Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 24th, '11

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002

"The bills represent an unprecedented, legally sanctioned assault on the Internet’s critical technical infrastructure." – Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, David G. Post


"I have not spoken to a single public health specialist who was against publication." – Ron A. M. Fouchier
































QnA

Hey Jack, what do you think are some good hard drives? I don't want to skimp on quality, as I want this purchase to last quite awhile. Also, what would be the best method of providing a second backup to these files?

I purchase hard drives from Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba. They run 24/7, are all relatively bulletproof and have gone through countless power failures over the years without losing data. I used to experience the occasional catastrophic loss with internal drives that I’d converted to external drives so I stopped doing that. Since then the only drives I use are new factory built externals and the only issue I’ve had was just last week as it happens when a brand new drive wasn't performing properly on install. I think it was a balky cable. In any event there wasn't any data lost just a warning sign...so I returned it to Staples for an exchange and the new one is fine.

Since I’m fairly confident in my drives I only do backups every 200 gigs or so, to a similar sized secondary unit, and store it offline in a waterproof plastic bag in a box in another location, but you may want to backup your data more often.

I prefer my media on a single drive so I purchase larger and larger ones as my content expands and retire the older ones with their data intact. This way I can at least recreate the earlier files if my house and storage drives ever fail simultaneously. In ten years that hasn't happened but it's a possibility, particularly during a backup procedure when both are connected and running off the same main.

Holiday markdowns notwithstanding it’s unfortunately a very bad time to shop for drives. Recent flooding in Thailand has damaged many factories and caused prices to triple. A 2TB external on sale for 65 bucks in the fall is now $190. They say supplies won't get back to normal for a year making deals a lot harder to find. There are the beginning signs of some improvement however. A 90 dollar off coupon recently brought a $170 1.5TB drive down to a much more reasonable 80 bucks, but even still that’s 60% higher than September.

Check out the discount sites weekly and consider signing up for emails from Staples, Frys, Tiger Direct and Newegg among others. It may take a while but you'll find a deal eventually.













Enjoy,

Jack














December 24th, 2011




Not-Guilty Decision On File-Sharing Program Developer Upheld

The Supreme Court has upheld a high court decision that acquitted the developer of the widely used Winny file-sharing software of abetting illegal copying of movies, games and other content over the Internet, the top court said Tuesday.

Under Japan's Code of Criminal Procedure, prosecutors can still file an objection with the highest court against its decision. But it is limited to technicalities such as an error in the wording. The latest decision is expected to stand as the top court has rarely accepted such an objection.

The top court's five-justice third petty bench handed down the 4-1 decision on Monday, the court said.

Justice Kiyoko Okabe, the presiding judge for the case who voted with the majority, said the panel could not recognize that the defendant, Isamu Kaneko, 41, a former University of Tokyo researcher, intended to violate the 1970 copyright law aimed at protecting the rights of authors.

Only Justice Takehiko Otani argued that the defendant should be found guilty, saying that Kaneko was aware that the file-sharing program could be used in violation of the copyright law.

In the majority opinion, the top court said it is up to the user to decide how to use the Winny file-sharing program which it said can be used either legally or unlawfully.

The crime of abetting violation of the copyright law can only be established if the defendant provided the program being well aware that a number of people would use it in violation of the copyright law, the top court said, noting the defendant had repeatedly issued warnings against using the program in violation of the copyright law.

The high court added the defendant did not intentionally help users violate the copyright law.

In December 2006, Kaneko was found guilty at the Kyoto District Court of assisting users in copyright violations through peer-to-peer online file exchanges, and was fined 1.5 million yen.

But the Osaka High Court overturned the district court decision and acquitted the defendant in October 2009, saying its publication was not intended chiefly to encourage copyright violations.

Lower court findings show that Kaneko published the Winny file-sharing program over the Internet for free in 2002.

Kaneko was accused of assisting two users to illegally make movies and other files available for download in September 2003 in violation of copyrights. The two users have been found guilty.

Kaneko's case was the first in Japan to address the question of whether the developer of file-sharing software can be held criminally responsible for copyright violations.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/...dm082000c.html





Record Industry Loses P2P Case in Spain
Glenn Peoples

The developer of file-sharing applications was found innocent of copyright infringement and unfair competition by a Spanish court on Monday.

Pablo Soto and his companies were sued for 13 million euros by the four major music groups and trade group Promusicae for providing file-sharing applications that profit from the exchange of copyrighted material. According to a report at El Mundo, the judges in the case ruled Soto and his companies offer a neutral technical function and found the plaintiffs are not actually in competition with the defendant.

"We are extremely grateful to the court for finding not only in our favor, but in favor of justice, innovation and in equal access to digital distribution," MP2P Technologies founder/CEO Pablo Soto said in a statement.

The court's decision is sure to add to Spain's reputation regarding piracy. Over the years the country's approach to copyright has differed from many other Western countries. One Spanish judge likened P2P to lending books. Sites that offer file-sharing links to illegal content have been found to be legal in the country.

Spain's recorded music revenue dropped precipitously as copyright owners' legal defeats have mounted. According to the IFPI, music sales in Spain fell 21 percent in 2010 after losses of 14.3 percent in 2009, 7.4 percent in 2008, 19.9 percent in 2007 and 10 percent in 2006. Spain's legal digital market is far weaker than its peers. In 2010, the per-capita value of the country's digital recorded music market was just 78.2 cents. That lags far behind the per-capita digital revenue of the U.K. ($5.58), Sweden ($4.12), France ($2.25) and Germany ($2.17), according to figures available in the IFPI's Recording Industry in Numbers 2011 report.

And there are worries that Spain's faltering record business is harming local musicians. The IFPI notes that no new Spanish artist had a top 50 album in 2010, while 10 artists landed in the top 50 in 2003.
http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/indus...05703152.story





Hurt Locker BitTorrent Lawsuit Dies, But Not Without Controversy
Ernesto

The record-breaking lawsuit, filed by the makers of The Hurt Locker against 24,583 alleged BitTorrent users, has come to an end. Although this appears to be good news for the defendants, the lawyers representing the movie studio are continuing with their cash demands. During recent months the lawyers engaged in dubious behavior, asking people to settle with them after they were dismissed from the lawsuit, and targeting people who were never included to begin with.

hurt lockerAfter being honored with an Oscar for Best Motion Picture last year, the makers of The Hurt Locker went on to secure the award for the biggest file-sharing lawsuit a few months ago.

By targeting at least 24,583 alleged BitTorrent users, Voltage Pictures hoped to recoup millions of dollars in settlements to compensate the studio for piracy-related losses. And so it happened.

After former RIAA-lobbyist Judge Beryl Howell signed off on the subpoenas, the suspected infringers were asked to pay thousands of dollars to settle their case, or else.

As the case dragged on, the major roadblock for Voltage Pictures turned out to be the Internet providers, who were often only releasing the personal details of a few dozen defendants each month. As a result, the Hurt Locker makers had to file extension after extension to keep the case alive. Judge Howell eventually ran out of patience and decided not to grant a new extension this month, thereby closing the case.

Although this appears to be good news for the tens of thousands of defendants, a range of questionable actions from Voltage Picture’s law firm Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver suggests that they might be in for a surprise.

Over the past months TorrentFreak talked to several defendants who were notified by their Internet providers that Voltage Pictures had sent a subpoena to reveal their personal details. By itself this is nothing new, were it not for the fact that these people’s IP-addresses were among the thousands that were dismissed from the case weeks earlier.

It turns out that after removing IP-addresses from the complaint, the lawyers were asking the ISPs for identifying information of the account holders anyway. Initially we thought that this must have been an isolated incident, but after contacting some lawyers we heard that it was most certainly not.

Speaking to TorrentFreak, BitTorrent defense lawyer Robert Cashman described the actions as unethical and sanctionable, and told us that the Judge would probably not allow this to happen if she knew what was going on.

“I am having this same issue with a potential client,” Cashman said. “As far as I know they cannot have the names from the ISP as the IP-addresses no longer belong to putative defendants,” he said. “A number of in-house attorneys at one of the ISPs are looking into the issue now to determine whether or not to comply with the request.”

From the people we talked to thus far we heard that at least some ISPs have complied, probably because the ISPs nor the defendants knew that the IP-addresses were no longer listed as defendants. Questionable behavior to say the least, but it gets worse, much worse.

BitTorrent defense lawyer Blair Chintella informed us that aside from going after dismissed defendants, the lawyers are also targeting people who’ve never been listed as a defendant in the first place. In a separate article Chintella provides additional background on the issue, where he believes Voltage Picture’s lawyers are out-of-order.

“Recently I’ve been contacted by one or more people whose alleged IP addresses aren’t listed in the court records,” Chintella says. “This appears to be not only an ethical violation but a legal issue giving rise to one or more claim under state or federal law.”

So it appears that the lawyers were using the court subpoenas to get the personal details of people whose IP-addresses were never listed in any complaint. Although it’s not clear how many times this has occurred, it’s possible that the lawyers went after thousands more people than they told the court.

To get their take on the situation, TorrentFreak contacted law firm Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver, but received no response.

While it’s clear that the practices outlined here warrant further investigation, it is doubtful that they will be looked into as the case is now officially closed. People who have recently received a settlement letter should remain vigilant though, as the Hurt locker makers may start to file individual lawsuits.

Meanwhile, the number of people sued in the US for alleged BitTorrent downloads has surpassed 250,000, and new mass-lawsuits are added every week.
https://torrentfreak.com/hurt-locker...oversy-111222/





Ninth Circuit Puts Lump of Coal in UMG's Stocking, Affirms DMCA Safe Harbors for Veoh
Corynne McSherry

Today the Ninth Circuit handed the Internet a bittersweet and crucial victory by affirming a district court's holding that the safe harbors created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) protected Veoh, a now-defunct video hosting site, from copyright liability. The case has been pending since 2007, when Universal Music Group (UMG) sued Veoh based on allegedly infringing content in UMG music videos that Veoh users uploaded.

It's a hefty decision, but here are some highlights:

The sweet: The appellate court squarely rejected UMG's assertion that the DMCA safe harbors do not apply to any service that "displays" or "distributes" copyrighted material rather than simply "storing" it. As EFF (with several other public interest groups) pointed out in an amicus brief on which the court expressly relied, every web hosting service "displays" and "distributes" the material that its users upload -- that's how the Web works. Quoth the court:

UMG's theory fails to account for the reality that web hosts, like Veoh, also store user-submitted materials in order to make those materials accessible to other Internet users. The reason one has a website is so that others may view it. As amici note, these activities define web hosting -- if the web host only stored information for a single user, it would be more aptly described as an online backup service.

If UMG's arguments had been accepted, virtually every hosting service could lose the DMCA safe harbors. That, in turn, would mean that it would be too dangerous to host content without first clearing every bit with every conceivable copyright owner. If this were the law, the Web would be transformed from an open platform for amateur creativity into something a lot more like television, where nothing gets on the air until every clip is "cleared" by an army of lawyers.

The court also dismissed UMG's claim that general awareness that one's site hosted some infringing videos is enough to deprive a service of the safe harbors. UMG's theories, the court explained, would render the safe harbors "a dead letter." Instead, the DMCA requires that service providers act expeditiously when they have specific knowledge of particular infringing activities -- such as information provided by a proper DMCA notice. That is consistent with Congress' intent in drafting the DMCA: to encourage service providers and copyright holders to cooperate in policing infringement but not, as the Ninth Circuit has repeatedly held, to shift the burden identifying and documenting infringement to service providers.

The bitter: The cost of defending the case effectively drove Veoh out of business years ago. If Hollywood manages to get Internet blacklist bills SOPA and PIPA passed, expect to see many more innovative startups meet the same sad fate -- or never get off the ground in the first place. UMG will doubtless claim that this decision is why it needs more arrows in its online enforcement quiver. Given that UMG never bothered to send a single DMCA notice to Veoh before filing suit -- meaning, it never bothered to take advantage of the tools it already had -- this case actually sends a very different message: Don't give Hollywood new ways to impede online innovation and expression.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/1...e-harbors-veoh





‘Massive Blow’ to Music Industry as Eircom Anti-Piracy Measures Rejected

A RULING AGAINST Eircom’s ‘three strikes’ anti-online piracy system has been described as “a massive blow” to the music industry.

IT law expert TJ McIntyre told TheJournal.ie that the reported ruling by the Data Protection Commissioner was highly significant, as the entertainment industry fights to prevent people downloading music and films for free.

Under the system agreed with several large record companies in 2009, Eircom broadband customers who were found to have illegally downloaded copyrighted material three times would have their internet access cut off.

But Mark Tighe reports in the Sunday Times that the Data Protection Commissioner has ordered Eircom to halt the practice. It’s understood the ruling is based on privacy concerns over the use of web surfers’ IP addresses to identify them.

McIntyre said the decision was especially significant as it follows a recent European Court of Justice ruling, which held that monitoring web users at the behest of copyright holders was an infringement on their right to privacy.

“Now both the courts and the offical DPC are begining to realise the fundamental right of people to access the internet, and not to be monitored while they do so,” he said.

However McIntyre, who also chairs advocacy group Digital Rights Ireland, rejected concerns that the ruling effectively offered carte blanche for pirates. He said those who upload copyright material can still be pursued.

“The music industry can still do what it has always done, which is look for people who are uploading music and take action against them, rather than looking for ISPs to do their work for them,” he said.

He added the music industry may now attempt to challenge the ruling in court, or look for legislative change to protect its copyrights.
http://businessetc.thejournal.ie/mas...07584-Dec2011/





Government to Close File Sharing Loophole in Copyright Law

Legislation due mid-January
TechCentral Reporters

Minister for Research and Innovation Sean Sherlock has said government has plans to tackle abiguities in copyright law to make ISPs more accountable for traffic on their networks. The move marks an important step in protecting rights holders and modernising Irish copyright law.

Last year, record labels EMI, Warner Music Ireland, Sony BMG and Universal Music Ireland initiated procedings against UPC as it refused to implement a 'three strikes' law that could see sers have their Internet access cut off for repeat copyright infringment. UPC refused to comply with EMI's requests but a subsequent High Court judgement found there was no basis in Irish law to prosecute service providers for allowing access to websites where material is shared without the consent of the rights holder.

Eircom reached an out-of-court settlement with the major record labels through recording industry body IRMA to identify persistent file sharers identified and subsequently warned their conduct was being monitored and in violation of copyright law. It is unclear how many eircom customers have had their service cut off for seven days following a third violation. UPC was the first ISP to challenge the three strikes proposal in court, and the decision by Mr Justice Charleton effectively stopped any lititgation against other service providers.

Minister Sherlock said: "The Government is proposing to introduce a Statutory Instrument (SI), to redress the situation highlighted by Justice Charleton, by providing for injunctions for copyright owners against intermediaries whose services are used to infringe their copyright."

In granting such injunctions the Courts must take account of Court of Justice of the European Union Judgements. They require that a fair balance be struck between the various fundamental rights protected by the Community legal order and the principle of proportionality. That would include, inter alia, the protection of the fundamental rights of individuals who are affected by such measures, the freedom to conduct a business enjoyed by operators such as Internet Service Providers, the protection of private data and right of freedom of expression and information."

Legislation is expected in mid-January.
http://www.techcentral.ie/article.aspx?id=18000





Sweden's 'Youngest' File Sharer, 16, Found Guilty

A now 16-year-old boy who had been turned in by his school for downloading films was convicted of violating Sweden's copyright laws by a appeals court on Wednesday, overturning a lower court's acquittal.

In August, the Gothenburg District Court acquitted the boy, who was put on trial for having downloaded at least 24 films from the internet and then sharing them with others.

As he was 15 at the time of the initial trial, he is considered to be the youngest person ever to be put on trial in Sweden for filesharing crimes.

At the time of the boy's acquittal, prosecutors called the lower court's ruling “absurd” and vowed to appeal.

On Wednesday, the Court of Appeal for Western Sweden reversed the district court's ruling, and convicted the teenager for downloading copyrighted material.

The boy was reported to police by his school principal after the school's IT department discovered the downloaded films on his computer.

They made the find after having identified the boy's computer as the source of a virus that had infected the school's computer system.

While he admitted to downloading the films, the 16-year-old claimed he was unaware that his actions were criminal.

According to the appeals court, the boy must have realized it was “possible that his downloading covered copyright protected material that he couldn't legally download”.

