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

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Contrary to the Chamber of Commerce’s rhetoric, SOPA gives rightsholders many ways to blacklist a website." – EFF


"I want everybody to be fully aware of the rights we apparently forfeit every time we sign one of these user agreements that no one reads." – Birgitta Jonsdottir


































November 12th, 2011




Niklas Zennstrom: “Peer-To-Peer Is Not Disruptive Today”
Erick Schonfeld

Last week at Disrupt Beijing, Sarah Lacy interviewed Skype co-founder and Atomico investor Niklas Zennstrom. Zennstrom was a pioneer in building a series of startups on peer-to-peer technology (Skype, Kazaaa, Joost), but towards the end of the interview he says, “Peer to peer is not disruptive today.” Sometimes it makes sense to use it, sometimes it doesn’t. Many networks are hybrid. But what was originally a competitive advantage and a way to get around bandwidth bottlenecks is no longer so crucial. Zennstrom learned that with Joost when broadband costs plummeted and made it more economical to just stream videos directly to users.

The other reason Joost failed was because “the incumbents did a fantastic job” of competing with Hulu. Joost never could get the best content for its third-party network.

Skype was always big in China, and he explains how Skype cracked the market. He also talks about how the venture business needs to change on a global basis. ”The market has changed from an investor’s market to an entrepreneur’s market,” he says, recalling back when he was pitching Skype to VCs and nobody really getting it, especially in Europe. ”What needs to change is that traditional venture capital investors are very local,” he says, “but the tech industry is a global industry today. You tend to see companies become global leaders or regional losers.” It is very binary.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/05/nik...ruptive-today/





BT Block Isn't Working, Says Newzbin
Luke Westaway

Newzbin (also known as Newzbin2), the controversial members-only site that collects links to copyright infringing content, has been blocked by BT as of 2 November, following a court order. But Newzbin reckons that BT's blockade isn't affecting the site.

In a first-of-its-kind ruling, BT was ordered to block access to the site following legal action against it from the Motion Picture Association, a group that represents major Hollywood studios including Paramount, Disney and Fox.

BT is stopping its customers from visiting the site using a modified version of Cleanfeed, a tool designed to stop web surfers finding child sexual abuse online.

Newzbin itself doesn't seem bothered by the barricade, telling the BBC, "Newzbin2 shall go on, its users shall continue to access the site and its facilities".

Newzbin has issued a downloadable client to its customers that stops the block, and says 93.5 per cent of its active UK visitors have downloaded the block-stopping software.

The client appears to use encryption to hide visitors' identities. TorrentFreak claims that some people trying to access the site are still getting error messages, while others are getting through by typing the site's IP address into their browser.

The MPA already managed to get Newzbin shut down last year, but when the site relocated to the Seychelles, the group took the fight to BT. The telecoms giant warned that a ruling in favour of blocking Newzbin would be the "thin end of the wedge."

The court order against BT could make it hard for other ISPs to resist similar rulings in the future.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/bt-...zbin-50005944/





More ISPs Asked to Block Access to File-Sharing Sites
Zack Whittaker

Summary: A U.S. film industry body will apply for more court orders to force other major web providers in the UK to block websites that infringe copyright.

Three more British internet service providers have been asked by the Motion Picture Association (MPA) to block access to file-sharing site Newzbin2.

Virgin Media, TalkTalk and Sky have received written requests on Monday, which said the film industry body is planning to take the two companies to court to prevent its users accessing the torrent site.

This comes just over a fortnight since the MPA won a case against broadband giant BT to block access to the Newzbin2 site, and only days after a music representative body the BPI asked BT to block torrent search engine The Pirate Bay from its customers.

But there is hope for the free and open British web, which was cut short this week by the MPA’s court order, as some ISPs are considering their positions in a possible fightback.

While TalkTalk indicated it was considering its position after discovering “some objectionable elements to the proposed injunction”, Sky suggested it would obey court orders, in the run up to the MPA applying for a formal court hearing.

Virgin Media also said it would only adhere to the request if forced to by a UK court, which could result in its customers ultimately paying for the cost of having restricted web service.

But because BT was ordered to block its customers from accessing the site, rather than voluntarily doing so upon the MPA’s request, the broadband and telecoms giant had to pay about £5,000 ($8,000) to do so, with an added £100 ($160) for each subsequent blocking notification.

BT has six million customers, and is the largest internet service provider in the UK. Though an MPA spokesperson said that “we don’t rule out any options” regarding tackling smaller broadband providers, it would concentrate its efforts on the larger providers for “reasons of practicality”.

The MPA said it will focus its efforts “only on the most harmful sites”.

Before BT’s court order was issued, the only web-blocking technology that was implemented on the British web was Cleanfeed, which flags and restricts access to sites hosting or linking to child abuse imagery. But since the court order went into effect, with BT forced to block access to the Newzbin2 site, the British web was no longer ‘open’.

Though British web providers are not taking this lightly, it is clear that once the initial court order was given, forcing BT to block the Newzbin2 site, the set precedence alone would make it difficult to retreat from.

Newzbin2 said on the day that BT began its court-ordered block that 90 percent of its members had downloaded a workaround to bypass the restrictions. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/london/mor...ring-sites/726





Major Usenet Provider Shuts Down Following Court Order
Ernesto

News-Service.com, one of the leading Usenet providers with many prominent resellers, has terminated its services with immediate effect. The shutdown is the direct and unavoidable outcome of a two-year battle with Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, which was eventually decided against the Usenet provider. News-Service announced that it will appeal the decision “out of principle” as it threatens the entire 30-year-old Usenet community.

Two years ago BREIN, representing the movie and music industries, took News-Service.com (NSE) to court.

Although the name NSE might not ring a bell with many people, it is the largest usenet provider in Europe and has many high-profile resellers such as Usenext.

Through the court BREIN demanded that the NSE delete all infringing content from its servers, and six weeks ago the Court of Amsterdam sided with the copyright holders.

In an attempt to keep their service operational, NSE asked the Court to put the execution of the verdict on hold while the Usenet provider appealed its case, but this week that request was denied. As a result NSE was forced to shut down its services.

“This means that we are forced to cease our operations with immediate effect,” NSE said in a statement.

Despite the setback the Usenet provider will persist with its appeal, not least because the landmark verdict could have disastrous consequences for other Usenet providers.

“For reasons of principle, News-Service.com will not accept the verdict and has lodged an appeal,” NSE announced.

The verdict of the Amsterdam Court is very similar to the one that decimated BitTorrent site Mininova two years ago. It requires NSE to finding a way to identify and delete all copyrighted files from its servers, which is practically impossible.

Aside from threatening many other Usenet providers, a similar judgement would also mean the end of file-hosting sites such as Megaupload, and other cloud storage services including Dropbox. All these services remove copyrighted files when they are asked to, but policing their own servers proactively may prove to be impossible.

BREIN is nevertheless delighted with the verdict of the court. “It is a breakthrough step to further dismantle the availability of illegal content on Usenet,” director Tim Kuik said previously.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if BREIN now waves this verdict in the face of other Usenet providers, in the hope of shutting them down. Using this same tactic BREIN has already managed to pull hundreds of (small) torrent sites offline in the Netherlands.

TorrentFreak contacted NSE to ask what the decision means for their resellers and whether they have plans to “go abroad” in some shape or form. We will update this article when a response comes in.
https://torrentfreak.com/major-usene...-order-111106/





Cybercrime Police Shut Down Five File-Sharing Sites
enigmax

The Italian police division tasked with handling cybercrime cases has announced it has shut down several file-sharing websites. The sites, which were connected by ownership, offered links to torrents and files hosted on cyberlocker services and indexed more than 31,000 illicit items including movies, music, TV show, games and software.

Translated as “Financial Guard”, Guardia di Finanza (GdF) is a department under Italy’s Minister of Economy and Finance and actually part of the Italian Armed Forces. It is tasked with dealing with financial crime and smuggling, and is increasingly involved in file-sharing cases.

Today the department announced that following an investigation and the execution of a warrant against a resident of Naples, its officers have shut down a total of five file-sharing sites.

A 49-year-old man, known online under the pseudonym “Tex Willer”, was allegedly the operator of the series of sites including ItalianShare, MusicShare, FilmShare and ItalianSexy. All were hosted in Las Vegas and are currently down.

Together they reportedly had in excess of 136,000 subscribers and carried 31,600 links to movies, music, TV shows, software, games and pornography indexed on BitTorrent, cyberlockers and eDonkey networks.

As is common in such investigations, emphasis is being placed on the fact that the sites made music, movies and games available before their commercial release.

Furthermore, since the sites had advertising and donation accounts operating through PayPal, Guardia di Finanza are framing their investigation as one against for-profit piracy and tax evasion.

With assistance from FPM (Federation Against Music Piracy), AESVI (Italian Entertainment Software Publishers Association) and movie anti-piracy group FAPAV, complaints were filed against three alleged leaders of the websites along with the seizure of computer equipment.

The investigation is still ongoing, with GdF noting that seized data will “provide specific facts relating to those who were responsible for illegally sharing tens of thousands of protected copyright works online.”

In April, Italy censored torrent search engine BTjunkie but in response to its owner creating a proxy site to unblock access, GdF quickly took the proxy site down.
https://torrentfreak.com/cybercrime-...-sites-111111/





ISPs: Blocking The Pirate Bay Violates Freedom of Expression
Ernesto

Two of the largest Internet providers in the Netherlands clashed in court with the local anti-piracy outfit BREIN today. The ISPs argued that blocking The Pirate Bay would be useless, even dangerous, as it could take down the entire network. In addition they feel that this type of censorship violates basic human rights such as freedom of expression. BREIN disputed these concerns and said that the ISPs want to keep The Pirate Bay online because they profit from the site.

After the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN lost its preliminary case against the ISPs Ziggo and Xs4all, the group started a full trial to demand a blockade of The Pirate Bay.

Today the case was heard before Court of The Hague

BREIN wants the largest ISP in The Netherlands to implement a DNS and IP address block of The Pirate Bay, with any future domain names and IP addresses of the site blocked within 24 hours of notification by BREIN.

The anti-piracy group argues that the ISPs can easily block the site with simple technical measures, and that as a result millions of people would be prevented from sharing files via the notorious torrent site.

The ISPs on the other hand claim that these measures are not as simple as BREIN claims, and that their implementation could have disastrous results.

Rebooting network services after adding DNS and IP-filters “could shut down the entire network,” the defense noted.

In addition the defense argued that such measures would be useless because the public can easily circumvent them by using alternative DNS servers and proxy sites. BREIN didn’t refute this, but noted that the blocks are “dummy proof” and that the majority of people wouldn’t jump through hoops to access The Pirate Bay.

Aside from the technical objections the ISPs also said that this type of censorship would violate basic human rights such as freedom of expression. Xs4all lawyer Milica Antic said it would turn the providers into the “Internet police” and that copyright holders should turn to the people who host the site itself.

BREIN countered these arguments and said that freedom of expression is “not that relevant,” and pointed out the copyright holders also have the right to protect their property. The fact that The Pirate Bay also hosts links pointing to legal content doesn’t take away these rights, BREIN’s lawyer said.

BREIN went even further and claimed that the ISPs don’t want to block The Pirate Bay because they “profit” from it. Millions of people in The Netherlands use BitTorrent, and blocking the Pirate Bay would drive people to other providers.

The case between the ISPs and BREIN brings up many of the censorship issues that are also being discussed in the United States at the moment. The pending SOPA legislation would make DNS and IP-blocks standard procedure, something BREIN can only dream of at this point.

The verdict in the case is expected to be announced early next year.
https://torrentfreak.com/isps-blocki...ession-111111/





Warner Bros: We Issued Takedowns for Files We Never Saw, Didn't Own Copyright to
Timothy B. Lee

In a Monday court filing, Warner Brothers admitted that it has issued takedown notices for files without looking at them first. The studio also acknowledged that it issued takedown notices for a number of URLs that its adversary, the locker site Hotfile, says were obviously not Warner Brothers' content.

Hotfile has been locked in a legal battle with Hollywood studios since February; the studios accuse the site of facilitating copyright infringement on a massive scale. Hotfile counters that it is immune from liability for the infringements of its users because it complies with the notice-and-takedown procedures established by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But Hotfile has also tried to turn the tables by arguing that one of the studios, Warner Brothers, has itself violated the DMCA by issuing bogus takedown requests.

In a September filing, Hotfile described how it provided Warner Brothers with an automated takedown tool to enable the studio to rapidly remove content it believed to be infringing. As we described it at the time, the studio doesn't seem to have used the tool very carefully:

Hotfile alleges that Warner Brothers abused this tool by submitting thousands of takedown requests for files it didn't own. Hotfile suggests these requests were generated by automated crawlers without adequate human supervision. For example, Warner Brothers owns the copyright for the 2009 movie The Box. Hotfile alleges that Warner Brothers scraped websites for hotfile.com links containing the phrase "the box," which of course led to takedowns for dozens of files that were clearly not Warner Brothers content. For example, Warner Brothers sought the removal of an audiobook called "Cancer: Out Of The Box" and a BBC production of "The Box that Saved Britain."

Indeed, some of the removed files were clearly not infringing at all. Hotfile says that the most popular file removed by Warner Brothers was a free software title that had been uploaded to Hotfile by its publisher. Warner Brothers also sought the removal of the file with the URL "http://hotfile.com/contacts.html and give them the details of where the link was posted and the link and they will deal to the @sshole who posted the fake."

No, that's not a misplaced quotation mark. A scraper apparently misidentified part of a web comment as an infringing URL, and no one at the studio noticed the mistake.

In the Monday court filing, Warner Brothers confirmed key details of Hotfile's story. In particular, Warner admitted that it submitted takedown requests for "Cancer: Out Of The Box," "The Box that Saved Britain," and that "@ssholes" URL.

Warner Brothers also tacitly acknowledged removing the free software title, which it characterized as "software that had been posted alongside infringing Warner content in order to facilitate the rapid downloading of the infringing Warner content." The studio also requested removal of some gaming software, though it insists it did so with the permission of the relevant copyright owners.

The studio also "admits that it did not (and did not need to) download every file it believed to be infringing prior to submitting the file's URL" to the Hotfile takedown tool. That's because "given the volume and pace of new infringements on Hotfile, Warner could not practically download and view the contents of each file prior to requesting that it be taken down."

This is interesting because the DMCA requires a copyright holder issuing a takedown notice to state that it has a "good faith belief that the use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law." It's hard to see how anyone at Warner Brothers could have formed any beliefs—good faith or otherwise—about files it admits that no human being at Warner had even looked at.

The recently-proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, which is backed by the major Hollywood studios, would give copyright holders new powers to cut off websites' access to payment processors and advertising networks. It even includes a new DMCA-style notice-and-takedown scheme. But given the cavalier way that Warner Brothers has used the powers it already has under the DMCA, policymakers may be reluctant to expand those powers even further.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-looked-at.ars





RIAA Lawyer Says DMCA May Need Overhaul
Greg Sandoval

The four largest record labels are unhappy with the way the courts have interpreted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in recent years and may need to ask Congress for changes, according to Jennifer Pariser, the attorney who oversees litigation for the Recording Industry Association of America.

The DMCA is just not providing the kind of protection against online piracy that Congress intended, Pariser said at a conference here on Thursday.

"I think Congress got it right, but I think the courts are getting it wrong," Pariser said during a panel discussion at the NY Entertainment & Technology Law Conference. "I think the courts are interpreting Congress' statute in a manner that is entirely too restrictive of content owners' rights and too open to [Internet] service providers.

"We might need to go to Congress at some point for a fix," Pariser added. "Not because the statute was badly drafted but because the interpretation has been so hamstrung by court decisions."

