaded or downloaded by targeting users of a file-sharing service called BitTorrent, under human rights laws and legislation against harassment.

In addition, she sought to obtain the same sort of injunction guaranteeing anonymity that public figures have used to stop details of their love affairs being published in newspapers.

The orders were granted by Mr Justice Ramsey in the Technology and Construction Court last month, following a three-year battle, allowing the claimant’s lawyers to find websites hosting the photos alongside her name and order them to stop doing so.

Experts say the judgement could have “far-reaching” consequences in the attempt to bring social media users across Europe within the reach of the law.

The judge ruled: “I consider that non-disclosure of the identity of the Claimant is therefore necessary to protect the interests of that Claimant.

“In such circumstances on the basis of the matters set out in the evidence and pleading I consider that this is an appropriate case for the court to grant relief both in relation to a breach of the Claimant's right to privacy and also a breach of the provisions of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997.

“This is a case where the Claimant is entitled to an interim injunction to prevent the distribution of the digital photographic images, either by conventional downloading from a site or by downloading by the use of the BitTorrent Protocol.”

The judgement, highlighted by the UK Human Rights Blog, states that while at university in June 2008 the woman, referred to only as AMP, either lost her mobile or had it stolen, and reported it to police.

“The phone contained digital images of the Claimant which had been taken in or about August 2007 using the digital camera on that phone.

“These digital images included images of an explicit sexual nature which were taken for the personal use of her boyfriend at the time.

“The Claimant is alone in the photos and her face is clearly visible. The phone also contained other digital images of her family and friends.”

Soon after her phone went missing, these photos were uploaded to a file-sharing website and she was “informed by strangers on Facebook that the images had been uploaded and that her name and Facebook profile had been attached to them”.

She complained and the images were taken down in about August 2008, but around the same time she was contacted on Facebook by a man who “threatened to expose her identity and to post the images widely online and tell her friends about the images if she did not add him as a friend”.

In addition, “her father's business public relations team were contacted and allegedly threatened and blackmailed about some images but it was not specified that the images were of her”.

Later that year the photographs were placed on a Swedish file-sharing website, and went to “the top of the list of search engine searches for her name”.

Her lawyers used US law to remove some of these links, but went to the High Court because of the particular problems posed by the “peer-to-peer” form of file-sharing called BitTorrent.

Under this technology, which is harder for authorities to stop than individual websites that host illegal files themselves, internet users who download files in turn become uploaders or “seeders” of a piece of the file, so that others can then access it when they are online.

Experts told the court that if they also downloaded the files, they would be able to identify the unique IP Address of every computer that is helping to share the images and then contact their broadband provider to find their name and address.

If enough of the “seeders” were contacted and ordered to stop their account being used, it would become harder for anyone to download the pictures.

As a result, the woman brought the claim against “persons unknown”, so a forensic computer company instructed by her lawyers could track down anyone hosting the files. It is said that anyone in the EU could be bound by the order.

The judge agreed that the woman had a “reasonable expectation of privacy” with regard to her photos under the Human Rights Act, while those sharing them did not enjoy the right to freedom of expression.

He also said the dissemination of the pictures amounted to a breach of the Protection from Harassment Act, and that she should be granted anonymity in order to protect her privacy and avoid further harassment.

Andrew Murray, Professor of Law at the LSE who was involved in the case, wrote on his blog that the case “provides a new approach to the regulation of online content for individuals” and could show that “content on BitTorrent may just be regulatable after all”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...ed-online.html

'Net Sex' Allows Women to 'Take the Lead': Study

Sexual encounters on the internet are more than just porn surfing and those who frequent the sites aren't just passive victims or lonely loons, according to a new Swedish-American study.

”We been looking at how the phenomenon has changed,” said Kristian Daneback, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg.

In the study, Danemark and his American colleague focus on the internet sex culture and reveal that the internet makes it easier for gay men to hook up, for women to be more hands-on in initiating sexual liaisons, and for youngsters to get answers to their queries on sex and relationships.

Anything that is in any way connected to sex can be found on the internet today.

Shy customers, too nervous to visit a sex shop, can purchase sex toys online.

On addition, those that don't like the social scene can meet a partner via an internet dating service.

According to Daneback, the internet today contains more images and more possibilities for interaction. And as a result of this development, the group making use of these pages has become more complex.

”The image that people had of this group was initially very negative. It was believed that only very special people used the internet for sexual purposes,” Danemark said to TT.

Despite the fact that many Swedes today have visited a sex page at one time or another, many of them together with a partner, the negative image of internet porn surfers remains.

The users are often regarded as passive victims.

”But what we have been able to see is that people make an active choice as to what they want to make use of. They make competent choices,” Danemark said.

However, according to Danemark, there is still too little knowledge on how or if sex surfing on the internet has changed the way people have sex in real life.
http://www.thelocal.se/37848/20111209/

Joel J. Tyler, Judge Who Pronounced ‘Deep Throat’ Obscene, Dies at 90
Bruce Weber

Joel J. Tyler, who as a Manhattan judge ruled, in a particularly explicit and colorful opinion, that the pornographic film “Deep Throat” was obscene and that the New York City theaters showing it were breaking the law, inadvertently helping it become perhaps the most popular X-rated movie of all time, died in Yonkers on Nov. 9. He was 90.

The cause was a heart attack, his daughter Alexandra said. She said the family did not report his death until now because her father did not want the acknowledgment. But in the weeks after his death, she said, she and her sister, Lisa, “came to feel overwhelmingly that he deserved it.”

Judge Tyler, a former city commissioner of licenses, had been on the Criminal Court bench for four years when “Deep Throat” opened at the New Mature World Theater on West 49th Street on June 12, 1972. The film, about a woman whose quest for sexual satisfaction is frustrated until she discovers that her clitoris is in her throat, almost immediately became a touchstone in the culture wars of the day.

On one side was outrage over the film’s flagrant and unashamed depiction of sex acts; on the other was cheering for its daring to confront social taboos and to present a woman’s sexual needs as being equally robust as a man’s.

A notorious artifact, “Deep Throat” became a target in the early efforts of New York City to rid Times Square of its seamier elements. In August that year, complaints were lodged by the Police Department and charges were filed against Mature Enterprises, the company that owned the theater, for promotion of obscene material. The trial began in December 1972.

A psychiatrist testified that the sexual acts depicted in the film were “well within the bounds of normal behavior.” A film critic testified that “Deep Throat” had redeeming social value — a key element in the definition of obscenity — because it showed sympathy for female desires, because the script contained humor and because, unlike other porn films, it was photographed “with clarity and lack of grain.”

On the other hand, a New York University professor, responding to a claim that the film was at least in part a spoof of sexual behavior, said, “I do not see how you can spoof fellatio by showing continuous performance of fellatio.”

On March 1, 1973, Judge Tyler came down stridently against the film, though not without literary flourish. In an opinion that came with a long appendix, he called “Deep Throat” “this feast of carrion and squalor,” “a nadir of decadence” and “a Sodom and Gomorrah gone wild before the fire.”

“Oh, yes! There is a gossamer of a story line — the heroine’s all-engrossing search for sexual gratification, and when all sexual endeavors fail to gratify, her unique problem is successfully diagnosed to exist in her throat,” he wrote, adding, “The alleged story lines are the facade, the sheer negligee through which clearly shines the producer’s and the defendant’s true and only purpose, that is, the presentation of unmistakably hard-core pornography.”

Judge Tyler fined Mature Enterprises $100,000, which was later reduced on appeal.

Born Josël Gonigman on July 28, 1921, in Balti, a Romanian city now a part of Moldova, Judge Tyler came to the United States with his family as an infant. His name was Americanized to Joseph Honigman. His father left the family shortly thereafter, and young Joseph grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, reared by his mother, Sonia, who earned money with sewing jobs. A bout of polio as a boy left him with a lifelong limp.

According to his daughters, as he grew to adulthood he experimented with names, changing Joseph to Joel, choosing the middle initial J for Jefferson (and later settling on Jeffrey) and the last name Tyler after seeing it on a billboard while he was driving through the South.

“I remember him saying that he liked presidents,” Lisa Tyler said.

He attended Indiana University and finished his undergraduate education at New York University before graduating from law school at Fordham. His first job was in the law department of the Allied Chemical and Dye corporation. He opened his own practice in 1951.

Mayor John V. Lindsay named him licensing commissioner in 1966, a post he held until 1968. Afterward, he served on the Criminal Court of New York and was an acting State Supreme Court justice and then a federal magistrate until he retired in 1991.

In addition to his daughters, Judge Tyler’s survivors include his wife, the former Helen Wolinsky, whom he married in 1952, and two granddaughters.

Shortly after Judge Tyler’s ruling, the United States Supreme Court, in Miller v. California, redefined obscenity and made it easier for states to regulate material that fit the definition. (The court said material was obscene if it appealed to a prurient interest in sex; if it described sexual conduct in a patently offensive way; and if, as a whole, it lacked serious literary, artistic, scientific or political value.)

Judge Tyler’s ruling added to the must-see cachet of “Deep Throat.” The film eventually reopened in New York (with a few scenes cut) and across the country, closely followed by officials scrambling to shut it down. According to a 2005 documentary, “Inside Deep Throat,” by the mid-1970s the film had been banned in 23 states.

In 1975 the federal government filed conspiracy charges in Memphis against 117 people involved with the film, and Harry Reems, its male star, was convicted and sentenced to five years in jail. The conviction was overturned on appeal.

Linda Lovelace, the female star, eventually renounced the film, saying she had been coerced into making it. But none of this derailed its popularity. As X-rated films emigrated from movie theaters to living rooms, “Deep Throat” continued to bring in revenue, much of it for organized crime, which controlled much of its distribution. The film, which was made for $25,000 by the director Gerald Damiano, a former hairdresser, earned an estimated $600 million.

Judge Tyler, whose reputation as a prude frustrated him — he told The New York Times that Ingmar Bergman’s film “Cries and Whispers” “had a lot of sex, but it was one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen” — recognized that his ruling was a function of its era.

“If I were to write that appendix today,” he told The New York Law Journal in 1991, “I would be deemed a fool, given the substantial change in our outlook.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/n...ies-at-90.html

Remain Diligent: SOPA and PIPA Must Be Squashed, Not Changed
JD Rucker

This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert's views alone.

As members of both the Senate and the House start falling back to a more defensible position by considering the removal of the DNS provision from SOPA and PIPA, many voices of opposition to the bills are claiming victory. This is a big mistake.

Protest

As with most news that's intended to avoid as much publicity as possible, many members of congress announced on a Friday that they were considering the removal of key provisions from the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) after public outcry continued to swell. They selected the Friday prior to a blackout planned for January 18 on social news site Reddit and several other prominent websites to get the word out to those paying close attention while limiting the display of weakness the move represents to those who aren't as familiar with the battle.

If the hope was to quell the protests and make SOPA and PIPA easier pills to swallow, it doesn't seem to be working yet. Nobody on the list has withdrawn their intentions to go black and more are being encouraged to join the fight.

"These bills need to be killed altogether," said Corynne McSherry, the intellectual property director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Our view all along has been they are not fixable."

Whether the DNS provision is truly removed or not (and Techdirt is quick to point out that it's not a done deal) doesn't matter. This should be nothing more than a further rallying call. It's not a victory. It's an attempted pacification of the outrage that is being directed at Congress, one that should be dealt with more harshly than if they kept it intact.

The biggest challenge for those who oppose SOPA/PIPA is the lack of public knowledge. Despite a perceived groundswell of opposition against them, the reality is that the majority of Americans still have no idea what SOPA is or what it means. The internet and social media in particular are powerful but without the attention of mainstream media, particularly those in Hollywood and New York City who support the bill by default, this is still too small of an issue for most to take notice.

January 18th can be a day that exposes more Americans to the disaster that SOPA will become if passed. On that day, as many Americans as possible must visit a site that goes black and they must be prompted to ask why. The message must reach the true masses, not just those visiting Reddit, GOOD, Mozilla, and other prominent sites.

As great as it is that these sites have taken a leadership role and are willing to charge forward with the protest (losing revenue as a result), others must be encouraged. Without the unified declaration of solidarity against SOPA, we are still facing a major uphill battle. If anything, the change of the DNS provision represents a greater likelihood that it will pass.

It cannot. It must not.

If you're a website owner, here's an easy way to join the SOPA blackout.

If you want to help by encouraging other major websites to join the cause, ask them to do so here.

This is one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation ever introduced in Washington. It will not only strip us of many of the freedoms (and websites) that we currently hold dear, but will also set a precedent that the US Government controls the internet. We've seen what has happened in the Middle East and Asia when governments meddle with the internet. It cannot happen here.

It must not.

Act.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1808216/r...ed-not-changed

Under Voter Pressure, Members of Congress Backpedal (Hard) On SOPA
Timothy B. Lee

The public outcry over the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act seems to have gotten so loud that even members of Congress can hear it. On Thursday we covered the news that Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) was expressing second thoughts about SOPA's DNS provisions. He said he changed his mind after he "heard from a number of Vermonters" on the issue.

On Friday, several Republicans started backpedaling as well.

SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith (R-TX) announced that he would be pulling the DNS-blocking provisions from his own bill. “After consultation with industry groups across the country, I feel we should remove Domain Name System blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision," Smith said in a Friday statement.

Meanwhile, six GOP senators who served on the Senate Judiciary Committee (which unanimously approved the legislation last year) wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asking him to postpone a vote on PIPA to give them more time to study the legislation.

"We strongly believe that the theft of American intellectual property is a significant problem that must be addressed," they wrote. But since the Judiciary Committee last considered the legislation, "we have increasingly heard from a large number of constituents and other stakeholders with vocal concerns about possible unintended consequences of the proposed legislation, including breaches in cybersecurity, damaging the integrity of the Internet, costly and burdensome litigation, and dilution of First Amendment rights."

The current plan for the full Senate to consider the bill on January 24 "may not permit us to work through many of the concerns that have been raised," they warned.

Lest anyone doubt the signers' tough-on-piracy bona fides, they include Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who once proposed that Congress give copyright holders a special exemption allowing them to hack into the computers of those suspected of piracy. In a 2003 hearing, he suggested that damaging someone's computer "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."

Another member of Congress that has been feeling the heat from voters is Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). After reddit members raised $15,000 in 48 hours for his anti-SOPA challenger, Ryan came out with a clear statement of opposition to the legislation.

"It appears that lawmakers are beginning to realize how much damage their anti-'piracy' bills could cause to the Internet and to Internet-related businesses," said Public Knowledge's Sherwin Siy in a statement. "While we are pleased that some progress is being made, we are also firm in our opposition to both bills because some very bad provisions remain."

Washington insiders hold disproportionate sway on Capitol Hill. But members of Congress are ultimately chosen by American voters. When enough of them express a strong view on an issue, members of Congress do pay attention.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...al-on-sopa.ars

SOPA Delayed; Cantor Promises It Won't Be Brought To The Floor Until 'Issues Are Addressed'
Mike masnick

Some late breaking news here: following Lamar Smith's announcement that the new manager's amendment for SOPA will remove DNS blocking (to be added back at a later date after it's been "studied"), Rep. Issa has announced that he will now postpone the "nerd" hearing that he was holding in the House Oversight Committee, which was originally scheduled for Wednesday. The key reason? Majority Leader Eric Cantor has promised him that he will not bring the bill to the floor unless there's real consensus on the bill. That's big news -- though, as Issa notes in his statement, it's worrisome that Senator Reid still seems to want to move forward with PIPA:

"While I remain concerned about Senate action on the Protect IP Act, I am confident that flawed legislation will not be taken up by this House. Majority Leader Cantor has assured me that we will continue to work to address outstanding concerns and work to build consensus prior to any anti-piracy legislation coming before the House for a vote,” said Chairman Issa. “The voice of the Internet community has been heard. Much more education for Members of Congress about the workings of the Internet is essential if anti-piracy legislation is to be workable and achieve broad appeal.”

"Earlier tonight, Chairman Smith announced that he will remove the DNS blocking provision from his legislation. Although SOPA, despite the removal of this provision, is still a fundamentally flawed bill, I have decided that postponing the scheduled hearing on DNS blocking with technical experts is the best course of action at this time. Right now, the focus of protecting the Internet needs to be on the Senate where Majority Leader Reid has announced his intention to try to move similar legislation in less than two weeks."

Indeed. It is still important that Congress hears from "the nerds" and plenty of other experts concerning the implications of these attempts to regulate the internet, but if SOPA is not going to be rushed to the floor, such hearings and education can (and should) happen in due time, rather than rushing to get them in, just as Congress comes back into session. There are more important things for Congress to focus on.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...ddressed.shtml

White House Says It Opposes Parts of Two Antipiracy Bills
Edward Wyatt

The Obama administration said Saturday that it strongly opposed central elements of two Congressional efforts to enforce copyrights on the Internet, all but killing the current versions of legislation that has divided both political parties and pitted Hollywood against Silicon Valley.

The comments by the administration’s chief technology officials, posted on a White House blog Saturday, came as growing opposition to the legislation had already led sponsors of the bills to reconsider a measure that would force Internet service providers to block access to Web sites that offer or link to copyrighted material.

“Let us be clear,” the White House statement said, “online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs.”

However, it added, “We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”

The bills currently under consideration in Congress were intended to combat the theft of copyrighted materials by preventing American search engines like Google and Yahoo from directing users to sites that allow for the distribution of stolen materials. They would cut off payment processors like PayPal that handle transactions.

The bills would also allow private citizens and companies to sue to stop what they believed to be theft of protected content. Those and other provisions set off fierce opposition among Internet companies, technology investors and free speech advocates, who said the bills would stifle online innovation, violate the First Amendment and even compromise national security by undermining the integrity of the Internet’s naming system.

Though the Obama administration called for legislation this year that would give prosecutors and owners of intellectual property new abilities to deter overseas piracy, it also embraced the idea of “voluntary measures and best practices” to reduce piracy.
Whether Congress can produce a compromise is uncertain, particularly in the House of Representatives, where Republicans have fought bitterly over the antipiracy legislation and party leaders, who control the chamber, are loath to offer further opportunities for intraparty battles.

The Motion Picture Association of America, the Hollywood lobbying group that has been most visible in its support for the current bills, said in a statement on Saturday that it welcomed the administration’s call for antipiracy legislation. But, the trade group added, “meaningful legislation must include measured and reasonable remedies that include ad brokers, payment processors and search engines.”

Hollywood and the music industry have broad political support for their efforts, and the Chamber of Commerce and labor organizations have pushed for the legislation. But they often find themselves facing off against the libertarian views of leaders in the technology industry.

Opponents of the House bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the Senate bill, the Protect IP Act, have focused most of their attention on the proposed blocking by Internet service providers of Web sites that offer access to pirated material.

In December, a group of influential technology figures, including founders of Twitter, Google and YouTube, published an open letter to lawmakers saying that the legislation would enable Internet regulation and censorship on par with the government regulation in China and Iran.

That argument struck a chord with the Obama administration, which through the State Department and other channels has been pushing other countries to loosen restrictions on Internet access.

In its statement Saturday, the White House said any proposed legislation “must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet.” Parts of the bills that provide for filtering or blocking through the Domain Name System — the Internet’s address book — could drive users to unreliable routes through and around the blocked sites, the White House said. That would “pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online.”

The statement did not threaten a presidential veto, but it made plain what types of piracy enforcement measures the White House would not accept.

The statement was attributed to Victoria Espinel, the intellectual property enforcement coordinator at the Office of Management and Budget; Aneesh Chopra, the administration’s chief technology officer; and Howard Schmidt, a cybersecurity coordinator for the national security staff.

Jenna Wortham contributed reporting from New York.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/u...acy-bills.html

Until next week,

- js.

Current Week In Review

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Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.