“When he, despite this, downloaded the films without finding out the particulars, he behaved with serious recklessness,” the court wrote in its ruling, the Göteborgs-Posten (GP) daily reported.

“In this respect, he is guilty of committing a crime against the copyright law.”

The court ordered the boy to pay a fine of 1,500 kronor ($220).

As the offence was limited and not seen to be a part of any larger organized filesharing operation, the court's sentence was relatively lenient.

Nevertheless, the Pirate Party, a political party which wants to see reforms of copyright laws, condemned the guilty verdict.

“The appeals court's ruling means that hundreds of thousands of young Swedes are at risk of being dragged into court,” party leader Anna Troberg said in a statement.

“This is not right. Today's copyright laws are wrong in that they criminalize an entire generation of young people and throw a spanner in the works for new creators of culture that see technology's possibilities.”
http://www.thelocal.se/38074/20111221/





‘Wolverine’ Pirate To Serve Year In Prison
FBI Press Release

A New York man who admitted illegally uploading to the Internet a pirated, nearly final “workprint” copy of the movie “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” was sentenced this afternoon to one year in federal prison.

Gilberto Sanchez, 49, who resides in The Bronx and who used screen names that were variations on “skillz,” was sentenced by United States District Judge Margaret M. Morrow, who described the offense as “extremely serious.” In addition to the prison term, Judge Morrow imposed one year of supervised release and numerous computer restrictions.

“The federal prison sentence handed down in this case sends a strong message of deterrence to would-be Internet pirates,” said United States Attorney André Birotte Jr. “The Justice Department will pursue and prosecute persons who seek to steal the intellectual property of this nation.”

Sanchez “uploaded the workprint more than one month before theatrical release, he has a prior conviction for a similar offense, he had been regularly uploading pirated movies for four or five years, and did not appear remorseful after charges were brought,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum.

Sanchez pleaded guilty in March to one count of uploading a copyrighted work being prepared for commercial distribution. When he pleaded guilty, Sanchez admitted that he uploaded a “workprint” copy of the copyrighted “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” to www.Megaupload.com in March 2009, about one month before the motion picture was released in theaters. After uploading the Wolverine movie, Sanchez publicized the upload by posting links on two publicly available websites, so that anyone who clicked on the links would have access to the movie and be able to download it. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation owns the copyright to the movie.

“Although Fox was able to get defendant’s Wolverine Workprint removed from his Megaupload account within approximately one day, by then, the damage was done and the film had proliferated like wildfire throughout the Internet, resulting in up to millions of infringements,” prosecutors said in court documents.

This case is the result of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
http://www.deadline.com/2011/12/wolv...ear-in-prison/





Retired, Computerless Woman Fined For Pirating ‘Hooligan’ Movie
enigmax

Despite not owning a computer or even a router, a retired woman has been ordered by a court to pay compensation to a movie company. The woman had been pursued by a rightsholder who claimed she had illegally shared a violent movie about hooligans on the Internet, but the fact that she didn’t even have an email address proved of little interest to the court. Guilty until proven innocent is the formula in Germany.

The just-concluded case in Germany demonstrates perfectly that in some jurisdictions the standard way to deal with a file-sharing claim is guilty until proven innocent.

At 09:10 during a cold January morning in 2010, the defendant in the case says she was tucked up in bed. A movie copyright holder, however, insists the retired single woman was illegally sharing files on the Internet.

The settlement letter sent to the woman by the copyright holder stated clearly that on January 4th she’d been using the eDonkey network to share a violent film about hooligans. For this offense she must pay compensation of around 650 euros or face court, they said.

Like so many claims of this nature, the accusation was problematic. Although she previously subscribed to a 2-year Internet and telephone package, six months earlier the woman had sold her computer and didn’t even maintain an email address. After refuting the allegations of the rightsholder, the case went to court.

The Munich District Court handled the case, and heard evidence that not only is the woman computerless, she lives alone and doesn’t possess a wireless router either. How the alleged offense could have been carried out even by a third party remains a mystery.

Nevertheless, none of the above protestations were of interest to the court. Despite the fact that the copyright holder and/or their tracking company could have made errors, or that the woman’s ISP could have identified her account incorrectly, none of these avenues were examined.

“Normally the copyright holder has to prove who did the copyright infringement. As this is hard for him – because he has no chance to look into thousand houses – the courts in Germany alleviate this burden of proof,” explains Christian Solmecke, a lawyer with Wilde Beuger Solmecke, the law firm that defended the woman.

Solmecke told TorrentFreak that initially all a copyright holder has to do is show that a protected work has been traded via a specific IP-address, then the accused has to prove their innocence.

“In the next step the defendant has to prove, that neither he nor anyone else who had access to his internet account did the copyright infringement. In my opinion our client has proved that fact. If you have no computer and no W-LAN, there has to be a failure in the backtracking of the IP-address,” he added.

The bottom line in Germany is that account holders are responsible for everything that happens on their account and if they can’t prove their innocence, they are found guilty. The woman must now pay just over 650 euros in damages to the copyright holder.

There can be little doubt that German law is tipped heavily in the favor of rightsholders. Little surprise then that Germany is without doubt the worst place in the world for pay-up-or-else-schemes. So how often are people wrongly accused?

“Every second person tells me, that he or she appears to be wrongfully accused,” says Solmecke. “Some of them lie even to their lawyer but most of them tell the truth. From my point of view, there has to be a big mistake in some of the different backtracking-systems.”

So for now the formula for rightsholders seems incredibly simple.

IP address. Accusation. Profit.
https://torrentfreak.com/retired-com...-movie-111222/





RIAA: Someone Else Is Pirating Through Our IP-Addresses
Ernesto

A few days ago we reported that no less than 6 IP-addresses registered to the RIAA had been busted for downloading copyrighted material. Quite a shocker to everyone – including the music industry group apparently – as they are now using a defense previously attempted by many alleged file-sharers. It wasn’t members of RIAA staff who downloaded these files, the RIAA insists, it was a mysterious third party vendor who unknowingly smeared the group’s good name.

Over the past week we’ve had fun looking up what governments, Fortune 500 companies, and even the most dedicated anti-piracy groups download on BitTorrent. All we had to do is put their IP-addresses into the search form on YouHaveDownloaded and hit after hit appeared.

To our surprise, we found out that even IP-addresses registered to the RIAA were showing unauthorized downloads of movies, TV-shows and software.

This curiosity was quickly picked up by other news outlets to whom the RIAA gave a rather interesting explanation. Apparently these file-sharing transactions weren’t carried out by RIAA staffers, but by a third party who’s using the RIAA IP-addresses to share and distribute files online.

“Those partial IP addresses are similar to block addresses assigned to RIAA. However, those addresses are used by a third party vendor to serve up our public Web site,” a spokesperson told CNET, adding, “As I said earlier, they are not used by RIAA staff to access the Internet.”

This is all a bit confusing. First of all, the addresses are not similar, they are simply assigned to the RIAA. Everyone can look that up here, or here.

Secondly, while we are prepared to believe that RIAA staff didn’t download these files, we are left wondering what mysterious third party did. Also, is it even allowed by the official registry to register a range of IP-addresses to your private organization, and then allow others to use these IPs?

Also, just as a bit of friendly advice, it’s generally not a good idea to let others use your organization’s addresses to browse the internet. This time it’s “just” copyrighted material up for debate, but who knows what else they may be sharing online.

Considering the RIAA’s past of suing tens of thousands of file-sharers for copyright infringement, the excuse is perhaps even more embarrassing than taking full responsibility. When some of the 20,000 plus people who were sued by the RIAA over the years used the “someone else did it” excuse this was shrugged off by the music group’s lawyers. Can these people have their money back now? We doubt it.

Elsewhere, Henrik Chulu from the Free Culture blog discovered that someone at the infamous Johan Schlüter law firm downloaded the Danish movie ‘Dirch’. But Maria Fredenslund from anti-piracy group RettighedsAliancen had their excuse ready.

“We’re working for right holders, who obviously have given us permission to collect their material online as part of an investigative work,” she told Comon.dk in response.

Notably, Sarkozy is staying quiet and not attempting to justify any infringements carried out in his name. Perhaps a case of least said, soonest mended…
https://torrentfreak.com/riaa-someon...resses-111221/





RIAA Scolds Google, Wants Search Algorithm Changed To Fight Online Piracy
Matt McGee

Saying that Google has a “special responsibility” to fight copyright infringement, the RIAA has issued a report card that scolds Google for not following through on promises to fight piracy.

In a report card issued Monday, the RIAA takes a look back at four promises that Google made last year surrounding copyright protections on the web. Overall, Google gets an “Incomplete” grade. The RIAA admits that Google has “taken some modest steps” to fight copyright infringement, but spends most of its five-page report scolding Google for coming up short: “…the promises made by Google remain unfulfilled,” the report says.

One of the specific problems that the RIAA cites is search terms that encourage copyright infringement continuing to show up in Google’s Autocomplete search suggestions. The report card mentions a search for “lady gaga mp3,” which includes terms that “lead to illegal sites,” according to the RIAA.

In January — about seven weeks after making its promises — Google did begin to remove some piracy-related terms from Autocomplete.

The RIAA credits Google for acting more quickly to remove links to “infringing files” in its search results and on Blogger-hosted blogs to less than 24 hours. On the flip side, the report says the takedown time for pirate apps in the Android Marketplace still takes more than 24 hours and criticizes Google for not adequately screening apps before they appear there and for making money off these apps before they’re removed from the marketplace.

Among several requests, the RIAA wants Google to change its search algorithm to favor sites that offer content legally.

Sites that engage in infringing activity should not appear as the first results when searching for what entertainment content to download or stream. This just leads to more piracy and popularity of the site. Rather, whether a site is authorized or unauthorized to make copyrighted works available to the public should be a significant indicator in determining ranking of the result, with unauthorized sites having lower rankings than authorized sites.

And the RIAA isn’t the first to suggest such an idea. It came up early this year in the US House of Representatives during a hearing about online piracy.

There’s no mention in the RIAA report card of the recently announced Google Music service, which is essentially Google’s version of the iTunes Music Store (or Amazon MP3 store) and can be seen as an attempt to fight piracy by helping consumers find and buy music legally.
http://searchengineland.com/riaa-sco...-piracy-105254





BT Sues Google Over Android

British Telecom claims Google's Android mobile operating system infringes a number of the company's patents
Charles Arthur

BT is sueing Google over claims the Android operating system infringes its patents. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

British Telecom is claiming billions of dollars of damages from Google in a lawsuit filed in the US which says that the Android mobile operating system infringes a number of the telecoms company's key patents.

The lawsuit, filed in the state of Delaware in the US, relates to six patents which BT says are infringed by the Google Maps, Google Music, location-based advertising and Android Market products on Android.

If successful, the suit could mean that Google or mobile handset makers will have to pay BT royalties on each Android handset in use and which they produce.

That could be expensive: Android is presently the most successful smartphone platform in the world, with its handsets making more than 40% of sales, equating to more than 40m produced every quarter. Google recently said that more than 500,000 Android devices are activated every day.

BT's move – which could also be repeated in Europe – means that Google is now fending off lawsuits against Android from six large publicly-traded companies, according to Florian Müller, an independent expert who follows the twists and turns of international patent litigation. BT joins Apple. Oracle, Microsoft, eBay and Gemalto, a digital security company.

A BT spokesman told the Guardian: "BT can confirm that it has commenced legal proceedings against Google by filing a claim with the US District Court of Delaware for patent infringement.

"The patents in question relate to technologies which underpin location-based services, navigation and guidance information and personalised access to services and content. BT's constant investment in innovation has seen it develop a large portfolio of patents which are valuable corporate assets."

A Google spokesman said: "We believe these claims are without merit, and we will defend vigorously against them."

In the filing, BT cites a number of US patents which were applied for and, apart from one, awarded in the 1990s which it says Android is infringing. BT has a long history in the mobile business, having been one of the original providers of mobile phone services with the Cellnet joint venture in the UK in the 1980s.

Müller says: "Android already had more than enough intellectual problems anyway. Now Google faces one more large organisation that believes its rights are infringed. BT probably wants to continue to be able to do business with all mobile device makers and therefore decided to sue Google itself."

Google is fending off multiple lawsuits relating to Android, while a number of handset makers including HTC and Samsung have yielded to patent claims by Microsoft against Android and are paying a per-handset fee for every one they make.

Many of the alleged infringements made by Android would also seem to apply to Apple's iPhone and iPad mobile devices – such as the "Busuioc Patent", which detects whether a mobile device is connected to a cellular or Wi-Fi network and allows streaming dependent on that.

Apple's iTunes Match service, launched in the US earlier this year and last Friday in the UK, also detects what sort of connection the device has before allowing file uploads or downloads. It is not known whether Apple has licensed use of the systems from BT, or whether BT has decided they do not infringe its patents, or whether litigation is pending.

BT points in the lawsuit to its large patent portfolio, from research at its Adastral Park centre near Ipswich, and that it has a portfolio of more than 10,000 patents.

The new lawsuit marks a return to attempts by BT to monetise its patent portfolio over web use.

In 2000 it asserted a patent claim in the US against Prodigy, one of the biggest internet service providers, claiming a patent on the hyperlink – the method by which people follow links between pages on the web. But embarrassingly for BT the claim was rejected when a judge said that no jury could find that the patent was infringed.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...e-over-android





Publishing Insider Tipped Law Firms About E-Book Price Fixing Conspiracy
Jeff Roberts

The decision by major publishers to strike a pricing deal with Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has been the source of speculation and several antitrust investigations. Now, a new court filing suggests someone inside the industry was leaking the publishers’ pricing strategy.

In a brief filed in New York federal court this week, law firm Grant & Eisenhofer said it should get to represent consumers because it has special knowledge about how the scheme took place. The filing reads in part:

G&E has been investigating this case since we were approached through counsel by an industry source in March 2011. This source provided detailed knowledge from his years in the industry that further spurred our investigation

The filing is significant because, until now, allegations that the publishers colluded with Apple to fix book prices has been based on speculation from public sources, in particular a January 2010 article in which Steve Jobs told a Wall Street Journal (NSDQ: NWS) reporter that publishers were “unhappy.”

The insider’s information might mean that the law firm will have an easier time proving an actual conspiracy took place. The insider is also mentioned in another filing this week by a lawyer from a different, Washington-based law firm. It refers to “an in-person meeting, which I attended, with a very knowledgeable and important confidential source.”

This week’s filings came in the context of different law firms jockeying over who will get to play lead violin in a series of nearly 30 nation-wide class action suits. The cases, some of which also name Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) as part of the conspiracy, were recently consolidated before a federal judge in Manhattan.

The litigation process will likely take years. Meanwhile, Apple and the publishers are also being investigated by the Justice Department, state attorneys general and European authorities.

The law firms tied to the confidential source did not immediately return email requests for comment. Readers, if you have any idea as to the identify of the “important, confidential source,” please send on your thoughts to me or my publishing reporter colleague, Laura Owen.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-p...ing-conspirac/





U.S. Removes Baidu from "Notorious Markets" List

The United States has removed Baidu Inc, China's largest search engine, from its list of notorious markets for piracy in a nod to the firm's efforts to clean up its music offerings.

Baidu, which has been on the notorious markets list for years, in July inked an agreement with top music studios to distribute licensed songs through its mp3 search service, ending a legal dispute over accusations the company encouraged piracy.

However, Alibaba Group's Taobao unit made it on the United States Trade Representative's November notorious markets list for offering a wide range of copyright infringing products.

"Several commentators reported that pirated and counterfeit goods continue to be widely available on China-based Taobao. While stakeholders report that Taobao continues to make significant efforts to address the problem, they recognize that much remains to be done," USTR said in its report on Tuesday.

The report also cited two Chinese music websites, Sogou Mp3 and Gougou as providing "deep linking" services to copyrighted music. Four of the 15 listed physical notorious markets for piracy are located in China, USTR said.

(Reporting by Melanie Lee; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7BK0A020111221





Don't Break the Internet
Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, & David G. Post

Mark Lemley is the William H. Neukom Professor at Stanford Law School
David Levine is an Assistant Professor at Elon University School of Law
David Post is a Professor at Beasley School of Law, Temple University

Two bills now pending in Congress—the PROTECT IP Act of 2011 (Protect IP) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House—represent the latest legislative attempts to address a serious global problem: large-scale online copyright and trademark infringement. Although the bills differ in certain respects, they share an underlying approach and an enforcement philosophy that pose grave constitutional problems and that could have potentially disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet’s addressing system, for the principle of interconnectivity that has helped drive the Internet’s extraordinary growth, and for free expression.