Following the panel, Pariser clarified that nobody at the RIAA has asked anyone on Capitol Hill for action and there's no plan to do so in the near future. But Pariser is among the first high-ranking entertainment executives to acknowledge that the battle to protect copyrights online, at least in the courts, has gone against content owners.

The DMCA is supposed to balance the rights of content producers with those of Web service providers. The law limits the liability of service providers for copyright violations committed by their users--provided they obey certain guidelines. For example, a service provider must remove infringing content quickly after being notified by a copyright owner and must boot users who repeatedly post pirated material.

Another requirement involved is known as "red-flag knowledge." Service providers can't have direct participation in infringement of course but also must not have knowledge or a reason to know of direct infringement.

This "red flag" requirement is at the core of where the courts have fallen down, says Pariser as well as others on the side of content owners. In the three most notable copyright cases on this issue, the judges have seemingly chopped away at the red-flag requirement, rendering it almost meaningless, say content owners.

In 2007, Viacom--the conglomerate behind MTV, Paramount Pictures, and Comedy Central--alleged in a $1 billion copyright suit that YouTube and parent company Google encouraged users to post unauthorized video clips copied from movies and TV shows. Viacom argued that the vast amounts of pirated video on the site--prior YouTube's development of a content filter--made it obvious to anyone of the copyright violations on the site. Viacom's lawyers also pointed to e-mails they claim shows YouTube managers were well aware that their service was loaded with infringing materials.

That kind of knowledge isn't enough to violate the red-flag requirement, according to District Judge Louis Stanton. A service provider must have knowledge of specific violations, and YouTube has always said that it is impossible for the company to determine whether a clip of a movie or TV show was uploaded illegally by some teen in his basement or it was posted for promotional reasons by a studio business managers and completely legal.

The judge in Universal Music Group's copyright suit against Veoh, as well as the judge in EMI vs. MP3tunes.com, issued similar findings. The courts have now determined the burden of policing the Web for infringing materials is the content owner and not the service provider.

Content companies think it is unfair for them to be required to spend resources on scouring the Web when their pirated work helps service providers make money. What they complain about almost as much is that after they notify a service provider of an infringing song or movie clip and they're removed, new copies appear almost immediately.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57...need-overhaul/





The Stop Online Piracy Act: A Blacklist by Any Other Name Is Still a Blacklist
Trevor Timm

During the past week, momentum against the House’s draconian copyright bill has gained steam, as venture capitalists, Internet giants and major artists have denounced it for handing corporations unprecedented power to censor countless websites and stifle free speech. In response, the bill’s big-pocketed supporters have gone on the offensive, attempting to mislead the public about the bill’s true reach. In a particularly egregious example, the Chamber of Commerce posted an attack on its website insisting that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is not a “blacklist bill."

Before they even saw the House bill, they started calling it the “New Internet Blacklist Bill.” Blacklist? That sounds pretty bad. But before we get carried away, let’s take a look at the actual language of the actual legislation. Can YOU find a blacklist? No? Can you find a list of ANY kind? No?

Of course the word “blacklist” does not appear in the bill’s text—the folks who wrote it know Americans don’t approve of blatant censorship. The early versions of PROTECT-IP, the Senate’s counterpart to SOPA, did include an explicit Blacklist Provision, but this transparent attempt at extrajudicial censorship was so offensive that the Senate had to re-write that part of the bill. However, provisions that encourage unofficial blacklisting remained, and they are still alive and well in SOPA.

First, the new law would allow the Attorney General to cut off sites from the Internet, essentially “blacklisting” companies from doing business on the web. Under section 102, the Attorney General can seek a court order that would force search engines, DNS providers, servers, payment processors, and advertisers to stop doing business with allegedly infringing websites.

Second, the bill encourages private corporations to create a literal target list—a process that is ripe for abuse. Under Section 103 (cleverly entitled the “market based” approach), IP rightsholders can take action by themselves, by sending notices directly to payment processors—like Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal—demanding that they cut off all payments to the website. Once notice is delivered to the payment processor, that processor has only five days to act.1 The payment processor, and not the rightsholder, is then responsible for notifying the targeted website. So by the time Visa or Mastercard—who will no doubt be receiving many of these notices—processes the notice, informs the website, and the website decides whether to file a counter notice, the five days will almost certainly have elapsed. The website will then be left without a revenue source even if it did nothing wrong.

Third, section 104 of SOPA also allows payment processors to cut websites off voluntarily—even if they haven’t received a notice. Visa and Mastercard cannot be held accountable if they cease processing payments to any site, as long as they have a “reasonable belief” that the website is engaged in copyright violations of any kind. Hmm, wonder how long it will take big media to publicly post a list of allegedly infringing sites, and start pressuring payment processors to cut them off? As long the payment processors are willing to comply, the rightsholders can essentially censor anyone they see fit. Even well-meaning payment processors might do this to avoid liability down the road.

The potential for rampant abuse is obvious—whether it’s a frivolous claim that wouldn’t withstand the scrutiny of the official process or an attempt to put an emerging competitor at an extreme disadvantage.

Clearly, contrary to the Chamber of Commerce’s rhetoric, SOPA gives rightsholders many ways to blacklist a website: they can hope the attorney general acts, they can cut off a website with a notice, or they can give notice unofficially and let the payment processors do their dirty work for them. Please help keep the Internet free and take action to help stop this bill!
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/1...till-blacklist





Hollywood's New War on Software Freedom and Internet Innovation
Corynne McSherry and Peter Eckersley

This is the third in our series (Part 1, Part 2) breaking down the potential effects of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an outrageous and grievously misguided bill now working its way through the House of Representatives. This post discusses dangerous software censorship provisions that are new in this bill, as well as the DNS censorship provisions it inherited from the Senate's COICA and PIPA bills. Please help us fight this misguided legislation by contacting Congress today.

In this new bill, Hollywood has expanded its censorship ambitions. No longer content to just blacklist entries in the Domain Name System, this version targets software developers and distributors as well. It allows the Attorney General (doing Hollywood or trademark holders' bidding) to go after more or less anyone who provides or offers a product or service that could be used to get around DNS blacklisting orders. This language is clearly aimed at Mozilla, which took a principled stand in refusing to assist the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to censor the domain name system, but we are also concerned that it could affect the open source community, internet innovation, and software freedom more broadly:

• Do you write or distribute VPN, proxy, privacy or anonymization software? You might have to build in a censorship mechanism — or find yourself in a legal fight with the United States Attorney General.
• Even some of the most fundamental and widely used Internet security software, such as SSH, includes built-in proxy functionality. This kind of software is installed on hundreds of millions of computers, and is an indispensable tool for systems administration professionals, but it could easily become a target for censorship orders under the new bill.
• Do you work with or distribute zone files for gTLDs? Want to keep them accurate? Too bad — Hollywood might argue that if you provide a complete (i.e., uncensored) list, you are illegally helping people bypass SOPA orders.
• Want to write a client-side DNSSEC resolver that uses multiple servers until it finds a valid signed entry? Again, you could be in a fight with the U.S. Attorney General.

It would be bad enough to have these types of censorship orders targeted at software produced and distributed by a single company. But for the free and open source software community — which contributes many billions of dollars a year to the American economy — legal obligations to blacklist domains would be an utter catastrophe. Free and open source projects often operate as decentralized, voluntary, international communities. Even if ordered to by a court, these projects would struggle to find volunteers to act as censors to enforce U.S. law, because volunteers usually only perform tasks that they consider constructive. And in the case of larger projects and repositories like Mozilla, to monitor and enforce such court orders against generic functionality could potentially violate licensing obligations and would likely create acrimony, demoralizing and shrinking the communities of contributors and innovators that those projects depend upon.

Essentially any software product or service, such as many encryption programs, that is not responsive to blocking orders could be under threat. And lest you think we exaggerate for effect, recall how some of the provisions of another copyright bill have been used to chill security research.

Those are just the new provisions in SOPA. Like its companion Senate bill, PROTECT-IP, the bill also authorizes the United Sates Attorney General to wreak havoc with the Domain Name System by ordering service providers to block U.S. citizens' ability to access domain names, which will inevitable lead to competing Internet naming infrastructures and widespread security risks. As leading Internet engineers explained (commenting on an earlier version of the bill), this approach:

[W]ill risk fragmenting the Internet's global domain name system (DNS), create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. In exchange for this, the bill will introduce censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties' ability to communicate.

All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended to restrict, but this bill will be particularly egregious in that regard because it causes entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under this bill. These problems will be enough to ensure that alternative name-lookup infrastructures will come into widespread use, outside the control of US service providers but easily used by American citizens. Errors and divergences will appear between these new services and the current global DNS, and contradictory addresses will confuse browsers and frustrate the people using them. These problems will be widespread and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.

By introducing bills like this, Congress is recklessly endangering Internet innovation and security. The free/open source and Internet engineering communities need to fight back.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/1...net-innovation





Belgian ISPs Pressured to Pay Piracy Levy
Janko Roettgers

Remember those plans to legalize music file sharing in exchange for a flat monthly fee? Belgian music rights group Sabam now has its own unique take on these kinds of alternative compensation schemes: It wants ISPs to pay for the music their customers trade — but still keep file sharing illegal.

TorrentFreak reported Thursday morning that Sabam wants Belgian ISPs to pay 3.4 percent of their subscribers’ monthly fees.

From the story:

“Sabam base their claim on a provision in the Copyright Act of 1994, which states that authors should be paid for any ‘public broadcast’ of a song. According to Sabam, downloads and streams on the Internet are such public broadcasts, and they are therefore entitled to proper compensation. This 3.4 percent share is the same amount as the copyright fees on cable television.”

The flip side of Sabam’s demands is that this levy is only meant to compensate rights holders for the ISP’s use of the music and not for the actual behavior of its customers. In other words: File traders would still break the law, even if their swapping was covered by a public performance fee like the one proposed by Sabam.

That may sound crazy, but it actually has more to do with the complexities of music licensing than Sabam’s current plans. The group only represents authors, composers and publishers, and it administers rights to the composition of the songs in its catalog. The actual recordings are owned by record companies, which aren’t compensated through this plan.
http://gigaom.com/video/sabam-piracy-levy/





RIAA: Google Refused to Remove MP3 Download App
Mark Hachman

Google has refused requests to remove MP3 Music Download Pro, an extremely popular Android app which allows users to download copyrighted music onto their phones, according to the RIAA.

The app, which PCMag.com highlighted Thursday, is now the fifth most popular free app on the Android Market, jumping past Google Books in a single day. Other free apps on the Market, such as Easy MP3 Downloader and MP3 Music Download Super, also advertise the ability to "search and download free music & lyric[s]".

A representative of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) told PCMag.com that MP3 Music Download Pro is clearly being used for piracy, similarly to software like Kazaa and LimeWire, both of which folded under the weight of industry lawsuits. (Kazaa later relaunched as a licensed service.)

"We sent a takedown notice to Google in August for this particular app, which is clearly being used for illegal purposes, and Google responded that they were declining to remove it from the Android Market," the RIAA spokeswoman said. "We continue to have concerns with Google's screening and takedown procedures and hope that they will be improved."

Meanwhile, Google has begun inviting reporters to what appears to be the launch of a licensed Google music store on Nov. 16. If industry reports are to be believed, Google has signed agreements with the four major record labels to offer licensed music via its store, similar to Apple's iTunes Music Store.

It's unclear, however, whether all consumers would choose to purchase licensed music via Google's store, when they could freely (but illegally) download it via the MP3 downloader apps that Google has published on the Market. Representatives at Universal Music, Warner Music, and Sony Music did not return calls seeking comment.

PCMag.com also requested a comment from Google on Thursday and again on Friday on MP3 Music Download Pro and related apps. Although a Google spokeswoman acknowledged receiving the request on Thursday, the company has not yet responded.

Industry sources indicated, however, that Google declined to take down the MP3 Music Download Pro app because the search giant apparently felt that the app could be used for legitimate purposes. Screenshots posted by the developer Yu Liu had shown the app being used to search for classical music, which may or may not be in the public domain, depending on the performer. On Friday, that screenshot with the search results was not there.

Companies like LimeWire and those challenging the legality of "rogue sites" legislation on Capitol Hill have also argued that file-sharing or "locker" sites can be used for legitimate purposes as well as to share copyrighted works.

What's different this time around?

Google has previously published and then removed MP3 music downloading apps on the Market. MP3 Music Download Pro does not appear to be substantially different than those apps, industry sources said.

Google itself claimed in September that it had made "considerable progress" on the issue of copyright infringement, with steps taken to remove infringing content from its Autocomplete function and search results. Kent Walker, Google's general counsel, also said that Google had built in processes "to submit DMCA takedown requests for Google products (starting with Blogger and Web Search), and to reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less for submissions using these new tools."

In response, Steven Marks, the executive vice president and general counsel at the RIAA noted that the RIAA and Google have engaged in "dialogue," which industry sources said would continue. However, the RIAA took Google to task for the proliferation of Android apps that contributed to piracy.

"Google has taken down some mobile apps that facilitate infringement," Marks wrote. "But the takedown times are long, and too often we see the same or substantially similar apps from the same developers re-appear a few days later. Google could also take a more proactive role by screening and evaluating apps before they are made available. Most importantly, too many apps created to harvest links to unauthorized files remain available and popular on the Android marketplace, resulting in widespread infringement of copyrighted works."

The RIAA spokeswoman declined to comment when asked if it or the labels would file suit against Google for copyright infringement.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2396293,00.asp





Google Music Launching Without Sony and Warner
Greg Sandoval

Universal Music Group will be well represented at a press event Google has scheduled for Wednesday, but conspicuously missing will be two of the other top-four record companies.

Google sent invitations today for a press event, to be held in Los Angeles, where the company is expected to add downloads to its cloud music service, as well as unveil social-networking features.

CNET has learned that Google has signed a licensing agreement for the new service with Universal Music Group but does not have deals in place with Sony Music Entertainment or Warner Music Group, according to multiple industry sources. It is unclear whether EMI would participate. Talks between Sony, Warner and Google continue, the sources said.

The negotiations between Google and the labels by and large haven't gone well for either side. The labels are eager for a serious iTunes competitor to emerge and believe Google has the technological know-how, money, and Internet presence to give iTunes a run for its money.

On the other hand, Google wants to offer first-class music and movie services to users of Android, the company's powerhouse mobile operating system.

Google has a tense relationship with some of the record companies. In general, the search company's past dealings with media companies has at times been acrimonious. Most notably was Viacom's accusations in a $1 billion copyright suit it filed against Google that the company encouraged YouTube users to post pirated clips to the site.

For the past two years, Google has attempted to improve relations with content creators. Managers boosted antipiracy efforts and helped Vevo, the Internet music-video service, get off the ground.

Despite that, Google is once again launching a major part of its music service without acquiring licenses and this may serve to widen the rift between the company and some of the labels.

Google launched the test version of its cloud music service earlier this year without licenses.

The labels argue that for Google to challenge Apple and offer a feature-rich service, the search company needs music from all the top record companies as well as all the licenses. Google apparently sees it differently and next Wednesday we will learn more about how Google plans to compete without songs from some of the the top labels.

What could also aggravate record-company execs is a disagreement over a request by the labels' trade group to remove a popular but controversial music app from the Android Market.

The Recording Music Industry Association of America has alleged, according to PCMag.com, that MP3 Download Pro enables users to download music to their mobile phones and is being used for piracy.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57...ny-and-warner/





How Litigation Only Spurred on P2P File Sharing

Analysis: Did the content industry lose the legal battle?
Rebecca Giblin

Do you remember back in 2001 when Napster shut down its servers? US courts found Napster Inc was likely to be liable for the copyright infringements of its users. Many of Napster's successors were also shut down.

