Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 18th, '12

[JackSpratts]

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"[Kate Upton]’s like a Page 3 girl. She’s like a footballer’s wife, with the too-blond hair and that kind of face that anyone with enough money can go out and buy. We would never use her. Too obvious." – Sophia Neophitou, Victoria’s Secret


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February 18th, 2012




UK Now Seizing Music Blogs (With American Domains) Over Copyright Claims
Mike Masnick

Last year, we wrote about how the UK was following in the footsteps of the US's Homeland Security/ICE domain seizures. As we noted, the process there is even less rigorous than in the US -- often without a court being involved at all. Law enforcement just had to ask, and Nominet would take down the domain. Still, we hadn't heard about any specific domains that were seized -- and we hadn't heard of any non-Nominet (which handle .co.uk domains) being subject to UK claims.

Until now.

Dajaz1 -- who, of course, had its own issues with bogus domain seizures -- has a story up about how the site rnbxclusive.com appears to have been seized via UK law enforcement, who put up a splash page even more ridiculous (though with fewer eagles) than the ICE splash page.

The site, like many music blogs, did post various videos and commentary about new music. Perhaps some were infringing, but you'd think that there would be a trial first. This takedown is apparently happening via SOCA, the Serious Organized Crime Agency in the UK -- who, amusingly, puts a copyright symbol on their takedown splash page. There are all sorts of issues to be raised here.

1. First and foremost, as mentioned, this is the first time we've heard of a foreign country seizing a .com -- which the US DOJ/DHS appear to claim as their own jurisdiction. While perhaps this was done in concert with US law enforcement, it seems pretty questionable that the US would allow what they insist are "domestic" domains to be seized by foreign countries. Think of the precedent that sets for... say... Iran. The operators of the site appear to have been in the UK, so that may be the reasoning behind this, but it still raises significant jurisdictional questions about just who can seize a .com.

2. Second, the big red warning at the top is insane. Merely downloading music wouldn't be a criminal offense with a possibility of 10 years imprisonment. While I'm not as familiar with the differences between civil and criminal infringement when it comes to UK copyright law, I believe it's not that different than the US, where merely downloading is going to be civil, not criminal. A quick review of UK law suggests that it can only be a criminal issue if it's done at commercial scale, and doesn't seem to apply at all to personal downloads. In fact, the UK explicitly fought the idea of expanding criminal sanctions to file sharing. So, SOCA is basically lying.

3. Next, the splash page claims that the music was "stolen" from artists. While the copies may be infringing, it's doubtful that the music was literally stolen.

4. The scare tactic of displaying your IP address and pretending that this suggests they're coming after any visitor to the site. This is, again, insane. The RIAA tried this years ago when it got the Grokster site and it was just as silly then as it is now. Merely visiting a site is not breaking the law, and splashing your IP address next to a message suggesting visitors are about to be put in jail is insane hyperbole.

5. Further, claiming that SOCA has the ability to "monitor" you is also an exaggeration. While it may be able to monitor certain transactions, it seems to be implying that it's watching your every move.

6. Claiming that "young, emerging artists may have had their careers damaged" because of this site is pretty silly. Most young, emerging artists are actively leaking their works to such sites so they can emerge. They know that obscurity is a much bigger threat than piracy ever was or will be.

7. Saying that downloading music means you have (absolutley) "damaged the future of the music industry" is again insane hyperbole. The music industry has continued to grow pretty consistently over the past decade. It's just one segment -- the direct sales of music -- that has stumbled, and that was the part that rarely pays artists very much anyway.

This whole thing is pretty crazy, and I'm surprised such blatant censorship by UK law enforcement of a "US" domain hasn't received more attention yet. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...t-claims.shtml





Govt Holds Second Secret Anti-Piracy Meeting
Renai LeMay

The Federal Government has reportedly held a second closed door meeting held between the content and telecommunications industries to address the issue of illegal file sharing on the Internet through avenues such as BitTorrent.

The first meeting in the series held by the Attorney-General’s Department on 23 September last year, saw major Australian ISPs sit down with the representatives of the film, television and music industries with the aim of discussing a potential industry resolution to the issue of online copyright infringement. The issue has come to the fore over the past several years due to the high-profile court case on the matter ongoing between iiNet and the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft.

The Financial Review reported late last week that the Department had held a second meeting on the issue on Wednesday last week in Sydney. However, no details are yet available on what was discussed at the meeting.

The majority of the organisations who attended the September meeting were from content industry organisations, including the Asia-Pacific branch of the Motion Picture Association, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, Foxtel, the Australian Home Entertainment Distributor’s Association, the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, News Limited, Music Industry Piracy Investigations, the Australian Recording Industry Association, the Interactive Gaming and Entertainment Association, the Australian Publishers Association and the Australian Performing Right Association.

On the ISPs’ side, only Telstra, Optus, the Communications Alliance (which represents telcos), the Internet Industry Association and networking vendor Ericsson attended — although Telstra and Optus both sent a number of staff to the meeting. It is not clear whether iiNet attended. All up, about 25 industry representatives attended.

Delimiter today filed a Freedom of Information request with the Attorney-General’s Department seeking the following documents with respect to the new meeting held last week:

• A list of all attendees at the meeting
• Notes of any and all attendees at the meeting from any government agency
• A copy of any documentation issued to attendees at the meeting
• Any and all email correspondence related to the calling and conduct of the meeting
• Any correspondence between the office of the Secretary of the Department and the Office of the Attorney-General discussing the meeting before or after it was held

At the last meeting on the issue, documents released under Freedom of Information laws revealed that the Attorney-General’s Department hoped to frame the discussion on the day through the lens of the so-called “six strikes” policy to tackling online copyright infringement agreed between the content and ISP industries in the US this year.

Under the deal, major US ISPs — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable agreed with the film and music industries to forward copyright infringement notices from content owners to alleged Internet pirates. After five or six of these notices, ISPs have agreed to institute certain punitive measures, including, for example, temporary reductions in Internet speeds, redirections to educational pages and pages to discuss the problem.

There is speculation in the industry that one potential resolution to the issue of online piracy could be the implementation of a so-called ‘strikes’ system, which would see internet users disconnected after content owners had complained a certain amount of times and provided evidence that a certain user was committing copyright infringement online. Such systems have already been implemented in countries such as New Zealand and France.

So far, the ISP industry has resisted implementing such a system in Australia, although a number of ISPs — such as Exetel, for example — have already voluntarily implemented a system whereby the receipt of a certain number of complaints will eventually lead to a request for a customer to churn to another ISP. AFACT has signalled to ISPs that it wants an “automated processing system” for copyright infringement notices to be distributed to ISP customers.

In November, many of Australia’s largest ISPs banded together behind a proposal which would see Australians issued with warning and educational notices after content holders provided evidence that they had breached their copyright online — and the door opened for ISPs to hand over user details to the content industry if they keep on pirating content online.
http://delimiter.com.au/2012/02/13/g...iracy-meeting/





New Cybersecurity Act Could be Costly for Critical Infrastructure Vendors

Some Republican senators and the Chamber of Commerce call for the Senate to slow down its efforts to pass a new bill
Grant Gross

Leaders in the US Senate are trying to fast-track new cybersecurity legislation that will create costly new regulations for some businesses, some critics said Thursday.

A plan by Senate Democrats to move the Cybersecurity Act, introduced this week, directly to the Senate floor for a vote raises serious questions about the process and will lead to bureaucrats at the US Department of Homeland Security writing regulations for businesses that control critical infrastructure, said Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, during a hearing on the bill.

The Cybersecurity Act, introduced Tuesday by four senators, would allow DHS to "promulgate prescriptive regulations on American businesses," McCain said. "The regulations that would be created under this bill authority would stymie job creation, blur the definition of private property rights and divert resources from actual cybersecurity to compliance with government mandates."

European Parliament chief speaks out against ACTABill would allow US intelligence to share cyber-threat information
Bill would affect critical systems to the US economy
The wide-ranging bill would require operators of so-called critical infrastructure networks to adopt cybersecurity practices if evaluations by DHS find their security lacking. The legislation would cover operators of systems that, if compromised, would cause mass death, evacuation or major damage to the US economy.

The bill would allow owners of critical infrastructure systems to decide how best to meet the performance standards developed in cooperation with DHS.

McCain was among seven Republican senators who, in a Tuesday letter to Senate leadership, called for multiple hearings on the legislation. The Senate needs to have a serious discussion about whether DHS is the best agency to protect the US against cyberattacks or whether the Department of Defense or National Security Agency might be better suited, McCain said.

Thomas Ridge, chairman of the National Security Task Force at the US Chamber of Commerce and a former US secretary of homeland security, also voiced opposition to the bill during the hearing, before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The bill doesn't appear to have a limit on what businesses DHS can designate as critical infrastructure, he said.

Cybersecurity mandates may not be effective, Ridge added. "Frankly, the attackers and the technology move a lot faster than any regulatory body or political body will ever be able to move," he said.

Critics calling for stripped-down bill that won't affect everyone
But supporters of the bill argued that new cybersecurity measures are needed. Lawmakers have been working on a comprehensive cybersecurity bill for years, and this legislation is a product of dozens of past hearings and meetings between lawmakers and business leaders, said Senator Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent and sponsor of the bill.

While critics call for delays, cyberthieves are looting US businesses and government agencies, added Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican and co-sponsor. Sponsors made several changes to the bill in response to concerns from the Chamber of Commerce, she said.

"This bill is urgent," Collins said. "We can't wait to act. We cannot wait until our country has a catastrophic cyberattack."

Janet Napolitano, current secretary at DHS, and Stewart Baker, a former official at DHS and the NSA, both voiced support for the bill.

Although some critics have called for a stripped-down bill that deals mainly with security efforts at government agencies, "now is not the time for half-measures," Napolitano said.
http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/...ystem-vendors/





Sweden Seeks New Tools to Aid File Sharing Hunt

The Swedish government wants police and prosecutors to have more power to crack down on illegal file sharing by making it easier to force internet service providers to reveal the identity of individual computer users.

“I would no longer need to make a preliminary assessment of the penalties associated with the crimes I'm investigating. If I have an IP-address, I can request information about who the customer is, regardless of how serious the crime is,” Henrik Rassmussen, a prosecutor who specializes in copyright infringement crimes, told the TT news agency.

“Previously, I've only been able to request information if I judged the crime to be over a certain level.”

Today, investigators can only request subscriber information if the suspected crime is punishable by jail or a suspended sentence.

But in a bid to make it easier for police to hunt down individuals who hide behind IP-addresses, the government has included language in a bill designed to fight internet bullying and “grooming” that in principal will allow police to summon to an interrogation anyone who has downloaded a movie illegally.

In the bill, the government call for police and prosecutors to be able to request information from internet service providers (ISPs) about the users tied to IP-addresses suspected of illegal file sharing even if the crime in question is only a minor offence, Sveriges Radio (SR) reports.

Internet bullying and other forms of online harassment are a growing problem in Sweden, as is grooming, whereby adults attempt to make contact with children for sexual purposes, according to the bill.

The bill explains that, when it comes to suspected violations of copyright laws, copyright holders have the ability to request information about suspected file sharers from a court in a civil law process.

But police and prosecutors would be able to avoid the extra step, according to the bill, which, if it were to become law, would allow investigators to go directly to ISPs to obtain information that could help them identify users suspected of downloading pirated material.

The bill does not, however, change police powers when it comes to carrying out raids at the homes of suspected file sharers and will still require that the suspected crime carry stiffer penalties.

“We're still not going to be able to carry out search warrants for minor crimes,” said Rasmusson.

“But it will be easier for us to round up suspects and in cases where we will have other evidence than a raid. We can also conduct interrogations and it has happened that people who are summoned to an interrogation and faced with certain facts have admitted to the crime. That's something me may used to a greater extent.”

According to Rasmusson, the new bill should be a cause for concern for Swede who download a pirated movie from time to time.

“Sure, they would be worried to the extent that there is a real possibility that they can be identified if the bill is passed,” he told TT.

“But our experience is that the organizations that track copyright infringement crimes aren't interested in those who download one movie or a couple of songs.”
http://www.thelocal.se/39152/20120216/





EU Court Rules Social Networks Cannot Police Downloads
Benjamin Fox

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has struck the latest blow in the debate over internet policing, ruling on Thursday (16 February) that online social network sites cannot be forced to construct measures to prevent users from downloading songs illegally.

The court, which is the highest judicial authority in the EU, stated that installing general filters would infringe on the freedom to conduct business and on data privacy.

In a press statement accompanying its judgement, the court stated that forcing sites to police their network for illegal downloads “would not be respecting the prohibition to impose on that provider a general obligation to monitor nor the requirement that a fair balance be struck between the protection of copyright, on the one hand, and the freedom to conduct business, the right to protection of personal data and the freedom to receive or impart information.”

The case was brought before the ECJ by Sabam, the Belgian national music royalty collecting society, against social network site Netlog. In 2009, Sabam went to the Belgian Court of First Instance to demand that Netlog take action to prevent site-users from illegally downloading songs from its portfolio. It also insisted that Netlog pay a €1,000 fine for every day of delaying in compliance. Netlog legal submission argued that granting Sabam’s injunction would be imposing a general obligation to monitor on Netlog, which is prohibited by the e-commerce directive.

Like other social networking sites Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, Netlog allows users to create a profile through which they keep a diary, link with their friends and display photos or video clips, including copy-righted works.

In its ruling, the court duly cited the e-commerce directive, judging that implementing a filter system would require the host site to work as an active policeman of all files stored on its servers which could hold copyrighted works. Agreeing with Netlog’s submission, it stated that “general monitoring of the information stored on its servers” was “prohibited” by the e-commerce directive.

"Such an injunction would result in a serious infringement of Netlog's freedom to conduct its business since it would require Netlog to install a complicated, costly, permanent computer system at its own expense," the ECJ concluded.

The court added that the right to data privacy and to be able to receive or send information were part of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, with which all EU law must comply.

The ECJ ruling is the latest act in the long-running worldwide saga on the policing of online piracy. In the last fortnight there have been mounting protests against the controversial Acta treaty, an attempt to establish global rules for policing counterfeit trade online.

Although negotiations on Acta began in 2006, with 22 of the EU’s 27 Member States having signed up to it, five countries, including Germany and Poland, have halted the accession process following rising public pressure. Public protests swept across Europe’s streets last weekend in protest against the treaty.

Rights-holders and companies want internet service providers and technology companies to take action to prevent widespread copyright theft of illegally downloaded films and music.

Technology companies have argued that this would infringe on freedom of speech, internet freedom and be difficult to enforce, while internet campaigners fear that Acta would lead to invasive internet surveillance.

Watch Brussels based protest against the international intellectual property enforcement treaty, acta.
http://euobserver.com/871/115291





How Do We Know That Piracy Isn't Really A Big Issue? Because Media Companies Still Haven't Needed To Change As A Result Of It
Glyn Moody

One of the positive outcomes of the debate that has raged around SOPA/PIPA is that more people have looked at the facts, rather than listened to the rhetoric, surrounding piracy. In particular, the copyright industries' hitherto unchallenged claim that piracy is destroying their business is finally being challenged – not least by reports like "The Sky is Rising" that consolidate industry figures to show that things are really looking pretty good across the board.

Another indication of that new attitude is the incredible response elicited by an article in Forbes entitled "You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You", which has received over 3600 re-tweets on Twitter, and nearly 10,000 shares on Facebook. The basic argument will be familiar enough to Techdirt readers: that the war on piracy can never be "won", and that what is needed is a change of attitude on the part of the media companies. The article concludes:

Treat your customers with respect, and they’ll do the same to you. And that is how you fight piracy.

Pretty obvious, you would have thought, although strangely it isn't to the media companies.

The author of that piece, Paul Tassi, has followed it up with "Lies, Damned Lies and Piracy." Although this has proved far less popular than the first one, I think it's better, because it offers some original insights where the other went over well-trod ground.

I particularly liked his closing thoughts:

If the industry is struggling, I just don’t see it, as their projects are getting bigger and more costly with each passing year. When a movie bombs or a show gets cancelled, no one ever says “oh, well, piracy.” Rather, it’s the quality of the product that accounts for such failures. Even with relatively high piracy rates across all forms of media, we’re still seeing blockbuster films, shows and games released at a higher rate than ever, and profits to match.

I think the media industries would love to kill piracy with a quick piece of legislation that blacks out every torrent site on the internet, but I don’t think they want to fight it so much that they’ll change their entire distribution model on a dime, which would actually go a long way toward truly competing with piracy. The reason things are the way they are is because they’re working. Despite the fact that even though yes, every piece of media is available on the internet for free somewhere, people are still buying.

There are three really key points packed in there. First, that the media industries just aren't struggling, despite their cries of woe. Secondly, what causes real financial harm to the film and music worlds are bad products that lose huge amounts of money and disappoint audiences. And finally – and most importantly – if piracy really were so life-threatening to the copyright industries, and if their bottom lines really were in danger, then they would have tried something other than begging lawmakers to protect them. The fact that they haven't, as Tassi emphasizes, means that there is no real pressure on them to do so: people still buy lots of stuff, piracy isn't really a problem, things are working.
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovat...esult-it.shtml





Kazaa File Sharer Gets Help Fighting Capitol
Nick McCann

Imposing a $1.5 million fine against a woman who shared 24 songs is excessive and stifles innovation, a coalition of libraries, public interest and online privacy advocates told the 8th Circuit.

In a joint amicus brief filed Friday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive, the American Library Association and others urged the St. Louis-based federal appeals court to accept a reduced damage award against Jammie Thomas-Rasset.

Capitol Records sued Thomas-Rasset in 2006 for posting songs by bands like Aerosmith and Green Day on the peer-to-peer file-sharing program Kazaa.

Marking the first individual file-sharing action to go to trial, Thomas-Rasset was initially fined $220,000 for 24 songs that had been downloaded from her account.

But the judge convened a retrial, and a third jury ultimately awarded Capitol $1.5 million in damages. The judge reduced that figure to $54,000, calling the verdict "so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportionate to the offense and obviously unreasonable."

Capitol is appealing for more money, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others have come to Thomas-Rasset's defense in favor of the reduced award.

The amicus brief argues that damage awards must pass constitutional due-process review. Without that review, damages can be unpredictable and can discourage Internet users from reasonably using copyrighted materials.

"Excessive (and unpredictable) statutory damage awards can stifle creativity and innovation that involves even a small risk of copyright liability," according t othe brief authored by Corynne McSherry, the intellectual property director at Electronic Frontier.

"That chills, in turn, reasonable uses of copyrighted material, especially in the digital environment," the brief continues.

McSherry also asked the court to reject Capitol's theory that making a copyrighted work available to the public is the same as "distributing" it. Her colleague, Michael Barclay, echoed that argument in a statement on the foundation's website.

"The Copyright Act is very clear: a work isn't 'distributed' unless someone actually downloads it," Barclay said. "In essence, the labels want the courts to give them a pass on proving a crucial part of their case."

Public Knowledge, the Internet Archive, the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the American Library Association co-signed the brief.
http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/02/14/43877.htm





Megaupload Co-Founder Released On Bail
enigmax

The co-founder of Megaupload has been freed on bail by a judge in New Zealand. Mathias Ortmann will be the subject of strict conditions including no Internet access. The US will now rely on a United Nations treaty to extradite the Mega team. Separately, it was revealed that the FBI remotely monitored last month’s raids and congratulated New Zealand police on their work.

Following his arrest almost a month ago, the co-founder of the now-defunct Megaupload file-hosting service has finally been granted bail.

Mathias Ortmann was expected to be freed following a January 26th hearing but that was delayed when information collected by the authorities on his finances fell short of Ortmann’s own estimates.

According to the FBI, Ortmann made around $14.5 million from Megaupload between 2005 and 2010, and an additional $3 million in 2011. His accounts, however, showed a total of $20.2 million, some $3.5 million more.

This morning, concerns over the 40-year-old, who was previously described as a serious flight risk by Prosecutor Anne Toohey, were overcome.

Ortmann, from Germany, was released earlier today and will now join his co-accused Bram van der Kolk and Finn Batato at the former’s Auckland home. Bail conditions for all three are strict and include a complete ban on Internet access.

Of those arrested in New Zealand following the raids in January, only Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom remains behind bars. He is due to appear in court next week.

In the meantime it has been revealed that US authorities intend to rely on a United Nations treaty aimed at combating international organized crime to extradite all the NZ-based members of the so-called “Mega Conspiracy” to the US.

While a lawyer working on behalf of the United States government admitted that no copyright offenses are specifically listed in the extradition treaty, he said that certain offenses which involve trans-national crime are covered by the country’s Extradition Act.

In New Zealand, crimes must carry a four year prison sentence to be deemed extraditable. Under the country’s Copyright Act, distributing an infringing work carries a five year maximum sentence. Nevertheless, some observers are predicting that due to its groundbreaking status, the extradition battle for the Megaupload defendants will be both complex and prolonged, and could even go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Separately, according to a report citing the latest issue of New Zealand Police’s ‘Ten One’ magazine, US authorities have congratulated local police on the raids they carried out last month.

“Feedback on the New Zealand operation has been extremely positive from our international law enforcement partners including the FBI and the US Department of Justice,” said Detective Superintendent Mike Pannett, who reportedly monitored events from the FBI’s command center in Washington.

As revealed last week, dozens of heavily armed police – some from elite anti-terrorist divisions – were used to arrest the operators of Megaupload in January.
https://torrentfreak.com/megaupload-...n-bail-120215/





Feds Seize $50 Million in Megaupload Assets, Lodge New Charges
David Kravets

The authorities said Friday they have seized $50 million in Megaupload-related assets and added additional charges in one of the United States’ largest criminal copyright infringement prosecutions.

Megaupload, the popular file-sharing site, was shuttered last month and its top officials indicted by the Justice Department, just days after online protests scuttled a Congressional proposal to make changes to the internet to reduce online copyright infringement.

Seven individuals connected to the Hong Kong-based site were indicted on a variety of charges, including criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Five of the members of what the authorities called a 5-year-old “racketeering conspiracy” have been arrested in New Zealand, where they are being held pending extradition to the United States.

One of those arrested was Kim Schmitz, aka Kim Dotcom, Megaupload’s high-flying founder, who has been denied bail in New Zealand. Items seized from Dotcom include a large collection of cars, a mansion, bank accounts, jet skis and jewelry.

The government said the site, which generated millions in user fees and advertising, facilitated copyright infringement of movies “often before their theatrical release, music, television programs, electronic books, and business and entertainment software on a massive scale.” The government said Megaupload’s “estimated harm” to copyright holders was “well in excess of $500 million.”

Megaupload was on the recording and movie industries’ most-hated lists, often being accused of facilitating wanton infringement of their members’ copyrights. The indictment claims Megaupload induced users to upload copyrighted works for others to download, and that it often failed to comply with removal notices from rights holders under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

New charges levied Friday allege that Megaupload falsely represented to rights holders that it had removed infringing works from its servers.

The superseding indictment in the Eastern District of Virginia also claims that Megaupload paid one of its registered users $3,400 between 2008 and 2009 for uploading 16,960 files that generated 34 million views. The files included motion pictures Ocean’s Thirteen, Ratatouille and Evan Almighty, the government said.

The government, meanwhile, also said Friday that, despite claims of having 180 million registered users, the site had 66.6 million. The authorities said that 5.86 million of these registered users uploaded files, “demonstrating that more than 90 percent of their registered users only used the defendant’s system to download.”

Still, anyone who used Megaupload as a way to share and store legitimate files is now likely never going to be able to get them back.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ng-indictment/





The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde Questions Why We Let Dying Industries Dictate Terms Of Democracy
Mike Masnick

Peter Sunde, a very thoughtful and insightful guy, who's been completely demonized by the entertainment industry for his role with The Pirate Bay, has written up an interesting piece for Wired UK where he not only goes over highly questionable issues related to his conviction, but raises a larger question about why we, as a society, allow one obsolete industry to have so much power in government and policy issues. The connections between those involved in his prosecution and the entertainment industry are simply too numerous to be fair:

The Swedish prosecutor sent out a memo in 2006 saying that TPB wasn't guilty of "main" crimes -- at best it aids and abets (he also mentioned that the people running TPB were very clever). But Hollywood was not happy with this and forced the Swedish Minister of Justice to visit the White House and talk about it. The United States told Sweden that if they didn't get rid of the site, they would not be allowed to trade with the US!

The minister (illegally) told the prosecutor what had happened which forced him to raid TPB -- only a few weeks after sending out that memo about how legal it was.

Evidently, Warner Brothers felt that the investigation was taking too long. The studio contacted the police officer in charge of the investigation (one person that worked mostly by himself) and before I had even been questioned by him, he interviewed for a job with Warner Brothers.

When we found out he'd been hired (by him changing his employer from "Polisen" to "Warner Bros" on Facebook) the reply we got was that it was proof that Swedish IT police are of such high caliber that even the big US companies would hire them.

I got promoted from "witness" to "suspect" a week after the job was promised.

During the trial it turned out that the judge was the chairman for the Swedish pro-copyright society, one lay judge ran a record company, another one was formerly the chairman for the songwriter lobby organisation. I could go on.

It's stories like this that raise significant questions about the prosecution. Even if you believe that Sunde was guilty of what he was charged with, I would think you should be able to admit that the list of things above should not have happened under any circumstance. When you read that... and then realize that the guy leading the prosecution against Megaupload for the US DOJ used to work for the industry as an "anti-piracy" exec -- you see the same pattern happening again and again. People who have too close connections to industry are making decisions on these issues designed to protect their industries, rather than looking at the actual impact on society and the economy. That's a pretty big problem, and shows how "regulatory capture" can sometimes become "judicial capture" as well.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...emocracy.shtml





Pirate Bay: The RIAA Is Delusional and Must Be Stopped
Winston

The Pirate Bay is not happy with a recent article published by the RIAA, where the torrent site is portrayed as the prime example of why tougher anti-piracy laws are necessary. In a rebuttal, The Pirate Bay argues that the RIAA is delusional, behaving like a spoiled kid that has lost touch with reality.

The following is a guest post by The Pirate Bay’s ‘Winston’ in reply to an article published by RIAA boss Mitch Glazier.

—

The Senior Executive Vice President of the RIAA (wow, what a long title), Mitch Glazier, has published a blog post on why TPB is “one of the worst of the worst”. The piece gives us ample information on just how delusional the recording industry really is, and shows why they must be stopped.

In the very first sentence Glazier uses the phrase “copyright theft”. It’s an interesting concept – if anyone in history ever stole copyright, it must be the record industry. At least they tried, as in the Swedish TPB case where they sued over a record they did not have the copyright to.

A small lesson to Mr Glazier: If someone steals something, you don’t have it anymore. If you copy it, both have it. This means: If someone steals your copyright (aka “copyright theft”) you don’t have the copyright anymore. I’m having a hard time to see that happening though, since copyright isn’t really physical.

The jobs that you say are being stolen in the US are somewhat physical though. And if someone steals them where do they go? Maybe they just aren’t needed anymore! That’s what technology does! Sorry, it’s 2012 not 1912 – do you want to forbid robots as well, since they steal jobs?

Let me quote the title of Peter Sunde’s latest piece in Wired: “It’s evolution, …”. If you search for it, you’ll find the rest of the title for that piece. It might be illegal for me to put that in print since a new censorship law was passed in Syria. Since you apparently think that US law should control people around the world, shouldn’t we follow laws in Syria as well?