To begin with, the bills represent an unprecedented, legally sanctioned assault on the Internet’s critical technical infrastructure. Based upon nothing more than an application by a federal prosecutor (or, in certain circumstances, an intellectual property rights holder) alleging that a foreign website is “dedicated to infringing activities,” Protect IP authorizes courts to order all U.S. Internet service providers, domain name registries, domain name registrars, and operators of domain name servers—a category that includes hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, and the like—to take steps to prevent the offending site’s domain name from translating to the correct Internet protocol address. These orders can be issued even when the domains in question are located outside of the United States and registered in top-level domains (e.g., .fr, .de, or .jp) whose operators are themselves located outside the United States; indeed, some of the bills’ remedial provisions are directed solely at such domains.

Directing the remedial power of the courts towards the Internet’s core technical infrastructure in this sledgehammer fashion has impact far beyond intellectual property rights enforcement—it threatens the fundamental principle of interconnectivity that is at the very heart of the Internet. The Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) is a foundational block upon which the Internet has been built and upon which its continued functioning critically depends; it is among a handful of protocols upon which almost every other protocol, and countless Internet applications, rely to operate smoothly. Court-ordered removal or replacement of entries from the series of interlocking databases that reside in domain name servers and domain name registries around the globe undermines the principle of domain name universality—the principle that all domain name servers, wherever they may be located across the network, will return the same answer when queried with respect to the Internet address of any specific domain name. Much Internet communication, and many of the thousands of protocols and applications that together provide the platform for that communication, are premised on this principle.

Mandated court-ordered DNS filtering will also have potentially catastrophic consequences for DNS stability and security. It will subvert efforts currently underway—and strongly supported by the U.S. government—to build more robust security protections into the DNS protocols. In the words of a number of leading technology experts, several of whom have been intimately involved in the creation and continued evolution of the DNS for decades:

Mandated DNS filtering would be minimally effective and would present technical challenges that could frustrate important security initiatives. Additionally, it would promote development of techniques and software that circumvent use of the DNS. These actions would threaten the DNS’s ability to provide universal naming, a primary source of the Internet’s value as a single, unified, global communications network. . . . DNS filtering will be evaded through trivial and often automated changes through easily accessible and installed software plugins. Given this strong potential for evasion, the long-term benefits of using mandated DNS filtering to combat infringement seem modest at best.[1]

Indeed, this approach could actually have an effect directly contrary to what its proponents intend: if large swaths of websites are cut out of the Internet addressing system, those sites—and the users who want to reach them—may well gravitate towards alternative, unregulated domain name addressing systems, making it even harder for governments to exercise their legitimate regulatory role in Internet activities.

The bills take aim not only at the Internet’s core technical infrastructure, but at its economic and commercial infrastructure as well. Credit card companies, banks, and other financial institutions could be ordered to “prevent, prohibit, or suspend” all dealings with the site associated with the domain name. Online advertisers could be ordered to cease providing advertising services to the site associated with the domain name. Search engine providers could be ordered to “remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name,” and to disable all hypertext links to the site.

These drastic consequences would be imposed against persons and organizations outside of the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts by virtue of the fiction that these prosecutorial actions are proceedings in rem, in which the “defendant” is not the operator of the site but the domain name itself. Both bills suggest that these remedies can be meted out by courts after nothing more than ex parte proceedings—proceedings at which only one side (the prosecutor or even a private plaintiff) need present evidence and the operator of the allegedly infringing site need not be present nor even made aware that the action was pending against his or her “property.”

This not only violates basic principles of due process by depriving persons of property without a fair hearing and a reasonable opportunity to be heard, it also constitutes an unconstitutional abridgement of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that governmental action suppressing speech, if taken prior to an adversary proceeding and subsequent judicial determination that the speech in question is unlawful,[2] is a presumptively unconstitutional “prior restraint.” In other words, it is the “most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights,”[3] permissible only in the narrowest range of circumstances. The Constitution requires a court “to make a final determination” that the material in question is unlawful “after an adversary hearing before the material is completely removed from circulation.”[4]

The procedures outlined in both bills fail this fundamental constitutional test. Websites can be “completely removed from circulation”—rendered unreachable by, and invisible to, Internet users in the United States and abroad—immediately upon application by the government, without any reasonable opportunity for the owner or operator of the website in question to be heard or to present evidence on his or her own behalf. This falls far short of what the Constitution requires before speech can be eliminated from public circulation.

As serious as these infirmities are, SOPA, the House’s bill, builds upon them, enlarges them, and makes them worse. Under SOPA, IP rights holders can proceed vigilante-style against allegedly offending sites, without any court hearing or any judicial intervention or oversight whatsoever. For example, SOPA establishes a scheme under which an IP rights holder need only notify credit card companies of the facts supporting its “good faith belief” that an identified Internet site is “primarily designed or operated for the purpose of” infringement. The recipients of that notice will then have five days to cease doing business with the specified site by taking “technically feasible and reasonable” steps to prevent it “from completing payment transactions” with customers. And all of this occurs based upon a notice delivered by the rights holder, which no neutral third party has even looked at, let alone adjudicated on the merits. If they get the assistance of a court, IP owners can also prevent other companies from “making available advertisements” to the site, and the government can prevent search engines from pointing to that site.

These bills, and the enforcement philosophy that underlies them, represent a dramatic retreat from this country’s tradition of leadership in supporting the free exchange of information and ideas on the Internet. At a time when many foreign governments have dramatically stepped up their efforts to censor Internet communications, these bills would incorporate into U.S. law a principle more closely associated with those repressive regimes: a right to insist on the removal of content from the global Internet, regardless of where it may have originated or be located, in service of the exigencies of domestic law.

United States law has long allowed Internet intermediaries to focus on empowering communications by and among users, free from the need to monitor, supervise, or play any other gatekeeping or policing role with respect to those communications. Requiring Internet service providers, website operators, search engine providers, credit card companies, banks, Internet advertisers, and others to block access to websites because of their content would constitute a dramatic retreat from that important policy. Laws protecting Internet intermediaries from liability for content on the Internet are responsible for transforming the Internet into the revolutionary communications medium that it is today. They reflect a policy that has not only helped make the United States the world leader in a wide range of Internet-related industries, but that has also enabled the Internet’s uniquely decentralized structure to serve as a global platform for innovation, speech, collaboration, civic engagement, and economic growth. These bills would undermine that leadership and dramatically diminish the Internet’s capability as a communications medium. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted last year:

[T]he new iconic infrastructure of our age is the internet. Instead of division, it stands for connection. But even as networks spread to nations around the globe, virtual walls are cropping up in place of visible walls. . . . Some countries have erected electronic barriers that prevent their people from accessing portions of the world’s networks. They’ve expunged words, names, and phrases from search engine results. They have violated the privacy of citizens who engage in non-violent political speech. . . . With the spread of these restrictive practices, a new information curtain is descending across much of the world.[5]

It would be not just ironic, but tragic, were the United States to join the ranks of these repressive and restrictive regimes, erecting our own “virtual walls” to prevent people from accessing portions of the world’s networks. Passage of these bills will compromise our ability to defend the principle of the single global Internet—the Internet that looks the same to, and allows free and unfettered communication between, users located in Boston, Bucharest, and Buenos Aires, free of locally imposed censorship regimes. As such, it may represent the biggest threat to the Internet in its history.

Copyright and trademark infringement on the Internet is a very real problem, and reasonable proposals to augment the ample array of enforcement powers already at the disposal of IP rights holders and law enforcement officials may serve the public interest. But the power to break the Internet shouldn’t be among them.

• Steve Crocker et al., Security and Other Technical Concerns Raised by the DNS Filtering Requirements in the PROTECT IP Bill, domainincite.com (May 2011), http://domainincite.com/docs/PROTECT...aper-Final.pdf.
• Freedman v. Maryland, 380 U.S. 51, 58-60 (1965).
• Neb. Press Ass’n v. Stuart, 427 U.S. 539, 559 (1976).
• Ctr. For Democracy & Tech. v. Pappert, 337 F. Supp. 2d 606, 657 (E.D. Pa. 2004) (emphasis added).
• Hillary Clinton, U.S. Sec’y of State, Remarks on Internet Freedom (Jan. 21, 2010), http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2010/01/135519.htm.

http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/onl...break-internet





Sponsors of SOPA Act Pulled in 4 Times as Much in Contributions from Hollywood than Silicon Valley
Jeffrey ErnstFriedman

The House Judiciary Committee on December 15 held a markup of the so-called SOPA Act (HR 3261), a bill that has produced surprising allegiances and adversaries and has pit some of California's most powerful business interests against each other.

The measure, which would crack down on Web sites that offer or sell pirated and counterfeit products, is opposed by a collection of the largest tech companies because they believe it would come at the cost of innovation and future jobs. The bill's supporters, spearheaded by entertainment producers, believe that the measure is necessary to protect consumers from potentially dangerous products and to protect US companies and workers from losing profits and jobs, respectively.

The Stop Online Piracy Act would allow the Department of Justice to shut down any website determined to be facilitating online piracy as well as order any Internet search provider to block links to the offending site.

The debate over the bill's language has pitted the entertainment capital, Los Angeles, against the tech incubator, Silicon Valley. The measure is supported by entertainment producers such as Comcast, Disney, Sony, and the RIAA. It is opposed by tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Mozilla, and Yahoo!

Since the beginning of the 2010 election cycle, the 32 sponsors of the bill have received almost 4 times as much in campaign contributions from the movie, music, and TV entertainment industries ($1,983,596), which support the bill, as they have received from the software and Internet industries ($524,977), which believe the language goes too far.


Industry Business Interest Contributions
(Jan. 1, 2009 - Jun. 30, 2011)

Computers/Internet (Opposes) Computer software $273,744
Online computer services $251,233
Total
$524,977

TV/Movies/Music (Supports) Cable & satellite TV production & distribution $672,750
Commercial TV & radio stations $265,050
Entertainment Industry/Broadcast & Motion Pictures $320,800
Motion Picture production & distribution $282,150
Recorded Music & music production $317,446
TV production & distribution $125,400
Total
$1,983,596

Grand Total $2,508,573

METHODOLOGY: MapLight analysis of reported contributions to congressional campaigns of the sponsors of HR 3261 from Jan. 1, 2009-Jun. 30, 2011. The bill's sponsors as of Dec. 15, 2011 are Lamar Smith, Joe Baca, Howard Berman, Marsha Blackburn, Mary Bono Mack, John Carter, Steven Chabot, John Conyers, Jim Cooper, Elton Gallegly, Robert Goodlatte, Tim Holden, Peter King, John Larson, Adam Schiff, Brad Sherman, Lee Terry, Melvin Watt, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, John Barrow, Steve Scalise, Ben Luján, Judy Chu, William Owens, Karen Bass, Ted Deutch, Ben Quayle, Tim Griffin, Dennis Ross, Alan Nunnelee, Thomas Marino, and Mark Amodei. The included industries are Computer software, Online computer services, Cable & satellite TV production & distribution, Commercial TV & radio stations, Entertainment Industry/Broadcast & Motion Pictures, Motion Picture production & distribution, Recorded Music & music production, and TV production & distribution. Campaign contributions and industry classifications provided by the Center for Responsive Politics.
SOPA_Sponsor_Contributions-20090101-20010630.xls
http://maplight.org/content/72896





Lamar Smith Says 'Just Joking...' About Tomorrow; SOPA Markup Postponed
Mike Masnick

Well, look at that. There's been a lot of back and forth over the past few days concerning whether or not Lamar Smith was serious about holding the continuation of the SOPA markup tomorrow morning. Many people believed he was bluffing just to piss off the anti-SOPA folks... and it appears that his bluff has been called. Smith has just announced that the continuation of the markup has been "postponed due to House schedule." In other words, see everyone next year on this... Either way, just saying that the markup was going to continue tomorrow was a pretty cheap political trick designed to piss off lots of people... and to avoid Smith's own promise that he'd actually take time to hear from technology experts on the subject of online security.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...ostponed.shtml





Scribd Protests SOPA By Making A Billion Pages On The Web Disappear
Erick Schonfeld

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is delayed in Congress, but it is definitely not dead. The media company lobbyists and their Congressmen (hello, Lamar Smith!) are simply regrouping. Some of the more controversial aspects of the bill include transferring liability for copyright infringement to sites that host user-generated content and blocking that content via DNS servers.

To highlight the chilling effect this legislation could have on free speech on te Internet, today document-sharing site Scribd is protesting SOPA by making every document disappear word-by-word when you vist the site. All in all, there are a billion pages of documents on the Scribd. “With this legislation in place, entire domains like Scribd could simply vanish from the web,” warns Jared Friedman, CTO and co-founder, Scribd.

You can see the effect by checking out this Lawrence Tribe legal memo on the constitutionality of SOPA (embedded below, but the disappearing act only works on Scribd’s site). After the words disappear, a message comes up urging readers to call their Congress person to stop SOPA. It also provides a few links where people can learn more, including to a our video interview with Brad Burnham on the subject (also embedded below)
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/21/scribd-protests-sopa/





Coders Are Already Finding Ways Around SOPA Censorship
Adam Clark Estes

A developer who calls himself T Rizk doesn't have much faith in Congress making the right decision on anti-piracy legislation, so he's built a work around for the impending censorship measures being considered: DeSOPA. The Firefox add-on is stunningly simple as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would block specific domain names (e.g. www.thepiratebay.com) of allegedly infringing sites, T Rizk's lightweight tool allows you to revert to the bare internet protocol (IP) address (e.g. 194.71.107.15) which takes you to the same place. “I feel that the general public is not aware of the gravity of SOPA and Congress seems like they are about to cater to the special interests involved, to the detriment of Internet, for which I and many others live and breathe," T Rizk told the site TorrentFreak -- and you can pretty easily guess whose side they're on. If that doesn't work, TorrentFreak points to another developer-made anti-SOPA solution that's also in the works. Meanwhile, Rep. Darrell Issa is busy rallying developers behind his transparent laboratory for digital democracy, as Reddit-types continue to flood the Internet with protest memes (like the one above).

As the number of acronyms and parentheses in our intro suggest, the technical details of SOPA are, well, pretty technical. And with the exception of anti-SOPA folks like Rep. Darrell Issa and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, most of the members of Congress now considering the legislation are not tech experts. On Friday, the House Judiciary Committee decided to table SOPA until 2012, citing the need to speak to some Internet experts, to balance out the so-far overwhelmingly Hollywood-centric testimonies we've heard so far. Civil rights groups hailed the decision as a victory, at first. That is, until committee chairman Rep. Lamar Smith scheduled a last minute hearing on Wednesday morning in an attempt to push the bill to the floor. Not long before he scheduled the hearing -- which may or may not happen depending on whether or not the larger Congress decides to break for holiday recess on Tuesday -- pro-SOPA lobbyists sent out a press release with the misleading title "Markup Shows Strong Support for SOPA." It quotes Smith, a Republican from Texas: "The criticism of this bill is completely hypothetical; none of it is based in reality. Not one of the critics was able to point to any language in the bill that would in any way harm the Internet. Their accusations are simply not supported by any facts."

This must sound insulting to SOPA's opponents. Especially because an increasing number of tech and legal experts have been stepping forward not only to wonder why Congress hasn't consulted fact-based research that examines the scope of America's piracy problem as well as the potential impact of the proposed solutions but also to argue that SOPA itself is downright unconstitutional. The latest to mount the argument against SOPA's constitutionality is the Stanford Law Review. A well-sourced article published on Monday and authored by three separate law school professors reads, in part:

This not only violates basic principles of due process by depriving persons of property without a fair hearing and a reasonable opportunity to be heard, it also constitutes an unconstitutional abridgement of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that governmental action suppressing speech, if taken prior to an adversary proceeding and subsequent judicial determination that the speech in question is unlawful,[2] is a presumptively unconstitutional "prior restraint." In other words, it is the "most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights,”[3] permissible only in the narrowest range of circumstances. The Constitution requires a court "to make a final determination" that the material in question is unlawful "after an adversary hearing before the material is completely removed from circulation."[4]

Then there's the lack of facts in support of SOPA. We covered the problem of lawmakers not understanding the Internet last week, but this part is worth repeating:

We recently spoke to Jonathan Zittrain, a professor and cofounder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, who maintains a number of deep concerns about the implications of SOPA, and while he's been outspoken elsewhere about the specific line items within the bill that frighten him, he told The Atlantic Wire that he was basically confused about why Congress hasn't done any real data-driven research into the problem of online piracy. "I would like to find a well-researched, peer-reviewed, credible study about the dimension of the problem this is trying to solve," Zittrain said, noting that he did not know of such a study -- and since he wrote the book on the future of the Internet, he would know if one existed. "It's costless to the aggrieved industries, so why not do it?"