Aimster and its controversial CEO were forced into bankruptcy, the highest court in the US strongly suggested that those behind Grokster and Morpheus ought to be held liable for "inducing" their users to infringe, and Kazaa's owners were held liable for authorisation by our own Federal Court. Countless others fled the market in the wake of these decisions with some, like the formerly defiant owners of Bearshare and eDonkey, paying big settlements on the way out.

By most measures, this sounds like an emphatic victory for content owners. But a funny thing happened in the wake of all of these injunctions, shutdowns and settlements: the number of P2P file sharing apps available in the market exploded.

By 2007, two years after the US Supreme Court decided Grokster, there were more individual P2P applications available than there had ever been before. The average number of users sharing files on file sharing networks at any one time was nudging ten million and it was estimated that P2P traffic had grown to comprise up to 90 percent of global internet traffic. At that point content owners tacitly admitted defeat, largely abandoning their long-time strategy of suing key P2P software providers and diverting enforcement resources to alternatives like graduated response or "three strikes" laws.

Why is it that, despite being ultimately successful in holding individual P2P software providers liable for their users' infringement, content owners' litigation strategy has failed to bring about any meaningful reduction in the amount of P2P development and infringement?

Physical vs digital

I would argue pre-P2P era law was based on a number of "physical world" assumptions. That makes sense, since it evolved almost exclusively with reference to physical world scenarios and technologies. However, as it turns out, there is often a gap between those assumptions and the realities of P2P software development.

Four such physical world assumptions are particularly notable in explaining this phenomenon.

The first is that everybody is bound by physical world rules. Assuming this rule had universal application, various secondary liability principles evolved to make knowledge and control pre-requisites to liability. But software has no such constraint. Programmers can write software that will do things that are simply not possible or feasible in the physical world. So once the Napster litigation made P2P programmers aware of the rules about knowledge and control, they simply coded Napster's successors to eliminate them – something no provider of a physical world distribution technology ever managed to do.
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In response, the US Supreme Court in Grokster created a brand new legal doctrine, called inducement, that did not rely on either knowledge or control. That rule was aimed at capturing "bad actors" - those P2P providers who aimed to profit from their users' infringement and whose nefarious intent was demonstrated by "smoking guns" in their marketing and other communications. But the inducement law failed to appreciate some of the other differences that make the software world special and thus led directly to the explosion in the number of P2P technologies. In understanding why, three other physical world assumptions come into play.

One is that it is expensive to create distribution technologies that are capable of vast amounts of infringement. Of course in the physical world, the creation of such technologies, like printing presses, photocopiers, and VCRs required large investment. Research and development, mass-manufacturing, marketing and delivery all require massive amounts of cash. Thus, the law came to assume that the creation of such technologies was expensive.

That led directly to the next assumption – that distribution technologies are developed for profit. After all, nobody would be investing those massive sums without some prospect of a return.

Finally comes the fourth assumption: that rational developers of distribution technologies won't share their secrets with consumers or competitors. Since they needed to recoup those massive investments, they had no interest at all in giving them away.

All of these assumptions certainly can hold up in the software development context. For example, those behind Kazaa spent a lot on its development, squeezed out the maximum possible profit and kept its source code a closely guarded secret. By creating a law that focused on profits, business models and marketing, the Supreme Court succeeded in shaking out Kazaa and its ilk from the market.

But the Court failed to appreciate that none of these things are actually necessary to the creation of P2P file sharing software. It can be so inexpensive to develop that some university programming courses actually require students to make an app as part of an assignment. When the software provider puts in such a small investment, there's much less need to realise a profit. This, combined with widespread norms within the software development community encouraging sharing and collaboration, also leads to some individuals making the source code of their software publicly available for others to adapt and copy.

When the US Supreme Court created its new law holding P2P providers liable where they "fostered" third party infringement, as evidenced by such things as business models, marketing and internal communications, the result was an enormous number of programmers choosing to create new applications without any of those liability attracting elements. In the absence of any evidence that they had set out to foster infringement, they could not be liable for inducement, and having coded out of knowledge and control they could not be held liable under the pre-P2P law either.

The end result? The mismatch between the law's physical world assumptions and the realities of the software world meant that the law created to respond to the challenges of P2P file sharing led to the opposite of the desired result: a massive increase in the availability of P2P file sharing software. The failure of the law to recognise the unique characteristics of software and software development meant the abandonment of the litigation campaign against P2P providers was only a matter of time.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/279763...e-sharing.aspx





A Bid to Get Film Lovers Not to Rent
Brooks Barnes

Hollywood has had enough of the sharp consumer shift toward renting movies through Netflix. Desperate to raise home entertainment profits, studios want people to start buying movies outright again, either digitally or on little silver discs.
But what’s the best way to force that pendulum to swing?

Every studio is grappling with that question, but one of the more aggressive and risky bets is being made by Warner Brothers. The studio, which is owned by Time Warner and commands a 20 percent share of the DVD and Blu-ray market, has decided to center its buy-not-rent hopes on Flixster, a small social network for movie buffs that it bought in May for about $75 million.

Warner last month introduced technology that makes Flixster the home base for a new movie storage service called UltraViolet. The free service, backed by most of the big studios, allows people to buy a movie once and watch it anywhere — on a computer, mobile device or Web-ready television. The strategy is to make owning more compelling than renting by loading digital portability into purchases.

“We must move consumers in mass numbers toward collecting movies digitally, and this is a path,” said Kevin Tsujihara, president of Warner Home Entertainment.

Retailers like Wal-Mart are working on UltraViolet access sites, but the only way to use the cloud-based service for now is via Flixster. Once consumers buy an UltraViolet-enabled DVD or Blu-ray set — say, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” which arrived in stores on Friday — they can set up an account on Flixster and type in a code provided on the disc packaging to claim their digital rights.

That may seem complicated for consumers in the age of Netflix and iTunes. “We recognize that the product is not perfect today,” Mr. Tsujihara said. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting a year until we have everything perfect.”

Some analysts say Warner is moving too quickly. Rank-and-file consumers are still hazy about what cloud storage even means. There will be only 10 or so titles for UltraViolet by Christmas. And large swaths of the UltraViolet system are still incomplete.

“It remains far, far easier for DVD-buying consumers to pirate a digital copy of their movie,” said Richard Greenfield, an analyst for BTIG Capital, adding that, “moving forward with UltraViolet before it is ready for prime time risks pushing consumers increasingly toward rental-priced options where they do not need to deal with the hassles.”

Warner and other studios are racing ahead for a variety of reasons. Purchases provide margins for the studios that are typically three times greater than rentals — and the rise of Netflix, Redbox and video-on-demand rental services have severely cut into purchases. And the down economy has also taken a toll. Sales of DVDs in the United States last year totaled $7.8 billion, a 43 percent decline from the industry’s 2006 peak of $13.7 billion, according to the media-tracking firm IHS Screen Digest.

At the same time, the sale of movies online, hampered by the lack of interoperability that UltraViolet is intended to fix, has been “a complete failure to date,” Mr. Greenfield said. In the first three quarters of 2011, electronic sales increased about 7 percent to $406 million, according to the Digital Entertainment Group.

Warner has bigger ambitions for Flixster. In the coming months, Flixster will start offering a service called Disc to Digital that will allow people to pay a small fee per disc to convert their existing DVD collections into digital copies. The idea is to train consumers to manage their movie libraries online, much the way they do digital music or photos.

Flixster already offers a service called Collections that allows users to tie together their iTunes, Hulu and Netflix accounts to show any films that they have rented or bought online.

Flixster will also transform itself into a film retailer, allowing users to buy digital movies through what it calls a “studio agnostic” storefront. That positions Flixster as a competitor to Apple’s iTunes and Wal-Mart’s Vudu, a strategy that some other studios see as foolhardy. What does it know about retail? Won’t retail partners — especially Wal-Mart — see the move as turf infringement?

The plan “hasn’t caused any problems,” Mr. Tsujihara said, indicating that Warner intends to tread carefully. He added, “We didn’t buy Flixster as a retail outlet.”

Still, building a direct relationship with consumers was one of the primary reasons Warner bought the site. Flixster Collections allows the studio to see users’ movie purchases, for instance. If Warner sees that a user has bought five of its eight Harry Potter films, the studio can try to sell the other three. “It’s a huge opportunity from a marketing perspective,” Mr. Tsujihara said.

The question that remains, of course, is whether Warner had a choice — did the studio step in because it’s a forward thinker? Or was no retailer willing to stick its neck out for the UltraViolet locker?

Flixster.com had only about 1.2 million unique visitors in September, according to comScore. Most of the company’s muscle comes from a free what’s-in-theaters-now app that works on Apple, Android and BlackBerry devices. The app, which Warner says attracts about 25 million unique users a month on a global basis, includes information from RottenTomatoes.com, the review aggregation site that is also owned by Flixster.

(The studio dismisses industry worries that owning Rotten Tomatoes is a conflict because the site will be reviewing Warner films. “It’s completely independent, and if you looked at some of Warner’s scores, you would know I’m serious,” Mr. Tsujihara said.)
Flixster was founded in 2006 by two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Initial backers included the LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. The idea was to create a network for movie fans to share ratings and reviews. It quickly became part of the studio marketer toolbox, with studios paying to sponsor quizzes that could be shared with friends, essentially turning users into sales agents.

It is too early to judge the consumer response to Flixster’s UltraViolet push, but there are early indications of trouble among the geek squad. “Talk about a bad first impression,” wrote the tech blog GigaOm.

Warner’s analysis of early results is starkly different. “We are very, very happy with the redemption rates,” said Thomas Gewecke, Warner’s president for digital distribution. He declined to reveal numbers to back up the assertion, but he said Warner had plans to prod more people to open UltraViolet accounts on Flixster by offering a “starter kit” that comes with a choice of a free digital movie.

“This is only the beginning,” Mr. Gewecke said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/12/b...ies-again.html





The Children Are Our Future, and They’re Not Paying for TV
Ryan Lawler

A weak economy is putting pressure on the pay TV industry, as it struggles to get new users to sign up for cable, IPTV and satellite services. But the short-term issue around the affordability of cable is hiding a bigger trend of young people who are choosing not to pay for TV. The latest evidence of this comes from statements made by Dish Network Chairman Charlie Ergen, who’s trying to figure out how to keep pay TV subscribers who are increasingly watching over-the-top video.

While there’s still some debate over how many users are ditching pay TV in lieu of cheaper online options, Ergen said on Monday’s earnings call that there’s a bigger macro trend developing, with young people choosing to forgo pay TV subscriptions altogether:

“Young people who move to an apartment or get a house for the first time don’t subscribe to any MVPD (multichannel video programming distributor) and they just… get their network programming from Hulu and they get Netflix… As an industry where people pay between $70 and $92 a month, that’s a lot of money to a young person today who is getting their first job when they can go out and watch Hulu for free and Netflix for $7.99. So it’s a threat.”

We’ve written about this phenomenon before, as operators must convince these so-called “cord nevers” — recent college and high school grads moving into their first homes and paying their own bills for the first time — that subscribing to pay TV services is worth it. For many of these users, who likely grew up watching content online — on mobile devices and on their own time — the concept of paying close to a hundred dollars for access to linear programming might not be a winning formula.

Pay TV is not giving up on young people

But pay TV providers are going to great lengths to win over this demographic. That means lower-priced packages of content, and in many cases, it can involve pitching broadband services ahead of TV. Take Comcast, for instance: In meetings at Comcast headquarters in Philadelphia last week, execs said the company has benefited from a number of marketing programs aimed at college students and recent grads that push data-first packages. Other cable providers, like Time Warner Cable, are also focusing on broadband as their core selling point.

That’s fine for cable and IPTV providers, which have the infrastructure to roll out broadband Internet offerings, but for a satellite provider like Dish Network, the lack of an Internet offering of its own can be a roadblock to acquiring customers that way.
Premium services take a bigger hit

While Netflix and Hulu are eating into potential new customers in the younger segment of the market, they’re also decreasing revenues that Dish gets for premium channels like HBO and Showtime. Online services are largely still seen as complementary to pay TV services for most consumers, except when it comes to paying more for premium packages of TV content.

“One reason our premium business is down is… when someone can buy Netflix for $7.99, do they really want to pay $14.99 for HBO? And so when people look at their pocketbooks, obviously, every time somebody subscribes to Netflix, it’s probably 1/2 of a customer that our industry loses from a premium perspective,” Ergen said. He also noted that about 20 percent of Dish subscribers also pay for Netflix, which cuts into its potential premium network revenues.

That said, there’s the possibility that the streaming business model might not hold up, particularly as broadband service providers move to more usage-based pricing models. Ergen noted that a $7.99 subscription to Netflix might not be as attractive if the cost of broadband increases. If broadband goes up $20, that’s the equivalent of a $27.99 service, he argued, which is something streaming video providers can’t control.
http://gigaom.com/video/cord-nevers-dish/





Misleading Metaphors That Drive The War On Online Sharing
Mike Masnick

Certain terms crop up time and again in the arguments around copyright infringement and file sharing. Words like "theft" and "stealing" clearly represent an attempt to frame the debate in a certain way. That's hardly a new insight: many posts on Techdirt have pointed out these attempts to manipulate the discourse.

But until now, no one has stepped back and looked at this phenomenon as whole, placing it in a historical and legal context, or tried to analyze how it is related to the battles for the future shape of the Internet currently taking place. That's just what Stefan Larsson has done for his doctorate at Lund University in Sweden, in a thesis entitled "Metaphors and Norms - Understanding Copyright Law in a Digital Society" (available as a PDF.)

Here's how the accompanying press release (yes, even theses have them these days) explains the central question it seeks to answer:

What is it about copyright that doesn't work in the digital society? Why do millions of people think it's OK to break the law when it comes to file sharing in particular? Sociology of law researcher Stefan Larsson from Lund University believes that legal metaphors and old-fashioned mindsets contribute to the confusion and widening gaps between legislation and the prevailing norms.

Our language is made up of metaphors, even in our legal texts. Stefan Larsson has studied what consequences this has when digital phenomena, such as file sharing and downloading, are limited by descriptions intended for an analogue world.

In other words, the problem arises when we transpose concepts from an analog context into a digital one, where those concepts are used as metaphors that fail to work because of key differences between the two worlds.

One of those metaphors is "theft":

"When legal arguments equate file sharing with theft of physical objects, it sometimes becomes problematic", says Stefan Larsson, who doesn't think it is possible to equate an illegal download with theft of a physical object, as has been done in the case against The Pirate Bay.

Using the compensation model employed in the case against The Pirate Bay, the total value of such a site could be calculated at over SEK 600 billion. This is almost as much as Sweden's national budget, says Stefan Larsson.

Another is "copy":

In Stefan Larsson's view, the word 'copies' is a hidden legal metaphor that causes problematic ideas in the digital society. For example, copyright does not take into account that a download does not result in the owner losing his or her own copy. Neither is it possible to equate number of downloads with lost income for the copyright holder, since it is likely that people download a lot more than they would purchase in a shop.

Both of those will be familiar terrain to Techdirt readers. But Larsson believes that these misleading metaphors have something in common:

"The problem is that these metaphors make us equate copyright with ownership of physical property", says Stefan Larsson.

That is, the very idea of "intellectual property" is a metaphor that encourages people to make critical mistakes about what we can do with it, and what the ethical framework governing it should be. I certainly agree with that analysis – it's why I prefer to call copyright and patents what they are: time-limited, government-backed intellectual monopolies. But maybe that's just another metaphor....
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...-sharing.shtml





Universal, Sony Win Dual Bids to Buy EMI Group
Alex Pham

Universal Music Group and Sony Corp. have reached agreements with Citigroup Inc. to buy EMI Group's music business for a combined $4.1 billion, an 8% premium over Citigroup's initial minimum asking price.