Yes, Glazier is upset that TPB moved away from a US-controlled domain name. He doesn’t seem to understand that there is a worldwide problem when one single country tries to take control over a global infrastructure. TPB has no connections to the US so why should the US be able to control it?

It’s a very undemocratic procedure which obviously the RIAA is supportive of. Apparently “escaping US laws” means not being born in the US, not living there, not working there or not wanting to kiss your ass.

And Mr. Glazier, talking about the countries in the EU that you have forced ISPs to block TPB (and other sites) is interesting, as the European Court has just decided that these types of censorship are just that – censorship, and should be treated as illegal. Could we see your view on the matter, as the RIAA is clearly supporting illegal censorship?

The RIAA wants the tech industry to sit down and talk to them. Fuck that. You’re not in charge. If you want the help of the tech industry, ask for it. You’ll probably get it since most tech people are nice. You’re not in charge anymore and that’s probably why you’re pissed off.

Plz stop calling yourself “the creative community”. You’re not a community, you’re a coalition of some of the richest companies in the world. And the only thing you seem to be creative with is your accounting procedures.

The recording industry is like a kid screaming for candy. The problem is that the kid has diabetes.
https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-...topped-120217/





SOPA Style Shutdown of JotForm.com
James Gaskin

Another website that allows users to upload content taken off the Web without due process.

Aytekin Tank, JotForm.com cofounder, used the company blog to explain how the US Government suspended the jotform.com domain. Tank says JotForm has been cooperating, but has no timetable from the shuttering agency for a release of his domain name. The offending content came from a JotForm user, not the company.

JotForm hosts over two million user-generated forms, and uses software to block fraudulent accounts (65,000 so far). Some point to forms used for a phishing attack on a South African bank as the content that created the problem, but nothing official has been released at this time. Aytekin Tank says it all: "SOPA may not have passed, but what happened shows that it is already being practiced. All they have to do is to ask Godaddy to take a site down."
http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computi...own-jotformcom





Takedowns Run Amok? The Strange Secret Service/GoDaddy Assault on JotForm
Nate Anderson

Popular site JotForm doesn't host music or movies or child pornography, all of which have led US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to seize other Internet domain names without advance warning (sometimes making serious mistakes). JotForm also doesn't create content itself. Instead, it helps customers create online forms that can then be embedded in their websites for easy data collection.

But that didn't spare the site from having its entire business shuttered without warning yesterday as the site's domain name was shut down at the request of the US Secret Service. JotForm's domain name registrar, GoDaddy, redirected the site's nameservers to NS1.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM—and with that, JotForm.com became unreachable and the site's two million user-created forms all broke.

And it all may have been done without a court order.

When he saw his site was down, JotForm cofounder Aytekin Tank scrambled. He checked in with GoDaddy, which told him that the site had been suspended as part of an ongoing investigation.

GoDaddy has long supported authorities who have concerns about the websites and domains it hosts. In Congressional testimony last year, the company's general counsel Christine Jones noted that "Our staff routinely works with courts and law enforcement from the local to international level to shut down domain names and websites through which infringers and counterfeiters operate. Any time we are notified by a court or a federal or state prosecutor that there is criminally infringing material on our systems, we work rapidly to disable access to that material."

Note the two criteria: a court order or a notification from a prosecutor. That latter category amounts to an unproven allegation—and it's what Tank believes derailed him here. "No, as far as I know, there is no judge order," he told me. "They sent a request to GoDaddy and GoDaddy complied."

But GoDaddy won't say publicly whether the takedown was voluntary or compulsory. When I asked, the company's Director of Network Abuse, Ben Butler, told me that his office complies with "orders from courts, as well as confirmed official requests from law enforcement agencies," but he wouldn't get into specifics in this case.

"We can tell you in general terms, at the specific request of law enforcement, Go Daddy sometimes takes action to prevent further harm being caused by a website hosted on our servers," he added. "This would include things like sites engaged in phishing, malware installation, securities fraud, and so on."

Butler's office acted on whatever request was received and shut down the site's domain, but he did pass the requesting agent's contact info along to JotForm so that the company could work to resolve the issue. According to a copy of an e-mail seen by Ars Technica, GoDaddy told JotForm that "the domain name was suspended as part of an ongoing law enforcement investigation" and that Tank should contact a special agent at the US Secret Service.

Tank, desperate to find out what had happened, called her.

"The agent told me she is busy and she asked for my phone number, and told me they will get back to me within this week," he wrote in an explanation post on Hacker News. "I told them we are a Web service with hundreds of thousands of users, so this is a matter of urgency, and we are ready to cooperate fully. I was ready to shutdown any form they request and provide any information we have about the user. Unfortunately, she told me she needs to look at the case which she can do in a few days. I called her many times again to check about the case, but she seems to be getting irritated with me."

A Secret Service spokesperson had no public comment when reached by Ars Technica, but he promised to look into the episode. No further information was available by publication time.

Though unsure of what the case was even about, Tank suspected a phishing form—something that JotForm has dealt with for quite some time. The company says it runs a Bayesian phishing filter to identity and block accounts being used to harvest various kinds of user information, and that it suspended 65,000 such accounts last year alone.

Such phishing attacks have been ongoing in recent weeks. Perusing the JotForm support forums turns up comments such as this one from the RSA Anti-Fraud Command Center. RSA says that it has "been appointed to assist [South Africa's] Standard Bank in preventing or terminating online activity that targets, or may target Standard Bank’s clients as potential fraud victims" and that "it appears the form service you provide is being used in a phishing attack."

The shutdown of his entire domain, without notice, for something a user had done even after protections were in place against it, seemed hugely unfair to Tank; he made his public case in terms that would also apply to other user-generated sites like YouTube. "We have 2 millions user generated forms," he wrote. "It is not possible for us to manually review all forms. This can happen to any Web site that allows user-generated content."

The first priority for JotForm was restoring some kind of access. Tank decided to migrate everything to jotform.net and make that site live instead. This wouldn't fix anything automatically—existing Javascript that pointed to jotform.com would continue to fail—but site operators who needed the forms could manually tweak their embedding code to point to jotform.net instead. For customers with hundreds of forms, this could take a while.

"When they have suspended jotform.com, and told us that it might take a few days to even take a look into the case, we had to do something to keep our users' forms alive," Tank told me.

"We have 700,000 users and 2,000,000 user-generated forms on our site. So, we had to make jotform.net live and email our users so that their forms will keep working. They have not provided any information about the content they would like us to disable, and we cannot keep 2,000,000 forms down for a few days. They don't seem to care about our concerns or about our customers."

The government also didn't seem to care that a new site with the exact same content was also live on the Internet under a different name; jotform.net remains active.

As for the impact on JotForm's business, Tank doesn't yet know what it will be. "Many users were unhappy and lost trust in us," he added. "We might lose many of our customers. It is hard to say at this point."

Customers blasted the site. "Jotform sucks. Always some sort of problem. I will never again use or recommend Jotform. Already cancelled my subscription and will tell my friend to do so as well," one wrote.

"We are a multimillion dollar Canadian company that has used jotform the last year for customer inquires," said another. "They have been very reliable. However because of what has happened now we will have to implement an internally hosted solution to guarantee this will not happen again and ensure we will not loose [sic] our data. I will now have to question purchasing any more services from US internet related providers."

Numerous commenters blamed the company for using GoDaddy as a registrar. "This is what you get for finically [sic] supporting a domain registrar which has a history of extrajudicial and unjustifiable actions like this," wrote another. "Idiots."

JotForm today moved its domains away from GoDaddy to registrars NameCheap and Hover. Tank still doesn't know why his domain was suspended or when it might be returned; however, a WHOIS search this afternoon revealed that GoDaddy has at last removed the domain from its penalty box.

Not that anyone bothered to tell him this.

"Yes, the site seems to be back now. This made us very happy!" he wrote me by e-mail. "We have been working for the last two days to restore our service for our customers. They have not provided any details. I just found it out from you. Thank you for the great news!"

Update: Secret Service spokesman Brian Leary has confirmed to Ars that, after further investigation, his agency is indeed involved in the JotForm case. The Secret Service has also launched an internal review to "make sure all our policies and procedures were followed" in the matter, he added. He could not comment on any other issues surrounding the case, including whether a court order had been obtained.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...y-complies.ars





Critics Seek to Stall Senate Cybersecurity Bill

Republican critics of a Senate cybersecurity bill want to slow down consideration of the measure, saying it could give government too much power over private-sector infrastructure companies.

A group of senators introduced a comprehensive bill this week that requires the secretary of homeland security to designate certain infrastructure like air traffic control as critical and compel steps to defend against hackers.

Senators John Rockefeller and Dianne Feinstein, both Democrats; Susan Collins, a Republican, and Joseph Lieberman, an independent, are the primary sponsors of the bill.

They say it is needed to prevent a catastrophic attack on the nation's water supply, electric grid, financial networks and transportation infrastructure.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said the bill would be brought quickly to the Senate floor because portions of it had been worked on for years.

This irritated Senator John McCain, who said on Thursday that he and other Republicans on committees that have jurisdiction over the bill thought that it was moving too fast.

The Arizona Republican, speaking at a Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, also criticized the leading role that the Department of Homeland Security would take under the bill in pushing better cyber practices on sometimes reluctant industries.

McCain said that "unelected bureaucrats" at DHS would promulgate regulations that would stymie job creation and provide a distraction from actual cybersecurity.

He promised his own bill in coming weeks.

Senator Lieberman said he was disappointed by McCain's remarks. "We pleaded for involvement. A lot of people including yourself have not come to the table."

Lieberman said it was unlikely that Reid would slow the bill coming to the floor because of critics' objections.

Tom Ridge, a former homeland security secretary now at the Chamber of Commerce, said that companies support elements of the bill that allow better information sharing between the government and companies about threats and attacks as they develop.

But the chamber opposed putting DHS in charge of critical infrastructure to ensure key companies can defend their networks from dangerous attacks.

Defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin Corp have been among the high-profile victims of cyberattacks. Others include web search leader Google Inc, Citigroup bank and exchange operator Nasdaq OMX.

Despite the criticisms, Collins argued for moving the bill quickly, citing data showing that cybercrime globally cost $114 billion a year. "It would be irresponsible for us not to pass legislation because of turf battles," she said.

The U.S. House of Representatives is considering legislation that overlaps with the Senate measure on some points.

(Reporting By Diane Bartz; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...81F2B420120216





Tories On E-Snooping: ‘Stand With Us or With the Child Pornographers’
John Ibbitson

Canada’s privacy commissioners will be surprised to hear it, but the Conservatives are accusing anyone who opposes their bill to give police new powers to monitor the Internet of supporting child pornography.

A similar comment might have cost Stephen Harper the 2004 election. But with the next election years away, it’s hard to know whether or when Public Safety Minister Vic Toews will change his tune.

Mr. Toews will introduce Lawful Access legislation, as it is commonly called, into the House of Commons Tuesday. Previous versions of the bill failed to make it through minority parliaments, but now that the Conservatives have a majority it is almost certain to pass.

The bill will require Internet service providers to store and to make available to the government and police forces information on the Internet activity of their customers.

Police will require a warrant to obtain that information. But the bill would also permit them to obtain IP addresses (which identifies someone on the Internet), email addresses, mobile phone numbers and other information without any warrant.

Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s privacy watchdog, is fiercely opposed to the legislation, which she calls “surveillance by design.” Federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart and other provincial privacy commissioners have also raised concerns.

But when Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia attacked the Conservatives for “preparing to read Canadians' emails and track their movements through cellphone signals” – which does appear to be a severe distortion of the bill’s powers – Mr. Toews’s counterattack was fierce.

“As technology evolves, many criminal activities, such as the distribution of child pornography, become much easier,” he told the House. “We are proposing to bring measures to bring our laws into the 21st century and to provide police with the lawful tools that they need.

“He can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.”

During the 2004 election campaign, the Conservatives issued and then quickly withdrew a press release suggesting then-prime minister Paul Martin supports child pornography because his government wasn’t, in the eyes of Conservatives, sufficiently tough on crime.

When confronted by reporters, Mr. Harper refused to back down. “I'm not going to, in any way, give the Liberal Party any break in its record on child pornography,” the Conservative Leader maintained. “It is disgraceful, they have had multiple opportunities to do something about it, and they have refused.”

Mr. Martin leapt at the gaffe. “Look, this is personal. I am a father and I am a husband, and he has crossed the line. He should apologize,” he maintained. Many observers credit the exchange with a last-minute surge that returned the Liberals to office in a minority government.

Now, it would appear, the Conservatives are once again lumping opponents of their law-and-order program in with pedophiles and pornographers.

Ms. Stoddart and Ms. Cavoukian have indicated they will wait to see the legislation Tuesday before offering comment.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...rticle2336889/





A Necessary Change in Policy
reddit

At reddit we care deeply about not imposing ours or anyone elses’ opinions on how people use the reddit platform. We are adamant about not limiting the ability to use the reddit platform even when we do not ourselves agree with or condone a specific use. We have very few rules here on reddit; no spamming, no cheating, no personal info, nothing illegal, and no interfering the site's functions. Today we are adding another rule: No suggestive or sexual content featuring minors.

In the past, we have always dealt with content that might be child pornography along strict legal lines. We follow legal guidelines and reporting procedures outlined by NCMEC. We have taken all reports of illegal content seriously, and when warranted we made reports directly to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who works directly with the FBI. When a situation is reported to us where a child might be abused or in danger, we make that report. Beyond these clear cut cases, there is a huge area of legally grey content, and our previous policy to deal with it on a case by case basis has become unsustainable. We have changed our policy because interpreting the vague and debated legal guidelines on a case by case basis has become a massive distraction and risks reddit being pulled in to legal quagmire.

As of today, we have banned all subreddits that focus on sexualization of children. Our goal is to be fair and consistent, so if you find a subreddit we may have missed, please message the admins. If you find specific content that meets this definition please message the moderators of the subreddit, and the admins.

We understand that this might make some of you worried about the slippery slope from banning one specific type of content to banning other types of content. We're concerned about that too, and do not make this policy change lightly or without careful deliberation. We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal. However, child pornography is a toxic and unique case for Internet communities, and we're protecting reddit's ability to operate by removing this threat. We remain committed to protecting reddit as an open platform.
http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comment...nge_in_policy/





Legalizing Child Pornography is Linked to Lower Rates of Child Sex Abuse
From 2010

Could making child pornography legal lead to lower rates of child sex abuse? It could well do, according to a new study by Milton Diamond, from the University of Hawaii, and colleagues. Results from the Czech Republic showed, as seen everywhere else studied (Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sweden, USA), that rape and other sex crimes have not increased following the legalization and wide availability of pornography. And most significantly, the incidence of child sex abuse has fallen considerably since 1989, when child pornography became readily accessible – a phenomenon also seen in Denmark and Japan. Their findings are published online today in Springer's journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

The findings support the theory that potential sexual offenders use child pornography as a substitute for sex crimes against children. While the authors do not approve of the use of real children in the production or distribution of child pornography, they say that artificially produced materials might serve a purpose.

Diamond and team looked at what actually happened to sex-related crimes in the Czech Republic as it transitioned from having a strict ban on sexually explicit materials to a situation where the material was decriminalized. Pornography was strictly prohibited between 1948 and 1989. The ban was lifted with the country's transition to democracy and, by 1990, the availability and ownership of sexually explicit materials rose dramatically. Even the possession of child pornography was not a criminal offense.

The researchers monitored the number of sex-related crimes from Ministry of Interior records – rape, attempted rape, sexual assault, and child sex abuse in particular – for 15 years during the ban and 18 years after it was lifted.

Most significantly, they found that the number of reported cases of child sex abuse dropped markedly immediately after the ban on sexually explicit materials was lifted in 1989. In both Denmark and Japan, the situation is similar: Child sex abuse was much lower than it was when availability of child pornography was restricted.

Other results showed that, overall, there was no increase in reported sex-related crimes generally since the legalization of pornography. Interestingly, whereas the number of sex-related crimes fell significantly after 1989, the number of other societal crimes – murder, assault, and robbery – rose significantly.
http://esciencenews.com/articles/201...ld.sex.ab use





Congress Left in Dark on DOJ Wiretaps
David Kravets

A Senate staffer was tasked two years ago with compiling reports for a subcommittee about the number of times annually the Justice Department employed a covert internet and telephone surveillance method known as pen register and trap-and-trace capturing.

But the records, which the Justice Department is required to forward to Congress annually, were nowhere in sight.

That’s because the Justice Department was not following the law and had not provided Congress with the material at least for years 2004 to 2008. On the flip side, Congress was not exercising its watchdog role, thus enabling the Justice Department to skirt any oversight whatsoever on an increasingly used surveillance method that does not require court warrants, according to Justice Department documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

The mishap is just one piece of an ever-growing disconnect between Americans’ privacy interests, and a Congress seemingly uncommitted to protecting those interests.

Pen registers obtain non-content information of outbound telephone and internet communications, such as phone numbers dialed, and the sender and recipient (and sometimes subject line) of an e-mail message. A trap-and-trace acquires the same information, but for inbound communications to a target.

The reports, recently posted on Justice Department website, chronicle a powerful surveillance tool undertaken tens of thousands of times annually by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

The reports show that, from 2004 to 2008, the number of times this wiretapping method was employed nearly doubled, from 10,885 to 21,152. Judges sign off on these telco orders when the authorities say the information is relevant to an investigation. No probable cause that the target committed a crime — the warrant standard — is necessary.

The Justice Department, beginning in late 2010, has only published the reports from 2004 to 2009, the year it obtained 23,895 judicial orders to conduct such surveillance. It did not immediately comment on whether the 2010 and 2011 reports have been compiled and sent to Congress, or explain why the mishap occurred.

Internet security researcher Christopher Soghoian recently obtained e-mails via a two-year FOIA process confirm for the first time that Congress was left out of the loop for at least the years 2004 to 2008. Using FOIA, he and others have crowbarred from the Justice Department the reports from 1999 to 2009.

“This is an important surveillance tool,” Soghoian said in a telephone interview. “In addition to showing that DOJ is lazy and not obeying the law, the most notable thing here is that Congress was asleep at the wheel.”

The handful of government e-mails Soghoian obtained confirm for the first time that Congress was left out of the loop for at least the years 2004 to 2008. A law review article suggests the same for years 1999 through 2003.

Soghoian provided the nine pages of e-mail to Wired.

They show that, in September of 2009, a staffer for then-Sen. Russ Feingold sent an e-mail to the Justice Department’s Mark Agrast, the deputy assistant attorney general for legislative affairs. The staffer, Lara Flint, was seeking “the last few” reports for a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Any help you can provide would be much appreciated,” Flint wrote Agrast.

Three months later, Agrast sent them over to Flint only after Agrast had learned from Mythili Raman, who was the DOJ’s principal deputy assistant attorney general for the criminal division, that no reports were filed.

“Although there was an annual reporting requirement, apparently, no one had been actually fling the annual report,” Raman wrote Argast in a December 2009 e-mail.

Agrast did not immediately return a telephone message from Wired seeking comment.

To be sure, even had Congress obtained the data, it’s hard to imagine that it would have mattered.

Consider that the House and Senate punted in May on revising the controversial Patriot Act adopted in the wake of 9/11. Congress extended three expiring spy provisions for four years without any debate.

The three provisions extended included:

• The “roving wiretap” provision allows the FBI to obtain wiretaps from a secret intelligence court, known as the FISA court (under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) without identifying the target or what method of communication is to be tapped.
• The “lone wolf” measure allows FISA court warrants for the electronic monitoring of a person for any reason — even without showing that the suspect is an agent of a foreign power or a terrorist. The government has said it has never invoked that provision, but the Obama administration said it wanted to retain the authority to do so.
• The “business records” provision allows FISA court warrants for any type of record, from banking to library to medical, without the government having to declare that the information sought is connected to a terrorism or espionage investigation.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act is the law that requires the DOJ’s pen-register reporting. It turned 25 years old in October.

Another feature of that law had once protected Americans’ electronic communications from the government’s prying eyes, but it has become so woefully outdated that it now grants the authorities nearly carte blanche powers to obtain Americans’ e-mail stored in the cloud, such as in Gmail or Hotmail — without a court warrant.

Congress has shown no interest in amending the law to afford Americans their privacy, despite calls from some of the nation’s largest tech companies and civil rights groups to do so.

In October, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee who had originally sponsored ECPA during the Ronald Reagan administration, promised to hold hearings on ECPA reform before his committee by year’s end. He never called a hearing, despite saying “this law is significantly outdated and outpaced by rapid changes in technology.”

As Soghoian sees it, none of this is surprising.

“Privacy is a hot topic,” he said. “Congress is in the dark.’
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...s-in-the-dark/





Venture Capital Sees Big Returns in Big Data
Sarah McBride

When Jason Goldberg set out to raise a new round of funding for his flash sales site Fab.com, he dispensed with the usual PowerPoint presentations and instead gave potential investors a look at the crown jewels: the "dashboard" of real-time analytics that can instantly spot trends and enable the site to tweak its offerings on the fly.

The company soon closed a $40 million round of funding from blue-chip venture capitalists including Andreessen Horowitz.

Such is the allure of big data, a buzzword that refers to the newfound ability to collect and analyze massive amounts of information on almost every dimension of the human experience. In sectors ranging from retail to healthcare to social media, the promise of Big Data has venture capitalists salivating.

"The best themes are the ones you can see everywhere and big data is everywhere you turn," said David Hornik, a partner at August Capital.

Venture firms invested a total of $2.47 billion last year in fields around big data, including database management and data processing, according to Thomson Reuters data. That compares to $1.53 billion in 2010 and $1.1 billion in 2009.

Venture investors are building their strategies around a few key themes within big data.

Accel Partners' Ping Li controls a dedicated $100 million Big Data fund, carved out of bigger Accel funds. He divides the themes into four, starting with the storage and networking services that support big data platforms. Amazon, with its web-services business, is an example.

The next group is the type of company that builds the platforms that enable the analysis of huge volumes of data.

That would include his own portfolio company, Cloudera, and others such as Hortonworks, backed by Benchmark Capital and Yahoo. Cloudera and Hortonworks help companies work with Apache Hadoop, an open-source software framework that helps organize and manipulate big sets of data.

Once the data is set up in an analysis-friendly way, businesses need software applications that make sense of it. Here, Li sees two more areas for investment -- what he calls big data apps, and data-driven apps.

A prominent big-data app is Domo, the business-intelligence service run by Omniture founder Josh James. It has snagged $63 million in funding from venture firms like Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital.

Data-driven apps -- meaning the data is used in a way that drives another app, rather than analyzed and managed for its own intrinsic value -- range from companies like the Climate Corporation, which takes myriad data points about the weather and uses them to price crop insurance, to Lookout, which uses data to protect mobile phones.

Others, such as John Connors of Ignition Partners or Jim Smith of Mohr Davidow, prefer to think of the apps category as consumer-focused or enterprise-focused.

In the enterprise category, Connors gives the example of his and August Capital's portfolio company Splunk, which allows companies to analyze data in a way that in the past might have required expensive data warehouses and specialized, hard-to-deploy technology. Splunk filed for an initial public offering last month.

"People can begin, in corporate situations, to use corporate data the way we as consumers use the internet," Connors said. He pointed to a phone company cross-referencing a customer's data use compared to her payment plan compared to a plan the phone company is pushing, which he said became a simple exercise on Splunk compared to a too-expensive and too-complicated process even just a few years ago.

"The cost to build and maintain the data warehouse under old technology would be in the range of $10 million to $15 million, and take about two years," he said. On Splunk, it cost $1.5 million and took three months. Without the lower pricetag and simplicity of use, the customer nuances wouldn't have come to light, perhaps costing the company lost customers and revenue.

Liquid Robotics, a VantagePoint Capital-backed company that deploys floating robots to measure vast amounts of ocean data, plans to start selling information about minute variations in ocean currents that wouldn't have been practical to track using old technology, said chief technology officer James Gosling. Fishing fleets could use the information to find areas with the best catch, he said, or shipping companies could use it to find the fastest routes.

Consumer plays include companies like Google, Facebook, and Zynga. "Social media is not monetizable without big data," said Mohr Davidow's Smith, who believes it would be impossible to target ads precisely without it.

Connors sees medical services and traditional retail as areas that are ripe for more big-data based investments.

Boston-based Foundation Medicine crunches through massive data sets on patients' tumors to compare aberrations, treatments and outcomes, with the goal of refining cancer care and improving the quality and length of life for those with the disease. Its backers, including Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Third Rock Ventures, hope it will one day become a big business.

Co-founder and Third Rock Partner Alexis Borisy says Foundation wouldn't exist without the ability to collect vast amounts of data on individual tumors and analyze it quickly and inexpensively.

In the retail sector, Fab.com aggregates data including users' purchase history, membership date, purchase rates and total spending on a minute by minute basis. While some quibble that data sets in retail may not reach the massive level of terabytes or more that some think of as big data, others say the definition depends more on the expansive way the data is drawn together and used. In Fab's case, the data sets are connected to a software platform that digests them in real time and spots trends that help drive business decisions.

Another method called cohort analysis lets Fab.com use data to monitor groups of users by their join date and compare their engagement levels, purchase rates and lifetime value to the site.

"We look at RJ Metrics data on cohorts, on sources where they joined Fab, what they go on to do and then we make adjustments on our advertising targets," Goldberg said, referring to the company that provides its big-data software.

Venture capitalists say the big-data wave is just starting to build. Li, for one, sees limitless opportunity in mobile. "The mobile device is the single best data-capture device ever," he said. "Always with you, and it generates a ton of data."

(Reporting By Sarah McBride. Additional reporting by Malathi Nayak. Editing by Jonathan Weber, Phil Berlowitz)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...81G1HO20120217





The Right to Be Forgotten
Jeffrey Rosen

At the end of January, the European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship, Viviane Reding, announced the European Commission’s proposal to create a sweeping new privacy right—the “right to be forgotten.” The right, which has been hotly debated in Europe for the past few years, has finally been codified as part of a broad new proposed data protection regulation. Although Reding depicted the new right as a modest expansion of existing data privacy rights, in fact it represents the biggest threat to free speech on the Internet in the coming decade. The right to be forgotten could make Facebook and Google, for example, liable for up to two percent of their global income if they fail to remove photos that people post about themselves and later regret, even if the photos have been widely distributed already. Unless the right is defined more precisely when it is promulgated over the next year or so, it could precipitate a dramatic clash between European and American conceptions of the proper balance between privacy and free speech, leading to a far less open Internet.