Stay tuned for more updates on the seemingly neverending SOPA saga. If Smith gets his way, the House Judiciary Committee will reconvene at 9 a.m. Wednesday morning to continue marking up the bill. And we'll bet you a Buffalo-head nickel that developers, tech experts, law scholars and, well, the rest of the Internet will watch and tweet to make it clear how the groups of people that SOPA will affect most does not support this bill.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/polit...sorship/46425/





How SOPA's 'Circumvention' Ban Could Put a Target on Tor
Declan McCullagh

A little-noticed section of the Stop Online Piracy Act could make it illegal to distribute Tor and other software that can "circumvent" attempts by the U.S. government to block pirate Web sites.

The controversial Hollywood-backed copyright bill allows injunctions to be filed against "any" person, nonprofit organization, or company that distributes a "product or service" that can be used to circumvent or bypass blockades erected against alleged pirate Web sites such as ThePirateBay.org.
The U.S. government-funded Tor Project could be a target of SOPA's anti-circumvention section.

The U.S. government-funded Tor Project could be a target of SOPA's anti-circumvention section.

"It looks like SOPA would outlaw Tor," says Markham Erickson, an attorney with Holch & Erickson LLP who runs NetCoalition. The trade association opposes SOPA and counts Amazon.com, eBay, Google, and Yahoo among its members.

This section of SOPA is straightforward enough: a copyright holder would contact the U.S. Department of Justice to complain that a Web site is engaged in piracy. Then the Justice Department would seek a court order from a federal judge that would compel U.S.-based Internet service providers and domain name system providers to render the target inaccessible.

But SOPA's author, Rep. Lamar Smith, a conservative Texan who has become Hollywood's favorite Republican, anticipated that savvy programmers would find a way around these virtual roadblocks. So Smith inserted language in SOPA (PDF) -- it's not in the Senate's similar Protect IP bill -- allowing anyone who knowingly and willfully distributes "circumvention" software to be forced to remove it. (See CNET's FAQ on SOPA.)

"I worry that it is vague enough, and the intention to prevent tunneling around court-ordered restrictions clear enough, that courts will bend over backwards to find a violation," says Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in intellectual property law.

Smith's anti-circumvention language appears designed to target software such as MAFIAAFire, the Firefox add-on that bypassed domain seizures, and ThePirateBay Dancing and Tamer Rizk's DeSOPA add-ons, which take a similar approach. (As CNET reported in May, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has tried, unsuccessfully so far, to remove MAFIAAFire from the Web.)

But Smith worded SOPA broadly enough that the anti-circumvention language isn't limited to Firefox add-ons. In an echo of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention section, SOPA targets anyone who "knowingly and willfully provides or offers to provide a product or service designed or marketed by such entity...for the circumvention or bypassing" of a Justice Department-erected blockade.

Smith did not respond to questions from CNET yesterday asking whether Tor and similar products would be affected. The Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, all of which have lobbied for SOPA, also declined to comment. (See CNET's report on why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce loves SOPA.)

Wendy Seltzer, a fellow at Yale Law School and former intellectual property litigator who is a member of the Tor Project's board of directors, says she's worried about how the Justice Department would wield this language. The Tor Project develops software to preserve online anonymity but which can also be used to bypass SOPA-created blockades.

"Ordinary security and connectivity tools could fall within its scope," Seltzer wrote, referring to SOPA's anti-circumvention, anti-bypassing language. She added in an e-mail to CNET: "Can actions for injunction be brought against all sort of general purpose tools, causing nuisance and expense even if the claims wouldn't hold up in court? Worse, if the injunction succeeds, then further distribution without an appeal would face contempt charges."

There's a bit of irony here: Tor was created by the U.S. government (specifically, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory). The subsequent organization formed to develop the software, the nonprofit Tor Project, is currently funded in part by multiple federal agencies that hope that it will let Internet users in China and other repressive regimes bypass their country's informational blockades.

The problem for Smith and other SOPA supporters is that censorship-circumventing software -- and Tor has consciously used that phrase to describe itself -- doesn't differentiate between China devising a list of off-limits Web sites and the U.S. government doing the same thing.

During last week's SOPA debate in the House Judiciary committee, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat whose district includes the heart of Silicon Valley, offered an amendment to revise the anti-circumvention language.

"Those very same tools that we have worked to devise, that we have funded to develop in some cases, are the same tools that could also be used by Internet users in the United States to circumvent the blocking of a foreign infringing site under the bill," Lofgren said.

Smith replied by suggesting that "you and I and others involved could write language that would address your concerns." Lofgren agreed to withdraw her amendment temporarily, as long as she could offer it again before a final vote. The committee's debate on SOPA had been scheduled to resume this morning, but Smith has postponed it until early 2012.

Lofgren's temporarily withdrawn amendment (PDF) said that SOPA "does not include any product or service designed or marketed for the circumvention of measures taken by a foreign government to block access to an Internet site."

A broad interpretation of SOPA's anti-circumvention language would sweep even more broadly than Tor. Software such as VPNs, used by security-conscious businesses, can also "bypass" a SOPA-established blockade. So could DNS software. And even the humble "/etc/hosts" file, part of every major operating system including OS X, Linux, and Windows, can be pressed into service as a SOPA-bypasser as well.

Stewart Baker, Homeland Security's former policy chief who's now a partner at the Steptoe and Johnson law firm, suggests SOPA's anti-circumvention and anti-bypassing language would target Web browsers too.

It's hard to escape the conclusion that this provision is aimed squarely at the browser companies," he wrote in a blog post. "Browsers implementing DNSSEC will have to circumvent and bypass criminal blocking, and in the process, they will also circumvent and bypass SOPA orders." A successful injunction from the attorney general, Baker said, would shut down all shipments of a Web browser "until it's been revised to the satisfaction of his staff and their advisers in Hollywood."

To be sure, it's unlikely that the attorney general would try to force Microsoft, Apple, and Mozilla to rewrite their operating systems or Web browsers. Nor would federal judges automatically agree. But, argue SOPA's many critics (PDF), the Justice Department shouldn't be granted such sweeping authority in the first place.

David Post, a professor of law at Temple University who has been writing about copyright law for over a decade, says that even after analyzing SOPA (and organizing a letter from law professors protesting the legislation) the anti-circumvention language remains surprisingly opaque.

"It's ambiguous to me," Post says. How far does it reach? "I don't know. Which is bad."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57...target-on-tor/





Paul Graham: SOPA Supporting Companies No Longer Allowed At YC Demo Day
Alexia Tsotsis

At this point quite a few internet companies have protested H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in creative ways. Held by many to be the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet if it passes, SOPA would makes it really easy for copyright holders to force sites offline that they think are offending, among other things.

While the judiciary vote has been delayed until next year, the list revealing the companies who support the act was released yesterday, and many startups, such as Reddit, have begun to drill down into boycotts of individual companies like domain provider GoDaddy.

The company boycotts have sparked a thread on Hacker News, where user Solipsist posted a link to the list with the comment, “While I understand your sentiments towards SOPA, are you really going to distance yourself from all of these companies?”

To which YCombinator founder and investor Paul Graham replied,

“Actually that’s exactly what I thought when I saw the list yesterday. Several of those companies send people to Demo Day, and when I saw the list I thought: we should stop inviting them. So yes, we’ll remove anyone from those companies from the Demo Day invite list.”

Disinviting offending companies to YCombinator Demo Day? That takes, um, guts. Graham told me in a followup email that he was indeed serious and had just given the list of SOPA supporters to the people in charge of the Demo Day invites, ”I don’t know exactly which companies had people on the list. But I know which will now: none of them.”

When asked if that boycott extended to investors in those companies, Graham responded, “Several of the companies on the SOPA list have venture arms. I encourage startups to boycott them. We’ll certainly encourage all the startups we’ve funded to.”

The rationale? “If these companies are so clueless about technology that they think SOPA is a good idea, how could they be good investors?”

The next YCombinator demo day is scheduled for March 27th, 2012.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/22/pau...t-yc-demo-day/





Killing the Internet to Save Hollywood
Julian Sanchez

All Hollywood wants for Christmas this year is to see Congress pass the Stop Online Piracy Act — and the industry’s thrown Santa-sacks of cash at lawmakers in hopes of making the copyright scofflaws on their “naughty list” disappear.

But the law, which would empower the US government to start censoring foreign Web sites, would be a lump of coal in every Internet user’s stocking.

The goal of SOPA (and its Senate counterpart, the PROTECT-IP Act) is legitimate enough: To fight copyright violators and counterfeiters who run sites beyond the reach of US courts. The trouble is the method. These bills empower the attorney general to seek orders compelling thousands of Internet service providers to block purported “rogue sites,” forcing search engines to redact their results and requiring ad networks and payment processors to sever ties.

SOPA’s supporters have made a New Years resolution to continue ramming these bills through as early as January, ignoring calls to pause to hear from experts about the bill’s unintended consequences.

As Uncle Sam’s own cybersecurity experts at Sandia National Labs have noted, the measure is “unlikely to be effective.” Anyone with a tiny bit of technical know-how can easily bypass the proposed blocks in any number of simple ways.

For the computer illiterate, there are several one-click circumvention tools already in circulation. As we’ve seen again and again over the last decade, shutting down pirate sites and services ultimately does little to hinder piracy.

But SOPA wouldn’t just be costly and futile: It would deter innovation, interfere with legal speech protected by the First Amendment and (as the geeks at Sandia put it) “negatively impact US and global cybersecurity and Internet functionality.”

Under SOPA, any foreign site that allowed users to upload — or even just link to — content would have to fear being wrongly branded a “rogue site,” effectively shut down and cut off from revenue until it could prove its innocence in a US court. That’s the kind of risk that sends investors running — and why tech entrepreneurs are among the voices loudly opposed to SOPA.

More than 100 eminent constitutional scholars have joined that chorus. They point out that blocking entire Web domain names after a one-sided hearing will inevitably shut down discussion forums where protected speech coexists with links to infringing content, and block Americans’ access to their own legal files along with pirated material — as we’ve already seen happen under existing authorities. Such sweeping “prior restraint” flies in the face of our First Amendment traditions.

Perhaps even more troubling, SOPA would lead to the creation of a sophisticated legal and technological architecture for censorship — a single Internet blacklist implemented across the entire country. Once that machinery is in place, it would be easy, and all too tempting, for future administrations to turn that blacklist to other purposes. Citizens would have to trust the government to only block truly criminal sites — or join the pirates in evading the blocks to judge for themselves.

Network engineers hate SOPA too: A who’s-who of the proud geeks who built the modern Internet has warned that domain blocking — and users’ inevitable efforts to evade it — would have unpredictable and disruptive consequences for the network’s architecture. Stewart Baker, a former top official with the Department of Homeland Security, has pointed to language in the bill that he fears will “kill” an expensive and ongoing effort to make the Internet more secure.

The same “anticircumvention” clause, though a joke to pirates, could threaten programmers who build the vital tools our own State Department has promoted and funded for dissidents seeking to escape the more aggressive online censorship of regimes like China and Iran — regimes that will surely be delighted to point out that the United States, too, now blocks foreign sites it considers “harmful.”

These are high costs to pay for a law that would, at best, amount to an impotent symbolic gesture against piracy. Lawmakers should be wary of meddling with technology they admit they don’t understand, and instead focus on measures aimed at shutting off the flow of money to criminals, without starting down the dark road of Internet blacklists and government firewalls.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion...Wbvn5siAQgs K





Dear Internet: It's No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works
Clay Johnson

This weekend I read a post titled "Dear Congress: It Is No Longer OK To Not Know How the Internet Works." The author, Joshua Kopstein, is right: it's not ok to not know about something before legislating or regulating it. The confessions by members of Congress that they are "not nerds" is frustrating at best because these guys, the guys that are regulating the Internet can't tell a server from a waiter.

And so a post is born, sympathetically climbing the charts at Reddit and HackerNews, telling Congress to get a clue. But the problem is that that post won't do any good. Few if any members of Congress will read it, and those that might certainly won't read it and decide that it's time for them to brush up on understanding how the Internet works as well as a professional that works on the Internet.

The fact is, Congress isn't the only group in this equation that needs to get a clue. The online activists, the free culture crowd, and the pro-open and free Internet crowd needs to get a clue too. See -- it's just as important for us to understand how Congress works as it is for the Congress to understand how the Internet works. In Washington, those who "educate" Congress the best usually end up with the winning legislation.

What you have to understand is that Congress is saying that they don't understand the Internet isn't a failure of Congress. You may think these guys in Washington are foolish -- even too stupid to really understand the "mysteries of the Internet." but look at how our members of Congress talk about the biopharmaceutical industry: I haven't used the word "biosimilar" once in my life, but Congress used it 70+ times in a single month.

If Congress is complaining that they don't know about something that you care about, the right answer isn't to tell them to go get educated. The right answer is to educate them. Congress mentioned the word "biologics" 75 times in a month because a lobbyist spent a long time doing their job: educating members of Congress on the needs of its industry.

Right now, if you want effective legislation around your industry, then you need to pay the right lobbyists, make the right campaign contributions, and write the right legislation at the right time in order to get it out of Washington. If you had to objectively pick the winning team in Washington, pick the team with deep pockets and great lobbyists, not the team with community organizers and signed petitions. It's a gross system that needs change. It's a cancer on our democracy.

But looking for a specific innovation to try and change the way Washington works by the time Congress votes on SOPA is about as foolish as Steve Jobs trying to diet his way out of having pancreatic cancer. With billions of dollars in the bank, and not a lot of time left, isn't it worth going for the sure bet? Just spend the money. Then, after you're sure you beat cancer, worry about disrupting the system that caused it.

It sucks, but those are the rules of the game. We can work to disrupt the rules of the game too: that's what my whole career is about and what a the last third of The Information Diet is specifically about. But Washington doesn't, and shouldn't change quickly.
Disrupting the System

You might think that I'm some how pro-lobbyist as a result of this post so far. That'd be incorrect: I've spent the past decade building tools and technologies that help expose or curb the influence that lobbyists have in Washington over ordinary people. But that change doesn't happen as quickly as much of us on the Internet have come to expect -- the federal government is not attached to Moore's Law like we are.

The other half of this is that we've got to make it so the side of community and organizers and signed petitions start winning over deep pockets and billions of dollars. And the way you do that is through education. We've got to educate activists on how to more effectively send their voice to Washington, and we've got to educate Washington on how to more effectively hear those voices.

Right now, Congress uses a tool called "Intranet Quorum" to effectively listen to constituents. It's a tool built by Lockheed Martin, built in the 1990s, and built without any real social media. Here's what it looks like (taken from here):

So ask yourself: does this look like the kind of software that you'd want to use to hear from your 717,000 constituents? Sure, it's a CRM, and not a lot of CRM's look "great to use" but this one, clearly belongs on Daring Fireball's User Interface of the Week not just for its patently bad interface but also for the harm its doing to democracy.

Unfortunately, the world of government is a world of locked-up vendor contracts and displacing Intranet Quorum isn't as simple as just building a better product, offering it at a lower cost. It's entrenched, and there are all kinds of rules and regulations around what kinds of software members can use in an official capacity. That stuff is actually not the federal acquisition regulation, but rather regulations made up by the rules committee of the United States House of Representatives -- the executive branch isn't allowed to push regulations on the legislative branch of government like that.

In the House, internal for-fee software for a member's correspondence must be housed by House Information Resources, and incorporate the suggested best practices put forth by the Chief Administrative Officer's office. In the Senate, it's the Senate Sergeant at Arms office with jurisdiction over the rules.