"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black

11-01-12, 09:01 AM	#1
JackSpratts Join Date: May 2001 Location: New England Posts: 10,017	Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 14th, '12 Since 2002 "In exchange for mobile presence in India, RIM, Nokia and Apple have allegedly provided backdoor access for the Indian intelligence to spy on communication." – Manan Kakkar "It is amazing to me that the [SOPA] opponents apparently don't want to protect American consumers and businesses." – Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas "Lamar Smith's organisation did improperly use my image. So according to the SOPA bill, should it pass, maybe I could petition the court to take action against www.texansforlamarsmith.com." – D.J. Shulte "We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet." – The White House January 14th, 2012 File Sharing On The Increase Maximilian Clarke Soon after it was declared granted religious recognition in Sweden, a survey has suggested that file sharing is on the increase across Europe. Four in five respondents to One.com’s survey of European customers share photos, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, music and videos via email, while only seven percent burn discs to share with friends and family. Swedes emerge from the study as those who use tablets and smartphones the most, while the Europeanaverage is only one in seven respondents using mobile devices for file sharing. The survey reveals that 82% of European respondents shared more files in 2011 than they did in 2010. This trend is being led by survey participants in the UK (92%), Belgium (83%) and Denmark (82%), while 24% of respondents in the Netherlands and 22% in Sweden are sharing fewer files in 2011 than in 2010. The main reasons given for sharing less this year are that there are fewer opportunities to share files (40%), it is too time-consuming (13%) and concerns over privacy (13%). Interestingly security worries do not seem to concern respondents in Belgium, Netherlands or Sweden much, who did not cite this as an explanation for sharing a reduced amount of files in 2011. Recent analyst houses including Forrester Research report that as early as next year there could be 60 million tablets and 175 million smartphones in use by mobile professionals around the world[1] <#_ftn1> . In spite of this, the survey reveals that file sharing takes place predominantly over laptops (63%) and desktop computers (22%). Out of all respondents, the Swedes are the most active mobile users distributing files music, videos and photos to friends, family and colleagues over tablets (seven percent) and smartphones (20 percent). In contrast, Belgians (two percent for tablets and two percent for smartphones), Dutch (two percent for tablets and twelve percent for smartphones) and Danish (three percent for tablets and no smartphone usage) are at the other end of the spectrum, lowering the average of European mobile sharing to two percent for tablets and twelve percent for smartphones. “People often think that sharing large files can be complicated and time-consuming, especially if you use ftp servers with complicated log-in procedures or need to split the data into different packages so it can fit on two or three USB sticks”, said Thomas Medard Frederiksen, Chief Operating Officer at One.com. “It does not need to be complicated. With our Cloud Drive, part of our web hosting packages, you can store files easily and safely and create a sharable link directly on your computer, through the browser or with one of the apps for mobile devices. You can give the link to those you want to share some folder, files or pictures with and by clicking on the link, the recipient can access all the data you have chosen to share.” http://www.freshbusinessthinking.com...n+the+increase 80% of Europeans Prefer to Share Files by Email Just 7% burn a disc Carrie-Ann Skinner Email is the most popular method in Europe when it comes to sharing files with friends and family, says One.com. Research of 272 Europeans by the web hosting firm revealed 80 percent said they prefer to share documents, photos, music and videos by email, while just seven percent burn discs to give to friends and family. Furthermore, 82 percent of Europeans admitted they shared more files in 2011 than they did in 2010. Brits were the most likely to increase their file-sharing over the past year with 92 percent saying their file sharing has surged, followed by Belguim with 83 percent and Denmark with 82 percent. More than one in five of Sweedish residents said they shared less files last year than in 2010. Two in five said the reason behind the decrease in file-sharing was fewer opprtunities to do so, while 13 percent cited concerns over privacy. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of file-sharing involves laptops, while 22 percent uses desktop computers. Despite the popularity of tablet PCs and smartphones, just two percent of file-sharing uses tablet PCs and 12 percent takes place using smartphones. Photos are the most-commonly shared files, with 79 percent of respondents admitting to distriburing these to others. Meanwhile, text documents were the next most popular at 62 percent, closely followed by PDF files at 61 percent, spreadsheets at 47 percent and music at 31 percent. One.com also revealed file-sharing occurs the most during the second half of the day, with 47 percent saying they're more like to share files between midday and 6pm mainly, while more than a third (36 percent) file share between 6pm and midnight. "People often think that sharing large files can be complicated and time-consuming, especially if you use ftp servers with complicated log-in procedures or need to split the data into different packages so it can fit on two or three USB sticks", said Thomas Medard Frederiksen, COO at One.com. "It does not need to be complicated. With our Cloud Drive, part of our web hosting packages, you can store files easily and safely and create a sharable link directly on your computer, through the browser or with one of the apps for mobile devices. You can give the link to those you want to share some folder, files or pictures with and by clicking on the link, the recipient can access all the data you have chosen to share." http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/inte...iles-by-email/ How Much Does File Sharing Resemble Stealing--And Does it Matter? Megan McArdle Kevin Drum takes a courageous and rare stand on the internet, arguing that yes, downloading millions of files from JSTOR while evading attempts by both JSTOR, and the owner of the network you're using, to stop you, is, well, pretty close to stealing: This affair has raised a lot of hackles among the infovore set, but I'm a little stumped about why I should be outraged. As James Joyner says, maybe this should have been a civil matter, not a criminal one (though Swartz did break into an MIT network closet to do all this), but beyond that does anyone really think JSTOR should just sit idly by as their entire archive is downloaded? Would the librarians at Stanford sit idly by if someone backed up a semi and started shoveling hundreds of thousands of books into it? Sure, there's no evidence that you're planning to steal the books. Maybe you intend to return them all in two weeks. But come on. Are we really all expected to be that stupid? Likewise, Swartz may say that he had no intention of putting his 4.8 million documents online, but come on. It's a pretty safe assumption, no? Swartz's suggestion that he just wanted to perform a research project is a wee bit improbable. As near as I can tell, Swartz is basically engaging in civil disobedience, publicly breaking a law that he considers unjust in order to generate publicity. Fine. But one of the tenets of civil disobedience is that you accept that you're breaking the law and accept the consequences. Now he is. Naturally, Kevin's readers lay into him, saying that this is completely not a good analogy, because of course, when you download JSTOR's files, JSTOR still has the files. This is a concept that economists call "non-rivalrous goods", and it's very important to file-sharing advocates. I don't think it's going to far to say that for many proponents, it's at the very heart of their case. And yet, it's not clear to me why this is supposed to be a devastating rejoinder--why rivalrousness is so fundamental to property that we should not have property rights over non-rivalrous goods. I get the sense that people find it intuitive that many people think property is, at its heart, a system for deciding how to allocate a limited and fixed set of stuff. And, of course, it is that. But it's not just that. Property rights serve a lot of functions in our society, and property rights can attach to things that are quite nebulous indeed, like accounting entries in computers that exist in a physical space not visible to the naked eye. They are highly contingent in ways we rarely think about. I'm not sure how we settled on "it's non-rivalrous" as the reason that file sharing is a) not stealing and b) okay. I've asked a bunch of libertarians this question, since they usually believe in very strong property rights as both a moral and an economic imperative--but also display a somewhat disproportionate aversion to strong intellectual property protections. So far, I don't feel as if I've gotten a lot of satisfying answers as to why people who support strong real estate protections and weak IP protections think that this particular argument matters so much. I have heard a lot of restatements of the definition of non-rivalrous goods, gotten many elaborations on why rivalrousness is different from non-rivalrousity, been told what the implications are for various markets and so forth. But they haven't, to me, advanced a theory of property--either moral or economic--to which the property "rivalrous" is really so obviously fundamental that in its absence, we're no longer dealing with property. Reading through the comments to Kevin's post, it occurred to me how many of the analogies seem to have been designed by and for college students. Which is to say, they are reasoning from a pretty simple version of property, appropriate to someone who doesn't really engage in much commerce. The important aspect of property in these arguments is personal use. And of course it is true that if I have a JSTOR article, your copying that article does not deprive me of it. But personal use is far from the only function of property in a modern economy. If you think about uses beyond what might happen in a dorm room or professor's office, these answers to Kevin's analogy seem less apt. Think about a bookstore, for example. Why isn't it okay to take their books? Because, unlike with file-sharing, I haven't deprived them of the use of the book, you will say. But in the sense that file-sharers are talking about, Barnes and Noble is not using the book. They want to make money off of it, but they are not interested in reading it, or using it to prop up a shaky table leg, or impressing people who see it left on the coffee table. In fact, holding onto that copy of the book is costing them money. Stealing the book doesn't deprive them of the use of the item, in the primitive way that most of the analogies offered by file sharers seem to me to depend on. What it does is deprives them of one very particular use: the ability to sell the book for its set price. But isn't this exactly the use of which you deprive musicians of when you download an album that you otherwise would have bought? Once you download it for free, they can't sell it to you. But other people can't use that book either, you will say. Not that particular book, no, but who cares? In all important aspects, that particular book is identical to thousands of other books with the same words on the cover. It is very unlikely that anyone who shows up at Barnes and Noble with the purchase price of a book will be denied the opportunity to walk home with all the words, illustrations, and page numbers that you "stole". Barnes and Noble stocks many, many copies of the books they sell, and if their stock dips below the amount they want to hold, they will automatically order more. There is perhaps some hypothetical case in which someone wants a rare book you have stolen right now and cannot get a hold of it for two days because of your actions, but these cases are going to be extremely rare: by definition, if Barnes and Noble does not have extra copies of a book around, it is because almost no one buys it. We probably should not construct a whole system of property rights around extremely rare boundary cases. Moreover, no book sells every copy that the bookstore has. They get damaged, lost, and eventually remaindered--sent back to the publisher. One could plausibly argue that an individual book-thief is simply slightly lowering the eventual supply of remaindered books. Which is to say, the supply of nothing: some of those books used to be sold in remainder bookshops, but with the economics of bookselling being what they are, these days, as I understand it, they're mostly just destroyed. So really, you're not stealing a book: you're saving it from being pulped. But the book cost them money That's true. But it cost them a pretty small amount of money. You probably cost them more if you leave a mess in their public bathrooms, or mumble your latte order so that the clerk gets it wrong and has to do it over, but we don't give Barnes and Noble property rights in those things. More to the point, this doesn't have anything to do with whether a good is rivalrous or not. It has to do with whether the good has a low marginal cost. Making records costs money too. But not for the individual copy. Electronic files have zero marginal costs. But hotel rooms and airplane seats also have near-zero marginal costs. Is it therefore okay to sneak into a hotel room, as long as you make the bed perfectly before you leave? This brings us to the issue of trespass, which--despite the fact that it is often, maybe even usually, non-rivalrous, most libertarians don't support. If you own a cabin in a snowy and distant mountain, and I know for a fact that you cannot leave town for the weekend, is it okay to pick the lock and use my house? You might break things. Is it okay if I am very careful, or only occupy a small portion of the home filled with things that are not breakable? I might change my mind and want to come. The partners said everyone in your group has to work all weekend. Your wife is dying in a hospital bed, surrounded by all your friends and family. For whatever reason, I can be reasonably quite sure that you are not going to use this property this weekend. Is it okay, morally, for me to use it? Should you have legal rights against me if you find out? How about camping on a part of your property that you haven't trod in ten years? Even if you clean up, you'll change things. Seriously? We're arguing for a system of property rights because I disturbed some leaves on your property? You might frighten away deer I hunt. You can't know whether you're damaging my property, or whether I might want to use it, which is why I should be able to decide whether I want you to change things. But this is the argument of publishing houses, and increasingly, artists: they should be able to decide whether you get to make non-rivalrous use of what they created, and whether your use damages them. Also, you could make the law clear that you had to be really, really sure that they wouldn't come, or you wouldn't break things, before you could use peoples' stuff. Law makes fine distinctions like this all the time. (For that matter, as I understand it, the law actually does give me a right to trespass if, say, I am lost in a storm and am clearly going to freeze to death unless I break into your cabin. I may have to pay you for any damage I do, but I'm not legally in the wrong simply for entering your property.) On the other hand, there are plenty of rivalrous uses that do not have clearly defined property rights, like how loud parties can be, how much smell or visual blight can be inflicted on a neighbor, how much care I have to take to keep the rat population down, how to allocate responsibilities and rights over common resources like ponds and trees that span property lines, and so forth. These questions are adjudicated differently in different jurisdictions, or by negotiation between neighbors, because no one has a particularly well developed theory of how such rivalrous uses should be allocated. Now go back to those accounting entries at our bank. They do not take up any meaningful physical space, and they're non-rivalrous: if I copy them and pretend they're mine, you can still use yours. To the extent that they're rivalrous at all, it's only because--as with intellectual property!--we have a social convention, and a very strong legal regime, that makes it that way. There's nothing inherent about the computer entries that makes it so we couldn't both claim to have the money in your bank account--and both be right, if the government and our neighbors would just agree with us. And yet most of us think that counterfeiting is a very, very bad thing to do--that it is a next door neighbor to stealing, if not living in the same house. They think this even if the counterfeiting is so good as to be undetectable. Most people support the treasury's efforts to fight counterfeiting, rather than arguing that we should simply stay with the old, easy-to-counterfeit currency so that we could all enjoy the bounty of increased money supply. Fine, counterfeiting is bad, but it's not stealing, you may say--it's only stealing if it's rivalrous. I think the argument about whether file sharing is "stealing" or some other word is really tedious and beside the point, and ends up in circles where you say that maybe it's wrong and it's not stealing and when your opponent concedes the point you argue that it's not wrong because after all, it's not like stealing and no one has less stuff . . . But I digress. Let's talk about this distinction. Why do we oppose counterfeiting, if it doesn't deprive people of anything? The answer is that it is stealing: by increasing the amount of currency in circulation, it makes everyone else's money worth just a little bit less. It's just stealing from everyone, instead of one specific person. Nor am I just playing with words; this has always been a historic justification for laws against counterfeiting, usually the most important one besides a bunch of puffery about the majesty of the state. It's also, I'd note, the language used by a lot of libertarians about governments who print money in order to make their debts easier to pay back. And it's not really an unfair usage of the word. It's important to note that most people who think about it agree that counterfeiting is basically like stealing even though no one counterfeiter is likely to have much impact on the money supply (with the possible exception of the government of North Korea, which was allegedly printing US bills on an industrial scale for a while). Even if you're having a tiny effect that only becomes really problematic in aggregate, I think the common intuition is that it's wrong to deprive people of even a tiny fraction of the full use of their money. If I made a perfect copy of your AT&T shares and sold them, no one would much care if I pointed out that you still had the physical certificates. Or to take an example offered by Kevin Drum some time back: But if he had a draft magazine article stored on his hard drive, and his girlfriend copied it and sold it somewhere without his knowledge, I'll bet he'd consider it stolen -- possibly with the word emphasized by hurled crockery and intemperate language. He'd consider it stolen even though, technically, he still has a copy too. And he'd be right to. Before the theft, he had the potential to earn a certain amount of money by selling the publishing rights to his work. Afterward, he didn't. That potential may not be a tangible physical object, but that doesn't make it a nonrival good. Once it's gone, it's gone. We could argue about whether this is stealing or plagiarism, but who cares? We'd all agree it's really, fundamentally wrong. And not just because she's passing off someone else's work as her own, though of course that's part of it. I think most people would agree that it is much more wrong to plagiarize and publish an article that hasn't been sold yet, thereby depriving the author of the income they would earn, than to say turn in a column that was a straight lift from Montaigne. All of which is to say that we don't, in fact, seem to think that rivalrousness is actually a fundamental property of property--we think that property rights still apply even when we're not using our property, and have no intention of doing so. We think that depriving Barnes and Noble, or the publisher, of the revenue from a book we stole is wrong--and that depriving a friend, or even a stranger, of the revenue from an article they wrote is also wrong even if no physical object is involved. We think that counterfeiting is very close to stealing, but more fundamentally, that property rights inhere in all sorts of things that are rivalrous only by the mandate of the state. None of this establishes that we should have strong IP, of course--only that I don't think you can make a good case against strong IP by pointing out that Rihanna can still listen to "Pon the Replay" any time she wants. Or that copying is super cheap. Or that no individual file-sharer costs the owner of the rights very much money. But of course, no system of property rights is built from first principles. Nor did property rights spring full-blown from the head of Zeus at the dawn of the universe. It's a highly contingent system that evolved over centuries, with all sorts of weird principles that we'd never have thought of if we'd been designing the thing from scratch. (For example, read the chapter in Moby Dick about the system for allocating rights over hunted whales. A lawyer once told me that in law school, his class was assigned to come up with a system to solve the problem. No one came up with anything that looked like what actually evolved; the only justification for the real system was that it worked.) That's why I don't find these heroic invocations of very simple principles nearly as convincing as, well, most of the avid file sharers I know. As to whether we should have strong or weak IP rights, I'll leave that for another day, since I've gone on quite long enough. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...matter/251277/ What Everyone in the SOPA Debate is Missing Underlying the debate about the so-called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is the unstated assumption that intellectual property rights have the same legal standing as other property rights. They don't, and the tacit concession of this point by opponents of SOPA is significantly weakening their position. The foundation of intellectual property (patents and copyrights) in the United States is this clause in Article 2 of the Constitution: The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. This clause clearly establishes intellectual property as a granted right, not a recognized or fundamental right, that is, the "right" to "intellectual property" does not exist unless explicitly granted by Congress at its discretion. Furthermore, Congress is constrained to grant this right only in service of a specific purpose. namely, to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, and only "for limited times". Notwithstanding that the Supreme Court has effectively eviscerated the "limited time" constraint in the case of copyright, "intellectual property" is clearly on a different legal footing from the "inalienable rights" to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" to which people are endowed by their Creator, as recognized in the declaration of Independence. Neither the Declaration nor the Constitution mentions "property" by name [correction: the 5th amendment does mention it. See the comments.], but it is quite clear that the right to physical property was universally considered an inalienable fundamental right by the Founders. To cite but one of many examples, the state of Rhode Island attached a signing statement to its ratification of the Constitution that reads in part: We, the delegates of the people of the state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations... do declare and make known,— I. That there are certain natural rights of which men, when they form a social compact, cannot deprive or divest their posterity,—among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property... Rhode Island's signing statement is significant because it is quite lengthy. It contains 18 separate clauses explicitly recognizing a long list of fundamental rights. (It's actually worth reading in its entirety). It is reasonable to suppose that if Rhode Island took issue with the clear implication of the Constitution that "intellectual property" is not a fundamental right, they would have said so. The arguments against SOPA are mainly based on the collateral damage that would accrue by giving content "owners" the power to indiscriminately shut down web sites without due process. But this argument tacitly concedes a much more fundamental point, which is that a grant of copyright is not a right but a privilege granted at the discretion of the People for a particular purpose. It is far from clear that the Constitutional requirement that exclusivity be granted "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" is being met. Political arguments are often lost before they even start because one side allows the other to frame the debate. The clearest example of this is the tacit acceptance of the terms "pro abortion" and "anti abortion" in the debate on reproductive rights. In this case, the tacit acceptance of the term "intellectual property rights" concedes the fight before it starts. If there are intellectual property rights, then the debate can only be about the extent to which the state should go in order to defend those rights. But, as I have shown above, there is no legal basis for intellectual property "rights", only intellectual property "grants" (for limited times and for a specific purpose). I hope it's clear how this reframing would change the tenor of the debate. http://rondam.blogspot.com/2012/01/w...s-missing.html Sponsor: Protect IP Act May be Amended in Response to Concerns The amendment would require a study of the effects of the ISP provision in the bill, Sen. Leahy says Grant Gross The controversial copyright enforcement bill the Protect IP Act may be amended on the Senate floor later this month in response to ongoing concerns about its provisions affecting Internet service providers and the domain-name system, the bill's chief sponsor said. Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and chief sponsor of the Protect IP Act, or PIPA, said Thursday he plans to offer an amendment that would require a study of the impact of the ISP provisions in the bill before they are implemented. If the study found negative impacts, it's likely the ISP provision would be killed. The Senate is scheduled to begin debate on PIPA on Jan. 24. PIPA would allow the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders requiring U.S. ISPs to block access to foreign websites accused by the DOJ of infringing copyright. Opponents of PIPA and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a similar bill in the House of Representatives, have argued that the bills would lead to widespread cybersecurity problems as U.S. Internet users attempt to circumvent the blocks, and could lead to the blocking of legitimate speech. Leahy defended the bill, saying the ISP provisions were developed in consultation with major service providers. Several ISPs support the bill, he said in comments on Vermont Public Radio. However, sponsors of the bill have heard concerns about its effect on the domain name system from fellow lawmakers, Internet engineers, human rights groups and "a number of Vermonters," he said. "I remain confident that the ISPs -- including the cable industry, which is the largest association of ISPs -- would not support the legislation if its enactment created the problems that opponents of this provision suggest," Leahy said. "Nonetheless, this is in fact a highly technical issue, and I am prepared to recommend we give it more study before implementing it." Other provisions of the bill would allow the DOJ and copyright owners to seek court orders requiring online advertising networks and payment processors to stop doing business with websites accused of infringement. Those provisions would remain in the bill. It appears that Leahy's amendment would not strip out a provision in PIPA that would allow court orders requiring search engines to stop linking to the accused sites. Leahy did not talk about the search engine provision when talking about the amendment, a spokeswoman said. The amendment will allow the Senate to "focus on the other important provisions in this bill, which are essential to protecting American intellectual property online, and the American jobs that are tied to intellectual property," Leahy said. "I regret that law enforcement will not have this [ISP] remedy available to it when websites operating overseas are stealing American property, threatening the safety and security of American consumers." However, the other portions of the bill offer "a strong and balanced approach to protecting intellectual property," Leahy said. A spokesman for Public Knowledge, a digital rights group opposed to PIPA, said the group would have to see specifics before taking a position on the amendment. The bill "would have to be watered down a lot to be acceptable," said Art Brodsky, communications director at Public Knowledge. On Wednesday, Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican and SOPA opponent, has scheduled a hearing on the security impact of the legislation. The hearing will take place in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which Issa chairs. Community news site Reddit.com plans to go dark on Wednesday in a protest against SOPA and PIPA. http://www.techworld.com.au/article/...ponse_concerns How Copyright Industries Con Congress Julian Sanchez I’ve yet to encounter a technically clueful person who believes the Stop Online Piracy Act will actually do anything to meaningfully reduce—let alone “stop”—online piracy, and so I haven’t bothered writing much about the absurd numbers the bill’s supporters routinely bandy about in hopes of persuading lawmakers that SOPA will be an economic boon and create zillions of jobs. If the proposed solution just won’t work, after all, why bother quibbling about the magnitude of the problem? But then I saw the very astute David Carr’s otherwise excellent column on SOPA’s pitfalls, which took those inflated numbers more or less as gospel. If only because I’m offended to see bad data invoked so routinely and brazenly, on general principle, it’s important to try to set the record straight. The movie and music recording industry have gotten away with using statistics that don’t stand up to the most minimal scrutiny, over and over, for years, to hoodwink both Congress and the general public. Wherever you come down on any particular piece of legislation, this is not how policy should get made in a democracy, and it’s high time they were shamed into cutting it out. The bogus numbers Carr cites—which I’ll get to in a moment—actually represent a substantial retreat from even more ludicrous statistics the copyright industries long peddled. In my previous life as the Washington editor for the technology news site Ars Technica, I became curious about two implausible sounding claims I kept seeing made over and over—and repeated by prominent U.S. Senators!—in support of more aggressive antipiracy efforts. Intellectual property infringement was supposedly costing the U.S. economy $200–250 billion per year, and had killed 750,000 American jobs. That certainly sounded dire, but those numbers looked suspiciously high, and I was having trouble figuring out exactly where they had originated. I did finally run them down, and wrote up the results of my investigation in a long piece for Ars. Read the whole thing for the full, farcical story, but here’s the upshot: The $200–250 billion number had originated in a 1991 sidebar in Forbes, but it was not a measurement of the cost of “piracy” to the U.S. economy. It was an unsourced estimate of the total size of the global market in counterfeit goods. Beyond the obvious fact that these numbers are decades old, counterfeiting of physical goods imported in bulk and sold by domestic retail distributors is, rather obviously, a totally different phenomenon with different policy implications from the problem of illicit individual consumer downloads of movies, music, and software. The 750,000 jobs number had originated in a 1986 speech (yes, 1986) by the secretary of commerce estimating that counterfeiting could cost the United States “anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000″ jobs. Nobody in the Commerce Department was able to identify where those figures had come from. These are the numbers that were driving U.S. copyright policy as recently as 2008—and I’m still seeing them repeated in “fact sheets” circulated by SOPA boosters. Finally, in 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology.” Now, if a single journalist could discover as much with a few days work, minimal due diligence should have enabled highly paid lobbyists to arrive at the same conclusion. The only way to explain the longevity of these figures, if we charitably rule out deliberate deception, is to infer that the people repeating them simply did not care whether what they were saying was true. If I were a legislator, I would find this more than a little insulting As Carr’s piece suggests, SOPA’s corporate backers have fallen back on new numbers, but they’re still entirely bogus: The Motion Picture Association of America cites figures saying that piracy costs the United States $58 billion annually. Mark Elliot, an executive from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a letter to The New York Times that such piracy threatened 19 million American jobs Only $58 billion! We’re making progress! So where does that figure come from? The source here is a paper released by the Institute for Policy Innovation, and authored by one Stephen Siwek, an MBA and principal of a consulting firm called Economists Incorporated that produces economic analysis for hire on behalf of (among others) businesses seeking to influence policy makers. That does not, in itself, invalidate the research, but we should at least begin with the recognition that we are not dealing here with impartial academic studies produced by a university or government research agency. What does invalidate the “research” is the inappropriate use of “multiplier” effects to double—and triple—count loss estimates that were dubious to begin with. As the GAO report notes in its typically understated fashion: Most of the experts we interviewed were reluctant to use economic multipliers to calculate losses from counterfeiting because this methodology was developed to look at a one-time change in output and employment. In other words, Siwek is taking a method that’s useful for analyzing where in the economy we will likely see the effects of demand shifts, and pretending that it somehow reflects aggregate economic losses. As my colleague Tim Lee has pointed out, this is Bastiat’s Broken Window Fallacy on steroids: [i] n IPI-land, when a movie studio makes $10 selling a DVD to a Canadian, and then gives $7 to the company that manufactured the DVD and $2 to the guy who shipped it to Canada, society has benefited by $10+$7+$2=$19. Yet some simple math shows that this is nonsense: the studio is $1 richer, the trucker is $2, and the manufacturer is $7. Shockingly enough, that adds up to $10. What each participant cares about is his profits, not his revenues. So, to stay focused on movies, Siwek takes an estimate of $6.1 billion in piracy losses to the U.S. movie industry, and through the magic of multipliers gets us to a more impressive sounding $20.5 billion. That original $6.1 billion figure, by the way, was produced by a study commissioned from LEK Consulting by the Motion Picture Association of America. Since even the GAO was unable to get at the underlying research or evaluate its methodology, it’s impossible to know how reliable that figure is, but given that MPAA has already had to admit significant errors in the numbers LEK generated, I’d take it with a grain of salt. Believe it or not, though, it’s actually even worse than that. SOPA, recall, does not actually shut down foreign sites. It only requires (ineffective) blocking of foreign “rogue sites” for U.S. Internet users. It doesn’t do anything to prevent users in (say) China from downloading illicit content on a Chinese site. If we’re interested in the magnitude of the piracy harm that SOPA is aimed at addressing, then, the only relevant number is the loss attributable specifically to Internet piracy by U.S. users. Again, we don’t have the full LEK study, but one of Siwek’s early papers does conveniently reproduce some of LEK’s PowerPoint slides, which attempt to break the data down a bit. Of the total $6.1 billion in annual losses LEK estimated to MPAA studios, the amount attributable to online piracy by users in the United States was $446 million—which, by coincidence, is roughly the amount grossed globally by Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. So in a fantasy world where U.S. movie pirates don’t just circumvent blockage with a browser plugin, and SOPA actually stops all online movie piracy by American users, we get a $446 million economic benefit to the United States in the form of movie revenues, and presumably comparable benefits in music and software revenues? Well, no. Remember our old friend the Broken Window Fallacy. It’s true that some illicit U.S. downloads displace sales of legal products. But what happens to the money the pirates would have otherwise spent on those legal copies? They don’t eat it! As that same GAO report helpfully points out: (1) in the case that the counterfeit good has similar quality to the original, consumers have extra disposable income from purchasing a less expensive good, and (2) the extra disposable income goes back to the U.S. economy, as consumers can spend it on other goods and services. As one expert consulted by GAO put it, “effects of piracy within the United States are mainly redistributions within the economy for other purposes and that they should not be considered as a loss to the overall economy.” In many cases—I’ve seen research suggesting it’s about 80 percent for music—a U.S. consumer would not have otherwise purchased an illicitly downloaded song or movie if piracy were not an option. Here, the result is actually pure consumer surplus: The downloader enjoys the benefit, and the producer loses nothing. In the other 20 percent of cases, the result is a loss to the content industry, but not a let loss to the economy, since the money just ends up being spent elsewhere. If you’re concerned about the overall jobs picture, as opposed to the fortunes of a specific industry, there is no good reason to think eliminating piracy by U.S. users would yield any jobs on net, though it might help boost employment in copyright-intensive sectors. (Oh, and that business about 19 million jobs? Also bogus.) Does that mean online piracy is harmless? Of course not. But the harm is a dynamic loss in allocative efficiency, which is much harder to quantify. That is, in the cases where a consumer would have been willing to buy an illicitly downloaded movie, album, or software program, we want the market to be accurately signalling demand for the products people value, rather than whatever less-valued use that money gets spent on instead. This is, in fact, very important! It’s a good reason to look for appropriately tailored ways to reduce piracy, so that the market devotes resources to production of new creativity and innovation valued by consumers, rather than to other, less efficient purposes. Indeed, it’s a good reason to look for ways of doing this that, unlike SOPA, might actually work. It is not, however, a good reason to spend $47 million in taxpayer dollars—plus untold millions more in ISP compliance costs—turning the Justice Department into a pro bono litigation service for Hollywood in hopes of generating a jobs and a revenue bonanza for the U.S. economy. Any “research” suggesting we can expect that kind of result from Internet censorship is a fiction more fanciful than singing chipmunks. http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-c...-con-congress/ How the Internet Works (And How SOPA Would Break It) Todd Mitchell Last week, I explained SoftLayer’s stance against SOPA and mentioned that SOPA would essentially require service providers like SoftLayer to “break the Internet” in response to reports of “infringing sites.” The technical readers in our audience probably acknowledged the point and moved on, but our non-technical readers (and some representatives in Congress) might have gotten a little confused by the references to DNS, domains and IP addresses. Given how pervasive the Internet is in our daily lives, you shouldn’t need to be “a techie” to understand the basics of what makes the Internet work … And given the significance of the SOPA legislation, you should understand where the bill would “break” the process. Let’s take a high level look at how the Internet works, and from there, we can contrast how it would work if SOPA were to pass. The Internet: How Sites Are Delivered 1. You access a device connected in some way to the Internet. This device can be a cell phone, a computer or even a refrigerator. You are connected to the Internet through an Internet Service Provider (ISP) which recognizes that you will be accessing various sites and services hosted remotely. Your ISP manages a network connected to the other networks around the globe (“inter” “network” … “Internet”). 2. You enter a domain name or click a URL (for this example, we’ll use http://www.softlayer.com since we’re biased to that site). 3. Your ISP will see that you want to access “www.softlayer.com” and will immediately try to find someone/something that knows what “www.softlayer.com” means … This search is known as an NS (name server) lookup. In this case, it will find that “www.softlayer.com” is associated with several name servers. 4. The first of these four name servers to respond with additional information about “softlayer.com” will be used. Domains are typically required to be associated with two or three name servers to ensure if one is unreachable, requests for that domain name can be processed by another. 5. The name server has Domain Name System (DNS) information that maps “www.softlayer.com” to an Internet Protocol (IP) address. When a domain name is purchased and provisioned, the owner will associate that domain name with an authoritative DNS name server, and a DNS record will be created with that name server linking the domain to a specific IP address. Think of DNS as a phone book that translates a name into a phone number for you. 6. When the IP address you reach sees that you requested “www.softlayer.com,” it will find the files/content associated with that request. Multiple domains can be hosted on the same IP address, just as multiple people can live at the same street address and answer the phone. Each IP address only exists in a single place at a given time. (There are some complex network tricks that can negate that statement, but in the interest of simplicity, we’ll ignore them.) 7. When the requested content is located (and generated by other servers if necessary), it is returned to your browser. Depending on what content you are accessing, the response from the server can be very simple or very complex. In some cases, the request will return a single HTML document. In other cases, the content you access may require additional information from other servers (database servers, storage servers, etc.) before the request can be completely fulfilled. In this case, we get HTML code in return. 8. Your browser takes that code and translates the formatting and content to be displayed on your screen. Often, formatting and styling of pages will be generated from a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) referenced in the HTML code. The purpose of the style sheet is to streamline a given page’s code and consolidate the formatting to be used and referenced by multiple pages of a given website. 9. The HTML code will reference sources for media that may be hosted on other servers, so the browser will perform the necessary additional requests to get all of the media the website is trying to show. In this case, the most noticeable image that will get pulled is the SoftLayer logo from this location: http://static2.softlayer.com/images/layout/logo.jpg 8. When the HTML is rendered and the media is loaded, your browser will probably note that it is “Done,” and you will have successfully navigated to SoftLayer’s homepage. If SOPA were to pass, the process would look like this: The Internet: Post-SOPA 1. You access a device connected in some way to the Internet. 2. You enter a domain name or click a URL (for this example, we’ll use http://www.softlayer.com since we’re biased to that site). The Change 3. Before your ISP runs an NS lookup, it would have to determine whether the site you’re trying to access has been reported as an “infringing site.” If http://www.softlayer.com was reported (either legitimately or illegitimately) as an infringing site, your ISP would not process your request, and you’d proceed to an error page. If your ISP can’t find any reference to the domain an infringing site, it would start looking for the name server to deliver the IP address. 4. SOPA would also enforce filtering from all authoritative DNS provider. If an ISP sends a request for an infringing site to the name server for that site, the provider of that name server would be forced to prevent the IP address from being returned. 5. One additional method of screening domains would happen at the level of the operator of the domain’s gTLD. gTLDs (generic top-level domains) are the “.____” at the end of the domain (.com, .net, .biz, etc.). Each gTLD is managed by a large registry organization, and a gTLD’s operator would be required to prevent an infringing site’s domain from functioning properly. 6. If the gTLD registry operator, your ISP and the domain’s authoritative name server provider agree that the site you’re accessing has not been reported as an infringing site, the process would resume the pre-SOPA process. Back to the Pre-SOPA Process 7. The domain’s name server responds. 8. The domain’s IP address is returned. 9. The IP address is reached to get the content for http://www.softlayer.com. 10. HTML is returned. 11. Your browser translates the HTML into a visual format. 12. External file references from the HTML are returned. 