In theory, the right to be forgotten addresses an urgent problem in the digital age: it is very hard to escape your past on the Internet now that every photo, status update, and tweet lives forever in the cloud. But Europeans and Americans have diametrically opposed approaches to the problem. In Europe, the intellectual roots of the right to be forgotten can be found in French law, which recognizes le droit à l’oubli—or the “right of oblivion”—a right that allows a convicted criminal who has served his time and been rehabilitated to object to the publication of the facts of his conviction and incarceration. In America, by contrast, publication of someone’s criminal history is protected by the First Amendment, leading Wikipedia to resist the efforts by two Germans convicted of murdering a famous actor to remove their criminal history from the actor’s Wikipedia page.[1]

European regulators believe that all citizens face the difficulty of escaping their past now that the Internet records everything and forgets nothing—a difficulty that used to be limited to convicted criminals. When Commissioner Reding announced the new right to be forgotten on January 22, she noted the particular risk to teenagers who might reveal compromising information that they would later come to regret. She then articulated the core provision of the “right to be forgotten”: “If an individual no longer wants his personal data to be processed or stored by a data controller, and if there is no legitimate reason for keeping it, the data should be removed from their system.”[2]

In endorsing the new right, Reding downplayed its effect on free speech. “It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right of the total erasure of history,” she said.[3] And relying on Reding’s speeches, press accounts of the newly proposed right to be forgotten have been similarly reassuring about its effect on free speech. In a post at the Atlantic.com, Why Journalists Shouldn’t Fear Europe’s ‘Right to be Forgotten,’ John Hendel writes that although the original proposals a year ago “would have potentially given people the ability to cull any digital reference—from the public record, journalism, or social networks—they deemed irrelevant and unflattering,” Reding had proposed a narrower definition of data that people have the right to remove: namely “personal data [people] have given out themselves.”[4] According to Hendel “[t]his provision is key. The overhaul insists that Internet users control the data they put online, not the references in media or anywhere else.”[5]

But Hendel seems not to have parsed the regulations that were actually proposed three days later on January 25. They are not limited to personal data that people “have given out themselves”; instead, they create a new right to delete personal data, defined broadly as “any information relating to a data subject.”[6] For this reason, they arguably create a legally enforceable right to demand the deletion of any photos or data that I post myself, even after they’ve gone viral, not to mention unflattering photos that include me or information about me that others post, whether or not it is true.

In a widely cited blog post last March, Peter Fleischer, chief privacy counsel of Google, notes that the right to be forgotten, as discussed in Europe, often covers three separate categories, each of which proposes progressively greater threats to free speech.[7] And the right to be forgotten, as proposed at the end of January, arguably applies in all three of Fleischer’s categories.

The first category is the least controversial: “If I post something online, do I have the right to delete it again?” This involves cases where I post a photo on Facebook and later think better of it and want to take it down. Since Facebook and other social networking sites already allow me to do this, creating a legally enforceable right here is mostly symbolic and entirely unobjectionable. As proposed, the European right to be forgotten would also usefully put pressure on Facebook to abide by its own stated privacy policies by allowing users to confirm that photos and other data have been deleted from its archives after they are removed from public display.

But the right to delete data becomes far more controversial when it involves Fleischer’s second category: “If I post something, and someone else copies it and re-posts it on their own site, do I have the right to delete it?” Imagine a teenager regrets posting a picture of herself with a bottle of beer on her own site and after deleting it, later discovers that several of her friends have copied and reposted the picture on their own sites. If she asks them to take down the pictures, and her friends refuse or cannot be found, should Facebook be forced to delete the picture from her friends’ albums without the owners’ consent based solely on the teenager’s objection?

According to the proposed European Right to Forget, the default answer is almost certainly yes. According to the regulation, when someone demands the erasure of personal data, an Internet Service Provider “shall carry out the erasure without delay,” unless the retention of the data is “necessary” for exercising “the right of freedom of expression,” as defined by member states in their local laws.[8] In another section, the regulation creates an exemption from the duty to remove data for “the processing of personal data solely for journalistic purposes, or for the purposes of artistic or literary expression.”[9] Essentially, this puts the burden on Facebook to prove to a European commission authority that my friend’s publication of my embarrassing picture is a legitimate journalistic (or literary or artistic) exercise. If I contact Facebook, where I originally posted the embarrassing picture, it must take “all reasonable steps” on its own to identify any relevant third parties and secure the takedown of the content.[10] At the very least, Facebook will have to engage in the kinds of difficult line-drawing exercises previously performed by courts. And the prospect of ruinous monetary sanctions for any data controller that “does not comply with the right to be forgotten or to erasure”—a fine up to 1,000,000 euros or up to two percent of Facebook’s annual worldwide income[11]—could lead data controllers to opt for deletion in ambiguous cases, producing a serious chilling effect.

For a preview of just how chilling that effect might be, consider the fact that the right to be forgotten can be asserted not only against the publisher of content (such as Facebook or a newspaper) but against search engines like Google and Yahoo that link to the content. The Spanish Data Protection authority, for example, has sued Google to force it to delete links to embarrassing newspaper articles that are legal under Spanish law.[12] And suits against third party intermediaries are also threatening freedom of speech in Argentina, as the case of Virginia Da Cunha shows. The Argentine pop star had posed for racy pictures when she was young, but recently sued Google and Yahoo to take them down, arguing that they violated the Argentine version of the “right to be forgotten.” Google replied that it could not comply technologically with a broad legal injunction demanding the removal of the pictures, and Yahoo said that the only way to comply would be to block all sites referring to Da Cunha for its Yahoo search engines. Nevertheless, an Argentine judge sided with Da Cunha and after fining Google and Yahoo, ordered them to remove all sites containing sexual images that contained her name. The decision was overturned on appeal, on the grounds that Google and Yahoo could only be held liable if they knew content was defamatory and negligently failed to remove it. But there are at least one hundred and thirty similar cases pending in Argentine courts demanding removal of photos and user-generated content, mostly brought by entertainers and models. The plaintiffs include the Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Yesica Toscanini; when a user of Yahoo Argentina plugs her name into the Yahoo search engine, the result is a blank page.[13]

Finally, there is Fleischer’s third category of takedown requests: “If someone else posts something about me, do I have a right to delete it?” This, of course, raises the most serious concerns about free expression. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that states cannot pass laws restricting the media from disseminating truthful but embarrassing information—such as the name of a rape victim—as long as the information was legally acquired.[14]

The proposed European regulation, however, treats takedown requests for truthful information posted by others identically to takedown requests for photos I’ve posted myself that have then been copied by others: both are included in the definition of personal data as “any information relating” to me, regardless of its source.[15] I can demand takedown and the burden, once again, is on the third party to prove that it falls within the exception for journalistic, artistic, or literary exception. This could transform Google, for example, into a censor-in-chief for the European Union, rather than a neutral platform. And because this is a role Google won’t want to play, it may instead produce blank pages whenever a European user types in the name of someone who has objected to a nasty blog post or status update.

It’s possible, of course, that although the European regulation defines the right to be forgotten very broadly, it will be applied more narrowly. Europeans have a long tradition of declaring abstract privacy rights in theory that they fail to enforce in practice. And the regulation may be further refined over the next year or so, as the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers hammer out the details. But in announcing the regulation, Reding said she wanted it to be ambiguous so that it could accommodate new technologies in the future. “This regulation needs to stand for 30 years—it needs to be very clear but imprecise enough that changes in the markets or public opinion can be maneuvered in the regulation,” she declared ominously.[16] Once the regulation is promulgated, moreover, it will instantly become law throughout the European Union, and if the E.U. withdraws from the safe harbor agreement that is currently in place, the European framework could be imposed on U.S. companies doing business in Europe as well.[17] It’s hard to imagine that the Internet that results will be as free and open as it is now.
http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/onl...o-be-forgotten





How Companies Learn Your Secrets
Charles Duhigg

Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”

Pole has a master’s degree in statistics and another in economics, and has been obsessed with the intersection of data and human behavior most of his life. His parents were teachers in North Dakota, and while other kids were going to 4-H, Pole was doing algebra and writing computer programs. “The stereotype of a math nerd is true,” he told me when I spoke with him last year. “I kind of like going out and evangelizing analytics.”

As the marketers explained to Pole — and as Pole later explained to me, back when we were still speaking and before Target told him to stop — new parents are a retailer’s holy grail. Most shoppers don’t buy everything they need at one store. Instead, they buy groceries at the grocery store and toys at the toy store, and they visit Target only when they need certain items they associate with Target — cleaning supplies, say, or new socks or a six-month supply of toilet paper. But Target sells everything from milk to stuffed animals to lawn furniture to electronics, so one of the company’s primary goals is convincing customers that the only store they need is Target. But it’s a tough message to get across, even with the most ingenious ad campaigns, because once consumers’ shopping habits are ingrained, it’s incredibly difficult to change them.

There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments — the moment, really — is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs. But as Target’s marketers explained to Pole, timing is everything. Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know a baby is on the way. Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. “Can you give us a list?” the marketers asked.

“We knew that if we could identify them in their second trimester, there’s a good chance we could capture them for years,” Pole told me. “As soon as we get them buying diapers from us, they’re going to start buying everything else too. If you’re rushing through the store, looking for bottles, and you pass orange juice, you’ll grab a carton. Oh, and there’s that new DVD I want. Soon, you’ll be buying cereal and paper towels from us, and keep coming back.”

The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”

Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That’s where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Target’s Guest Marketing Analytics department come in.

Almost every major retailer, from grocery chains to investment banks to the U.S. Postal Service, has a “predictive analytics” department devoted to understanding not just consumers’ shopping habits but also their personal habits, so as to more efficiently market to them. “But Target has always been one of the smartest at this,” says Eric Siegel, a consultant and the chairman of a conference called Predictive Analytics World. “We’re living through a golden age of behavioral research. It’s amazing how much we can figure out about how people think now.”

The reason Target can snoop on our shopping habits is that, over the past two decades, the science of habit formation has become a major field of research in neurology and psychology departments at hundreds of major medical centers and universities, as well as inside extremely well financed corporate labs. “It’s like an arms race to hire statisticians nowadays,” said Andreas Weigend, the former chief scientist at Amazon.com. “Mathematicians are suddenly sexy.” As the ability to analyze data has grown more and more fine-grained, the push to understand how daily habits influence our decisions has become one of the most exciting topics in clinical research, even though most of us are hardly aware those patterns exist. One study from Duke University estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day, and recent discoveries have begun to change everything from the way we think about dieting to how doctors conceive treatments for anxiety, depression and addictions.

This research is also transforming our understanding of how habits function across organizations and societies. A football coach named Tony Dungy propelled one of the worst teams in the N.F.L. to the Super Bowl by focusing on how his players habitually reacted to on-field cues. Before he became Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill overhauled a stumbling conglomerate, Alcoa, and turned it into a top performer in the Dow Jones by relentlessly attacking one habit — a specific approach to worker safety — which in turn caused a companywide transformation. The Obama campaign has hired a habit specialist as its “chief scientist” to figure out how to trigger new voting patterns among different constituencies.

Researchers have figured out how to stop people from habitually overeating and biting their nails. They can explain why some of us automatically go for a jog every morning and are more productive at work, while others oversleep and procrastinate. There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.

Inside the brain-and-cognitive-sciences department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are what, to the casual observer, look like dollhouse versions of surgical theaters. There are rooms with tiny scalpels, small drills and miniature saws. Even the operating tables are petite, as if prepared for 7-year-old surgeons. Inside those shrunken O.R.’s, neurologists cut into the skulls of anesthetized rats, implanting tiny sensors that record the smallest changes in the activity of their brains.

An M.I.T. neuroscientist named Ann Graybiel told me that she and her colleagues began exploring habits more than a decade ago by putting their wired rats into a T-shaped maze with chocolate at one end. The maze was structured so that each animal was positioned behind a barrier that opened after a loud click. The first time a rat was placed in the maze, it would usually wander slowly up and down the center aisle after the barrier slid away, sniffing in corners and scratching at walls. It appeared to smell the chocolate but couldn’t figure out how to find it. There was no discernible pattern in the rat’s meanderings and no indication it was working hard to find the treat.

The probes in the rats’ heads, however, told a different story. While each animal wandered through the maze, its brain was working furiously. Every time a rat sniffed the air or scratched a wall, the neurosensors inside the animal’s head exploded with activity. As the scientists repeated the experiment, again and again, the rats eventually stopped sniffing corners and making wrong turns and began to zip through the maze with more and more speed. And within their brains, something unexpected occurred: as each rat learned how to complete the maze more quickly, its mental activity decreased. As the path became more and more automatic — as it became a habit — the rats started thinking less and less.

This process, in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine, is called “chunking.” There are dozens, if not hundreds, of behavioral chunks we rely on every day. Some are simple: you automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush before sticking it in your mouth. Some, like making the kids’ lunch, are a little more complex. Still others are so complicated that it’s remarkable to realize that a habit could have emerged at all.

Take backing your car out of the driveway. When you first learned to drive, that act required a major dose of concentration, and for good reason: it involves peering into the rearview and side mirrors and checking for obstacles, putting your foot on the brake, moving the gearshift into reverse, removing your foot from the brake, estimating the distance between the garage and the street while keeping the wheels aligned, calculating how images in the mirrors translate into actual distances, all while applying differing amounts of pressure to the gas pedal and brake.

Now, you perform that series of actions every time you pull into the street without thinking very much. Your brain has chunked large parts of it. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any repeated behavior into a habit, because habits allow our minds to conserve effort. But conserving mental energy is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment, we might fail to notice something important, like a child riding her bike down the sidewalk or a speeding car coming down the street. So we’ve devised a clever system to determine when to let a habit take over. It’s something that happens whenever a chunk of behavior starts or ends — and it helps to explain why habits are so difficult to change once they’re formed, despite our best intentions.

To understand this a little more clearly, consider again the chocolate-seeking rats. What Graybiel and her colleagues found was that, as the ability to navigate the maze became habitual, there were two spikes in the rats’ brain activity — once at the beginning of the maze, when the rat heard the click right before the barrier slid away, and once at the end, when the rat found the chocolate. Those spikes show when the rats’ brains were fully engaged, and the dip in neural activity between the spikes showed when the habit took over. From behind the partition, the rat wasn’t sure what waited on the other side, until it heard the click, which it had come to associate with the maze. Once it heard that sound, it knew to use the “maze habit,” and its brain activity decreased. Then at the end of the routine, when the reward appeared, the brain shook itself awake again and the chocolate signaled to the rat that this particular habit was worth remembering, and the neurological pathway was carved that much deeper.

The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop — cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward — becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges. What’s unique about cues and rewards, however, is how subtle they can be. Neurological studies like the ones in Graybiel’s lab have revealed that some cues span just milliseconds. And rewards can range from the obvious (like the sugar rush that a morning doughnut habit provides) to the infinitesimal (like the barely noticeable — but measurable — sense of relief the brain experiences after successfully navigating the driveway). Most cues and rewards, in fact, happen so quickly and are so slight that we are hardly aware of them at all. But our neural systems notice and use them to build automatic behaviors.

Habits aren’t destiny — they can be ignored, changed or replaced. But it’s also true that once the loop is established and a habit emerges, your brain stops fully participating in decision-making. So unless you deliberately fight a habit — unless you find new cues and rewards — the old pattern will unfold automatically.

“We’ve done experiments where we trained rats to run down a maze until it was a habit, and then we extinguished the habit by changing the placement of the reward,” Graybiel told me. “Then one day, we’ll put the reward in the old place and put in the rat and, by golly, the old habit will re-emerge right away. Habits never really disappear.”

Luckily, simply understanding how habits work makes them easier to control. Take, for instance, a series of studies conducted a few years ago at Columbia University and the University of Alberta. Researchers wanted to understand how exercise habits emerge. In one project, 256 members of a health-insurance plan were invited to classes stressing the importance of exercise. Half the participants received an extra lesson on the theories of habit formation (the structure of the habit loop) and were asked to identify cues and rewards that might help them develop exercise routines.

The results were dramatic. Over the next four months, those participants who deliberately identified cues and rewards spent twice as much time exercising as their peers. Other studies have yielded similar results. According to another recent paper, if you want to start running in the morning, it’s essential that you choose a simple cue (like always putting on your sneakers before breakfast or leaving your running clothes next to your bed) and a clear reward (like a midday treat or even the sense of accomplishment that comes from ritually recording your miles in a log book). After a while, your brain will start anticipating that reward — craving the treat or the feeling of accomplishment — and there will be a measurable neurological impulse to lace up your jogging shoes each morning.

Our relationship to e-mail operates on the same principle. When a computer chimes or a smartphone vibrates with a new message, the brain starts anticipating the neurological “pleasure” (even if we don’t recognize it as such) that clicking on the e-mail and reading it provides. That expectation, if unsatisfied, can build until you find yourself moved to distraction by the thought of an e-mail sitting there unread — even if you know, rationally, it’s most likely not important. On the other hand, once you remove the cue by disabling the buzzing of your phone or the chiming of your computer, the craving is never triggered, and you’ll find, over time, that you’re able to work productively for long stretches without checking your in-box.

Some of the most ambitious habit experiments have been conducted by corporate America. To understand why executives are so entranced by this science, consider how one of the world’s largest companies, Procter & Gamble, used habit insights to turn a failing product into one of its biggest sellers. P.& G. is the corporate behemoth behind a whole range of products, from Downy fabric softener to Bounty paper towels to Duracell batteries and dozens of other household brands. In the mid-1990s, P.& G.’s executives began a secret project to create a new product that could eradicate bad smells. P.& G. spent millions developing a colorless, cheap-to-manufacture liquid that could be sprayed on a smoky blouse, stinky couch, old jacket or stained car interior and make it odorless. In order to market the product — Febreze — the company formed a team that included a former Wall Street mathematician named Drake Stimson and habit specialists, whose job was to make sure the television commercials, which they tested in Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Boise, Idaho, accentuated the product’s cues and rewards just right.

The first ad showed a woman complaining about the smoking section of a restaurant. Whenever she eats there, she says, her jacket smells like smoke. A friend tells her that if she uses Febreze, it will eliminate the odor. The cue in the ad is clear: the harsh smell of cigarette smoke. The reward: odor eliminated from clothes. The second ad featured a woman worrying about her dog, Sophie, who always sits on the couch. “Sophie will always smell like Sophie,” she says, but with Febreze, “now my furniture doesn’t have to.” The ads were put in heavy rotation. Then the marketers sat back, anticipating how they would spend their bonuses. A week passed. Then two. A month. Two months. Sales started small and got smaller. Febreze was a dud.

The panicked marketing team canvassed consumers and conducted in-depth interviews to figure out what was going wrong, Stimson recalled. Their first inkling came when they visited a woman’s home outside Phoenix. The house was clean and organized. She was something of a neat freak, the woman explained. But when P.& G.’s scientists walked into her living room, where her nine cats spent most of their time, the scent was so overpowering that one of them gagged.

According to Stimson, who led the Febreze team, a researcher asked the woman, “What do you do about the cat smell?”

“It’s usually not a problem,” she said.

“Do you smell it now?”

“No,” she said. “Isn’t it wonderful? They hardly smell at all!”

A similar scene played out in dozens of other smelly homes. The reason Febreze wasn’t selling, the marketers realized, was that people couldn’t detect most of the bad smells in their lives. If you live with nine cats, you become desensitized to their scents. If you smoke cigarettes, eventually you don’t smell smoke anymore. Even the strongest odors fade with constant exposure. That’s why Febreze was a failure. The product’s cue — the bad smells that were supposed to trigger daily use — was hidden from the people who needed it the most. And Febreze’s reward (an odorless home) was meaningless to someone who couldn’t smell offensive scents in the first place.

P.& G. employed a Harvard Business School professor to analyze Febreze’s ad campaigns. They collected hours of footage of people cleaning their homes and watched tape after tape, looking for clues that might help them connect Febreze to people’s daily habits. When that didn’t reveal anything, they went into the field and conducted more interviews. A breakthrough came when they visited a woman in a suburb near Scottsdale, Ariz., who was in her 40s with four children. Her house was clean, though not compulsively tidy, and didn’t appear to have any odor problems; there were no pets or smokers. To the surprise of everyone, she loved Febreze.

“I use it every day,” she said.

“What smells are you trying to get rid of?” a researcher asked.

“I don’t really use it for specific smells,” the woman said. “I use it for normal cleaning — a couple of sprays when I’m done in a room.”

The researchers followed her around as she tidied the house. In the bedroom, she made her bed, tightened the sheet’s corners, then sprayed the comforter with Febreze. In the living room, she vacuumed, picked up the children’s shoes, straightened the coffee table, then sprayed Febreze on the freshly cleaned carpet.

“It’s nice, you know?” she said. “Spraying feels like a little minicelebration when I’m done with a room.” At the rate she was going, the team estimated, she would empty a bottle of Febreze every two weeks.

When they got back to P.& G.’s headquarters, the researchers watched their videotapes again. Now they knew what to look for and saw their mistake in scene after scene. Cleaning has its own habit loops that already exist. In one video, when a woman walked into a dirty room (cue), she started sweeping and picking up toys (routine), then she examined the room and smiled when she was done (reward). In another, a woman scowled at her unmade bed (cue), proceeded to straighten the blankets and comforter (routine) and then sighed as she ran her hands over the freshly plumped pillows (reward). P.& G. had been trying to create a whole new habit with Febreze, but what they really needed to do was piggyback on habit loops that were already in place. The marketers needed to position Febreze as something that came at the end of the cleaning ritual, the reward, rather than as a whole new cleaning routine.

The company printed new ads showing open windows and gusts of fresh air. More perfume was added to the Febreze formula, so that instead of merely neutralizing odors, the spray had its own distinct scent. Television commercials were filmed of women, having finished their cleaning routine, using Febreze to spritz freshly made beds and just-laundered clothing. Each ad was designed to appeal to the habit loop: when you see a freshly cleaned room (cue), pull out Febreze (routine) and enjoy a smell that says you’ve done a great job (reward). When you finish making a bed (cue), spritz Febreze (routine) and breathe a sweet, contented sigh (reward). Febreze, the ads implied, was a pleasant treat, not a reminder that your home stinks.

And so Febreze, a product originally conceived as a revolutionary way to destroy odors, became an air freshener used once things are already clean. The Febreze revamp occurred in the summer of 1998. Within two months, sales doubled. A year later, the product brought in $230 million. Since then Febreze has spawned dozens of spinoffs — air fresheners, candles and laundry detergents — that now account for sales of more than $1 billion a year. Eventually, P.& G. began mentioning to customers that, in addition to smelling sweet, Febreze can actually kill bad odors. Today it’s one of the top-selling products in the world.

Andrew Pole was hired by Target to use the same kinds of insights into consumers’ habits to expand Target’s sales. His assignment was to analyze all the cue-routine-reward loops among shoppers and help the company figure out how to exploit them. Much of his department’s work was straightforward: find the customers who have children and send them catalogs that feature toys before Christmas. Look for shoppers who habitually purchase swimsuits in April and send them coupons for sunscreen in July and diet books in December. But Pole’s most important assignment was to identify those unique moments in consumers’ lives when their shopping habits become particularly flexible and the right advertisement or coupon would cause them to begin spending in new ways.

In the 1980s, a team of researchers led by a U.C.L.A. professor named Alan Andreasen undertook a study of peoples’ most mundane purchases, like soap, toothpaste, trash bags and toilet paper. They learned that most shoppers paid almost no attention to how they bought these products, that the purchases occurred habitually, without any complex decision-making. Which meant it was hard for marketers, despite their displays and coupons and product promotions, to persuade shoppers to change.

But when some customers were going through a major life event, like graduating from college or getting a new job or moving to a new town, their shopping habits became flexible in ways that were both predictable and potential gold mines for retailers. The study found that when someone marries, he or she is more likely to start buying a new type of coffee. When a couple move into a new house, they’re more apt to purchase a different kind of cereal. When they divorce, there’s an increased chance they’ll start buying different brands of beer.

Consumers going through major life events often don’t notice, or care, that their shopping habits have shifted, but retailers notice, and they care quite a bit. At those unique moments, Andreasen wrote, customers are “vulnerable to intervention by marketers.” In other words, a precisely timed advertisement, sent to a recent divorcee or new homebuyer, can change someone’s shopping patterns for years.

And among life events, none are more important than the arrival of a baby. At that moment, new parents’ habits are more flexible than at almost any other time in their adult lives. If companies can identify pregnant shoppers, they can earn millions.

The only problem is that identifying pregnant customers is harder than it sounds. Target has a baby-shower registry, and Pole started there, observing how shopping habits changed as a woman approached her due date, which women on the registry had willingly disclosed. He ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. What’s more, because of the data attached to her Guest ID number, Target knows how to trigger Jenny’s habits. They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she’ll use it when she comes back again.

In the past, that knowledge had limited value. After all, Jenny purchased only cleaning supplies at Target, and there were only so many psychological buttons the company could push. But now that she is pregnant, everything is up for grabs. In addition to triggering Jenny’s habits to buy more cleaning products, they can also start including offers for an array of products, some more obvious than others, that a woman at her stage of pregnancy might need.

Pole applied his program to every regular female shopper in Target’s national database and soon had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. If they could entice those women or their husbands to visit Target and buy baby-related products, the company’s cue-routine-reward calculators could kick in and start pushing them to buy groceries, bathing suits, toys and clothing, as well. When Pole shared his list with the marketers, he said, they were ecstatic. Soon, Pole was getting invited to meetings above his paygrade. Eventually his paygrade went up.

At which point someone asked an important question: How are women going to react when they figure out how much Target knows?

“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

When I approached Target to discuss Pole’s work, its representatives declined to speak with me. “Our mission is to make Target the preferred shopping destination for our guests by delivering outstanding value, continuous innovation and exceptional guest experience,” the company wrote in a statement. “We’ve developed a number of research tools that allow us to gain insights into trends and preferences within different demographic segments of our guest population.” When I sent Target a complete summary of my reporting, the reply was more terse: “Almost all of your statements contain inaccurate information and publishing them would be misleading to the public. We do not intend to address each statement point by point.” The company declined to identify what was inaccurate. They did add, however, that Target “is in compliance with all federal and state laws, including those related to protected health information.”

When I offered to fly to Target’s headquarters to discuss its concerns, a spokeswoman e-mailed that no one would meet me. When I flew out anyway, I was told I was on a list of prohibited visitors. “I’ve been instructed not to give you access and to ask you to leave,” said a very nice security guard named Alex.

Using data to predict a woman’s pregnancy, Target realized soon after Pole perfected his model, could be a public-relations disaster. So the question became: how could they get their advertisements into expectant mothers’ hands without making it appear they were spying on them? How do you take advantage of someone’s habits without letting them know you’re studying their lives?

Before I met Andrew Pole, before I even decided to write a book about the science of habit formation, I had another goal: I wanted to lose weight.

I had got into a bad habit of going to the cafeteria every afternoon and eating a chocolate-chip cookie, which contributed to my gaining a few pounds. Eight, to be precise. I put a Post-it note on my computer reading “NO MORE COOKIES.” But every afternoon, I managed to ignore that note, wander to the cafeteria, buy a cookie and eat it while chatting with colleagues. Tomorrow, I always promised myself, I’ll muster the willpower to resist.

Tomorrow, I ate another cookie.

When I started interviewing experts in habit formation, I concluded each interview by asking what I should do. The first step, they said, was to figure out my habit loop. The routine was simple: every afternoon, I walked to the cafeteria, bought a cookie and ate it while chatting with friends.

Next came some less obvious questions: What was the cue? Hunger? Boredom? Low blood sugar? And what was the reward? The taste of the cookie itself? The temporary distraction from my work? The chance to socialize with colleagues?

Rewards are powerful because they satisfy cravings, but we’re often not conscious of the urges driving our habits in the first place. So one day, when I felt a cookie impulse, I went outside and took a walk instead. The next day, I went to the cafeteria and bought a coffee. The next, I bought an apple and ate it while chatting with friends. You get the idea. I wanted to test different theories regarding what reward I was really craving. Was it hunger? (In which case the apple should have worked.) Was it the desire for a quick burst of energy? (If so, the coffee should suffice.) Or, as turned out to be the answer, was it that after several hours spent focused on work, I wanted to socialize, to make sure I was up to speed on office gossip, and the cookie was just a convenient excuse? When I walked to a colleague’s desk and chatted for a few minutes, it turned out, my cookie urge was gone.