Both chambers have the same problem, really: in order to provide software to members offices, that software must be hosted inside the data centers of each chamber, using the hardware that each chamber provides, using only the languages and software available on that hardware.

Here's an area for both some disruption and some lobbying. Let's build tools that allow members of Congress to aggregate messages being sent to them, and to associate those messages with congressional districts. Let's come up with a way for a member to see what their constituency is saying about any particular issue they'd like, and let's provide that as an open service so that anybody can see what a particular constituency is saying. That way, when a member has a track record of voting against the desires of a substantial portion of his or her district, we've got a record of it, and it can get brought up in the next election.

At the same time, it's also an area for some great lobbying. Hardware and software platforms are no more or less secure inside or outside the walls of Congress. Let's lobby for a rules change that allows our members to use the software they want to use. It's a non-political no-brainer that could allow members to work with businesses in their own districts rather than in Washington, and could help government attach itself to Moore's law like the rest of us.

We also need to do similar stuff for the Executive Branch. Right now, your voice online -- in the mediums you participate in, not only don't matter: legally they can't matter. Online identities don't count when it comes to the official record -- the information our regulators use to regulate. That's what we're working hard on at ExpertLabs and with ThinkUp.

Now I know there's some cynics amongst you who say: "yes Clay, but the truth is, government doesn't actually want to hear from us. They want to hear from rich fancy-pants lobbyists who give them campaign contributions and foie gras."

You are correct that that's frequently all that members of Congress listen to. But I don't believe that's out of ill-will or spite for the public. Rather, it's about attention management. Lobbyists can manage the attention of our Representatives because they have the time and the resources. But I've never met a member of Congress who liked constantly begging for money so that they could get re-elected. Nobody wants that.

The truth is that Congress would much rather listen to its constituents than listen to lobbyists. They'd much rather be at home in their districts with their families than at fundraisers in Washington, too. But the way to fix it involves a two-fold plan: first, let's accept that we'll have to make our own foie gras for the time being. Then, let's make foie gras obsolete.

The final thing we have to do, and the final space we have to educate. Educating the activists about how Congress really works needs to be a seamless part of the advocacy process. It would be trivial to make it so that every advocacy action taken online contained an educational component -- so that activists weren't blindly signing petitions and yelling at Congress but were rather coming out of an advocacy campaign being better citizens.

Here's something that was created for Design for America -- a contest from the Sunlight Foundation:

How a Bill Becomes a Law

Incorporate it on every page involving an action on a bill. Make it live-update so that people can see what's happening with their bill as it proceeds through Washintgon, DC. It's more fair and honest than inciting people with fear and anger so that they get charged up in order to hand over their email address.

This is the kind of stuff I'm talking about when I talk about developers and the impact they can have on society -- and why I close The Information Diet with a note to developers. The skill of making software isn't just about making cool software. It's about rewiring society. The sooner we acknowledge that, the sooner we can get on with the rewiring, and hopefully with a watchful eye, rewire it for the better.

It's no longer acceptable for us to not take responsibility for our Congress anymore. If we want it to be better then throwing bums out, and replacing them with new bums doesn't seem to be doing the trick. Let's work instead to educate whomever is in Congress, and the professional class around them. Let's do more of the stuff that works, and less of the stuff that doesn't.
http://www.informationdiet.com/blog/...ongress-works-





Senate Will Vote Next Month on Protect IP Copyright Bill
Declan McCullagh

The U.S. Senate will debate a controversial Hollywood-backed copyright bill as soon as senators return in January.

A vote on the Protect IP Act, a close cousin of the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, will be held January 24, thanks to a last-minute push by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) over the weekend.

"This is a bipartisan piece of legislation which is extremely important," Reid said Saturday. "I repeat, it is bipartisan. I hope we can have a productive couple of days, pass this bill, and move on to other matters."

Both Protect IP and SOPA have earned the enmity of Silicon Valley companies, Internet engineers, venture capitalists, civil libertarians, and a growing number of Internet users (PDF) because of the methods they use to make suspected piratical Web sites virtually disappear from the Internet. Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, author of the treatise American Constitutional Law, says this approach violates the First Amendment.

On Saturday, as the Senate was preparing to adjourn until 2012, Reid proposed that the initial debate on Protect IP would take place at 2:15 p.m. ET on January 24, one day after senators return from the holidays.

"I am pleased the majority leader has filed a motion to proceed to the Protect IP Act," Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Protect IP's author, said afterward. "The costs of online infringement are American jobs, harm to America's economy, and very real threats to consumers' safety. The answer cannot simply be to do nothing."

In the House of Representatives, allies of the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Association of America also are moving with dispatch. Even though the House is likely not to be in session then, SOPA author Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) has scheduled a vote on the legislation and related amendments for Wednesday, just in case.

"From our perspective we don't understand the rush, especially when these are dramatic policy changes with regard to the Internet," Markham Erickson, head of NetCoalition, whose members include Amazon.com, eBay, Yahoo, and Google, told CNET today. "We think they ought to be handled in a very thoughtful and careful way."

One explanation for the rush to vote is that a groundswell of opposition among Internet users has become better organized and higher-profile in the last month--meaning that if SOPA and Protect IP supporters move quickly, they may be able to send one version of the legislation or another to President Obama for his signature.

Nearly 90,000 Tumblr users telephoned Congress to register their disagreement, and another 10,000 did using Engine Advocacy's Web site. More than 1 million people have signed a petition posted by the Avaaz.org advocacy group; over 700,000 people chose to "like" the AmericanCensorship.org anti-SOPA site.

Sen. Ron Wyden, a foe of Protect IP, has threatened to filibuster it on the Senate floor. "I will be working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle over the next month to explain the basis for this widespread concern, and I intend to follow through on a commitment that I made more than a year ago, to filibuster this bill when the Senate returns in January," he said over the weekend.

Reid's motion to end debate, which would require a three-fifths supermajority of 60 senators to invoke a procedure called "cloture," is a preemptive strike against Wyden's promised filibuster.

Invoking cloture would impose a 30-hour limit on the motion to end debate. There would then be a second 30-hour period on the bill itself, and a third 30-hour period if supporters want to amend Protect IP from the version approved by a committee in May.

Obtaining 60 votes to end Wyden's filibuster curb debate, however, may not be that difficult for Hollywood's allies in the Senate: Protect IP already has 41 sponsors. (During last week's House Judiciary hearing, copyright enthusiasts outnumbered critics of the bill by margins of three-to-one or four-to-one.)

A representative for Wyden, who has offered an alternative proposal, told CNET today that her boss is undaunted:

The senator is prepared to require the Senate to take multiple cloture votes and use all time allowed under Senate rules to prevent passage of this misguided bill, even if that means taking a full week of floor time or longer. And he intends to use every minute of that floor time to let colleagues know that there is a lot more to voting for Protect IP than doing a favor for industry lobbyists.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57...opyright-bill/





Law Firms Removing Their Name From SOPA Supporters' List; SOPA 'Support' Crumbling
Mike Masnick

So we were just discussing how a bunch of companies who were listed by the US Chamber of Commerce as SOPA/PIPA supporters are demanding to be taken off the list, noting that, while they had agreed to a generic statement about fighting the sale of counterfeit goods, they don't support crazy broad legislation like SOPA/PIPA. It seems that others listed as "supporting" SOPA are scrambling to get off the list as well. The Judiciary Committee's official list had included a bunch of big name law firms as being in support of the law as well -- which is a little strange, since law firms usually don't take official positions on things like this. They may express opinions on such matters on behalf of clients, but outright supporting legislation is a different ballgame altogether.

A group of lawyers (most of whom have a long history of working with the entertainment industry) did send a letter to the Judiciary Committee to say that they agreed with Floyd Abrams' analysis of SOPA. That's it. They didn't say their firms supported SOPA -- and, in fact, there's an asterisk with the signatures noting that the names of their firms are solely for identification purposes. Yet the Judiciary Committee took those names anyway and put them on the supporters list. Expressing a legal opinion on a bill is extraordinarily different from supporting the bill. But the Judiciary Committee ignored that and listed them as supporters anyway.

From what we've heard, many of those law firms are not happy, and have been demanding removal from the Judiciary Committee's official list. Among those who have already complained/been taken off the official list are Morrison & Foerster, Davis Wright Tremaine, Irell & Manella, Covington & Burling. I would hope that the Judiciary Committee removes all the names and issues a rather public apology for blatantly including the names of firms who clearly made no statement in support of the proposed legislation. This is a pretty egregious move on the part of House Judiciary Committee staff. They're so eager to list supporters that they've been naming firms who do not support the bills. And then they've been using those claims to pretend there's widespread support...

So, between the US Chamber of Commerce stretching what many companies thought they were supporting and pretending it meant support for SOPA/PIPA, and the Judiciary Committee's over-eagerness to assume that a legal analysis of one part of the bill by a few lawyers meant their huge law firms supported the bill... it's looking like the facade of widespread corporate support for SOPA is crumbling pretty quickly...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...rumbling.shtml





Reddit, GoDaddy, SOPA and Consumer Sovereignty

Or as we might recast the phrase consumer sovereignty, you’d better do what your customers want or you’re not going to have any customers.
Tim Worstall

The background is certainly well known to you all: SOPA is the latest piece of copyright and intellectual property law nonsense to come down the pike. As such laws so often are it’s been largely crafted by the rent seekers and would work against the interests of consumers.

So what happens next? There’s no election coming up in which we can cast a democratic vote against the bill. Even if there were such an election a law like this is not going to have an election turn on it. So the political system doesn’t really have what is needed to be able to successfully oppose it.

However, as classical liberals (otherwise known as right wing ideologues) like me continually try to point out is that in our interactions with companies, corporates or suppliers, we all have a vote all the time. We can simply withdraw our custom from those who displease us. Might be because they’ve got the girls and boys toys separated (outrageous sexism according to those who have just managed to get Hamley’s (the UK equivalent of Schwartz’s in New York) to stop the practice), could be because we don’t like the way an oil company is disposing of an old rig (Greenpeace organised a boycott of Shell over the disposal of Brent Spar: a very bad decision as it happened but an effective boycott all the same) or it could be because we’re not going to buy domains, or have them maintained, by someone willing to support such grubbily rent seeking laws.

And there has been such a consumer boycott gaining speed:

SOPA Supporters Learning (Slowly) That Pissing Off Reddit Is A Bad Idea
from the don’t-mess-with-reddit dept

As they point out:

Enemy number one on the list appears to be GoDaddy, with Redditor’s organizing a day (Dec. 29th) for GoDaddy customers to transfer their domains away from the registrar. We’ve discussed GoDaddy’s bizarre support for the law in the past — including the fact that, under the original definitions of SOPA, GoDaddy itself qualified as a “rogue site” since it recommended people buy domains violating the trademarks of lots of big companies. Of course, it’s also notable that GoDaddy recently hired a top lawyer… whose previous job was in “IP enforcement” for the federal government.

Well, guess what? It has worked:

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (Dec. 23, 2011) – Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” currently working its way through U.S. Congress.

“Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO, said. “It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.”

Who needs politicians when we’ve each got a vote with how we spend our money?

Although, being a classical liberal (read “horrible right wing ideologue” if you wish) I do have to go on to point out that there’s another side to all of this as well.

We can see that the consumer dollar can stop companies from doing what we don’t want companies to do. The flip side of this is that if we all quite happily spend our consumer dollars with a company then we’re not actually unhappy with what the company does. Remember this the next time someone tells you how appalling it is that WalMart closes down Mom and Pop stores just by the very fact that they open an outlet. If we the consumers preferred the Mom and Pop stores then we would spend our dollars there and the WalMart would be empty of customers. That isn’t generally, what happens (although it did happen to WalMart in Germany, and WalMart closed down its operation in that country), it’s the Mom and Pop stores that close down and the WalMart that near collapses under the throngs vying to give the store money.

We actually prefer the WalMart experience as is shown by the manner that we go and shop there. Which is why those who oppose the store chain so often try to use the law, zoning, politicians, to stop it. Because they know that a consumer boycott won’t, for the consumers by their very actions show that they’re perfectly happy with the idea of cheap goods rather than more expensive ones.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworst...r-sovereignty/





Desperation: Go Daddy Calling Customers, Begging Them to Stay
Drew Olanoff

Not to keep beating a dead horse (or elephant), but Go Daddy continues to screw up with its latest PR effort is to let you know that it was just kidding, and that it doesn’t really support SOPA.

When the Internet decided to let the company know that they’d rather have their domain names be kept by a company who doesn’t support the Stop Online Piracy Act, the company flip-flopped on its stance.

They’re not stopping there though, they want to keep you as a customer, because they care about you. Or something like that. One person has reported getting a phone call from a Go Daddy customer support representative, basically begging him to keep his domains put.

GoDaddy is now scurrying for damage control, customer service reps are reaching out to customers transferring domains: plus.google.com/11199640901382…

— Steve Finkelstein (@stevefink) December 23, 2011

Here’s an excerpt from a Google+ post describing the awkward call:

I just got a call from #GoDaddy. The rep said he noticed that I’d transferred my 60+ domains away (I’ve still got a few there that I’m working on transferring, but am being conservative with, since I can’t afford any downtime at all with them), and wanted to know if I’d tell them why. I got to tell them that it was because of their #SOPA support, and that I couldn’t in good conscience give my money to a tech company that would support legislation like that. I told him I was aware that they had reversed their position, but that their explicit support of it in the first place had cost them my confidence in them, as it is at the best viciously ignorant, and at worst, malicious.

The rep was quite sincere in his apology to me, asked if there was anything they could do to win me back. He had a “We support IP protections, and now realize that support of SOPA is too broad” song-and-dance routine that probably came in from a PR memo today. I told him “no thanks”, and that was that. I’m impressed by the customer service hustle, but it shows that this little incident really spooked them.

While it’s nice that Go Daddy customer support reps are apologizing to customers, it’s sad that they have to do this in the first place. It’s been a complete PR shitstorm for the company the past few days, and it’s not getting any better.

Go Daddy failed by supporting a half-baked act that would affect a lot of people’s lives and careers. You can’t back it one day, only to back down the next. The damage is done. No amount of phone calls will change that.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/1...-them-to-stay/





Anonymous Threatens Internet Blackout Over Controversial Legislation

The hacker group Anonymous has vowed to blackout the Internet if U.S. lawmakers pass the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Under the bill, government powers would be greatly expanded, enabling the Justice Department working at the behest of individual copyright holders to shut down websites for potential copyright violations.

Critics including Google, Facebook, eBay, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Human Rights Watch contend that the bill infringes on the free and fair use of the Internet and could hamper innovation and business.

As the bill makes its way through the House of Representatives, Anonymous has become increasingly militant in its opposition to the legislation.

On Wednesday the group announced “Operation Blackout,” a plan urging opponents of the bill to “replace the front page of every website we can with a simple, clear protest page.”

“Let’s replace the face of the internet with a clear message about how we feel about censorship. Replace the front page of every web site we can with a simple, clear protest page,” the group said in a statement.

“Encourage friends, businesses, organizations, social media to take a stand alongside us in the same way. Get this image and message everywhere online. Plant the seeds of dissent wherever they can grow.”

Anonymous argued that the bill endangers the Internet by “[allowing] the Federal Government of the United States to shut down, arrest, fine and prosecute any website and it’s operator(s) at the behest of corporations who can and do stand to profit from weaponized censorship.”

“The goal of the so-called ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ SOPA is to empower litigious U.S. corporations to police the internet, with the ability to act as judge, jury and executioner. SOPA tramples civil rights laws, fair use, freedom of press and freedom of speech,” the statement continued.

The group has already targeted Representative Lamar Smith (R – Texas), SOPA’s sponsor, releasing personal information including his home address and telephone number.

In defense of the bill, Smith wrotein the National Review, “Claims that the Stop Online Piracy Act will censor legal activity on the Internet are blatantly false. Enforcing the law against criminals is not censorship.”

Contrarily, last week, a group of eighty-three high profile Internet engineers including Vint Cerf of Google and domain name system software author Paul Vixie senta letter to the House Judiciary Committee urging them not to pass SOPA.

“If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure,” the engineers wrote.

The bill is currently being considered House Judiciary Committee and a vote is not likely until the new year.
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire....al-legislation





Jacob Goldman, Founder of Xerox Lab, Dies at 90
John Markoff

Jacob E. Goldman, a physicist who as Xerox’s chief scientist founded the company’s vaunted Palo Alto Research Center, which invented the modern personal computer, died on Tuesday in Westport, Conn. He was 90.