The dual transaction would split London-based EMI in two, with the company's recorded music going to Universal for approximately $1.9 billion and the publishing division sold to Sony for $2.2 billion, the companies announced Friday morning. Citigroup in October had asked for a minimum of $1.9 billion for the recorded music business and $2.5 billion for EMI's smaller but more profitable publishing business.

Among EMI's roster of artists are Coldplay, Norah Jones, Katy Perry and Pink Floyd, to name just a few. In addition, its publishing catalog contains 1.4 million songs, including “New York New York,” “The James Bond Theme,” “Empire State of Mind,” “We Are the Champions,” “Wild Thing,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

The deals are subject to approvals by antitrust regulators in both the U.S. and Europe. Universal is already the largest recorded music company in the world, with an estimated 27% of the global market, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Adding EMI's share of roughly 9% would put Universal at a comfortable distance relative to Sony, whose market share has approached, and at times, surpassed Universal's with regard to recorded music.

The recorded music business is primarily concerned with selling records and breaking new artists, whereas music publishing collects royalties from music that is licensed for use in advertising, games, television shows and other commercial purposes.

For Sony, the agreement to buy EMI Publishing came at the eleventh hour, as financing for its $2.2-billion purchase came together in the last week or so via a network of partners that include Mubadala, an Abu Dhabi investment fund, Blackstone, Guggenheim Partners, UBS Investment Bank and several others. The offer narrowly edged out a $2.1 billion bid from BMG Chrysalis, a music publishing company owned by German media giant Bertelsmann and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.

Sony is considered an investor and partial owner in the deal, but will manage the business under its Sony ATV publishing business, which owns or administers the publishing rights to 750,000 songs, including the Beatles catalog.

The deal is a coup for Sony Chief Executive Howard Stringer, who has made music a priority for the company at a time when the industry has been ravaged by piracy and plummeting CD sales. In 2008, Stringer spent $1.2 billion to buy out Bertelsmann's 50% share in a joint venture, Sony BMG.

For Universal, the purchase keeps EMI out of the hands of Warner Music Group, which would have gained enough market share to closely rival Universal and Sony.

In the end, the deal hinged upon a solution to EMI's pension plan obligations to its 21,000 employees. Warner offered to assume the pension liability, but would pay about $1 billion in cash. Universal's $1.9 billion cash offer, however, left Citigroup with the pension obligations. Estimates for the amount of money necessary to pay out the pensions over the lifetme of the plan have ranged dramatically from $200 million to $600 million.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/ente...emi-music.html





Obama Pledges to Veto Anti-Net Neutrality Legislation
David Kravets

The White House said Tuesday that President Barack Obama likely would veto upcoming legislation that would unwind net-neutrality rules the Federal Communications Commission adopted last year.

Senate Journal Resolution 6, which is expected to go to the Senate floor perhaps as early as this week, “would undermine a fundamental part of the Nation’s Open Internet and innovation strategy — an enforceable, effective but flexible policy for keeping the internet free and open,” the White House said. The House passed a similar measure last spring, and Obama had threatened to veto that, too, if it landed on his desk.

The Senate measure, which mirrors the House resolution, says Congress “disapproves” of the FCC’s net neutrality rules, which “shall have no force or effect.” The rules, which don’t go into effect until Nov. 20, bar broadband providers like Comcast and Time Warner Cable from playing favorites with internet traffic, while a lighter set of rules applies to mobile broadband providers like Verizon.

The Obama administration said the measure, floated by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), threatens “the very foundations of innovation in the internet economy and the democratic spirit that has made the Internet a force for social progress around the world.”

The net-neutrality dispute harkens to 2008, when the FCC ordered Comcast to stop interfering with the peer-to-peer service BitTorrent, which can use a lot of bandwidth and is often associated with online piracy.

That marked the first time the FCC officially tried to enforce fairness rules put in place in 2005 by Republican FCC head Michael Powell. Oddly, those rules, which differ only slightly from the ones the FCC put into place, were not opposed by Republicans or Democrats at the time.

That 2008 FCC action came as a response to complaints that Comcast was sending forged packets to broadband customers to close their peer-to-peer sessions, which was first discovered by a technologist who was trying to download out-of-copyright barbershop quartet tunes.

Comcast appealed the decision, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last year set aside the agency’s net-neutrality rules, saying the FCC was powerless to adopt the rules.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said the agency was enforcing a set of agency principles dating to 2005 that supposedly guarantee that cable and DSL subscribers have the right to use the devices, services and programs of choice over their wireline connections.

The FCC, however, adopted the rules again in December, hoping to put them on stronger legal grounds. Those rules however are tied up in the courts, where the issue is likely to be resolved, following the White House’s veto threat. Verizon is already suing the FCC over the rules, which mostly apply to cable and DSL providers.

The rules prohibit companies from unfairly blocking services they don’t like and require them to be transparent about how they manage their networks during times of congestion. Mobile carriers like AT&T and Verizon face fewer rules but are banned from interfering with alternate calling services such as Skype.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...utrality-veto/





It Was Close, But We Won: Viva Net Neutrality!

Today in the Senate there was a major win for freedom of speech and the Internet. In a largely partisan vote Senate Democrats defeated a resolution introduced by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) which would have overturned the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) open Internet rules that are set to go into effect this month.

Though the FCC’s rules are not great, they do offer some protections for net neutrality on the wired Internet and overturning them would have been a huge setback for free speech on the web. During debate on the Senate floor yesterday supporters of the resolution railed against government regulation while opponents defended the rules saying they were necessary to maintain the openness and innovation that has allowed the Internet to thrive.

Those who supported the resolution repeatedly and falsely claimed that net neutrality represents a heavy-handed government takeover of the Internet that would quell innovation. The opposite is true. Fortunately, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) were there to set the record straight.

The senators explained that the FCC’s rules only formalize the open Internet principles that have guided the Internet to date and ensured the level playing field that has allowed small businesses to meaningful compete with large corporations. This principle is what has allowed small start-ups like YouTube, Facebook, and Flckr to become the kind of massive success stories that revive the American dream. As Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) pointed out, if Google or other online video sites would have been able to pay off Verizon or Comcast to slow or even block traffic to YouTube they never would have had a chance.

Sens. Franken and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) spoke on the floor about the critical free speech issues involved in this debate. Franken said he believed net neutrality to be the “free speech issue of our time” as the Internet has become the soap box of the 21st century. He explained that protestors are no longer using poster board to display their messages but instead they are posting to Twitter and Facebook to communicate and organize. Udall highlighted the vital role an open Internet played in the Arab Spring. He challenge opponents of net neutrality by asking what message America would be sending the rest of the world if it removed regulations put in place to guarantee free speech and open access online.

As opponents of this resolution explained on the floor yesterday, the Internet has thrived under basic net neutrality rules. They successfully argued that by denying the FCC’s ability to cement these commons sense rules, a handful of corporations controlling access to the Internet and having both the technical means and the financial incentives to interfere with the free flow of information would do so.

We would like to thank our champions of free speech for standing up to defend the FCC’s rules on the floor yesterday and protecting our First Amendment rights online.
http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-...net-neutrality





F.C.C. Push to Expand Net Access Gains Help
Brian Stelter

To sign up some of the estimated 100 million Americans who are not online, the Federal Communications Commission and private providers are trying to make broadband Internet access both less expensive and more valuable.

On Wednesday, the F.C.C. will announce commitments from most of the big cable companies in the United States to supply access for $9.99 a month to a subset of low-income households. The low introductory price is meant to appeal to new customers who have not had broadband in the past.

The F.C.C. is billing the initiative as the biggest effort ever to help close the digital divide. Because no federal funds are being invested, the initiative relies in large part on the cooperation of private companies. One such company, Comcast, started offering $9.99 monthly broadband service to some low-income households this year after promising the F.C.C. that it would do so when it acquired control of NBCUniversal.

By enlisting the cable companies as well as a wide range of nonprofit groups that will educate eligible families about the low-cost access, “we can make a real dent in the broadband adoption gap,” Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

Mr. Genachowski has made broadband deployment and adoption the top priority of his tenure at the F.C.C. The government estimates that about one-third of American households, or 100 million people, do not have high-speed Internet access at home. Some of those homes simply do not have access to service, but most do and choose not to receive it, for reasons involving cost and perceived relevance to their lives.

To address the first point, along with the low monthly price, a technology company will supply refurbished computers for low-income households for $150; Microsoft will provide software; and Morgan Stanley will help develop a microcredit program so that families can pay for those computers.

To address the second point, job Web sites and education companies will offer content that will, in theory, make online access more valuable.

Eligibility will be limited to those households that have a child enrolled in the national school lunch program and that are not current or recent broadband subscribers. About 17.5 million children are enrolled in the school lunch program. That limitation is likely to disappoint advocates who would like more affordable access extended to all households.

For those households, the $9.99 monthly price will apply only for a two-year period. The price is akin to an on-ramp for new customers, with the hope being that they will decide to pay more for access once they have had it for a while.

The F.C.C. said the initiative would begin in the spring and reach all parts of the country in September 2012. It is similar in some ways to Adoption Plus, a partnership that was proposed two years ago, but never carried out, by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, a cable trade group.

The participating cable companies — including almost all of the biggest ones in the country, like Time Warner Cable, Cox and Charter — are not expected to sustain a significant financial loss. Broadband service normally has a high markup, and the $9.99 price will more than cover the overhead costs of providing monthly Internet service.

The announcement on Wednesday will not include two companies that are major players in the broadband business, Verizon and AT&T. The F.C.C. is reviewing AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile.

Asked why the cable companies were willing to participate, Mr. Genachowski said he thought they “looked at this and said, this is an important national challenge, let’s be part of the solution.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/b...al-divide.html





Google: Microsoft Uses Patents When Products "Stop Succeeding"
Timothy B. Lee

A Google patent lawyer says that the patent system is broken, and he accuses Microsoft of abusing the system. Speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, Google's Tim Porter pointed to Microsoft's attacks on Linux as an example of its broader corporate strategy.

"When their products stop succeeding in the marketplace, when they get marginalized, as is happening now with Android, they use the large patent portfolio they've built up to get revenue from the success of other companies' products," he said.

Microsoft has argued that the patent royalties it seeks from Android vendors are part of the natural evolution of a new industry. Porter disagrees.

"Microsoft was our age when it got its first software patent," he said. "I don't think they experienced this kind of litigation in a period when they were disrupting the established order. So I don't think it's historically inevitable."

Of course, the reason Microsoft didn't have to worry about patents during its first dozen years was because the courts and the patent office didn't allow patents on software until the 1980s. Indeed, the idea of patents on software alarmed Bill Gates, who wrote in 1991 (when Microsoft was already older than Google is now) that "the industry would be at a complete standstill" if software had been eligible for patent protection in the early days of the industry. He worried that "some large company will patent some obvious thing," enabling the company to "take as much of our profits as they want."

Today, Google finds itself in exactly the predicament Gates warned about 20 years ago. The Chronicle asked Porter the obvious question: should software be patentable? Porter refused to give a straight answer "There are certainly arguments" that copyright protection is "more appropriate" for the software industry, he said. But he would only say that "the current system is broken," and that there has been "a 10- or 15-year period when the issuance of software patents was too lax."

Porter pointed to the 2007 Teleflex decision as an important step toward reform. In that case, the Supreme Court raised the bar for obviousness and encouraged patent examiners to use common sense to reject obvious patents.

Yet in the four years since that decision, both the rate at which patents are granted and the amount of patent litigation has continued to skyrocket. Porter said he hoped the Supreme Court's decision would "put some teeth" in the law, but there's no sign that it has.

So why is Google unwilling to admit that we'd be better off without software patents? We can only speculate, but here are two likely explanations. One is that public companies like Google are inherently conservative institutions. They worry that taking "radical" positions might damage their reputations and cause PR problems. For example, future opponents in patent litigation could seize on comments opposing software patents as evidence that Google deliberately flouts the law.

Second, companies tend to delegate decisions about their patent policy stance to patent lawyers. And patent lawyers overwhelmingly believe that software (and almost everything else) should be eligible for patent protection.

Still, neither of these are solid reasons for Google's timid stance on patent reform. For example, Red Hat has consistently opposed software patents. This stance doesn't seem to have hurt it in the marketplace or in the courtroom, and the company has generated significant goodwill among programmers, especially in the free software community.

"There are only so many ways to describe a piston, but software patents are written by lawyers in a language that software engineers don't even understand," Porter said. "They're being used to hinder innovation or skim revenue off the top of a successful product."

He's exactly right. Which makes it a shame that he won't admit we'd be better off without them.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...succeeding.ars





Apple & Ed-Tech Payola
Audrey Watters

Matt Richtel has published the latest article in his New York Times series Grading the Digital School. The series has been quite critical of education technology, questioning the amount of money schools are spending on it and doubting that those expenditures are having any impact on student achievement — as evidenced by stagnant test scores, at least.

This most recent story again invokes test scores as a main indicator of “what works” in education. But test scores aren’t what educators are focused on, according to Richtel, suggesting that instead schools are being unduly influenced by the tech industry’s schmoozing and lobbying.

Wowing and Wooing Educators

“Silicon Valley Wows Educators, Woos Them,” the headline reads. Its original title, which you can still see via the URL and which points the finger at one Silicon Valley company in particular: “Apple Woos Educators with Trips to Silicon Valley.” The argument: Apple brings educators to its Cupertino campus to meet with company executives, to watch presentations, to test-drive technology tools for the classroom, and to dine at “trendy restaurants.” The implication: schools that have opted to buy MacBooks or iPads have been “wowed” and “wooed” by these trips.

The article does briefly note that these sorts of sales and marketing tactics occur throughout the education industry, not just with hardware and software companies. “What the textbook sellers had perfected for years has moved into the high-tech world,” Harvard’s Graduate School of Education lecturer John Richards tells Richtel. But there’s no link from Richtel to some of the recent stories in which the NYT has covered these practices. (Within the last six weeks, there have been two raising questions about potential improprieties of the education giant Pearson – link and link.) There’s no real comparison in Richtel’s piece of how districts’ textbook or testing contracts differ — in scale or in sales practices — with contracts for school-wide iPad or Macbook installations.

One district, the story reports, has spent $637,000 to give its faculty and students laptops and iPads. I looked at the schools’ 2010-2011 budget, hoping to see what it spent on textbooks or standardizing testing but I couldn’t find the line items. For what it’s worth, $600K is also roughly what it spent on student athletics.

Apple, Technology and Textbooks

Richtel’s article does, however, offer a contrast between schools’ technophilia and tech spending and comments by Steve Jobs himself, citing a 1996 Wired interview that seems to encapsulate the theme of Richtel’s whole “Grading the Digital School” series: “I used to think that technology could help education,” Jobs told Wired. “I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.” The problem according to Jobs (of course): teachers’ unions.

But as the Walter Isaacson biography of Jobs suggests, the Apple co-founder also saw textbooks as key piece of the education bureaucracy, another part of the “problem,” and another industry (a $8 billion a year industry) that Apple could potentially disrupt. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” Jobs told Isaacson. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”

In other words, buy the iPads. Get the textbooks for free.

It’s not too hard to imagine the vast amount of lobbying (whether we’re talking lavish trips to Silicon Valley or simply very heated school board meetings) that would need to go in to convincing schools to abandon the traditional textbook. But that’s not what Richtel has uncovered in the case of Apple. And it’s probably worth pointing out too that as publishers are (slowly) making the switch to digital content, schools now buy computers and electronic and print textbooks.

Even with budget crises, schools buy a lot of things, and that means there’s an incredible amount of money at stake when convincing school officials to sign contracts, whether it’s to buy software licenses, computers, iPads, textbooks, football team uniforms, cafeteria food, vending machine drinks, paper products and the like. Education, and not just education technology, is big business.