All that was left was identifying the cue.

Deciphering cues is hard, however. Our lives often contain too much information to figure out what is triggering a particular behavior. Do you eat breakfast at a certain time because you’re hungry? Or because the morning news is on? Or because your kids have started eating? Experiments have shown that most cues fit into one of five categories: location, time, emotional state, other people or the immediately preceding action. So to figure out the cue for my cookie habit, I wrote down five things the moment the urge hit:

Where are you? (Sitting at my desk.)

What time is it? (3:36 p.m.)

What’s your emotional state? (Bored.)

Who else is around? (No one.)

What action preceded the urge? (Answered an e-mail.)

The next day I did the same thing. And the next. Pretty soon, the cue was clear: I always felt an urge to snack around 3:30.

Once I figured out all the parts of the loop, it seemed fairly easy to change my habit. But the psychologists and neuroscientists warned me that, for my new behavior to stick, I needed to abide by the same principle that guided Procter & Gamble in selling Febreze: To shift the routine — to socialize, rather than eat a cookie — I needed to piggyback on an existing habit. So now, every day around 3:30, I stand up, look around the newsroom for someone to talk to, spend 10 minutes gossiping, then go back to my desk. The cue and reward have stayed the same. Only the routine has shifted. It doesn’t feel like a decision, any more than the M.I.T. rats made a decision to run through the maze. It’s now a habit. I’ve lost 21 pounds since then.

After Andrew Pole built his pregnancy-prediction model, after he identified thousands of female shoppers who were most likely pregnant, after someone pointed out that some of those women might be a little upset if they received an advertisement making it obvious Target was studying their reproductive status, everyone decided to slow things down.

The marketing department conducted a few tests by choosing a small, random sample of women from Pole’s list and mailing them combinations of advertisements to see how they reacted.

“We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, ‘Here’s everything you bought last week and a coupon for it,’ ” one Target executive told me. “We do that for grocery products all the time.” But for pregnant women, Target’s goal was selling them baby items they didn’t even know they needed yet.

“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

In other words, if Target piggybacked on existing habits — the same cues and rewards they already knew got customers to buy cleaning supplies or socks — then they could insert a new routine: buying baby products, as well. There’s a cue (“Oh, a coupon for something I need!”) a routine (“Buy! Buy! Buy!”) and a reward (“I can take that off my list”). And once the shopper is inside the store, Target will hit her with cues and rewards to entice her to purchase everything she normally buys somewhere else. As long as Target camouflaged how much it knew, as long as the habit felt familiar, the new behavior took hold.

Soon after the new ad campaign began, Target’s Mom and Baby sales exploded. The company doesn’t break out figures for specific divisions, but between 2002 — when Pole was hired — and 2010, Target’s revenues grew from $44 billion to $67 billion. In 2005, the company’s president, Gregg Steinhafel, boasted to a room of investors about the company’s “heightened focus on items and categories that appeal to specific guest segments such as mom and baby.”

Pole was promoted. He has been invited to speak at conferences. “I never expected this would become such a big deal,” he told me the last time we spoke.

A few weeks before this article went to press, I flew to Minneapolis to try and speak to Andrew Pole one last time. I hadn’t talked to him in more than a year. Back when we were still friendly, I mentioned that my wife was seven months pregnant. We shop at Target, I told him, and had given the company our address so we could start receiving coupons in the mail. As my wife’s pregnancy progressed, I noticed a subtle upswing in the number of advertisements for diapers and baby clothes arriving at our house.

Pole didn’t answer my e-mails or phone calls when I visited Minneapolis. I drove to his large home in a nice suburb, but no one answered the door. On my way back to the hotel, I stopped at a Target to pick up some deodorant, then also bought some T-shirts and a fancy hair gel. On a whim, I threw in some pacifiers, to see how the computers would react. Besides, our baby is now 9 months old. You can’t have too many pacifiers.

When I paid, I didn’t receive any sudden deals on diapers or formula, to my slight disappointment. It made sense, though: I was shopping in a city I never previously visited, at 9:45 p.m. on a weeknight, buying a random assortment of items. I was using a corporate credit card, and besides the pacifiers, hadn’t purchased any of the things that a parent needs. It was clear to Target’s computers that I was on a business trip. Pole’s prediction calculator took one look at me, ran the numbers and decided to bide its time. Back home, the offers would eventually come. As Pole told me the last time we spoke: “Just wait. We’ll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/m...ng-habits.html





Google Reportedly Ignoring Safari Users' Privacy Settings to Better Track its Ads
Daniel Eran Dilger

Google has joined other online advertisers in intentionally circumventing the privacy settings of desktop and iOS Safari users in an effort to better track their web browsing activity [updated with comment from Google].

According to an investigation by Wall Street Journal, Google and at least three other smaller web ad networks (Vibrant Media, Media Innovation Group and Gannett PointRoll), have purposely overridden Safari's browser privacy settings using code that misrepresents its ads as being a user-initiated form submission.

The default settings of Safari block cookies "from third parties and advertisers," a setting that is supposed to only allow sites that the user is directly interacting with to save a cookie (client side data that remote web servers can later access in subsequent visits).

Advertisers like Google save cookies on users' browsers so they can track their browsing habits across the various websites they place their ads on, and these "third party" cookies are expressly what the setting is designed to block.

The report notes that "Google added coding to some of its ads that made Safari think that a person was submitting an invisible form to Google. Safari would then let Google install a cookie on the phone or computer."

While the cookies were set to expire with a day or two, the report states that a "technical quirk in Safari" subsequently "allows companies to easily add more cookies to a user's computer once the company has installed at least one cookie," resulting in "extensive tracking of Safari users."

Google's hack around Safari's browser privacy settings was discovered by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer and "independently confirmed by a technical adviser to the Journal, Ashkan Soltani," who the site reported to have found Google's circumvention code enabling tracking for about a third of the web's top 100 sites for either desktop users or iOS users.

The Wall Street Journal named a wide variety of top websites, including Google's own YouTube, Aol, About.com, Comcast, NYTimes, YellowPages.com, Match.com and Fandango, as testing positive for Google's circumvention code, but noted that "there is no indication that any of the sites knew of the code" that Google was placing on their pages as a third party web advertising network.

The report cited Michael Balmoris, a spokesperson for AT&T, the operator of YellowPages.com, as saying "We were not aware of this behavior," and "we would never condone it."

It also cited an unnamed "official" from Apple as saying "we are working to put a stop" to the circumvention of Safari's privacy settings by advertisers like Google.

Google itself issued a statement saying the Wall Street Journal "mischaracterizes what happened and why. We used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled. It's important to stress that these advertising cookies do not collect personal information."

Update: Google reached out to AppleInsider to share the following comment from the company's senior vice president of Communications and Public Policy, Rachel Whetstone:

The Journal mischaracterizes what happened and why. We used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled. It’s important to stress that these advertising cookies do not collect personal information.

Unlike other major browsers, Apple’s Safari browser blocks third-party cookies by default. However, Safari enables many web features for its users that rely on third parties and third-party cookies, such as “Like” buttons. Last year, we began using this functionality to enable features for signed-in Google users on Safari who had opted to see personalized ads and other content--such as the ability to “+1” things that interest them.

To enable these features, we created a temporary communication link between Safari browsers and Google’s servers, so that we could ascertain whether Safari users were also signed into Google, and had opted for this type of personalization. But we designed this so that the information passing between the user’s Safari browser and Google’s servers was anonymous--effectively creating a barrier between their personal information and the web content they browse.

However, the Safari browser contained functionality that then enabled other Google advertising cookies to be set on the browser. We didn’t anticipate that this would happen, and we have now started removing these advertising cookies from Safari browsers. It’s important to stress that, just as on other browsers, these advertising cookies do not collect personal information.

Users of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome were not affected. Nor were users of any browser (including Safari) who have opted out of our interest-based advertising program using Google’s Ads Preferences Manager.

Vibrant Media, another web advertiser using similar tactics to Google's, called the circumvention a "workaround" intended to "make Safari work like all the other browsers," because other major browsers, including Google's own Chrome and the almost exclusively Google-financed Mozilla Firefox, do not block third party cookie tracking by default.

Google is already under government scrutiny regarding its privacy policies. In a settlement last year with the US Federal Trade Commission, the company agreed not to "misrepresent" privacy practices to customers or pay a fine of $16,000 per violation per day.

However, in its own online privacy guide, Google represented to Safari users that they did not need to do anything to opt out of its advertising cookies because "Safari is set by default to block all third-party cookies. If you have not changed those settings, this option effectively accomplishes the same thing."

Google has since removed that wording from its site, and after being contacted by the Wall Street Journal, has also reportedly disabled the tracking code to circumvent Safari's privacy settings.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...k_its_ads.html





Will Do Not Track Kill the 'Free' Internet?

That's what some folks believe, anyway. I think that argument is wrong. Here's why.
Dan Tynan

I got some interesting reactions to my last post about Abine’s Do Not Track Plus utility. In a nutshell: Without the benefits brought by online tracking, the “free” Internet will cease to exist.

I want to address some of those concerns here, but first, let’s get one thing straight: For me and the 1 billion+ people who access the Web on a daily basis, the Internet is hardly “free.” Adding up the costs of access at home, at my office, and for various mobile devices for my family of four, I spend more than $200 a month for “free” Internet.

Yes, I understand, that money is going to ISPs, not content providers. But to me, Joe Consumer, the Internet isn’t all that much different than cable TV: I pay a certain amount each month to get mostly ad-supported content delivered to me. I don’t give a damn about how CNN or AMC or MSNBC make their money, their business models, who pays how much to whom for what, yadda yadda; all I care about is what my cable bill costs each month.

But the Internet costs much more than cable TV, and not just in terms of pure dollars. It costs me my privacy. Because Web ads know far more about me than TV commercials do. They know which other ads I’ve seen as I surf, and they know which ads I may have responded to. They also know what “channels” I’ve watched (i.e., sites I’ve visited), and depending on the ad network, they might also know my IP address, my city, the things I’ve searched for, and more. And once they collect this information, they can do anything they want with it. There are no rules.

In the ad biz this is called Behavioral Targeting. You and I know this better as Web Tracking. Now Behavioral Targeting/Web Tracking is not necessarily evil. But it’s another way I pay for online access, and it happens automatically without my prior consent.

There are a lot of moving parts to this debate, which I can’t tackle in a single blog post. But to grossly oversimplify: Advertisers and their cronies argue that a) online tracking is totally anonymous and thus not a threat, and b) without targeted advertising, the “free” Internet will go away. Privacy advocates argue that a) tracking isn’t quite as anonymous as advertisers claim, and b) consumers who don’t want their movements tracked online have a right to Just Say No.

I have a problem with the argument that, without targeted ads, the “free” Internet will dry up and blow away. For one thing, behavioral targeting accounted for only about 15 percent of all online advertising last year, per Parks Associates. That number will undoubtedly rise, largely because publishers make significantly more money for targeted ads than they do for “run of network” ads. As every device we use gets an IP address, this type of targeting will also come to television and our phones. But an Internet without Web tracking is not an Internet without ads. If you removed behaviorally targeted ads from the InterWebs tomorrow, it would hardly be a death blow.

Another thing: How many people are likely to use a tool like Abine’s Do Not Track Plus to block Web trackers, really? What that tool primarily does is make it easy to set opt out cookies to block trackers – a practice the ad industry itself has grudgingly endorsed, and something Evidon’s Ghostery also does, though it makes you jump through more hoops. Ten percent? Twenty? I suspect a lot less. It’s a fraction of Internet users who care enough to think about it. So we’re really talking about 1 to 2 percent of all ads being affected, maybe.

Is the “Don’t track me, bro” crowd excessively paranoid? Possibly. I would argue that we don’t really know what these nearly 800 Web tracking companies know about us, because the only source we have for that information is the companies themselves. So their argument really comes down to two words: Trust us.

I’m willing to assume 90 to 95 percent of Web trackers are perfectly benign and have no interest in building a dossier of my Web behavior that can be traced back to my name and address. It’s the other 5 to 10 percent that worries me. And for that reason alone, I’d rather block than fight.

This argument isn’t over by a long shot. Look for followup posts on this topic later this week.
http://www.itworld.com/it-management...-free-internet





Bram Cohen: My Goal is to Kill off Television
Janko Roettgers

BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen demoed his P2P live streaming protocol at the San Francisco MusicTech Summit on Monday, which he said could potentially stream live video to millions of computers with no central infrastructure. Cohen said that the protocol could potentially be used for video conferencing, live streams of video game tournaments or even live sports events. “My goal here is to kill off television,” he joked.

Cohen has worked on P2P live streaming for a number of years, and told us a while back that he completely had to start from scratch because traditional P2P algorithms introduce too much latency for live applications. BitTorrent Inc. hasn’t said how exactly it intends to productize the protocol, but Cohen said on Monday that he is talking to a number of potential partners. BitTorrent has also started to run a number of field tests on its website in recent months, streaming weekly live music events with the P2P protocol.

The ultimate winners of a P2P-based solution could be consumers, he argued, because it would enable publishers to put much more content online at a fraction of the cost of traditional CDNs. “Most of the video that people consume today is still not on the Internet,” said Cohen, adding that existing protocols aren’t set up to support big live events.
http://gigaom.com/video/bram-cohen-kill-tv/





Samsung Not Worried About Apple’s TV: “TVs are Ultimately About Picture Quality”
Devin Coldewey

In what may, in a couple years, be remembered as a telltale remark of overconfidence, Samsung’s AV product manager said today in an interview “TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are…great, but let’s face it that’s a secondary consideration.” Pride goeth before a fall, Samsung!

It’s true in a way. But only in the dumbest possible way. Yes, TVs are about picture quality. Because that’s all Samsung and Sony and Sharp have been willing to improve for the last half a century. As soon as someone comes along and changes what TVs are “ultimately about,” it’s going to be a bloodbath. Will it be Apple? I don’t know. But it sure as hell doesn’t look like it’s going to be Samsung.

To be fair, the AV product manager (his name is Chris Moseley) isn’t paid to have a lateral point of view. But his orders do come from on high, and if they say they want twice the contrast ratio of the competition and that’s what they’re selling on, well by god that’s what the AV product manager will arrange. And that’s what on high has been ordering since the TV was invented: make it look better. That’s starting to change a bit now, as we saw at CES, but it’s going to take a while to turn this ship around. The experimental stuff they’re showing off is going to be years behind anything put out by a big, UX-heavy company like Apple or a smaller, more agile one like Boxee.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a good picture. But LCD-based TVs, which will probably remain the standard for at least five or ten more years, are kind of peaking right now. You can buy a TV for under five hundred bucks that’s 90% as good as the five-thousand-dollar one. And furthermore, it’s already ten times better than what you could get for the same price a few years ago.

And add to this the fact that many people don’t understand, recognize, or even care about the difference between 720p and 1080p, to say nothing of 4K or HDR or local dimming or what have you. Moseley teases Apple, saying “they don’t have 10,000 people in R&D in the vision category.” And what have those 10,000 researchers, and their counterparts at Sharp and Toshiba and the rest, done for them lately? TV sales are down, nobody cares about 3D, and everybody wonders why it’s so hard to get content for their big screen.

People are curious about Roku and Boxee Box. Netflix Streaming has reinvented home movies. And the big TV companies are, contrary to Mosely’s suggestion, realizing that the way you interact with the content is becoming as important as the content itself.

And it’s here that Apple (and Google, and Netflix, and Hulu) have a leg up on Samsung. Sure, Samsung has 10,000 researchers putting together slightly better TVs every year. But TVs aren’t ultimately about picture quality, they’re about what that great picture quality is showing. The other guys have been working on that piece for years.

Picture quality is going to take a much-needed break while more important things take its place among the yearly updates and spec points. And as long as Samsung is of the opinion that how things look is the only metric worth considering, they’re going to be paying someone else for those new features.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/13/sam...cture-quality/





Thinking Outside the Redbox
Nick Wingfield

To many people, the coffee dispensed by vending machines is a sour brew, forever associated with jury duty waiting rooms and bowling alleys.

But Coinstar, which has become a force in self-service retailing through the swift rise of Redbox, its movie rental subsidiary, hopes to change that. When a visitor to its headquarters here dips a credit card into a coffee machine in the company cafeteria, the machine grinds a batch of beans and dribbles out a $1 cup of fresh coffee that tastes pretty close to a cup from any upscale coffee bar.

The machine is the latest bet by Coinstar, which is best known for its Redbox kiosks that have become nearly inescapable in some parts of the country. More than 35,000 of the bright red machines are tucked into corners of Walmarts, McDonald’s outlets and drugstores. Its $1.20-a-night DVD rentals made it into the biggest renter of home videos in the United States and helped drive many Blockbuster stores out of business.

Those cheap rentals also turned Redbox into one of Hollywood’s boogeymen who, along with Netflix, were blamed for accelerating the decline of home video sales. Faced with the prospect that online movie watching will eventually replace physical discs, Redbox last week banded together with Verizon Communications to form a service that combines DVD and streaming movie options.

Redbox’s profile has largely overshadowed its parent company’s broader ambitions to reinvent vending machines by applying them to new categories of retailing, as well as old ones like coffee. In an interview at the company’s headquarters, Paul Davis, chief executive of Coinstar, said there was great convenience in self-service kiosks because of how widely they can be placed in grocery stores and other locations.

“Consumers love it because they don’t have a lot of time on their hands,” Mr. Davis, 54, said over coffee dispensed by the new vending machine in Coinstar’s cafeteria. “We try to be where the consumer goes everyday.”

Until Redbox took off, Coinstar was known for its namesake coin-counting kiosks, more than 20,000 of which are now installed inside grocery and other retail chains. The company was founded just over two decades ago by Jens Molbak, who as a Stanford University graduate student realized there wasn’t an easy way to spend the spare change piled up in a jar on top of his dresser. Coinstar converts change into cash or store vouchers, earning a transaction fee in the process.

The coffee kiosks are the first of what Coinstar expects to be a wave of new vending machines from the company. It is testing the machines in locations around the country and expects to have about 500 installed by the end of the year.

Mr. Davis envisions the 3-foot-by-3-foot kiosks going into supermarkets, gas stations and office buildings, though he does not see a need for them in retail locations that already have a small Starbucks or some other coffee chain. Coinstar joined with Starbucks on the kiosks, which are labeled with the company’s Seattle’s Best Coffee brand.

Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said he believed the coffee kiosks represented a meaningful growth market for Coinstar. “The retailer relationship is their biggest competitive advantage,” Mr. Pachter said. “If every place has a coin box, they know how to get another 12 square feet.”

A kiosk concept Coinstar is experimenting with in about eight retail locations in Texas and California is called Gizmo, through which it sells used video game consoles, iPads and other electronics. Many of the items in the kiosks are refurbished by a manufacturer or another party with prices that are up to half off retail, Mr. Davis said.

Other concepts it is testing include ecoATM, a kiosk created by a start-up Coinstar invested in that allows consumers to trade in old cellphones and other electronics for cash. The machine uses a camera to evaluate the condition of the devices. Coinstar says the traded-in phones often end up being sold in developing countries, a more environmentally friendly outcome than going to landfills.

Mr. Davis said Coinstar had about eight or nine kiosk ideas in various stages of development, part of an effort it established about 18 months ago. It tests concepts in public locations, often in primitive form and with employees nearby to observe how customers are interacting with them; the early prototypes of Gizmo, for example, were made out of cardboard.

“What we try to do is plant a lot of seeds,” Mr. Davis said. “We know the math says only about half are going to work.”

The company will need new kiosk successes as physical movie rentals, its biggest business, face an uncertain future. About 85 percent of Coinstar’s $1.85 billion in revenue last year was from Redbox. The number of movies rented in DVD and Blu-ray formats last year in the United States fell by 11 percent from the year before, as chains like Blockbuster closed more bricks-and-mortar stores and viewers switched to online movie watching, according to NPD Group, a research firm in Port Washington, N.Y.

Despite the weakness in the overall rental market, Redbox thrived by gobbling up share from physical stores. Its number of rentals jumped 28 percent in 2011 from 2010. It accounted for 37 percent of physical movie rentals last year, up from 25 percent in 2010, NPD said. Earlier this month, Coinstar made a move to further consolidate its position in physical rental with the proposed acquisition for up to $100 million of the entertainment business of NCR, which operates DVD rental kiosks that use the Blockbuster brand.

Still, analysts say the long-term trend is irreversible: Consumers will increasingly stop renting discs in favor of the convenience of online movie watching. “Consumers’ interest in the DVD medium is going to fall far faster than we think,” said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG Research.

Mr. Davis said that the decline in physical rentals would take longer than most expected. He does, however, concede that the decline will come. That is one reason the company worked with Verizon on the venture to create a service combining physical and online movie rentals. Details about the service, which will begin during the second half of the year, are sparse, but it is expected to be a subscription service with a monthly fee, like Netflix.

The online movies licensed by Verizon for the service will most likely consist of older titles because Hollywood studios tend to delay the release of many new films online. Customers will be able to go to Redbox kiosks to get newer movies on disc. Redbox owns 35 percent of the venture, with Verizon owning the remainder.

Some Hollywood studios, though, are trying to make it difficult for Redbox to get fresh movies into its kiosks, out of concern that its dirt-cheap rentals are cutting into home video sales. Several years ago, Redbox sued several of the studios for threatening to withhold DVD supplies for rentals for almost a month after the discs went on sale. In later settlements, Redbox agreed to delay rentals for 28 days in exchange for getting better economic terms from the studios for DVDs.

An agreement with one of those studios, Warner Brothers, expired at the end of January, and Redbox refused to agree to a new deal to delay rentals by 56 days from the date of their DVD release. That, in turn, forced Redbox to get Warner movies from other sources, including the same retail stores where consumers buy DVDs. United States copyright law allows a company like Redbox to rent out movies they buy retail.

Warren Lieberfarb, the former president of Warner’s home video division and now a consultant in Los Angeles, said Redbox had largely become an adversary of the studios, which “completely missed Netflix and Redbox as threats to the business model of people buying” movies. In a recent research report, Mr. Greenfield, the analyst, called Redbox “Hollywood Enemy #1.”

Mr. Davis said Redbox had good relationships with most of the studios. “I think we can always get better,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/b...x-success.html





FCC Can Auction Spectrum, But Will Broadcasters Sell?
Joe Flint

When it comes to parting with their spectrum, many broadcasters have the same attitude Charlton Heston had when it came to his rifle: The government can pry it from their “cold dead hands.”

On Friday, Congress cleared the way for the Federal Communications Commission to auction off some of the airwaves that broadcasters use to transmit their programming to wireless companies.

The proceeds would go toward building a new national network for law enforcement and public safety workers and toward paying for an extension of payroll tax and unemployment benefits.

Now comes the hard part: actually getting the spectrum, which has been valued at $25 billion, back from broadcasters to sell.

Even though the potential cut for broadcasters from the sale is $1.75 billion, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of excitement about the idea.

“We have no intention of giving up spectrum,” said Alan Frank, president and chief executive of Post-Newsweek Stations, a broadcasting group that owns stations in several big cities, including Detroit, Houston and Miami.

David Smith, CEO of Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., which operates 74 stations around the country, said he “hasn't heard of any broadcaster who has said they have anything for sale.”

The big networks seem to share that view. Although none would comment publicly, executives at Fox and NBC indicated they had no desire to sell any of their airwaves. CBS Chief Executive Leslie Moonves has previously said his company wants to keep all its spectrum.

“It would hurt our business,” Moonves said when asked last year at the National Assn. of Broadcasters convention if he would consider parting with some of CBS' airwaves.

Some broadcasters of independent and small-market stations could be game. Bert Ellis, president of Titan Broadcasting, which owns KDOC-TV Channel 56 in Los Angeles, told the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology last June that his company might be willing to sell some of its spectrum.

In Los Angeles, there are several small independent stations that cater to ethnic groups including Asians and Latinos. The National Assn. of Broadcasters worries that if they sell, local communities would suffer.

“The stations likely to sell — if any — are the ones that offer truly niche programming serving a melting pot of immigrant populations,” said Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the broadcasters group. “The notion that an ABC or CBS affiliate would voluntarily choose to go out of business to help solve an alleged spectrum crunch is ludicrous.”

Not everyone paints such a grim picture. The Wireless Assn. and the Consumer Electronics Assn. said this week that “only a very small percentage of the nation’s broadcast stations need participate in the auction in order to address the nation’s broadband spectrum shortage.”

Philip Weiser, dean of the University of Colorado Law School and a former telecommunications advisor for the Obama administration, said he expects smaller broadcasters to try to have their cake and eat it too by sharing spectrum.

For example, one TV station could sell its spectrum and then partner with another station and share airwaves. Although that would not appeal to a big broadcaster, smaller mom-and-pop TV stations might be more willing to embrace such an option.

“It is a huge opportunity for them,” said Weiser, adding that such a practice would allow for a more efficient use of spectrum and would give broadcasters who choose to sell a “hefty profit.”
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/ente...-spectrum.html





The Pirate Bay Says Goodbye to (Most) Torrents on February 29
Ernesto

The Pirate Bay has confirmed that all torrent files being shared by more than 10 people will be deleted on February 29. The decision is causing a small panic among the site’s users, but in reality little will change as all files will remain available through magnet links. The Pirate Bay crew told TorrentFreak that this is merely a “step forward in technology” and confirmed that the site is here to stay.

For half a decade The Pirate Bay has been the leading BitTorrent site, but soon its users will no longer be able to download .torrent files.

The first step in this direction will be taken on February 29, the Pirate Bay announced today.

Instead of deleting all torrent files at once, the Pirate Bay crew will start with all files that have more than 10 peers. This is to guarantee that people will still be able to download less popular files, which tend to start slower through magnets.

While there are fears that this is the end of The Pirate Bay, nothing could be further from the truth. For users of the site the upcoming switch is expected to go smoothly.

People will be able to download all files as usual, but instead of using a .torrent file downloads will be initiated through a magnet link. The actual content of the .torrent file will then be downloaded from other people instead of the Pirate Bay’s servers.

Although it might take a little longer for less popular downloads to get started, all files will remain available. Also, users will still be able to upload .torrent files, which will be converted into magnet links by The Pirate Bay.

The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that the transition to a magnet site is “a step forward in technology,” and one that will make the site more resistant to being shut down.

Without torrents it takes less bandwidth to host a Pirate Bay proxy site which are used to circumvent ISP blockades in countries like Italy, Ireland, The Netherlands and Belgium. In addition, the Pirate Bay will become much more portable and thus easier to move around.

How easy it is to carry a copy of a torrent-less Pirate Bay became apparent last week, when a user reduced the entire site to 90 megabytes – small enough to fit on a tiny thumb drive. The Pirate Bay team likes the idea of a “portable” backup of the site and told TorrentFreak that they are considering releasing an official version in the future.

It’s quite remarkable to see how The Pirate Bay has transformed in recent years. The site is no longer hosting a tracker, and soon .torrent files will be entirely replaced by magnet links. Despite these changes the iconic file-sharing site is picking up new users every week.