The cause was congestive heart failure, his son Melvin said.

Emblematic of a time when American corporations invested heavily in basic scientific research, Dr. Goldman played an important role both at the Ford Motor Company, during the 1950s, and later at Xerox in the 1960s and 1970s, in financing basic scientific research in an effort to spark corporate innovation.

In the late 1960s, Xerox, then the dominant manufacturer of office copiers, was searching for ways to move into new markets when he proposed an open-ended research laboratory to explore what C. Peter McColough, chief executive at the time, called “the architecture of information.” Computer systems were still not available in offices at that time, and little was known about the shape of what would come to be called “the office of the future.”

Xerox had recently acquired Scientific Data Systems, a California computer maker, to compete with I.B.M. in the data-processing market. At the time, however, computers were largely centralized systems that were not interactive. The minicomputer market was just being pioneered by the Digital Equipment Corporation.

Xerox did not initially have a grand strategy for entering the computing business, only an inkling that the data processing world was both an opportunity and a potential threat.

“He was the one that made sure that Xerox understood there was a revolution coming behind them that might change their business,” said Michael Hiltzik, author of “Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age.”

Dr. Goldman had originally been brought from Ford to Xerox by John Bardeen, who was on the Xerox board and was also a physicist. (He helped invent the transistor at Bell Labs.) Dr. Bardeen knew Dr. Goldman in part because of his contributions as a corporate science manager and also for running a well-known poker game every year at the American Physical Society meeting, according to his son.

The Xerox laboratory was almost still-born in 1970 when many of the company’s directors resisted the idea of a West Coast center in an area in which the company did not have an active business. It was Dr. Bardeen who backed Dr. Goldman’s early vision and convinced the company to support the venture even though it would not bear fruit any time soon.

“It was Jack who brought the idea back to management that they could not expect to get anything useful for at least five years, but maybe in 10,” Mr. Hiltzik said. “It was this idea that they did have to look far ahead and nurture research.”

Established in 1970 in an industrial park next to Stanford, PARC researchers designed a remarkable array of computer technologies, including the Alto personal computer, the Ethernet office network, laser printing and the graphical user interface.

The technologies would later be commercialized by both Apple Computer and Microsoft, among others, and Xerox would be criticized for not capitalizing enough on the technologies it had pioneered — for “fumbling the future.”

Years later, Dr. Goldman explained Xerox’s failure to enter the personal computing market early on as part of a large corporations’ unwillingness to take risks.

“A big company will not make the investment to bring out a new product unless they see it makes a big difference,” he said in a 1988 interview in The New Haven Advocate. “Look at the personal computer industry today. It’s a multibillion-dollar industry today. And we at Xerox could have had that industry to ourselves.”

Dr. Goldman, who was often called Jack, was born in Brooklyn on July 18, 1921. His parents, Solomon Goldman, a jeweler, and the former Sarah Goldstein, had immigrated from Russia. Jacob attended Yeshiva University and received a master’s degree and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Pennsylvania. With expertise in magnetism, he began his career at Westinghouse in 1945, before moving to teach at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh.

Dr. Goldman also excelled as a manager. At Ford, which he joined in 1955, he went on to head the company’s research and development laboratory.

Under Henry Ford Jr., he was one of the company’s first high-ranking Jewish executives, as the company broke with its founder’s anti-Semitism. A lifelong Democrat, he resisted a corporate memorandum early on demanding that executives make contributions to the Republican Party, according to his son. After Dr. Goldman complained, the company changed its political contribution policy.

After retiring from the company he became a private investor and served on the boards of Xerox, General Instrument Company, Burndy Corporation and other companies.

In, 1975, while still at Xerox, Dr. Goldman, as a director of United Brands, temporarily served on a committee that ran the company after the death of its chief executive, Eli M. Black, a high school classmate of Dr. Goldman’s. Dr. Goldman is survived by his wife Rhoda Miller Goldman; his children Melvin, Edith and Beth; his stepsons Shalom, Ari, and Dov; a sister, Judy Crystal; eight grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/b...ies-at-90.html





Mystery Men Forge Servers For Giants of Internet
Cade Metz

If you drive down highway 880 from Oakland, California, take an exit about 30 miles south, and snake past a long line of car dealerships, you’ll find an ordinary office building that belongs to a company you’ve never heard of. And if you’re allowed to walk inside — past the receptionist and the cubicles, through another door, around the security guard, and into the warehouse — you’ll find some technicians assembling and testing server hardware for some of the biggest names on the internet.

This includes Facebook and Rackspace and at least one or two other names that even your grandmother knows about it.

The warehouse belongs to a company called Synnex — an outfit that spent the last 30 years buying and selling computers, hard drives, chips, memory, and all sorts of other hardware. But Synnex isn’t the one assembling and testing all that internet server hardware — at least not officially. Those technicians work for a brand new Synnex division called Hyve.

Hyve Solutions was created to serve the world’s “large-scale internet companies” — companies increasingly interested in buying servers designed specifically for their sweeping online operations. Because their internet services are backed by such an enormous number of servers, these companies are looking to keep the cost and the power consumption of each system to a minimum. They want something a little different from the off-the-shelf machines purchased by the average business. “What we saw was a migration from traditional servers to more custom-built servers,” says Hyve senior vice president and general manager Steve Ichinaga. “The trend began several years ago with Google, and most recently, Facebook was added to the ranks of companies who want this kind of solution.”

The net’s biggest names have caused a tectonic shift in the worldwide server market. These are the companies that need more servers than anyone else on the planet, and they’re moving away from traditional server makers such as Dell and HP, embracing Hyve, various manufacturers in Taiwan, and other little known companies that can help them build servers for their particular needs. In response, Dell and HP are now doing custom work as well. But the Hyves of the world are here to stay.

Be Like Google

Hyve doesn’t count Google as a customer — or at least it doesn’t seem to. But it’s serving many of the internet companies that are imitating Google. Unhappy with the cost and design of traditional servers from the likes of Dell and HP, Google designs its own servers, and it contracts with companies in Taiwan to build them. Facebook has now followed suit. Its no-frills servers are built by Taiwanese “original device manufacturers” (ODMs) Quanta and Wistron, and then they’re shipped to Hyve in Fremont, California, where technicians load them into racks, hook up the required networking equipment, test them, and ship them off to Facebook’s data centers.

Google treats its latest server designs as trade secrets, but earlier this year, Facebook open sourced its designs under the aegis of the Open Compute Project, sharing them to anyone who wants them. And this led Synnex to create Hyve. Hyve is a place where internet giants can go if they want Open Compute servers. But even before Hyve was created, Synnex was working for the big internet names. It has long provided custom machines for Rackspace — the Austin, Texas company that offers infrastructure services across the net as a scale rivaled only by Amazon — and though Synnex won’t identify its other customers, it will say that these are companies everyone knows. “They’re household names,” Ichinaga says.

Hyve is just one of the under-the-radar server companies feeding these big internet names. SGI — the company once known as Rackable (not to be confused with Rackspace) — has spent years building custom servers for the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. And a New Jersey-based outfit known as ZT Systems is building servers for similar internet outfits — though it won’t say who. Hyve and ZT say very little about how their operations work, but both seem to have very close ties to manufacturing outfits in China and Taiwan, where so much of the world’s IT hardware is built. This means they can provide custom servers while still keeping prices down.

“We have very long term relationships with the key vendors,” says Ichinaga. “We already sell billions of dollars’ worth of components and other IT equipment, and that basically allows us to leverage our relationships with our partners when we serve our [internet] customers.” Tim Symchych, the director of supply chain operations at Rackspace, confirms that his company can get lower prices from Hyve than he can from Dell and HP (though the company continues to buy from Dell and HP as well). Jason Hoffman — the chief technology officier of Amazon- and Rackspace-rival Joyent — says there will be cases when his company can actually get a better price from a traditional server maker such as Dell. But the point is the Hyves and ZT Systems of the world are competing with the big boys, and in many cases, they’re winning.

With Facebook sharing its designs through the Open Compute Project this trend will only continue. According to Ichinaga, Hyve has already received orders for Open Compute servers from multiple companies. And that doesn’t include Facebook.

The Hyve Mind

Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman visited Hyve one afternoon in early December. Joyent typically buys its servers from Dell or Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle), but he’s exploring other options. He spent an hour discussing Hyve’s services with a company sales rep, and then he took a brief tour of the warehouse. We tagged along, and though Hyve was careful not to expose its other customers, it did show off some of the Open Compute server racks it’s putting together for Facebook.

Hoffman and Joyent don’t want Open Compute servers. Facebook’s designs are meant for web serving and memcaching — a way of storing caching data in server memory, so it can be quickly accessed — and he’s looking for something more robust. “Facebook is really just running one applications,” he says. “We’re supporting different applications for all our customers.”

But Hyve says it can give him what he wants. Though Facebook’s servers are built in Taiwan and shipped to Hyve’s warehouse in Fremont, Hyve tells us that in most cases, it builds servers on its own, pulling parts from partners across the globe. Hyve says it can work with a company like Joyent to design a server that suits its particular needs. “It starts with collaboration,” Ichinaga says. “We figure out what the customer wants in terms of server workload and the physical environment and everything else. If you need something different, we can do it.”

Ichinaga won’t go into detail about Hyve’s business model. But he says the company is only able to do this because Synnex has spent thirty years distributing computer hardware to thousands of resellers across the globe. It has close relationships, Ichinaga says, with the likes of chip giant Intel and hard drive maker Seagate, as well as ODMs such as Quanta and Wistron. “Compared to a traditional OEM companies,” he says, referring to original equipment manufacturers such as Dell and HP. “We have a very low S,G, and A [selling, general and administrative expenses]. It’s just a very efficient model.”

Synnex is a US company. Its Fremont, California, offices are the official headquarters. But the company’s founder, Robert Huang, was born in Taiwan and studied electrical engineering in Japan. And its ties to Asia run deep. The company has offices in both China and Japan.

Somewhere in New Jersey

ZT Systems seems to operate in much the same way. And it too builds servers for some of the biggest names on the net.

It would appear that these names include Amazon. Amazon job listings seeking technicians for its data centers sometimes request engineers that have “hands-on experience with Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Rackable, or ZT Systems.” It’s no secret that Rackable builds for Amazon. As a public company, Rackable (now SGI) must name customers that account for more than 10 percent of its revenues — and Amazon does. But Amazon’s relationship with ZT is still very much under the radar.

Amazon has not responded to requests to discuss ZT Systems, and ZT declines to name any of its customers. But a company spokesman will say that like Hyve, it builds custom servers for “very large data center operators.” And he says it runs sales offices in Fremont, California, near Hyve, and in Seattle, Washington. Amazon is headquartered in Seattle. AMD — Intel’s chief chip rival — has sold chips to ZT Systems for at least six years, according to John Fruehe, director of product marketing for server and embedded products at AMD and former business development man at the chip maker. Fruehe won’t name ZT’s customers, but he confirms that it serves “mega-data-center customers.”

Like Hyve, ZT is a US company, and according to a company spokesman, it builds all its servers in New Jersey. But it too has close ties to Asia. That said, ZT insists it shouldn’t be compared to Hyze, because it has a longer history as a full-fledged OEM. “ZT Systems is a full-featured server OEM with robust engineering capabilities, and extensive experience designing and building computers in the USA for over 17 years,” says the company spokesman. “Our systems contain the highest quality components, many of which are produced in Asia.”

Uh, Who Makes These Things?

The server supply chain is a complicated thing. At times, it’s difficult to tell who’s actually building the machines and who’s merely sprucing them up. Traditionally, ODMs such as Quanta and Wistron build the systems. Then OEMS such as Dell and HP add some additional hardware and ensure the systems meet certain standards. And these OEMs work with VARs — value added resellers — who will sell gear to the end user and may add some extra, well, value.

But the lines between these various layers are rather blurry, and a company like Hyve blurs them further still. Synnex sells hardware to resellers and distributes hardware on behalf of OEMs like HP, but now, with the rise of Hyve, it’s turning into a server maker. With Facebook’s servers, Hyve isn’t actually building the systems. But with other customers — such as Rackspace — it says that it is.

Even Jason Waxman — general manager of high-density computing in Intel’s data center group and a board member of the Open Compute Project — finds it hard to classify a company like this. “I’m still trying to understand some of their models,” he says. “[With an company like Hyve], I don’t know if they allow the end user to take responsibility for the design or if they’re really becoming an OEM themselves. OEM is actually building a fully configured system and supporting it.”

What’s more, there are cases where component companies such as AMD are selling parts directly to the big internet names, and these names will then go to companies like ZT Systems or the Taiwanese ODMs and ask them to actually put these components into servers. Google buys chips directly, and at least some others have followed. “This was all the rage about two years ago,” says AMD’s Fruehe. “There was one extremely large web company that was doing this, and they still to this day build their own systems. Everybody looked at this and said ‘This is great. I’ve been going to an OEM to have them build my systems, but I can really cut down my costs if I do it myself and go straight to Taiwan.”

Intel sells chips in this way as well. But Jason Hoffman says this is not the norm. “Our goal is that we almost exclusively work with OEMs,” he says.

As AMD’s Fruehe points out, there are still reasons for even the biggest internet companies to lean on OEMs like Dell and HP and ZT. “The OEM is providing the system integration, the tests, the qualifications, all the low-level systems code,” he says. “You start to realize this is a whole lot of work, and if you build your own servers, you have to hire a whole lot of people do what you could have hired HP or Dell or ZT or another partners to do.”

In addition to building the systems, ZT will help support them. The company runs “integration facilities” around the world, which are essentially support offices that serve the data centers of the big internet players. In some cases, says a company spokesman, ZT will have someone working inside a customer’s data center. This is quite different from the way Hyze works with Facebook. Facebook does get on-site support from the company, but it does use Hyve to put its servers into racks, hook them up, test them, and deliver them.

The big internet names are approaching the task in many different ways. And generally, each is dealing with multiple server vendors. Rackspace uses Dell, HP, and Hyve. Facebook is moving to Quanta, Wistron, and Hyze, but it continues to use Dell and HP. According to job listings, Amazon is using HP, Dell, Rackable, and ZT, and it may be using other companies as well.

Beyond the Net

None of this is new. But in open sourcing its new server designs, Facebook is pushing the market in a new direction. It’s now easier for server buyers to go directly to Taiwan. Or if they want a bit more hand-holding, they can go to Hyve. Facebook recently released version 2.0 of its Open Compute server designs, and in the new year, it will be shipping servers based on these designs not only to Facebook but to other big name internet outfits.

Both Amazon and Apple attended Facebook recent Open Compute summit in New York. “There’s folks from Google and Apple and other folks here today as well,” Facebook’s Frank Frankovski told Wired. “Even though we didn’t highlight the contributions from those companies, everybody’s included. And people can just consume the technology and not contribute back.”

Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim — another Open Compute Project board member — believes that Apple will at least consider Open Compute servers. “Apple wants to build a big iCloud,” he told us. “Obviously, they want to minimize their power consumption and cost. I’m pretty sure they will look at this. The point is they couldn’t have looked at this until it became an open spec. Their other choice was to build their own version.”

And the internet giants aren’t the only ones. According to Ichinaga, all sorts of other outfits — government organizations, telecoms, and large financial organizations — have ordered Open Compute servers. Chris Kemp — the CEO of Nebula, a startup that’s selling appliances that run OpenStack, an open source platform that mimics Amazon’s web services — has been involved with the Open Compute Project from the beginning, and he echoes Ichinaga.

“Every company in the world is going to take a close look at what they’re all about,” he says. “If you’re a financial or biotech company, you’re gonna to start looking at the cost of your infrastructure, and you’re going to start behaving a lot like Google and Amazon and Facebook. In today’s world, everybody’s business is becoming computationally intensive.”

In other words, he says, the business world will move even further away from the Dells and the HPs.

Additional reporting by Eric Smalley.
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise...-servers/all/1





Red: The Camera That Changed Hollywood

How a sunglasses entrepreneur helped end the golden age of the 35-millimeter film camera.
Lee Gomes

In Hollywood history, 2011 will go down as the year during which the last three companies still making traditional 35-millimeter film cameras—the gently whirring behemoths that directors sit next to on movie sets—all said, in effect, that they were getting out of the business. Film cameras would remain in inventory, but Panavision, ARRI, and Aaton announced that from here on out, all their new models will be digital.