Not all technology companies are engaged in this sort of enterprise-level wooing. Indeed, you’ll often hear startups in Silicon Valley say they’re doing whatever they can do avoid this sort of direct sales to schools, partly because they are up against corporations with much deeper pockets.

Branding and Buying Ed-Tech

Even though Apple has some of the deepest corporate pockets in the world, Richtel’s description of the company as engaged in this sort of influence peddling doesn’t seem quite right. What Richtel’s article doesn’t really address — and something that I think really undermines his larger argument about corporations’ “wooing and wowing” — is the way in which the Apple brand now feels far stronger than any of these lobbying efforts. The lure of Apple is more powerful than sending a district tech coordinator on an all-expenses-paid trip to Silicon Valley. Lots of companies offer “perks” like this to get a school district to adopt their particular Algebra textbooks or their Interactive Whiteboards or their learning management systems (and don’t get me wrong here — bad behavior is bad). But the relationship that consumers have to Apple products feels somehow different than these other purchasing decisions. Consumers — students, teachers, librarians, principals – want Apple products.

Richtel does briefly allude to that consumer desire, citing Common Cause‘s Mike Dean saying that “There is a geek culture that very much worships Apple, and they’re feeding into that to get more contracts.” But I’m wary about conflating that worship with payola. And I’m wary about pointing at tech companies for “buying” their way into schools without focusing on the practices of the rest of the education industry — particularly those that offer the standardized tests that Richtel contends are so indicative of what supposedly “works” in education/technology.
http://www.hackeducation.com/2011/11...PZ4.hackernews





Why Won’t Professor Greenfield Publish This Theory in a Scientific Journal?
Ben Goldacre

This week Baroness Susan Greenfield, Professor of pharmacology at Oxford, apparently announced that computer games are causing dementia in children. This would be very concerning scientific information: but it comes to us from the opening of a new wing at an expensive boarding school, not an academic conference. Then a spokesperson told a gaming site that’s not really what she meant. But they couldn’t say what she does mean.

Two months ago the same professor linked internet use with the rise in autism diagnoses (not for the first time), then pulled back when autism charities and an Oxford professor of psychology raised concerns. Similar claims go back a very long way. They seem changeable, but serious.

It’s with some trepidation that anyone writes about Professor Greenfield’s claims. When I raised concerns, she said I was like the epidemiologists who denied that smoking caused cancer. Other critics find themselves derided as sexist in the media. When Professor Dorothy Bishop raised concerns, Professor Greenfield responded: “it’s not really for Dorothy to comment on how I run my career”.

But I have one, humble question: why, in over 5 years of appearing in the media raising these grave worries, has Professor Greenfield of Oxford University never simply published the claims in an academic paper?

A scientist with enduring concerns about a serious widespread risk would normally set out their concerns clearly, to other scientists, in a scientific paper, and for one simple reason. Science has authority, not because of white coats, or titles, but because of precision and transparency: you explain your theory, set out your evidence, and reference the studies that support your case. Other scientists can then read it, see if you’ve fairly represented the evidence; and decide whether the methods of the papers you’ve cited really do produce results that meaningfully support your hypothesis.

Perhaps there are gaps in our knowledge? Great. The phrase “more research is needed” has famously been banned by the British Medical Journal, because it’s uninformative: a scientific paper is the place to clearly describe the gaps in our knowledge, and specify new experiments that might resolve these uncertainties.

But the value of a scientific publication goes beyond this simple benefit, of all relevant information appearing, unambiguously, in one place. It’s also a way to communicate your ideas to your scientific peers, and invite them to express an informed view.
In this regard, I don’t mean peer review, the “least-worst” system settled on for deciding whether a paper is worth publishing, where other academics decide if it’s accurate, novel, and so on. This is often represented as some kind of policing system for truth, but in reality, some dreadful nonsense gets published, and mercifully so: shaky material of some small value can be published into the buyer-beware professional literature of academic science; then the academic readers of this literature, who are trained to critically appraise a scientific case, can make their own judgement.

And it is this second stage of review by your peers – after publication – that is so important in science. If there are flaws in your case, responses can be written, as letters, or even whole new papers. If there is merit in your work, then new ideas and research will be triggered. That is the real process of science.

If a scientist sidesteps their scientific peers, and chooses to take an apparently changeable, frightening, and technical scientific case directly to the public, then that is a deliberate decision, and one that can’t realistically go unnoticed. The lay public might find your case superficially appealing, but they may not be fully able to judge the merits of all your technical evidence.

I think these serious scientific concerns belong, at least once, in a clear scientific paper. I don’t see how this suggestion is inappropriate, or impudent, and in all seriousness, I can’t see an argument against it. I hope it won’t elicit an accusation of sexism, or of participation in a cover-up. I hope that it will simply result in an Oxford science professor writing a scientific paper, about a scientific claim of great public health importance, that they have made repeatedly – but confusingly – for at least half a decade.
http://www.badscience.net/2011/11/wh...tific-journal/





1TB Hard Drive Prices up 180% in a Month
Marc Bevand

Thailand manufactures 25% of the world's hard drives, and the severe 2011 monsoon season floods affected some of its largest industrial parks, where many hard drive manufacturers and component suppliers are located, causing worldwide shortages and price increases.

Between October 15th and 21st, water penetrated the Bang Pa-in Industrial Park, the Navanakorn Industrial Park (the largest of its kind in Thailand), and the Bangkadi Industrial Park.

All of Western Digital's and Toshiba's manufacturing sites in Thailand were located in these 3 parks.

All of them have been rendered inoperable.

Seagate is relatively lucky as it is merely affected by the components shortages while none of its factories in Thailand have been inundated according to a November 3rd SEC filing. As a result, Seagate's stock is up +81% between October 6th's low of $10.1 and November 5th's high of $18.3 (disclosure: as a value investor, I hold STX —it was undervalued, and still is.)

Meanwhile, shortages have caused phenomenal hard drive price increases. Over the past month, I observed on Newegg:

1TB SATA hard drives went from $50/TB to $140/TB, +180%, almost triple the price
1.5TB from $47/TB to $93/TB, +100%
2TB from $40/TB to $72/TB, +80%
3TB from $67/TB to $87/TB, +30%

Large-scale data center operators who are currently growing very rapidly with a focus on storage must be financially impacted by the situation. I thought of Amazon Web Services and, sure enough, one of my favorite tech bloggers James Hamilton (vice president on the AWS team) wrote an insightful post entitled Serious Hard Drive Shortage Expected for at Least 2 Quarters. "Higher drive and component prices will persist into the summer months of 2012" Yikes!
http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=62





DHS Warns Anonymous May Target Critical Infrastructure

DHS is warning critical infrastructure operators that the international hacking group known as Anonymous has threatened to attack industrial control systems, the software that governs automated processes for nearly every major utility or production facility including factories, power stations, chemical plants, and pharmacies

DHS is warning critical infrastructure operators that the international hacking group known as Anonymous has threatened to attack industrial control systems, the software that governs automated processes for nearly every major utility or production facility including factories, power stations, chemical plants, and pharmacies.

The security bulletin from the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center was careful to note that “while Anonymous recently expressed intent to target [industrial control software], they have not demonstrated a capability to inflict damage to these systems.”

Following the Stuxnet virus at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear facility, which resulted in physical damage, cyberattacks against ICS systems have emerged as one of the greatest threats to critical infrastructure.

By taking control of the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, the Stuxnet virus forced several nuclear centrifuges to spin out of control while it simultaneously knocked out the system’s automatic shutdown safety procedure. Analysts now fear that hackers can similarly cause power generators to explode, release dangerous chemicals, or pollute water supplies by attacking SCADA systems at various facilities.

The restricted security bulletin obtained by the website Public Intelligence, noted that hackers from Anonymous have published key programming code and other materials that instruct users on how to gain some access to ICS systems.

Furthermore Anonymous “could be able to develop capabilities to gain access and trespass on [ICS] networks very quickly,” the report cautioned.

In particular, oil and gas companies may be at greatest risk due to Anonymous’ “green energy” agenda in which it has supported the campaign against the Keystone XL oil pipeline and the Alberta Tar Sand project in Canada.

“This targeting could likely extend beyond Anonymous to the broader [hacker activist] community, resulting in larger-scope actions against energy companies,” the bulletin warned.

DHS concluded by urging “owners and operators of critical infrastructure control systems … to engage in addressing the security needs of their [ICS] assets.”
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire....infrastructure





James Murdoch's Make or Break Day in Parliament
Peter Lauria and Kate Holton

James Murdoch is about to face his day of reckoning.

The News Corp deputy chief operating officer will appear before a special committee of Britain's parliament on Thursday for a second round of questioning about a phone-hacking scandal at his company's now-defunct News of the World tabloid.

According to company insiders, Murdoch family confidantes, analysts and industry observers, the committee's success in pinning the widespread corruption that took place at News Corp's British unit News International on James -- or how deftly James deflects responsibility -- will ultimately determine if he stays at News Corp as the likely successor to his father, Rupert.

"Thursday is a make or break day for James," said a News Corp insider and Murdoch family confidant who asked to remain anonymous. "The situation is much more dire than last time around."

To put the gravity of that comment into perspective, consider reports in recent weeks detailing how Elizabeth Murdoch, eldest of Rupert's three children from his second marriage, pushed for James's ouster from the company during preparations for his first appearance before parliament in July; and how Rupert seriously pondered making the move.

Those stories confirmed a Reuters report from early August citing News Corp insiders as saying they were preparing for the possibility that James may need to "take a breather" from the company as a result of the damage to his credibility caused by the scandal.

A spokeswoman for News Corp declined to comment on how James Murdoch planned to handle Thursday's appearance or speculation about his future.

Since July, the situation hasn't improved for James. In fact, it has grown worse. His initial testimony was immediately contradicted by Colin Myler and Tom Crone, the former editor and former head of legal for the News of the World. Inquiries into other News Corp divisions are taking place in the United States. Moreover, a reporter for The Sun was recently arrested on suspicion of bribing police, suggesting that questionable practices spread beyond a lone "rogue" News of the World reporter to at least one other paper in the News Corp empire.

James would not have been re-elected to News Corp's board at the company's annual shareholder meeting in late October had it not been for the Murdoch family's 40 percent voting control. Strip out the family's votes and James's re-election would have been rejected by a more than 3 to 1 margin, suggesting severe disenchantment with his handling of the crisis among News Corp's independent shareholders.

On Monday, News International, the UK newspaper arm of News Corp, admitted its staff had ordered surveillance of two lawyers representing victims suing the media group over phone-hacking, and on Tuesday a private investigator told the BBC he had been paid by the News of the World to spy on more than 90 people, including Britain's Prince William and the parents of "Harry Potter" actor Daniel Radcliffe.

Harriet Harman, deputy leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party, said that this week's revelations "take the shame of the phone hacking scandal to a new low. Acts intended to intimidate the legal profession are a fundamental attack on the rule of law."
Tom Watson, the most relentless questioner on the committee, told Reuters: "I would imagine that James Murdoch will want to clear this up with the committee. He said in September 2010 that he was getting on top of the matter and if it transpires that the investigators were hired in 2011 then clearly something is amiss with the management."

Maintaining Moral Authority

The key for James is to maintain both his composure and moral authority during Thursday's testimony, sources close to the company said. The committee will be looking for evidence to prove that it was misled by James during his last appearance. In the absence of any hard proof, however, all the committee has to go on is conflicting accounts of when James was made aware that phone hacking involved more than one journalist.

News Corp had for years argued that phone hacking was solely limited to royal correspondent Clive Goodman and the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who both went to jail in 2007 for the crime. But in 2008, James Murdoch accepted the advice of lawyers and a News of the World editor to pay out roughly 700,000 pounds to soccer union boss Gordon Taylor, a figure that dwarfed all previous settlements paid by the newspaper.

Writing to the committee in August, James explained why he approved the large payment to Taylor. He said that having agreed to this course of action he did not believe there was any need for a further investigation. But Myler and Crone contradicted that assertion, saying that they had explained to Murdoch that the payment to Taylor was necessitated by the fact that Taylor had evidence appearing to prove that other journalist besides Goodman had been involved in phone hacking.

Using evidence obtained through emails, meeting notes, and legal briefing papers, the committee has established that several senior News of the World executives knew the problem was more widespread than acknowledged. Indeed, repeated and insistent denials that the company was unaware of a wider problem have been found to be false. Legal notes circulated between an external counsel and then head of legal affairs Crone in 2008 referred to "a culture of illegal information access."

The committee has also exposed News International to be a company that has paid huge sums of money to staff who had gone to jail and to a hacking victim if they agreed to keep the matter confidential. This prompted suggestions that the company was engaged in a huge corporate cover up. Repeated statements by executives that they simply did not know or could not remember what happened have done nothing to correct that impression.

"We didn't believe them then and we don't believe them now," committee member Paul Farrelly told Reuters.

What the committee has not yet proven, however, is when precisely James learned about the scale of the problem. In essence, Thursday's questioning is an attempt by the committee to figure out if they were misled by the Murdochs or Myler, Crone and other News International executives.

"James Murdoch will be asked what he knew and when about hacking," Farrelly said. "Where there are contradictions, there is plenty of other ground from our enquiries and the documents to come to some very hard hitting conclusions."

Therefore, it is essential that James be able to put some distance between himself and the other executives and prove that if the committee was indeed misled it was by them and not him. Although few believe James can emerge from Thursday's proceedings unscathed, some of his supporters are hoping he'll use his appearance as an opportunity to be as open and honest as he can be.

Embarrassment In Lieu Of Evidence

The doggedness of the committee in pursuing James has left the impression that the 38-year-old failed to ask the right questions of those around him. And though the committee is powerless to hold James accountable on its own, numerous sources said its aim is to make him seem so negligent a steward of the company that it becomes impossible for him to ever succeed Rupert as CEO of the $30 billion News Corp empire.

"Given that this has led to the closure of the News of the World and has cost News International handsomely, he'll be asked if he didn't know the full extent, why didn't he when he was the chief executive?" said Farrelly.

Noting that Rupert is immune to outside and even familial pressure until it starts affecting the company's business prospects, the News Corp insider said the committee's goal "seems to be to make James seem so bad to a powerful intermediary figure like Carey or Devoe that one of them tells Rupert that James has to go for the good of the business."

So far, Carey has remained steadfast in his support of James, giving him another vote of confidence on News Corp's earnings call last week, which also highlighted the company's continued strong financial performance. Among others inside the company, however, there is a recognition of the building pressure for someone to take wider responsibility for the scandal and the lack of other candidates besides James to do so since it is clear that Rupert himself won't be the scapegoat.

Claire Enders, a media consultant who very publicly led the opposition in derailing News Corp's deal to take full control of satellite broadcaster BSkyB over the summer, thinks that James should be held responsible for the scandal but likely won't face any real consequences from it.

"He was the chief executive, he should have known what was going on," Enders said. "I think he will get a slap on the wrist by the committee. He can be criticized for his lack of attention and lack of interest and for the fact that alarm bells didn't ring."

Enders said James's performance will play into his chances of being re-elected as BSkyB chairman during its annual general meeting at the end of November. Just as James was re-elected to the News Corp board, Enders fully expects him to be re-elected at BSkyB as well. The company could even benefit since he has had to rein in his more aggressive tendencies in recent months after years of troubling regulators by criticizing rivals and any politician seen to oppose his company.

For his part, James appears to be going about his business as usual. According to a source close to James, he is gradually continuing his move to the U.S. but it is going more slowly than previously planned. While he's spending more time in the U.S. and will continue to do so in the new year, his family plans to hold off on relocating until the summer, this source said.