13. The site is loaded. The proponents of SOPA are basically saying, “It’s difficult for us to keep up with and shut down all of the instances of counterfeiting and copyright infringement online, but it would be much easier to target the larger sites/providers ‘enabling’ users to access that (possible) infringement.” Right now, the DMCA process requires a formal copyright complaint to be filed for every instance of infringement, and the providers who are hosting the content on their network are responsible for having that content removed. That’s what our abuse team does full-time. It’s a relatively complex process, but it’s a process that guarantees us the ability to investigate claims for legitimacy and to hear from our customers (who hear from their customers) in response to the claims. SOPA does not allow for due process to investigate concerns. If a site is reported to be an infringing site, service providers have to do everything in their power to prevent users from getting there. http://blog.softlayer.com/2012/how-t...ould-break-it/ A Guide for Using SOPA & PIPA to Kill Scientific Debate -- You're Welcome Michael Ham Simply put, The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) currently under development in Congress will provide a rapid way to sentence websites to death without the need for pesky things like judges and juries. Much to the surprise of nobody who understands how the Internet works, these two Acts will have absolutely no effect on digital piracy, but they will create an environment where freedom of speech could be severely curtailed, large companies can execute competitors, and scientific data can be hidden from the public. To understand these claims, we need to explore how copyright works. As I type each and every word in this column they are copyrighted the moment they appear. Although you can file official copyright forms with the government, it's not required. Pretty clever, right? Now, because you own a copyright on everything you write or record, this makes the Internet a tricky place to set up a website like the Huffington Post. The only way to allow free expression in an online environment where millions of people leave copyrighted comments is to involve some lawyers. For example, if you leave a message at the bottom of this page (please do by the way), you are giving the Huffington Post the right to use your magically copyrighted sentences -- do use full sentences when commenting; this isn't YouTube, we've got some standards. It's all explained right here in the Official HuffPost Terms and Conditions, which I hope you read thoroughly and memorized before entering the website. Under the current law, if you leave a comment that contains the entire Harry Potter saga, you and you alone are responsible for infringing on that copyright... you also have too much time on your hands. As it stands, Huffington Post would have to remove the comment if the copyright holder contacts them, but it is not their fault that you posted the copyrighted work to their website. This is known as the Safe Harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It's the equivalent of saying you aren't personally responsible for murder if a random person kills someone on your property. This is a reasonably sane method of protecting copyright, which was apparently a problem that had to be rectified immediately. Enter SOPA and PIPA. What these Acts will do is make websites liable for any content that appears on them. The bills will create a way to cut the link between the name of the website, like HuffingtonPost.com to the place where the website actually lives -- a web server with a seemingly non-connected numerical identity. The server will still exist and contain the website, but typing in the human friendly '.com' name will no longer connect it to the IP address. Don't fret though, it only took the online community a couple microseconds to create a Firefox plugin that ignores that problem. The end result? Pirates will go on their merry way and never look back, but legitimate websites will be stuck with the consequences. As a side note, I have no idea why the SOPA supporters insist on using the term pirate. The same studios fighting against 'pirates' produced a billion dollar franchise romanticizing the idea of piracy using Johnny Depp and Keira Knightly. Torrenters of the Caribbean just doesn't have the same ring to it. Anyhow, what these Acts will really do is kill websites that have a reputation and paid staff. In other words, websites that already comply with the DMCA. The insidious parts of SOPA and PIPA create a simple way for copyright holders, without a trial, to force payment companies and services like Paypal to stop sending money to websites accused of hosting pirated content. Ultimately they may even be able to force your Internet service provider to stop allowing you to connect to the server where the accused website lives. This means that every single website will have to monitor every single post, looking for copyrighted content. Which is hard, because as I explained earlier, you don't have to report a copyrighted work to a central database. Everything you've ever written is technically copyrighted. This opens an unscrupulous backdoor that would allow businesses to kill off their competitors, stifle free speech and shut down scientific discussion. For example, lets say I want to take down the Huffington Post because it competes with my website for traffic. I could reach deep into my two copyrighted books (shameless plug for Betrayal and Tails of Socrates) and pick out a couple chunks of text. Then I could use different anonymous wifi hot zones to upload passages from my books to the Huffington Post as comments. I then report HuffPost to the Justice Department. I could keep doing this until I established that the Huffinton Post has a pattern of displaying my copyrighted works without a license (I would totally make up a name to call them.... like the Pirate Post... or something way more clever). Under PIPA and SOPA, the Justice Department would then order financial institutions to stop processing payments for HuffPost, which would keep them from collecting advertising revenue. I've killed the site for my own personal gain. Lest you think I'm engaging in hyperbole, there is strong evidence that Viacom and many other studios uploaded their own content to YouTube using public wireless networks and doctored them to look pirated. More recently, Universal Music forced YouTube to take down a song they disagreed with by apparently claiming the 'Mega Song' infringed on their copyright, even though they clearly didn't own the copyright. Now, how does this apply to science? Let's say you are greatly displeased that a science journal posted a result that disagrees with you in some way. Maybe it's business, ideology, religious, or a personal vendetta. You could write a letter to the editor supporting or opposing some unrelated article and include a liberal sprinkling of copyrighted work within the letter. You would of course need a silent partner who owned the copyrighted work you cribbed from. The journal, in the interest of scientific discussion and openness, posts the work. Mission Accomplished! The journal's website is now responsible for publishing that copyrighted work. Your friend can now try and use the Justice Department to financially execute the journal, which will likely result in their entire catalog (including the offending article) being thrown in disarray and possibly lost because they can no longer afford to operate. Since the journal owns the copyright to that work, the scientists cannot just reproduce the articles elsewhere. At the very least such actions would make scientific outlets rightfully suspicious of discussions that emanate from the general public. Don't be fooled by pro-SOPA supporters who claim that these Acts will only apply to websites outside the country. The big copyright holders are trying to get laws like SOPA and PIPA passed worldwide. You can probably see where I'm going with this. For the rest of the world, U.S. websites exist outside of their country. That means that if someone in Spain can show that a U.S. website infringes on their copyright, they can demand it be taken down and financially executed. The U.S. has signed many copyright treaties and would likely be required to comply. Make no mistake, I am a strong supporter of copyrights. They prevent others from profiting off my work without my permission. However, SOPA and PIPA will never achieve their desired goal of decreasing piracy and increasing jobs. Instead they will allow unscrupulous activities that stifle freedom of speech, throw off the balance of the free market and hide scientific results. I urge you to do something about it. Contact your Congressional Representatives. More than 1 million people already have. You can check SOPATrack to see where your reps fall on the issue and get their phone numbers. Many have not taken a position, you can make sure they take the right one. Already Paul Ryan has been forced to back off his support for SOPA, we can make the rest of them do the same. For Science! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michae...b_1195598.html MIT The Media Lab is Against SOPA and PIPA As many of you may be aware, there are two bills being considered by the US Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act - they're better known as SOPA and PIPA. While the goal to try to minimize the dissemination of copyright materials online is laudable, the bills are misguided and dangerous and could damage innovation on the Internet and free speech. A number of organizations have spoken up publicly against the bills and a number of the Media Lab community members, including myself have been actively opposing the bill. Today the Media Lab would like to officially go on the record opposing the bill as well. We encourage you to learn more about these bills, develop your own opinions and participate in the debate and collective action. It's a critically important moment for internet freedom and these bills could have a very negative repercussions both in the United States and globally. You can read more about the issue on Ethan Zuckerman's blog and my blog where we have cross-posted a longer post on the topic. http://blog.media.mit.edu/2012/01/me...-and-pipa.html Reddit Successfully Pressures Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to Back Off Support of SOPA. REDDIT! - Since my AMA you've generated a lot of buzz about SOPA and established yourself as a political force. After weeks of getting hammered by redditors, blogs and increasingly mainstream media for his inaction on SOPA, Paul Ryan has today reversed course and denounced SOPA: January 9, 2012 WASHINGTON - Wisconsin’s First District Congressman Paul Ryan released the following statement regarding H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act: "The internet is one of the most magnificent expressions of freedom and free enterprise in history. It should stay that way. While H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act, attempts to address a legitimate problem, I believe it creates the precedent and possibility for undue regulation, censorship and legal abuse. I do not support H.R. 3261 in its current form and will oppose the legislation should it come before the full House." This is an extraordinary victory. Reddit was able to force the House Budget Chair to reverse course - shock waves will be felt throughout the establishment in Washington today - other lawmakers will take notice. We still have much work to do. I encourage you to continuously pressure pro-SOPA/PIPA legislators and remain vigilant, this is merely the first of many battles to come. Best, Rob Zerban http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/com...paul_ryan_rwi/ Fighting Antipiracy Measure, Activist Group Posts Personal Information of Media Executives Amy Chozick The hacking group Anonymous posted online the personal details of Jeffrey L. Bewkes, left, the chairman of Time Warner, and also leaked information about the family of Sumner M. Redstone, right, who controls Viacom and the CBS Corporation.Mike Segar/ReutersThe hacking group Anonymous posted online the personal details of Jeffrey L. Bewkes, left, the chairman of Time Warner, and also leaked information about the family of Sumner M. Redstone, right, who controls Viacom and the CBS Corporation. The online activist group known as Anonymous, which has targeted opponents of the Occupy Wall Street movement and businesses that stopped providing services to WikiLeaks, has set its sights on a new adversary: media executives. In protest of antipiracy legislation currently being considered by Congress, the group has posted online documents that reveal personal information about Jeffrey L. Bewkes, chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, and Sumner M. Redstone, who controls Viacom and the CBS Corporation. Those companies, like almost every major company in the media and entertainment industry, have championed the Stop Online Piracy Act, the House of Representatives bill, known as SOPA, and its related Senate bill, called Protect I.P. The documents, culled from various databases, included Mr. Bewkes’s home addresses and phone numbers, and encouraged users to bombard the company and its executives with e-mails, faxes and phone calls. Mr. Bewkes has received intimidating phone calls and a barrage of e-mails, according to supporters of the legislation who have knowledge about the matter but are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The documents also included the corporate contact information for a range of companies including NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Entertainment and the Walt Disney Company. A Disney spokeswoman said neither the company nor its chief executive, Robert A. Iger, had received threats. Time Warner declined to comment. The file that was posted regarding Mr. Redstone has details about his family, home and career but does not include private contact information. A Viacom spokeswoman declined to comment. Anonymous, a loosely organized collective of so-called hacktivists, has called its effort “Operation Hiroshima.” It began on Jan. 1, when the group dropped a trove of documents on Web sites that facilitate anonymous publishing, like Pastebin.com and Scribd.com. The documents included information about media executives and government figures like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, and data on corporations and government entities that the group opposes. “They should feel threatened,” said Barrett Brown, a Dallas-based online activist who has worked with Anonymous, referring to backers of the antipiracy legislation. “The idea is to put pressure on the politicians and companies supporting it.” The online effort underscores how heated the arguments have become over legislation that may seem like arcane government regulation. Media companies say the legislation, which has bipartisan support, will crack down on illicit downloads of movies, music and television, especially from overseas Web sites. SOPA would expand the ability of the government and private companies to hold Web sites responsible for content the companies believe infringes on their copyrights, allowing greater use of court orders and lawsuits that could ultimately shut down the sites. The technology industry, including giants like Google and Yahoo, and advocates for Internet freedom say the bills would censor the Internet, stifle free speech and give the government too much power to regulate and shut down Web sites in the United States. Both sides have spent millions on lobbying in Washington. But at the grass-roots level, the issue has galvanized Internet activists, who lack lobbying power but have promoted the cause among the online community. “You take our speech, you take our Internet, you take our Bill of Rights, you take our Constitution, we fight back,” said a monotone voice on a YouTube video posted by Anonymous before the Operation Hiroshima document drop. Lawmakers and their aides have also been targets. A photograph of a 25-year-old aide for the House Judiciary Committee was superimposed into pornography by a group related to Anonymous, according to another aide who was briefed on security threats to lawmakers and their staffs. “Why can’t they just hire a lobbyist like everyone else?” this aide said. The vast majority of SOPA opponents convey their views through legitimate means. Hundreds of Web sites have encouraged blackouts and boycotts to protest the legislation. According to BlackoutSOPA.org, nearly 12,000 users have changed their Twitter profile pictures to a “Stop SOPA” badge. “The more outrage expressed on the Internet in the coming days, the better,” said Fred Wilson, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm and an early investor in Twitter. He said he did not condone threats or “any kind of intimidation” by hackers. Last month Scribd.com introduced a function that made the words on documents gradually fade away. As they did, a pop-up prompted users to contact their representatives. “Don’t let the Internet vanish before your eyes,” it read. The tactics have succeeded in some cases. Initially a supporter, the Web hosting company Go Daddy reversed its position on SOPA after Wikipedia and thousands of other Web sites said they would withdraw their domains from the service. “Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s chief executive, said in a statement. Companies like Time Warner, which owns HBO, CNN and the Warner Brothers studio, and Viacom, which owns MTV and the Paramount studio, have experienced security teams, but they are not necessarily trained to handle anonymous online threats, said Josh Shaul, chief technology officer at Application Security Inc., a New York-based provider of database security software. “It’s easy to get something taken off a Web site, but it’s impossible to erase things off the Internet,” he said. Less than a week after the Operation Hiroshima documents were posted, a Twitter message linking to Mr. Bewkes’s home phone numbers and addresses, his annual income and his wife’s name and age had spread across the Internet. The message included #OpHiroshima, the shortened Twitter code for the effort. The global activists in the nebulous collection known as Anonymous often use computer skills to support political causes. For example, Anonymous demanded a full Christmas dinner for Pfc. Bradley Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who is in prison facing charges of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks. Last month, hackers associated with Anonymous published a trove of e-mail addresses and the personal information of subscribers of Stratfor, a security group based in Austin, Tex. Last year, a splinter group affiliated with Anonymous attacked the Sony Corporation, shutting down its PlayStation online network. The attack cost the company around $171 million, according to industry estimates. Movements like Anonymous often squabble among themselves, but SOPA is a uniquely unifying cause, said Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University and an expert on hacking. To these activists, she said, “Internet freedom is not controversial.” http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...ia-executives/ Boycott SOPA: An Android App that Terrifies Publishers and Politicians Sebastian Anthony Armchair activists now have a tool that can transport their SOPA protestations into the real world: Boycott SOPA, an Android app that scans barcodes and tells you whether an object’s manufacturer/publisher is a supporter of the much maligned Stop Online Piracy Act. If you’ve ever scanned a barcode on your Android phone to look up a book or CD on Amazon, Boycott SOPA works in exactly the same way: First you have to install the ZXing Barcode Scanner app, but then you simply go around pointing your phone’s camera at product barcodes. Boycott SOPA gives you a big red cross if the product is distributed by a SOPA supporter, or a green tick if it’s “clean.” Much to my chagrin, Coca-Cola supports SOPA — but Smirnoff, on the other hand, does not. If you ever needed a sign from Above that you ought to drink more, there it is. Scanning food isn’t really where Boycott SOPA is at, though: Really, it’s all about scanning books, CDs, movies, and games — products that are protected by massively militant groups like the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA who are spending millions on buying off Representatives to shoehorn SOPA through Congress. If you scan a random selection of media in your DVD rack or bookcase, you’ll be unsurprised to see that almost every object is produced by a company that supports SOPA. It’s worth noting that the app isn’t perfect, though: It relies on a user-curated list of SOPA supporters — a list that isn’t complete nor publicly visible. The app developer claims that the list will be regularly updated. Boycott SOPA Android appTechnicalities aside, though, the ultimate goal of Boycott SOPA is to change your shopping habits. The idea is that you should scan everything that you buy at the supermarket, and refuse to put any SOPA-backed products into your basket. It’s a very grandiose idea, and in a day and age where shoppers regularly eschew a selection of products on principle (“damn baby-killing multinationals!”), or buy entirely local produce, Boycott SOPA fits right in. Inadvertently, though, the developers of Boycott SOPA have given us a tantalizing hint of how technology empowers consumers. Imagine for a second if you chopped “SOPA” from the name of the app and simply called it “Boycott.” Imagine if there was an Android app that let you boycott whatever you wanted. If you had a personal beef with Coca-Cola — which has very long tendrils indeed — you could program the app to pick up anything produced by Coca-Cola and its manifold subsidiaries. Likewise, if you want to stick it to publishers or artists that refuse to make their songs available on Spotify, you could tell Boycott to block them. You could even take it one step further and make Boycott the one-stop-shop for all of your political needs. Imagine if you could scan a cereal box and find out that the company’s CEO likes to hunt rhinos, ride elephants, and eat shark fin soup — at the same time. Imagine if you could scan a video game box and immediately see all of the active legislation, the Representative sponsors and supporters, and how much money they’ve received from industry lobbying. You could even go as far as equipping the app with facial recognition, so that you can point your phone at a Senator’s face on the TV and quickly find out whether what he’s saying actually jives with his real world behavior and voting record. This isn’t a futuristic concept; we could do this right now with the tech we have. http://www.extremetech.com/computing...nd-politicians SOPA Opera The SOPA Debate and How It’s Affected by Congress’s Understanding of Child Porn Dan Nguyen Note: The title of this post is not salacious link-bait. It refers to specific aspects of pending Congressional legislation. A week ago I put up SOPA Opera, a site that shows where Congressmembers stand on the much-talked about Stop Online Piracy and PROTECT-IP Acts. I did little more than collect and present publicly available information. But the strong reaction to the site is a testament to both how difficult it is to find clear information about our legislative system and how convoluted the issues are behind SOPA. The most common refrain I saw was: “I cannot believe that Rep/Senator [insert name] is for SOPA! [insert optional expletive].” In particular, “Al Franken” was a frequently invoked name because his fervent advocacy on net neutrality seemed to make the Minnesota senator, in many of his supporters’ opinions, an obvious enemy of SOPA. In fact, one emailer accused me of being out to slander Franken, even though the official record shows that Franken has spoken strongly for PROTECT-IP (the Senate version of SOPA) and even co-sponsored it. One look at SOPA Opera’s front page is all that’s needed to see how wide and bipartisan SOPA’s support is. No matter what your position on SOPA is, you’re likely to find a legislator who you would otherwise strongly disagree with (the second most common reaction: “Michelle Bachmann is against SOPA?”). So there has been a fair amount of confusion as to what mindset is responsible for SOPA. Since party lines can’t be used to determine the rightness/wrongess of SOPA, fingers have been pointed at the money trail: SOPA’s proponents reportedly receive far more money from media/entertainment-affiliated donors than they do from the tech industry. The opposite trend exists for the opponents. It’s impossible of course to know exactly what’s in the Congressmembers’ minds. But a certain key moment during the Nov. 16 House Judiciary hearing on SOPA suggest that their opinions may be rooted less in malice/greed (if you’re of the anti-SOPA persuasion) than in something far more prosaic: their level of technological comprehension. You can watch the entire, incredibly-inconvenient-to-access webcast at the House Judiciary’s hearing page. I’ve excerpted a specific clip in which Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA) is asking Katherine Oyama (Google’s copyright lawyer) about why Google can stop child porn but not online piracy: REP. MARINO: I want to thank Google for what it did for child pornography – getting it off the website. I was a prosecutor for 18 years and I find it commendable and I put those people away. So if you can do that with child pornography, why can you not do it [with] these rogue websites [The Pirate Bay, et al.]? Why not hire some whiz kids out of college to come in and monitor this and work for the company to take these off? My daughter who is 16 and my son who is 12, we love to get on the Internet and we download music and we pay for it. And I get to a site and I say this is a new one, this is good, we can get some music here. And my daughter says Dad, don’t go near that one. It’s illegal, it’s free, and given the fact that you’re on Judiciary, I don’t think you should be doing that…Maybe we need to hire her [laugh]…but, why not? OYAMA: The two problems are similar in that they’re both very serious problems they’re both things that we all should be working to fighting against. But they’re very different in how you go about combatting it. So for child porn, we are able to design a machine that is able to detect child porn. You can detect certain colors that would show up in pornography, you can detect flesh tones. You can have manual review, where someone would look at the content and they would say this is child porn and this shouldn’t appear. We can’t do that for copyright just on our own. Because any video, any clip of content, it’s going to appear to the user to be the same thing. So you need to know from the rights holder…have you licensed it, have you authorized it, or is this infringement?” REP. MARINO: I only have a limited amount of time here and I appreciate your answer. But we have the technology, Google has the technology, we have the brainpower in this country, we certainly can figure it out. The subject of child pornography is so awful that it’s little wonder that no one really thinks about how it’s actually detected and stopped. As it turns out, it’s not at all complicated. When I was a college reporter, I had the idea to drive down to the county district attorney’s office and go through all the search warrants. Search warrants become part of the public record, but district attorneys can seal them if police worry that details in an affidavit or search warrant would jeopardize an investigation. I wanted to count how many times this was done at the county DA, because some major cases had been sealed for months. And I wondered if the DA was too overzealous in keeping private what should be the people’s business. But there were plenty of big cases among the unsealed warrants. I went to college in a small town but there was a bizarre, seemingly constant stream of students being charged with child porn possession. Either college students were becoming particularly perverse or the campus police happened to be crack cyber-sleuths in rooting out the purveyors. I don’t know about the former, but I learned that the police were not particularly skilled at hacking, based on their notes in the search warrants. In fact, finding the suspects was comically easy because of the unique setup of our college network. Everyone in the dorms had an ethernet hookup but there was no Google, Napster or BitTorrent at the time. So one of the students built a search engine that allowed any student to search the shared files of every other student. And since Windows apparently made this file sharing a default (and at the time, 90+ percent of students’ computers were PCs), the student population had inadvertent access to a huge breadth of files, including MP3s and copied movies and even homework papers. So to find out if anyone had child porn, the police could just log onto the search engine and type in the appropriate search terms. But the police didn’t even have to do this. Other students would stumble upon someone’s porn collection (you had the option of exploring anyone’s entire shared folder, not just files that came up on the search) and report it. The filenames were all the sickening indication needed to suspect someone of possession. Google’s Oyama alludes to more technically sophisticated ways of detecting it, but the concept is just as simple as it was at my college: no matter how it’s found, child pornography is easy to categorize as child porn because of its visual characteristics, whether it’s the filename or the images itself. In fact, it’s not even necessary for a human to view a suspected file to know (within a high mathematical probability) that it contains the purported illegal content. If you’ve ever used Shazam or any of the other song-recognition services, you’ve put this concept into practice. When you hold up a phone to identify a song playing over the bar’s speakers, it’s not as if your phone dials up one of Shazam’s resident music experts who then responds with her guess of the song. The Shazam app looks for certain high points (as well as their spacing, i.e. the song’s rhythm) to generate a “fingerprint” of the song, and then compares it against Shazam’s master database of song “fingerprints”. No human actually has to “listen” to the song. This is not a new technological concept; it’s as old as, well, the fingerprint database used by law enforcement. So what Rep. Marino essentially wants is for Google to build a Shazam-like service that doesn’t just identify a song by “listening” to it, but also determines if whoever playing that song has the legal right to do so. Thus, this anti-pirate-Shazam would have to determine from the musical signature of a song such things as whether it came from an iTunes or Amazon MP3 or a CD. And not only that, it would have to determine whether or not the MP3 or CD is a legal or illegal copy. In a more physical sense, this is like detecting a machine that can determine from a photograph of your handbag whether it’s a cheap knockoff and whether or not you actually own that bag – as opposed to having stolen it, or having bought it from someone who did steal it. I’m not a particularly skilled engineer but I can’t fathom how this would be done and neither can Google, apparently. But Rep. Marino and at least a few others on the House Judiciary committee have more faith in Google’s technical prowess and they don’t believe that Google is doing enough. And frankly, I can’t blame them. From their apparently non-technical vantage point, what they see is that Google is an amazing company who seems to have no limit in its capabilities. It can instantly scour billions of webpages. It can plot in seconds the driving route from Des Moines ot Oaxaca, Mexico. And at some point, might even make a car that drives that route all by itself. And Google has demonstrated the power to stop evil acts, because it has effectively prevented the spread of child porn in its search engine and other networks. Child porn is a terrible evil; software/media piracy less so. It stands to reason – in a non-technical person’s thinking – that anyone who can stop a great evil must surely be able to stop a lesser evil. And so, to continue this line of reasoning, if Google doesn’t stop a lesser evil such as illegal MP3 distribution, then it must be because it doesn’t care enough. Or, as some House members noted, Google is loathe to take action because it makes money off of sites that trade in ill-gotten intellectual property. So you can see how one’s position on SOPA may be inspired not as much out of devotion to an industry but more from a particular (or lack thereof) understanding of the technological tradeoffs and hurdles. Rep. Marino et. all sees this as something within the realm of technological possibility for Google’s wizards, if only they had some legal incentive. Google and other SOPA opponents see that the problem that SOPA ostensibly tackles is not one that can be solved with any amount of technological expertise. Thus, each side can be as anti-online-piracy/pro-intellectual-property as the other and yet fight fiercely over SOPA. — Though SOPA has taken the spotlight, there is another Internet-related bill on the House Judiciary’s agenda. It’s H.R. 1981, a.k.a The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, which proposed a mandate that Internet service providers keep track of the sites their users visit for up to 18 months, to make it easier to investigate Internet crimes – such as downloading child pornography. H.R. 1981 was introduced by House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) who is, of course, the legislator who introduced SOPA. And like SOPA, the support for H.R. 1981 is non-partisan because child pornography is neither a Republican or Democratic cause. And also like SOPA, the opposition to H.R. 1981 is along non-partisan lines. Among the most vocal opponents to the child porn bill is the Judiciary committee’s ranking member Rep. John Conyers (D-MI). Is it because he is in the pocket of the child porn lobby? No; Conyers argues that even though child porn is bad, H.R. 1981 relies on using technology in a way that is neither practical nor ethical. From CNET: The bill is mislabeled,” said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the panel. “This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes.” Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) Rep. Conyers apparently understands that just because a law purports to fight something as evil (and, of course, politically unpopular) as child pornography doesn’t mean that the law’s actual implementation will be sound. So when the wrong-to-be-righted is online piracy – i.e. SOPA – what is Conyers’ stance? He is one of its most vocal supporters: The Internet has regrettably become a cash-cow for the criminals and organized crime cartels who profit from digital piracy and counterfeit products. Millions of American jobs are at stake because of these crimes. Is it because Conyers is in the pocket of big media? Or that he hates the First Amendment? That’s not an easily apparent conclusion judging from his past votes and legislative history. It’s of course possible that Conyers takes this particular stance on SOPA because SOPA, all things considered, happens to be a practical and fair law in the way that H.R. 1981 isn’t. But a more cynical viewpoint is that Conyer’s technological understanding for one bill does not apply to the other. Everyone has been screwed over at some point by a massive, faceless database so it’s easy to be fearful of online databases – in fact, the less you know about computers, the more concerned you’ll be of the misuse of databases. The technological issues underlying SOPA are arguably far more complex, though, and it’s not clear – as evidenced by Rep. Marino’s line of questioning – that Congressmembers, whether they support or oppose SOPA, have a full understanding of them. http://danwin.com/2012/01/the-sopa-d...of-child-porn/ Tim O’Reilly: Why I’m Fighting SOPA Colleen Taylor As the debate about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) rages on from Silicon Valley to Washington DC, a number of the technology industry’s most influential leaders have come out against the proposed legislation, which would give the government and private corporations unprecedented powers to remove websites from the internet for any alleged copyright infringement. On Thursday, I interviewed Tim O’Reilly about why he believes SOPA is wrong and what the tech industry can do to stop it. His concerns fell into five main categories: Piracy is not a real problem The way I see it, there’s a lack of need for any legislation at all. As a publisher, I have a very deep experience here, and the fact is that piracy is not a significant problem. Yes, there are people who are pirating my books, there are people who are sharing links to places where they can be downloaded. But the vast majority of customers are willing to pay if the product is widely available and the price is fair. If you have a relationship with your customers, and they know you’re doing the right thing, they will support you. The people who are pirating are most likely the people who would never give you a nickel to begin with. Piracy serves people on the fringes who are not being served adequately by legitimate markets. Frankly, if people in Romania can download my books and enjoy them, more power to them. They weren’t going to pay me anyway. SOPA protects the wrong people I talked with Nancy Pelosi about SOPA the other day, and she said that the experience with piracy is different for people in the movie industry. Maybe — I’m not a movie producer. But I do know that right now the entire content industry is facing massive systemic changes, and to claim that declining sales are because of piracy is so over the top. Any company that is providing great content online in a way that’s easy to use with a fair price has a booming business right now. The people who don’t are trying to fight that future. So here we have this legislation, with all of these possible harms, to solve a problem that only exists in the minds of people who are afraid of the future. Why should the government be intervening on behalf of the people who aren’t getting with the program? SOPA ignores history If you look at it from a historical perspective, the American book publishing industry as a whole began with piracy; there are lots of documents of Charles Dickens and the like taking a stand against these American pirates who were stealing their work. But America went on to become the largest publishing and copyright market in the world. Once the market matures, the pirates go away. They always do. Legitimate markets work better than pirate markets. More recently you can see this in what happened with the music industry. For a while, music companies were fighting peer-to-peer file sharing. But once Apple came out with iTunes, which was an alternative that was easy to use and fairly priced, it became a huge business. Our policy makers need to encourage the people who get it right, not protect people who clearly didn’t get it right. They need to protect our future. Tech and lobbying don’t mix Certainly, the tech industry needs to do a lot more lobbying in Washington, DC. But the whole notion of lobbying is anathema to so many tech people, and for good reason. We’re used to a world in which people design products that have a purpose, where your work speaks for itself. So yes, the tech industry should try to communicate more with the people in DC, but at the same time, congresspeople need to use more of their own independent judgement. The US needs tech innovation Laws like SOPA make us sclerotic as a country, where we have all these extra burdens that provide little benefit. In general it makes America less competitive. If SOPA goes through, it could very well force certain innovative companies to go offshore. There are incumbent industries that will always protest every new technology; but any forward-looking country needs to protect its emerging industries. http://gigaom.com/2012/01/13/tim-ore...fighting-sopa/ Reddit to 'Black Out' for 12 Hours to Protest SOPA, PIPA Sounds weird -- not to mention self-defeating -- but the social news website has a plan Chris Nerney The reddit community has been one of the most vocal and effective online critics of the Stop Online Piracy Act, with its December 22 call to punish GoDaddy forcing the domain registrar just one day later to publicly disavow its support of SOPA after losing tens of thousands of domains. Now reddit plans to black itself out for 12 hours on January 18 from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST to underscore its opposition to the SOPA bill currently in the House as well as the Senate's Protect IP Act (PIPA). At first glance this seems like an odd, even dumb, strategy. How can a site essentially shutting itself down for a half-day help in the fight against legislation that opponents (including myself) believe would allow the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright holders, through court orders, to punish foreign and domestic sites accused of copyright infringement by having them 1) removed from search engine results 2) prohibited from generating revenue through online advertising networks, and 3) cut off from online payment processing networks? It can't. But reddit's doing more than that. It's using the site during those 12 hours not to literally go dark, but to educate and, hopefully, build public opposition to the proposed legislation. Here's how reddit explains it in a blog post: Instead of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action. We will showcase the live video stream of the House hearing where Internet entrepreneurs and technical experts (including reddit co-founder Alexis “kn0thing” Ohanian) will be testifying. We will also spotlight community initiatives like meetups to visit Congressional offices, campaigns to contact companies supporting PIPA/SOPA, and other tactics. Reddit acknowledges that while "support for a blackout isn’t unanimous" among redditors (when is anything unanimous among redditors?), "we feel focusing on a day of action is the best way we can amplify the voice of the community." It strikes me as a pretty clever way for a site to leverage its large readership (nearly 35 million unique visitors and 2 billion page views in December alone) in a political battle. Redditors less aware of the potential ramifications of SOPA and PIPA who visit the site during the 12-hour "blackout" will get an education and be provided with ways to take action against these two bills. So maybe the "blackout" should be called a "learn-in." Feel free to run with that, reddit. http://www.itworld.com/internet/2407...test-sopa-pipa Why Google And Facebook Need To Go Dark To Protest SOPA House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas and Senate Judiciary Committee Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. are the men behind the latest attempt to stamp down on piracy – and free speech – online. E.D. Kain The Stop Online Piracy Act and its counterpart in the Senate, the Protect IP Act, represent the greatest threat to a free internet we’ve seen from the US government yet. So far, the internet remains a frontier of innovation, the sharing of ideas, and free-wheeling communities. In many ways its the last unregulated bastion of free commerce in the world. And now it’s under attack. Like David Carr in the New York Times, I do think online piracy is a real problem despite what web-evangelists may say. However, as Carr notes these laws would do little to stop piracy and even if they “made some progress toward reining in rogue sites, the collateral damage would be significant.” Censorship would break the internet and toss free speech out the window. When you look at exactly what these bills do you can see just how pernicious the legislation really is – and how unnecessary. Piracy is a problem but there are better, more constitutional ways to help fight against it. Groups like Reddit and other online communities and internet companies are up in arms about the legislation and a few good congressmen are on the case but so far the outcry has only slowed the progress of the bills and most of the mainstream media remains glaringly silent on the laws (perhaps because the laws are being pushed by various parent companies who support the legislation.) As a fervent opponent of both SOPA and PIPA I wholeheartedly second Paul Tassi‘s call for an internet blackout. Noting that Reddit will go dark next week, Tassi says it’s just not enough and may be preaching to the choir: That’s where a Google/Facebook blackout would have the power to instantly crush SOPA. If the sites went dark and instead linked to pages explaining the problems with SOPA, and then had links for people to contact Congress, I guarantee it would be the killing blow for the bill. National news agencies which have largely been avoiding covering SOPA because their parent companies support it would be forced to report on the topic, as Facebook and Google going offline would undoubtedly be the biggest tech story of the day, week, month, or possibly the year. Paul is fairly sanguine about all of this, however. He argues that the leaders of the internet industry will be able to dissuade clueless lawmakers and push them toward better rules. I’m not so sure. Politics is hardly the realm of the rational. The entertainment industry is behind the current bills and they’re pushing as hard as they ever have figuring that every penny spent lobbying for SOPA will pay off big-time when they have the power to shut down so-called “rogue” websites. The bipartisan support for the bills is what makes me nervous. The fact that the lawmakers in question have a very poor understanding of the bills and the technology they’re attempting to regulate is hardly comforting. Obama’s signature on the National Defense Authorization Act convinces me that he’d sidestep a veto on SOPA as well. My only comfort is with the courts. The Supreme Court has already shot down legislation aimed at censoring violent video games. And while the current court is hardly a civil libertarian’s dream-team it’s still a more likely graveyard for SOPA than Congress. It’s not hard to imagine the court declaring these laws unconstitutional breaches of free speech. But it’s a gamble. So let’s blacken the internet. Google and Facebook are in the unique position of making this happen. http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain...-protest-sopa/ Time Is Running Out For SOPA Opponents Congressmen Warn At CES 2012 E.D. Kain Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) showed up at CES 2012 in Las Vegas to issue a stark warning: we’re running out of time to stop legislation aimed at cracking down on copyright infringement. That legislation – the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate – is intended to clamp down on piracy but is widely believed to go much further, with free speech and censorship ramifications that could have profound consequences on the way the internet works. “This is a crucial window here for those who want to see the Net come out of this debate without this enormous collateral damage” caused by the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, Wyden told conference-goers. “We are not prepared to say that this juggernaut for innovation and freedom and citizen empowerment, the Internet, ought to be dealt such a serious body blow in the name of copyright.” Meanwhile, Rep. Issa warned that the bills have had little or no discussion in any committees, saying “This should have been widely involved at every committee that looks at the Internet or commerce or trade.” The only hearing held so far on the legislation was conducted by the bill’s author, Lamar Smith of Texas. Few, if any, experts have been called in front of congress to discuss the bills. Thanks to a filibuster from Wyden, PIPA is currently held in check in the Senate. But it’s not inconceivable that the bipartisan legislation could find the 60 votes needed to sidestep Wyden and move on to the president’s desk where it’s almost certain the legislation would become law. A number of websites and web companies are protesting or opposing the legislation, with communities like Reddit staging various protests and an upcoming blackout. Wikipedia has also come out in opposition to the bills and has floated the idea of a blackout of the online encyclopedia. Groups like the Consumer Electronic Association have backed Wyden and Issa’s OPEN Act, a much milder alternative to the SOPA/PIPA bills. Wyden, however, remains dour. “I believe we could have SOPA passing in the House and OPEN passing in the Senate – and I don’t even want to think about what kind of conference committee there would be,” he told the IBTimes. http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain...n-at-ces-2012/ SOPA Sponsor Rep. Lamar Smith to SOPA Opponents: You Don’t Matter Andrew Couts Rep. Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor of the 'Stop Online Piracy Act' (SOPA), has dismissed the opposition to SOPA as illegitimate and of minor importance. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the chief sponsor of the ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ (SOPA), says that criticisms of the controversial legislation are entirely unfounded, and that the online communities that oppose the bill are illegitimate. “The criticism of this bill is completely hypothetical; none of it is based in reality. Not one of the critics was able to point to any language in the bill that would in any way harm the Internet. Their accusations are simply not supported by any facts,” said Smith in a statement, quoted by Roll Call. When asked about the burgeoning opposition to the bill from online communities like Reddit.com, Smith added: “It’s a vocal minority. Because they’re strident doesn’t mean they’re either legitimate or large in number. One, they need to read the language. Show me the language. There’s nothing they can point to that does what they say it does do. I think their fears are unfounded.” There are so many things just factually wrong about Rep. Smith’s statement that it’s hard to know where to begin. So let’s just take his asinine dismissal from the top, shall we? First, Rep. Smith says that “not one of the critics” could point to specific language in the bill that would “in any way harm the Internet.” No? What about the 83 Internet pioneers — we’re talking people like Vint Cerf, co-designer of TCP/IP; Jim Gettys, editor of the HTTP/1.1 protocol standards; Leonard Kleinrock, a key developer of the ARPANET; in other words, the very people who built the Internet — who say that SOPA (and the Protect IP Act, PIPA), “will risk fragmenting the Internet’s global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious technical consequences” because of the bills’ requirement that Internet service providers block domain names of infringing sites. In their letter to Congress, this group of Internet founders also argues that SOPA “will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure.” If that’s not damaging to the Internet, what is it? To Rep. Smith, it’s nothing, apparently. Hyperbole. Rep. Smith’s own hyperbole goes against the opinion of former Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Stewart Baker, who agrees with the Internet founders when he says that SOPA will “do great damage to Internet security, mainly by putting obstacles in the way of DNSSEC, a protocol designed to limit certain kinds of Internet crime,” among other repercussions. Now, in terms of Rep. Smith’s statement that the anti-SOPA crowd is neither “legitimate” nor “large in number,” well, that’s so obviously false, it would be laughable if it weren’t so infuriating. As we have mentioned before, the list of vocal SOPA opponents includes more than 850 companies, organizations and individual experts who are adamantly against the legislation’s passage — far more than appear on the House Judiciary Committee’s list of SOPA supporters. This includes the Internet’s largest companies: Google, AOL, Facebook, eBay, LinkedIn, Mozilla, PayPal, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Tumblr (to name only a few). The list of SOPA opponents also includes 425 venture capitalists and entrepreneurs — i.e. job creators. The editorial boards of The New York Times and Los Angeles Times are on the list, as are 39 public advocacy groups, nonprofits and think tanks who believe that SOPA will stifle freedom of speech. These are joined by 61 international human rights groups, and 116 academics and law experts from the nation’s top law schools. In short: The list of SOPA critics could not be any more legitimate. In addition to these industry, human rights, and law experts, the anti-SOPA faction includes countless individuals — voters, as they’re called in Washington, who have sent hundreds of thousands of letters to Congress, and made nearly 90,000 calls in one day to their representatives, as Tech Dirt’s Mike Masnick reports, urging them to denounce SOPA. For the sake of brevity, we won’t go into detail about Reddit’s apparently successful GoDaddy boycott over the company’s SOPA support, or the countless other less-public actions concerned citizens are taking to fight this bill. But it’s important for those of you on the sidelines to know that when Rep. Smith questions the legitimacy of those who oppose SOPA, he’s questioning the legitimacy of the American people, and damaging the democratic principles upon which this country relies. http://www.digitaltrends.com/opinion...u-dont-matter/ Author of U.S. Online Piracy Bill Vows Not to Buckle Jim Forsyth The lawmaker behind a bill to combat online piracy vowed on Thursday to press ahead in the face of fierce criticism from Internet giants such as Google and Facebook. "It is amazing to me that the opponents apparently don't want to protect American consumers and businesses," Republican Representative Lamar Smith told Reuters in a telephone interview. "Are they somehow benefitting by directing customers to these foreign websites? Do they profit from selling advertising to these foreign websites? And if they do, they need to be stopped. And I don't mind taking that on." The Stop Online Piracy Act, which is before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee chaired by Smith, aims to fight online piracy of pharmaceuticals, music and other consumer products by allowing the Department of Justice to seek federal court injunctions against foreign-based websites. Smith said Internet counterfeiters cost American consumers, businesses, inventors and workers some $100 billion a year, though critics accuse him of exaggerating. Under the bill, if a judge agrees that websites offer material that violates U.S. copyright laws, Internet service providers could be required to block access to foreign sites and U.S. online ad networks could be required to stop ads and search engines barred from directly linking to them. Heavyweights such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit oppose the bill, which came under fire at this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Reddit chief executive Alexis Ohanian has said it would "cripple the Internet" and pledged to take his social media site dark for one day next week to protest the bill. "This (SOPA) could potentially obliterate the entire tech industry - a job-creating industry," Ohanian wrote on his blog. Smith stressed the bill would only affect websites based outside the United States and criticized opponents for failing to cite specific sections, saying many have failed to read it and were disguising their economic interests with rhetoric about Internet freedom. Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt told the Economic Club of Washington last month that the bill would "effectively break the Internet" and he compared Smith's efforts to the same type of censorship that Google has experienced in China. "There are some companies like Google that make money by directing consumers to these illegal websites," Smith said. "So I don't think they have any real credibility to complain even though they are the primary opponent." Smith has received numerous awards from conservative organizations for his opposition to efforts to expand the federal government's power. But the Texas representative says giving Washington sweeping powers over the Internet is necessary to protect free enterprise. Smith predicted the bill would pass the House. It was about halfway through the process of committee hearings and could go to the House floor in a matter a weeks, he said. The Senate was considering a similar measure. (Editing by Daniel Trotta and Xavier Briand) http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80C04T20120113 The Author of SOPA Is a Copyright Violator Jamie Lee Curtis Taete Wanna spend your Thursday night looking for hypocrites on the internet? Help us expose other SOPA-supporting, copyright-flaunting hypocrites here. US Congressman and poor-toupee-colour-chooser Lamar Smith is the guy who authored the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA, as I'm sure you know, is the shady bill that will introduce way harsher penalties for companies and individuals caught violating copyright online (including making the unauthorised streaming of copyrighted content a crime which you could actually go to jail for). If the bill passes, it will destroy the internet and, ultimately, turn the world into Mad Max (for more info, go here). I decided to check that everything on Lamar's official campaign website was copyright-cleared and above board. Lamar is using several stock images on his site, two of which I tracked back to the same photographic agency. I contacted the agency to make sure he was paying to use them, but was told that it's very difficult for them to actually check to see if someone has permission to use their images. (Great news, copyright violators!) However, seeing as they're both from the same agency and are unwatermarked, it seems fairly likely that he is the only person on the entire internet who is actually paying to use a stock image (and he'd be an idiot not to). So I took a look back at an archived, pre-SOPA version of his site. And this is the background image Lamar was using. I managed to track that picture back to DJ Schulte, the photographer who took it. And whaddya know? Looks like someone forgot to credit him. I contacted DJ, to find out if Lamar had asked permission to use the image and he told me that he had no record of Lamar, or anyone from his organisation, requesting permission to use it: "I switched my images from traditional copyright protection to be protected under the Creative Commons license a few years ago, which simply states that they can use my images as long as they attribute the image to me and do not use it for commercial purposes. "I do not see anywhere on the screen capture that you have provided that the image was attributed to the source (me). So my conclusion would be that Lamar Smith's organisation did improperly use my image. So according to the SOPA bill, should it pass, maybe I could petition the court to take action against www.texansforlamarsmith.com." Oh dear. Luckily for DJ, there are people out there like Lamar making new laws to protect the little guy against online copyright theft. Keep fighting that good fight, Lamar! We've contacted the office of Lamar Smith and are waiting on a response. http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/lamar...pyright-whoops Comcast -- Owner Of NBC Universal -- Admits That DNS Redirects Are Incompatible With DNSSEC Mike Masnick Well, well, well. Here's something interesting. Comcast, who owns NBC Universal (one of the main forces behind SOPA/PIPA), is officially a SOPA/PIPA supporter. However, yesterday, Comcast put up a post congratulating itself (deservedly so!) for completing its DNSSEC deployment, making it "the first large ISP in the North America to have fully implemented" DNSSEC across the board. That's huge, and a clear vote of confidence for DNSSEC, obviously. They also urge others to use DNSSEC: Now that nearly 20 million households in the U.S. are able to use DNSSEC, we feel it is an important time to urge major domain owners, especially commerce and banking-related sites, to begin signing their domain names. While in the past those domains may have wanted to do so but felt it would have limited effect, they now can work on signing their domains knowing that the largest ISP in the U.S. can validate those signatures on behalf of our customers. All of this is good... but what may be much more interesting is that, along with this announcement, Comcast has also mentioned that it is shutting down its Domain Helper service. Domain Helper was a somewhat controversial DNS-redirect system, so that when you mistyped something, it would suggest the proper page or alternatives. Many in the internet community complained that these types of redirects mess with the underlying DNS system (which they do). But, as the DNS experts have been saying all along (and NBC Universal has been trying to play down), DNSSEC is incompatible with such DNS redirects. So... that makes this next part a little awkward. Comcast is now admitting, indeed, that DNS redirects, such as Domain Helper, are incompatible with DNSSEC: When we launched the Domain Helper service, we also set in motion its eventual shutdown due to our plans to launch DNSSEC. Domain Helper has been turned off since DNS response modification tactics, including DNS redirect services, are technically incompatible with DNSSEC and/or create conditions that can be indistinguishable from malicious modifications of DNS traffic (including DNS cache poisoning attacks). Since we want to ensure our customers have the most secure Internet experience, and that if they detect any DNSSEC breakage or error messages that they know to be concerned (rather than not knowing if the breakage/error was "official" and caused by our redirect service or "unofficial" and caused by an attacker), our priority has been placed on DNSSEC deployment -- now automatically protecting our customers... Let's be doubly clear about this, because it's important. Just as NBC Universal and other SOPA supporters continue to insist that DNS redirect is completely compatible with DNSSEC... Comcast (and official SOPA/PIPA supporter) has rolled out DNSSEC, urged others to roll out DNSSEC and turned off its own DNS redirect system, stating clearly that DNS redirect is incompatible with DNSSEC, if you want to keep people secure. In the end, this certainly appears to suggest that Comcast is admitting that it cannot comply with SOPA/PIPA, even as the very same company is advocating for those laws. It would appear that the left hand (people who actually understand technology) isn't speaking to the right hand (lawyers/lobbyists) within the Comcast family. But, I think that NBC Universal and anyone else insisting that DNS redirects are fine in DNSSEC owe everyone else a pretty big apology... when their own company's experts are admitting that the two are incompatible. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...h-dnssec.shtml If SOPA's Main Target Is The Pirate Bay, It's Worth Pointing Out That ThePirateBay.org Is Immune From SOPA Mike Masnick In looking over Eric Goldman's excellent "linkwrap" of a bunch of recent SOPA/PIPA stories, it pointed me to a News.com article from last month, about how SOPA was really about going after one single site: The Pirate Bay. I've actually heard this repeatedly -- and from folks heavily involved with the bill itself. The whole point of the bill is to try to take down The Pirate Bay. Now, we can argue back and forth about how pointless that is... but there's something else that seems important: As written, nothing in SOPA can touch ThePirateBay's main website, ThePirateBay.org That's because the current version of the bill excludes any .com or .org. from being a target (though, they can be required to take action against other sites). This has caused some confusion, mainly because of the changes between the original version of SOPA and the "manager's amendment," which is the current version of the bill. The manager's amendment makes you jump through some hoops to understand this, but the key point is that a "U.S.-directed site" is defined to be a "foreign internet site" in the bill (in the original SOPA, a U.S.-directed site could be any site). Then, a foreign domain name is listed as not a "domestic domain" (keep hopping!), which itself is defined as "a domain name that is registered or assigned by a domain name registrar, domain name registry or other domain name registration authority that is located within a judicial district of the United States." This means that all .com or .org domains are domestic, since they're assigned by a registry that is located within the US (for those confused, a domain registry is a company like VeriSign that runs the master database of all domains under a single top level domain). The thinking here is that (as ICE and the Justice Department have claimed) any website that has a TLD that is controlled by an American company can be dealt with via existing laws, such as the one that ICE uses to seize websites. .com is run by VeriSign, which is based in the US. And .org is run by the Public Interest Registry, which is also based in the US (Virginia, specifically). That means that thepiratebay.org -- the main website for The Pirate Bay... is actually immune from the two key parts of SOPA (sections 102 and 103, since both clearly state that they only cover "U.S.-directed sites"). So, based on the law as written... The Pirate Bay is immune from SOPA (though, potentially not from ICE just seizing the domain). It's worth noting the same is true of both RapidShare and Megaupload -- two other sites frequently cited by the MPAA and the US Chamber of Commerce as the types of awful, evil sites that these bills are targeted to take down. In fact, remember that "53 billion visits to rogue websites" claim that the US Chamber of Commerce loves to repeat? Nearly half of that is from RapidShare and Megavideo/Megaupload. And yet, those sites are clearly excluded from SOPA based on the definitions. So why would they still be trotting them out as examples? http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...une-sopa.shtml Finnish Operator Required To Block Access To ThePirateBay, Among Others Antti Vilpponen Elisa, one of the largest internet service providers in Finland, has been forced to block access to The PirateBay for its customers. Elisa issued a press release (in Finnish) on the matter moments ago. The decision was given by a local district court in Helsinki. Elisa has stated that they will seek correction to the decision in supreme court. As of today, all Elisa and Saunalahti (part of the same group) customers will be denied access to ThePirateBay on an operator level, meaning they have denied access to the servers in their name servers. TTVK, the anti-piracy organisation put forth by IFPI Finland, is opposing Elisa in the case. They have also sought a similar decision for other operators and internet service providers in Finland. While the case is far from clear, this is not a healthy road to go down. It has a very bad ring to it, especially after it comes out just following our guest post regarding issues in Hungary. Bad business models and industries under disruption should under no circumstance be protected by law this extensively that seriously deteriorate citizens right to information. While ThePirateBay shares illegal material, uploaded by its users, there is a ton of legal material as well. In addition to blocking access to ThePirateBay, Elisa has been forced to block access to all of the following addresses: thepiratebay.org, www.thepiratebay.org, depiraatbaai.be, www.depiraatbaai.be, piratebay.am, www.piratebay.am, piratebay.net, www.piratebay.net, www.piratebay.no, piratebay.no, piratebay.se, www.piratebay.se, suprnova.com, www.suprnova.com, themusicbay.com, www.themusicbay.com, themusicbay.net, www.themusicbay.net, themusicbay.org, www.themusicbay.org, thepiratebay.am,www.thepiratebay.am, www.thepiratebay.com, thepiratebay.com, thepiratebay.gl, www.thepiratebay.gl, thepiratebay.net, www.thepiratebay.net, www.thepiratebay.se, thepiratebay.se, www.piraattilahti.fi, piraattilahti.fi, thepiratepay.org.nyud.net This also raises an interesting question: what rights do we as ArcticStartup have in asking operators to block access to news sites that take our content without proper accreditation? What rights do any other companies have? As you give it more thought, you begin to realise how dangerous this turn of events can really be. Update: Also, Piraattilahti.fi -address currently hosts just a video file casting criticism against the SOPA legislation in the US. How does this promote copyright infringement? Update 2: In response to the blocking of ThePirateBay, the Finnish branch of the Anonymous hacker group has taken down the anti-filesharing website Antipiracy.fi. Furthermore, they demand Elisa restore access, threatening "This is only the beginning." http://www.arcticstartup.com/2012/01...y-among-others Anonymous Targets Finland Over Anti-Piracy Efforts AFP Cyber-activists attacked the websites of Finnish anti-piracy groups after a local Internet service provider was forced to block access to a popular file-sharing website, officials said Tuesday. Antti Kotilainen, a spokesman for the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC), told AFP that websites run by his organisation and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) had been "down since Monday". "It isn't the first time this has happened ... We have no precise information who is behind this," he added. Meanwhile a group of hacker activists, or "hacktivists," known as Anonymous Finland claimed responsibility on the microblogging site Twitter for the attacks, insisting about the CIAPC site: "We'll keep it down as long as we want". In May 2011, the CIAPC and IFPI brought a case against Elisa, a major Finnish Internet service provider, seeking to block its customers from accessing the Swedish file sharing website The Pirate Bay. Following a ruling by the Helsinki District Court last October ordering Elisa to block access to Pirate Bay or face a 100,000-euro ($130,000) fine, the service provider announced Monday it would temporarily block access to the site. The websites of both plaintiffs in the anti-piracy case later became inaccessible, apparently due to the "Elisagate" campaign launched by the cyber-activists claiming an anti-censorhip agenda. "We know about it ... We are following what's happening," police investigator Timo Piiroinen told AFP, adding that such cases are "extremely challenging." Elisa meanwhile indicated in a customer statement Monday that it intended to appeal the October court ruling. Founded in 2003, The Pirate Bay makes it possible to skirt copyright fees and share music, film and computer game files using bit torrent technology, or peer-to-peer links offered on the site. The site has been involved in numerous lawsuits concerning copyright infringement, and Finland is just one of several countries that have attempted to block access to the site. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp...d8739775a81.71 Dutch Cabler Appeals Order to Ban File-Sharing Site Dutch MSO Ziggo has appealed a court order that it restricts access to the Pirate Bay website, which facilitates file-sharing of TV and movie content. The cabler was told this week that if it did not block users from the site within ten days, it faced a fine of up to €250,000.  Ziggo said that it opposed the illegal downloading of content, but that restricting access to certain websites was potentially the start of a slippery slope. ISP XS4All is also subject to the court ruling and is appealing alongside Ziggo. http://www.digitaltveurope.net/19418...-sharing-site/ The Best 3 Private Torrent Trackers That You Should Be Invited To Craig Snyder With Napster, WinMX, LimeWire, and Kazaa mostly in their graves (SoulSeek is still around, I guess), the world of filesharing has made a swift transition to torrents. Just like the good old Napster days though, public torrent sites and trackers are riddled with trojans and other garbage. The best way to enjoy your filesharing experience is getting an invite to one of the many (but few illustrious) private trackers. While invite-only web is becoming a slight trend, I’m here to share three niche-specific and very reliable private sites that I use to get my complete media fix. Let’s get started. PassThePopcorn PTP has been around for quite a while, and through a legacy of staff drama and domain name changes, it still stands today as the best private torrent site for movies. High-quality rips are added to PTP faster than almost anywhere else on the net, and speeds are generally top notch. PTP is at around 23,000 (of 25,000) users with a daily activity rate that hangs around 40%. Monthly, it’s at more than 90%. PTP is hanging right under the 100,000 total torrents mark. They’ve got over 53,000 individual movies, more than 80,000 subtitles, 533,000+ user ratings, 3.5 million total snatches, and a seeder/leecher ratio of 85.49. That’s impressive. The site is very smooth and easy to navigate, also. As a little added bonus, PTP has some of the most active forums I’ve seen across private trackers. The community is very involved. This is where I go when I want movies. If you’re fortunate enough to be an active, invited member than you can tag along with me. My username there is Craig. What.CD What.CD is the premiere private tracker for music. Even their splash page is mysterious and makes you want to join up. Like PTP, What.CD has been going strong forever. The site has not changed much over the years, and that’s a good thing. It’s here to stay. Here are the current stats that What.CD boasts: Maximum Users: 200,000 Enabled Users: 147,441 Users active today: 31,864 (21.61%) Users active this week: 75,651 (51.31%) Users active this month: 120,045 (81.42%) Torrents: 1,274,496 Releases: 588,517 Artists: 442,475 “Perfect” FLACs: 298,750 Requests: 158,012 (70.30% filled) Snatches: 66,631,197 Peers: 8,836,049 Seeders: 8,687,317 Leechers: 148,732 Seeder/Leecher Ratio: 58.40 Those numbers are completely insane! If you’re an audiophile and love your FLACs, this is the place to be. I’ve never gone to What.CD and left without finding what I wanted. I’m CSS over at that tracker. TvTorrents.COM TvT is the up-and-comer of this list. It’s much different from PTP and What.CD. It doesn’t run on Project Gazelle like those two, the tracker software that What.CD made famous. The invitation and credits system is completely different also. Again, just like the others, this is absolutely at the top of its class. Sometimes shows are uploaded as briefly as 15 minutes after their live airing. They’ve even got sections of the website that shows recently aired episodes of the most popular TV series’, complete with the matching user-contributed torrents (if there). These guys are really doing it right, and their approach is definitely changing the way a lot of people watch “TV”. No more sitting and waiting, you don’t even have to set the TiVo. TvTorrents.com has everything you want, from Dexter to the most obscure foreign sitcoms. I’m over there too, self-named. Now how do you get an invite to these awesome trackers? That’s on you. Just know that they are out there and hold all of your cravings and desires! In the event that you do get invited, you’ll want one of these clients to speed up your downloads. Might also want to check this article out too, it could save you some worry. Don’t Forget: The Free A-Z Torent Guide If you know any other quality sites, get at me in the comments. No begging for invites, either! http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3-priva...ckers-invited/ The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents Ernesto In a month The Pirate Bay will no longer offer downloads of .torrent files. Instead, the largest torrent site on the Internet will only provide so-called magnet links to its visitors. The first step in this direction was made today with The Pirate Bay replacing the current default torrent download links with magnets. Could this be the end of an era? After half a decade of loyal service, The Pirate Bay shut down its tracker in November 2009. The Pirate Bay argued that BitTorrent trackers have been made redundant by technologies such as DHT and PEX. In addition, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering magnet links instead. “We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT and PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time. Now, two years later, that date is coming soon. Today, The Pirate Bay made the first step towards this new future by making magnets the default download links instead of torrents. TorrentFreak was further informed that in “a month or so” the largest torrent site on the Internet will stop serving torrent files indefinitely. The announcement is bound to lead to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users, but in reality very little will change for the average Pirate Bay visitor. Users will still be able to download files, but these will now be started through a magnet link instead of a .torrent file. The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that one of the advantages of the transition to a “magnet site” is that it requires relatively little bandwidth to host a proxy. This is topical, since this week courts in both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local Internet providers to block the torrent site. Perhaps even better, without the torrent files everyone can soon host a full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future. Unlike the site’s users, existing torrent sites that scrape .torrent files from The Pirate Bay will have to make some drastic changes. If they want to continue serving .torrent files they will have to fetch them from DHT. Also, hotlinks to .torrent files will stop working and will soon redirect to The Pirate Bay’s detail page for the files in question. One of the potential downsides of using magnets is that it could take a bit longer for downloads to start, especially if there are relatively few people sharing a file. This is because the .torrent file has to be fetched from other users instead of being downloaded directly from the site. More background on these and other technicalities can be found here. The good news is that all mainstream BitTorrent clients support magnet links. This wasn’t the case back in 2009, but when The Pirate Bay hinted that in the future they could become a magnet-only site, all developers quickly made their clients fully compatible. There’s no doubt that a torrent-less Pirate Bay will certainly mark the end of an era. At the moment it’s hard to predict what the impact of The Pirate Bay’s decision will be on the BitTorrent community. But torrents, however, will never disappear completely. https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-...rrents-120112/ Bulgarian Police Raid Two Filesharing Web Sites Arrest 17 year old web site admin Kate O'Flaherty TWO BULGARIAN filesharing web sites have been raided by the country's organised crime unit. According to Torrent Freak, three locations were raided and two web site admins were arrested, one of whom was only 17 years old. The web sites served in excess of three quarters of a million members and had been established for several years. Bulgaria's organised crime unit targeted the two web sites over the weekend as part of an ongoing campaign to crack down on internet based copyright infringement. The National Directorate for Combating Organized Crime said it had raided three locations in the western city of Pernik, the central northern city of Gabrovo and the capital Sofia. Computer equipment and other hardware was seized, but both web sites remain up on the same host located outside the country in Germany. Meanwhile, access to their Bittorrent trackers has been disabled. The Bulgarian Interior Ministry described the raids as "another successful operation" as the country's Ministry of Culture continues to crack down on copyright infringement. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...ring-web-sites 'Piracy' Student Richard O'Dwyer Loses Extradition Case BBC A Sheffield student can be extradited to the US to face copyright infringement allegations, a judge has ruled. Richard O'Dwyer, 23, set up the TVShack website which US authorities say hosts links to pirated copyrighted films and television programmes. The Sheffield Hallam University student lost his case in a hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court. If found guilty in a US court he could face up to five years in jail. Mr O'Dwyer's lawyer, Ben Cooper, indicated during the hearing that he would appeal against the ruling. Mr Cooper said the website did not store copyright material itself and merely directed users to other sites, making it similar to Google. He also argued that his client, who would be the first British citizen to be extradited for such an offence, was being used as a "guinea pig" for copyright law in the US. But District Judge Quentin Purdy ruled the extradition could go ahead. Mr O'Dwyer's mother, Julia O'Dwyer, from Chesterfield, has described the moves by US authorities as "beyond belief" and described Britain's extradition treaty with the United States as "rotten". Speaking before the hearing, Mr O'Dwyer said he was "surprised" when police officers from the UK and America seized equipment at his home in South Yorkshire in November 2010. However, no criminal charges followed from the UK authorities. The case was brought by the US Customs and Border Protection agency, which claims that the TVShack.net website earned "over $230,000 in advertising revenue" before US authorities obtained a warrant and seized the domain name. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england...shire-16544335 NinjaVideo "Queen" Gets 22 Months in Jail, Owes $200,000 to Hollywood Nate Anderson NinjaVideo.net's "queen" is going to jail—and paying the MPAA over $200,000. A federal judge today sentenced Hana Amal "Queen Phara" Beshara to 22 months in a West Virginia prison and enrolled her (at her request) in a drug rehab program there. Beshara was the public face of NinjaVideo, a major US-based movie download site trafficking in hot Hollywood movies, sometimes before they were released. Beshara, now 29, had her condo raided in 2010 by the feds, who seized her gear and eventually charged her with criminal copyright infringement. Last year, Beshara issued a YouTube video to the NinjaVideo community in which she suggested that she hadn't known her actions were wrong. "We weave and we bob through these grey areas of laws not yet written," she said. But after pleading guilty, she changed her tune. Her plea agreement with the government admits that she said, "we are extremely illegal" during an Internet chat and later that "my best work… is my illegal website moderation and uploading." My mind on my money The site managed to rake in $505,000 between 2008 and 2010, and money was on the mind of people like Beshara. "You're so helpless when you're limited to so few ad companies to choose from being a pirate site," she complained in an online chat. And when it came to DMCA takedowns, she admitted that NinjaVideo would "leave some content specifically listed in the DMCA takedown notices on the NinjaVideo.net website, based primarily on the volume of user hits/requests and the amount of revenue." Beshara personally received $260,246 over the course of the site's existence, but she paid $50,420 to other NinjaVideo workers. The remaining $209,826.95 went into accounts at TD Ameritrade, Chase, and Paypal—all of which are now forfeit. The government will also keep her Seagate external hard drives, three laptops, an iPod touch, a Motorola Droid, 11 DVDs, and $1,000 cash seized during the raid on her home. Where the money goes Beshara was ordered to repay the full amount of money, but not to the government—checks are to go straight to the Motion Picture Association of America. Beshara's lawyer says that she has no cash left, however. "This restitution amount should not obscure the fact that Ms. Beshara did not make a lot of money from her participation in NinjaVideo," her attorney wrote to the court. "She was only able to support herself through her position at NinjaVideo during the final 6 months of its operation. For most of her time at NinjaVideo, she also worked as a dentist's receptionist, earning $1,100 to $1,200 a month." He also noted that Beshara was an "emotional and high strung woman" who "used up many Kleenexes crying in counsel's office, at the arraignment and afterwards." Character reference A letter on her character arrived from her brother, an Air Force captain. "Watching my mom and dad cry every day during Christmas break is heart wrenching and they question whether it was their fault that Hana got caught up in all this," he wrote. "We understand that Hana has made mistakes and must pay your debt, but we do ask for leniency since she is a significant part of our very small family. Since all of this has unraveled our family has been torn apart emotionally and we all eagerly look forward to putting this behind us and helping Hana get back on her feet." Her best friend also wrote a letter about meeting Beshara through the NinjaVideo.net forums. "I attended a Church retreat with her and her parents in July 2011," runs the letter. "I find her the most considerate friend that I have… I even got a tattoo of her favorite flower because I truly know that she is someone I will keep in touch with always.” The judge did provide a more lenient sentence than called for in sentencing guidelines, but it was more than Beshara requested. For the next 22 months, she will call a federal prison her home. When she emerges on probation, she will have to pay a minimum of $150 per month toward her restitution. After that, who knows? Her brother notes that she was valedictorian of her high school class and holds a degree from NYU. Recently, he says, she's been talking about "turning her life around" and heading off to graduate school when she leaves prison. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-hollywood.ars All Four Major Record Labels Are Now Suing Grooveshark Andrew Couts Grooveshark is now being sued by EMI for allegedly failing to pay royalties. This follows a lawsuit served by Universal, Sony and Warner. Things are not looking good for music streaming service Grooveshark. After getting hit with lawsuits from Universal Music, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment, EMI — the only company with whom Grooveshark actually had a licensing deal — has now filed suit against Escape Media Group, Grooveshark’s parent company, claiming that Escape has failed to make a single royalty payment. While the lawsuit, filed in the New York State Supreme Court, does not specify the amount in damages EMI is seeking from Grooveshark, reports The New York Times, correspondence between the two companies show that EMI has requested Grooveshark pay it $150,000 in royalties. Grooveshark said in a statement that the matter is simply a “contact dispute,” which the company expects to “resolve.” Grooveshark currently boasts 35 million members, who are able to upload their own tracks to Grooveshark’s music library. Because of this legally dubious practice, Grooveshark is often hit with take-down orders specified under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA), which requires Internet companies to remove infringing content within a specified amount of time, but protects these companies from being sued if they comply with the order. Unfortunately for Grooveshark, someone claiming to be an employee of the company posted a detailed comment on industry publication Digital Music News, claiming that Grooveshark employees regularly uploaded music to the service — a move not protected by the DCMA. This led to an investigation by Universal, which concluded that Grooveshark employees — including its CEO and several vice presidents — had together uploaded more than 113,000 songs. Universal is seeking damages of $150,000 per song (the maximum allowed by law), which equals out to about $17.1 billion in total. This lawsuit was later joined by Warner and Sony. Grooveshark claims that the allegations of employee wrongdoing are “blatantly false.” With EMI now bearing down on Grooveshark with a gavel of its own, the company is now being sued by all four of the major record labels. Unlike most of the other streaming services, Grooveshark is more or less cost-free, and makes money from advertisers, including big names like Mercedes-Benz. But unless Grooveshark can swim its way out of these legal troubles, it would appear that the whole endeavor is far from cost-free, at least for Escape Media and its employees. If you’re a user of Grooveshark, now might be a good time to start migrating to another service. Spotify, anyone? http://www.digitaltrends.com/music/a...g-grooveshark/ Music Industry v. Ireland TJ McIntyre The long suffering Irish taxpayer will be delighted to learn that the music industry has joined the queue of those seeking a payout and yesterday issued a plenary summons against the State in the High Court for alleged failure to implement aspects of EU copyright law. The background to this case lies in the October 2010 judgment of Charleton J. in EMI v. UPC where he held that Irish law did not permit an order to be made against an ISP requiring blocking of websites and went on to say that: "In failing to provide legislative provisions for blocking, diverting and interrupting internet [filesharing] Ireland is not yet fully in compliance with its obligations under European law." Immediately after that decision there was some sabre-rattling from the music industry which threatened to sue the State for damages caused by filesharing, on the theory that if blocking laws were in place then filesharing would go away. (Ignoring research such as that from Ofcom which has found that site blocking is easily evaded.) Since then, however, the music industry appears to have fallen silent on this threat, presumably on the basis that it would get what it wanted through a statutory instrument which would permit blocking. This statutory instrument isn't yet in place but has been promised by mid January 2012, making the timing of this case all the more interesting - on the face of it, the music industry seems to have jumped the gun by bringing an action before that legislation is in place. Curiously, the normally vocal IRMA have nothing on their website and no press release seems to have been put out - perhaps this was intended as a shot across the bow of the State in case the statutory instrument doesn't meet music industry demands? Or perhaps the music industry feels the need to ramp up the pressure in light of the Data Protection Commissioner's ruling against Eircom's three strikes system? As to the legal basis for the action, the music industry will presumably be relying on the well-known principle in Francovich v. Italy under which damages are possible against a state for failure to transpose a directive if three conditions are met: first, that the result prescribed by the directive should entail the grant of rights to individuals; secondly, that it should be possible to identify the content of those rights on the basis of the provisions of the directive; and thirdly, that there should be a causal link between the breach of the State's obligation and the loss and damage suffered by the injured parties. While I'm not aware of any other action of this sort being brought against a country for failure to implement copyright law, the third element would seem to be problematic for the music industry - establishing a causal link between Irish law and filesharing will be difficult, particularly given the evidence from elsewhere that blocking is ineffective. http://activepolitic.com:82/Outside_News/11623.html MPAA Attacks Ars for "Challenging Efforts to Curb Content Theft" Nate Anderson The Motion Picture Association of America doesn't like us. According to the MPAA blog on Tuesday, "Arts Technica" is a "tech blog with a long history of challenging efforts to curb content theft." (If so, we're the only such tech blog that actually encouraged a now-current MPAA lawyer to do copyright coverage for our site and that recommended the pro-rightsholder book Free Ride in this year's holiday guide.) One can see why MPAA staffers might think this way. "Ars Technica opposes our attempt to gain 'broadcast flag' control over people's digital devices," they might say. "And it doesn't appreciate our plan to censor the Internet. And for some reason they'd like to rip copies of their DVDs to watch on the airplane, even though we managed to write anti-DRM cracking provisions into law. Man, these guys really love piracy!" Put this way, the problem becomes clear: it's a simple conflation of our opposition to absolutely freaking insane (you'll forgive the slight hyperbole) approaches to copyright enforcement with opposition to enforcement of any kind. It's a lot like saying, thirty years ago, that anyone who supported the VCR and its nefarious, time-shifting ways was to copyright holders what the Boston Strangler was to women home alone. (Not that any MPAA official would say anything so ridiculous.) Not quite notorious enough for the MPAA to get our name right Let's run down just a short list of the highest-profile copyright-related ideas we've opposed in the last few years. In parentheses are the, err, crazy freetards who came to the same conclusions we did on enforcement overreach. • Broadcast flag (US Court of Appeals, DC) • $1.92 million in damages against Jammie Thomas for P2P use (Federal judge Michael Davis) • $675,000 award against Joel Tenenbaum (Federal judge Nancy Gertner) • DRM is needed on purchased music (all RIAA members, iTunes, Amazon) • YouTube and Veoh don't qualify for safe harbors (US District Court, Southern District of New York; federal judge A. Howard Matz) • SOPA/PIPA Internet blacklisting (Sen. Ron Wyden, Rep. Darrell Issa, Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, GoDaddy, the Internet) That's a long list of federal judges, official, and companies who came around on copyright. Perhaps they likewise can't stand anyone who tries to stop content theft? As for the argument about economics that the post goes on to make, we'll just note that MPAA's own track record on the issue of piracy and money is so bad that, as Robert Levine notes in Free Ride, "The exaggerations of most Hollywood-funded studies have become a running joke." Even the MPAA had to admit that a 2008 study it was using to push a law was off by a factor of 3 in the key metric. Regarding Julian Sanchez, the former Ars editor who is the main subject of the MPAA blog post, he committed a serious act of journalism for us back in 2008 when he showed conclusively just how bogus some of the central antipiracy figures were. His new post on the subject for Cato is also well worth a read. Intervention The thing is, we're really on the MPAA's side; they just don't realize it. We're both content creators who support copyright and want to see creators get paid for their efforts. But copyright maximalism is the wrong way forward. Like an addict who can't help himself, though, major copyright holders are so used to stanching their piratical worries with just one more hit on that sweet, sweet bottle of 120-proof distilled Essence of Enforcement that they can't stop the impulse any longer; it has become reflex. Those who ask them to have a calming cup of tea instead go on the "enemies list." "Good copyright policy" doesn't necessarily mean "stronger copyright policy." Thinking that it does has caused a long litany of problems over the last century as copyright holders have sought to throttle the photocopier, the VCR, digital audio tape, MP3 players, and the DVR. Indeed, the industry's record on this score is downright shocking. But most of the people who backed those devices—like Mr. Rogers did with the VCR—weren't out to screw creative professionals. Neither are we. But sometimes, you need to stage an intervention, and you need to do so for the good of the addict... and the health of the community around him. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...tent-theft.ars U.S. Trade Judge: Motorola Does Not Infringe Apple Motorola Mobility Inc did not violate Apple's patented technology in making its Droid, Cliq, BackFlip and other smartphones, a judge at the U.S. International Trade Commission said in a preliminary decision issued on Friday. The full ITC will issue a final decision in March. Apple had filed a complaint with the ITC in October of 2010, accusing Motorola Mobility of infringing three Apple patents to make its smartphones. Two of the patents have to do with how the devices accept manual input when users type or handwrite on them while the third relates to ways for consumers to add applications without jumping through hoops like rebooting the smartphone. The complaint, like many patent battles focusing on smartphones, is part of a larger fight between Apple and Google Inc's fast-growing Android operating system, which Motorola uses. The ITC is a popular venue for patent disputes because it can order devices made with infringing technology barred from importation. Google has reached an agreement to buy Motorola Mobility, and is seeking the antitrust approval needed to close the sale. (Reporting By Diane Bartz; Editing by Tim Dobbyn) http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80C2IA20120113 Chinese Authors Sue Apple for Copyright Infringement: Report A group of Chinese authors has sued Apple Inc for 11.9 million yuan ($1.9 million) in compensation for allegedly providing copyright-infringing books for download through its online store, Chinese financial magazine Caixin reported. The group behind the lawsuit has been lobbying Apple for months to remove copyright-infringing books from its App Store. The group of nine authors, under the mantle of the China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS), sued Apple in Beijing's No. 2 Intermediate People's Court for copyright infringement of 37 works, Caixin reported on Friday. Over the years, the lobby group has waged similar high-profile battles with Baidu Inc and Google Inc over their online book products. The CWWCS said no one was available to comment for this article. An Apple spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment. Calls to the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court were not answered. ($1 = 6.3095 Chinese yuan) (Reporting by Melanie Lee; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Muralikumar Anantharaman) http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8080B020120109 Amazon's Plagiarism Problem Adam Penenberg Amazon's erotica section isn't just rife with tales of lust, incest, violence, and straight-up kink. It's also a hotbed of masked merchants profiting from copyright infringement. And even with anti-piracy legislation looming, Amazon doesn't appear too eager to stop the forbidden author-on-author action. After publishing 20 non-fiction books with mainstream publishers, Sharazade (her pen name) decided to try her hand at erotica, and over the past year has published two sex- and fantasy-themed ebooks, both of which are available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords (Warning: Linked pages may contain explicit content.) Her stories often involve travel--a passion of hers--and are set in exotic locales. Recently she began publishing other authors through 1001 Nights Press, a small house she founded, and last month she learned that Amazon was letting indie publishers and self-published authors into its Kindle Select program. Sharazade, who requested anonymity because she also works as a freelance writer, editor, and teacher and doesn't want clients or students to know about her erotica exploits, recognized several benefits to working with Amazon. She could offer a title free for up to five days, and that's great publicity since her book would inevitably shoot up in the rankings. If any Kindle Select members borrowed her book--they are entitled to one title per month--she would receive a proportional sliver of the $500,000 Amazon set aside in December to pay publishers and authors. Then, once her book wasn't free anymore, it would be tied to things like "Customers who bought X also bought Y," plus readers might post glowing reviews and buy backlist books. She decided to test drive the service with Erotic Stories of Domination and Submission: Taking Jennifer, a book by one of her authors, then watched it climb the rankings in "gratifying leaps." But Sharazade was dismayed that a number of books, a few with nonsensical titles, were beating hers, even though they were hamstrung by twisted grammar and perverse punctuation. Some sported covers comprised of low-resolution images with no lettering. One author managed to misspell her own name. "Even in porn, customers come down on books that are totally incompetent," Sharazade says, "but this wasn't happening with these." After checking the author page for Maria Cruz, who that day had the top-selling erotica book in Amazon's U.K. Kindle store, she counted 40 erotica ebook titles, including Sister Pretty Little Mouth, My Step Mom and Me, Wicked Desires Steamy Stories and Domenating [sic] Her, plus one called Dracula's Amazing Adventure. Most erotica authors stay within the genre, so Sharazade was surprised Cruz had ventured into horror. Amazon lets customers click inside a book for a sample of text and Sharazade was impressed with how literate it was. She extracted a sentence fragment, googled it, and found that Cruz had copy and pasted the text from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Curious, Sharazade keyed in phrases from other Cruz ebooks and discovered that every book she checked was stolen. Here's Maria Cruz on Amazon... Compare with the earlier story, published on Literotica... It turns out Cruz isn't the only self-published plagiarist. Amazon is rife with fake authors selling erotica ripped word-for-word from stories posted on Literotica, a popular and free erotic fiction site that according to Quantcast attracts more than 4.5 million users a month, as well as from other free online story troves. As recently as early January, Robin Scott had 31 books in the Kindle store, and a down-and-dirty textual analysis revealed that each one was plagiarized. Rachel M. Haven, a purveyor of incest, group sex, and cheating bride stories, was selling 11 pilfered tales from a variety of story sites. Eve Welliver had eight titles in the Kindle store copied from Literotica and elsewhere, and she had even thought to plagiarize some five-star reviews. Luke Ethan's author page listed four works with titles like My Step Mom Loves Me and OMG My Step-Brother in Bisexual, and it doesn't appear he wrote any of them. Maria Cruz had 19 ebooks and two paperbacks, all of which were created by other authors and republished without their consent, while her typo-addled alter ego Mariz Cruz was hawking Wicked Desire: Steamy bondage picture volume 1. Writers I contacted through Literotica, who do not profit from the stories they post, expressed different reactions to being plagiarized, ranging from abject anger to flattery that someone thought their work worth stealing to fear I might reveal their real identity. A highly prolific scribe with the pen name Boston Fiction Writer, whose story, "Boston Halloween Massacre" had been transposed into an ebook titled Massacre on Halloween and sold under Robin Scott's name, threatened to hurt the person who stole her work, "even more than they hurt me, so that they'd think twice about stealing another story from me. I dare say, she'd have no more fingers left to steal anyone's stories, ever again." David Springer, a security guard whose "nom de naughty" is Oediplex, recently learned that his story, "I Remember Mother" was repackaged for the Kindle as My Step Mom Loves Me by Luke Ethan, and wondered how well the book was selling. "I never did expect to get wealthy from writing," he says, "though I wish I had a penny for every orgasm my stories have produced." Luke Ethan's story on Amazon... And now here's the original, by Oediplex, on Literotica... David Weaver, a 52-year-old math teacher whose story "Galactic Slave" was being sold for Kindle as Slave of the Galaxies, also by Robin Scott, doesn't have the resources to engage in a spat over copyright. "What makes this kind of theft so insidious is how easy it is to get away with and avoid getting caught," he says.    Naturally erotica isn't the only category ebook pirates have set their sights on. Manuel Ortiz Braschi has published thousands of ebooks on Amazon, often claiming as his own works in the public domain, including Alice in Wonderland. Amazon has pulled most of them, but Braschi continues to peddle an advice book for senior citizens and a plagiarized cookbook Amazon previously removed when it was sold under a different author's name.   Mike Essex, a search specialist at U.K. digital marketing agency Koozai, identified several how-to books on procuring health insurance that were plagiarized, sometimes sold under three or more different author's names with slightly different titles but identical content (like this one). Fan fiction abounds with plagiarized titles, as does fantasy. Last year Canadian novelist S.K.S. Perry learned that an imposter was selling his novel Darkside for $2.99 as a Kindle ebook without his knowledge. He wrote on his blog: "All I can assume is that someone convinced Amazon that they were S.K.S. Perry, and submitted my book for sale." The same happened to Steve Karmazenuk, whose fantasy novel, The Unearthing, was co-opted by another Amazon seller. Amazon's policy is to remove offending content when it receives complaints of plagiarism. Erotica author Elizabeth Summers had at least 65 titles expunged when plagiarism allegations surfaced. Recently Robin Scott's books also disappeared from Amazon when writers complained. (Scott, which is almost assuredly not her--his?--real name, did not respond to requests for an interview over Twitter.) But this reactive approach isn't entirely effective. After users in a Kindle forum griped about Maria Cruz, her entire cache of ebooks--all 51 of them--were deleted, but in the days that followed she posted a whole new set of material, mostly collections of porn pictures although there were a few traditional text-based works, too. And it usually takes Amazon time to act. "Galactic Slave" writer David Weaver told me he contacted Amazon weeks ago to request the stolen work be removed from the site and all proceeds forwarded to him, but Amazon has not yet complied. To be fair, Amazon isn't the only ebook store grappling with plagiarism. In addition to her collection of Kindle ebooks, Eve Welliver offers five plagiarized works through Apple's iBookstore. "Supposedly Apple hand-checks all the erotica, which is why it takes forever for your books to show up there, but somehow she got through," Sharazade says. This penchant for plagiarism shouldn't surprise us. Self-publishing has become the latest vehicle for spammers and content farms, with the sheer volume of self-published books making it difficult, if not impossible, for e-stores like Amazon to vet works before they go on sale. In 2006, 51,000 self-published titles were released; last year there were 133,036 self-published books, and that number is destined to climb. Writing a book is hard. All those torturous hours an author has to spend creating, crafting, culling until nonsensical words are transformed into engaging prose. It's a whole lot easier to copy and paste someone else's work, slap your name on top, and wait for the money to roll in. This creates a strong economic incentive, with fake authors--Sharazade thinks it's possible they are organized gangs based in Asia--earning 70% royalty rates on every sale, earning far more than a spammer could with click fraud. The new self-publishing platforms are easy to use and make it possible to publish a title in as little as 24 hours. There's no vetting, editing, or oversight, and if your work is taken down you can always throw up more titles or simply concoct a new pen name and start over. There's even a viral ebook generator that comes packed with 149,000 articles that makes it possible to create an ebook in minutes. Legislation has been proposed that would give content holders more leverage in dealing with etailers: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). It would award copyright holders wide-ranging powers to run websites that host infringing material off the Internet without needing to acquire a court order. If it becomes law credit card companies could be forced to suspend financial transactions, search engines required to de-link ecommerce sites, and DNS providers made to hobble access. It's the kind of law, well-intentioned as it might be, that could have serious negative repercussions, opponents say. No wonder Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo! have reportedly been considering a coordinated protest against it in the form of a blackout day. There is, I believe, a simpler solution. Why not require an author to submit a valid credit card before she can self-publish her works on the Kindle? If an author, who could still publish under a pen name, were found to have violated someone else's copyright Amazon could charge that card $2,000 and ban her from selling again. Amazon could also run content through one of the many plagiarism detectors that are available--such as Turnitin or iThenticate--before an ebook is put on sale. Perhaps, though, Amazon doesn't care if it sells plagiarized works; it benefits from the sale whether it holds back an author's royalties or not. A company spokesperson responded to my requests for comment with the following statement: We take violations of laws and proprietary rights very seriously. More information about eBooks rights can be found in Sections 5.7 and 5.8 of the Kindle Direct Publishing Terms and Conditions. If a copyright holder believes that their work has been copied in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, they can write to copyright@amazon.com. More information on Amazon's notice and procedure for making claims of copyright infringement can be found here. [Ed note: typed out links were converted to hyperlinks] Sharazade, for her part, says, "I have no problem competing against legitimate writers and publishers. That's all part of the deal. But I am irritated by competing with cheaters. That kills the fun of it." And she adds: "It's lying, cheating, money, and sex. Might make a nice story?" http://www.fastcompany.com/1807211/a...iarism-problem News in Slovakia: No Copyright in Newspaper News "No copyright in journalists' writings! Read all about it!" Jeremy Phillips From Zuzana Hecko (Allen & Overy, Bratislava) comes some pretty hot news about the battle in Slovakia over whether articles by journalists are deserving of copyright protection. The latest salvo in the battle, contested by press publishers and their new-found foes the monitoring agencies (think Meltwater), comes with a decision of the Bratislava Regional Court which, says Zuzana, creates quite a dangerous precedent. She explains: "Yet another 'word of wisdom' has been delivered by a Slovak Regional Court in the recent Ecopress v Storin decision. This, the first decision in the war between the press publishers and the media monitoring agencies in Slovakia, dealt with the question whether media monitoring agencies need to conclude a licensing agreement with publishers in order to use their works (or extracts from them). While in other jurisdictions the debate on this point has somehow matured and it is generally not disputed that newspaper articles are authors' own intellectual creations (which was also clearly confirmed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in Case C-5/08 Infopaq, the Slovak court ruled that newspaper articles constitute "mere information" and therefore are excluded from the scope of the Slovak Copyright Act. Unfortunately, neither Infopaq nor any decisions from other jurisdictions seem to have been pleaded by the publishers. This is quite disappointing since Infopaq expressly states that "as regards newspaper articles, their author’s own intellectual creation … is evidenced clearly from the form, the manner in which the subject is presented and the linguistic expression. In the main proceedings, moreover, it is common ground that newspaper articles, as such, are literary works covered by Directive 2001/29/EC". The court has provided a long and detailed reasoning of how it came to this conclusion by stating that none of the articles which were submitted as evidence by the publishers is "original enough" and that the articles have the character of "daily reports". Ignoring the wording of the Slovak Copyright Act and Infopaq, the court stated that, apart from the requirements of (1) original and (2) author's own intellectual creation, there is yet another condition which is required for the work to enjoy copyright protection: the work needs to be "unique". The court, clearly being aware of the fact that the addition of such requirement goes beyond the current legislation, stated that the condition of "uniqueness", even if not embedded in the Copyright Act "expressis verbis", is inherent in the purpose of the Slovak Copyright Act. Such argumentation is clearly in conflict with Infopaq, which confirmed that Directive 2001/29/EC also harmonised the originality principle by stating clearly that "where provisions of Community law make no express reference to the law of the Member States … they must be normally given an autonomous and uniform interpretation throughout the Community". The criterion of uniqueness for a work to enjoy copyright protection is certainly not part of the acquis communautaire. The court has effectively concluded that there are no literary works published in the press which would be protected by copyright and that editors are not authors. Accordingly, media monitoring agencies do not require a licence from the authors. While in other jurisdictions licences seem to be required even for end users of the monitoring services (Court of Appeal for England and Wales, NLA and others v Meltwater), the Slovak court says it is permissible to copy someone else's work without obtaining a licence. The decision is rather disappointing. If court decisions constituted "works" which could be protected by copyright, this decision would certainly qualify, as it is truly "unique" ..." Thanks, Zuzana. This is quite an astonishing decision. We shall watch for further developments. http://the1709blog.blogspot.com/2012...yright-in.html Three Attorneys Face Righthaven Inquiry by State Bar Steve Green Copyright lawsuit filer Righthaven LLC of Las Vegas was hit with a new problem Thursday when the State Bar of Nevada said it’s launching formal proceedings to deal with grievances involving Righthaven CEO Steven Gibson and two former Righthaven attorneys. The State Bar, which regulates attorneys, has since as early as the Fall of 2010 received complaints from unidentified parties about Righthaven and has been watching Righthaven’s litigation campaign work its way through the courts. The Bar this week opened grievance files concerning Gibson, an attorney, and former Righthaven attorneys Jodi Donetta Lowry and J. Charles Coons. The attorneys have been asked to respond to the grievance issues by Jan. 31. Gibson and Lowry now work for the Las Vegas office of the Detroit law firm Dickinson Wright PLLC. Coons is with a Las Vegas firm called Cooper Coons Ltd. Phil Pattee, assistant Bar counsel, said the agency couldn’t disclose the nature of the grievances against the attorneys or whether they relate to complaints from outside parties or the Bar’s own review of the Righthaven cases or both. But he confirmed the grievances relate to the attorneys’ work for Righthaven. “We’ll be asking them about Righthaven,” he said. This week’s development may answer a question Righthaven observers have been asking for months: whether any of its attorneys would be formally questioned about charges by a federal judge that the company made “inaccurate and likely dishonest” statements to the court as it pursued its copyright infringement lawsuits. Observers also have asked whether anyone individually would be penalized after the company was fined $5,000 for violating local federal court rules requiring disclosure of all parties with a financial interest in its lawsuits, as well as charges Righthaven ran a shakedown operation in which defendants were coerced into settling by what critics called Righthaven’s false lawsuit claims of copyright ownership and the authority to seize defendants’ website domain names. On top of that, the federal judge in Las Vegas who fined Righthaven and suggested it made misrepresentations, Roger Hunt, has also commented that it appears Righthaven, as a company, has been engaged in the unauthorized practice of law. The attorneys named in the grievance files were all involved in some of Righthaven’s early cases in which Righthaven failed to disclose that Stephens Media LLC, owner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, received a cut of lawsuit revenue. Righthaven is half owned by the same Arkansas investors who own Stephens Media. Righthaven operated by obtaining copyright assignments from Stephens Media as well as the owner of the Denver Post. Righthaven used the copyrights to file 275 no-warning lawsuits since March 2010, claiming websites and website users infringed on copyrights by posting material from those newspapers without authorization. After initially winning what are believed to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuit settlements, Righthaven is now in financial distress after judges ruled it lacked standing to sue because of flawed copyright assignments and that some defendants were protected by fair use. Judges have awarded defendants $216,335 in legal fees after they defeated Righthaven in court, and a defendant collecting on his judgment convinced a judge to appoint a receiver, who has auctioned Righthaven’s website and is trying to seize its copyrights for auction. Despite the complaints about Righthaven and its attorneys, the three attorneys named Thursday will likely dispute any allegations of wrongdoing. Righthaven and Stephens Media have argued the lawsuits were necessary to crack down on rampant online infringement of news content, and Righthaven is appealing key court rulings against it. “I will be responding to the informational requests of the Bar and believe that after such responses and clarifications, the matter will be properly addressed. Miss Lowry indicates her concurrence,” Gibson said Thursday. Coons couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. Creating grievance files does not suggest the Office of Bar Counsel at the State Bar has filed complaints against the attorneys. Rather, it means the office has determined there is sufficient information to warrant a review of the matter by a screening panel of the Bar’s Southern Nevada Disciplinary Board. The opening of the files sets in motion a process in which the Office of Bar Counsel will present the cases to the screening panel. The panel has several options, including dismissing the matter, issuing a “letter of caution” or issuing a “letter of reprimand.” If the screening panel believes the conduct in question potentially may merit more severe professional discipline, it refers the matter to a formal hearing, after which the State Bar prepares a complaint and the attorney is required to file an answer. Potential penalties at that stage range as high as the panel recommending to the Nevada Supreme Court that an attorney receive a public reprimand, suspension or disbarment. The Supreme Court then decides what to do. http://m.vegasinc.com/news/2012/jan/...iry-state-bar/ The Songs Remain the Same, But Broadway Heirs Call the Shots Patrick Healy By all accounts George and Ira Gershwin never considered making the family name part of the title of their most famous work, the 1935 opera “Porgy & Bess.” But their heirs wield enormous power, and in the 1990s they re-branded it as “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” as they sought business partners to adapt this four-hour opera into a perennial musical moneymaker the way shows like “Oklahoma!” have been under the careful management of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization. On Thursday, after years of fits and starts, “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” will open on Broadway, updated and streamlined, part of a spate of unusually aggressive undertakings by musical-theater estates. Few recent Broadway seasons have had as much estate-driven handiwork as this one, a reflection of the rising entrepreneurship of heirs and the affection of audiences for song standards. Heirs are increasingly hands-on in trying to wrest moneymaking shows out of their ancestral trunks: another current example is the producer Liza Lerner’s overhaul this winter of a musical by her father, Alan Jay Lerner, “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” for modern Broadway. (It drew mostly negative reviews.) The organization that represents the estates of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II recently authorized a stage version of the duo’s TV musical “Cinderella,” which is aiming for Broadway next season. And the Gershwin estates have another musical coming to Broadway in March, “Nice Work if You Can Get It” starring Matthew Broderick, which is an attempt to take characters and songs from an old show (the Gershwins’ 1920s bootlegger musical, “Oh, Kay!”) and refashion them into a better musical that includes additional Gershwin tunes. The estates tried a similar reworking of “Oh, Kay!” in 2001 with the pastiche “They All Laughed,” but it hit a dead end after mixed reviews at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut. The newly adapted book for the Broadway version of “Porgy and Bess” — but not the songs — will likely gain a new copyright that could be licensed. The estates’ trustees say the moneymaking potential of the new copyright depends on the Broadway musical becoming a hit that producers will want to license in the future. Since “Nice Work” is a new show, the Gershwin estates will have a long new copyright to enjoy, whereas the rights for the original 1926 show, “Oh, Kay!” expire at the end of 2021. (The Gershwin estates now earn a few million dollars a year, according to the trustees.) The Gershwin heirs have created pastiche shows before that have gone on to earn millions, like “My One and Only” (1983) and “Crazy for You” (1992), which won a Tony Award for best musical. They also recently authorized a new musical revue of Gershwin songs, “ ’S Wonderful,” which ran at a theater in Queens in November. But estate decision making has been most controversial in the case of “Porgy and Bess.” The Gershwin heirs — chiefly nephews and grand-nephews of George and Ira, who had no children of their own — sought a Broadway-suitable “Porgy” to license to other musical producers worldwide with the hopes of earning millions of dollars before the right to the famous songs expire in 2030. With that in mind they encouraged the trimming of the opera nearly by half, and approved some updating, including a reconciliation scene at the end. (The goat-pulled cart of the disabled Porgy is out; a cane and leg braces are in.) If all goes well, they may pursue a movie. “Our responsibilities are to not have ‘Porgy and Bess’ stuck in an attic, to open up the property to younger generations, and to make money for the families,” said Jonathan Keidan, a 38-year-old digital media executive whose grandmother was George and Ira’s sister and who is now a trustee of George’s estate. In August, Stephen Sondheim attacked some of the artistic changes, and recently has narrowed his invective to “the greedy Gershwin estate” — apparently referring to the collaborative efforts of the George and Ira estates. Mr. Sondheim declined to comment for this article, but other theater artists said that estate management was a major concern given that artists’ legacies would be at stake. “I do think that, as composers and writers, we should leave pretty specific instructions to our estates about how we want our work to be protected,” said John Kander, the 84-year-old composer who, with Fred Ebb, wrote the scores for hits like “Cabaret” and “Chicago.” Several of the Gershwins’ trustees — as well as those of Lerner and Burton Lane, the “Clear Day” composer — dismissed the idea that money was their primary motivator. But they were also not bashful in saying that money was one factor and described themselves as business-minded stewards more than as artistic tastemakers. “I never felt we were capable producers, but we have similar impulses to producers in the sense that I want to get these shows performed and I’m driven to try to make money,” said Michael Strunsky, a former construction-firm executive and the trustee of Ira Gershwin’s estate. (His father was the brother of Ira’s wife.) Executors can decide to withhold rights altogether or else demand contractual approvals over actors, directors, orchestrations and other artistic elements. More and more estates seek as many approvals as possible, given the rise of experimental theater that stresses auteur visions, and producers grant as few approvals as they can in the interest of artistic control. Estates do not have to disclose finances publically, and the structure of musical-theater estates vary, as does the size of the periodic checks cut to the heirs. If the executors sour on a revival, they can rarely close it outright; instead, they deny an extension of the rights, so the show has a limited run. For instance, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization — which became part of a Dutch conglomerate in 2009 — refused an extension to Anne Bogart’s memorable student production of “South Pacific” at New York University in 1984, which was set in a rehab ward for psychologically damaged war veterans. “Her concept was intriguing when it was presented to the estate,” recalled the organization’s president, Theodore S. Chapin, “but the production ended up with Nellie Forbush in a straitjacket repeating, ‘I’m in love,’ for practically a half hour.” In the Broadway “Cinderella” project the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization hopes for a new, revenue-generating hit to add to the songwriters’ catalog decades after their deaths. (The pair’s musicals now earn more than $10 million a year.) Mr. Chapin said he authorized a revisionist updating of the “Cinderella” book, with a more assertive heroine, to be done by Douglas Carter Beane, because he had faith in Mr. Beane and the producers. “An old show that feels familiar can turn off Broadway audiences,” Mr. Chapin said. “But you can’t go so far that you totally undermine the spirit and soul of the original.” Marc G. Gershwin, son of George and Ira’s brother, Arthur, and a stockbroker by training, said he took an “entrepreneurial approach” to the brothers’ works, allowing experimental productions of “Porgy and Bess” like one set in Los Angeles after an earthquake (with Porgy on a motorcycle, no less). He said he would draw the line somewhere, for example if someone proposed an all-white production of the opera. He and his fellow trustees worked for years to try to create a musical-theater version of “Porgy and Bess,” with the director Trevor Nunn’s production in London in 2006 coming close to success. But that outing lacked star power and used dialogue from the earlier novel and stage play about Porgy by DuBose Heyward, who wrote the book for the opera as well as the lyrics with Ira Gershwin. The new Broadway version, by contrast, includes new dialogue by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and stars a four-time Tony winner, Audra McDonald, as Bess. The original will always remain available for opera companies, Marc Gershwin noted, “but that doesn’t mean it has to be a museum piece.” https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/t...ir-rights.html Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad, Book Apps, and Toronto: a Q & A The TRB Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad, Book Apps, and Toronto: a Q & A TRB: Released in the spring of 2010, Alice for the iPad became a huge, Oprah-featured hit that is credited with convincing reading publics of how book apps could be even more fun and engaging than paper books. How many times has Alice been downloaded by now? Were you surprised by its reception? How have traditional book publishers and book reviewers reacted to it? CS: Alice is installed on over 500,000 iPads. The reception was a surprise, especially since most of the design work was done out of my bedroom in London. The initial reaction from traditional book publishers was one of awe and confusion. Alice was only out a few days before I found myself in a boardroom at HarperCollins explaining to a bunch of people in suits how we’d managed to beat them to the top of the book charts on the iPad. For a while they thought I had the key to the future of publishing—they thought that if they could extract the secret to what made Alice a success, they could revitalize the market. The excitement surrounding the iPad led a lot of publishers to suspect that Apple might be able to bolster the industry, but—just as it always is—great content, not technology makes a popular app. I told them what I did, but they didn’t seem to get it. Book reviewers were generally positive about Alice, although The New York Times wrote a scathing piece about how the massive popularity of Alice for the iPad would lead to the extinction of the careful-reader, reducing our attention spans and quiet engagement with literature. The NYT wrote of Alice: “The question is what will become of the readers we’ve been—quiet, thoughtful, patient, abstracted—in a world where interactive can be too tempting to ignore.” But they forgot to actually put a question mark at the end of that question, so perhaps all hope of “thoughtful” readers is already lost – for the NYT at least. TRB: You’ve been a journalist, a writer for CNET, and a graphic designer—a perfect background for making book apps—but where did the Alice app idea itself come from? Eureka moment or series of conversations? CS: Alice was the result of a lot of lucky events. Only they didn’t seem lucky at the time. First, I lost my job. I was fired from The Times newspaper in London by an editor who claimed that they had been overpaying me by 50%. To deliver this news he put his foot on my desk, which I stared at for a very long time in confusion.He then turned and left in a hurry—presumably to hack a few phones. A friend of mine also lost his job around the same time and we teamed up. I took care of the graphics and design, and my friend took care of the programming. We launched a couple of relatively unknown apps, but I became interested in the idea of applying simulated physics to objects in the original Sir John Tenniel-illustrated edition of Alice in Wonderland. The result was a kind of digital pop-up book. The book was out of copyright, therefore in the public domain—another appealing aspect. I had no idea that it would become a success on this scale, but I remember being very engrossed in the design process. It took about 3 months of solid work to complete—15 hour days. TRB: Tell us about the process of making Alice into an app. What aspects of the original book were more or less conducive to being made interactive? 392px Alice par John Tenniel 02 196x300 Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad, Book Apps, and Toronto: a Q & A CS: The original Sir John Tenniel illustrations were carved out of wood block before being printed onto the page—as a fortunate result of that, they have a thick outlined style to them. Each page of the original Lewis Carroll book jumped out at me and elements seemed to beg to spring to life. It was supernatural really; this imperative to create movement in the pages. Almost as if Tenniel somehow anticipated me using Photoshop and an iPad to adapt his work over 100 years later. TRB: Besides Alice, what are some of your favourite book apps? Any lesser known app publishers you think TRB readers should check out? CS: I’m desperate for the book industry to produce some work that blows me away, but for now there’s a few Alice clones and not much else. I can see exactly why this is happening. The major publishers have completely abdicated responsibility for producing the digital versions of their catalogues: it’s all handed over to amateurs. You see it throughout the industry. From the typographical horror of most eBooks, through to the lacklustre iPad titles being produced. The big problem is that most publishers don’t care about the iPad or eBooks very much, whether this is an aesthetic rejection based on the publisher’s historical reverence for the printed page, or a reflection of the relatively small profits to be made on the iPad so far, it’s hard to know. What’s happening at the moment is that most publishers are handing their major titles over to app developers who are ruining these titles with rushed, unprofessional layout and design. There is this weird situation where programmers are suddenly being given free reign to design books. We watch as publishers like Random House outsource the design of cherished titles to programmers who—despite their excellence at programming—are not designers. The complete lack of care and attention paid to the production of digital books is genuinely mystifying. Having said that, the McSweeney’s app is pretty inspiring at times. The new Chris Ware book graphic story inside that McSweeney’s app is particularly great—though very short. Nursery Rhymes with Storytime is great and the new ustwo app Papercut is interesting. Aside from that, nothing has jumped out at me yet. TRB: What do you like to read on a day-to-day basis? Would you ever make a book app out of a novel or work of nonfiction, or are you interested in sticking to illustrated work? CS: Generally I enjoy modern fiction: Michel Houellebecq and Milan Kundera stand out for me. I’m also a big fan of Yevgeny Zamyatin—a Russian sci-fi writer from the 20s who is like Orwell, but much more disturbing and brilliant—his best book is We. I’ve also just finished The Brain that Changes Itself which is a fascinating non-fiction book about neuroplasticity. I was reading it in the cafe of the Drake Hotel the other day and one of the staff came over to explain that the author was her family doctor. Wonderful. At the moment, making books for the iPad remains a risky business. I was lucky enough to have such a huge success with Alice that it has allowed me to produce other books that have seen only moderate success, like Alice in New York—which takes the illustrations from Alice Through The Looking Glass and re-situates them in New York City. This was a huge project, a real labour of love, and has barely recouped its investment. Bizarrely, I am now considering heading the other way, and I’m working on a traditional paperback novel. TRB: Tell us about your new book. Appilionaires 197x300 Chris Stevens on Alice for the iPad, Book Apps, and Toronto: a Q & A CS: Alongside Alice for the iPad and Alice in New York, I’ve also written two non-fiction books. The latest is called Appillionaires and it tells the stories of those small teams that have made millions of dollars on the App Store. It’s a rags-to-riches multi-biography of many different people, including a submarine captain who made a small fortune with an iPhone game called Stickwars, two brothers who have sold over 10 million copies of Doodle Jump and the family who made the immensely popular Angry Birds game. Their stories are bizarre and inspiring. TRB: What brings you to Toronto? We hear you like this city better than anywhere else.Why? (We’re chuffed—and also concur.) You mentioned the recently released Alice in New York. Any chance she’ll be coming to Toronto? CS: I visited Toronto last year to give a talk about the future of the book and fell completely in love with the city. It has a creative energy that propels me. I’ve had the good fortune to run into so many fantastic and intriguing people here, including Professor Robert K. Logan from the University of Toronto. I’m planning to co-author a title with him called Alice in the Atom—which teaches kids key ideas in physics using the Alice in Wonderland characters. As for Alice coming to Toronto, I think she’d like it here. Professor Logan features as a character in the new book, and he lives in Toronto, so there will be a Torontonian edge to the next Alice book. Alice for the iPad is available in the App Store. http://www.torontoreviewofbooks.com/...vens-on-alice/ The Critics Rave ... for Microsoft? Nick Wingfield “GORGEOUS,” raves The Huffington Post. “Best-looking smartphone operating system in the industry,” gushes Slate. “Far superior to most if not all the Android smartphones,” says TechCrunch. Sounds like the usual adulation for a gadget from Apple. In fact, they’re actually accolades for a new product from Microsoft. Microsoft? Exactly. Long ridiculed as the tech industry dullard, Microsoft actually has a hit, at least with the technorati. It’s cellphone software called Windows Phone — and they need it to be a blockbuster here at Microsoft Central. Yes, Windows and Office products are ubiquitous and highly profitable. But they’re about as inspirational as a stapler. While the likes of Apple have captured our imaginations with nifty products like the iPhone, Microsoft has produced a long list of flops, from smart wristwatches to the Zune music player to the Kin phones. Steve Jobs used to deride Microsoft for a lack of originality. In his opinion, the company didn’t bring “much culture” to its products. With Windows Phone, though, Microsoft is finally getting some buzz. “I am a devoted Apple fan — I was in line for the iPhone,” said Axel Roesler, assistant professor for interaction design at the University of Washington in Seattle, but Windows Phone “strikes me as quite different and an advance.” Windows Phone, which began appearing in devices last fall, certainly stands out visually. It has bold, on-screen typography and a mosaic of animated tiles on the home screen — a stark departure from the neat grid of icons made popular by the iPhone. While most phones force users to open stand-alone apps to get into social networks, Facebook and Twitter are wired into Windows Phone. The tiles spring to life as friends or family post fresh pictures, text messages and status updates. Even so, relatively few consumers have been tempted, and sales have been lackluster. A big problem is that, initially, the handsets running Microsoft’s software, made by companies like HTC and Samsung, were unexceptional. Even more important, wireless carriers, the gatekeepers for nearly all mobile phones, have not been aggressively selling Windows phones in their stores. Most promote the iPhone and devices running Google’s Android operating system. And so Microsoft has struck a partnership with Nokia, and executives at both companies have high hopes that their handsets will catch on with consumers. On Monday at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nokia plans to introduce a sleek metallic Windows Phone called the Lumia 900 that will be sold by AT&T in the United States, according to two people with knowledge of its plans who spoke on condition of anonymity because the product has not yet been announced. Unlike other handset makers creating devices with Microsoft’s software, Nokia is not also developing Android phones. “We are doing our best work for Windows Phone,” said Stephen Elop, the chief executive of Nokia and a former Microsoft executive. While the customers’ verdict is still unknown, the group that developed Windows Phone has already profoundly affected Microsoft itself, influencing work on other consumer products. The next major version of software for PC’s, Windows 8, will look a lot like Windows Phone, which Microsoft hopes will help it work better on tablet devices. A Windows Phone-like makeover was also part of the new software update for Xbox, which along with Kinect is one of Microsoft’s few consumer hits. Bill Flora, one of the designers of Windows Phone, said the care that Microsoft took in designing its products had changed vastly since he joined the company out of art school in the early 1990s. “Now, instead of 80 percent of its efforts being unenlightened, just 20 percent are unenlightened,” said Mr. Flora, who recently left Microsoft to form his own design firm in Seattle. THE tale of how Microsoft created Windows Phone starts with the introduction of the iPhone, in 2007. To Joe Belfiore, now 43, an engineer who oversees software design for Windows Phone, that was the spark. “Apple created a sea change in the industry in terms of the kinds of things they did that were unique and highly appealing to consumers,” Mr. Belfiore said in an interview at Microsoft’s campus here. “We wanted to respond with something that would be competitive, but not the same.” Microsoft had been an early player in smartphones with Windows Mobile, software that ran on devices made by Samsung, Motorola and others. But one word describes its early effort: complicated. Windows Mobile had a complex array of on-screen menus, including a start button for applications that was borrowed from Windows PCs. The software ran on sluggish devices that had physical keyboards and, in some cases, styluses. Once the iPhone exploded into the marketplace, Microsoft executives knew that their software, as designed, could never compete. So in December 2008, Terry Myerson, who had just taken over engineering for the mobile group, convened a meeting that members of his management team came to call the “cage match.” With a prototype of a new Windows Mobile phone on a table, Mr. Myerson, a no-nonsense engineer , led a heated debate over whether any of the software could be salvaged. No one was leaving the room until the issue was resolved, he said. Seven hours later, the meeting finally adjourned, after Mr. Myerson got a call from his wife saying a pipe had frozen at his home. By then, a consensus had emerged that there wasn’t much technology worth saving. “We had hit bottom,” Mr. Myerson, who is now 39. “That frankly gives you the freedom to try new things, build a new team and set a new path,” he added. The decision was to start from scratch, a move that had serious consequences. Not only did it delay a Windows phone, it gave Google an opening to woo Microsoft handset partners to Android. Charlie Kindel, a longtime Microsoft manager who joined its mobile team in early 2009, compared the pain caused by starting over to the predicament of Aron Ralston, the hiker who amputated his own arm in 2003 after it was it pinned under a boulder in the Utah desert. “This boulder comprised of Apple and Blackberry rolled on our arm,” said Mr. Kindel, who left Microsoft last summer. “Microsoft sat there for three or four years struggling to get out.” Mr. Myerson also had to rebuild the mobile team — and Mr. Belfiore was his first major hire. Mr. Belfiore is a rare breed of Microsoft executive: he joined the company in 1990 fresh out of college and stayed, even as others fled to work for companies with more pizazz. For much of his career, Mr. Belfiore worked on the design of Windows and Internet Explorer, the kind of Microsoft software that is everywhere but not always admired for innovation. But he was also known for spending hours testing Microsoft technologies outside the office to see how they could be simplified. In recent years, Mr. Belfiore earned a reputation in the company for working on more adventurous projects, even if they sometimes bombed in the market. Before he joined the mobile group, for instance, he oversaw design of Zune, Microsoft’s ill-fated answer to the iPod. A version of the product released in 2009, the Zune HD, was praised by reviewers for its spare design that featured elegant typography and snappy, animated screen transitions as users flipped around music collections. But the Zune HD came out years too late, well after the iPod had cemented its lead. Mr. Belfiore took over the mobile group in early 2009, just as designers were finishing up the earliest prototypes for Windows Phone. In those prototypes, Mr. Flora drew inspiration from the signs in airports and other transportation hubs. He borrowed the emphasis on clarity, clean typography and broadcast-quality transitions between screens from Zune, which he had worked on with Mr. Belfiore. The ideas gradually gelled into a software design language that Microsoft calls Metro. But there were challenges beyond design. Microsoft had to take a fresh approach to working with phone makers so it could have its slick new software function properly. Unlike Apple, Microsoft doesn’t make its own hardware. Before it restarted its mobile strategy, Microsoft did little to ensure that its handset partners were putting its software on devices that could run it well. No longer would that be tolerated. Microsoft gave its handset partners detailed specifications of the types of technical innards required, including processors with certain amounts of power and screen technologies. Handset makers grumbled about the rules, but the result was phones that ran better. “It’s not just about software,” said Albert Shum, general manager of the design studio for Windows Phone. “It’s about the whole end-to-end experience.” When senior executives got their first look at the software, Mr. Myerson said, there was “some hesitancy.” Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, didn’t like that the first screen that appeared after turning on the device contained oversized type that cut off the day of the week. (Wednesday showed up as Wed.) Revisions were made. But the group was given its creative freedom. And the critics, at least, have approved the final results. “It looks like nothing we’ve seen before from Microsoft,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner, the technology research firm. “The company is being somewhat bold and saying what worked for them in 1992 won’t work now.” Still, last summer, Mr. Ballmer told Microsoft investors that he was disappointed with Windows Phone sales. In mid-December, he named Mr. Myerson, the engineering head, to take full control of the group. He charged Mr. Myerson with improving the Windows Phone advertising campaign and relationships with wireless carriers. A software update for Windows Phones in the fall added a number of improvements to the product, including basic editing functions like copy and paste. BUT this year is crucial; it will show whether a respected product is enough to help Microsoft make up for lost time. Even if it feels good to be a favorite of tech critics for a change, Microsoft needs a blockbuster in the mobile business, not a cult hit. “Entering the market so late with this experience has created some special challenges for us,” Mr. Myerson said. “I think if we were there earlier it would be different.” https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/t...ows-phone.html Microsoft Confirms UEFI Fears, Locks Down ARM Devices Aaron Williamson At the beginning of December, we warned the Copyright Office that operating system vendors would use UEFI secure boot anticompetitively, by colluding with hardware partners to exclude alternative operating systems. As Glyn Moody points out, Microsoft has wasted no time in revising its Windows Hardware Certification Requirements to effectively ban most alternative operating systems on ARM-based devices that ship with Windows 8. The Certification Requirements define (on page 116) a "custom" secure boot mode, in which a physically present user can add signatures for alternative operating systems to the system's signature database, allowing the system to boot those operating systems. But for ARM devices, Custom Mode is prohibited: "On an ARM system, it is forbidden to enable Custom Mode. Only Standard Mode may be enable." [sic] Nor will users have the choice to simply disable secure boot, as they will on non-ARM systems: "Disabling Secure [Boot] MUST NOT be possible on ARM systems." [sic] Between these two requirements, any ARM device that ships with Windows 8 will never run another operating system, unless it is signed with a preloaded key or a security exploit is found that enables users to circumvent secure boot. While UEFI secure boot is ostensibly about protecting user security, these non-standard restrictions have nothing to do with security. For non-ARM systems, Microsoft requires that Custom Mode be enabled—a perverse demand if Custom Mode is a security threat. But the ARM market is different for Microsoft in three important respects: • Microsoft's hardware partners are different for ARM. ARM is of interest to Microsoft primarily for one reason: all of the handsets running the Windows Phone operating system are ARM-based. By contrast, Intel rules the PC world. There, Microsoft's secure boot requirements—which allow users to add signatures in Custom Mode or disable secure boot entirely—track very closely to the recommendations of the UEFI Forum, of which Intel is a founding member. • Microsoft doesn't need to support legacy Windows versions on ARM. If Microsoft locked unsigned operating systems out of new PCs, it would risk angering its own customers who prefer Windows XP or Windows 7 (or, hypothetically, Vista). With no legacy versions to support on ARM, Microsoft is eager to lock users out. • Microsoft doesn't control sufficient market share on mobile devices to raise antitrust concerns. While Microsoft doesn't command quite the monopoly on PCs that it did in 1998, when it was prosecuted for antitrust violations, it still controls around 90% of the PC operating system market—enough to be concerned that banning non-Windows operating systems from Windows 8 PCs will bring regulators knocking. Its tiny stake in the mobile market may not be a business strategy, but for now it may provide a buffer for its anticompetitive behavior there. (However, as ARM-based "ultrabooks" gain market share, this may change.) The new policy betrays the cynicism of Microsoft's initial response to concerns over Windows 8's secure boot requirement. When kernel hacker Matthew Garrett expressed his concern that PCs shipped with Windows 8 might prevent the installation of GNU/Linux and other free operating systems, Microsoft's Tony Mangefeste replied, "Microsoft’s philosophy is to provide customers with the best experience first, and allow them to make decisions themselves." It is clear now that opportunism, not philosophy, is guiding Microsoft's secure boot policy. Before this week, this policy might have concerned only Windows Phone customers. But just yesterday, Qualcomm announced plans to produce Windows 8 tablets and ultrabook-style laptops built around its ARM-based Snapdragon processors. Unless Microsoft changes its policy, these may be the first PCs ever produced that can never run anything but Windows, no matter how Qualcomm feels about limiting its customers' choices. SFLC predicted in our comments to the Copyright Office that misuse of UEFI secure boot would bring such restrictions, already common on smartphones, to PCs. Between Microsoft's new ARM secure boot policy and Qualcomm's announcement, this worst-case scenario is beginning to look inevitable. http://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/...ocks-down-ARM/ Government Engineers Actively Plan for Cyberwar Governments are arming themselves to their cyber-teeth with offensive and counter-defense cyber weapons, and there's little enterprises can do to avoid the fray. George V. Hulme A decade ago, most viruses and worms were unleashed by curious students, pranksters and punks wanting to see what kind of damage they could inflict. That quickly evolved into criminals and thieves writing most of the malware once they realized money could be made. Now, governments have arrived for the party. State-sponsored cyberwar is an increasing concern as more and more nations arm themselves with cyber-weapons. Japanese defense engineers, for example, announced that they've developed a digital virus that can track down, identify, and disable attacking systems. Development of the virus began three years ago, and has only been tested on a closed network so far, the Daily Yomiuri reported. The idea of digital viruses being used to thwart ongoing attacks isn't new. Following the infamous Code Red worm in 2001, a number of worms -- Code Blue and Code Green among them -- were released to patch systems that were vulnerable to Code Red infections. Code Green even tried to clean Code Red infected systems. Around 2005, according to reports from experts close to the military, the U.S. government began to significantly invest in the development of programs and exploits robust enough to wage cyberwarfare. The tools range from botnets to software exploits to powerful worms. Today, most large governments are suspected of or have stated that they have put into place offensive cyber-warfare capabilities. Many have speculated that Stuxnet, with or without help from Israel, was a U.S. government creation. "When it comes to nation-on-nation war, automated counter-defenses makes sense," says Pete Lindstrom, research director at Spire Security. "Humans can't match the scaled response computers can achieve." However, if governments start launching large-scale electronic responses to attacks, such as unleashing viruses and worms meant to neutralize an attack, or conducting denial-of-service attacks designed to knock adversaries offline, enterprises had better brace for the potential for collateral damage. "Once released, no one really knows what the impact could have on certain systems and networks." David Mortman, an analyst with the security research firm Securosis, says enterprise security managers need to brace for all of the same types of attacks that we've seen across the past two decades. "It's unlikely you are going to see anything new from viruses, worms, denial-of-service, botnets, software exploits, social engineering," says Mortman. "But you could very well see increased scale. Essentially, to protect yourself from these kinds of attacks, you need to be doing all of the stuff that you should already be doing, and that's to have the right defenses and plans in place for traditional attacks and disasters." http://www.csoonline.com/article/697...n-for-cyberwar Have RIM, Nokia & Apple Provided Indian Military with Backdoor Access to Cellular Comm? Manan Kakkar Summary: In exchange for mobile presence in India, RIM, Nokia and Apple have allegedly provided backdoor access for the Indian intelligence to spy on communication. On January 6th reports of Symantec (makers of Norton Anitvirus) being hacked surfaced. The group of hackers behind the attack behind the attack were from India. In a statement issued by a member from the Lords of Dharamraja group (badass name!), the guys said: As of now we start sharing with all our brothers and followers information from the Indian Militaty (sic) Intelligence servers, so far we have discovered within the Indian Spy Programme (sic) source codes of a dozen software companies which have signed agreements with Indian TANCS programme (sic) and CBI Ignoring the typing error, gaining access to Indian Military’s Intelligence servers is pretty damning for the agency. The hack got covered since the hackers claimed to have acces to Norton’s source code. Earlier today I came across scans of a set of documents that are internal communications between the Indian Military. The documents claim the existence of a system known as RINOA SUR. While I did not find what SUR stands for but RINOA is RIM, NOkia and Apple. And this is where things start to get very interesting, according to the set of documents, the RINOA SUR platform was used to spy on the USCC—the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Let’s take a moment for that to digest. Here’s an image from the documents underlining the relevant part: The documents contain snippets of emails sent by members of the USCC. Apparently, RINOA SUR platform has been declared a success and the Indian Navy has shown interest in the same. The leaked military documents suggest, RINOA were arm twisted into providing backdoor access in exchange for operating in India: While the Indian government recently gave the nation’s premiere spy agency—RAW—permission to access any citizen’s electronic communication, the Department of Telecommunications has reached out to the Interpol for help in decrypting communication via services like RIM’s BlackBerry. The set of leaked images: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/india/have...lular-comm/838 Fake Memo But Real Code? India-U.S. Hacking Mystery Deepens Frank Jack Daniel A memo that triggered a U.S. investigation into a possible cyber-attack by Indian military intelligence is probably a fake, but it is clear from leaked documents that serious security breaches did take place. A little-known hacker group, 'Lords of Dharmaraja', began posting the documents last year, but only drew widespread attention after the anti-virus software firm Symantec confirmed on Saturday that a segment of its source code had been accessed by the group. Reuters has obtained a large digital cache appearing to contain emails that were posted by the group but were quickly blocked by file-sharing sites. Dated between April and October last year, many of the emails were addressed to Bill Reinsch, a member of an official U.S. commission monitoring economic and security ties between the United States and China, including cyber-security issues. Military and cyber-security experts in India say the hackers may have created the purported military intelligence memo simply to draw attention to their work, or to taint relations between close allies India and the United States. "There is some malicious intent, but to try and work out who has done it, given the current nature of the Internet, is an exercise in futility," said Cherian Samuel, a specialist on cyber-security and Indo-U.S. relations at India's Defense Ministry-funded Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses. Speculation has focused on India's neighbors, arch-rival Pakistan and China, both of which are active in cyber-operations. "It's also possible that Pakistan's hackers have done it, or China's hackers," said Mukesh Saini, an expert on cyber-security who served on the secretariat of India's national security council, an intelligence agency, until 2006. But if that were the case, he said, the attackers could be acting without state sponsorship. "Pro-Indian and pro-Pakistan individuals and small hacker groups have been attacking each other's government and non-government websites, with or without the consent of their government, for a very long time," he said. INCONSISTENCIES Two Washington sources close to the U.S. China Commission said that while they were positive the commission was a target for Chinese intelligence, they found it hard to believe its activities were of any interest to Indian intelligence. They said it was possible that Chinese operatives forged the document to embarrass both the commission and the Indians. Other Washington officials, however, said it was equally possible, if not more plausible, that the alleged Indian intelligence document was genuine and that the Indians were spying on the commission out of their own interest in learning about Washington's attitudes to China. Genuine or not, the sophisticated language the document was written in suggests it was created by someone with a clear grasp of India's bureaucratic style. Technology blog Infosec Island said on Wednesday it had seen more data obtained by the Lords of Dharmaraja, including dozens of usernames and passwords for compromised U.S. government network accounts. Infosec Island blogger Anthony Freed said the hacker group claimed to have taken the data from servers belonging to India's Ministry of External Affairs and the Indian government's IT organization, among others. Officials in India declined to comment on the document's content or authenticity. The alleged memo (http://bit.ly/zYze7w), which had a number of inconsistencies, including the letterhead of a military intelligence unit not involved in surveillance, claimed India had been spying on the USCC using know-how provided by Western mobile phone manufacturers. While the memo looks dubious, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission has not denied the veracity of the email cache, and U.S. authorities are investigating the matter. The emails include conversations between U.S. embassy officials in Tripoli, DHL and General Electric about delivering medical equipment to Libya, as well as concerns that GE was helping China improve its jet engine industry. "ANONYMOUS" It is unclear whether Lords of Dharmaraja got the emails from Indian military intelligence servers, as they claim, but they first mentioned the documents in November, at the same time as they announced they hacked India's embassy server in Paris. That breach was confirmed at the time by India's foreign ministry, and some experts believe the cache of U.S. emails was taken from the same source, raising the question of how they ended up there in the first place. "An individual could have hacked someone's personal computer and handed it over to the embassy. There are so many means and measures," said Saini, who himself was charged with leaking secrets to Washington in 2006. He proclaims his innocence. "There may be cooperation between India and the United States, the United States may have shared them, or India could have done the hack ... or a third country may have handed it to India," said Saini. It is also unclear how Symantec's source code ended up with the Lords of Dharmaraja, whose public face goes by the name Yamatough on a Twitter feed. Yamatough, whose profile picture shows a Tibetan painting of Dharmaraja, the Hindu god of death and justice, follows many members of the "Anonymous" hacking collective, and Symantec attributes the hack to that group. "We are still investigating exactly where or how Anonymous accessed the code, but to date we have found no evidence that we shared any information with the Indian government," Symantec said in a statement. "If the Indian government was indeed in possession of the code - as Anonymous claims and which has not yet been verified - we have no indication that it came from Symantec or as a result of our software assurance processes." (Additional reporting by Paul Eckert in WASHINGTON; Editing by John Chalmers and Ian Geoghegan) http://news.yahoo.com/fake-memo-real...175519916.html India OKs Censoring Facebook, Google, Microsoft, YouTube Emil Protalinski Summary: The Indian government has sanctioned the prosecution of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, YouTube, and 16 others. India warned these websites it can block them just like China can. The Indian government has given the green light for the prosecution of “21 social networking sites.” The list features 10 foreign-based companies, and could affect websites provided by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and YouTube. The recent development is part of an ongoing argument between the companies and India over whether content should be regulated (read: censored) in the country. The approval was actually made on December 23, 2011, but was only revealed today. Earlier this week, Delhi’s High Court warned various companies they will be blocked in India if they fail to check and censor content. When counsel for Facebook and Google pointed to their global policy of non-interference even if contents posted on their webpages are found to be obscene or objectionable, the court told the Internet firms that this policy won’t work in India. “Like China, we too can block such websites,” said Justice Suresh Kait. Before today’s news, I got in touch with Manan Kakkar, ZDNet’s journalist for all things related to India, and he told me he wasn’t interested in the story. “But just as a side note, it’s not India that’s made the threat but a high court judge in a city,” Kakkar told me “Then there’s the Supreme Court above this so I’m not giving much credence to this.” He then pointed out Google said it can’t censor such content and I remembered Facebook also said it won’t help India censor the Web. This all changed, however, when Kakkar followed up to tell me the Indian government today sanctioned the court’s stance. “The sanctioning authority has personally gone through the entire records and materials produced before him and after considering and examining the same, he is satisfied that there is sufficient material to proceed against the accused persons under section 153-A, 153-B and 295-A of the IPC,” the report said according to IBN Live. Earlier in the day, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo India, and others had sought exemption from the Delhi court because they argued the matter is still pending before the High Court. After the counsel said over 10 out of 21 companies named as accused in the case were foreign-based, the court agreed it had to it had to serve the summons on them, which came in the form of a two-page report from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). That’s when the approval from the Indian government was revealed. While this is a big deal, the case is far from over. “Let the process (to serve the summons) on (foreign- based) accused be sent through the MEA as per the process,” Metropolitan Magistrate Sudesh Kumar said. “The accused are allowed exemption for today only but are directed to appear in person on the next date of hearing without fail.” The next hearing is scheduled for March 13, 2012. The case first began with a private complaint filed by journalist Vinay Rai against these firms for allegedly webcasting objectionable content. Representatives of the 21 companies were thus summoned to court and a long proceeding began. Despite the statement about China, I hope India won’t go down the same path. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/i...t-youtube/7308 Biometrics in Argentina: Mass Surveillance as a State Policy Two years ago, the UK dismantled their national ID scheme and shredded their National Identity Registry in response to great public outcry over the privacy-invasive program. Unfortunately privacy protections have been less rosy elsewhere. In Argentina, the national ID fight was lost some time ago. A law enacted during the military dictatorship forced all individuals to obtain a government-mandated ID. Now, they are in the process of enhancing its mandatory National Registry of Persons (RENAPER) with biometric data such as fingerprints and digitized faces. The government plans to repurpose this database in order to facilitate “easy access” to law enforcement by merging this data into a new, security-focused integrated system. This raises the specter of mass surveillance, as Argentinean law enforcement will have access to mass repositories of citizen information and be able to leverage existing facial recognition and fingerprint matching technologies in order to identify any citizen anywhere. In the waning days of 2011, Argentinean President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner issued an executive decree ordering the creation of the Federal System of Biometric Identification (SIBIOS), a new centralized, nation-wide biometric ID service that will allow law enforcement to “cross-reference” information with biometric and other data initially collected for the purpose of operating a general national ID registry. Historically, police fingerprint databases were limited to those suspected or convicted of criminal offences. Recently, however, the Argentinean Federal Police (Policía Federal Argentina – PFA) was given a large database holding digital fingerprints collected from random Argentineans as part of the national ID and passport application process. Since March 2011, this database has been fed by data collected through the RENAPER national ID application process. The PFA has managed to amass a database of about 8 million fingerprints, yet this process appears to have been too slow for the Argentinean government. Further to the new decree, the SIBIOS initiative will give PFA access to RENAPER’s database (and vice versa), doubling PFA’s reach to approximately 14 million digitized fingerprints. Starting with the first New Year’s baby of 2012, Argentina has even begun registering newborn biometric information with the SIBIOS. Argentina projects that, as national IDs and passports expire and are renewed (and new babies are born), the SIBIOS database will grow to over 40 million within the next two years. But the SIBIOS initiative will do far more than expand the number of digitized fingerprints the FPA will have ready access to. According to President Fernández de Kirchner, the SIBIOS will be fully “integrated” with existing ID card databases, which, aside from biometric identifiers, include an individuals’ digital image, civil status, blood type, and key background information collected since her birth and across the various life stages. Further, it is not just the FPA that will have access to this new information sharing system. SIBIOS is designated for use by other federal security forces, including the National Directorate of Immigration, the Airport Security Police, and the National Gendarmerie, and is even available to Provincial enforcement entities, upon agreement with the National State. However, there has been no public discussion about the conditions under which public officials will have access to the data. Supporters of the SIBIOS program tout that it would give law enforcement easy, real-time access to individuals’ data, but whether any of the safeguards typically used to put checks on state surveillance will limit access remains an open question. Perhaps the most troubling part of this new SIBIOS initiative is the technologies Argentinean law enforcement intends to leverage in order to exploit these databases. The FPA, for example, will be able to use its new facial recognition capacities to search the immense RENAPER digital image repository in order to identify people in photos, and maybe even on surveillance cameras! Argentinean police are also equipping themselves with mobile fingerprinting devices that will allow them to check the fingerprints of any passing Argentinean against the database itself. The Dangers of Surveillance Society National IDs and similar methods of data centralization increase state capacity for intrusive surveillance. Coupled with the simultaneous collection of biometric identifiers, such as digitized faces, it creates an additional layer of tracking that is even more pervasive and dangerous. As is the case in Argentina, biometrics are inherently individuating and interfaces easily with database technology, making widespread privacy violations easier and more harmful. To our alarm, President Fernández de Kirchner has gone so far as to embrace the potential to link unidentified faces obtained through surveillance cameras with identified images through the SIBIOS system. Due to the technology’s relative affordability, street cameras and video-surveillance are now everywhere. Therefore this functionality is especially dangerous with the potential to lead to mass political surveillance. (This visualization shows how there are over 1,000 cameras installed in the Argentinian capital of Buenos Aires alone.) Given the prevalence of street cameras and how easy it has become to identify one unnamed face amidst thousands, individuals who care about their privacy and anonymity will have a very difficult time protecting their identity from biometrics databases in the imminent future. There are extreme unforeseen risks in a world where an individual’s photo, taken from a street camera or a social network, can be linked to their national ID card. Additionally, matching technologies will only improve with time. (Check here and here to learn more about facial recognition). EFF has long argued that perfect tracking is inimical to a free and democratic society. Citizens have a reasonable expectation of privacy and anonymity, particularly with regard to profiling. A combination of government-run biometric ID systems and facial recognition violates core elements of freedom by making it easy to locate and track people, and dangerously centralizing this data makes it ripe for state exploitation. As Beatriz Busaniche of Fundacion Via Libre notes, this type of mass surveillance can have serious repercussions for those who are willing to voice political dissent: “In the name of public security, Argentina has pushed for mass surveillance policies, including the heightened monitoring of public spaces. Privacy is particularly crucial for our country since throughout our long history of social and political movements, calls for action have often taken to the streets. It is of higher importance for activists to remain anonymous in their demonstrations, especially when they are at odds with the government itself. In this way, SIBIOS not only challenges their privacy and data protection rights, but also poses serious threats to their civil and political rights.” Mora Arqueta, Director of RENAPER, noted in an interview that the current purpose of the national ID scheme is to retain the “maximum amount of personal data, and treat the citizen as an individual who interacts with the State in many places.” Her comments admit to a direct perversion of the existing national identification system, from one that has simply assigned an ID number to an individual, to one that outright violates personal data minimization principles through massive and unnecessary collection of sensitive personal information. The problem with allowing the government to retain so much sensitive data is that it gives it too much unchecked concentrated power. One wonders, for example, whether those who enacted the decree considered what would have occurred if Argentina's military dictatorship had access to such an expansive database. The public debate in Argentina should therefore be about power and the possible limits of actors in society to know. A healthy amount of distrust is necessary to sustain an open, democratic society. Fernández de Kirchner’s arguments that SIBIOS provides “a major qualitative leap in security, in the fight against crime” are troubling and represent a further deviation from the purpose for which the RENAPER databases were first created. This argument is misleading, and fails to analyze SIBIOS’ risks and limitations as well as its impact on civil liberties and data protection. Time and again, we have heard the dubious rhetorical argument that biometrics are needed to fight against crime and increase security. In fact, these massive biometrics databases are a honeypot of sensitive data that remains extremely vulnerable for exploitation by criminals and identity thieves themselves. The rights to privacy and data protection are enshrined in international law and the Argentinean Constitution. Given the long list of privacy concerns surrounding biometrics, and the plausibility of future security breaches, it is irrationally excessive to collect biometric data in a nation-wide ID scheme. The Argentinean government needs to limit the unnecessary collection, processing, retention, and sharing of this very sensitive data. EFF and Fundacion Via Libre in Argentina will work together to fight against these intrusive measures. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/0...e-state-policy EPIC v. Department of Homeland Security: Media Monitoring Seeking Disclosure of Records Detailing the Department of Homeland Security's Media Monitoring Activities Background EPIC is pursuing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security for information about the agency's surveillance of social networks and news organizations. In February 2011, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the agency planned to implement a program that would monitor media content, including social media data. The proposed initiatives would gather information from "online forums, blogs, public websites, and messages boards" and disseminate information to "federal, state, local, and foreign government and private sector partners." The program would be executed, in part, by individuals who established fictitious usernames and passwords to create covert social media profiles to spy on other users. The agency stated it would store personal information for up to five years. Top News • EPIC Sues DHS Over Covert Surveillance of Facebook and Twitter : EPIC has filed a Freedom of information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to force disclosure of the details of the agency's social network monitoring program. In news reports and a Federal Register notice, the DHS has stated that it will routinely monitor the public postings of users on Twitter and Facebook. The agency plans to create fictitious user accounts and scan posts of users for key terms. User data will be stored for five years and shared with other government agencies.The legal authority for the DHS program remains unclear. EPIC filed the lawsuit after the DHS failed to reply to an April 2011 FOIA request. For more information, see EPIC: Social Networking Privacy. (Dec. 20, 2011) EPIC's FOIA Request In April 12, 2011, EPIC submitted a FOIA request to the DHS seeking agency records detailing the media monitoring program.The request sought the following documents: • All contracts, proposals, and communications between the federal government and third parties, including, but not limited to, H.B. Gary Federal, Palantir Technologies, and/or Berico Technologies, and/or parent or subsidiary companies, that include provisions concerning the capability of social media monitoring technology to capture, store, aggregate, analyze, and/or match personally-identifiable information. • All contracts, proposals, and communications between DHS and any states, localities, tribes, territories, and foreign governments, and/or their agencies or subsidiaries, and/or any corporate entities, including but not limited to H.B. Gary Federal, Palantir Technologies, and/or Berico Technologies, regarding the implementation of any social media monitoring initiative. • All documents used by DHS for internal training of staff and personnel regarding social media monitoring, including any correspondence and communications between DHS, internal staff and personnel, and/or privacy officers, regarding the receipt, use, and/or implementation of training and evaluation documents. • All documents detailing the technical specifications of social media monitoring software and analytic tools, including any security measures to protect records of collected information and analysis. • All documents concerning data breaches of records generated by social media monitoring technology. Noting the extraordinary public interest in the plan and the public's right to comment on the measures, EPIC asked the DHS to expedite the processing of its request. On April 28, 2011, the agency acknowledged receipt of EPIC's FOIA request, but denied the request for expedited processing and did not make any substantive determination regarding the FOIA request. The DHS did not disclose any records in response to EPIC's FOIA request. On May 18, 2011, EPIC appealed the DHS's failure to make a timely substantive determination as well as the agency's denial of EPIC's expedited processing request. The DHS failed to respond to EPIC's administrative appeal and failed to disclose any records. EPIC's FOIA Lawsuit On December 20, 2011, EPIC filed a lawsuit against the DHS to compel the disclosure of documents relating to the agency's media monitoring program. In January 2012, the DHS disclosed 285 pages of agency records in response to EPIC's FOIA lawsuit. FOIA Documents EPIC's FOIA request and lawsuit forced disclosure of the following records concerning the DHS's media monitoring program: January 2012 Disclosure - 285 pages (including contracts, price estimates, Privacy Impact Assessment, and communications concerning DHS Media Monitoring program) EPIC's FOIA lawsuit forced the DHS to disclose 285 pages of records. The documents include contracts, price estimates, Privacy Impact Assessment, and communications concerning DHS Media Monitoring program. These records make public, for the first time, details of the DHS's efforts to spy on social network users and journalists. The records reveal that the DHS is paying General Dynamics to monitor the news. The agency instructed the company to monitor for "[media] reports that reflect adversely on the U.S. Government, DHS, or prevent, protect, respond government activities." The DHS is attempting to "capture public reaction to major government proposals." The DHS instructed the social media monitoring company to generate "reports on DHS, Components, and other Federal Agencies: positive and negative reports on FEMA, CIA, CBP, ICE, etc. as well as organizations outside the DHS." One of the example social network monitoring summaries is titled "Residents Voice Opposition Over Possible Plan to Bring Guantanamo Detainees to Local Prison-Standish MI." The report summarizes dissent on blogs and social networking cites, quoting commenters. The DHS instructed the company to "Monitor public social communications on the Internet." The records list the websites that will be monitored, including the comments sections of [The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, Wired, and ABC News.]" https://epic.org/foia/epic-v-dhs-media-monitoring/ Stuxnet Cyberweapon Looks to be One on a Production Line, Researchers Say Evidence is rising that Stuxnet, a cyberweapon that attacked Iran's nuclear facilities in 2009, is part of a supersophisticated manufacturing process for malicious software, two antivirus companies tell the Monitor. Mark Clayton Somewhere in the world, the creators of the Stuxnet worm are involved in a cyberweapon manufacturing operation that can pump out supersophisticated malicious software tweaked for specific missions, new targets, and detection evasion. Stuxnet, the first military-grade cyberweapon known to the world, has been called a digital missile and a cyber-Hiroshima bomb. But it was not a one-shot blast, new research shows. Rather, Stuxnet is part of a bigger cyberweapons system – a software platform, or framework – that can modify already-operational malicious software, researchers at two leading antivirus companies told the Monitor. The platform appears to be able to fire and reload – again and again – to recalibrate for different targets and to bolt on different payloads, but with minimal added cost and effort, say researchers at Kaspersky Labs and at Symantec. Kaspersky, based in Moscow, and Symantec, in Sunnyvale, Calif., are antivirus companies, competitors in fact. Each has had teams laboring independently for more than a year to decipher Stuxnet. Both are amazed to have discovered digital fingerprints of a much larger family of weaponized software. What each has uncovered are at least seven cyberweapon "launcher" files created from a common software platform. A launcher file is needed to stealthily insert the malicious payload (Stuxnet, for instance) onto a computer, as well as carrying the payload files and encryption keys needed to unfurl them and make them function. All seven launcher files contain chunks of identical source code, yet differ in small but important ways, according to a Kaspersky Labs study released last week. Just two of those files are known to be used by the Stuxnet program. Two others are related to an espionage software program called Duqu, discovered last fall. That leaves three launcher files with no known affiliations. While those three could be affiliated with as-yet-undetected variants of Stuxnet or Duqu, they are more likely to be affiliated with undiscovered cyberweapons operating "in the wild" somewhere in cyberspace, researchers say. Kaspersky's findings are buttressed by researchers at Symantec, which led the deciphering effort on Stuxnet in 2010. The companies' findings imply that Stuxnet's creators are not resting on past deeds, such as the attack on Iran's nuclear fuel manufacturing facilities. Instead, they are apparently churning out new cyberweapons for new missions from that same common software platform, researchers from both firms told the Monitor. "Stuxnet's creators used a [software] platform to package and deliver it, because they wanted to be able to make many cyberweapons easily and be able to change them rapidly for targeting and attack," says Costin Raiu, director of the global research and analysis team at Kaspersky Labs, in a phone interview from Romania. "What's going on seems not so much like a weapons factory as much as a super-secret lab that creates experimental cyberweapons," he adds. "It's more like they're making ion cannons or something – but for cyberwar. These are not normal line weapons, but the highest tech possible to wage cyberwar and cybersabotage." First signs that Stuxnet was part of a larger family of malicious software, or malware, came with the discovery in September 2010 of Duqu, a specialized espionage program. Duqu appears to be designed to zero in on industrial secrets related to Stuxnet's target, and its code contains digital fingerprints akin to some in Stuxnet, indicating it was created with some of the same source code. Stuxnet's mission, much of it now decoded, was to wreak havoc on Iran's ability to refine nuclear fuel using centrifuges. "We've done the same analysis Kaspersky has, and seen the same timelines, dates, encryption keys," says Liam O Murchu, manager of operations for Symantec Security Response, in a phone interview. "We think Stuxnet and Duqu are made by the same team, with the same goal.... They can change [the software weapon produced on the common platform], manipulate it, have different payloads." Using a common malware "platform," or "framework," system can be likened to an auto factory building an exotic car, like a Lamborghini. There are a lot of common parts, but also a bit of artistry. There may be a common frame and engine, but other code has been hand-tooled by expert engineers, Mr. Raiu and Mr. O Murchu agree. That common platform – for Stuxnet, Duqu, and the rest – is a way to reuse software that was expensive to develop. But it also allows for faster assembly of existing modules into full-blown cyberweapons, which can then be tweaked to sabotage a new industrial control system target or to evade detection. "Let's imagine you want to steal documents," Raiu adds. "You don't need the sort of sabotage capability built into Stuxnet, so you take that off. Instead, you use the same platform to create targeted malware, but perhaps focusing on espionage instead. That's Duqu." A light bulb went on last October when Kaspersky researchers looking at Duqu downloaded a different piece of malware that had been on a Chinese computer that also had Duqu on it. At first, the file was misidentified as Stuxnet. But a closer examination showed it was something new and slightly different. So Kaspersky began reexamining its own archive of malware again to see what files might have been missed, dredging up seven in all. Duqu used two files. Stuxnet used two files. Three others had no affiliated programs. But all of the files shared a common characteristic: They carried a "~d" symbol in their names. That led Kaspersky's researchers to dub the common platform used to create all the files for Duqu, Stuxnet, and the others the Tilde-d, or "Tilded," platform. "There were a number of projects involving programs based on the “Tilded” platform throughout the period 2007-2011," Kaspersky's report concludes. "Stuxnet and Duqu are two of them – there could have been others, which for now remain unknown. The platform continues to develop, which can only mean one thing – we’re likely to see more modifications in the future." Some experts agree that Duqu and Stuxnet share code, but strongly disagree on what that implies. It could mean that different entities, working toward their own ends, used the same "kit." Despite the common code, "many other dimensions of the separate attacks indicate no common authorship or attribution," writes Don Jackson, a senior security researcher with the Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit research team, in an e-mail. Still others say the Kaspersky findings are telling. "It makes tremendous sense," says Ed Skoudis, cofounder of Inguardians, a cybersecurity firm based in Washington, D.C. "Look at the effort needed to produce Stuxnet. You wouldn't want to do it in a way that was one-off. You would want to produce a process that could reuse the parts, not shoot your entire cache of weapons in one attack." He likens it to the US system for building atom bombs after World War II. "When the US built the atom bomb. it wasn't just the one. We had an infrastructure and platform for building additional weapons," Mr. Skoudis says. "Whoever built Stuxnet got a lot of money and a lot of smart people working on it. It just makes sense that creating these kinds of weapons be repeatable –and that some set of fingerprints are left behind that shows that." But what neither he nor any expert interviewed for this article believes is that identifying the software platform used to build Stuxnet and Duqu will lead to the identity of whomever built those weapons. "I don't think it will help much," he says. "But this finding does indicate that we'll see more of these kinds of weapons when a definite military objective that suits whoever created these things appears. We now know there is a production facility for these types of things – and that it is operational and releasing things. I'm sure we'll see more." http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2012/01...esearchers-say Hacker Says to Release Full Norton Antivirus Code on Tuesday A hacker who goes by the name of 'Yama Tough' threatened Saturday to release next week the full source code for Symantec Corp's flagship Norton Antivirus software. "This coming Tuesday behold the full Norton Antivirus 1,7Gb src, the rest will follow," Yama Tough posted via Twitter. In the past week Yama Tough has released fragments of source code from Symantec products along with a cache of emails. The hacker says all the data was taken from Indian government servers. (Reporting By Frank Jack Daniel) http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...80C1QW20120114 Lockdown The coming war on general-purpose computing Cory Doctorow This article is based on a keynote speech to the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, Dec. 2011. General-purpose computers are astounding. They're so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they're for, how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. This brings us back to something you might be sick of reading about: copyright. But bear with me, because this is about something more important. The shape of the copyright wars clues us into an upcoming fight over the destiny of the general-purpose computer itself. In the beginning, we had packaged software and we had sneakernet. We had floppy disks in ziplock bags, in cardboard boxes, hung on pegs in shops, and sold like candy bars and magazines. They were eminently susceptible to duplication, were duplicated quickly, and widely, and this was to the great chagrin of people who made and sold software. Enter Digital Rights Management in its most primitive forms: let's call it DRM 0.96. They introduced physical indicia which the software checked for—deliberate damage, dongles, hidden sectors—and challenge-response protocols that required possession of large, unwieldy manuals that were difficult to copy. These failed for two reasons. First, they were commercially unpopular, because they reduced the usefulness of the software to the legitimate purchasers. Honest buyers resented the non-functionality of their backups, they hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles, and they chafed at the inconvenience of having to lug around large manuals when they wanted to run their software. Second, these didn't stop pirates, who found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication. People who took the software without paying for it were untouched. Typically, the way this happened is a programmer, with possession of technology and expertise of equivalent sophistication to the software vendor itself, would reverse-engineer the software and circulate cracked versions. While this sounds highly specialized, it really wasn't. Figuring out what recalcitrant programs were doing and routing around media defects were core skills for computer programmers, especially in the era of fragile floppy disks and the rough-and-ready early days of software development. Anti-copying strategies only became more fraught as networks spread; once we had bulletin boards, online services, USENET newsgroups and mailing lists, the expertise of people who figured out how to defeat these authentication systems could be packaged up in software as little crack files. As network capacity increased, the cracked disk images or executables themselves could be spread on their own. This gave us DRM 1.0. By 1996, it became clear to everyone in the halls of power that there was something important about to happen. We were about to have an information economy, whatever the Hell that was. They assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information. Information technology improves efficiency, so imagine the markets that an information economy would have! You could buy a book for a day, you could sell the right to watch the movie for a Euro, and then you could rent out the pause button for a penny per second. You could sell movies for one price in one country, at another price in another, and so on. The fantasies of those days were like a boring science fiction adaptation of the Old Testament Book of Numbers, a tedious enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information—and what might be charged for each. Unfortunately for them, none of this would be possible unless they could control how people use their computers and the files we transfer to them. After all, it was easy to talk about selling someone a tune to download to their MP3 player, but not so easy to talk about the the right to move music from the player to another device. But how the Hell could you stop that once you'd given them the file? In order to do so, you needed to figure out how to stop computers from running certain programs and inspecting certain files and processes. For example, you could encrypt the file, and then require the user to run a program that only unlocked the file under certain circumstances. But, as they say on the Internet, now you have two problems. You must now also stop the user from saving the file while it's unencrypted—which must happen eventually— and you must stop the user from figuring out where the unlocking program stores its keys, enabling them to permanently decrypt the media and ditch the stupid player app entirely. Now you have three problems: you must stop the users who figure out how to decrypt from sharing it with other users. Now you've got four problems, because you must stop the users who figure out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs from telling other users how to do it too. And now you've got five problems, because you must stop users who figure out how to extract these secrets from telling other users what the secrets were! That's a lot of problems. But by 1996, we had a solution. We had the WIPO Copyright Treaty, passed by the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization. This created laws that made it illegal to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and it created laws that made it illegal to extract media (such as songs and movies) from the unlocking programs while they were running. It created laws that made it illegal to tell people how to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and it created laws that made it illegal to host copyrighted works or the secrets. It also established a handy streamlined process that let you remove stuff from the Internet without having to screw around with lawyers, and judges, and all that crap. And with that, illegal copying ended forever, the information economy blossomed into a beautiful flower that brought prosperity to the whole wide world; as they say on the aircraft carriers, "Mission Accomplished". That's not how the story ends, of course, because pretty much anyone who understood computers and networks understood that these laws would create more problems than they could possibly solve. After all, these laws made it illegal to look inside your computer when it was running certain programs. They made it illegal to tell people what you found when you looked inside your computer, and they made it easy to censor material on the internet without having to prove that anything wrong had happened. In short, they made unrealistic demands on reality and reality did not oblige them. Copying only got easier following the passage of these laws—copying will only ever get easier. Right now is as hard as copying will get. Your grandchildren will turn to you and say "Tell me again, Grandpa, about when it was hard to copy things in 2012, when you couldn't get a drive the size of your fingernail that could hold every song ever recorded, every movie ever made, every word ever spoken, every picture ever taken, everything, and transfer it in such a short period of time you didn't even notice it was doing it." Reality asserts itself. Like the nursery rhyme lady who swallows a spider to catch a fly, and has to swallow a bird to catch the spider, and a cat to catch the bird, so must these regulations, which have broad general appeal but are disastrous in their implementation. Each regulation begets a new one, aimed at shoring up its own failures. It's tempting to stop the story here and conclude that the problem is that lawmakers are either clueless or evil, or possibly evilly clueless. This is not a very satisfying place to go, because it's fundamentally a counsel of despair; it suggests that our problems cannot be solved for so long as stupidity and evilness are present in the halls of power, which is to say they will never be solved. But I have another theory about what's happened. It's not that regulators don't understand information technology, because it should be possible to be a non-expert and still make a good