The analog-to-digital transition that is occurring in industries around the world is largely responsible. But special mention should go to a small Southern California company whose technology has stirred the imagination of a roster of legendary directors. The innovation: a line of digital movie cameras that, almost miraculously, are smaller, lighter, and cheaper than film cameras, yet have comparable image quality.

Red Digital Cinema Camera Company, located in Irvine, California, was founded in 1999 by Jim Jannard, who had no experience in the movie business. He was, instead, an entrepreneur who had made a fortune with his line of Oakley sunglasses—must-haves among the California fun-and-sun crowd.

While Jannard is an active participant on Red's user forums, he rarely gives interviews to reporters. Ted Schilowitz, who is something like the CEO of the 400-person company (it eschews formal titles), says Jannard originally became intrigued by the idea of a digital camera that would be a no-compromise alternative for feature-movie makers.

That interest in cameras, says Schilowitz, was a logical extension of Jannard's Oakley business, which also sold prescription glasses and protective goggles for athletes. "Jim is obsessed with the way the world sees things," Schilowitz says.

In the "standard model" of technological disruption, a relatively inexpensive, low-end product, which at first might appeal only to entry-level users, slowly improves in performance until it meets the demands of even the most discriminating power customers. The PC is the prototypical example; current models have the horsepower that until recently was the exclusive province of supercomputers.

The path Red took was slightly different. Digital movie cameras were already on the market when the Red team began their work. But the image quality of early digital cameras was nowhere near what was required for a feature movie. Quality was improving—but Jannard wanted his first model to leapfrog past all current digital cameras and exceed the strictest performance specs, even for film.

That required several years of engineering, mostly related to the semiconductor chip that is the heart of any digital camera and converts photons into electrons. The Red team came up with a chip that was the same physical size as a frame of 35-mm film, the Hollywood standard, and produced an image that was virtually indistinguishable, albeit digital.

"When we looked around, we saw digital cameras slowly moving up the food chain," recalls Schilowitz. "But none of them were even close to living up to what we saw as the magic of film. We didn't really know what we were doing, so we started from zero, but that turned out to be a huge advantage."

The first Red model was introduced in 2007, and immediately attracted the attention of filmmakers like Peter Jackson and Steven Soderbergh. Since then, directors have used Red cameras to shoot some of Hollywood's biggest movies, including The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and installments of such blockbuster Hollywood franchises as The Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Spiderman.

The camera also has ardent fans outside the Hollywood mainstream. The last two winners of the Oscar for Best Foreign Film—The Secret In Their Eyes, from Argentina, and last year's In A Better World, from Denmark—were both shot on Reds.

Price comparisons between Red and traditional film cameras aren't especially informative, since most film cameras are rented rather than purchased. Schilowitz says that a fully-loaded version of the latest Red model costs between $45,000 and $60,000, perhaps a quarter as much as a new film camera—if anyone were still making them.

The body of the Red camera isn't much bigger than a professional-sized still camera. All the same, it isn't as though the cinematographer walks around the movie set with the camera strapped around his neck, snapping pictures like a tourist. A fully configured Red system, with lenses, dollies, and the rest, can be as imposing as a traditional film camera.

But filmmakers say they like to take advantage of Red's greater portability when they need it. The lower price also means that some crews use multiple cameras. The crew filming The Hobbit in New Zealand is using 48 red cameras, including models configured for 3-D effects.

Digital cameras can also capture more images per second than standard film, enhancing the image quality. Jackson, who is directing The Hobbit, has said the effect is "like the back of the cinema has had a hole cut out of it where the screen is, and you are actually looking into the real world."

Digital movie cameras are one of the last steps towards a "film" industry in which actual celluloid film plays no role. Currently, even movies shot on film are usually digitized afterwards, so that editing and effects can be done on computer. The movies are then printed back onto film, and shipped to theaters, most of which still use traditional threaded film projectors.

But theaters are also in the midst of an epic transition to digital projectors, which could allow studios to simply transmit copies of movies to theaters using high-speed Internet connections. Not an ounce of celluloid will be required once big-screen movies are both filmed and projected digitally.

Exact figures on the film vs. digital split in Hollywood moviemaking are hard to come by, but there is little doubt that film's market is shrinking. Both Kodak and Fuji still sell movie-film stock, but many of Los Angeles's developing and transfer facilities for film are closing down or consolidating. Executives from film camera companies have been quoted in the trade press as saying they expect 85 percent of moviemaking to be digital a few years from now, but they aren't making predictions much beyond that.

As a private company, Red won't reveal information about sales or profits. Clearly, it will need more than an innovator's head start to remain a leader in what is becoming a very crowded market. Incumbents like Panavision, with deep roots in Hollywood, are busily promoting their digital models, and Sony is active in the market as well. Canon just checked in with a feature-caliber digital system of its own, recruiting no less a figure than Martin Scorsese to sing its praises.

Red will press on, of course. Schilowitz wants to make clear his company is not on any anti-film vendetta, even though its camera had been called the "Panavision killer." Schilowitz says, "It was never our goal to kill film. Instead, we wanted to evolve it."
https://www.technologyreview.com/business/39225/





Video Chat Reshapes Domestic Rituals
Julie Scelfo

AFTER nightfall on Tuesday, the Darvick family of Birmingham, Mich., began their Hanukkah rituals, just as they had done for years.

Debra and Martin Darvick set out a tin menorah given to them by long-gone relatives. Their son, Elliot, 27, struck a match and lighted the first candle. And his sister, Emma, 24, joined in a prayer.

But the Darvicks celebrated this centuries-old tradition with a modern twist — the family was in three different cities across the country, but connected by Skype.

“We call it Skypanukkah,” Elliot said of the family’s second year of using the service’s video chat. “Being able to use Skype on a holiday allows me to basically build a memory with my family that I couldn’t have otherwise.”

Though Skype is now eight years old, the software — and others like it, including Apple’s FaceTime and Google chat — has become a regular fixture in a growing number of American homes, providing new ways for families to stay connected in an age where generations are less likely to gather around the table on Sunday afternoons to share a meal.

There are the familiar uses, of course — nieces performing dance routines for their aunts, brothers showing off holiday decorations to cousins, and grandparents meeting new grandchildren, despite being separated by hundreds or thousands of miles.

Yet as Skype becomes a part of everyday life, far-flung families are opening birthday gifts together, reading bedtime stories and even providing brief moments of child care. And rather than just making video calls to catch up, people are using them to share experiences that would otherwise require a plane ticket.

With the proliferation of built-in cameras and microphones on computers and mobile devices, broadband connections and program refinements, an average of 300 million minutes of Skype video calls are made a day globally, an increase of about 900 percent from 2007, according to data provided by the company. Many more calls are made using other popular software programs, like FaceTime and Google chat.

During peak time, Sunday morning in the United States, 30 million people are logged into their Skype account, with half a million simultaneously making video calls, the company said.

This summer, when Jamie Van Houton, 28, moved from Riverside, Calif., to Ohio six months into her pregnancy, her best friend, Tasha Montgomery, 33, worried that her friend would feel lonely in the run-up to childbirth.

“They really didn’t know anyone out there,” Ms. Montgomery said.

In July, Ms. Montgomery decided to give a baby shower using video chat, and enlisted mutual friends in Riverside to bake a brunch dish and join them for the party.

“We set her up on the mantel so she could see everybody,” said Ms. Montgomery, who had mailed Ms. Van Houton a paper banner beforehand. “We had expected the party to be two or two-and-a-half hours, and people ended up hanging out, talking for four or five hours. It was great.”

Ms. Van Houton, who hung the banner behind her so that guests could see it, said she was surprised at how lively her high-tech shower turned out to be.

“I had thought, ‘Oh, this will be fun, but it’s not the same as being there,’ ” Ms. Van Houton said. “But it turned out to be even better,” she said, explaining how friends also took turns talking to her. “I got to connect with everybody one-on-one, more so than if I was there.”

Skype and other similar programs seem custom-built to ease feelings of separation during celebrations and holidays.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas last year, Jessica Hunt, 37, who lives in Eugene, Ore., grew increasingly sad that she and her two children were unable to spend the holiday at her parents’ home in Durand, Wis.

“I felt like such a baby,” said Ms. Hunt, who had separated from her husband several months earlier. “I’m almost 40, and this was the first Christmas I hadn’t been home.”

So they opened presents by Skype instead, and Ms. Hunt said she and her children fell into an easy rhythm.

When her brother and his family unwrapped a large gift from his parents — what turned out to be a new set of luggage to be used for a coming vacation with Ms. Hunt — her spirits lifted.

“It sounds super-cheesy, but it reminded me they were coming and it wasn’t far away,” she said. “And it was all O.K.”

She also noticed another advantage of sharing the holidays over the computer.

“It was the first Christmas where I didn’t feel rushed,” she said. “I didn’t have to travel or worry about packing up the kids. It relieved a lot of stress.”

Video chat is adding more retirees to its fan base, as more senior centers offer classes to teach the elderly how to boot up, sign up and log in.

Elaine Welin, 64, a retired technologist who keeps a laptop on her dining room table near a crocheted doily and a scented candle, often uses the service to drink her morning coffee with one of several friends who live in the same town.

“I get a kick out of that,” said Ms. Welin, who teaches Skype classes at the L. E. Phillips Senior Center in Eau Claire, Wis. “We’ll sit and sip our coffee and just chat. They’ll say ‘What are you wearing Elaine?’ And I’ll say ‘Don’t look! It’s just my old bathrobe.’ ”

Parents of young children have also discovered an unexpected benefit. During a video call with his parents two years ago, Jeremy Rothman-Shore, 36, of Cambridge, Mass., wanted to buy some soup for his wife, Aviva, pregnant with their second child and down with a cold. He asked his parents, Deborah and Robert Rothman of Rochester if they could entertain his daughter, Ayelet, then 2, for the half-hour he estimated it would take him to go to and from a local Asian restaurant.

“My wife was barely able to sit up,” Mr. Rothman-Shore explained. When he returned, Ayelet “was engaged and having a blast.”

“It was so much better than plopping her in front of the TV,” he said. “And my parents were happy as well. It’s not baby sitting in the sense of, ‘Hey, I’ll see you kids in a couple of hours,’ but it’s that extra pair of hands.”

Participating in — and not just hearing about — children’s daily lives seems to be one of video chat’s greatest appeals.

Ms. Welin of Fall Creek, Wis., was tickled when Maleah, her 10-year-old granddaughter in Stevens Point, wanted to show off her bedroom décor. “She said ‘Grandma, I want you to see my new curtains.’ Then she picked up the laptop, turned it outward and walked it all over the room,” Ms. Welin said. “She was so proud.”

Families also use video chat to include others in experiences that, when separated by long distances, they would otherwise miss.

When Leslie Jerkins, 27, and her husband, Jonathan, 31, first learned the sex of their baby during her pregnancy, she organized a group video chat to share the news with relatives in other states. “It took Skype, FaceTime and Google chat to get everybody,” recalled Mrs. Jerkins, who lives in Memphis.

To add to the suspense, they organized a lottery to determine who would get to make the announcement. After drawing the name of Mr. Jerkins’s sister-in-law from a bowl, Mr. Jerkins texted her a photo that said “girl,” and she yelled, “It’s a girl!” to the whole group. “It was mayhem,” Mrs. Jerkins wrote on her blog later that night. “Little nieces Kendall and Kailyn were dancing around with their mommy, ‘A girl! A girl! Just what we wanted!’ ”

Just as video chat helps families celebrate life, it can also help families cope with death.

For more than a decade, Maxine Jackson, 90, a mother of 11 and one of seven siblings in Lansing, Mich., had spoken by phone twice a day to her youngest surviving sister, Selia Mae Basdon, who lived in a small town near St. Louis. Earlier this year, their ritual ended when Mrs. Basdon, who had colon cancer, entered a hospice.

Concerned that his mother wouldn’t have a chance to say goodbye to her younger sister, Jerome Jackson, who goes by J. J., arranged a Skype video chat. “Selia Mae was very ill, and we knew she didn’t have long to live,” he said, adding that his mother had lost two brothers and a sister in the last five years and had been physically unable to pay any of them a final visit.

After a technology-savvy friend did the setup, Mrs. Jackson got to see Selia Mae on a laptop screen on a table in her living room.

“We set it all up, and they were ready on their end, and voilà, we had picture and we had sound,” Mr. Jackson recalled. “And I never will forget the moment because there were about 11 or 12 people gathered in my mother’s living room and kitchen, all kind of waiting for the moment. And I heard my mother say, ‘I see you Mae Mae!’ And tears just came to my eyes.”

While the technology has opened up new opportunities, it has also created an array of complications.

A mother in Vancouver (her name is not appearing here to protect her toddler’s privacy), complained that her ex-husband, who video chats three times a week with their 23-month-old daughter, seemed to believe that such interactions were an adequate form of being a parent. It has “given him an excuse to be an absent father.”

“He can say, ‘Oh yeah, I saw her, she’s doing this and that,’ ” the mother said. “But she has no sense of him. She can’t touch him, she can’t feel him. There’s none of that other sensory experience. He hasn’t seen her in person since she was 3 weeks old.”
Video chat also carries certain risks.

They “can be recorded and can potentially be shared through any other online platform,” said Jill Murphy, editorial director of Common Sense Media. “Your child may not necessarily know that.” The group, a nonprofit for parents, offers a list of video-chatting tips on its Web site, like making sure privacy settings prevent strangers from requesting calls.

“If your kids like an audience,” Ms. Murphy added, “you have to watch out for their behavior, like body parts that can end up on display.”

For all its benefits, Skype and other video chat programs have inevitable limitations.

“There’s no technology that can ever reproduce what it means to be with your children in person,” said Debra Darvick, referring to how, before her family’s Hanukkah Skype gathering, she cooked latkes, but only half her family was there to eat them. “It’s great, and yet, nothing beats having my children in my home, in my arms, celebrating at the same table.”

“As cool as it was,” she added, “it just makes me long for them more.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/g...c-rituals.html





Flirting With Danger: More Drivers Texting on the Road Than Ever
Samantha Murphy

Despite various state law bans and nationwide awareness campaigns to prevent texting from behind the wheel, the amount of people texting while driving is actually on the rise, a new study suggests.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the percentage of drivers who sent texts and use mobile devices while on the road has jumped from 0.6% in 2009 to 0.9% to 2010.

The news comes as automakers and legislators try to bring more awareness to the dangers of distracted driving. In fact, the National Transportation Safety Board is working to make cellphone use from talking hands-free with a headset to texting illegal in all 50 U.S. states. Although each state can make its own laws on the issue, the recommendation from NTSB is expected to hold a lot of weight.

The latest findings from the NHTSA study indicate that 3,000 people were killed in car accidents in 2010 due to distracted drivers. Although the study classified distractions as talking and changing the radio to using a mobile device, it noted that reading or writing texts increases the chances of an accident by 2,300%.

The NHTSA also said that drivers who use mobile devices in any capacity are four times more likely to have an accident and injure themselves or others. Car accidents are the leading cause of death for teens in the U.S., and 16% of young drivers involved in fatal accidents were driving distracted.

“Using a cell phone while driving is the equivalent of having a blood alcohol concentration level of .08%, the legal limit in most states,” the NHTSA said in a statement. “Using a cell phone can reduce the brain activity associated with driving by 37%.”

In July, a study from the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) highlighted the impact that cellphones and other gadgets can have on car crashes and found that as many as 25% of U.S. car crashes are associated with drivers distracted by tech devices.
http://mashable.com/2011/12/19/driving-and-texting





New iPhone? No Thanks, Say Cash-Conscious Europeans
Tarmo Virki

Weakening economies and falling prices of rival smartphones are hurting sales of Apple iPhones across Europe, data from research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech showed on Thursday.

The October roll-out of Apple's iPhone 4S boosted its position in Britain and United States, but the new phones failed to excite interest in continental Europe, where Apple's share of the fast-growing smartphone market slipped.

The smartphone industry is dominated by Google, which has stormed the market with its free Android platform.

"In Great Britain, the U.S. and Australia, Apple's new iPhone continues to fly off the shelf in the run-up to Christmas. However, this trend is far from universal," said Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director.