(Additional reporting by Georgina Prodhan in London)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7A83Y420111109





Massive DNS Poisoning Attacks in Brazil
Fabio Assolini

In the past few days several Brazilian ISPs have fallen victim to a series of DNS cache poisoning attacks. These attacks see users being redirected to install malware before connecting to popular sites. Some incidents have also featured attacks on network devices, where routers or modems are compromised remotely.

Brazil has some big ISPs. Official statistics suggest the country has 73 million computers connected to the Internet, and the major ISPs average 3 or 4 million customers each. If a cybercriminal can change the DNS cache in just one server, the number of potential victims is huge.

Last week Brazil’s web forums were alive with desperate cries for help from users who faced malicious redirections when trying to access websites such as YouTube, Gmail and Hotmail, as well as local market leaders including Uol, Terra and Globo. In all cases, users were asked to run a malicious file as soon as the website opened.

We monitored one attack which saw a clean machine displaying this warning when opening Google:

“To access the new Google.com you need to install Google Defence”

It asks the customer to download and install the so-called “Google Defence” software required to use the search engine. In reality, though, this file is a Trojan banker detected by Kaspersky’s heuristic engine. Research into this IP highlighted several malicious files and exploits hosted there:

80.XX.XX.198/Google_setup.exe
80.XX.XX.198/google_setup.exe
80.XX.XX.198/Google_Setup.exe
80.XX.XX.198/ad2.html
80.XX.XX.198/flash.jar
80.XX.XX.198/FaceBook_Complemento.exe
80.XX.XX.198/ad.html
134XX69350/AppletX.class
80.XX.XX.198/YouTube_Setup.exe
80.XX.XX.198/FlashPlayer.class
80.XX.XX.198/google2.exe
80.XX.XX.198/crossdomain.xml
80.XX.XX.198/favicon.ico

In fact the file ad.html is an encrypted script, exploiting CVE-2010-4452 and running arbitrary code in an old installation of JRE. The exploit detected by us as Exploit.Java.CVE-2010-4452.a calls up one of the files in this list. According to statistics in KSN (Kaspersky Security Network) all the infected users are from Brazil; we registered more than 800 attempts to access this site which were thwarted by our web antivirus.

In related news, last week Brazil’s Federal Police arrested a 27-year-old employee of a medium-sized ISP in the south of the country. He was accused of participating in this malicious scheme. Over a 10-month period he had changed the DNS cache of the ISP, redirecting all users to phishing websites. We strongly suspect similar security breaches will be happening in other small and medium ISPs in the country.

Attacks in network devices

In another related incident some companies reported attacks in their network devices, where an attacker remotely accessed the company’s router or modem and changed all the DNS configurations of the devices. In those cases, when employees of the affected companies tried to open any website they were requested to execute a malicious Java applet:

Not surprisingly the malicious applet goes on to install a Trojan banker, spotted by our heuristic detection.

As described by my colleague Marta in this analysis, several routers and modems have security flaws that enable an external attacker to access and change the configuration of the device. They are able to exploit security failures and vulnerable configurations such as default passwords.

We advise all affected users to update antivirus and all software in the computer (such as Java), also change the DNS configuration to other providers (such as Google DNS). In attacks against network devices we also recommend updating the firmware of the router and changing the default passwords.
http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/20...acks_in_Brazil





FBI Takes Out $14M DNS Malware Operation

NASA computers amongst 4 million infected by DNS-based malware scam
Layer 8

US law enforcement today said it had smashed what it called a massive, sophisticated Internet fraud scheme that injected malware in more than four million computers in over 100 countries while generating $14 million in illegitimate income. Of the computers infected with malware, at least 500,000 were in the United States, including computers belonging to U.S. government agencies, such as NASA.

Details of the two-year FBI investigation called Operation Ghost Click were announced today in New York when a federal indictment was unsealed against six Estonian nationals and one Russian national. The six cyber criminals were taken into custody yesterday in Estonia by local authorities, and the U.S. will seek to extradite them. In conjunction with the arrests, U.S. authorities seized computers and rogue DNS servers at various locations.

As part of a federal court order, the rogue DNS servers have been replaced with legitimate servers in the hopes that users who were infected will not have their Internet access disrupted, the FBI stated.

Beginning in 2007, the cyber thieves used malware known as DNSChanger to infect computers worldwide, the FBI said. DNSChanger redirected unsuspecting users to rogue servers controlled by the cyber thieves, letting them manipulate users' web activity. When users of infected computers clicked on the link for the official website of iTunes, for example, they were instead taken to a website for a business unaffiliated with Apple Inc. that purported to sell Apple software. Not only did the cyber thieves make money from these schemes, they deprived legitimate website operators and advertisers of substantial revenue, the FBI said.

The FBI went on to note the harm inflicted by the defendants was not merely a matter of reaping illegitimate income. The defendants also inflicted the following:

• Unwitting customers of the defendants' sham publisher networks were paying for Internet traffic from computer users who had not intended to view or click their ads.
• Users involuntarily routed to Internet ads may well have harbored discontent with those businesses, even though the businesses were blameless.
• And then there is the harm to the users of the hijacked computers. The DNSChanger malware was a virus more akin to an antibiotic-resistant bacterium. It had a built-in defense that blocked anti-virus software updates. And it left infected computers vulnerable to other malware.
https://www.networkworld.com/communi...ware-operation





Mexican Blogger Decapitated; Cartels’ War on Social Media Spreads
Robert Beckhusen

The moderator of a popular Mexican social network has been murdered, allegedly for tipping off the authorities about the local drug cartel.

Nicknamed “Rascatripas” or “Scraper” (literally “Poor Fiddler”) on the network Nuevo Laredo en Vivo, the 35-year-old appears to have been handcuffed, tortured, decapitated and dumped beside a statue of Christopher Columbus one mile from the Texas border. Below the man’s body was a partially obscured and blood-stained blanket. Written on the blanket in black ink: “Hi I’m ‘Rascatripas’ and this happened to me because I didn’t understand I shouldn’t post things on social networks.”

The discovery of the body Wednesday morning brings the total number of bloggers and social media networkers apparently killed in the past three months by organized crime in Mexico — and in the border city of Nuevo Laredo — to four. It’s another sign of that a war in Mexico against media (or rather, an ongoing media war) has turned even more dangerous.

On Sept. 13, the bodies of a man and woman were found strung by their arms and legs from a pedestrian overpass (see picture, above). The appearance of the deceased, both in their twenties, revealed signs of torture. The woman was disemboweled. Written on a nearby banner was a message threatening the tip line of the Mexican attorney general, and two blogs including the popular and secretive Blog del Narco.

Then, on Sept. 25, newspaper administrator and Nuevo Laredo en Vivo moderator Marisol Macias Castaneda was found decapitated beside that Christopher Columbus statue. Following the death of Macias, the social network promoted resources on its website to help citizens report organized crime to authorities.

It didn’t help the latest victim, Macias’ co-moderator, “Rascatripas.”

Next to his headless body was a scrawled message: “With this, I say goodbye to ‘Nuevo Laredo Live’ … always remember, never forget, my handle, ‘Rascatripas.’”

Social media has become an important means for ordinary Mexicans to strike back at the cartels. Civilians have taken to real-time reporting of trouble spots on the country’s dangerous northern highways. Using Twitter, locations of firefights between cartels and government security forces, or risky cartel checkpoints, are broadcast by volunteers to wired motorists.

“Do not be afraid to report,” said Anon4024 at Nuevo Laredo en Vivo earlier today. “This is how we citizens can make a difference in this city.”

Another contributor, Danlaredo, warned against giving out personal information: “No need to worry, no way of knowing our data since WE’RE ALL ANONYMOUS, and the only way to know them, is that we disclose ourselves so PLEASE, follow the rules .. and do not give your personal INFORMATION …. please!!!!”

He didn’t need to mention the consequences, if an online critic of the drug lords is unmasked.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011...r-decapitated/





Twitter Ordered to Yield Data in WikiLeaks Case
Somini Sengupta

A federal judge on Thursday ruled that Twitter, the popular microblogging platform, must reveal information about three of its account holders who are under investigation for their possible links to the WikiLeaks whistle-blower site.

The case has become a flash point for online privacy and speech, in part because the Justice Department sought the information without a search warrant last year. Instead, on the basis of a 1994 law called the Stored Communications Act, the government demanded that Twitter provide the Internet protocol addresses of three of its users, among other things. An Internet protocol address identifies and gives the location of a computer used to log onto the Internet.

The three people came to the Justice Department’s attention because it believed they were associated with WikiLeaks.

Twitter informed the three people — Jacob Appelbaum, an American computer security expert, along with Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch citizen, and Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Iceland’s Parliament — of the government’s demand for information earlier this year.
The petitioners argued in federal court that their Internet protocol addresses should be considered private information and that the demand for information was too broad and unrelated to WikiLeaks. They also argued that the order suppressed their right to free speech.

The court disagreed. Judge Liam O’Grady, from the United States District Court in Alexandria, Va., wrote in his opinion that “the information sought was clearly material to establishing key facts related to an ongoing investigation and would have assisted a grand jury in conducting an inquiry into the particular matters under investigation.”

The judge said that because Twitter users “voluntarily” turned over the Internet protocol addresses when they signed up for an account, they relinquished an expectation of privacy.

“Petitioners knew or should have known that their I.P. information was subject to examination by Twitter, so they had a lessened expectation of privacy in that information, particularly in light of their apparent consent to the Twitter terms of service and privacy policy,” Judge O’Grady wrote.

The court also dismissed a petition to unseal the Justice Department’s explanation for why it sought the account information.

Neither the Justice Department nor Twitter company officials responded to e-mail and telephone requests for comment.

The petitioners themselves spoke up on Twitter. “I would do it again,” Ms. Jonsdottir posted.

“Today is one of those ‘losing faith in the justice system’ kind of days,” Mr. Appelbaum wrote on Twitter.

Lawyers for one of the petitioners said they were still reviewing the judge’s order and could not yet say what the next steps were.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/t...eaks-case.html





US Court Verdict 'Huge Blow' to Privacy, Says Fomer WikiLeaks Aide

Decision made to open Twitter account of Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, who is taking the case to the Council of Europe
Dominic Rushe

A US court ruled Icelandic member of parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir must release details of her Twitter account. Photograph: Halldor Kolbeins/AFP/Getty Images

Icelandic MP and former WikiLeaks volunteer Birgitta Jonsdottir has slammed the decision by US courts to open her Twitter account to the US authorities and is taking her case to the Council of Europe.

On Thursday a US judge ruled Twitter must release the details of her account and those of two other Twitter users linked to WikiLeaks. Jonsdottir learned in January that her Twitter account was under scrutiny from the Justice Department because of her involvement last year with WikiLeaks' release of a video showing a US military helicopter shooting two Reuters reporters in Iraq. She believes the US authorities want to use her information to try and build a case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

"This is a huge blow for everybody that uses social media," said Jonsdottir. "We have to have the same civil rights online as we have offline. Imagine if the US authorities wanted to do a house search at my home, go through my private papers. There would be a hell of a fight. It's absolutely unacceptable."

She said she would press for the Council of Europe to act on the case, which she believes sets a worrying precedent for private citizens and politicians across the world.

Last month the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which represents MPs from 157 countries, unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the move by the Justice Department. The IPU said the move threatened free speech and suggested it could violate Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which upholds the right of everyone to freedom of opinion and expression.

"Members of parliament are elected by people to represent them in parliament. In their daily work they legislate and they hold the governments to account. They are unable to perform these duties if they cannot receive and exchange information freely without fear of intimidation," wrote the IPU.

Jonsdottir's account was targeted alongside Seattle-based WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum and Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp. The order also sought records relating to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and alleged WikiLeaks source private Bradley Manning.

This is the second court victory for the US authorities in a case that has alarmed privacy and free speech advocates; in part because the inquiries' targets might never have known they were being investigated had Twitter not challenged the subpoenas.

The Justice Department also sought the information without a search warrant. US authorities used a 1994 law called the stored communications act to demand that Twitter provide the internet protocol addresses of users, a move that would give the location of the computer they used to log onto the internet. They also asked for bank account details, user names, screen names or other identities, mailing and other addresses.

The petitioners argued that the order suppressed their right to free speech and that their internet protocol addresses should be considered private information. They also argued the demand for information was too broad and unrelated to WikiLeaks.

Judge Liam O'Grady disagreed. In his opinion, "the information sought was clearly material to establishing key facts related to an ongoing investigation and would have assisted a grand jury in conducting an inquiry into the particular matters under investigation."

The Twitter users "voluntarily" turned over the internet protocol addresses when they signed up for an account and relinquished an expectation of privacy, he ruled.

"Petitioners knew or should have known that their IP information was subject to examination by Twitter, so they had a lessened expectation of privacy in that information, particularly in light of their apparent consent to the Twitter terms of service and privacy policy," Judge O'Grady wrote. He also dismissed a petition to unseal the Justice Department's explanation for why it sought the account information.

The fight comes amid widening concerns about online privacy. Facebook is expected to revamp its privacy rules after widespread criticism. Twitter too has become an increasing concern for privacy advocates.

"I want everybody to be fully aware of the rights we apparently forfeit every time we sign one of these user agreements that no one reads," said Jonsdottir.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011...ileaks-twitter





Face Recognition Makes the Leap From Sci-Fi
Natasha Singer

FACIAL recognition technology is a staple of sci-fi thrillers like “Minority Report.”

But of bars in Chicago?

SceneTap, a new app for smart phones, uses cameras with facial detection software to scout bar scenes. Without identifying specific bar patrons, it posts information like the average age of a crowd and the ratio of men to women, helping bar-hoppers decide where to go. More than 50 bars in Chicago participate.

As SceneTap suggests, techniques like facial detection, which perceives human faces but does not identify specific individuals, and facial recognition, which does identify individuals, are poised to become the next big thing for personalized marketing and smart phones. That is great news for companies that want to tailor services to customers, and not so great news for people who cherish their privacy. The spread of such technology — essentially, the democratization of surveillance — may herald the end of anonymity.

And this technology is spreading. Immersive Labs, a company in Manhattan, has developed software for digital billboards using cameras to gauge the age range, sex and attention level of a passer-by. The smart signs, scheduled to roll out this month in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, deliver ads based on consumers’ demographics. In other words, the system is smart enough to display, say, a Gillette ad to a male passer-by rather than an ad for Tampax.

Those endeavors pale next to the photo-tagging suggestion tool introduced by Facebook this year. When a person uploads photos to the site, the “Tag Suggestions” feature uses facial recognition to identify that user’s friends in those photos and automatically suggests name tags for them. It’s a neat trick that frees people from the cumbersome task of repeatedly typing the same friends’ names into their photo albums.

“Millions of people are using it to add hundreds of millions of tags,” says Simon Axten, a Facebook spokesman. Other well-known programs like Picasa, the photo editing software from Google, and third-party apps like PhotoTagger, from face.com, work similarly.

But facial recognition is proliferating so quickly that some regulators in the United States and Europe are playing catch-up. On the one hand, they say, the technology has great business potential. On the other, because facial recognition works by analyzing and storing people’s unique facial measurements, it also entails serious privacy risks.

Using off-the-shelf facial recognition software, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University were recently able to identify about a third of college students who had volunteered to be photographed for a study — just by comparing photos of those anonymous students to images publicly available on Facebook. By using other public information, the researchers also identified the interests and predicted partial Social Security numbers of some students.

“It’s a future where anonymity can no longer be taken for granted — even when we are in a public space surrounded by strangers,” says Alessandro Acquisti, an associate professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon who directed the studies. If his team could so easily “infer sensitive personal information,” he says, marketers could someday use more invasive techniques to identify random people on the street along with, say, their credit scores.