law. MPs and Congressmen and so on are elected to represent districts and people, not disciplines and issues. We don't have a Member of Parliament for biochemistry, and we don't have a Senator from the great state of urban planning. And yet those people who are experts in policy and politics, not technical disciplines, still manage to pass good rules that make sense. That's because government relies on heuristics: rules of thumb about how to balance expert input from different sides of an issue. Unfortunately, information technology confounds these heuristics—it kicks the crap out of them—in one important way. The important tests of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose are first whether it will work, and second whether or not it will, in the course of doing its work, have effects on everything else. If I wanted Congress, Parliament, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it's unlikely I'd succeed. If I turned up, pointed out that bank robbers always make their escape on wheeled vehicles, and asked, "Can't we do something about this?", the answer would be "No". This is because we don't know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications, but useless to bad guys. We can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we'd be foolish to risk changing them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberies—even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies—no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems. However, if I were to show up in that same body to say that I had absolute proof that hands-free phones were making cars dangerous, and I requested a law prohibiting hands-free phones in cars, the regulator might say "Yeah, I'd take your point, we'd do that." We might disagree about whether or not this is a good idea, or whether or not my evidence made sense, but very few of us would say that once you take the hands-free phones out of the car, they stop being cars. We understand that cars remain cars even if we remove features from them. Cars are special-purpose, at least in comparison to wheels, and all that the addition of a hands-free phone does is add one more feature to an already-specialized technology. There's a heuristic for this: special-purpose technologies are complex, and you can remove features from them without doing fundamental, disfiguring violence to their underlying utility. This rule of thumb serves regulators well, by and large, but it is rendered null and void by the general-purpose computer and the general-purpose network—the PC and the Internet. If you think of computer software as a feature, a computer with spreadsheets running on it has a spreadsheet feature, and one that's running World of Warcraft has an MMORPG feature. The heuristic would lead you to think that a computer unable to run spreadsheets or games would be no more of an attack on computing than a ban on car-phones would be an attack on cars. And, if you think of protocols and websites as features of the network, then saying "fix the Internet so that it doesn't run BitTorrent", or "fix the Internet so that thepiratebay.org no longer resolves," sounds a lot like "change the sound of busy signals," or "take that pizzeria on the corner off the phone network," and not like an attack on the fundamental principles of internetworking. The rule of thumb works for cars, for houses, and for every other substantial area of technological regulation. Not realizing that it fails for the Internet does not make you evil, and it does not make you an ignoramus. It just makes you part of that vast majority of the world, for whom ideas like Turing completeness and end-to-end are meaningless. So, our regulators go off, they blithely pass these laws, and they become part of the reality of our technological world. There are, suddenly, numbers that we aren't allowed to write down on the Internet, programs we're not allowed to publish, and all it takes to make legitimate material disappear from the Internet is there mere accusation of copyright infringement. It fails to attain the goal of the regulation, because it doesn't stop people from violating copyright, but it bears a kind of superficial resemblance to copyright enforcement—it satisfies the security syllogism: "something must be done, I am doing something, something has been done." As a result, any failures that arise can be blamed on the idea that the regulation doesn't go far enough, rather than the idea that it was flawed from the outset. This kind of superficial resemblance and underlying divergence happens in other engineering contexts. I've a friend, who was once a senior executive at a big consumer packaged goods company, who told me what happened when the marketing department told the engineers that they'd thought up a great idea for detergent: from now on, they were going to make detergent that made your clothes newer every time you washed them! After the engineers had tried unsuccessfully to convey the concept of entropy to the marketing department, they arrived at another solution: they'd develop a detergent that used enzymes that attacked loose fiber ends, the kind that you get with broken fibers that make your clothes look old. So every time you washed your clothes in the detergent, they would look newer. Unfortunately, that was because the detergent was digesting your clothes. Using it would literally cause your clothes to dissolve in the washing machine. This was, needless to say, the opposite of making clothes newer. Instead, you were artificially aging them every time you washed them, and as the user, the more you deployed the "solution", the more drastic your measures had to be to keep your clothes up to date. Eventually, you would have to buy new clothes because the old ones fell apart. Today we have marketing departments that say things such as "we don't need computers, we need appliances. Make me a computer that doesn't run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn't run programs that I haven't authorized that might undermine our profits." On the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea: a program that does one specialized task. After all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we don't worry if it's still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that's not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance. We're not making a computer that runs only the "appliance" app; we're taking a computer that can run every program, then using a combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn't want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer—it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box. We don't know how to build a general-purpose computer that is capable of running any program except for some program that we don't like, are prohibited by law, or which loses us money. The closest approximation that we have to this is a computer with spyware: a computer on which remote parties set policies without the computer user's knowledge, or over the objection of the computer's owner. Digital rights management always converges on malware. In one famous incident—a gift to people who share this hypothesis—Sony loaded covert rootkit installers on 6 million audio CDs, which secretly executed programs that watched for attempts to read the sound files on CDs and terminated them. It also hid the rootkit's existence by causing the computer operating system's kernel to lie about which processes were running, and which files were present on the drive. But that's not the only example. Nintendo's 3DS opportunistically updates its firmware, and does an integrity check to make sure that you haven't altered the old firmware in any way. If it detects signs of tampering, it turns itself into a brick. Human rights activists have raised alarms over U-EFI, the new PC bootloader, which restricts your computer so it only runs "signed" operating systems, noting that repressive governments will likely withhold signatures from operating systems unless they allow for covert surveillance operations. On the network side, attempts to make a network that can't be used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance measures that we know from repressive governments. Consider SOPA, the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act, which bans innocuous tools such as DNSSec—a security suite that authenticates domain name information— because they might be used to defeat DNS blocking measures. It blocks Tor, an online anonymity tool sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and used by dissidents in oppressive regimes, because it can be used to circumvent IP blocking measures. In fact, the Motion Picture Association of America, a SOPA proponent, circulated a memo citing research that SOPA might work because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan. It argued that because these measures are effective in those countries, they would work in America, too! It may seem like SOPA is the endgame in a long fight over copyright and the Internet, and it may seem that if we defeat SOPA, we'll be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But as I said at the beginning of this talk, this isn't about copyright. The copyright wars are just the beta version of a long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry is just the first belligerents to take up arms, and we tend to think of them as particularly successful. After all, here is SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage, ready to break the Internet on a fundamental level— all in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies. But the reality is that copyright legislation gets as far as it does precisely because it's not taken seriously by politicians. This is why, on one hand, Canada has had Parliament after Parliament introduce one awful copyright bill after another, but on the other hand, Parliament after Parliament has failed to actually vote on each bill. It's why SOPA, a bill composed of pure stupid and pieced together molecule-by-molecule into a kind of "Stupidite 250" normally only found in the heart of newborn star, had its rushed-through SOPA hearings adjourned midway through the Christmas break: so that lawmakers could get into a vicious national debate over an important issue, unemployment insurance. It's why the World Intellectual Property Organization is gulled time and again into enacting crazed, pig-ignorant copyright proposals: because when the nations of the world send their U.N. missions to Geneva, they send water experts, not copyright experts. They send health experts, not copyright experts. They send agriculture experts, not copyright experts, because copyright is just not as important. Canada's Parliament didn't vote on its copyright bills because, of all the things that Canada needs to do, fixing copyright ranks well below health emergencies on First Nations reservations, exploiting the oil patch in Alberta, interceding in sectarian resentments among French- and English-speakers, solving resources crises in the nation's fisheries, and a thousand other issues. The triviality of copyright tells you that when other sectors of the economy start to evince concerns about the Internet and the PC, copyright will be revealed for a minor skirmish—not a war. Why might other sectors come to nurse grudges against computers in the way the entertainment business already has? The world we live in today is made of computers. We don't have cars anymore; we have computers we ride in. We don't have airplanes anymore; we have flying Solaris boxes attached to bucketfuls of industrial control systems. A 3D printer is not a device, it's a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer. A radio is no longer a crystal: it's a general-purpose computer, running software. The grievances that arise from unauthorized copies of Snooki's Confessions of a Guidette are trivial when compared to the calls-to-action that our computer-embroidered reality will soon create. Consider radio. Radio regulation until today was based on the idea that the properties of a radio are fixed at the time of manufacture, and can't be easily altered. You can't just flip a switch on your baby monitor and interfere with other signals. But powerful software-defined radios (SDRs) can change from baby monitor to emergency services dispatcher or air traffic controller, just by loading and executing different software. This is why the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) considered what would happen when we put SDRs in the field, and asked for comment on whether it should mandate that all software-defined radios should be embedded in "trusted computing" machines. Ultimately, the question is whether every PC should be locked, so that their programs could be strictly regulated by central authorities. Even this is a shadow of what is to come. After all, this was the year in which we saw the debut of open source shape files for converting AR-15 rifles to full-automatic. This was the year of crowd-funded open-sourced hardware for genetic sequencing. And while 3D printing will give rise to plenty of trivial complaints, there will be judges in the American South and mullahs in Iran who will lose their minds over people in their jurisdictions printing out sex toys. The trajectory of 3D printing will raise real grievances, from solid-state meth labs to ceramic knives. It doesn't take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers. Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it's really important to make sure that computers can't execute programs which cause specialized peripherals to output custom organisms which literally eat their lunch. Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or hysterical fears, they are, nevertheless, the political currency of lobbies and interest groups far more influential than Hollywood and big content. Every one of them will arrive at the same place: "Can't you just make us a general-purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can't you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?" There will be programs that run on general-purpose computers, and peripherals, that will freak even me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general-purpose computers will find a receptive audience. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, protocols or messages will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy. As we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits, and all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship. This stuff matters because we've spent the last decade sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it's just been an end-level guardian. The stakes are only going to get higher. As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die. It won't be a hearing aid, though; it will really be a computer. So when I get into a car—a computer that I put my body into—with my hearing aid—a computer I put inside my body—I want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me, or to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests. Last year, the Lower Merion School District, in a middle-class, affluent suburb of Philadelphia, found itself in a great deal of trouble. It was caught distributing, to its students, rootkitted laptops that allowed remote covert surveillance through the computer's camera and network connection. They photographed students thousands of times, at home and at school, awake and asleep, dressed and naked. Meanwhile, the latest generation of lawful intercept technology can covertly operate cameras, microphones, and GPS tranceivers on PCs, tablets, and mobile devices. We haven't lost yet, but we have to win the copyright war first if we want to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policies for them; to examine and terminate the software processes that runs on them; and to maintain them as honest servants to our will, not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks. http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html Using Open Source to Build the Ultimate Walled Garden AT&T moving to dominate user experience? Brian Proffitt Much has been made about AT&T's surprise entry into the OpenStack project earlier this week. Most notably, why the major U.S. carrier decided to sign up for OpenStack in the first place. That's no slam on OpenStack, mind you: the Rackspace-owned cloud computing project is much-beloved in the open source community for the technology and the Apache license that covers the project. The fact that governance will be shifting from Rackspace proper to a planned OpenStack Foundation definitely helps, too. But why would a carrier want to make use of OpenStack? There are some clues, most notably AT&T's planned AT&T Cloud Architect program, a service that will provide "public, private, and bare metal cloud servers or choose dedicated options." In other words, AT&T is about to take on Amazon's EC2 and S2 cloud services, and OpenStack's technology is going to be the engine that drives it. It's not going to be a straight head-to-head match-up, either; AT&T appears to be sweetening the pot by announcing HTML5 support as well as enhancing its API platform to provide such things as in-app billing. For me, this is an important clue in itself: by trying to attract developers, it looks like the AT&T--the carrier--is trying to move up and down the stack to capture the servers on the back-end with OpenStack and the user space with some sort of Web-based interface. If this is so, that would represent a huge move: because it would be the first time a network provider would theoretically own the user's eyeballs from the desktop/device all the way to the servers. It won't be 100 percent, of course, since users will be able to zip around the Internet at will. But imagine this: AT&T providing customers with an interactive interface on their TVs, devices, or desktops that has apps (free or fee-based) provided by AT&T and running through AT&T's mobile and land-based networks. There'll be a browser, too, so users can surf; perhaps set up like Amazon's Kindle Fire browser Silk, which will handily pre-load pages for users. All of this will run quite well on OpenStack-managed cloud servers, and provide AT&T with a gold mine of user-generated surfing, commerce, and other data. An analogy for old folks like me: it would be like CompuServe, if CompuServe owned the phone company. Leaving aside the potential problems for user privacy here--and oh, there are many to be addressed to be sure--a plan such as this would represent a stunning coup for AT&T, since they would be able to provide the one thing Apple and Google have not been able to have in their respective plans to own the entire stack: the network on which all communications must flow. It would also be a huge validation for open source, because every single level of such an offering would be driven by open source software: from the interface and the browser to the bazillions of Linux-based servers managed by AT&T's OpenStack-based cloud. As a starry-eyed geek, such an offering intrigues me, because it may mean that AT&T might be able to provide users with a la carte programming… something that it doesn't do now and is driving users like me to devices like Roku that enable my family and me to purchase and subscribe to only the entertainment content we want. As a more savvy consumer, the thought of AT&T or any one network having that much involvement in my online experience is more than a little problematic. There is a lot of work out about AT&T's plans, since I am offering little more than speculation. But I offer you this: AT&T's desire to have a hand in all levels of the user stack could be reflected in Google's own plans to own the part of the stack they're missing: the network. For this, I give you Google's pilot fiber program in Kansas City, KS. If Google wants the whole stack, you can bet your bippy that others will want it, too. AT&T already has the hard part, if you'll pardon the pun: the wires. Thanks to open source, moving up and down the stack is a much easier and cheaper proposition than Google wiring the country. Let's see if this call goes through as dialed. http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wirele...-walled-garden Knock Knock Knockin' on Bridges' Doors twilde Greetings! My name is Tim Wilde, Software Engineer at Team Cymru, Inc., and a big fan of the Tor Project and everything that they do. We've helped out the Tor Project with a few investigations into probing/blocking of Tor by oppressive regimes, and the guys asked me to write this one up for the Tor Blog, so here I am! Note: any opinions expressed here are mine, nor those of Team Cymru or the Tor Project. In October 2011, ticket #4185 was filed in the Tor bug tracker by a user in China who found that their connections to US-based Tor bridge relays were being regularly cut off after a very short period of time. At the time we performed some basic experimentation and discovered that Chinese IPs (presumably at the behest of the Great Firewall of China, or GFW) would reach out to the US-based bridge and connect to it shortly after the Tor user in China connected, and, if successful, shortly thereafter the connection would be blocked by the GFW. There wasn't time for a detailed investigation and analysis at the time, but that kernel eventually grew into the investigation detailed below. We were, however, able to determine that limiting connections to the bridge relay to only the single IP expected to be its client would, in fact, block the probes and allow the connection to remain open for an extended period (>48 hours in our testing). Between 05 DEC and 09 DEC 2011, we undertook a detailed and methodical investigation into probing and blocking of Tor connections originating within China. Unfortunately for our analysis, it appears that the GFW's active blocking of connections to Tor bridges had stopped, but we were still able to gather valuable data about the probing performed by the GFW, which previously led directly and verifiably to blocking. To this end we discovered two types of probing. First, "garbage binary" probes, containing nothing more than arbitrary (but sometimes repeated in later probes) binary data, were experienced by the non-China side of any connection that originated from China to TCP port 443 (HTTPS) in which an SSL negotiation was performed. This probe was performed in near-real-time after the connection was established, implying near-line-rate deep packet inspection (DPI) capabilities. TCP/443 connections not performing an SSL handshake, such as using the obfsproxy obfs2 protocol or a plain-text protocol, did not provoke probing. The purpose of these probes is unknown, and further investigation is difficult to justify when it seems relatively clear that these probes are not aimed at Tor. The second type of probe, on the other hand, is aimed quite directly at Tor. When a Tor client within China connected to a US-based bridge relay, we consistently found that at the next round 15 minute interval (HH:00, HH:15, HH:30, HH:45), the bridge relay would receive a probe from hosts within China that not only established a TCP connection, but performed an SSL negotiation, an SSL renegotiation, and then spoke the Tor protocol sufficiently to build a one-hop circuit and send a BEGIN_DIR cell. No matter what TCP port the bridge was listening on, once a Tor client from China connected, within 3 minutes of the next 15 minute interval we saw a series of probes including at least one connection speaking the Tor protocol. The good news is, we were able to isolate which characteristic of the Tor handshake the GFW was using to decide whether or not to initiate these probes. By making a simple change to the list of supported SSL ciphers in the "hello" packet sent by the Tor client within China, we were able to prevent the probes from taking place. This has been documented and is being discussed in ticket #4744. This differs slightly from the method used by Iran to block Tor in September 2011, using the client-side of the SSL negotiation as its trigger rather than the server-side. It is likely, however, that technology capable of targeting either side of the connection to this degree could also target the other side, so it remains important to consider both the server and client sides of the Tor connection when attempting to blend in with normal, benign traffic. The bad news, however, is that this is happening at all. This probe again implies sophisticated near-line-rate DPI technology, coupled with a system that is aimed directly at Tor, using code that actually speaks the Tor protocol. Clearly there is a target painted firmly on Tor, and it is quite likely that the Chinese will continue to adapt their censorship technology as the Tor Project adapts to them. There is light at the end of the tunnel, though. A number of ideas have been put forward about new protocols, handshakes, and extensions to the Tor protocol that could be used to combat this type of censorship technology in a more long-term-sustainable way. Proposal 190 provides for password authorization for bridge relays. obfsproxy provides an extra layer on top of a Tor connection that makes it look like generic binary data. The Tor v3 link protocol/handshake, currently available and in testing in the 0.2.3.x-alpha series of Tor releases, eliminates SSL renegotiation in Tor session establishment, removing one of Tor's current "sore thumbs" that stick out from normal HTTPS SSL traffic. You're welcome to check out my full report on this investigation for more detail than I could provide in the blog post here. Thanks very much to everyone who assisted with the investigation and the report! It was fun to investigate and report on this, and I hope to have the opportunity to help out with similar adventures in the future. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/kno...-bridges-doors Delaware Student Takes Top Prize at Annual Cyber Competition The U.S. Cyber Challenge recently announced the results of its annual Fall Cyber Foundations competition with the top honors going to Gavy Aggrawal, a sophomore at Delaware’s Charter School of Wilmington The U.S. Cyber Challenge recently announced the results of its annual Fall Cyber Foundations competition with the top honors going to Gavy Aggrawal, a sophomore at Delaware’s Charter School of Wilmington. The competition is designed to spark interest among high school students in cybersecurity and is a feeder program for other U.S. Cyber Challenge events like the collegiate level competitions. The challenge tests participants on several basic elements of cybersecurity including networking, operating systems, and system administration. More than 2,000 students from across the United States participated in the challenge which took place online. Ultimately Aggrawal walked away with the highest score of 28,008 points and a $2,500 scholarship. Aggrawal credits his success with his careful preparation for the event following last spring’s competition. In particular Aggrawal said he focused on security problems with smartphone applications. Following Aggrawal, Ryan Foster of Ohio ranked second, trailed by Andrey Kuklev of Michigan, Jade Mollard of Maryland, and Jeffrey Yuan of California. The top five finishers in the nation each received scholarships courtesy of ISC2, the event’s sponsors. http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire....er-competition Barnes and Nobel is Legally Obligated to Release Source AdamOutler It would seem that Barnes and Nobel is betraying the most sacred of things in the open-source world, The General Public License(GPL). As open source programmers we all use the GPL daily. The GPL is what keeps Open-Source work like the Linux kernel free, modifiable and re-distributable. I tried to compile the sources provided by Barnes and Nobel, but they are incomplete. They will not compile.. I'm not the only one, others have tried and failed as well. So, I made a post on the Barnes and Nobel website. Last time I checked, at about 1PM today, the post had received about 20 responses and 38 "laurels" (their version of thanks). Each response was positive and that is an extraordinary amount of support, considering some of their "top laurled posts" have received 35 Laurels in 4 weeks. Barnes and Nobel deleted my request for source code granted by the GPL. These screen-shots were cached on my home computer before I went to sleep last night. Cached screenshot1:http://i41.tinypic.com/szy847.png Cached Screenshot2:http://i43.tinypic.com/2vsm7v9.png Text in case something happens to the images or the host is blocked in your country: Barnes and Noble, you have a legal obligation to release full, compilable source. I have tried to compile the provided sources here to no avail. The provided sources are incomplete. 1.4.0 source: http://images.barnesandnoble.com/PRe...let_1-4.tar.gz 1.4.1 source: http://images.barnesandnoble.com/PRe...t_1-4-1.tar.gz The following quotes are from GPL-Violations.org http://gpl-violations.org/faq/sourcecode-faq.html What kind of source code do I have to publish under the GNU GPL? The GNU GPL demands that as soon as you distribute GPL licensed software in executable format you make available the "complete corresponding source code". The GNU GPL also contains a definition of this term: “ The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. ” How can I verify that my source code release is complete? This is quite easy. If you only use source code provided in that release, and you can use this source code to produce a working form of the executable code, then the source code release seems complete. If the build process fails, or you end up with a non-working executable, or you have no way to install the resulting executable, then clearly something is missing. By releasing uncompilable source, you are not only making yourself look bad... You're violating the terms of service you agreed to by using the Linux kernel in the first place... You're loosing footholes in the open-source community.. You're also putting yourself up for legal action. As a book seller, you should respect the fact that Open-Source work falls into the same category as a classic novel. It is a public treasure and should be treated as such. Your failure to abide by the rules is not only offensive, but it is illegal. Using Linux is not a free cash cow. Linux is free as in "freedom of speech", not free as in "free beer". You have a duty to release full kernel and U-Boot sources. I've requested sources, now please provide full, compilable, executable source. They DELETED my request for corresponding source code because it does not comply with their terms of service agreement. This is unacceptable by the licensing they agreed upon in the GPL: Code: 3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following: a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.) • Barnes and Nobel sold the device with side-loading enabled, let the tech sites review it, then locked out that feature. • Barnes and Nobel is refusing applications for those without Tax ID numbers or business licenses to develop Open-Source Android apps on the Open-Source Android platform. • Barnes and Nobel is in a state of non-compliance with the GPL. I recommend contacting Barnes and Noblel about these in the following ways: Customer Service: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/customerservice/contactus Device Support: https://nookdeveloper.barnesandnoble...t/support.html Direct Email: service@barnesandnoble.com and support@book.com This site is called XDA-Developers because of the GPL. Without the GPL, we would not be conducting legitimate development, it would be something else like XDA-Hackers. As DEVELOPERS, we need to stand up for our rights and get the tools we need to develop. Please take action, in a professional manner XDA-Developers. Every e-mail and support request counts. http://forum.xda-developers.com/show....php?t=1432003 Pseudonyms Drive Communities! TiVo: Recorded and Internet-Delivered Content Surpasses Live TV Viewership The DVR company’s audience research unit found that only 38 percent of viewing is live, or 27 percent among users of Netflix, YouTube, Hulu Plus and other Web video options. Georg Szalai DVR pioneer TiVo on Wednesday said its latest research shows that viewership of recorded TV programs and Internet-delivered content is surpassing live TV viewership. Looking at Web-connected TiVo devices, nearly two thirds of viewing on them is now driven by delayed TV or online on-demand content, it said. TiVo's audience research division, which tracks anonymous usage across 2 million TiVo devices on a second-by-second basis, said that only 38 percent of viewing is live. Among users of so-called broadband over-the-top access to Netflix, YouTube, Hulu Plus and other online video options, live viewership amounts to only 27 percent, according to the DVR company. "This new second-by-second data shows that on demand viewing though a combination of time shifting on the DVR and broadband OTT has become a huge part of the consumer's entertainment mix," said Tara Maitra, senior vp and general manager of content and media sales for TiVo. "It really has become all about whatever they want to watch, whenever they want to watch it." Said TiVo president and CEO Tom Rogers: "As people watch less live TV, the television industry is being challenged like never before to meet the needs of viewers. For the cable industry, TiVo is the leading provider of advanced television solutions that deliver seamless access to four forms of content - traditional live TV, recordings from TV linear channels, operator video-on-demand, and broadband-delivered video.” http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...live-tv-280469 'Data Hog' Study Hypocritically Blames Customer For 1% of Phones that Eat 25% of Bandwidth New study blames iPhone, Android users to sucking up more than fair share of cell bandwidth Kevin Fogarty Most people know – thanks to relentless, pepper-spray-flavored attempts the OccupyWallStreet movement spent months reminding us during 2011 – that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans took in a quarter of all the income available to individuals last year. They also own 40 percent of everything there is to own, according to Census and U.S. Treasury figures That inequity prompted enough Occupations that defenders of or aspirants to the 1 percent worried aloud that the various Occupations would turn into an American version of the revolutions dubbed "Arab Spring" earlier in the year. That was alarmist hyperbole, of course, painting the protesters as dangerously unstable, potentially violent criminals intent on destroying all the things that made America great just to satisfy their own self-obsessed senses of entitlement. "Blame the Victim" is a really good game if you're the one being accused and can't come up with any plausible reasons to explain why a decades-long obsessive, pathological selfishness is not only legal(ish), but more Constitutional than allowing the victims to stand up and complain about being dismissed, marginalized and robbed of what used to be called the American Dream, and permanently relegated to lower socio-economic classes no matter how great their talents or ambitions. That's all about life, liberty and pursuing happiness, though – issues about which people tend to be sensitive because all three got a passing reference in some archaic, handwritten notes that are obviously irrelevant in the 21st century except the parts that allow the owning of guns, slaves and monopolies. Warning to Congress: Give carriers a break before iPhoners eat us all! Will anyone get anywhere near that upset following revelations that users of the iPhone 4S are nearly as blatant hogs of cellular bandwidth as "the 1 percent" are of the income, property and civil rights titularly available to every American? iPhone 4S smartphones use twice as much bandwidth as iPhone 4s, and three times the bandwidth of iPhone 3G users, possibly due to the relentless self-querying, web-surfing digital personal assistant Siri that comes with Apple's newest phones. Just 1 percent (we have heard that number before) – 1 percent of all wireless users consume half of all the data downloaded across cellular networks every day, according to a new study from cellular-network management vendor Arieso. ManyAndroid users also qualify as what Arieso calls "extreme" users – uploading three times as much data as iPhone 3G users and making far more data calls per subscriber – though both other iPhone versions are ahead even of the top Androids in most usage metrics. In one portion of Arieso's writeup the company becomes blatantly self-serving: it warns that that carriers don't know enough about who the data hogs are and what do to about them. Arieso sells software claiming to be able to fix that problem. Carriers on guard against 'extreme users' who use and buy services the carriers promote relentlessly The more insidious part of the writeup is the one in which Arieso stops talking about which devices use the most data and switches directly to a blatantly sycophantic, contextually inaccurate claim that "extreme users" are to blame for overloaded mobile networks. “The introduction of increasingly sophisticated devices, coupled with growing consumer demand, is creating unrelenting pressure on mobile networks. The capacity crunch is still a very real threat for mobile operators, and it looks set to only get harder in 2012,” commented Dr. Michael Flanagan, CTO, Arieso and study author. “The mobile industry needs new investment and new approaches to boost network performance and manage the customer experience”. – Arieso CTO Michael Flanagan, Jan. 6, 2012, announcing the study “Recent Smartphone Trends & the Extreme Data User” That all sounds dire enough to prompt some serious action. The first time you hear them so do the over-parodied local-news promos that ask "Is your shampoo killing you? Tune in at 11 for the answer," (which is 'no'). The carriers' version of killer shampoo is the extreme user who is selfishly eating up so much wireless bandwidth that carriers are helpless to provide even adequate levels of service to everyone else with a smartphone. Carriers complain that the FCC is shackling them with oppressive regulation, preventing them from properly managing their networks and allowing them to be victimized by anarchic, patchouli-smelling, financial-district-camping subversive bandwidth pirates whose reigns of terror the carriers did nothing to promote and whose outrages damage the Economy and Moral Fabric of these United States. Relentless competition for data hogs That's good political theater for people who still believe anything carriers say about their intentions for net neutrality, the technical capabilities and bandwidth of their networks or the degree to which they are involved in the technologies they claim will be their downfall without radical deregulation. AT&T, for example, consistently sits at the bottom of the performance- and customer-service-rating scale. Consumer Reports rated AT&T service the worst of all the major carriers at the end of 2010. During the following quarter, the first of 2011, its rating dropped even further. AT&T finished 2011 still at the bottom of the list in quality of service and satisfaction of its customers. Higher-rated carriers spent most of 2010 and 2011 chasing what AT&T had, though – the iPhone and its data-hogging customers. Verizon eventually managed to get iPhones to sell and, along with them, another reason to complain that it should be exempt from net neutrality regulations because all the new iPhone customers were hogging all its bandwidth. (It definitely helped attract the "hogs" that Verizon offered unlimited-data plans for the iPhone at first, though it quickly nixed that in favor of bandwidth-use-limiting data caps and higher fees for every byte a user downloads beyond 2GB/month.) It may be my fevered imagination from my relatively ancient and superficial training in economics in college, but cutting off a plan to offer unlimited amounts of anything for a flat fee and charging usurous fees for the same service seems to qualify as a cost/benefit-based control of usage. That is, it's an approach that pays not only for the service itself, but pays for the abuse of the system by a few bad apples by making them pay for disproportionate use with disproportionate fees. Verizon had its problems getting even a vaguely accurate idea of how much data people were using, of course. That's just incompetence and a refusal to instrument your network to the point that you can actually control it. I can't imagine any network manager getting an unlimited upgrade budget justified by his or her failure to figure out ahead of time how heavily the network was already being used. That's what Verizon and AT&T are doing, though. And they're blaming the "extreme users" for putting them in an untenable position. Is there a tech-industry TLA for hypocrisy, calumny and highway robbery? Every year the managers of state turnpikes and stat-road-maintenance bureaus make the same argument, by the way: there are too many cars; they're doing too much damage to my roads for me to fix; I need more money for roads. Those claims are almost always over blown and under-supported by data, too. They have one thing going for them the carriers don't though: Civil engineers responsible for maintaining state highways have no real control over how many people live in the state, travel through it, own cars, drove on highways, or drive on highways a LOT. Carriers have almost total control over everyone of those things. The services like Siri, auto-download, auto-updata apps Android users are unable to delete from their phones, and the increasing volume of web traffic coming from smartphones are all growing because the carriers add those services to their networks without upgrading the networks enough to support them. That's not the fault of people who buy the data-hog phones or use the data-hog services. It's the fault of the cell-network engineers (actually their boss's boss's bosses) who didn't add a few extra subnets or a few upgraded routers to data bottlenecks. It's even more the fault of the carriers' financial policies, which charge sky-high fees for every service or move online through a smartphone – money that could easily be used to upgrade the networks supposedly being swamped by extreme-user data-hogging iPhone 4S and Android users. If the problem exists at all – and it largely does not – it's more the fault of the carriers' decision to oversell the network, not the decision of extreme users to overuse it. "Extreme" users are doing exactly what the carriers worked so hard to sell them on: a ubiquitous voice-and-data service rich enough to provide directions, communications, recommendations, shopping, advice and information piped directly into the hand of the subscriber wherever he or she is. Users don't really want to pay the inflated data-plan fees most carriers charge. They do it anyway, but realize they're being overcharged. Even at those rates the data fees don't cover the need to expand networks and services as quickly as carriers need to do. That's why concepts like return-on-investment and risk-analysis entered the business world: There are times, frequent ones, during which businesses have to invest in themselves in order to be able to reap greater profits afterward. It's a well established principle, with well-documented metrics to define how well it's working. It doesn't include the need to villify the leading-edge customers willing to pay a premium to get the first, unreliable versions of the service and help offset some of the investment with those higher fees, their de facto role as test dummies for new technology and the example they set to more prudent users who would prefer to wait for prices to come down and quality to come up before buying new, expensive services. Don't spend all day hard-selling me a Cadillac and then call me a gas guzzler! 'Data Hogs' and 'Extreme Users' aren't deadbeats; they're good customers who caved in to the hard sell on devices that are expensive both to buy and to use. They're not deadbeats. So why do carriers keep claiming they are? Same reason "the 1 percent" complain that OccupyWallStreet people are anarchists intent on destroying our economy and society: if they can't demonize someone else they can't trade on fear of a demon to get what they want. And, if there weren't a demon – or a scapegoat, if you prefer a less colorful metaphor – on which to blame both existing problems and those the carriers intend to create with the next set of expensive services they add to the net, they might have to take the blame themselves for creating networks without enough bandwidth, flexibility or cost-effectiveness to provide the level of service they promise without grossly overcharging the exact customers they pursued most ardently. There are specific characteristics required for anyone cynical enough to sell premium services and then complain that they're being used, though they're more common in politics than technology: 1. Hypocrisy. 2. Constant self-serving restatements of the 'truth.' (Called 'lies' in person and 'rhetoric' on the campaign trail.) 