The Pirate Bay crew told TorrentFreak that users can be assured that they have no intention of going anywhere in the near future. With or without torrents, the site is here to stay.
https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-...ary-29-120213/





Copyright Enforcement and the Internet: We Just Haven't Tried Hard Enough?
Timothy B. Lee

On Tuesday, Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum suggested that we don't have effective copyright enforcement on the Internet because we just haven't tried hard enough:

Something that's good enough to provide a measure of IP protection that works for the vast majority of non-supermen and isn't too unwieldy. Is that really any more unlikely than the invention of the internet itself? I'm not sure why.

This is not something you want to believe if, ideologically, you're opposed to IP protection because you think that digital content is fundamentally different from meatspace content on the grounds that making a digital copy of something doesn't reduce anyone else's ability to use their copy. But neither does copying a book. That's never been the point of IP law. It's always been about the income stream an author can get from selling copies of his or her work, and that's exactly the same in the digital world as it is in the physical world. The arguments in favor of IP protection are much the same in both domains.

You might not want to hear that, but just because you don't want to hear it doesn't mean it's not true. The truth is that IP protection in the digital world might very well be possible. We won't know until we try, making a whole lot of mistakes along the way. If you want to argue that IP protection is a bad idea, then fine. Make the argument. But don't pretend that your preferences are also technological certitudes. They aren't.

The phrase that jumped out at me was "we won't know until we try." Among people who don't pay close attention to technology issues, there seems to be a widespread impression that the copyright debate pits those who think we should enforce copyright against those who are ideologically opposed to copyright protection. But the reality is that we've been "trying" to crack down on illicit file sharing for at least two decades, granting copyright holders stronger and stronger enforcement powers and devoting more and more taxpayer dollars to the effort.

This might not be obvious to those who only write about these issues on occasion. So in the interest of a better-informed debate, here's a partial list of significant US anti-piracy efforts made over the last couple of decades:

• 1992: Congress passed the Audio Home Recording Act, which mandated that digital audio devices have copy protection baked into them, and it also imposed a tax on blank media to offset harms from digital piracy.
• 1997: Congress passed the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act, which jacked up statutory damages for copyright infringement.
• 1997: The recording industry tried to sue the first MP3 players out of existence. Fortunately, courts argued that "space shifting" is a fair use. (This was a sequel to Hollywood's effort to have the VCR declared illegal on copyright grounds in the early 1980s.)
• 1998: Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which effectively gave Hollywood the power to control the design of entertainment devices; all that was needed was to link new technologies with particular DRM schemes. Manufacturers couldn't crack the DRM, thanks to the new law, so they had to take out a license for its use, complete with a whole set of unrelated conditions. This is why, for example, most DVD players will refuse to fast-forward through commercials in a DVD if the publisher sets the "don't allow fast-forwarding" flag. Hollywood has used its rights under the DMCA to create a licensing regime for DVD players that allows it to micro-manage the design of DVD players, and consumer electronics firms that try to create a DVD player without Hollywood's permission are subject to civil and criminal penalties.
• 2000: The recording industry forced My.MP3.com out of business. My.MP3.com was one of the first "cloud music" services. It wasn't a file-sharing site. Rather, it allowed users to listen to their own music collections while on the road. The decision probably delayed the emergence of cloud music services like Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player by a decade.
• 2001: The recording industry successfully forced Napster out of business.
• Early 2000s: Under pressure from Hollywood, most states adopted laws criminalizing recording movies with camcorders.
• 2003: The recording industry began suing individual file-sharers, a process it continued for at least five years.
• 2004: Hollywood sued Kaleidescape for creating a "DVD jukebox" product that allowed users to rip DVDs and stream them to various devices around their household. That litigation is ongoing, and likely prevented the emergence of similar products.
• 2005: content companies shut down the file-sharing service Grokster and several of its competitors after a lengthy court battle.
• 2007: Hollywood sued MP3tunes, another cloud music site by the same guy who created My.MP3.com. The courts mostly sided with MP3tunes in 2011, but the case is ongoing.
• 2008: Congress passed the PRO-IP Act, which gives the government the power to seize US-based domain names after a one-sided ex parte legal process similar to the one used to seize the property of drug dealers. The PRO-IP Act also jacks up the penalties for other copyright offenses, and it created a new "IP Czar" position in the executive branch.
• 2010: The federal government began seizing domains of accused pirate sites using the powers granted by PRO-IP. The program has resulted in several dubious seizures and a couple of outright errors, though has also taken down sites like NinjaVideo in advance of prosecution and later guilty pleas from its principals.
• 2011: The US government sought the extradition of a British college student for operating a "link site." Neither he nor his servers were located in the United States during the time he ran the site, and it's not clear if he violated British law.
• 2011: Under pressure from the Obama administration, major ISPs adopted a voluntary "graduated response" system in which they will soon play a more active role in enforcing copyright on their networks.
• 2012: The United States raided and shut down Megaupload, a file-hosting site that hosted a lot of infringing content and was one of the most heavily trafficked sites in the world. The principals of the site were arrested and at least their CEO has been denied bail.

This is a partial list, focusing on the most significant anti-piracy efforts undertaken in recent years. To be clear, my point isn't that all of these policies are bad. I think the case against Napster and Grokster was pretty strong (and said so at the time in the case of Grokster). The US version of the "graduated response" system seems fairly reasonable to me, and I haven't always found locker and link sites' legal arguments persuasive.

But the broader point is clear: every item on this list has imposed costs on third parties. Technologies with clear non-infringing uses have been pushed out of the market. Innocent parties have had their websites shut down. A woman was arrested for filming a birthday party that happened to occur in a movie theater. Angel investor Paul Graham has said he avoids funding music-related startups because the record labels are "effectively a rogue state with nuclear weapons." And most of these enforcement efforts costs taxpayer money.

Individually, none of these things might be worth getting upset over. But in the aggregate, they reflect a disproportionate focus on the interests of a handful of large companies. It's hard to think of a single example during this twenty-year period of copyright restrictions being repealed, relaxed, or any in any meaningful way liberalized. Reform proposals like the orphan works bill have languished.

Drum suggests that opposition to further increases in copyright enforcement comes from people who are "ideologically opposed to IP protection." But most of us are not anti-copyright; we just think enough is enough, and that the menu of enforcement tools Congress has already given to copyright holders is more than sufficient. We're tired of the constantly increasing copyright enforcement efforts because most of the costs of the "mistakes along the way" fall on innocent consumers, innovators, and taxpayers.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ard-enough.ars





Book Publishers Force Down Piracy Sites
Jeff Roberts

Faced with a proliferation of unauthorized book-sharing sites, the publishing industry is embracing some of the same legal tactics as their counterparts in the music and movie industry.

On Wednesday morning, an international coalition of publishers said they squelched two websites, library.nu and file.it. The industry described the sites as “one of the largest pirate web-based businesses in the world” and that the former site alone offered more than 400,000 copyrighted titles.

According to the release, the shut-down is the culmination of a long investigation in which the publishers struggled to identify who ran the sites. The site operators, who allegedly earned millions in advertising revenue, were finally located in Ireland. The publishers say they have commenced legal proceedings in both Ireland and Germany.

It’s not immediately possible to immediately verify the claims, but the sites now appear to be down.

[Update: Andi Sporkin of the Association of American Publishers contacted me shortly after this story appeared. She says the publishers did not obtain control of the sites but that the site operators themselves decided to shut down or redirect the sites.]
In the bigger picture, the announcement reinforces the publishing industry’s full-scale entry into a new phase of the copyright wars in which content owners are banding together to target foreign websites. The most dramatic recent example came last month when law enforcement seized the servers of file-sharing site Megaupload and arrested its owners in a dramatic raid.

Content owners’ recent success in taking down foreign websites also adds grist to the debate of whether new legal powers, like those in the failed SOPA bill, are actually necessary to target piracy.

The publishers’ aggressiveness overseas mirrors similar domestic efforts in the US. This week, publisher John Wiley launched a new series of “John Doe” suits to identify individuals who had downloaded its “For Dummies” books.

Note: An earlier version of this story stated that library.nu redirected to Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Books. The site is no longer doing so and it is unclear why it was doing so before. A Google representative said the company was unaware of the issue.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-b...-piracy-sites/





Sony Hikes Whitney Houston Album Prices Online
Athima Chansanchai

It's easy to get so emotional about a singer after they've passed prematurely, as Whitney Houston did Saturday at the age of 48. But fans seeking to buy her digital albums in remembrance weren't too happy at sudden price hikes so soon after her death.

The Brits picked up on it quickly, with London-based Next Web writer Matt Brian and The Guardian's Josh Halliday both finding the price increases, which raised Houston's "The Ultimate Collection" 2007 album from £5 (about $7.89) to £8 (about $12.63). In the United States, the cost is even steeper: $15 for the "Greatest Hits" collection at both Amazon (mp3 store) and iTunes.

Halliday found out that Sony Music increased the price of "The Ultimate Collection" at about 4 a.m. Sunday, not even 12 hours after news broke of Houston's death. Fans were quick to point fingers at Apple for the anti-sale, but it turned out that when Sony bumped up the wholesale price of "The Ultimate Collection," iTunes and other retailers automatically upped their pricing.

We've reached out to Sony for comment and will update if/when we hear from them.

Digital Spy found consumers who said the price change happened even more quickly: 30 minutes for it to jump from $4.74 to $12.62, which prompted one buyer to fume, "The album itself is great so please don't be put off purchasing it, just [realize] that you will merely be lining some fatcat's pocket before Whitney's lifeless body is cold."

But Tom Dolan, CEO of CDQuest.com, wrote to tell us this goes against his experience with Sony.

"The costs to the retailer on each of the titles that you mention in your article have not changed at all. So if the cost of the product hasn't changed, then the actual culprit for the price increases would be the retailer and not Sony," Dolan wrote.

Houston's "iTunes Essentials" album is even more expensive at $18.45 for 15 songs (vs. 36 songs for $14.99 on the "Greatest Hits" album, which was originally released in 2000).

Over at Google Music, you can't find those albums, but there are a smattering of free singles, including "Greatest Love of All" and "So Emotional."

Meanwhile, at Walmart, things are just plain fishy. Though the retail giant has exited the music download business, it is still a massive CD retailer. While the pricing of Whitney's CDs hasn't changed, every single one is listed as 'out of stock online.' Could that really be because of a surge in buying? Or is there a price change afoot?

Dolan told us his thoughts on this:

Hardly any websites maintain very much stock and this all points back to distributors warehouses. So as popular as Whitney may seem, just days after her death, most distributors were only carrying <30 copies on almost all of her CDs, because she just wasn't selling. All of her rabid fans owned everything and there were no converts to her in recent years. Even at the distributor level, I can see the stock level histories and it looks like they were selling maybe 1 or 2 copies a day and that is at the distributor level. People have this misconception that labels sit on hundreds of thousands of copies of albums like this, but the reality is that this was pretty deep, slow moving catalog until she died. Then when somebody dies, every Joe Blow comes out of the woodwork saying how important an artist was and people suddenly buy up all the stock and in the internet age, that can sell out in an hour. It is as simple as that...

When somebody dies unexpectedly, especially an artist that was huge about twenty years ago but barely trickled in sales in recent years, nobody has stock on hand to meet the demand, not even the label, not the distributors and not the retailers, from small independents all the way up to Walmart. Up until the moment of her death, it would have been completely irresponsible for any music buyer to have been sitting on a lot of WH CD stock.

As of this morning, three of Houston's singles were in the top 10 singles chart at iTunes, including the No. 1 "I Will Always Love You," which was also sung in tribute by Jennifer Hudson at last night's Grammy awards. Houston's "Greatest Hits" album was No. 2 on the iTunes albums chart, runner-up to only Adele, who swept the Grammy awards with hits from her "21" album.
http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news...-prices-online





Sony Says Price of 2 Whitney Houston Albums Was Raised by Mistake
Ben Sisario

Sony Music has responded to accusations that it was exploiting the death of Whitney Houston by raising the prices of two of her albums just hours after her death on Saturday.

Early Sunday, the price of one of the albums, “The Ultimate Collection,” jumped 60 percent on iTunes in Britain, from $7.85 to about $12.50; another album, “The Greatest Hits,” also jumped in price, from about $12.50 to $15.67 (or 25 percent). According to a report in The Guardian, the change was the result of the label’s decision, in the immediate aftermath of Ms. Houston’s death, to raise the wholesale price it charges digital retailers.

Sony stayed quiet about the price change, even as criticism spread online. But on Tuesday the company said that the changes — which were in effect only on the British version of iTunes, and were reversed Sunday evening — were made by mistake.

“Whitney Houston product was mistakenly mispriced on the U.K. iTunes store on Sunday,” the company said in a statement. “When discovered, the mistake was immediately corrected. We apologize for any offense caused.”

According to two executives at Sony Music, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, the price increase was the result of an error by a Sony employee in Britain, and that the company gave no orders for prices to be raised on Ms. Houston’s music.

Sales of her albums and tracks soared over the weekend, and executives say that downloads were especially strong. Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks music sales in the United States, will release figures on Wednesday covering the week that ended with the Grammy Awards on Sunday.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...ed-by-mistake/





Model Struts Path to Stardom Not on Runway, But on YouTube
Guy Trebay

There was a time, not long ago, when the surest path to modeling stardom was down the runway of a top designer’s show, when it would have been unthinkable to find among the industry’s top ranks a swimsuit girl whose main claims to fame were ad campaigns for Guess jeans and Beach Bunny Swimwear.

But that was before social media altered the paths to fame.

Unlike the many little-known beauties now on view at New York Fashion Week — women seldom identified by more than one name (Agata, Hanaa, Frida, Joan) — Kate Upton, just 19 and resembling a 1950s pinup, but with the legs of a W.N.B.A. point guard, has arrived on the scene as a largely self-created Internet phenomenon.

It is not just that she has a respectable Twitter following (170,000 people at last count), or a YouTube video with over 3 million viewers, or marketing potential perhaps best measured by her rocketing from obscurity to No. 2 on a list of the world’s 99 “top” women compiled by AskMen.com, an online magazine with 15 million readers. (Sofia Vergara, of the ABC sitcom “Modern Family,” is No. 1.)

Less than a year after Ms. Upton, curvaceous and rambunctious, posted a video of herself at a Los Angeles Clippers game doing the Dougie, a dance popularized in a hip-hop tune by Cali Swag District, she finds herself in one of the most coveted positions in the modeling business.

Joining an elite club of modeling powerhouses — brand names like Cheryl Tiegs, Tyra Banks and Heidi Klum — Ms. Upton was announced Monday night on David Letterman’s show as the latest cover girl for Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue, the circulation and advertising behemoth that has long been equally the dream book of adolescent males and the bane of feminists.

In modeling, as in movies (see: “Chronicle,” the film that hit No. 1 at the box office this month after relying on social media outlets like Twitter and YouTube for its marketing), music (the band Fun. and its inescapable viral hit “We Are Young”) and most other cultural endeavors, it is increasingly clear that there is no longer a single path to success.

“We all know that social media now creates its own reality,” said Wayne Sterling, the publisher of Models.com, an industry Web site. “If you become a YouTube star among teenagers, you have even more recognizability than a TV star,” he said. “Kate Upton is the perfect example of that.”

It was soon after the Dougie video went viral that a seasoned scout, David Cunningham, brought Ms. Upton to the attention of Ivan Bart of IMG Models, the company behind the multimillion-dollar careers of women like Gisele Bündchen, Ms. Klum and Kate Moss.
“When Kate first came in, everyone at the agency thought I was crazy,” Mr. Bart, the “superagent” who heads IMG Models, said of Ms. Upton. “She wasn’t ‘fashion’ enough.”

Mr. Bart signed her anyway. And soon, to the surprise of some in the industry, Ms. Upton was being sought out for editorial sittings with people like Carine Roitfeld, the French fashion eminence known for her prophetic eye, and by Katie Grand, the influential stylist and editor of the fashion-forward British magazine Love.

Wholesomely proportioned at 5 feet 11 inches with a 36-25-34 figure, Ms. Upton was a long way from the coolly robotic Eastern European beauty ideal that has dominated the catwalks for many seasons. “Kate is bigger than fashion,” Mr. Bart said. “She’s the Jayne Mansfield of the Internet.”

Though the catwalks of New York, Paris and Milan, traditionally a pathway to magazine covers and the lavish cosmetic and fragrance advertising campaigns that are the grail of every modeling hopeful, will continue to exert influence, it is increasingly difficult for the industry to ignore the world outside the Fashion Week tents, particularly the one that is virtual.

“It’s not just enough to cast such-and-such a girl that opened Prada or Vuitton or whatever,” said Trey Laird, the creative director of Laird & Partners, the advertising agency behind brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Juicy Couture and the Gap. “It’s a huge help if a girl already has a platform and followers, and Kate Upton is a great example of that.”

Those dubious about Ms. Upton’s crossover potential, or of any career driven toward the stony heart of fashion from the do-it-yourself fringes of the blogosphere, include Sophia Neophitou, editor of the English style bible 10 and a creative force behind the casting of the Victoria’s Secret shows.

“We would never use” Ms. Upton for a Victoria’s Secret show, Ms. Neophitou said by telephone last week from London. And, while Ms. Upton has, in fact, modeled on occasion for the company’s catalog, her look, said Ms. Neophitou, is “too obvious” to be featured in what has become the most widely viewed runway show in the world.

“She’s like a Page 3 girl,” Ms. Neophitou said, referring to the scantily clad voluptuous women featured in The Sun, a London tabloid. “She’s like a footballer’s wife, with the too-blond hair and that kind of face that anyone with enough money can go out and buy.”

And yet, Ms. Upton turns up as the hottest new face in the industry in a coming issue of V, a fashion magazine with a cult following among the cognoscenti.

“I wasn’t necessarily drawn to her because of her having been big online and having several million hits on YouTube,” said Stephen Gan, V’s editor in chief and creative director. “In fact, I first heard of her when we were having a party at the Boom Boom Room and Kate Moss’s agent called and said, ‘Can you put Kate Upton on your list?’ ”

Unfamiliar then with the young model, Mr. Gan searched Google and came upon the Dougie video, along with the welter of gossip items that connect Ms. Upton to celebrities like Kanye West and the New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez. Tabloid readiness aside, he saw in her something a less seasoned fashion eye might overlook.

“I come from a business where the perennial question is ‘Are you beautiful in a fashion sense or in a beauty pageant sense or beautiful-girl-next-door sense?’ ” Mr. Gan said. “And I feel like, why can’t we try to find something that’s a little bit different? If you’ve ever looked at pictures of Jean Harlow up close, she had the same curves as Kate Upton, the same silhouette, and she was the definition of beauty at the time.”

Sitting last week in the Manhattan offices of IMG Models, clad in tight jeans and Christian Louboutin stilettos and with her peroxided hair piled high, Ms. Upton called to mind the dumb blondes of an earlier era, women like Ms. Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe who, as we now know, were not dumb at all.

But unlike the passive beauties of the 1950s, Ms. Upton has a coolly appraising approach to her assets. She also has a big laugh, no shortage of confidence and the habit of cracking her knuckles like a tomboy bombshell.

“For a long time, fashion has been going to celebrities,” she said. “Celebrities are on the magazine covers, and nobody wanted models. But why not have a model celebrity? Why not a girl who comes with her own following? Social media brings a personality to models. That’s how consumers today decide what to buy.”

“I studied this,” added Ms. Upton, a Michigan native who was raised in Melbourne, Fla., and who began work at 15, spending her first few years toiling in the lucrative but unglamorous salt mines of catalog modeling.

What Ms. Upton learned was that before Ms. Bündchen grew Angel wings and became Mrs. Tom Brady and a business impresario overseeing a multimillion-dollar empire built on the licensing of everything from lingerie to shower shoes, she was just another runway girl from the first wave of then-new Brazilians, a woman routinely informed she would never make it big in high fashion because her figure was too curvy and her nose was too long.

“People told me I couldn’t be fashion, that I’m just an old-fashioned body girl, only good for swimwear,” Ms. Upton said. “But I knew that I could bring back the supermodel.”

“What can I say?” she added. “I’m relatable.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/u...tar-model.html





AP Files Lawsuit Against Meltwater News
Press release

Subscriber-only service uses unlicensed AP content to compete against AP

NEW YORK – The Associated Press today filed suit against Meltwater News for copyright infringement and “hot news” misappropriation. Using unlicensed verbatim AP content, Meltwater delivers a service to paying customers that competes directly with AP and its customers, the suit claims.

The suit was filed Tuesday, Feb. 14, in U.S. District Court for the Southern District, in Manhattan, by the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, representing AP.

As a subscriber only service, Meltwater distributes “Meltwater News,” which styles itself as a modern-day electronic clipping service with a guarantee of “no copyright fees.” Meltwater delivers to its paying customers substantial verbatim excerpts from AP stories and other published news stories based on keywords selected by its customers. As AP’s complaint alleges, Meltwater also offers its customers the ability to store these excerpts, as well as full-text articles, in a customer archive housed on Meltwater’s server and facilitates the incorporation of AP articles into customer newsletters to be further distributed.

“Meltwater News is a parasitic distribution service that competes directly with traditional news sources without paying license fees to cover the costs of creating those stories,” said Tom Curley, president and CEO of The Associated Press. “It has a significant negative impact on the ability of AP to continue providing the high-quality news reports on which the public relies.”

Meltwater is a directly competing news service for many AP subscribers, including government agencies that use the AP wire to monitor the news. AP bears all of the extensive costs associated with creating its content, while Meltwater bears only the minimal costs of electronic distribution – thus permitting it to undercut AP with lower subscription rates through its infringing activities.

The UK Court of Appeal and a Norway court have already issued decisions holding that the content delivered by Meltwater requires a license under those countries’ governing copyright laws. But, in contrast to many other news outlets and news aggregators that deliver AP news reports to the public (including Yahoo News, Google News and AOL, which all have licenses for AP content), Meltwater does not. It refuses to license the content that it delivers to its customers.

AP’s lawsuit is not a general attack on news aggregators, stressed Laura Malone, AP acting general counsel. Nor does AP in any way seek to restrict linking or challenge the right to provide headlines and links to AP articles.

“Meltwater is not a typical news aggregator,” said Malone. Most notably, Meltwater is a closed system sold only to subscribers for a fee, and not a means of expanding public access.

Further, the complaint alleges that Meltwater provides lengthier and more systematic excerpts from AP stories than most news aggregators, particularly with regard to AP breaking news articles. Meltwater retains a vast archive of AP articles dating back to at least 2007, many of which are no longer publicly available on the Internet. Meltwater actively facilitates the storage of those and other articles in customer archives on the Meltwater system.

The publication of fast and accurate worldwide news coverage requires a substantial financial commitment. AP has bureaus in more than 100 countries and is the only news organization with reporters in every U.S. statehouse. AP journalists gain an intimate knowledge of their beats and sources, greatly enhancing the value of their reporting.

“Meltwater free-rides on AP’s significant investments in gathering and reporting news,” said Malone. “In short, Meltwater earns substantial fees for redistributing premium news content, while bearing none of the costs associated with creating that content.”
http://www.ap.org/pages/about/pressr...r_021412a.html





Did the AP Just Declare War On News Aggregators?
Mathew Ingram

Like virtually every other traditional news entity, the Associated Press newswire has been under pressure for some time from digital media — but this disruption has been even worse for AP and its ilk because they are primarily distributors, and the web has fundamentally democratized content distribution. Instead of trying to find ways to adapt to this new reality, however, AP seems determined to fight it with everything it has, including lawsuits: on Tuesday, the service launched a lawsuit in New York against a digital news-aggregation service called Meltwater, accusing the service of copyright infringement and “free riding” on its content. AP says it isn’t going after news aggregators as a whole, but this is clearly meant as a show of force.

Meltwater — which was founded in Oslo, Norway, in 2001 — provides an electronic version of the old-style news clipping services that companies used to use as a way of keeping up on what was being said about them or their products in the media. Instead of a pile of clipped articles from printed newspapers and magazines, Meltwater gives company executives an electronic news-filtering service in return for monthly subscription fees, which summarizes content not just from AP but from hundreds of other public sources. But that’s not the way the Associated Press sees it — according to a statement from CEO Tom Curley, it is a parasite that leeches off the newswire’s content illegally:

Meltwater News is a parasitic distribution service that competes directly with traditional news sources without paying license fees to cover the costs of creating those stories. It has a significant negative impact on the ability of AP to continue providing the high-quality news reports on which the public relies.

The AP is determined to fight rather than adapt

It’s interesting that Curley’s argument seems to rest in part on the idea that the Associated Press is providing some kind of public service that is important to democracy, etc. — when in reality, the newswire is simply a content-distribution service that is owned by its member newspapers (and produces some of its own content as well). As media theorist Clay Shirky noted in an essay in 2010, this kind of distribution function seems woefully inadequate, and possibly even unnecessary, in the age of the web. “Syndication makes little sense in a world with URLs,” as Shirky described it.

The AP seems determined to fight this reality, however, and to do whatever it can to maintain control over its content, and the scarcity that is at the core of its business model — just as newspaper owners like Rupert Murdoch are trying to do with paywalls and other gates around their information. In addition to trying to compel companies like Meltwater to pay licensing fees for using its content (as it has with Google News and others), it is trying hard to keep its journalists from reporting news on Twitter, just as Sky News and other traditional providers are.

Associated Press says that it isn’t planning to go after news aggregators as a whole, and that it isn’t against services or sites that provide headlines and links to AP content. General counsel Laura Malone said in the statement issued by the newswire that Meltwater “is not a typical news aggregator” because it is a closed system that subscribers must pay a fee to access — and therefore not “public” in the sense that Google News is — and that the Norwegian company also provides “lengthier and more systematic excerpts” from AP articles (it also maintains archives of past AP content, the newswire complaint alleges).
To the AP, every news aggregator is a potential threat

When you combine this latest lawsuit with the fact that AP has forced Google News and others to license its content, however — even just to provide an excerpt of a few sentences and a headline — it seems fairly obvious that the newswire either wants aggregators to pay for the right to use any of its content, or face a lawsuit. And as Jeff Roberts of our sister site paidContent points out, the Meltwater case is actually a throwback to a landmark case from 1918, when the Associated Press won what the courts called a “hot news misappropriation” case against a now-defunct competitor who was “free riding” on AP’s business model. The AP statement against Meltwater makes the connection explicit:

Meltwater free-rides on AP’s significant investments in gathering and reporting news. In short, Meltwater earns substantial fees for redistributing premium news content, while bearing none of the costs associated with creating that content.

The Associated Press may be trying to create the impression that its dispute with Meltwater is a special case and doesn’t apply to other news aggregators, but its argument about excerpting and free-riding could just as easily apply to any site or service that bundles headlines and links — or potentially even to sites like The Huffington Post, which has been widely criticized by traditional media outlets for “over-aggregation” of their stories. And the AP may also be encouraged by a recent decision in the UK, where Meltwater and other services have to pay mandatory licensing fees for any content that they aggregate from newspapers or other traditional outlets.