Today, facial detection software, which can perceive human faces but not identify specific people, seems benign.

Some video chat sites are using software from face.com, an Israeli company, to make sure that participants are displaying their faces, not other body parts, says Gil Hirsch, the chief executive of face.com. The software also has retail uses, like virtually trying out eyeglasses at eyebuydirect.com, and entertainment applications, like moustachify.me, a site that adds a handle bar mustache to a face in a photo.

But privacy advocates worry about more intrusive situations.

Now, for example, advertising billboards that use facial detection might detect a young adult male and show him an ad for, say, Axe deodorant. Companies that make such software, like Immersive Labs, say their systems store no images or data about passers-by nor do they analyze their emotions.

But what if the next generation of mall billboards could analyze skin quality and then publicly display an ad for acne cream, or detect sadness and serve up an ad for antidepressants?

“You might think it’s cool, or you might think it’s creepy, depending on the context,” says Maneesha Mithal, the associate director of the division of privacy and identity protection for the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission. Whatever consumers think, she says, they should be able to choose whether to be subject to such marketing practices. (The F.T.C. is planning a workshop next month on facial recognition.)

ON Facebook, people who find the photo-tagging suggestion program creepy may turn off the system that proposes their names to friends who are uploading photos. If people opt out, Facebook deletes their facial comparison data, according to the site. Users may also preapprove or reject being listed by name in a friend’s photo before it is posted on their profiles.

Those options may suffice for many.

But in Germany, where German and European privacy regulations require private companies to obtain explicit permission from a person before they store information about that individual, merely being able to opt out does not go far enough, says Johannes Caspar, the commissioner of the Hamburg Data Protection Authority. (Although the United States has federal data protection laws pertaining to specific industries like credit and video rental, no general law requires that all companies obtain explicit consent before storing personal data about an individual.)

Mr. Caspar says many users do not understand that Facebook’s tag suggestion feature involves storing people’s biometric data to re-identify them in later photos. Last summer, he asked Facebook to give current users in Germany the power to delete their biometric data and to give new users in Germany the power to refuse to have their biometric data collected in the first place. In the long term, he says, such popular uses of facial recognition could moot people’s right to remain anonymous.

Mr. Caspar said last week that he was disappointed with the negotiations with Facebook and that his office was now preparing to take legal action over the company’s biometric database.

Facebook told a German broadcaster that its tag suggestion feature complied with European data protection laws.

“There are many risks,” Mr. Caspar says. “People should be able to choose if they want to accept these risks, or not accept them.” He offered a suggestion for Americans, “Users in the United States have good reason to raise their voices to get the same right.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/b...ial-media.html





Proliferation of Drones Raises Alarms

Security analysts fear that with the increasing proliferation of unmanned aerial drone technology, terrorists could eventually begin using them to drop explosives or even biological weapons

Security analysts fear that with the increasing proliferation of unmanned aerial drone technology, terrorists could eventually begin using them to drop explosives or even biological weapons.

Technological developments have led to ever smaller, remote-controlled drones that are easily transported, increasing the potential for extremists to get their hands on one. Furthermore, drones have developed at such a rapid pace, analysts are uncertain of their future.

“I think of where the airplane was at the start of World War I: at first it was unarmed and limited to a handful of countries,” said P. W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and the author of Wired for War. “Then it was armed and everywhere. That is the path we’re on.”

Analysts are particularly concerned as roughly fifty nations have purchased or are developing drones including India, Iran, Mexico, Pakistan, and Russia.

More troubling, China is now selling twenty-five different types of drones. During the drones’ debut at an airshow last November, promotional video footage showed the Chinese drones attacking an American aircraft carrier and an armored vehicle.
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire....-raises-alarms





Cops Enlist Data-Tracking Software in the Fight Against Child Predators

A new tool to track child abuse images shared via BitTorrent may soon be ready for the streets
Larry Greenemeier

Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing sites pose a particular challenge to law enforcement. After the initial pieces of a file transfer from a "seed" server (large system at the bottom), the pieces are individually transferred from client to client. The original seeder only needs to send out one copy of the file for all the clients to receive a copy. Image: Courtesy of Wikiadd, via Wikimedia Commons

Evidence of child abuse, including child pornography, is often readily available via the Web thanks to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing sites. BitTorrent software poses a particular problem for stopping the trade of these illicit images because it breaks the files into pieces and sends them from one computer to the next via different paths without passing through any centralized servers. This has for the most part rendered cops and security experts powerless to trace the origins of the files and catch the predators.

Recently, however, engineers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have developed promising new software to automate the tracking of BitTorrent content and hopefully help law-enforcement officials solve this puzzle. The key is locating the images quickly by focusing on new files coming out of RSS feeds and entering P2P networks, before they can be widely distributed.

The more times a file has been downloaded via a P2P network the more widely distributed the contents of that file are, making it much more difficult to track, says Robert Patton, an applied software engineering researcher at Oak Ridge who is developing the software with Thomas Potok, head of the lab's Applied Software Engineering Research Group.

Child predators can share images, videos or other content by first creating a small descriptor file, or "torrent," that can be distributed via the Web or e-mail. The torrent file will tell anyone interested in downloading this content how to contact a "tracker" computer that coordinates the matching of consumers with suppliers. Because of the way BitTorrent works, the consumer ends up getting different pieces of content from multiple computers with different IP (Internet Protocol) addresses.

Oak Ridge's software grabs the torrent file and immediately investigates the IP addresses of the different computers from which pieces of the file are stored. Based on data-traffic patterns, the software then prioritizes IP addresses to be investigated, creating a short list of suspects for cops to investigate.

The federal government estimates that more than five children die every day as a result of child abuse. As it is, law enforcement has the resources to work on less then 1 percent of the caseload, says Grier Weeks, executive director of the National Association to Protect Children, a nonprofit based in Knoxville, Tenn. Oak Ridge's automated winnowing of suspects is expected to be a valuable time-saver for law enforcement hunting down those computers and their owners. Currently cops have too many IP addresses, most of them dead ends, to investigate.

Oak Ridge's work on the BitTorrent tool began in early 2010 when the association asked researchers at Oak Ridge and law enforcement officials from Tennessee and Virginia to educate them on the pervasiveness of child abuse and exploitation, much of it shared on the Internet. The idea was for the association to connect Oak Ridge's scientists with law enforcement overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem and hindered by technical challenges. The Knoxville Police Department, home of the Tennessee Internet Crimes against Children Task Force, expressed interest in Oak Ridge's work soon after meeting the researchers.

Oak Ridge's software means that sophisticated methods of data analysis may soon be in the hands of law enforcement officials. Two police departments are now testing it, although Weeks declined to identify them. "This is a Geiger counter for locating predatory pedophiles," he says. "Instead of radiation, it finds the presence of child abuse images."

The biggest concern about the software at this point is whether its use will hold up in court or allow potential offenders to get off on some technicality. If the software does prove successful, however, "there will be one less excuse for inaction, which is what we have now," says Weeks, who adds that he has brought the software to the attention of top law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. "This is an entirely new field really, what we would call child-rescue technology, and it uses the same sorts of tools and methods as are used in counterterrorism."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...ttorrent-abuse





Essay Contest for Minnesota 8th Graders, Awards $100 Prizes, Deadline to Enter is November 22

The Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association essay contest for Minnesota's 8th graders, entitled: "Cool Technology Tools: How Do I Use Them for Good?"

Individual police departments around the state are part-sponsor of the contest, along with Target Corp., the MCPA, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, AAA Minnesota/Iowa, and Saint Mary's University of Minnesota.

The contest encourages 8th graders from public, private and charter schools in the area to enter the statewide, 500-word essay competition. Students are eligible for a total of 37 awards of $100 each in all parts of the state. The deadline to enter is Tuesday, Nov. 22.

The contest asks youth to examine their individual, moral compass for how they can use personal phones and computers in constructive ways. The essay also asks students to think creatively about how individuals, organizations and communities can integrate the use of technology toward thoughtful and beneficial causes.

The MCPA conducts the contest to convey a strong, positive message to communities and youth. Law enforcement professionals recognize benefits for communities, schools and families by taking a proactive role in positive youth development. Current and retired police chiefs in Minnesota will read an anticipated number of more than 600 essays.

The "Technology for Good" essay contest also is backed by the BCA/ICAC Task Force's years of research and expertise in education and training about appropriate and safe use of technology for kids.

Minnesota's police officers and investigators know of thousands of disturbing cases in our state that could have been avoided if kids had understood the downsides and even dangers of misusing technologies.

The contest sponsors also acknowledge that technology is part of everyday life, and only continues to become more complex and integrated into the lifestyles of people of all ages. As youth become more adept at using electronic tools and technologies, experts encourage positive guidance along the way as kids navigate their "virtual playground."

The Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association, headquartered in Woodbury, Minn., has existed since 1954. The MCPA is a private, non-profit organization serving a membership of nearly 450 top law enforcement officials in the state. About 95 percent of Minnesota police departments choose annually to maintain their police chief's voting membership status with the association.

The MCPA provides executive-level police chief training and policy assistance to chiefs to help build relationships in their communities, as well as connect with peers, mentors and policy makers in Minnesota. Programs are supported by member dues, fee-based training services and public sponsorships. More information at www.mnchiefs.org under Community Programs.
http://www.chisagocountypress.com/ma...rticleID=15175





ACLU to Wireless Carriers: Stop Tracking Americans' Movements

The ACLU today wrote to the CEOs of the nation’s major cell phone providers asking that they stop routinely collecting and storing data on their customers’ daily movements. We’re also urging Americans to make this same demand, and we’ve created a page making it easy to do so.

The fact is our cell phone companies know more about where we are throughout the day than our closest friends. One of the byproducts of the way cell phones work – staying in constant touch with the nearest cell tower – is that our carriers can tell roughly where we are. And over time, that data is getting increasingly accurate.

But the major carriers – AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint – don’t just know where we are from moment to moment. They also retain detailed data about our location for extended periods of time, as we learned recently when we received this document in response to our national public records request on how the authorities are using location data. The carriers also readily share the information they gather with government agencies and law enforcement.

Why should they be doing all this?

We pay them money, they provide us with phone and data services. Being tracked everywhere we go was never part of the bargain.

We don’t know exactly how precise the data the carriers retain is, or how they are using it. Often these days there is often an automatic, reflexive impulse to retain data – any and all. But it also seems that the companies are looking at how to monetize this information as they do with other information they gather. Verizon, for example, recently announced that it was selling location information about its customers. Although it is doing so only on an aggregate basis, that still represents a step closer to sharing our own individual movements, which the carriers are surely tempted to do.

Either way, if we roll over and accept this practice, then we’ll be accepting a world that totalitarian dictators can only dream of: an entire population carrying location tracking beacons that precisely record their every movement. This is not something we should be just taking in stride. It’s not something that we have to accept.

The best protection for privacy is for the carriers to not record our locations, even though the phone reveals them, unless we decide to give permission (and not through the fine print in some boilerplate click-through agreement). We should demand nothing less.

It’s time to put on the pressure. The ACLU has asked the mobile carriers to stop retaining data about our movements. Join us in demanding that your carrier to do the same.
http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-...cans-movements





Busted! Two New Fed GPS Trackers Found on SUV
Kim Zetter

As the Supreme Court gets ready to hear oral arguments in a case Tuesday that could determine if authorities can track U.S. citizens with GPS vehicle trackers without a warrant, a young man in California has come forward to Wired to reveal that he found not one but two different devices on his vehicle recently.

The 25-year-old resident of San Jose, California, says he found the first one about three weeks ago on his Volvo SUV while visiting his mother in Modesto, about 80 miles northeast of San Jose. After contacting Wired and allowing a photographer to snap pictures of the device, it was swapped out and replaced with a second tracking device. A witness also reported seeing a strange man looking beneath the vehicle of the young man’s girlfriend while her car was parked at work, suggesting that a tracking device may have been retrieved from her car.

Then things got really weird when police showed up during a Wired interview with the man.

The young man, who asked to be identified only as Greg, is one among an increasing number of U.S. citizens who are finding themselves tracked with the high-tech devices.

The Justice Department has said that law enforcement agents employ GPS as a crime-fighting tool with “great frequency,” and GPS retailers have told Wired that they’ve sold thousands of the devices to the feds.

But little is known about how or how often law enforcement agents use them. And without a clear ruling requiring agents to obtain a “probable cause” warrant to use the devices, it leaves citizens who may have only a distant connection to a crime or no connection at all vulnerable to the whimsy of agents who are fishing for a case.

The invasive technology, for example, allows police, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to engage in covert round-the-clock surveillance over an extended period of time, collecting vast amounts of information about anyone who drives the vehicle that is being tracked.

“A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts,” wrote U.S. Appeals Court Judge Douglas Ginsburg in a recent ruling that the Supreme Court will be examining this week to determine if warrants should be required for use with trackers.

Greg says he discovered the first tracker on his vehicle after noticing what looked like a cell phone antenna inside a hole on his back bumper where a cable is stored for towing a trailer. The device, the size of a mobile phone, was not attached to a battery pack, suggesting the battery was embedded in its casing.

A week later when he was back in San Jose, he checked the device, and it appeared to have been repositioned slightly on the vehicle to make it less visible. It was placed on the underside of the car in the wheel well that holds a spare tire.

Greg, a Hispanic American who lives in San Jose at the home of his girlfriend’s parents, contacted Wired after reading a story published last year about an Arab-American citizen named Yasir Afifi who found a tracking device on his car. Greg wanted to know what he should do with the device.

Afifi believed he was being tracked by authorities for six months before a mechanic discovered the device on his car when he took it into a garage for an oil change. He apparently came under surveillance after the FBI received a vague tip from someone who said Afifi might be a threat to national security. Afifi has filed a suit against the government, asserting that authorities violated his civil liberties by placing the device on his vehicle without a warrant and without suspicion of a crime. His attorney, Zahra Billoo, told Wired this week that she’s requested a stay in her client’s case, pending a ruling by the Supreme Court in the GPS tracking case now before it.

Greg’s surveillance appears to involve different circumstances. It most likely involves a criminal drug investigation centered around his cousin, a Mexican citizen who fled across the border to that country a year ago and may have been involved in the drug trade as a dealer.

“He took off. I think he was fleeing. I think he committed a crime,” Greg told Wired.com, asserting that he himself is not involved in drugs.

Greg says he bought the SUV from his cousin in June, paying cash for it to a family member. He examined the car at the time and found no tracking device on it. A month later, he drove his cousin’s wife to Tijuana. Greg says he remained in Mexico a couple of days before returning to the U.S.

The first GPS tracker, out of its sleeve. Photo courtesy of Greg.

It’s possible the surveillance began shortly after his return, but Greg discovered the device only about three weeks ago during his visit to Modesto. The device was slipped into a sleeve that contained small magnets to affix it to the car.

On Tuesday, Nov. 1, Wired photographer Jon Snyder went to San Jose to photograph the device. The next day, two males and one female appeared suddenly at the business where Greg’s girlfriend works, driving a Crown Victoria with tinted windows. A witness reported to Greg that one of the men jumped out of the car, bent under the front of the girlfriend’s car for a few seconds, then jumped back into the Crown Victoria and drove off. Wired was unable to confirm the story.

The following day, Greg noticed that the GPS tracker on his own car had been replaced with a different tracker, this one encased in a clam shell cover attached to a large round magnet to hold the device to the car. The device was attached to a 3.6 VDC Lithium Polymer rechargeable battery.

There was no writing on the tracker to identify its maker, but a label on the battery indicated that it’s sold by a small firm in Farmingdale, New York, called Revanche. A notice on a government web site last June indicates that it was seeking 500 of the batteries and 250 battery chargers for the Drug Enforcement Administration. A separate notice on the same site in 2008 refers to a contract for what appears to be a similar Revanche battery. The notice indicates the batteries work with GPS devices made by Nextel and Sendum.