3. A shameless and unethical willingness to manipulate and exploit customers, lawmakers, the economy and smartphone service providers in order to let carriers promise the moon and bill for it, but deliver only the image of a cable guy, pants around his ankles, facing away from us, bowing politely to deliver the right spin on the message the carriers are delivering. http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wirele...t-25-bandwidth How France’s Free Will Reinvent Mobile Om Malik Xavier Niel, the maverick founder of Iliad, the company behind Free.fr broadband service is about to redefine the mobile landscape, perhaps as early as tomorrow when he launches the much-talked about Free Mobile. In doing so, he will redefine what is the idea of a carrier in the 21st century thanks to a radical new approach. Utilizing a blend of Wifi, HSPA+ 3G, Femto cells and its all-fiber backbone, Free will offer unlimited voice, texting and data over the mobile networks. Just bring your own iPhone. But before I get into the details of his new company, let me back up and tell you about Iliad and Free.fr. Set it Free.fr In December 2007, while attending Le Web in Paris, I snuck out to visit Niel, the man behind Iliad, a Paris-based phone service that owned many entities including its most well known offering: Free.fr, a broadband service that offered phone (VoIP), video (IPTV) and broadband for a simple flat monthly fee. A simple low monthly rate was possible because of the network he owned and the technologies he used. Here is what I wrote then: By offering a flat-rate, high-speed Internet connection for 30 euros ($43) a month. That gives Free.fr’s three million subscribers a connection speed of roughly 28 megabits per second over DSL, free IPTV (and a free set-top box), a free Wi-Fi hub, and unlimited voice calls to some 70 countries. “We are a broadband service provider,” was his matter-of-fact reply. “Everything else — from voice to IPTV to storage – is just a feature that rides on this data service.” For the rest of the telecom industry, long addicted to metered minutes and billable items, this is rebellious thinking. Niel, who had started Free in 1999, bought a lot of dark fiber from carriers who had gone bust around the turn of the century and built an IP-only network that snaked across France. The unbundling of the telecom loops had given the necessary push to offer fast DSL and use the broadband pipes to offer different services. The flat fee model would force the incumbents – France Telecom (now Orange) and other competitors to follow suit. They too started offering simpler rate plans. Going Mobile In the four years since I first met him, Niel who is now 44 years old, is much more wealthier than he was in 2007. The number of subscribers on his Free.fr service have grown to five million. But his big bet on fiber hasn’t paid off — just yet. With the wireline market saturated, Niel started eyeing more opportunities – especially in the mobile arena. Free.fr is under pressure from the quad-play offerings – broadband, mobile, VoIP and video – from three of its major rivals France Telecom, Vivendi’s SFR and Bouygues Telecom. The company needs to respond by its own quad-play offering. To be fair, Niel saw it coming a long time ago and had applied for mobile licenses back in 2007. and Free Mobile was awarded a license in December 2009 at the cost of 240 million euros. The company also signed up a roaming agreement with Orange to cover most of the service. And now the mobile service is ready. There are few details available and Niel is keeping his cards close to the chest. In December 2011, once again I ducked out of Le Web and visited Niel in his offices in the 8th Arrondissement, a chic business district. He has moved next door from his old office having taken over a massive building with a lovely rotunda. It is befitting the growing stature of his company and the main himself. However, inside his offices, nothing much as changed. About three dozen engineers form the brain trust of Free.fr, inventing new features for the service. Five guys who built the software and a few others who hacked together the hardware are standing by the side as the boss man gives the demo. It was just like 2007 — as if nothing had changed. For about 45 minutes Niel gave me demo of his set-top box: which is everything a modern connected home needs- broadband modem, wifi router, storage center, a blue-ray player, web-surfing device and a game machine. And while it might not have the Apple brand, you could see who had inspired the Free’s set-top box. Why it was even able to playback music from my iPhone using AirPlay. Set-top Box = Stealth Weapon “Since it is our own set-top box, we can innovate around it,” he says. “In the US, they buy their set-top boxes from other providers.” And that is a mistake and lost opportunity, Niel says and proceeds to outline how pivotal these set-top boxes are for his company and its future. For example, Free.fr used the set-top box for automatically sharing a portion of one’s broadband connection via WiFi with other Free.fr customers. Over five million set-top boxes means that Free.fr has a a free WiFi cloud enveloping major cities such as Paris. Even when away from home, you can easily get broadband while resorting to expensive 3G network. This Free.Fr free wifi network is going to play a pivotal role in the soon to be launched service, which will be using 42 Mbps HSPA+ technology. The company has built a network of 15,000 macrocells, but those 5 million “nano cells” are going to be the key difference maker, Niel points out. Free.fr’s newer set-top boxes will have built-in femto cells. On top of that, Free is going to be beefing up its macrocells with high-capacity fiber connections being fed by Iliad’s dark fiber. And when time comes, he is going to embrace LTE and include that into his network as well. “We will go to wide area network (3G and 2.5 G) when we are not in WiFi coverage,” he tells me. (I got a sneaking suspicion that Free would be pushing iPhones into the market pretty heavily.) If they pull it off, it is going to be pretty spectacular and once again show what telecom of tomorrow looks like. I couldn’t help but notice that in 2000, he roped in Cisco, then desperately trying to get a toe-hold in the broadband market to help him with the network buildout. This time, he got an equally desperate Nokia Siemens Networks on the hook. Mobile Money When I ask him about the price, he demurs. “It will be cheaper than the current market price,” he adds. So how is he going to make money? The answer comes in a throwaway comment he made when we are sitting around talking. “In your pocket you have three things – your keys, your phone and your wallet,” he says. “I think of those three only one will remain – your phone.” He believes telecoms should charge for access and make money by selling the ID and payment services, not voice and SMS. It is one of the reasons he loves Square, Jack Dorsey’s payment company where he is an angel investor. “It is crazy to pay for voice by the minute as voice is so cheap,” he says. Even SMS texting is a lot of money and he finds that crazy. “We are trying to be the cheapest mobile service in France,” he adds. Don’t be surprised to see Google Voice type services built into the service itself. “Free has had a reputation as a trendsetter who understands the clarity consumers demand,” adds Rudolf van der Berg of OECD, an international treaty organisation, like the United Nations or the World Health Organisation that advises 34 countries (including France) on policies ranging from finances to telecoms.a global telecom group. ”Splitting the cost of the phone from the subscription simplifies things greatly for the consumer and might be a trend worth following. Certainly from a consumer rights perspective this is to be applauded as many offers from mobile phone company.” According to some rumors the service is said to cost 30 Euros a month with unlimited calls to 100 countries, unlimited data and unlimited SMS (20 euro if you also have broadband.) “What it really does is make both data and voice usage completely irrelevant to consumers. How much do you call per month will be as interesting a question for your bill as, how many e-mails do you send per month,” says van der Berg. “We have a different view of things because we are telecom with an Internet startup’s model,” Niel says. So far it is working. The company has sales of $2.8 billion and makes nearly a billion dollars in profits. For now it might seem good, but Niel knows that he has to continue out-innovating his rivals. So what comes next? For now his boffins are working on new 10 Gbps gear so that he can support the network upgrades he envisions. In three years from now, as network starts to support HD and 3D video streams, the pipes to our homes would need to have connections of around 1 Gbps. Niel points to the growing quality of televisions and points out that HD streams are going to have to get better. “We as a company have to begin now,” Niel says. “You don’t stand still and sell a product after the fact. We want to get people to use it.” For now, Niel wants to get 20 million folks to use his mobile service. http://gigaom.com/2012/01/09/how-fra...invent-mobile/ ViaSat Residential Satellite Broadband Internet Hands-On (Video) Zach Honig Last Thursday, ViaSat announced pricing for its new home broadband service, which is set to deliver 12 Mbps+ download speeds (3 Mbps+ up) beginning next week for $50 per month. We just dropped by the company's demo home just a few feet from the Engadget trailer at the Las Vegas Convention Center parking lot to try it out, and were quite impressed with the speeds we saw, especially considering that data was passing through the ViaSat-1 satellite thousands of miles above the Earth. We've used other satellite internet services before, and while there's still just over a half-second of latency, bandwidth speeds were significantly faster than what we've experienced with other services in the past. HD YouTube videos loaded very quickly, after a brief delay, as did Engadget and many other media-rich news websites. We performed a speed test and registered ping speeds of about 600ms, download speeds of about 30 Mbps and upload speeds of about 2 Mbps, but results aren't as accurate as they would be with a land-based connection because of latency and the way packet data is handled. We also placed a VOIP call, and while the delay was noticeable there, it was still usable. Want to see for yourself? Jump past the break as we step through ViaSat's front door to hop online. http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/08/v...ands-on-video/ With Enough Bandwidth, Many Join the Band Catherine Saint Louis When Dr. John McClure, a pathologist in Edina, Minn., was pondering his wish list several years ago, he added something a little out of the ordinary: learn to play the bagpipes. But his goal seemed like a long shot after a friend who had been teaching him moved away. Now he is getting lessons from a top-tier teacher — Jori Chisholm, whose résumé includes a first-place award at the 2010 Cowal Highland Gathering in Dunoon, Scotland. Mr. Chisholm lives in Seattle, but distance is no longer a problem — Dr. McClure now takes lessons over Skype. They even squeeze in a lesson sometimes when Dr. McClure, 50, is at work, though he keeps the noise down by using a practice chanter, essentially a pipe without a bag. “I’ve been on call, waiting for a specimen from the O.R., and I’ll do a lesson with Jori,” Dr. McClure said. Skype and other videochat programs have transformed the simple phone call, but the technology is venturing into a new frontier: it is upending and democratizing the world of music lessons. Students who used to limit the pool of potential teachers to those within a 20-mile radius from their homes now take lessons from teachers — some with world-class credentials — on other coasts or continents. The list of benefits is long: Players of niche instruments now have more access to teachers. Parents can simply send their child down the hall for lessons rather than driving them. And teachers now have a new way to build their business. “I’ve seen videos of individuals teaching students all over the world,” said Gary Ingle, chief executive of the Music Teachers National Association. “There will be people who would never take a music lesson unless it’s done online. As music teachers, we should be willing to meet students where they are.” There is no data on the number of video music lessons, and many people certainly will prefer face-to-face lessons. But many music teachers said in interviews that they were conducting more lessons over broadband connections. Jeffrey Thomas, who has taught in music stores near Seattle for 22 years, now teaches guitar, bass and ukulele to 30 students over Skype and other webcam programs. If he gets 10 more students, he said, he will teach entirely from home, saving the money he now pays to rent studio space. “If you have a lesson at 4, and traffic won’t let you make it until 4:10, you just lost 10 minutes,” Mr. Thomas said. “Having to get to this location to be in a lesson is now obsolete. There’s no need for it.” Parents are also driving the shift to webcam music lessons. After Susan Patterson grew tired of taking her 13-year-old daughter, Taylor, 45 minutes each way for violin lessons, she e-mailed 15 violin teachers with Web sites. “There were some that were not advertising for Skype, but I proposed it to them,” said Mrs. Patterson, who was homeschooling her three children in Jane Lew, W. Va., before a recent move to Boykins, Va. “Out of the 15, 5 were willing and able to do the lessons.” “It’s accessibility with quality,” she said. Videochat has created new opportunities for older students, too. Ken Tucker, 67, a retired lawyer in Simsbury, Conn., figured he might have a hard time finding someone to teach him the bagpipes. “It used to be an adult learner couldn’t get a teacher, because people didn’t want to bother with someone who didn’t have a future,” he said. Now he has a lesson every Wednesday morning with Donald F. Lindsay, a professional piper in Petersburgh, N.Y., who also has a few students in their late 70s, including a 79-year-old student in Islip, N.Y. The convenience of online learning means fewer missed lessons, said Nick Antonaccio, the owner of Rockfactory, a 10-room music studio in Newtown, Pa., that has 200 students, 25 of whom do some lessons remotely. “People who do online lessons end up doing a more consistent lesson schedule,” he said. “They don’t have to fight snowstorms. They don’t have to take an hour a day to get to us. Other things don’t conflict, like baseball games.” And most lessons are recorded so students can play them back while practicing, Mr. Antonaccio said. However, many parents remain wary of laptop lessons. Their chief reservation is that teachers can’t manipulate a student’s fingers to fine-tune the subtleties of playing a string instrument. “A lot of people don’t trust that the experience is the same,” said Mr. Antonaccio, who’s offered online lessons in violin, piano, and guitar since 2004. Even so, he said, “We have had kids that have grown up and learned to play entirely on camera.” Lessons over the home computer can create headaches of their own, though. Joey Potuzak, 17, a guitarist in Mountlake Terrace, Wash., occasionally yelled at his family because the webcam connection required so much bandwidth. “I’d tell everyone in my house, ‘I’m having a guitar lesson. Everyone off the computers!’ ” Mr. Potuzak said. “They were annoyed.” His family has since upgraded the Internet connection in their home. Music teachers are finding that video lessons offer them some more stability for a profession that is known for its ups and downs. Laurel Thomsen, a violin and viola instructor, held on to all of her Skype students when she moved recently from Monterey, Calif., to Santa Cruz. “Less and less are in-person people, and more and more are Skype people contacting me,” she said. Video is also creating new opportunities for tech-savvy teachers to build a business in this struggling economy. This year, after Matt Dahlberg, 22, a student at Edmonds Community College known as the Jumping Flea, graduates, he hopes he will be able to support himself and his fiancée, a nursing student, mostly by teaching ukulele via Skype. “I’m constantly turning people down, because I can’t give as many lessons as I’d like to give because I’m still in school,” said Mr. Dahlberg, whose nickname is the literal translation of ukulele, a Hawaiian word. He has 18 students, ranging in age from 6 to 50-something, including Karen Siebert, 57, a software developer from Cedar Grove, N.J., who discovered Mr. Dahlberg on YouTube, where thousands of people have viewed his videos, including his cover of Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.” “He’s a baby, but he plays phenomenal,” Ms. Siebert said. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/u...opularity.html The Dumbest Attack on the Netflix "Free Ride" You Have Ever Read Nate Anderson I've just about managed to stuff all those gloopy spare bits of brain back into my skull, but it took a while. I blame Harold Ford Jr. and John Sununu, the ex-politicians now shilling for the ISP-backed Broadband for America, for blowing my mind. Their most recent op-ed, which takes shaky aim at Netflix, must be one of the dumbest such pieces I have ever read—and I have read a lot of them. I would not absolutely swear that their Mercury News piece makes any coherent points, though vestigial traces of argument run through the post, going nowhere. The overriding idea is that Netflix must hand over wads of cash to Internet providers—$83 million a year being a nice round number. Netflix didn't get where it is today by handing out $83 million checks to anyone who asks, but the argument—such as it is—says that we need a new payment scheme that's "socially responsible and fair." Translation: Netflix is a dirty freeloader that quite possibly reeks of marijuana smoke. "The reality is that Netflix and similar services want a free ride on the networks built with more than $250 billion in design, engineering, manufacturing, construction and maintenance," says the op-ed, giving its angle away. That sweet Netflix cash needs to flow to the small cartel of broadband operators who aren't making any money are hugely profitable, so that they can keep building out their networks. "But," I hear you asking, "doesn't Netflix somehow pay for its bandwidth already? And if not, how do I get a piece of that free Internet action?" The economics of "freeriding" Netflix does pay. The company's 2010 annual report (PDF) notes that it uses the "services of third-party cloud computing providers, more specifically, Amazon Web Services, as well as content delivery networks such as Level 3 Communications, to help us efficiently stream TV shows and movies." Neither Amazon nor Level 3 works for free. If Netflix received a free ride, then ISPs would have no way to increase the company's costs. As it is, however, "to the extent that network operators implement usage based pricing, including meaningful bandwidth caps, or otherwise try to monetize access to their networks by data providers, we could incur greater operating expenses." In the Internet ecosystem, money flows in multiple directions, but no one works for free. Your home Internet fee pays your own ISP for its network, but portions of your bill are paid out by your ISP for "transit" onto other networks. In other cases, ISPs connect directly to networks with similar traffic volumes, called "peering," and the sides simply agree to call things even rather than send nearly identical checks back and forth. Newer arrangements like "paid peering" use the same direct connections but charge a fee, usually because one side is sending far more traffic than the other. Netflix also pays from its end, and its fee also propagates through the Internet thanks to peering and transit agreements. Internet distribution is certainly cheap—Netflix estimates streaming costs about a penny per hour—but it's not free. The Ford/Sununu op-ed then makes a totally different argument, that the Netflix calculation "ignores the hundreds of billions of dollars in sunken network investments needed to create that one-penny marginal cost efficiency at the customer's end." True, but that's because Netflix is only talking about streaming. Ford and Sununu make it sound like the content is being freely acquired and then transmitted at almost no cost. This is patently absurd. To get streaming content, the Netflix annual report points out that "we typically enter into multi-year, fixed-fee licenses with studios and other distributors. As of December 31, 2010, we had over $1.2 billion in such contractual commitments covering payments due over the next several years. Furthermore, we plan on increasing the level of committed content licensing in anticipation of our service and subscriber base continuing to grow." And, as Netflix grows in popularity, those fees are going up. So Netflix pays to acquire the content, then again to stream the content, and consumers pay both their ISP and Netflix to view the content. This is so far from a free ride that Netflix spent $1.15 billion, or 53.4 percent of its 2010 revenues, to acquire its video content and distribute it on DVDs and over the Internet. Its streaming bill in particular increased in 2010 "due to higher costs associated with our use of third-party delivery networks resulting from an increase in the total number of hours of streaming content viewed by our subscribers." Then the Ford/Sununu piece careens again. Suddenly, the issue isn't about what Netflix pays, it's about what consumers pay. "Broadband networks are delivering more than just the latest sitcom episodes and hottest movies," says the piece. "They facilitate telemedicine, education, job training, telecommuting and many other functions. It hardly seems fair to make users of these services pay more in order to subsidize Netflix's costs of delivering their videos online." The thinking here isn't really explained, but it seems to be that Netflix streaming uses tons of bandwidth; grandma just uses the Internet for e-mail; ergo, grandma should pay less for her Internet connection than those Internet-hogging hippies next door. To which the only real answer is: ISPs can certainly try this pricing model if they want! (It has not proven popular in the past.) Indeed, Ford and Sununu then note that the FCC has no problem with ISPs "asking subscribers who use the network less to pay less, and subscribers who use the network more to pay more." US ISPs actually do this already, especially on smartphones, where extra fees kick in once users exceed a certain monthly data allowance. "Ham-fisted analogies" The op-ed ends with the line, "But many increasingly question a service that forces tens of millions of non-customers to pay for something they never use." Netflix doesn't do this, of course; ISPs do, and they are free to alter their pricing schemes in a non-discriminatory manner and see how the market responds. The exact same argument could be deployed against any higher-than-average-bandwidth Internet service; what it has to do with Netflix is unclear—and my overtaxed brain simply exploded. I wasn't the only one. Comments on the piece are utterly negative. The very first one says, "With all due respect, this has to be one of the most poorly written or thought out articles I've come across in some time." Trashing the piece is almost too easy; it's become something of a sporting event in wonkish circles this week. Matt Yglesias, from the Center for American Progress, concluded, "Indeed, it’s difficult to see what the policy issue here is supposed to be. Do they want regulators to create a cartel? Why?" Liberal media watchdog Media Matters said, "It's possible that there is a point buried somewhere in its ham-fisted analogies and confused understanding of how broadband services work, but I'm struggling to see it." Target acquired So what was the target of the op-ed? "Data transfer" is one of the top issues on the Broadband for American website, which describes the "challenge" before us as: "how can we best ensure ongoing investment in robust broadband networks, let networks continue to work out their traffic exchanges by contract, and permit any disputes to be resolved without involving the courts or the regulators?" This is aimed at Level 3, the huge transit provider that more recently got into the content delivery business and now hosts much of Netflix's data. Last year, Level 3 and Comcast got into a nasty spat over peering arrangements. Comcast wanted Level 3 to start paying to deliver traffic, while Level 3 retorted that its Netflix traffic in particular had been requested by Comcast users and it was really doing Comcast a favor. The dispute then migrated to the FCC. Comcast and its fellow ISPs want to charge more to content providers, and they don't want the government mucking about with these contracts. Separately, many would also like to lower data caps and institute overage charges under out of "fairness," but consumers have rebelled against low caps (higher caps have passed without too much resistance). The op-ed seems like an effort to tie both of these ISP concerns to the "Red Menace" that is Netflix. Instead, it manages the impressive feat of making both ideas look just about bankrupt. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-ever-read.ars Woman Wins Court Order to Stop Explicit Photos Being Shared Online A University student has won a High Court order to stop explicit photographs of her taken from her mobile phone from being shared online. Martin Beckford The female university student had taken the sexual images for her boyfriend, but after her phone was lost or stolen she found that they were being circulated on the internet together with her name and Facebook profile. She was contacted online by someone who threatened to tell her friends about the pictures, while an alleged attempt was made to blackmail her father about them. The images were uploaded to file-sharing websites and came up as the top result for internet searches of her name. As a result she began a novel legal attempt to stop the intimate photos being uploaded or downloaded by targeting users of a file-sharing service called BitTorrent, under human rights laws and legislation against harassment. In addition, she sought to obtain the same sort of injunction guaranteeing anonymity that public figures have used to stop details of their love affairs being published in newspapers. The orders were granted by Mr Justice Ramsey in the Technology and Construction Court last month, following a three-year battle, allowing the claimant’s lawyers to find websites hosting the photos alongside her name and order them to stop doing so. Experts say the judgement could have “far-reaching” consequences in the attempt to bring social media users across Europe within the reach of the law. The judge ruled: “I consider that non-disclosure of the identity of the Claimant is therefore necessary to protect the interests of that Claimant. “In such circumstances on the basis of the matters set out in the evidence and pleading I consider that this is an appropriate case for the court to grant relief both in relation to a breach of the Claimant's right to privacy and also a breach of the provisions of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. “This is a case where the Claimant is entitled to an interim injunction to prevent the distribution of the digital photographic images, either by conventional downloading from a site or by downloading by the use of the BitTorrent Protocol.” The judgement, highlighted by the UK Human Rights Blog, states that while at university in June 2008 the woman, referred to only as AMP, either lost her mobile or had it stolen, and reported it to police. “The phone contained digital images of the Claimant which had been taken in or about August 2007 using the digital camera on that phone. “These digital images included images of an explicit sexual nature which were taken for the personal use of her boyfriend at the time. “The Claimant is alone in the photos and her face is clearly visible. The phone also contained other digital images of her family and friends.” Soon after her phone went missing, these photos were uploaded to a file-sharing website and she was “informed by strangers on Facebook that the images had been uploaded and that her name and Facebook profile had been attached to them”. She complained and the images were taken down in about August 2008, but around the same time she was contacted on Facebook by a man who “threatened to expose her identity and to post the images widely online and tell her friends about the images if she did not add him as a friend”. In addition, “her father's business public relations team were contacted and allegedly threatened and blackmailed about some images but it was not specified that the images were of her”. Later that year the photographs were placed on a Swedish file-sharing website, and went to “the top of the list of search engine searches for her name”. Her lawyers used US law to remove some of these links, but went to the High Court because of the particular problems posed by the “peer-to-peer” form of file-sharing called BitTorrent. Under this technology, which is harder for authorities to stop than individual websites that host illegal files themselves, internet users who download files in turn become uploaders or “seeders” of a piece of the file, so that others can then access it when they are online. Experts told the court that if they also downloaded the files, they would be able to identify the unique IP Address of every computer that is helping to share the images and then contact their broadband provider to find their name and address. If enough of the “seeders” were contacted and ordered to stop their account being used, it would become harder for anyone to download the pictures. As a result, the woman brought the claim against “persons unknown”, so a forensic computer company instructed by her lawyers could track down anyone hosting the files. It is said that anyone in the EU could be bound by the order. The judge agreed that the woman had a “reasonable expectation of privacy” with regard to her photos under the Human Rights Act, while those sharing them did not enjoy the right to freedom of expression. He also said the dissemination of the pictures amounted to a breach of the Protection from Harassment Act, and that she should be granted anonymity in order to protect her privacy and avoid further harassment. Andrew Murray, Professor of Law at the LSE who was involved in the case, wrote on his blog that the case “provides a new approach to the regulation of online content for individuals” and could show that “content on BitTorrent may just be regulatable after all”. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...ed-online.html 'Net Sex' Allows Women to 'Take the Lead': Study Sexual encounters on the internet are more than just porn surfing and those who frequent the sites aren't just passive victims or lonely loons, according to a new Swedish-American study. ”We been looking at how the phenomenon has changed,” said Kristian Daneback, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg. In the study, Danemark and his American colleague focus on the internet sex culture and reveal that the internet makes it easier for gay men to hook up, for women to be more hands-on in initiating sexual liaisons, and for youngsters to get answers to their queries on sex and relationships. Anything that is in any way connected to sex can be found on the internet today. Shy customers, too nervous to visit a sex shop, can purchase sex toys online. On addition, those that don't like the social scene can meet a partner via an internet dating service. According to Daneback, the internet today contains more images and more possibilities for interaction. And as a result of this development, the group making use of these pages has become more complex. ”The image that people had of this group was initially very negative. It was believed that only very special people used the internet for sexual purposes,” Danemark said to TT. Despite the fact that many Swedes today have visited a sex page at one time or another, many of them together with a partner, the negative image of internet porn surfers remains. The users are often regarded as passive victims. ”But what we have been able to see is that people make an active choice as to what they want to make use of. They make competent choices,” Danemark said. However, according to Danemark, there is still too little knowledge on how or if sex surfing on the internet has changed the way people have sex in real life. http://www.thelocal.se/37848/20111209/ Joel J. Tyler, Judge Who Pronounced ‘Deep Throat’ Obscene, Dies at 90 Bruce Weber Joel J. Tyler, who as a Manhattan judge ruled, in a particularly explicit and colorful opinion, that the pornographic film “Deep Throat” was obscene and that the New York City theaters showing it were breaking the law, inadvertently helping it become perhaps the most popular X-rated movie of all time, died in Yonkers on Nov. 9. He was 90. The cause was a heart attack, his daughter Alexandra said. She said the family did not report his death until now because her father did not want the acknowledgment. But in the weeks after his death, she said, she and her sister, Lisa, “came to feel overwhelmingly that he deserved it.” Judge Tyler, a former city commissioner of licenses, had been on the Criminal Court bench for four years when “Deep Throat” opened at the New Mature World Theater on West 49th Street on June 12, 1972. The film, about a woman whose quest for sexual satisfaction is frustrated until she discovers that her clitoris is in her throat, almost immediately became a touchstone in the culture wars of the day. On one side was outrage over the film’s flagrant and unashamed depiction of sex acts; on the other was cheering for its daring to confront social taboos and to present a woman’s sexual needs as being equally robust as a man’s. A notorious artifact, “Deep Throat” became a target in the early efforts of New York City to rid Times Square of its seamier elements. In August that year, complaints were lodged by the Police Department and charges were filed against Mature Enterprises, the company that owned the theater, for promotion of obscene material. The trial began in December 1972. A psychiatrist testified that the sexual acts depicted in the film were “well within the bounds of normal behavior.” A film critic testified that “Deep Throat” had redeeming social value — a key element in the definition of obscenity — because it showed sympathy for female desires, because the script contained humor and because, unlike other porn films, it was photographed “with clarity and lack of grain.” On the other hand, a New York University professor, responding to a claim that the film was at least in part a spoof of sexual behavior, said, “I do not see how you can spoof fellatio by showing continuous performance of fellatio.” On March 1, 1973, Judge Tyler came down stridently against the film, though not without literary flourish. In an opinion that came with a long appendix, he called “Deep Throat” “this feast of carrion and squalor,” “a nadir of decadence” and “a Sodom and Gomorrah gone wild before the fire.” “Oh, yes! There is a gossamer of a story line — the heroine’s all-engrossing search for sexual gratification, and when all sexual endeavors fail to gratify, her unique problem is successfully diagnosed to exist in her throat,” he wrote, adding, “The alleged story lines are the facade, the sheer negligee through which clearly shines the producer’s and the defendant’s true and only purpose, that is, the presentation of unmistakably hard-core pornography.” Judge Tyler fined Mature Enterprises $100,000, which was later reduced on appeal. Born Josël Gonigman on July 28, 1921, in Balti, a Romanian city now a part of Moldova, Judge Tyler came to the United States with his family as an infant. His name was Americanized to Joseph Honigman. His father left the family shortly thereafter, and young Joseph grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, reared by his mother, Sonia, who earned money with sewing jobs. A bout of polio as a boy left him with a lifelong limp. According to his daughters, as he grew to adulthood he experimented with names, changing Joseph to Joel, choosing the middle initial J for Jefferson (and later settling on Jeffrey) and the last name Tyler after seeing it on a billboard while he was driving through the South. “I remember him saying that he liked presidents,” Lisa Tyler said. He attended Indiana University and finished his undergraduate education at New York University before graduating from law school at Fordham. His first job was in the law department of the Allied Chemical and Dye corporation. He opened his own practice in 1951. Mayor John V. Lindsay named him licensing commissioner in 1966, a post he held until 1968. Afterward, he served on the Criminal Court of New York and was an acting State Supreme Court justice and then a federal magistrate until he retired in 1991. In addition to his daughters, Judge Tyler’s survivors include his wife, the former Helen Wolinsky, whom he married in 1952, and two granddaughters. Shortly after Judge Tyler’s ruling, the United States Supreme Court, in Miller v. California, redefined obscenity and made it easier for states to regulate material that fit the definition. (The court said material was obscene if it appealed to a prurient interest in sex; if it described sexual conduct in a patently offensive way; and if, as a whole, it lacked serious literary, artistic, scientific or political value.) Judge Tyler’s ruling added to the must-see cachet of “Deep Throat.” The film eventually reopened in New York (with a few scenes cut) and across the country, closely followed by officials scrambling to shut it down. According to a 2005 documentary, “Inside Deep Throat,” by the mid-1970s the film had been banned in 23 states. In 1975 the federal government filed conspiracy charges in Memphis against 117 people involved with the film, and Harry Reems, its male star, was convicted and sentenced to five years in jail. The conviction was overturned on appeal. Linda Lovelace, the female star, eventually renounced the film, saying she had been coerced into making it. But none of this derailed its popularity. As X-rated films emigrated from movie theaters to living rooms, “Deep Throat” continued to bring in revenue, much of it for organized crime, which controlled much of its distribution. The film, which was made for $25,000 by the director Gerald Damiano, a former hairdresser, earned an estimated $600 million. Judge Tyler, whose reputation as a prude frustrated him — he told The New York Times that Ingmar Bergman’s film “Cries and Whispers” “had a lot of sex, but it was one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen” — recognized that his ruling was a function of its era. “If I were to write that appendix today,” he told The New York Law Journal in 1991, “I would be deemed a fool, given the substantial change in our outlook.” https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/n...ies-at-90.html Remain Diligent: SOPA and PIPA Must Be Squashed, Not Changed JD Rucker This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert's views alone. As members of both the Senate and the House start falling back to a more defensible position by considering the removal of the DNS provision from SOPA and PIPA, many voices of opposition to the bills are claiming victory. This is a big mistake. Protest As with most news that's intended to avoid as much publicity as possible, many members of congress announced on a Friday that they were considering the removal of key provisions from the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) after public outcry continued to swell. They selected the Friday prior to a blackout planned for January 18 on social news site Reddit and several other prominent websites to get the word out to those paying close attention while limiting the display of weakness the move represents to those who aren't as familiar with the battle. If the hope was to quell the protests and make SOPA and PIPA easier pills to swallow, it doesn't seem to be working yet. Nobody on the list has withdrawn their intentions to go black and more are being encouraged to join the fight. "These bills need to be killed altogether," said Corynne McSherry, the intellectual property director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Our view all along has been they are not fixable." Whether the DNS provision is truly removed or not (and Techdirt is quick to point out that it's not a done deal) doesn't matter. This should be nothing more than a further rallying call. It's not a victory. It's an attempted pacification of the outrage that is being directed at Congress, one that should be dealt with more harshly than if they kept it intact. The biggest challenge for those who oppose SOPA/PIPA is the lack of public knowledge. Despite a perceived groundswell of opposition against them, the reality is that the majority of Americans still have no idea what SOPA is or what it means. The internet and social media in particular are powerful but without the attention of mainstream media, particularly those in Hollywood and New York City who support the bill by default, this is still too small of an issue for most to take notice. January 18th can be a day that exposes more Americans to the disaster that SOPA will become if passed. On that day, as many Americans as possible must visit a site that goes black and they must be prompted to ask why. The message must reach the true masses, not just those visiting Reddit, GOOD, Mozilla, and other prominent sites. As great as it is that these sites have taken a leadership role and are willing to charge forward with the protest (losing revenue as a result), others must be encouraged. Without the unified declaration of solidarity against SOPA, we are still facing a major uphill battle. If anything, the change of the DNS provision represents a greater likelihood that it will pass. It cannot. It must not. If you're a website owner, here's an easy way to join the SOPA blackout. If you want to help by encouraging other major websites to join the cause, ask them to do so here. This is one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation ever introduced in Washington. It will not only strip us of many of the freedoms (and websites) that we currently hold dear, but will also set a precedent that the US Government controls the internet. We've seen what has happened in the Middle East and Asia when governments meddle with the internet. It cannot happen here. It must not. Act. http://www.fastcompany.com/1808216/r...ed-not-changed Under Voter Pressure, Members of Congress Backpedal (Hard) On SOPA Timothy B. Lee The public outcry over the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act seems to have gotten so loud that even members of Congress can hear it. On Thursday we covered the news that Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) was expressing second thoughts about SOPA's DNS provisions. He said he changed his mind after he "heard from a number of Vermonters" on the issue. On Friday, several Republicans started backpedaling as well. SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith (R-TX) announced that he would be pulling the DNS-blocking provisions from his own bill. “After consultation with industry groups across the country, I feel we should remove Domain Name System blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision," Smith said in a Friday statement. Meanwhile, six GOP senators who served on the Senate Judiciary Committee (which unanimously approved the legislation last year) wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asking him to postpone a vote on PIPA to give them more time to study the legislation. "We strongly believe that the theft of American intellectual property is a significant problem that must be addressed," they wrote. But since the Judiciary Committee last considered the legislation, "we have increasingly heard from a large number of constituents and other stakeholders with vocal concerns about possible unintended consequences of the proposed legislation, including breaches in cybersecurity, damaging the integrity of the Internet, costly and burdensome litigation, and dilution of First Amendment rights." The current plan for the full Senate to consider the bill on January 24 "may not permit us to work through many of the concerns that have been raised," they warned. Lest anyone doubt the signers' tough-on-piracy bona fides, they include Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who once proposed that Congress give copyright holders a special exemption allowing them to hack into the computers of those suspected of piracy. In a 2003 hearing, he suggested that damaging someone's computer "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights." Another member of Congress that has been feeling the heat from voters is Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). After reddit members raised $15,000 in 48 hours for his anti-SOPA challenger, Ryan came out with a clear statement of opposition to the legislation. "It appears that lawmakers are beginning to realize how much damage their anti-'piracy' bills could cause to the Internet and to Internet-related businesses," said Public Knowledge's Sherwin Siy in a statement. "While we are pleased that some progress is being made, we are also firm in our opposition to both bills because some very bad provisions remain." Washington insiders hold disproportionate sway on Capitol Hill. But members of Congress are ultimately chosen by American voters. When enough of them express a strong view on an issue, members of Congress do pay attention. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...al-on-sopa.ars SOPA Delayed; Cantor Promises It Won't Be Brought To The Floor Until 'Issues Are Addressed' Mike masnick Some late breaking news here: following Lamar Smith's announcement that the new manager's amendment for SOPA will remove DNS blocking (to be added back at a later date after it's been "studied"), Rep. Issa has announced that he will now postpone the "nerd" hearing that he was holding in the House Oversight Committee, which was originally scheduled for Wednesday. The key reason? Majority Leader Eric Cantor has promised him that he will not bring the bill to the floor unless there's real consensus on the bill. That's big news -- though, as Issa notes in his statement, it's worrisome that Senator Reid still seems to want to move forward with PIPA: "While I remain concerned about Senate action on the Protect IP Act, I am confident that flawed legislation will not be taken up by this House. Majority Leader Cantor has assured me that we will continue to work to address outstanding concerns and work to build consensus prior to any anti-piracy legislation coming before the House for a vote,” said Chairman Issa. “The voice of the Internet community has been heard. Much more education for Members of Congress about the workings of the Internet is essential if anti-piracy legislation is to be workable and achieve broad appeal.” "Earlier tonight, Chairman Smith announced that he will remove the DNS blocking provision from his legislation. Although SOPA, despite the removal of this provision, is still a fundamentally flawed bill, I have decided that postponing the scheduled hearing on DNS blocking with technical experts is the best course of action at this time. Right now, the focus of protecting the Internet needs to be on the Senate where Majority Leader Reid has announced his intention to try to move similar legislation in less than two weeks." Indeed. It is still important that Congress hears from "the nerds" and plenty of other experts concerning the implications of these attempts to regulate the internet, but if SOPA is not going to be rushed to the floor, such hearings and education can (and should) happen in due time, rather than rushing to get them in, just as Congress comes back into session. There are more important things for Congress to focus on. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...ddressed.shtml White House Says It Opposes Parts of Two Antipiracy Bills Edward Wyatt The Obama administration said Saturday that it strongly opposed central elements of two Congressional efforts to enforce copyrights on the Internet, all but killing the current versions of legislation that has divided both political parties and pitted Hollywood against Silicon Valley. The comments by the administration’s chief technology officials, posted on a White House blog Saturday, came as growing opposition to the legislation had already led sponsors of the bills to reconsider a measure that would force Internet service providers to block access to Web sites that offer or link to copyrighted material. “Let us be clear,” the White House statement said, “online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs.” However, it added, “We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” The bills currently under consideration in Congress were intended to combat the theft of copyrighted materials by preventing American search engines like Google and Yahoo from directing users to sites that allow for the distribution of stolen materials. They would cut off payment processors like PayPal that handle transactions. The bills would also allow private citizens and companies to sue to stop what they believed to be theft of protected content. Those and other provisions set off fierce opposition among Internet companies, technology investors and free speech advocates, who said the bills would stifle online innovation, violate the First Amendment and even compromise national security by undermining the integrity of the Internet’s naming system. Though the Obama administration called for legislation this year that would give prosecutors and owners of intellectual property new abilities to deter overseas piracy, it also embraced the idea of “voluntary measures and best practices” to reduce piracy. Whether Congress can produce a compromise is uncertain, particularly in the House of Representatives, where Republicans have fought bitterly over the antipiracy legislation and party leaders, who control the chamber, are loath to offer further opportunities for intraparty battles. The Motion Picture Association of America, the Hollywood lobbying group that has been most visible in its support for the current bills, said in a statement on Saturday that it welcomed the administration’s call for antipiracy legislation. But, the trade group added, “meaningful legislation must include measured and reasonable remedies that include ad brokers, payment processors and search engines.” Hollywood and the music industry have broad political support for their efforts, and the Chamber of Commerce and labor organizations have pushed for the legislation. But they often find themselves facing off against the libertarian views of leaders in the technology industry. Opponents of the House bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the Senate bill, the Protect IP Act, have focused most of their attention on the proposed blocking by Internet service providers of Web sites that offer access to pirated material. In December, a group of influential technology figures, including founders of Twitter, Google and YouTube, published an open letter to lawmakers saying that the legislation would enable Internet regulation and censorship on par with the government regulation in China and Iran. That argument struck a chord with the Obama administration, which through the State Department and other channels has been pushing other countries to loosen restrictions on Internet access. In its statement Saturday, the White House said any proposed legislation “must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet.” Parts of the bills that provide for filtering or blocking through the Domain Name System — the Internet’s address book — could drive users to unreliable routes through and around the blocked sites, the White House said. That would “pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online.” The statement did not threaten a presidential veto, but it made plain what types of piracy enforcement measures the White House would not accept. The statement was attributed to Victoria Espinel, the intellectual property enforcement coordinator at the Office of Management and Budget; Aneesh Chopra, the administration’s chief technology officer; and Howard Schmidt, a cybersecurity coordinator for the national security staff. Jenna Wortham contributed reporting from New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/u...acy-bills.html Until next week, - js. Current Week In Review Recent WiRs - January 7th, December 31st, December 17th, December 10th Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved. "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black __________________ Thanks For Sharing

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