As I’ve tried to describe before, I think the AP’s attitude is fundamentally futile, whether it involves stopping reporters from breaking news on Twitter or suing those who re-use or aggregate its content. It’s clear that the newswire is threatened by the web and the democratization of distribution, but putting up walls and filing lawsuits is a waste of time and money — and it’s not even obvious that the AP’s “hot news” claim has a hope of succeeding, since U.S. copyright law is so different from that of the UK. All it does is make the AP seem like a frightened, cornered animal.
http://gigaom.com/2012/02/14/did-the...s-aggregators/





A Look Behind the Curtain of the Heartland Institute’s Climate Change Spin

The Heartland Institute — a self-described "think tank" that actually serves in part as a way for climate change denialism to get funded — has a potentially embarrassing situation on their hands. Someone going by the handle "Heartland Insider" has anonymously released quite a few of what are claimed to be internal documents from Heartland, revealing the Institute’s strategies, funds, and much more.

These documents are available over at DeSmogBlog. Several people are going over them, and so far they appear legit. You can read some relevant discussions at DeSmogBlog, Deep Climate, Planet 3, Greg Laden, ClimateCrocks, Shawn Otto, and Think Progress. John Mashey at DeSmogBlog has more info that also corroborates the leaked documents, and to call it blistering is to severely underestimate it.

One thing I want to point out right away which is very illuminating, if highly disturbing, about what Heartland allegedly wants to do: they are considering developing a curriculum for teachers to use in the classroom to sow confusion about climate change. I know, it sounds like I’m making that up, but I’m not. In this document they say:

[Dr. Wojick's] effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.

That seems clear enough, doesn’t it? From that, it sure sounds like they want to dissuade teachers from teaching science. I imagine there will be a lot of spin about how this quote is out of context, or a typo, or something alone those lines. Perhaps. But I remember all the hammering real scientists took when they used jargon in their emails to each other, jargon which was gleefully misinterpreted to make it seem as if these scientists were faking data. Interesting how this is pointing right back at them. Just as I said it does.

When it comes to all this, the comparison to "Climategate" springs to mind, but there’s one enormous difference: Climategate was manufactured, a made-up controversy (what I call a manufactroversy) that had no real teeth — as was its failed sequel. The emails released weren’t damning at all, and didn’t show scientists tinkering with or faking data. As much as the media made of it, as much as climate change denial blogs played them up, it has been shown again and again that Climategate was all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

These new documents, though, look different, especially given that quote above. The next few days should be very interesting as people start digging into them, especially if they prove to be authentic.

And how ironic! It was the Heartland Institute themselves who played up Climategate quite a bit. Back in 2009 when they were trumpeting Climategate, Heartland said:

The release of these documents creates an opportunity for reporters, academics, politicians, and others who relied on the IPCC to form their opinions about global warming to stop and reconsider their position. The experts they trusted and quoted in the past have been caught red-handed plotting to conceal data, hide temperature trends that contradict their predictions, and keep critics from appearing in peer-reviewed journals. This is new and real evidence that they should examine and then comment on publicly.

That claim from them is nonsense, but it will be interesting to see how happy they are when the tables are turned, and "reporters, academics, politicians, and others" look into their documents. And around that same time they also said:

For anyone who doubts the power of the Internet to shine light on darkness, the news of the month is how digital technology helped uncover a secretive group of scientists who suppressed data, froze others out of the debate, and flouted freedom-of-information laws.

Again, none of that is true. But that claim about freezing out others sticks out, especially in light of another of these leaked Heartland internal memos which says,

Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high-profile climate scientists (such as [Peter] Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out.

Emphasis mine. Yes, that sounds like a group interested in promoting "sound science".

Wow. Just, wow.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/ba...e-change-spin/





Mooresville’s Shining Example (It’s Not Just About the Laptops)
Alan Schwarz

Sixty educators from across the nation roamed the halls and ringed the rooms of East Mooresville Intermediate School, searching for the secret formula. They found it in Erin Holsinger’s fifth-grade math class.

There, a boy peering into his school-issued MacBook blitzed through fractions by himself, determined to reach sixth-grade work by winter. Three desks away, a girl was struggling with basic multiplication — only 29 percent right, her screen said — and Ms. Holsinger knelt beside her to assist. Curiosity was fed and embarrassment avoided, as teacher connected with student through emotion far more than Wi-Fi.

“This is not about the technology,” Mark Edwards, superintendent of Mooresville Graded School District, would tell the visitors later over lunch. “It’s not about the box. It’s about changing the culture of instruction — preparing students for their future, not our past.”

As debate continues over whether schools invest wisely in technology — and whether it measurably improves student achievement — Mooresville, a modest community about 20 miles north of Charlotte best known as home to several Nascar teams and drivers, has quietly emerged as the de facto national model of the digital school.

Mr. Edwards spoke on a White House panel in September, and federal Department of Education officials often cite Mooresville as a symbolic success. Overwhelmed by requests to view the programs in action, the district now herds visitors into groups of 60 for monthly demonstrations; the waiting list stretches to April. What they are looking for is an explanation for the steady gains Mooresville has made since issuing laptops three years ago to the 4,400 4th through 12th graders in five schools (three K-3 schools are not part of the program).

The district’s graduation rate was 91 percent in 2011, up from 80 percent in 2008. On state tests in reading, math and science, an average of 88 percent of students across grades and subjects met proficiency standards, compared with 73 percent three years ago. Attendance is up, dropouts are down. Mooresville ranks 100th out of 115 districts in North Carolina in terms of dollars spent per student — $7,415.89 a year — but it is now third in test scores and second in graduation rates.

“Other districts are doing things, but what we see in Mooresville is the whole package: using the budget, innovating, using data, involvement with the community and leadership,” said Karen Cator, a former Apple executive who is director of educational technology for the United States Department of Education. “There are lessons to be learned.”

Start with math lessons: each student’s MacBook Air is leased from Apple for $215 a year, including warranty, for a total of $1 million; an additional $100,000 a year goes for software. Terry Haas, the district’s chief financial officer, said the money was freed up through “incredibly tough decisions.”

Sixty-five jobs were eliminated, including 37 teachers, which resulted in larger class sizes — in middle schools, it is 30 instead of 18 — but district officials say they can be more efficiently managed because of the technology. Some costly items had become obsolete (like computer labs), though getting rid of others tested the willingness of teachers to embrace the new day: who needs globes in the age of Google Earth?

Families pay $50 a year to subsidize computer repairs, though the fee is waived for those who cannot afford it, about 18 percent of them. Similarly, the district has negotiated a deal so that those without broadband Internet access can buy it for $9.99 a month. Mr. Edwards said the technology had helped close racial performance gaps in a district where 27 percent of the students are minorities and 40 percent are poor enough to receive free or reduced-price lunches.

Others see broader economic benefits.

“Even in the downturn, we’re a seller’s market — people want to buy homes here,” said Kent Temple, a real estate agent in town. “Families say, ‘This is a chance for my child to compete with families that have more money than me.’ Six years from now, you’ll see how many from disadvantaged backgrounds go to college and make it.”

Mooresville’s laptops perform the same tasks as those in hundreds of other districts: they correct worksheets, assemble progress data for teachers, allow for compelling multimedia lessons, and let students work at their own pace or in groups, rather than all listening to one teacher. The difference, teachers and administrators here said, is that they value computers not for the newest content they can deliver, but for how they tap into the oldest of student emotions — curiosity, boredom, embarrassment, angst — and help educators deliver what only people can. Technology, here, is cold used to warm.

Mooresville frequently tests students in various subjects to inform teachers where each needs help. Every quarter, department heads and principals present summary data to Mr. Edwards, who uses it to assess where teachers need improvement. Special emphasis goes to identifying students who are only a few correct answers away from passing state proficiency standards. They are then told how close they are and, Mr. Edwards said, “You can, you can, you can.”

Many classrooms have moved from lecture to lattice, where students collaborate in small groups with the teacher swooping in for consultation. Rather than tell her 11th-grade English students the definition of transcendentalism one recent day, Katheryn Higgins had them crowd-source their own — quite Thoreauly, it turned out — using Google Docs. Back in September, Ms. Higgins had the more outgoing students make presentations on the Declaration of Independence, while shy ones discussed it in an online chat room, which she monitored.

“I’m not a very social person, but I have no problem typing on a keyboard,” said one of those shy ones, Chase Wilson. “It connected me with other students — opened me up and helped me with talking in public.”

In math, students used individualized software modules, with teachers stopping by occasionally to answer questions. (“It’s like having a personal tutor,” said Ethan Jones, the fifth grader zooming toward sixth-grade material.) Teachers apportion their time based on the need of students, without the weaker ones having to struggle at the blackboard in front of the class; this dynamic has helped children with learning disabilities to participate and succeed in mainstream classes.

“There are students who might not have graduated five years ago who have graduated,” said Melody Morrison, a case manager for Mooresville High School’s special education programs. “They’re not just our kids anymore. They’re everybody’s kids — all teachers throughout the school. The digital conversion has evened the playing field.”

Many students adapted to the overhaul more easily than their teachers, some of whom resented having beloved tools — scripted lectures, printed textbooks and a predictable flow through the curriculum — vanish. The layoffs in 2009 and 2010, of about 10 percent of the district’s teachers, helped weed out the most reluctant, Mr. Edwards said; others he was able to convince that the technology would actually allow for more personal and enjoyable interaction with students.

“You have to trust kids more than you’ve ever trusted them,” he said. “Your teachers have to be willing to give up control.”

That was the primary concern that the 60 visitors expressed during their daylong sojourn to Mooresville in November. “I’m not sure our kids can be trusted the way these are,” one teacher from the Midwest said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid trouble back home.

Thomas Bertrand, superintendent of schools in Rochester, Ill., said he was struck by the “culture of collaboration among staff and kids” in Mooresville and would emphasize that as his district considered its own conversion.

“There’s a tendency in teaching to try to control things, like a parent,” said Scott Allen, a high school chemistry teacher in South Granville, N.C. “But I learn best at my own pace, and you have to realize that students learn best at their own pace, too.”

Mooresville still has some growing pains. In one ninth-grade social studies class, a video that easily could have been shown on a large screen instead went through the students’ laptops, several of which balked, “Unable to find proxy server.” One fourth grader, having to complete 10 multiplication questions in two minutes for the software to let her move on, simply consulted her times tables, making the lesson more about speed typing than mathematics. And those concerned about corporate encroachment on public schools would blanch at the number of Apple logos in the hallways, and at the district’s unofficial slogan: “iBelieve, iCan, iWill.”

Mooresville’s tremendous focus on one data point — the percentage of students passing proficiency exams — has its pitfalls as well. At November’s quarterly data meeting, there were kudos for several numbers whose rise or dip was not statistically significant, and no recognition that the students who passed by one or two questions could very well fail by one or two the next time around. Several colorful pie charts used metrics that were meaningless.

“I realize the fallacy of looking at one measure,” Mr. Edwards said in an interview afterward. “We look at scholarships, A.P. courses taken, honors courses, SAT scores. But the measure that we use is what the state posts, and what parents look at when they’re comparing schools moving here.”

After three years of computers permeating every area of their schooling, Mooresville students barely remember life before the transformation and are somewhat puzzled by the gaggle of visitors who watch them every month. (“At times it’s kind of like being a lab rat,” one 11th grader said.) But Mooresville understands its growing fame in the world of education, much of which has yet to find the balance between old tricks and new technology.

“So,” Ms. Higgins asked her English class after the bell rang, “you think you’re going to like transcendentalism?”

“Only if you’re a nonconformist,” a student cracked.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/e...ess-story.html





Android Breathes New Life Into “Made in China”
Benjamin Dolgin-Gardner

How do you end up with millions of new sales overnight with low development and implementation costs? In the case of Chinese electronics companies Rock Chips and Box Chips the answer has been simple – hitch a ride on Android.

China’s economy is booming thanks to low cost assembly, the country’s key advantage when competing on the global playing field. Manufacturers deliver low cost laborers who are able to follow processes and procedures to a reasonable degree of accuracy at very reasonable rates, and thus gain an edge over Western manufacturers.

In my years in China I’ve seen technologies come and go, but none have excited these manufacturers like the prospect of Android. It’s a solid, “open” operating system that lets them do a number of interesting things without many risks.

The West in turn has provided the “design” element of the process, enabling the overall product to be reliable and aesthetically pleasing. Chinese companies aren’t yet geared to competing in this arena. In order to undertake the gamble of developing an OS that gave them an exclusively Chinese platform (a la Microsoft or Apple for the US), Chinese firms would need an extensive process of re-education.

Then there’s the problem of IP. While Western competitors have strong rules in place (and real penalties) for infringement of their IP – Chinese companies face a business environment where their development costs would be lost overnight as soon as another company could clone their product. Success, then, often led to copying.

This of course doesn’t mean that Western companies in China get an easy ride. In fact Apple, a strong defender of its IP everywhere, has been unable to prevent clones and copies from flooding the market, all guaranteed to look similar to the original, though never approaching the same quality or usability.

So it becomes clear why Android is so appealing to the Chinese marketplace: it enables companies to move into the usability “design” space that they’ve previously been unable to access. Here you have a strong, internationally accepted operating system, with an open license to be copied (at no cost) and installed and used on any device you like. In fact the OS developer positively encourages you to do so.

It’s a stable platform with the weight of Google behind it and the thousands of talented computer science graduates in the country can play with it, adapt it and improve it – without having to design a system from the ground up. The market entry costs are limited to wages, so there’s a huge incentive for Chinese firms to get involved.

This means that the traditional IC players now face stiff competition from China, with Rock Chips and Box Chips already selling millions and another local firm, Actions, about to enter the fray. These companies can focus on the Android platform and develop newer and faster processors to support the latest hardware and Android updates. As the OS gains further market traction and the Chinese companies find a growing talent pool of skilled engineers to work with it, this competition is going to get stronger.

Niche developers in China will benefit, too. They’ll have local chip sets for reasonable costs, and a versatile workforce to draw on – moving more in the long-term to a quality model, based on customization opportunities and away from a volume pricing model.

Currently there’s still a defined lag from Chinese firms in the commodity technology market, and when Android first launched this lag was a year or more over developed nation equivalents, but today this is down to 3 or 4 months. Soon Chinese companies, playing to their own strengths in the supply chain, will close this gap to make it negligible or even begin to take a leading role.

For Google this is a big win too. The Chinese consumer market is a huge one and the trade-off for using a free Google service is that the user agrees to share data with Google. Of course Google’s ability to aggregate massive amounts of personal data directly relates to the quality of their products and services, but it matters more how they can exploit the information they gain from their use.

China has only 40 million credit card users (based on slightly outdated figures released in 2010) and over 500 million computer users. This means that if the Android system were to appear on just 10% of all devices in the country, Google could conceivably, but probably won’t be able to access, more information on Chinese consumers than the country’s credit agencies! The rub is that the Android these firms are running is not “official” and as such rarely communicates with Google’s servers.

As the price of Android tablets and phones continues to decrease, the percentage of users is likely to grow exponentially.

This model of quality firmware partnered with lower-cost, mid-quality hardware, enables companies like Rock Chips and Box Chips to make millions of unit sales, and to win over not only the traditional “value” customer, but also the more discerning customers, domestically and overseas. It also encourages other IC manufacturers to come to the party and many will soon be joining them in an Android led technology revolution.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/18/and...made-in-china/





Music Industry Warms to Digital Streaming
Tim Bradshaw

It was Adele’s night at the Grammy awards in Los Angeles on Sunday, where the British singer won six awards including best album for 21, which has sold 17m copies around the world.

Adele’s international success makes the absence of her album from digital-music streaming services such as Spotify, Deezer and Rdio all the more glaring.

She is one of a small number of prominent artists who have held back most of their music from streaming services, amid concern that they can undermine or “cannibalise” purchases of albums on CD or more established download stores such as Apple’s iTunes.

But Spotify and its rivals are hitting back at this criticism – and, after years of industry scepticism, their arguments seem to be winning over many music company chiefs. And with Spotify recently topping 3m subscribers to become one of the world’s largest subscription music services, the music industry’s tone is beginning to warm towards digital streaming.

Even Warner Music, one of Spotify’s staunchest critics a few years ago, has been won over, with chief executive Steve Cooper telling analysts on a recent earnings call that streaming services are “coming on strong”. Although they generate less than 10 per cent of total digital revenues, their faster growth rate than downloads mean “you will eventually see those lines cross”, Mr Cooper said.

Adele and other holdouts such as The Beatles are increasingly becoming the “corner cases”, says Ken Parks, Spotify’s chief content officer. “These just happen to be higher-profile examples. The vast majority of artists and their labels are behind this model.”

Rob Wells, Universal Music’s digital president said last month that the cannibalisation argument is “totally bogus”. His remarks came as industry body – the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry – revealed that digital music revenues had increased by 8 per cent in 2011 to $5.2bn, an acceleration over the 5 per cent growth rate in 2010.

While the pay-out every time a track is played on streaming services is smaller than for a download on the likes of iTunes, successful artists can, over time, see a larger dividend as the number of listens accumulates.

The new-found support from music labels is now helping some digital-music services to move from regional champions to global businesses. Rhapsody, which pioneered the subscription model when it launched in the US a decade ago, has acquired Napster from Best Buy to launch in the UK and Germany. Deezer, after working for four years in its native France, has launched in dozens of countries across Europe and Latin America since December.

That is quite a change in the music industry’s tune compared with two years ago, when Spotify was struggling to secure rights to launch in the US.

Tim Hadley, director at Rara.com, which has launched in 20 countries since December, says: “It has taken a while to get here but it now feels like digital music services are being licensed on a global basis.”

Jon Irwin, Rhapsody’s president, says this new expansion is down to improvements in both business models and technology.

“In the last couple of years, technology moved to the point where smartphones and networks make the product experience so powerful,” he says. More than 40 per cent of activity on Rhapsody comes from mobile devices such as Android and iPhone, he adds. “Two and a half years ago, there was no mobile access.”

With so many “unlimited” music streaming services competing at the same £10, €10 or $10 monthly price point, differentiation is as much down to packaging as product.

Spotify’s ambitious “freemium” service, where users can listen to hours of music a month without ever having to pay, in return for listening to ads, contrasts with Rara’s more traditional method of discounting the first month’s fee. Deezer has placed emphasis on bundling the cost into mobile and broadband packages from France Telecom.

“The one thing rights holders require is a differentiated service,” says Rara’s Mr Hadley. “They don’t want five services targeting the same consumer.”

Rara is targeting consumers who fuelled Adele’s success through traditional CD sales but remain bewildered by the digital world – accounting for some 70 per cent of the UK population, according to an ICM poll that Rara commissioned.

At the current £120 annual pricing, they may struggle to win over the average Adele fan, who may buy just a handful of albums a year. But the opportunity to double music fans’ average spend is exactly why labels are so excited by subscription services.

Mark Mulligan, an independent music analyst, predicts a balance may be struck between holdouts such as Adele and the streaming services by introducing “windowing”, where albums’ releases are staggered across different services.

For example, Coldplay’s album Mylo Xyloto was released on CD and iTunes last October but only arrived on Spotify, Rdio and Rhapsody earlier this month.

“That is a really easy way to mitigate a lot of the risk of streaming,” Mr Mulligan says. “The relationship between streaming and the download could be the same as radio and the CD. Radio cannibalises sales as well … But artists get many multiples higher on Spotify per play than they get on the radio.”

Spotify’s Mr Parks notes that there was similar anguish about iTunes – still the world’s largest digital music service by some distance – back in 2003, when Radiohead was among holdouts. “We are obviously pursuing a model that changes the way the industry and artists have done business for over 50 years,” he says. “That kind of thing can be difficult to do.”
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/64568...44feabdc0.html





Apple Tweaks Apps Policy Under Lawmaker Pressure
Gerry Shih

Under pressure from U.S. legislators, Apple Inc moved Wednesday to quell a swelling privacy controversy by saying that it will begin to require iPhone and iPad apps to seek "explicit approval" in separate user prompts before accessing users' address book data.

Apple's move came shortly after two members of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce committee requested the company to provide more information about its privacy policies. Bloggers, in recent days, have published findings that some of the most popular software applications in Apple's App Store have been able to lift private address book data without user consent.

"Apps that collect or transmit a user's contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines," an Apple spokesman told Reuters. "We're working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release."

In a letter addressed to Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook, Representatives Henry Waxman of California and G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina, both Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, asked Apple earlier on Wednesday to clarify its developer guidelines and the measures taken by the company to screen apps sold on its App Store.

The letter came after Path, a San Francisco startup that makes a Facebook-like social networking app, attracted widespread criticism last week after a Singaporean developer discovered that Path's iPhone app had been quietly uploading his contacts' names and phone numbers onto Path's servers.

In the following days, other technology bloggers discovered that iPhone apps like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Foodspotting similarly uploaded user data -- without permission, in some cases.

The Path incident "raises questions about whether Apple's iOS app developer policies and practices may fall short when it comes to protecting the information of iPhone users and their contacts," the letter said.

The legislators' request for information cast the spotlight squarely onto Apple for the first time since an independent blogger, Dustin Curtis, wrote in a widely distributed post last week that "there's a quiet understanding among many iOS app developers that it is acceptable to send a user's entire address book, without their permission to remote servers and then store it for future reference."

Curtis blamed Apple, writing that he could not "think of a rational reason for why Apple has not placed any protections on Address Book in iOS."

In their letter to Apple, Waxman and Butterfield, referenced Curtis' blog post, adding: "There could be some truth to these claims."

The legislators had asked Apple to submit its response by February 29.

(Reporting By Gerry Shih; Editing by Richard Chang and Gerald E. McCormick)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...81E1W520120215





Early Praise in Inspection at Foxconn Brings Doubt
Steven Greenhouse

The president of a nonprofit group hired by Apple to inspect its suppliers’ factories has begun praising the Chinese plants of Foxconn, Apple’s largest supplier, just days after his group began inspections there.

According to reports by several news organizations, Auret van Heerden, president of the Fair Labor Association, said Foxconn’s “facilities are first-class” and “Foxconn is really not a sweatshop.”

Mr. van Heerden’s apparent praise of conditions at Foxconn came despite previous reports of employees committing suicide, dying in factory explosions and complaining of sometimes working more than 70 hours a week.

Mr. van Heerden, who is traveling with the Fair Labor Association’s team in China, could not be reached for comment on Thursday. But the group’s No. 2 official, Jorge Perez-Lopez, said, “The work we’re doing at Foxconn is not about first impressions or whether something has a paint job or not.”

“The proof,” Mr. Perez-Lopez continued, “will be in the pie, will be in the eating. It will be when the report comes out.”

When Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, announced the inspections earlier this week, he said, “We’ve asked the F.L.A. to independently assess the performance of our largest suppliers.”

According to Reuters, Mr. van Heerden said Foxconn’s “physical conditions are way, way above average of the norm” for factories in China. “I was very surprised when I walked onto the floor at Foxconn, how tranquil it is compared with a garment factory,” Mr. van Heerden said, according to the Reuters report. “So the problems are not the intensity and burnout and pressure-cooker environment you have in a garment factory. It’s more a function of monotony, of boredom, of alienation perhaps.”

He said his team of 30 monitors would interview tens of thousands of workers at Foxconn, which assembles major Apple products like the iPhone and the iPad at three huge factories in China.

In an NPR report, Mr. van Heerden said, “Workers are very outspoken and they’re not intimidated at all.”

Human rights advocates have long said that Foxconn City’s 230,000 employees are subjected to long hours, coerced overtime and harsh working conditions, all of which Foxconn disputes.

The working conditions at Apple’s suppliers were the subject of articles published last month by The New York Times.

Officials from several labor groups said on Thursday that they were surprised and dismayed by Mr. van Heerden’s comments.

“Generally, in a labor rights investigation, the findings come after the evidence is gathered, not the other way around,” said Scott Nova, executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium, a university-backed group that monitors apparel factories worldwide.

“I’m amazed that the F.L.A. would give one of the most notoriously abusive factories in the world a clean bill of health — based, it appears, on nothing more than a guided tour provided by the owner,” he added. “If the F.L.A. wants to convince people that it can somehow conduct an impartial investigation of Apple, despite being funded by Apple, this is not a good way to start.”

Heather White, the founder of Verite, another monitoring group, said Mr. van Heerden’s remarks appeared hasty. “That he would make any comments prior to workers being interviewed off-site in a confidential environment is somewhat premature, to say the least,” she said. “He doesn’t speak Chinese and he is not a trained auditor qualified to make quick assessments.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/b...ngs-doubt.html





News Corp Executives at Risk of US Prosecution for 'Willful Blindness'

American anti-corruption law holds company chiefs culpable for consciously avoiding knowledge of corrupt deeds at News Corp
Ed Pilkington

News Corporation executives could be vulnerable to individual prosecution by US anti-bribery authorities under the so-called "willful blindness" clause that holds company chiefs culpable if they chose to be unaware of any specific wrongdoing by their employees.

The FBI and other law-enforcers are probing Rupert Murdoch's media empire under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that seeks to punish US-based companies engaging in bribery abroad. News Corp is headquartered in New York.

Under the act, the company and its executives are liable to potentially severe penalties, including up to five years in prison, if it can be shown that they consciously avoided knowing about the corrupt deeds of their employees. "It's a well established prosecutorial principle that it is no defence to close your ears and shut your eyes," said Brad Simon, a former US federal prosecutor who now defends in cases of white-collar crime.

News Corporation's FCPA woes intensified sharply over the weekend after five senior journalists at the Sun newspaper and two military officials, as well as a police officer in the UK, were arrested. The eight were brought in for questioning by detectives involved in Operation Elveden investigating improper payments to police and other public officials from within News Corp's UK branch, News International.

The perils to News Corp of an FCPA prosecution in the US against the company and its executives was underlined by the revelation that a grand jury has been convened in the case of Avon Products. The Wall Street Journal reported that US authorities are probing an internal audit report compiled in 2005 that found that Avon employees had bribed officials in China, yet the company only launched an official inquiry into possible violations three years later.

In the Avon case, the grand jury is likely to be asked to consider whether executives were culpable under the "willful blindness" provision of the FCPA.

Professor John Coffee, a specialist in white-collar crime at Columbia law school in New York, said that executives were at risk of prosecution in cases where they failed to ask relevant questions about a suspicious persistent pattern of payments. He gave the metaphorical example of a driver used by a Mexican drugs cartel to transport cocaine across the border who was aware that the vehicle contained a secret storage panel but made no attempt to find out what packages had been placed inside.

As part of its response to the billowing phone hacking scandal, News Corp has amassed the most formidable team of FCPA lawyers ever assembled. "They have appointed not just one of the best lawyers in this field, they have appointed most of the best lawyers," Coffee said.

"That's not normal defensive strategy," he added.

The team is headed by Mark Mendelsohn, who as the former head of the US department of justice's FCPA section was responsible for developing much of the case law in this area.

Rupert Murdoch's younger son, James, is in a particularly sensitive position. He is a naturalised US citizen, and chairman of News Corporation in Europe.

He has come under repeated questioning by the UK parliament over precisely how much he knew about the News of the World phone hacking scandal, from which the bribery allegations have flowed. There has been no suggestion however that he had suspicions of any irregular payments to police or other public officials.

A focal point of the US investigations is likely to be whether false financial information relating to alleged improper payments was given in News International and News Corporation accounts. That could expose the company and its executives to prosecution by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The department of justice, working through the FBI on both sides of the Atlantic, is also likely to be exploring how much News Corporation executives in the UK were aware of a pattern of improper behaviour and if so what, if anything, they did to stop it. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012...us-prosecution





Sun Team Probing "Sustained Criminality": Source
Kate Holton and Mark Hosenball

An investigation into Rupert Murdoch's top-selling British newspaper, the Sun, has uncovered evidence that it paid tens of thousands of pounds in retainers to public officials for tipoffs, a source with knowledge of the probe said on Wednesday.