A spokeswoman with the DEA’s office in San Francisco, however, declined to say if the device on Greg’s vehicle was theirs.

“We cannot comment on our means or methods that we use, so I cannot provide you with any additional information,” said DEA spokeswoman Casey McEnry.

The second device on Greg’s vehicle appears to be a Sendum PT200 GPS tracker with the factory battery swapped out and replaced with the Revanche battery. The Sendum GPS tracker is marketed to private investigators, law enforcement and transportation security managers and sells for about $430 without the battery. With the factory battery “it will last 7-15 days reporting every hour in a good cellular coverage zone,” according to marketing literature describing it, and it uses CDMA cellular communications and gpsOne location services to determine its location.

When this reporter drove down to meet Greg and photograph the second tracker with photographer Snyder, three police cars appeared at the location that had been pre-arranged with Greg, at various points driving directly behind me without making any verbal contact before leaving.

After moving the photo shoot to a Rotten Robbie gas station a mile away from the first location, another police car showed up. In this case, the officer entered the station smiling at me and turned his car around to face the direction of Greg’s car, a couple hundred yards away. He remained there while the device was photographed. A passenger in the police car, dressed in civilian clothes, stepped out of the vehicle to fill a gas container, then the two left shortly before the photo shoot was completed.

The Obama administration will be defending the warrantless use of such trackers in front of the Supreme Court on Tuesday morning. The administration, which is attempting to overturn a lower court ruling that threw out a drug dealer’s conviction over the warrantless use of a tracker, argues that citizens have no expectation of privacy when it comes to their movements in public so officers don’t need to get a warrant to use such devices.

It’s unclear if authorities obtained a warrant to track Greg’s vehicle. While Greg says he’s committed no crimes and has nothing to hide, the not-so-stealthy police maneuver at his girlfriend’s place of employment makes it look to others like she’s involved in something nefarious, he says. That concerns him.

It concerns attorney Billoo as well.

“For a lot of us, it’s like, Well I’m not selling cocaine, so let them put a tracking device on the car of [a suspect] who is selling cocaine,” Billoo says. “And I’m not a terrorist, so let them put the device on someone [suspected of being] a terrorist. But it shouldn’t be unchecked authority on the part of police officers. If law enforcement doesn’t care to have their authority checked, then we’re in a lot of trouble.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...-times-two/all





Remember the "Borderless" Internet? It's Officially Dead
Nate Anderson

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there," wrote L.P. Hartley in his terrific novel The Go-Between. But Hartley knew nothing of the Internet when he wrote his novel of adolescent sexual awakening; if he had, he might have been shocked at just how quickly the past became a foreign place. Indeed, from the perspective of the recently introduced Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which would set up US website blacklisting, require search engine censorship, and divide the Internet into "domestic" and "foreign" sites, the sorts of Internet arguments being made in the late 1990s don't sound like something from a foreign country so much as something from a foreign planet.

An important strain of thought in the mid-1990s was "cyberlibertarianism," a view that saw the Internet as something truly novel in world history. This exceptionalist position led to arguments that governments should leave the 'Net alone; existing law stopped at the modem jack, and beyond was a new realm called cyberspace that would solve its own problems.

"You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve," wrote rancher, EFF co-founder, and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow in a 1996 manifesto to governments. "You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means." The conflicts would be worked out based on the Golden rule—the only one recognized by "all our constituent cultures." The Internet was its own place, and needed its own government.

As for all the horrific stuff that humans get up to in every place they have so far lived, Barlow downplayed it. "All the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits,” Barlow wrote. It simply wasn’t possible to “separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.”

Incredible sentiments when considered 15 years later—but perhaps understandable when coming from someone like Barlow. What was more surprising was that the most famous Internet case of the era went even further.

Welcome, chaos!

The Communications Decency Act (CDA) was a Congressional attempt to keep "indecent" (but still legal) online speech away from minors—think of it like an online porn shield. The practical difficulties were immense—how would sites know who a visitor was?—and suggested approaches like requiring a credit card ran headfirst into free speech concerns, given the extent of the material that would be affected.

But when the law was thrown out by a three-judge panel in 1996, Judge Stewart Dalzell went well beyond questions of practicality. “Any content-based regulation of the Internet, no matter how benign the purpose, could burn the global village to roast the pig," he wrote in his opinion. Any content-based regulation!

As a principle, this seemed to invite chaos. Sure, one would gain terrifically in free speech, but freedom didn't count for much if the Internet's usefulness was lost in a sea of spam and piracy and phishing sites. Dalzell didn't shy away from the implication. He concluded:

The absence of governmental regulation of Internet content has unquestionably produced a kind of chaos, but as one of plaintiffs' experts put it with such resonance at the hearing:

“What achieved success was the very chaos that the Internet is. The strength of the Internet is that chaos.”

Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects.

Remember, this was a senior federal judge in a highly-watched case—and he explicitly embraced a chaotic Internet. This vision of chaos didn't mean "anything goes," exactly, but it was close enough to stir up plenty of opposition from groups like the Family Research Council, which explicitly called out Dalzell's support of "chaos" and called for "order" on the Internet instead.

The cry of "order!" would be taken up later by the RIAA. "An Internet of chaos may meet a utopian vision but surely undermines the societal values of safe and secure families and job and revenue-creating commerce," said the music group in 2010. It later called for "an Internet predicated on order, rather than chaos."

Law professors also provided theoretical reasons why Internet control simply wasn't practical. "Individual electrons can easily, and without any realistic prospect of detection, 'enter' any sovereign's territory," wrote law professors David Post and David Johnson in a well-known 1996 Stanford Law Review article. "The volume of electronic communications crossing territorial boundaries is just too great in relation to the resources available to government authorities to permit meaningful control."

The Internet was borderless! Governments couldn't stop the signal! But of course they could, and have done so for years, in large part by simply ordering intermediaries like Internet providers and payment processors to take action or risk huge penalties. By 2006, the "non-exceptionalists" were on the offensive, arguing that the Internet did little to remove traditional notions of sovereignty and state control. (See books like Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World by Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith, or papers like "The Not So 'Borderless' Internet'." The "borderless" Internet began to have plenty of borders—and that wasn't always a bad thing. (In democratic societies, borders should represent lines of division where people have made different choices about what behavior to allow and condemn.)

How far we've come

But SOPA would write these de facto borders right into US law, setting up two classes on online entities. Right up front, the bill defines terms like "Domestic Internet Protocol Address" and "Foreign Internet Site." The concepts are messy if you think about geography, because a site in Spain can register a .com domain name with a US registrar and be considered "domestic."

But they make much more sense when you think of the concepts as pertaining to power, not location. The bill doesn't care if a domain name or an IP address actually resolves to somewhere in the US; it simply relies on the location of the (easy-to-lean-on) registrar or Internet provider to make its determinations.

The trends have been present for years, but if SOPA passes, it will make them explicit: the chaotic, unfilterable, borderless Internet of the 1990s is truly dead, replaced by an Internet of order, filtered connections, and national borders.

Balancing chaos and order has always been a challenge; you want to curtail botnets and spam and phishing and other Internet ills without destroying the productive chaos that allowed a million websites and online businesses to launch without permission from any gatekeeper. Early Internet theorists, caught up in this chaos and still somewhat insulated from criminal gang activity behind so much spam and fraud and hacking online today, worried about breaking the Internet's best qualities. Today, with 15 years of online bad behavior to look back on, governments have increasingly ignored Dalzell—but they sometimes risk imposing so much "order" on the 'Net that creativity, commerce, and free speech is affected.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ially-dead.ars





Dealing With Your Own Cultural Irrelevance (at Age 28)
Edith Zimmerman

Many years ago, my grandmother took me to McDonald’s for lunch, and the toy that came with the Happy Meal was a cricket that chirped when you spun its wings. (A “Mulan”-related toy, if that matters.)

“What do you mean it chirps?” my grandmother asked me.

“Wait, what do you mean?” I asked. “It’s chirping right now!”

Then there were about 30 seconds of me grinding its wings and holding it out as she tilted her head and listened.

“It’s not chirping,” she said.

“Yes it is!” I said.

We were both confused. What’s happening?

But then she decided that I wasn’t making it up and that it was just one of those high-pitched noises that her ears couldn’t hear anymore.

Speaking of high-pitched noises that people get too old to hear, I came across a video online earlier this year that felt like a cricket that someone was holding out to me. “It’s chirping,” they were saying. “Can’t you hear it?” And I couldn’t hear it! And it killed me.

Until now I’ve “heard” everything. For the past three or four years my job has been, in some capacity or another, to stay on top of Internet trends and viral videos and memes and other nerdy and non-nerdy things that take up all my time and energy and days and nights and dreams and thoughts. And I usually feel pretty good about my ability to do so — to be a decent judge of what’ll be popular, which videos will do well, blah, blah, blah, it’s not all that interesting or important, but in any case it’s my job, and I enjoy it. It’s like taking a hike along the Internet’s trail, picking up pretty rocks as I go along and sharing the rocks with others like me. Funny video of a cute British man in the hospital who superglued a tiny hat to his head? Got it. Older gentleman holding reins and wearing a papier mâché skirt with legs attached, so when he walks it looks like he’s riding a giant spider? Check. Pretty Swedish girls singing an a capella pop song while rhythmically banging empty plastic cottage cheese containers against a kitchen table? Things like that.

And then all of a sudden I’m “hiking” along, and I come across this technicolor alien orb pulsing among the usual pebbles (to be stupidly hyperbolic about what I will now reveal to be a kid’s YouTube video). The space rock in question was a rap video for a song called “Gucci Gucci,” performed by a skinny white girl from the Bay Area with tattoos, heavy eyeliner and gaudily overdone (but stylish) clothes. Her name is Kreayshawn.

You may have seen or heard of Kreayshawn by now (pronounced “CRAY-shawn”), who has an irrationally annoying (and sloppily spelled) name that might make you (or, at least, me) envision a high-school dropout who’s lazily dangling a cluster of grapes into her mouth with one hand while giving you (or, at least, me) the finger with the other. “Spell your name right! Or at least spell it shorter!” I wanted to shout at her, and then I felt sad, because even just the spelling of her name was turning me into a shrieky nerd. Her real name is Natassia Zolot, by the way; she’s 22; and she looks like a mix between Amy Winehouse and Taylor Swift.

Since “Gucci Gucci” landed on the Internet this summer, Kreayshawn’s face, her song and her name — that name! Ooh, I want to crush that name flat between two good, old, important books — have been everywhere, including at the MTV Video Music Awards, where she was nominated as best new artist; on the cover of Complex magazine; and on the payroll of Sony Records, where she signed a deal for an album due out early 2012. (For a million dollars! A figure no one will confirm!) She was even recently on NPR. “The rapper describes L.A. as overly materialistic,” reads NPR’s adorably NPR-ish online description of its interview, “where dress and possessions divide people.”

Which makes it all the more painful that, at the time — way back in May when I watched the video, wherein Kreayshawn brags about smoking weed and not wearing clothes made by fancy brands (for example, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Fendi) — it seemed like nothing new in rap as far as lyrical content went. Her voice was annoying, thin and smug. So I turned it off. Just some random stupid video that no one needs to know about. Case closed! (Brushes hands, moves on.)

Fast-forward to the following weekend, when all these pretty young people — who are starting to scare me with their prettiness and their youngness and their senses of humor that will soon be better and sharper than mine — were all over Facebook and Twitter, Facebooking and Twittering about how awesome and hilarious Kreayshawn is. And I thought, Wait. Wait!

So I went back to the Kreayshawn video I’d dismissed as ugly and stupid, determined to like it, sort of in the way a suburban dad flashes peace signs at his children to be hip. (I’m with it! Hip-hop!) And, quietly, alone in my apartment, I watched the video again, as if I were unwrapping a package I was afraid of. I watched it wanting to like it, I guess. And hey! Do you know what? I decided I did. I decided the video is actually pretty cool! The young people were right! (I’m 28, by the way.)

I mean, Kreayshawn’s kind of infuriating, and parts of the video are ridiculous, but maybe she realizes that, too. She gets it! Right? That the video is ridiculous? Is it ridiculous on purpose? Oh, my God, wait! What?

But then also there’s something else I realized about this video in particular, which is so tightly edited and visually lush, with all its spinning lights, colorful tattoos and glittery Minnie Mouse headbands, that it seems to suck a little life from the viewer. You can’t help thinking, These tiny gorgeous young people with their costumes and their cars and their crazy parties versus me in my gray T-shirt sweating alone in my apartment, not having spoken to anyone (in verbal words) in more than 24 hours, watching her bop around on YouTube. Which is not a fair fight. And as I had that thought, there was this dusty feeling in my mouth. As if she was so young and vibrant that I could feel myself withering.

I guess this may all just be a roundabout way of saying, “I saw something that made me feel old, isn’t that crazy?” To which you say, “No,” and also maybe, “That song sounds terrible.”

Then again, the Internet is a new kind of barometer for keeping track of exactly how old you feel: how many things you don’t get, how many mini-Internet worlds you can’t find the door to; exactly how many crickets in the world you can no longer hear chirping. Unlike in generations past, when (I imagine) you just kept doing what you and your same-aged friends did, and aged into obscurity in comfort on a cloud of your own tastes and generational inclinations, until you died either thinking you all were still the coolest or not caring anymore about being cool, these days the Internet exists in part to introduce you to all these things you didn’t know about, but in part to remind you how much there is out there that you’ll never know about. The Internet is basically like being at a house party and trying to find the bathroom and opening up a door to a room where a bunch of kids are playing a game or doing a drug or having an orgy (metaphorically) or something and you get all flustered and say, “Oh, my God, I’m sorry!” and they all look at you like, “You pervert,” and you quickly slam the door shut. Everywhere you go on the Internet there are rooms you don’t understand, people playing games you don’t know the rules to, teenagers doing drugs you’ve never heard of and can’t even pronounce. And you just walk through the halls of this house party, aging in fast forward, until you open the one last door at the end of the hallway and it’s Death. Ha, ha.

Again, this may be just a truly long-winded way of saying I saw a video that made me feel old.

But I was determined to cheat Internet death. I would open the wrong door at the party but then confidently stride into the room, peace signs flashing.

So I wrote about Kreayshawn for The Hairpin, the Web site I edit. And I called her equally awesome and annoying — the awesome part coming mostly because I saw the young people liking her and I wanted to like her, and I tried to like her, and finally I think I did like her?

But that was May, and this is November, and the media dust and Facebook frenzies have settled, revealing Kreayshawn to be a very photogenic and hypnotically confident if not particularly likable young woman with a droning voice and uninspired lyrics. She released another song, the painful “Rich Whores” (“I love my hoes, hoes in the secondhand clothes/who use their dollar bill to put the powder in they nose/rich whore, rich whore, spending at the thrift store/line it up, line it up, sniff more, sniff more”), and it basically sounds like what someone who hates rap might imagine all rap music sounds like, or the tune they would present to a judge as Exhibit A in the case of The World v. Music.

So I was both right and wrong. The cricket was both chirping and not chirping. The “Gucci Gucci” video was great, and I didn’t pick up on that, but Kreayshawn isn’t going to be the next Jay-Z. Not that that’s necessarily her goal, and if she’s reading this, she’s probably rolling her eyes and saying something so cool that if I could hear it would ruin my month.

But I also realized that the Internet isn’t like a house party at all. It’s like the mirror in “Snow White,” except instead of answering the question “Who’s the fairest of them all?” it answers the question “Am I old?”

And one day I asked it that question and it said yes. R.I.P.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/m...relevance.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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