Much of the evidence passed to police has been provided by Murdoch's own News Corp group, and deepens a crisis at the Sun, where officers have arrested nine former and current senior staff in recent weeks over illegal payments.

Murdoch has been trying to regain the high ground ever since an outcry last summer - over revelations that his journalists had hacked the voicemails of crime victims and their families - forced him to close the profitable News of the World title and abort a planned multibillion-dollar buyout of Britain's biggest satellite broadcaster.

"This is not about sources or expenses, this is an investigation into serious suspected criminality over a sustained period," the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"It involves regular cash payments totaling tens of thousands of pounds a year for several years to public officials, some of whom were effectively on retainers to provide information. In totality it involves a six-figure sum."

News Corp and the police both declined to comment.

Murdoch himself is due in London on Thursday and expected at the Sun on Friday to try to quell a backlash from staff who have accused News Corp and police, as well as the octogenarian himself, of conducting an unparalleled witch hunt into journalists and their sources.

Journalists Feel Betrayed

Much of the anger within News International, Murdoch's British newspaper arm grouping the Times and Sunday Times along with the Sun, is directed at the unit set up by News Corp to root out evidence of illegal behavior.

The Management and Standards Committee (MSC) was set up at the height of the earlier furor over phone hacking and was designed to rescue the company's reputation and show that it was cooperating with the police.

It includes the award-winning journalist Will Lewis, previously editor of the Daily Telegraph, and reports to Joel Klein, who in turn reports to News Corp board member Viet Dinh.

"Viet Dinh, speaking for the board, was clear from the outset: the investigation would be thorough, independent and go where the facts and evidence led them and let the chips fall where they may," said another source close to the internal investigation.

"So it should come as no surprise that Dinh, Joel Klein and the MSC have been doing exactly what they said they would do."

The close relationship between the MSC and police, where officers work out of the same building with the lawyers and forensic experts of the MSC, has infuriated the newspaper journalists who feel they have been hung out to dry.

Britain's two most senior police officers quit last year over their handling of the phone hacking scandal and a number of serving officers have also been detained in the investigation into payments to officials.

"The management has done nothing to protect us from this appalling invasion of our work," one company insider told Reuters. "Nobody has said, 'You can't do this to journalists'. A lot of people are angry."

The National Union of Journalists said it had been approached by News International staff who were looking into whether they could legally challenge the authority of the MSC.

Reuters is a competitor of Dow Jones Newswires, a unit of News Corp.

(Additional reporting by Paul Sandle; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...81E1D420120215





UK Authorities Take Down a U.S. Domain: Could it Happen to You?
Zack Whittaker

Summary: If you thought the Patriot Act ‘debacle’ was one-sided, with U.S. authorities striking at the heart of Europe, UK authorities can hit back just as hard.

A UK law enforcement agency has shut down a popular music blog in the style of a U.S. Department of Homeland Security domain name seizure.

Update: Confirmed by SOCA: “Yep, we did that,” according to a spokesperson.

As TechDirt noted, the process for UK law enforcement taking down a .co.uk website was far easier than that of how the U.S. does and continues to do so. In many cases, the courts were bypassed and Nominet was asked directly to take down the sites.

The worrying factor here is that while the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) and other police forces have the right to ask Nominet, the registrar for .co.uk domain names, the RnBXclusive blog in question was running from a .com domain name, seemingly outside of British jurisdiction.

If you try to access the site, users are warned of severe penalties in a splash page that appears even more daunting than that of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) pages that file-sharing sites often succumb to.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/london/uk-...en-to-you/3039





SOCA: Police Can Monitor File Download Histories
David Meyer

Police officers have been tracking when downloaders of copyright-infringing files have deleted their download histories, according to the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

On Wednesday evening, SOCA hailed the success of an operation against music blog RnBXclusive, which provided links to illegal music downloads. The agency took down the site on Tuesday, posting in its place a warning to people using the site for downloads that they could face up to 10 years in jail.

One of the measures of the campaign's success, SOCA said in its statement on Wednesday, is that "a number of site users have deleted their download histories".

RnBXclusive did not host the music files itself, instead directing people to cyberlocker services similar to Megaupload, going by captures of the blog on the Way Back Machine archive. Asked for an explanation of how SOCA could monitor downloads, given these are not available via the blog's site, the agency confirmed it is tracking individual people's actions.

SOCA's investigative team "has been monitoring activities [of] users of the site", a spokesman for the agency told ZDNet UK.

He declined to comment further, saying that to go into SOCA's "techniques and methodology" could hinder the investigation.

Legality questioned

Cybersecurity expert Peter Sommer said the legality of SOCA's monitoring depends on the methods it is using. The UK police have regional units that use hacking as one way of surveilling suspects.

"One can only speculate, but there are only two ways one can think of in which they would know that download histories had been deleted," Sommer told ZDNet UK. "The first would involve them having seized the suspect's computer and carried out a forensic inspection, which would be legal."

"The second would be by remotely hacking into a suspect's computer," Sommer continued. "If they do that, there is a considerable likelihood that it would be illegal because the law enforcement exemption in the Computer Misuse Act does not apply to the use of a Trojan for remote hacking."

In the UK, copyright enforcement laws allow rights holders to get a court order forcing ISPs to block access to copyright-infringing sites hosted overseas, as was the case with RnBXclusive. However, the RnBXclusive takedown was carried out under conspiracy-to-defraud laws, rather than copyright enforcement laws.

"All action taken in this case was done after due and careful consideration with respect to the legal position of [SOCA's] actions," the police agency's spokesman said, when asked whether Tuesday's takedown had followed due process.

He added that RnBXclusive "enabled access to music obtained by hacking, including some which had not yet been released". The site had 70,000 visitors daily, mainly men between 18 and 25 years old, in the week before the arrest, according to SOCA.

The spokesman declined to comment on whether users of other download-related sites were also being monitored.

Three more music sites have shut up shop or gone legal since the RnBXclusive takedown and arrest of its proprietor, according to SOCA, which said it had "monitored responses" to its action. The agency's spokesman declined to name the three sites.

"One has taken itself offline voluntarily, one claims to be considering taking itself offline, and another has posted a claim on its home page to now only be dealing in legal music files following the activity," SOCA said in its statement.

Industry warning

The message posted by SOCA on RnBXclusive's site said that "as a result of illegal downloads young, emerging artists may have had their careers damaged", and that "if you have illegally downloaded music you will have damaged the future of the music industry". The content of this warning was influenced by representatives of rights holders, according to the police agency's spokesman.

"It was written by SOCA, but we did have input from industry," he said.

That message has now been taken down, having been up for around 32 hours as part of what SOCA described as "the first phase of the operation". This operation is entirely connected to RnBXclusive, rather than referring to future, similar campaigns, the agency's spokesman explained. He also clarified that the 10-year-sentence threat in the message was made under the Criminal Justice Act 1987.

"[Rights-holder group] IFPI estimates losses to legitimate businesses and artists caused by the site to be £15m a year," SOCA said in its statement.

In response, digital rights campaigner Peter Bradwell said collaboration between UK law enforcement agencies and rights holders needs to be more transparent.

"This whole episode seems to be a kind of scarecrow operation. SOCA should not be using threats simply to scare users, almost all of whom have no reason to fear jail. This is at best a distraction for an organisation who should be dealing with serious, material threats," said Open Rights Group member Bradwell.

David Allen Green, head of the media practice at law firm Preiskel & Co, also questioned why the agency is taking part in what is effectively a copyright enforcement case.

"It is not clear why SOCA are involved, and it seems odd that they are using a Heath Robinson combination of contract and conspiracy law," Green said. "The alarmist web page they have used to replace the site taken down is preposterous and makes SOCA look frankly ridiculous."
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/security...ries-40095058/





A High-Tech War on Leaks
Adam Liptak

BACK in 2006, before the Obama administration made leak prosecutions routine, a panel of three federal appeals court judges in New York struggled to decide whether a prosecutor should be allowed to see the phone records of two New York Times reporters, Judith Miller and Philip Shenon, in an effort to determine their sources for articles about Islamic charities.

“I’ve been thinking about the scene in ‘All the President’s Men,’ ” said Judge Robert D. Sack, citing the leading cinematic precedent. He meant the part where Bob Woodward, in the process of unraveling the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post, meets his source in an underground parking garage.

“First of all,” Judge Sack asked, “do you really have to meet in a garage to maintain your confidentiality? Second of all, can the government go and subpoena the surveillance camera?”

Six years and six prosecutions later, those questions seem as naïve as their answers are obvious: yes and yes.

It used to be that journalists had a sporting chance of protecting their sources. The best and sometimes only way to identify a leaker was to pressure the reporter or news organization that received the leak, but even subpoenas tended to be resisted. Today, advances in surveillance technology allow the government to keep a perpetual eye on those with security clearances, and give prosecutors the ability to punish officials for disclosing secrets without provoking a clash with the press.

The changes have unsettled a decades-long accommodation between national security and press freedom, one in which the government did what it could to protect its secrets but exercised discretion in resorting to subpoenas and criminal charges when it failed. Even the administration of George W. Bush, no friend of leaks, more or less stuck to this script.

“The government does not pursue every leak,” said Mark Corallo, who served as the Justice Department’s spokesman in Mr. Bush’s administration. “On balance, it is more important that the media have the ability to report. It’s important to our democracy.”

That does not seem to be the view of the Obama administration, which has brought more prosecutions against current or former government officials for providing classified information to the media than every previous administration combined.

“It increases the level of paranoia,” Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said of recent trends. “As security has been ratcheted up, so has the anxiety of many government officials about dealing with the press and the public.”

Mr. Corallo, who served under Mr. Bush’s attorney general John D. Ashcroft, said he was “sort of shocked” by the volume of leak prosecutions under President Obama. “We would have gotten hammered for it,” he said.

The current administration attributes the volume of prosecutions to happenstance and the availability of evidence, rejecting accusations of politically motivated selective prosecution.

“The Justice Department has always taken seriously cases in which government employees and contractors entrusted with classified information are suspected of willfully disclosing such classified information to those not entitled to it,” a department official explained. “As a general matter, prosecutions of those who leaked classified information to reporters have been rare, due, in part, to the inherent challenges involved in identifying the person responsible for the illegal disclosure and in compiling the evidence necessary to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.”

MR. ASHCROFT authorized a single subpoena for reporters’ testimony or records in his four years in office, Mr. Corallo said. He would not say so, but that subpoena was probably the one that troubled Judge Sack in 2006. The reporters lost. In a dissent, Judge Sack said he feared for the future.

“Reporters might find themselves,” he wrote, “as a matter of practical necessity, contacting sources the way I understand drug dealers to reach theirs — by use of clandestine cellphones and meeting in darkened doorways. Ordinary use of the telephone could become a threat to journalist and source alike. It is difficult to see in whose best interests such a regime would operate.”

What he imagined may now be reality. Consider the most recent prosecution, of John C. Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. agent who is said to have disclosed classified information to journalists in 2008 about the capture and interrogation of an operative of Al Qaeda.

Daniel Ellsberg, who provided the secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, said he was deeply troubled by the charges.

“The Kiriakou indictment for leaking” the identities of C.I.A. officers involved in a program that many people called torture, he said, “is particularly disgusting in the context of zero indictments for actually torturing, or for directing torture, or for writing spurious legal justifications for it.”

The criminal complaint in the case says it is based largely on “e-mails recovered from search warrants served on two e-mail accounts associated with Kiriakou.”

Mr. Aftergood said the complaint provided both vivid glimpses of interactions between reporters and sources and proof of a new era in surveillance.

“The Kiriakou complaint is astonishing,” he said, “because you see the government delving into the innards of the news production process.”

Only one of the journalists involved in the Kiriakou case has been publicly identified: Scott Shane of The Times. A spokeswoman for The Times has said that neither the paper nor Mr. Shane had been contacted by investigators or had provided any information to them. The digital trail, it seems, was enough.

In a second case, against Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former C.I.A. officer accused of providing classified information to another Times reporter, James Risen, for a 2006 book, the government has been more aggressive, insisting that Mr. Risen must testify. He has refused to say anything about confidential matters, and Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., has sided with him. She said there were other ways to prove the case against Mr. Sterling, including “numerous telephone records, e-mail messages, computer files and testimony that strongly indicates that Sterling was Risen’s source.”

The government has appealed that ruling. “The circumstantial evidence of guilt, though compelling, is simply not comparable to Risen’s eyewitness testimony,” prosecutors told the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., in a brief filed last month.

The appeal in Mr. Risen’s case may, at first blush, suggest that the new primacy of digital surveillance in leak investigations is overstated. But Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the case was a vestige of another era.

She described a conference in June organized by the Aspen Institute that brought together lawyers, journalists and intelligence officials to talk about government secrecy. The ground rules, she said, were that the identities of those involved were to be kept confidential, but what was said could be reported.

“I was told in a rather cocky manner” by a national security representative, Ms. Dalglish recalled, that “the Risen subpoena is one of the last you’ll see.”

She continued, paraphrasing the official: “We don’t need to ask who you’re talking to. We know.”

The solution for reporters, Ms. Dalglish said, is to adopt Mr. Woodward’s methods from the 1970s. “For God’s sake, get off of e-mail,” she said. “Get off of your cellphone. Watch your credit cards. Watch your plane tickets. These guys in the N.S.A. know everything.”

Mr. Corallo, the former Justice Department spokesman, provided corresponding advice to government officials. “Don’t be stupid and use e-mail,” he said. “You have to meet a reporter face to face, hand him an envelope and walk away quickly.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/s...-on-leaks.html





New Surveillance Laws Ignite Online Firestorm

Toews' 'divisive' comments over legislation make minister target of Twitterverse
Jeff Davis and Sarah Schmidt and Vito Pilieci

Public outrage over the government's proposed Internet surveillance laws boiled over Thursday, as thousands of Canadians made their objections loud and clear on the Twitterverse.

At the same time, a Liberal MP turned the tables on Public Safety Minister Vic Toews and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, requesting that Parliament divulge the web-surfing histories of their computers and BlackBerrys.

Prince Edward Island Liberal MP Sean Casey said he's trying to make a point about the Harper government's contentious online surveillance law with his order paper question.

"I very much want the minister to have a taste of his own medicine," Casey said. "To have happen to him what he proposes to do to ordinary Canadians."

Liberal opposition to the bill comes as a surprise to some, given Liberal governments tried - and failed - to pass even further-reaching bills in the past.

Bill C-30, recently renamed the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, would give police much broader powers to snoop on the online communications of Canadians.

It has been met with fierce opposition from Internet privacy and civilrights groups, who say the bill would build a state surveillance system into Canada's Internet.

Public anger at the Internet snooping bill crystallized on Twitter Thursday, becoming the most tweetedabout subject in Canada.

The hashtag (used on Twitter to classify subjects) #TellVicEverything became the focal point for a mass popular protest. Thousands of Canadians flooded Toews with routine, often inane, updates on their lives, which is the kind of information many fear police could access if the Internet surveillance bill passes.

Others used the #TellVicEvery-thing tag to lampoon the surveillance bill, which they fear will give police constant access to personal communications.

"Hey ToewsVic, I lost an email from my work account yesterday," wrote British Columbia Twitter user Kevin Harding. "Can I get your copy?"

Others pilloried Toews' over-the-top rhetoric that those who oppose the bill are in bed with child pornographers.

"Hey, everybody! You either #Tell-VicEverything or you side with the child pornographers," wrote another Twitter user.

Casey's question requests a log of all "websites accessed on the person-al departmental desktop computers, laptop computers, mobile phones, tablet computers or other Internet-enabled devices" used by Toews, Nicholson and their political staffers. "I want him to be personally aware of what it's like to have someone combing through your browser histories," Casey said. "The question is not fair, but it's no more unfair than what he expects of ordinary Canadians."

Michael Geist, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and e-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, said Toews can only blame himself for setting off this "firestorm" in the Twittersphere.

Toews' intemperate accusation that anyone who objects to the bill is a friend to child pornographers has struck a loud, dissonant chord with millions of Canadians, he said.

"It's hard to believe the rollout of this bill could have gone any worse for the government. Obviously, Vic Toews caused significant problems with his over-the-top, very divisive comments about siding with child pornographers."

The Twittersphere has gone after Toews with a vengeance all week. For example, an IP address connected to what is known as the Vikileaks30 Twitter account - which has been burning up the Twittersphere with claims about Toews' personal life - originates within the House of Commons.

In a bid to determine the origin of the account, which posted a string of tweets online offering alleged details relating to Toews' divorce proceedings, the Ottawa Citizen undertook an investigation on Thursday.

An email was sent to the writer of the Vikileaks30 Twitter account, containing a link to a website. The website was monitored by the Citizen and only the author of Vikileaks30 had the address of the website.

About 15 minutes after sending the email, Vikileaks30 opened the link and visited the page, leaving behind an IP address that belongs to the House of Commons.

The Vikileaks30 Twitter account surged into public prominence in the wake of the tabling of the new snooping. The Vikileaks30 tweets began late Tuesday night and were posted directly in response to the tabling of the government's "lawful access" bill.

"Vic wants to know about you. Let's get to know about Vic," read the first tweet. "Let's start with affidavits from Vic's divorce case."

What followed were dozens of tweets with alleged quotes from affidavits connected to Toews' divorce proceedings. The contents of the tweets were not verified.

As the feed continued to put out 140-character messages throughout the day, the number of followers grew by leaps and bounds.

IP addresses are like fingerprints on the Internet. Each Internet account has its own unique IP address.

The Citizen used three separate Internet services that track and identify IP addresses to confirm the location of the address.

All the services identified the ad-dress as belonging to the Government of Canada - and specifically the House of Commons.

While it's impossible to say who is actually using the address with-out a full-scale investigation by the House of Commons, a trace of the IP address shows it is also used by an employee of the House to post comments on a website for fans of the musician Paul Simon.

When reached by phone, the employee said that while he frequents the Paul Simon website, he has nothing to do with the Vikileaks30 Twitter account.

A spokeswoman for the Speaker of the House of Commons said she is not aware of any investigation into whether any House IP addresses are behind the Vikileaks30 account.

Calls to Toews' office about the origin of the IP address - and whether he would request an investigation into who has been using it to author the Vikileaks30 Twitter feed - were not returned.
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/...770/story.html





Web. .Phone, Net Watchers Fuel 'Surveillance State' Fears Philip Dorling
Philip Dorling

AUSTRALIAN law enforcement and government agencies are accessing vast quantities of phone and internet data without warrants, prompting warnings of a growing "surveillance state" and calls for tighter controls.

The Attorney-General's Department has released figures showing federal and state agencies accessed telecommunications data and internet logs more than 250,000 times during criminal and revenue investigations in 2010-11.

Greens senator Scott Ludlam has called for tighter controls.

Advertisement: Story continues below ''We've already taken some pretty dangerous steps in this country towards the surveillance state,'' Senator Ludlam told a recent conference on internet privacy, ''and not that many of us are either interested or aware that it's going on, including people like me who should know better.''

Data available to police, security and other government agencies under federal telecommunications law includes phone and internet account information, outwards and inwards call details, phone and internet access location data, and details of Internet Protocol addresses visited, though not the actual content of communications. Access is authorised by senior police officers or officials rather than by judicial warrant.

Federal government agencies using telecommunications data include the Australia Federal Police, Australian Crime Commission, the Tax Office, the departments of Defence, Immigration and Citizenship and Health and Ageing, Medicare and Australia Post.

Data was also accessed by state police and anti-corruption bodies, government departments and revenue offices, the RSPCA in Queensland and Victoria, the Victorian Taxi Directorate and Wyndham City Council in Melbourne's west.

Victoria Police was the largest user of telecommunications data, with 65,703 authorisations in 2010-11. The force has reported a jump of more than 50 per cent in authorisations over two years.

The scale of telecommunications data mining by police and security agencies has also been illustrated by the release under freedom of information of a ''highly protected'' report on a single AFP-Defence Department leak investigation in 1999-2001. In an effort to identify the source of leaks to the media of secret intelligence reports on East Timor, the AFP and Defence security investigators accessed phone call records of nearly 14,000 phone services totalling more than 77,000 calls.

The Australian Privacy Foundation recently noted that it was now easy to track a person's mobile devices, smartphones and tablets ''in real-time, or retrospectively''.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/ph...#ixzz1mgGH3StP





Feds Urge Court to Reject Laptop Decryption Appeal
David Kravets

The government is urging a federal appeals court not to entertain an appeal from a bank-fraud defendant who has been ordered to decrypt her laptop so its contents can be used in her criminal case.

Colorado federal authorities seized the encrypted Toshiba laptop from defendant Ramona Fricosu in 2010 with valid court warrants while investigating alleged mortgage fraud, and demanded she decrypt it.

Ruling that the woman’s Fifth Amendment rights against compelled self-incrimination would not be breached, U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn ordered the woman in January to decrypt the laptop by the end of February. The judge refused to stay his decision to allow Fricosu time to appeal.

The Colorado woman’s attorney appealed anyway, and the government on Thursday asked the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reject the petition that asserts the woman’s constitutional rights would be breached by being forced to hand over evidence against herself.

The government argued the same reasons that Judge Blackburn gave when he denied staying his decision: The issue, however novel, was not ripe for appeal.

Generally, appellate courts frown on taking cases until after there’s been a verdict. So the woman, the government said, should unlock the drive and appeal if she gets convicted of the financial fraud charges, which theoretically carry decades in prison.

Fricosu, prosecutor Patricia Davies wrote, “can appeal her conviction — just as defendants do when compelled to produce documents pursuant to subpoena or when denied suppression of evidence or statements pre-trial.”

Davies also said Fricosu’s reasons for appealing are legally baseless.

“Fricosu argues that the order is appealable because of its novelty, and the fact that it is of public interest and importance,” Davies wrote “But courts have properly rejected the claim that otherwise non-final orders should be reviewed on such grounds.”

The decryption case is a complicated one, even if solely analyzed on the underlying Fifth Amendment issue. Such decryption orders are rare, and they have never squarely been addressed by the Supreme Court.

One case involved a child pornography prosecution that ended with a Vermont federal judge ordering the defendant to decrypt the hard drive of his laptop.

While that case never reached the Supreme Court, it differed from the Fricosu matter because U.S. border agents already knew there was child porn on the computer because they saw it while the computer was running during a 2006 routine stop along the Canadian border. The authorities’ belief that Fricosu’s hard drive might contain evidence against her was the result of a recorded jailhouse conversation between her and a co-defendant.

And now the case is even more complicated and raises the question of what might happen if the woman does not comply with the judge’s order. Her attorney, Philip Dubois, suggested in a recent interview that his client might have forgotten the password.

If she does not decrypt the drive by month’s end, as ordered, she could be held in contempt and jailed until she complies. If the case gets to that point, Judge Blackburn would have to make a judgment call and determine whether the woman had forgotten the code or was refusing to comply.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...yption-appeal/





Congrats, US Government: You're Scaring Web Businesses Into Moving Out Of The US
Mike Masnick

The federal government has been paying lip service to the idea that it wants to encourage new businesses and startups in the US. And this is truly important to the economy, as studies have shown that almost all of the net job growth in this country is coming from internet startups. Thankfully some politicians recognize this, but the federal government seems to be going in the other direction. With the JotForm situation unfolding, where the US government shut down an entire website with no notice or explanation, people are beginning to recognize that the US is not safe for internet startups.

Lots of folks have been passing around this rather reasonable list of activities for US-based websites:

Today's sysadmin todo list:

0. Get corporate membership with EFF.

1. Identify all applications with user-generated content.

2. Move all associated domains to a non-US based registrar.

3. Migrate DNS, web serving and other critical services to non-US based servers.

4. Migrate yourself to a non-US controlled country.

I'm sorry for US sites and users. Your government is hell-bent on turning the internet into a read-only device like TV, easily regulated and controlled. The population will be required to sit quietly and keep their eyes glued on the screen so they don't miss the ads, with any infringers deemed terrorists and pedophiles and thus deserving of summary punishment by DHS squads.

Hopefully the internet will route around the damaged segment, and the rest of us can continue to enjoy the amazing interactivity it has brought our society.

What's amazing is the "what's the big deal?" attitude the government has taken to all of this. For most of us, this situation is shocking. The US government should never be able to flat out shut down a business with no notice or explanation, only to say "sorry" a couple days later. It's done this in the past and insisted that it would be more careful in the future. So far, it doesn't appear to be living up to that promise. While these may be "mistakes," the wider impact should be frightening to federal officials. They're now actively scaring startups away from US businesses at a time when they should be doing exactly the opposite.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...g-out-us.shtml





Artist’s ‘Transparency Grenade’ Wants to Blow Apart Corporate Secrecy
Duncan Geere

Artist Julian Oliver has put together a “transparency grenade” that lets users leak information from closed meetings by just pulling a pin.

The grenade includes a computer with a microphone and powerful wireless antenna that captures network traffic and audio in a location and anonymously streams it to an external server that mines it for information — including e-mail excerpts, web pages, images and voice. The server then uploads that data to a public website and positions it on a map.

The body is the shape of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, made out of the sturdy Tusk2700T resin. The metal parts are created from silver, complete with an operational trigger mechanism that begins the recording process. “I wanted it to look elegant, a bottle of high-class perfume, as much as a weapon,” said Oliver in an interview with We Make Money, Not Art.

Inside, there’s a a “Gumstix” ARM Cortex-A8 computer, Arduino Nano, LED Bargraph (for wireless signal level), 802.11 board antenna, 3.7-volt battery, 64×32 pixel LCD RGB display, 5mm cardioid microphone and an 8 GB microSD card. The computer runs a modified GNU/Linux embedded operating system.

Oliver added: “The volatility of information in networked, digital contexts itself frames a precedent for clamoring (and often unrealistic) attempts to contain it. One could even say it’s this desperate fear of the leak that produces images like my grenade, images that will continue to take violent forms in popular culture, journalism and presidential speeches in time.”

Oliver says that he’s also working on a version of the grenade’s functionality that’s a little more subtle — it uses a rooted Android phone to achieve the same aims. “This will allow activists (or those simply sick of the relative opacity of their organization) to deploy Transparency Grenade-like functionality on their rooted Android phone and send the data over an encrypted channel via their GSM provider to a publicly available map, displaying the detonation as data from that site,” he said.

You can see the Transparency Grenade in the Weise7 Studio exhibition in Labor Berlin, Haus Der Kulturen der Welt, until Feb. 20, 2012. View more images in Wired UK’s Transparency Grenade gallery.
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/...rency-grenade/





F.C.C. Bars the Use of Airwaves for a Broadband Plan
Edward Wyatt

A proposed wireless broadband network that would provide voice and Internet service using airwaves once reserved for satellite-telephone transmissions should be shelved because it interferes with GPS technology, the Federal Communications Commission said Tuesday.

The F.C.C. statement revokes the conditional approval for the network given last year. It comes after an opinion by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which said that “there is no practical way to mitigate the potential interference at this time” with GPS devices. The telecommunications and information agency oversees telecommunications policy at the Commerce Department.

The news appears to squash the near-term hopes for the network pushed by LightSquared, a Virginia company that is majority-owned by Philip Falcone, a New York hedge fund manager.

LightSquared said on Tuesday that the testing of the network was “severely flawed.” It “remains committed to finding a resolution with the federal government and the GPS industry to resolve all remaining concerns,” the company said in a statement.

The company said it “profoundly disagrees” with the results of the testing, which was done by a national engineering group, and the telecommunication agency’s opinions, “which disregard more than a decade of regulatory orders, and in doing so, jeopardize private enterprise, jobs and investment in America’s future.”

The F.C.C., which had granted a conditional approval to LightSquared to go ahead with its network pending the results of more testing, will now propose barring near-term deployment of the LightSquared system, the F.C.C. said. The commission will issue a request for public comment on the proposed action on Wednesday.

LightSquared has argued that its network would have relieved a potential “spectrum crunch” and created billions of dollars of investment and thousands of jobs in support of President Obama’s push to expand wireless Internet access around the country.

The network has been opposed by organizations and industries that make heavy use of GPS systems, including the military, aviation, construction and agriculture.

After earlier negative test results, LightSquared had proposed using only land-based transmitters and receivers, rather than satellites, to transmit broadband signals over a narrow slice of the satellite airwaves. The company intended to build a wholesale network, selling access to other companies that provide broadband service directly to consumers.

The telecommunications and information agency said tests showed that even a scaled-back version of the company’s wireless network would interfere with GPS signals and systems.

Interference of LightSquared’s signals with GPS systems is a tricky issue for the F.C.C., telecommunications experts say, because the interference appears not to be the fault of LightSquared. The most commonly used GPS receivers tend to pick up signals from outside of the segment of spectrum designated for GPS.

Because the satellite-telephone segment of airwaves, used by LightSquared, is next to the GPS band on the electromagnetic spectrum, GPS devices will frequently hear those extraneous transmissions.

The F.C.C. could have told GPS users and systems manufacturers that they were at fault for letting their devices stray into nearby airwaves, but that would mean overhauling an industry now in widespread use.

Jeff Carlisle, LightSquared’s executive vice president for regulatory affairs and public policy, wrote on the company’s blog this week that the GPS industry had apparently become “too big to fail,” seeking protection from the federal government for its own mistakes.

“GPS manufacturers have been selling devices that listen into frequencies outside of their assigned spectrum band — namely into LightSquared’s licensed band,” Mr. Carlisle wrote. “The GPS industry has leveraged years of insider relationships and massive lobbying dollars to make sure that they don’t have to fix the problem they created.”

Opposition to LightSquared’s network has come from the Pentagon and military industries, as well as from commercial companies like John Deere, whose advanced farm equipment uses GPS systems.

Last July, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a report saying that it would take 10 years for the civil aviation industry to design, develop, certify and install modified GPS equipment in the nation’s fleet of commercial and private jets.

But in January, after initial results of the latest round of testing began to appear in the media, LightSquared conducted a conference call with reporters in which the company’s executives said the testing requirements were aimed at producing a failing result and that members of the advisory board overseeing the testing “have deep ties with the same GPS manufacturers who have sold poorly designed equipment to America’s farmers, public safety officials, military and government agencies.”

Mr. Falcone’s hedge fund, Harbinger Capital Partners, lost more than 46 percent of its value last year because of declines in the value of LightSquared, a private company whose shares do not actively trade.

Harbinger marked down the value of its LightSquared investment by 50 percent in December, a move that came after a 9 percent markdown earlier in the year. The New York Times reported earlier this month that LightSquared accounted for an estimated 60 percent of Mr. Falcone’s fund.

Late last year, Mr. Falcone received a Wells Notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission, an action the agency typically takes when it is planning enforcement proceedings against a firm or individual. The Times reported in December that the S.E.C was investigating whether Harbinger agreed in 2009 to allow Goldman Sachs to withdraw up to $50 million from the firm’s hedge funds, while not striking similar deals with other clients.

In a federal filing disclosing the issue, Harbinger said that it was “disappointed” about the notices, and that it would “vigorously defend against” any formal charges.

Mr. Falcone was part of an investment group that bought 19 percent of the common stock of The New York Times Company and in 2008 reached a deal to award the group two new seats on the company’s board. The group urged the company to begin selling assets to help increase the stock price. One of the two directors has since left the board.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/b...band-plan.html





AT&T on Data Throttling: Blame Yourselves
Zach Epstein

In an effort to justify its policies surrounding data service throttling for subscribers with unlimited smartphone data plans, AT&T on Tuesday issued a brief report regarding data usage on its nationwide wireless network. Senior EVP of AT&T technology and network operations John Donovan wrote on a company blog that data traffic on AT&T’s network has grown a staggering 20,000% over the past five years. Usage has doubled between 2010 and 2011 according to the executive, due in large part to the proliferation of smartphones. AT&T sold more smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2011 than in any other quarter in its history. And because its smartphone subscribers use so much data, AT&T seems to suggest it has no choice but to put measures such as data throttling in place. Read on for more.

“The growth is now driven primarily by smartphones,” the executive wrote on AT&T’s Innovation Space blog. “Add to that new customer additions and the continuing trend of upgrades from feature phones to smartphones, and you have a wireless data tsunami.”

While Donovan did not specifically address the recent resurgence of complaints surrounding AT&T’s throttling of unlimited data users, the timing of his blog post is no coincidence. AT&T’s questionable policy regarding unlimited data plans was brought back into the spotlight recently following a new wave of subscriber complaints. While AT&T currently offers a tiered 3GB smartphone data plan for $30 per month, unlimited data plan holders paying the same amount are often seeing their data speeds throttled — or slowed significantly in an effort to reduce network strain — after using less than 2GB of data in a single billing period.

Donovan offers no real solution, however he does stress AT&T’s continued investment in its network. “AT&T has invested more than $95 billion in its wireless and wireline networks over the past five years,” Donovan wrote. “In 2011, we invested $20 billion in our networks, and completed more than 150,000 wireless network improvements. And we expect to invest about $20 billion again in 2012 with a focus on wireless, including more 4G LTE deployment, the roll-out of distributed antenna systems in key venues across the U.S. and adding even more AT&T Wi-Fi Hot Spots to the nation’s largest Wi-Fi network.”

AT&T’s plan to address network issues by acquiring T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telecom for $39 billion was canceled late last year after the United States Justice Department sued to block the deal.
http://www.bgr.com/2012/02/15/att-on...me-yourselves/





AT&T Must Let Beastie Boy Vote on Net Neutrality, SEC Says
Jesse Hamilton

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has told AT&T Inc. and other telecommunications companies they must include a resolution supporting wireless net-neutrality in annual shareholder votes.

In a letter posted on the SEC website, the agency asserted that net neutrality -- the idea that Internet service providers must treat traffic equally -- has become a “significant policy consideration” and can no longer be excluded from shareholder ballots. AT&T, Verizon Communications Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp. must now grant shareholder requests for votes this year on resolutions that would support net neutrality.

“In view of the sustained public debate over the last several years concerning net neutrality and the Internet and the increasing recognition that the issue raises significant policy considerations, we do not believe that AT&T may omit the proposal from its proxy materials,” the SEC said in the Feb. 10 letter.

The shareholder resolution would recommend each company “publicly commit to operate its wireless broadband network consistent with network neutrality principles,” the letter said. The companies should not discriminate based on the “source, ownership or destination” of data sent over their wireless infrastructure.

“It allows shareholders to come to the table for the first time on an issue that we think is really of preeminent importance,” said Farnum Brown, an investment strategist at Boston-based Trillium Asset Management LLC, which led the multiyear effort of shareholder groups. “Persistence pays, I guess is the moral of the story.”

FCC Regulation

The Democrat-led Federal Communications Commission approved a regulation in 2010 that bars land-line Internet-service providers from blocking or slowing online content sent to homes and businesses, while still allowing mobile-phone companies to put limits on Internet traffic. Verizon sued the FCC in federal court, arguing the regulator lacks authority to regulate how companies provide Internet service.

Trillium, with the Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica Inc. and the Nathan Cummings Foundation, had been seeking access to company ballots for at least four years.

Beastie Boys

Trillium is representing three individual AT&T investors -- Michael Diamond, better known as Mike D of the hip-hop band Beastie Boys; his wife Tamra Davis, director of films including “Billy Madison” and “Half Baked”; and John P. Silva, of Silva Artist Management, which represents recording artists Foo Fighters and Beck.

AT&T argued the proposal “would directly interfere with its network management practices and seriously impair its ability to provide wireless broadband service to its customers,” David B. Harms, a lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, wrote in a letter to the SEC on behalf of the company. Mike Balmoris, a company spokesman, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the response.

The SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance had found in past years that similar net-neutrality proposals fell under the category of day-to-day business operations and that companies could exclude them from shareholder voting. With the agency changing its position, the previous exclusion no longer applies.

“Net neutrality is the free speech issue of our time and today’s decision by the SEC was a big win in the fight to maintain a free and open Internet,” Senator Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, said in a statement. Franken had co-written a Jan. 31 letter to SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro with four other senators, urging the commission to deny the companies’ exclusion requests.

Reviewing Next Steps

“We received word last week that the SEC declined,” said John B. Taylor, a spokesman for Sprint, in an e-mail. “We understand other companies in our industry received similar guidance. Sprint is reviewing the information received from the SEC and potential next steps.”

Bob Varettoni, a spokesman for New York-based Verizon, declined to comment. His company had argued that this latest shareholder proposal didn’t offer “any new information that would indicate that ‘net neutrality’ has emerged as a consistent topic of widespread public debate,” according to a Dec. 22 letter to the SEC from Mary Louise Weber, an assistant general counsel at Verizon.

Companies whose requests are declined by the SEC can challenge the regulator’s findings in court.

--With assistance from Todd Shields and Tom Schoenberg in Washington. Editors: Anthony Gnoffo, Maura Reynolds
http://www.businessweek.com/news/201...-sec-says.html





KT May Face Punishment for Cutting Internet to TVs
Lee Ji-yoon

The Korea Communications Commission discussed possible punitive measures against KT Corp., which limited Internet access for Samsung-made smart televisions for five days, during a regular meeting of its leadership on Wednesday.

The state-run telecom regulator also decided to seek ways to punish Samsung for causing the service shutdown as it refused to talk with KT over the network use of its smart TV owners.

As part of their agreement announced Tuesday, KT resumed Internet services like video-on-demand and smart TV applications immediately, while Samsung withdrew a lawsuit against KT.

Even though the harm from the incident, which affected an estimated 300,000 TV sets nationwide, was considered moderate, criticism is growing against the two companies for dragging their customers into their failed negotiations.

“It’s not right that business operators hold their users hostage when they fail to reach an agreement,” said KCC commissioner Shin Yong-sub.

“Under their consumer policy, KT should have posted the service shutdown notice a week ago. But they cut the service one day after the announcement.”

Yang Moon-seok, another commissioner, also stressed strict action.

“We should not excuse them because they reached an agreement,” Yang said.

The KCC had originally planned to issue a corrective order against KT. With the surprise service resumption on Tuesday, however, industry sources predict a low possibility of the two major firms facing harsh punishment.
http://www.koreaherald.com/national/...20120215001300





The Case for Publicly Owned Internet Service
Susan P. Crawford

In cities and towns across the U.S., a familiar story is replaying itself: Powerful companies are preventing local governments from providing an essential service to their citizens. More than 100 years ago, it was electricity. Today, it is the public provision of communications services.

The Georgia legislature is currently considering a bill that would effectively make it impossible for any city in the state to provide for high-speed Internet access networks -- even in areas in which the private sector cannot or will not. Nebraska, North Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee already have similar laws in place. South Carolina is considering one, as is Florida.

Mayors across the U.S. are desperate to attract good jobs and provide residents with educational opportunities, access to affordable health care, and other benefits that depend on affordable, fast connectivity -- something that people in other industrialized countries take for granted. But powerful incumbent providers such as AT&T Inc. and Time Warner Cable Inc. are hamstringing municipalities.

At the beginning of the 20th century, private power companies electrified only the most lucrative population centers and ignored most of America, particularly rural America. By the mid-1920s, 15 holding companies controlled 85 percent of the nation’s electricity distribution, and the Federal Trade Commission found that the power trusts routinely gouged consumers.

Costly and Dangerous

In response, and recognizing that cheap, plentiful electricity was essential to economic development and quality of life, thousands of communities formed electric utilities of their own. Predictably, the private utilities claimed that public ownership of electrical utilities was “costly and dangerous” and “always a failure,” according to the November 1906 issue of Moody’s Magazine. Now more than 2,000 communities in the U.S., including Seattle, San Antonio and Los Angeles, provide their own electricity.

Today, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which advocates for community broadband initiatives, is tracking more than 60 municipal governments that have built or are building successful fiber networks, just as they created electric systems during the 20th century. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, for example, the city’s publicly owned electric company provides fast, affordable and reliable fiber Internet access. Some businesses based in Knoxville -- 100 miles to the northeast -- are adding jobs in Chattanooga, where connectivity can cost an eighth as much.

Meanwhile, less than 8 percent of Americans currently receive fiber service to their homes, compared with more than 50 percent of households in South Korea, and almost 40 percent in Japan. Where it’s available, Americans pay five or six times as much for their fiber access as people in other countries do. Fully a third of Americans don’t subscribe to high-speed Internet access at all, and AT&T Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson said last month that the company was “trying to find a broadband solution that was economically viable to get out to rural America, and we’re not finding one, to be quite candid.” America is rapidly losing the global race for high-speed connectivity.

Tamping Down Enthusiasm

Like the power trusts of the 20th century, the enormous consolidated providers of wired Internet access want to tamp down any enthusiasm for municipal networks. Last year, telecom lobbyists spent more than $300,000 in a failed effort to block a referendum in Longmont, Colorado, to allow that city to provide Internet access. Time Warner Cable managed to get a North Carolina law enacted last year that makes launching municipal networks there extraordinarily difficult. The pending measures in Georgia and South Carolina are modeled on the North Carolina bill.

The Georgia bill is chock-full of sand traps and areas of deep statutory fog from which no local public network is likely ever to emerge. In addition to the ordinary public hearings that any municipality would hold on the subject, a town looking to build a public network would have to hold a referendum. It wouldn’t be allowed to spend any money in support of its position (there would be no such prohibition on the deep-pocketed incumbents). The community wouldn’t be allowed to support its network with local taxes or surplus revenues from any other services (although incumbents routinely and massively subsidize their networks with revenue from other businesses).

Most pernicious of all, the public operator would have to include in the costs of its service the phantom, imputed “capital costs” and “taxes” of a private provider. This is a fertile area for disputes, litigation and delay, as no one knows what precise costs and taxes are at issue, much less how to calculate these amounts. The public provider would also have to comply with all laws and “requirements” applicable to “the communications service,” if it were made available by “a private provider,” although again the law doesn’t specify which service is involved or which provider is relevant.

The end result of all this vague language will be to make it all but impossible for a city to obtain financing to build its network. Although the proponents of Georgia’s bill claim that they are merely trying to create a level playing field, these are terms and conditions that no new entrant, public or private, can meet -- and that the incumbents themselves do not live by. You can almost hear the drafters laughing about how impossible the entire enterprise will be.

Globally Competitive Networks

Right now, state legislatures -- where the incumbents wield great power -- are keeping towns and cities in the U.S. from making their own choices about their communications networks. Meanwhile, municipalities, cooperatives and small independent companies are practically the only entities building globally competitive networks these days. Both AT&T and Verizon have ceased the expansion of next-generation fiber installations across the U.S., and the cable companies’ services greatly favor downloads over uploads.

Congress needs to intervene. One way it could help is by preempting state laws that erect barriers to the ability of local jurisdictions to provide communications services to their citizens.

Running for president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt emphasized the right of communities to provide their own electricity. “I might call the right of the people to own and operate their own utility a birch rod in the cupboard,” he said, “to be taken out and used only when the child gets beyond the point where more scolding does any good.” It’s time to take out that birch rod.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-0...-crawford.html





Comcast’s Net Income Increases, Lifted by Internet Subscriptions
Amy Chozick

A slowing decline in the number of customers cancelling their cable service coupled with additional high-speed Internet subscriptions contributed to a 26.4 percent increase in quarterly net income at Comcast, the nation’s largest cable provider.

In the three months that ended Dec. 31, the company reported $1.3 billion in net income, up from $1.02 billion in the same period in 2010. Revenue jumped 54.7 percent to $15.04 billion, driven largely by 336,000 new high-speed Internet customers and a 37 percent increase in revenue in the company’s business services division, which sets up mostly small businesses with Internet, phone and cable. Operating income at the company, which is based in Philadelphia, soared 45 percent to $2.9 billion.

The results point to a slightly improved economic climate in which more consumers are able to afford their monthly cable service, still the essence of the rapidly expanding Comcast.

“Cable had another terrific year of improving customer metrics,” Brian L. Roberts, chairman and chief executive at Comcast, said in a statement. “Our intensified focus on service and innovation are making a real difference.”

Still, Comcast and its satellite and cable competitors have recently diversified their businesses away from video service as viewers increasingly watch television via the Internet. The company lost 17,000 video customers in the quarter, compared to 135,000 in the same period a year earlier.

One drag on the otherwise solid quarter is the NBC broadcast network, which Comcast took on as part of its acquisition of a majority stake in NBCUniversal. Revenue at the network fell 3.7 percent in the quarter and 7 percent in the year. Revenue at the media company’s filmed entertainment unit, which includes Universal Pictures, fell 1.8 percent to $1.3 billion.

Despite the widely covered struggles at NBC, Comcast has signaled that it purchased NBCUniversal primarily for the value of its cable networks. Those networks, including USA, CNBC and Bravo, saw a 5.3 percent revenue increase in the quarter. Revenue at the Universal Studios theme parks, a division Comcast plans to expand, jumped 4 percent.

On Wednesday, Comcast said it would increase its annual dividend by 44 percent, to 65 cents a share. The company also announced a $6.5 billion stock repurchasing plan, with $3 billion worth of those repurchases set for 2012, a 40 percent increase from last year.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...subscriptions/





Cell Phone Hackers Can Track Your Location Without Your Knowledge

Using a cheap phone, readily available equipment, and no direct help from a service provider, hackers could listen to unencrypted broadcast messages from cell phone towers

Hackers take advantage of cell carriers' operational methodology to track a cell phone // Source: spoki.lv
Cellular networks leak the locations of cell phone users, allowing a third party to easily track the location of the cell phone user without the user’s knowledge, according to new research by computer scientists in the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering.

A University of Minnesota release reports that University of Minnesota computer science Ph.D. student Denis Foo Kune, working with associate professors Nick Hopper and Yongdae Kim, and undergraduate student John Koelndorfer, described their work in a recently released paper “Location Leaks on the GSM Air Interface” which was presented at the 19th Annual Network & Distributed System Security Symposium in San Diego, California, earlier this month.

“Cell phone towers have to track cell phone subscribers to provide service efficiently,” Foo Kune explained. “For example, an incoming voice call requires the network to locate that device so it can allocate the appropriate resources to handle the call. Your cell phone network has to at least loosely track your phone within large regions in order to make it easy to find it.”

The result is that the tower will broadcast a page to your phone, waiting for your phone to respond when you get a call, Foo Kune said. This communication is not unlike a CB radio. Further, it is possible for a hacker to force those messages to go out and hang up before the victim is able to hear their phone ring.

Cellular service providers need to access location information to provide service. In addition, law enforcement agencies have the ability to subpoena location information from service providers. The University of Minnesota group has demonstrated that access to a cell phone user’s location information is easily accessible to another group — possible hackers.

“It has a low entry barrier,” Foo Kune said. “Being attainable through open source projects running on commodity software.”

The release notes that using an inexpensive phone and open source software, the researchers were able to track the location of cell phone users without their knowledge on the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network, the predominant worldwide network.

In a field test, the research group was able to track the location of a test subject within a 10-block area as the subject traveled across an area of Minneapolis at a walking pace. The researchers used readily available equipment and no direct help from the service provider.

The implications of this research highlight possible personal safety issues.

“Agents from an oppressive regime may no longer require cooperation from reluctant service providers to determine if dissidents are at a protest location,” the researchers wrote in the paper. “Another example could be thieves testing if a user’s cell phone is absent from a specific area and therefore deduce the risk level associated with a physical break-in of the victim’s residence.”

Foo Kune and his group have contacted AT&T and Nokia with low-cost techniques that could be implemented without changing the hardware, and are in the process of drafting responsible disclosure statements for cellular service providers.
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire....your-knowledge






Post SOPA, Influential Tech Investor Favors 'Blacklisting' Pirate Sites

Fred Wilson says: If they try to pass antipiracy legislation, it will once again be 'war.'
Greg Sandoval

Fred Wilson, a well-known venture capitalist from New York, says he's in favor of creating a blacklist for Web sites found to traffic in pirated films, music, and other intellectual property.

The co-founder of Union Square Ventures told a gathering of media executives at the Paley Center for Media yesterday that he believes a good antipiracy measure would be for Google, Twitter, Facebook, and other major sites to issue warnings to people when they try to connect with a known pirate site.

Wilson favors establishing an independent group to create a "black and white list." "The blacklist are those sites we all know are bad news," he told the audience in New York. "We all know who the good guys are [he listed Hulu, Netflix, Rdio, Spotify, Rhapsody] who are truly licensed and are operating legitimately. And we know who the bad guys are."

Under Wilson's plan, an independent body would determine the "good guys" and the bad. Then the Web sites that wish to participate would serve a pop-up notice when users tried to visit blacklisted sites.

"We're not blocking people from the site," Wilson continued. "The interstitial says, 'You're going to a site that's on our blacklist. We believe this site contains almost entirely pirated content and by the way you can get that content legally on these whitelisted sites.'"

Wilson would like to see Google, Facebook and even Mozilla participate and if they did he would want them to report "to the world" how many people they're sending to "MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay and the BitTorrent sites...Using technology, we train our youth to know that they're doing something bad and how they could do something that's good."

Sounds painless for everyone--and that's probably why such an idea is unlikely to receive support from copyright owners. There's no doubt that the entertainment industry would like to avoid alienating its audience, but copyright holders also appear intent on putting some real teeth in any antipiracy strategy.

Wilson did say he believes pirate sites should be shut down, which seemed to delight many in the audience. The studios and labels were big proponents of the antipiracy legislation known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and Protect IP Act (PIPA), which were defeated before there was even a vote on either bill. Opposition to the legislation came largely from tech companies.

Now, in a post-SOPA world, the big studios, TV networks, and record companies are picking through the wreckage, looking for ways to build support for antipiracy efforts in Silicon Valley, thus this meet-and-greet with Wilson, who is influential in the tech community.

But even Wilson didn't sound encouraging about whether his antipiracy idea would be welcomed by tech companies.

"Google should do this," Wilson said. "They won't but they should."

It won't come as a surprise that Wilson is sympathetic to at least some of the piracy problems that copyright owners face. His venture capital fund is invested in Turntable.fm, an online music service, and Boxee, software that enables owners to watch Web video on TVs.

Both companies have stayed within the law and competed against companies that don't. Not having to pay to license content is a big advantage over those that do pay.

This didn't stop Wilson, however, from taking copyright owners to task about their digital efforts. He said he was skeptical that many of the people pirating movies would have purchased the movie and therefore equate to lost sales for Hollywood.

"Our children have been taught to steal," Wilson said, "and they have been taught not just by the MegaUploads, BitTorrent (sites) and Pirate Bays but have been taught by the content industry because the content industry has not let them have what they want legally, inexpensively, and conveniently."

The studios and music labels note that they have been licensing their video and music to digital services for years: YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, Apple, etc.

Wilson saved his strongest statements for SOPA and for any future attempts to pass similar antipiracy legislation.

"We don't need legislation," Wilson said. "If we need legislation, we need legislation to undo the (Supreme Court decision in MGM vs. Grokster, which enables copyright owners sue companies for enabling people to illegally share intellectual property) ...We need a negotiated solution between the tech industry and content industry. The minute you introduce Washington and lawyers and courts, it's war. I don't think that's where we want to solve this problem. Let's solve this problem in boardrooms and meeting rooms, not in Washington."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57...-pirate-sites/





Dutch Pave the Way for Looser Copyright Laws

Mashups and remixes could be protected by law.
Christopher Mims

Much to the displeasure of the wider EU, the Dutch want to liberalize their copyright laws to explicitly allow remixes and mashups. The irony is that their inspiration is not political movements like Sweden's Pirate Party, but America's laws about fair use.

In the U.S., fair use protects the use of copyrighted material for commentary, criticism and the like. But automated tools for detecting copyrighted material (on e.g. YouTube) and the overly-broad Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows anyone to request that an infringing work be taken down, put the burden of proving that a work constitutes fair use on the content creator. This has a chilling effect on the kind of work everyday people release on the web.

The proposed Dutch laws, in contrast, would explicitly protect fair use of copyrighted material. Here's Marietje Schaake, of the European Parliament, quoted by Radio Netherlands:

"We must ensure that there is competition and a free market but we have to protect creativity as well. Right now the entertainment industry, for one, benefits from these outdated laws. These big parties will do all they can to prevent reform or redesign at all."

Remember when tape decks and VCRs represented mortal threats to copyright holders? The result was the Audio Home Recording Act, for which the RIAA lobbied. That law set the precedent for taxing media (in this case, tapes) to pay for perceived losses to content creators, and it paved the way for subsequent Digital Rights Management technologies.

We're in a similar situation today, in which rights holders would rather cripple the unique abilities of a new technology than be forced to innovate new ways to profit from it. If the Dutch actually pass the proposed law, it will be over the protests of the EU, which would like to harmonize copyright standards across all member countries. That harmonization wouldn't just be a tragedy for Europe, which has no fair use provisions in its copyright law. It would also represent a missed opportunity for the Netherlands to show the rest of the world that copyright can be guided by the principles under which it was first established, when the goal was an enlightened balance between the needs of citizens and corporations.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27576/





Anti-Piracy Agreement ACTA Is Falling Apart in Europe
Alex Fitzpatrick

Bulgaria won’t be ratifying the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) any time soon.

On Tuesday, Bulgaria followed some of its European neighbors, including Germany and Poland, in halting approval of the controversial intellectual property treaty.

Bulgaria will “practically stop its participation” until it sees a clear and unified European stance on the treaty, according to Traicho Traikov, the Bulgarian economy and energy minister.

“I’m a pessimist when it comes to regulating an industry, which hasn’t adapted to the digital age, through sanctions rather than market means,” Traikov told the press, according to Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, ACTA also stalled in the Dutch parliament. Lawmakers in Holland want time to examine the treaty’s potential effects on Internet privacy before moving forward with ratification, reported Radio Netherlands Worldwide.

The decisions by Bulgaria and the Netherlands come after anti-ACTA protests spread across Europe over the weekend. Thousands of people in nearly 200 cities took to the streets to protest the treaty.

ACTA was written by the U.S. and Japan in 2006 to provide countries with a new way to cooperate on counterfeiting and intellectual property investigations.

However, opponents say the treaty was negotiated largely in secret and could have disastrous consequences for free speech and an open, international Internet. ACTA has also been criticized for bypassing existing international trade groups, such as the World Trade Organization.

Eight countries have signed ACTA, but none have ratified it. Six countries will need to ratify the treaty for it to activate.
http://mashable.com/2012/02/14/bulga...herlands-acta/
















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- js.



















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