Apple's market share in the 12 weeks to end-November rose to 36 percent in the United States from 25 percent a year earlier and in Britain to 31 percent from 21 percent, Kantar said.

However, in France its share slipped to 20 percent from 29 percent and in Germany to 22 percent from 27 percent. Similar drops were seen in Italy and Spain.

"The French market is showing increasing signs of price sensitivity," Sunnebo said.

In part, the European sales of the expensive Apple model were hit by weakening economies across the continent.

Euro zone GDP grew just 0.2 percent in the third quarter and most economists expect it to contract in the fourth and also in the first three months of next year, sending the bloc back into recession after its two-year recovery from the worst global financial crisis since the 1930s.

The euro zone's own crisis with government debt has scared off investment and eaten into business and consumer confidence, particularly since August when investors intensified their scrutiny of the bloc's problems.

European consumers are keeping a lid on their expenses as government spending cuts and job losses deprive companies of demand for goods and crush exports.

Google had market shares of between 46 and 61 percent in all markets. Cellphone makers like Samsung Electronics, Sony Ericsson, LG Ericsson and Motorola Mobility all use its Android platform in their phones.

"In Germany, Android achieved a dominant 61 percent share of smartphone sales in the latest 12 weeks, with the Samsung Galaxy S II the top selling handset," Sunnebo said.

(Reporting By Tarmo Virki; Editing by Jodie Ginsberg)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7BL0FU20111222





Do You Really Need a Smart Phone?
Robin Miller

My phone is as stupid as a phone can be, but you can drop it or get it wet and it will still work. My cellular cost per month is about $4, on average. My wife’s LG phone is sort of half-bright, you might say. Her plan costs $25 per month (now $35 for new users) for unlimited data use and five hours (300 minutes) of talk time. Maybe one day we’ll need smarter phones, but for now these are fine.

I have almost certainly had a cellular phone longer than you have. I signed up for one shortly after Cellular One started offering service in the Baltimore/Washington metro area in 1984. At the time, Cell 1 was the only cellular service in the U.S., and they acted like it was a big privilege for you to pay $2000 for a phone and up to $1 per minute for airtime.

Naturally, the second there was competition, everyone with one fourth of a brain took their business elsewhere. The thing was, once I had a cell phone, I couldn’t get along without one, because the reason I got one was that I went into the limousine business, and as an independent I didn’t have a central dispatcher and a radio system. Disgustingly high though early cell phone charges were, they were still better than being a hired driver for a limo or cab company, most of which were run by people who thought greed was not only good, but the only good reason for living.

So, while Lilli Von Schtupp may be tired of love,I’m tired of cellular phones. I don’t need a GPS, since I don’t get lost, and I really don’t want to read Web pages or watch movies on a phone. I have a 24″ monitor at home. And a 21″ one. And a 17″ one. And a 42″ HDTV in the living room. And a 15″ laptop I can cart around with me So why should I squint at a tiny little screen when, before long, I’ll either be home or someplace I can whip out my laptop?

My wife’s phone may look like a smart phone, but it’s not one. It has a keyboard and is fine for text messaging and email, which are her most common uses for it. Want to take pictures? Sure. It’ll do that, and a little video, too. Want to load a Web page? This is supposedly a 3G phone, but it seems more like .3G to me. And it plays YouTube videos at about 5 frames per second, i.e. really choppy. But the sound is clear, and if you stick a decent-sized micro-SD card in it, you can watch a movie or two or carry a week’s worth of music.

I don’t know about you, but that’s smart enough for my wife. And when I eventually get a new phone, since mine is more than a few years old and kind of bashed up, I’ll get something along the same lines.

Who really needs an iRobot phone?

I write articles and email and things like that, so I carry a laptop with a full-sized keyboard. I make videos, so I carry a broadcast-quality HD camcorder and microphones. Sometimes I need to talk with someone while I’m not in my office. That’s what my cellular phone is for.

Do you catch my meaning? Do you get my drift? I use my cell phone to talk. In an emergency, like when evil Dr. Smegma throws me in a cell and is listening to me but can’t see me, I might send a “HELP!” message. Or tweet something like, “Dr. Smegma has captured me. How droll!”

I keep cell phone conversations short, and I have no trouble hanging up or not answering if I’m driving in traffic or doing something else that requires my full attention. And a lot of the time I’m away from home I’m shooting video or in an F2F conversation or doing something else that is more important to me than a phone call.

I have voice mail and caller ID on both my home/office and cell phones. If I can’t get to the phone when you call, leave a message. If you’re a legitimate caller, don’t worry. I’ll call you back before long. And I’ll probably get your voice mail.

Phone tag!

But we’ll get together sooner or later. Really.

Here’s a funny thing I learned about phones maybe 15 years ago: if I miss a call, the world does not end.

Every phone I’ve bought since that revelation has been equipped with an option called an “off” switch. This amazing gadget keeps people from bothering you when you’re on the toilet or working on your car or shooting video. Pure magic. And you know what? No call I have missed has had a noticeable impact on my income or quality of life.

Hard to believe, isn’t it?

So now I pay 10 cents a minute for cell phone calls. I spend, on average, around $4 per month with BoostMobile. My phone is so stupid that I understand what just about all its buttons and settings do.

I’m a happy man — at least when it comes to phones. And if you get a stupid phone, maybe you’ll be happy, too.
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarge...a-smart-phone/





2012 Will Be the Year of the Android Tablet

In Vegas in January the industry will take to go all in with tablets running Android 4 ("Ice Cream Sandwich"). Quality and features will go up, prices will go down.
Larry Seltzer

At the end of 2011 the tablet market is overwhelmingly an iPad market. There are some Android tablets, but they're mostly either highly customized like the Amazon Fire or Barnes and Noble Nook Color, or cheap pieces of garbage without even a capacitive display. The Samsung Galaxy Tab is one clear exception to the rule.

This will all change in 2012. At CES in Las Vegas the second week of January I expect to be able to walk from one side of the Las Vegas Convention Center to the other stepping only on Android tablets. The place will be full of them.

The reason is Android 4.0, a.k.a. Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), which is out in source code from Google and in hacked ROM form from CyanogenMod. Before too long we'll start seeing phones and tablets shipping with real, supported versions of it. It's an impressive piece of software which establishes a very high baseline for the next generation of Android devices.

By the end of the year Apple's enormous market share advantage will be in a precipitous dwindle. They'll still be selling a lot of iPads and who knows how compelling the iPad 3 will be, but consumers and businesses will have many reasonable alternatives. The biggest advantage for Android over iOS is that there is only one company making iOS phones and tablets, and they don't make a lot of models. There are many companies making Android devices and the magic of competition will force them to drive prices down and quality up.

The Novo7, an Android 4.0 tablet based on the MIPS JZ4770 processor. It retails for under $100.

We've been seeing it all year in the smart phone market. All the really hot hardware goes into Android phones. Most of the rapid advancement goes in it too. This is partly because of competition from hardware companies and partly from Android being an open source project.

If there's a dark side to the open Android model it's security. Without a bouncer at the door, like Apple with iOS, anyone can and does get into the party. It's not a real-world problem yet for Android users, at least those with a little horse sense, but clearly criminals are trying to establish a presence in the Android world.

I think that when it all shakes out businesses will be able to keep threats under control for devices they manage. It's certainly easier to write security software for Android than for iOS where Apple may not even let you write it, and things are not so bad on iOS.

The other part of this issue that makes me bullish on Android is more related to phones. I don't have numbers, but carriers must make more money on Android phones than on iPhones. They therefore have a greater incentive to push Android than Apple. Some of this issue probably spills over to the tablet market in the sense that tablet companies will be able to undercut Apple and allow greater margins for retailers, but it's not exactly the same. With phones, the carriers pretty much dictate the design and features of the phone to the manufacturer. Except with Apple, which is another reason carriers like Android.

By this time in 2012 you should not be surprised to see the tablet market at least 1/3 Android, maybe more. There's also the possibility that Windows 8 and tablets running it will be available at that time. It's all good for you, the buyer.
http://www.informationweek.com/byte/...lets/232301038





Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet Both Get 'Upgraded' With Reduced Functionality
Peter Smith

It often happens that when two similar products are competing in the industry, fans will band together to promote their favorite while doing whatever they can to denigrate the other product. This isn't a new phenomenon. As a kid I remember my uncles arguing over Ford vs Chevrolet with the same intensity that I hear in iOS vs Android battles today.

The Amazon Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet seem like ideal products to build fanboy camps around. They're priced within $50 of each other and are branded products of retailers who've been competing for years.

So yesterday when I heard that Amazon was rolling out the Kindle Fire 6.2.1 update and that it killed root access, I was waiting for the Nook contingent to start jeering. And then I heard that Banes and Noble was rolling out an update for the Nook Tablet that killed side-loading apps from stores other than the official Barnes and Noble app store. I guess when both sides lose it kind of sucks the fun out of flamewars.

So let's look at these two updates more carefully.

This is the Fire update that Amazon promised last week. It's supposed to improve performance of the Silk browser and allow you to customize (or at least remove items from) the carousel of 'recently used things' that dominates the Fire's homescreen. You can also password protect Wi-Fi access, which I assume is the start of giving the Fire some kind of parental controls.

That carousel change is very welcome in our household; we've got two Kindle Fire's attached to a single Amazon account, and what appears in the carousel is synced between devices. So every time the other half reads one of her urban vampire romance novels (or whatever they're called) it shows up in the carousel on my Fire.

The bad news is that if your Fire is rooted, the update will unroot it, at least until the hackers work out a way to re-root. I'm guessing that'll take 48 hours or so.

What's most disappointing about this update is that well before the launch of the Fire, Amazon's Jon Jenkins said that users were free to root the Kindle Fire and that Amazon wouldn't actively try to stop such behavior. I guess they've had a change of heart.

On to the Nook. The official purpose of the new firmware update, 1.4.1, is that it provides minor enhancements based on early customer feedback according to Barnes & Noble. But according to the writer of the Ebook Reader blog those enhancements seem to be removing root access and the ability to sideload apps from Android Market and Amazon's Appstore. Existing apps will continue to work, but you won't be able to sideload any new apps.

XDA-developers has a thread on how to block this update.

So there you have it, a bit of coal in the stockings of both Kindle Fire fans and Nook Tablet enthusiasts. Guess you people were Naughty this year. Neither side wins this round...at least not until those brilliant gadget hackers work their magic and bring back the functionality that Amazon and Barnes & Noble are striving to take away.
http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wirele...-functionality





Kindle Fire Display Doesn’t Stand Up To Nook, iPad 2 In Tests
Devin Coldewey

You probably know that not all LCDs are created equal: at a given size, you can have different resolutions, lighting methods, and display-driving technologies. Apple has led the way in this regard, generally shelling out in its products for the best options available, while cheaper brands tend to take a bit off the price tag by going with a cheaper or smaller display. That’s certainly the case with the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, both of which are aimed at a lower price point and must make sacrifices to reach it.

But an examination by DisplayMate indicates that Amazon might have cut corners just a little too much, or perhaps rushed the Fire to market without too much thought about image quality.

It’s nothing truly problematic, it should be said right away, and DisplayMate notes that it’s still a good display, but it has a couple serious problems that, objectively speaking, put it on a lower tier than the competition.

The “anti-reflective treatment” on the Fire appears to have backfired, as the display had the highest reflectance of any tablet they’d tested. Reflected ambient light (as in a bright room) and directed light (as from overhead lights) was significantly higher than the iPad, and more than twice as high as the Nooks, which by the by had extremely low reflectance, making it good for reading in diverse lighting situations. The reflectance also caused a reduction in effective contrast, which is bad news for reading print.

The Fire also uses an outdated gallery app that doesn’t use the full 24 bits of color depth of which the display is capable, resulting in banding and apparently a washed-out look that really has no place on a premium device.

The second problem may be fixed in a software update (it’s a bit like the problem Nexus Ones had back in the day), but the poor coating or material that’s resulting in the high reflectance likely isn’t going anywhere (unless this was an early batch problem). In many ways the Fire is the equal of the Nook and the iPad 2 displays, but all other things being equal, it’s just not as good. If possible, do a visual comparison in person to see if the difference is significant to you, and of course if you find the display is not up to your standards, you should feel perfectly justified in returning it. But if it looks good to you, it looks good, and there’s no point getting caught up in a few percentage points of difference here and there.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/20/kin...ad-2-in-tests/





Yo Amazon: Please Don’t Hijack the Web On Kindle Fire
Kevin C. Tofel

Amazon’s Kindle Fire, arguably considered a successful 7-inch tablet, is locked down more than people might think. When trying to browse the Google Android Market website in the Fire’s web browser, the device instead opens up Amazon’s Kindle Fire application store. Since the Fire doesn’t officially have access to the Android Market, I can understand the device highlighting its own app store. But to specifically hijack a browser URL and redirect it is disturbing and sets an ugly precedent.

This specific situation isn’t new; it was first reported on Reddit back on Nov. 22, not long after the Kindle Fire began shipping. I only just heard about it this weekend via TheVerge and I tested our Kindle Fire to verify the reports. The browser does redirect any Android Market requests to the Kindle app store; even if you turn off the accelerated browsing feature that routes traffic through Amazon’s servers. That means this hijacking isn’t done via the cloud, but instead is hard-coded into every Kindle Fire. TheVerge reports that a file called MarketIntentProxy.apk is the culprit here.
Who owns “your” mobile device?

I have several concerns here. First is the idea of limiting what a consumer can or can’t do on a device that they’ve purchased. I’ve seen this situation before with smartphones and tablets sold through carriers. Some examples include the blocking or removal of tethering applications and more recently, Verizon’s insistence not to have Google Wallet installed on its Galaxy Nexus model.

To some this is a grey area because the operator has an asset to protect — its network — and also because of the hardware subsidy model. If there’s a mobile application that is pinging servers too much, carriers should have recourse and processes to let the offending app maker know, fix the problem or be pulled from an app store. This exact scenario recently happened with YouMail and T-Mobile, for example. In terms of subsidized hardware, when does a consumer actually “own” their device? Carriers can pay for some of the costs, so do they “own” the device as well over the life of a network contract and does that allow them to have control?

Regardless of where your opinion lies on these two particular angles, these arguments shouldn’t apply to the Kindle Fire. Why? Because even though Amazon is reportedly selling the Fire at a small loss, consumers are paying the full price for the hardware. There’s no subsidy for Amazon to pay in order to get people to buy or use a Kindle Fire. And with no subsidy, there’s no contract for network service.

In fact, the Kindle Fire can’t even use a mobile broadband network because it only has a Wi-Fi radio. So consumers are buying the device outright and supplying or finding their own network connection. I’d say the owner should have full control over their device in this situation, with the understanding that technical support is limited or not provided when using the device outside of its intended use.
Redirecting specific web requests is bad karma

My second concern is: where does it end? By routing a specific web request away from the intended site on the Internet, Amazon has set a dangerous precedent here. We collectively debate open vs. closed ecosystems, net neutrality and other related themes, but if I had to pick one app to consider “sacred” in these discussions it would be the browser. That’s not the case for this particular web request on a Kindle Fire and once millions of these are in consumer hands, who or what could stop Amazon from adding other URLs to a list of redirects?

You’d think a Kindle Fire owner could simply install a third-party browser — Dolphin Browser HD on a Fire can access Google’s web-based Market, for example — but guess what: There are no third-party browsers in the Kindle AppStore save for Maxthon. But the point here is that the browser is our window to the web and that window should not have smears or streaks obscuring our view because a company says so.

I understand that Amazon sells the Fire in order to sell apps, movies, TV shows, magazines, books and physical goods. And the company built its tablet upon Google’s open source Android platform. I think that was a smart strategy.

But Amazon’s tablet relies heavily on Google’s platform; it’s not like the Fire is a standalone platform of its own because standard Android apps can and do run on the device. You simply have to know how to access them and install them. Most people don’t, so I don’t think Amazon should worry. And blocking one of the easiest ways to get standard Amazon apps on the Fire — via the Android Market website — isn’t a long term answer because the company could suffer through the tag of “web censorship.”

Perhaps I’m being too hard on Amazon here, since many apps require hardware such as a GPS or microphone, which the Kindle Fire doesn’t have. But when I think about this situation in a different light, it doesn’t sound like I am. For instance, if you decided to purchase a new car and after you bought it, the dealership told you that it can only be driven on certain roadways, how would you feel? Maybe that’s too extreme of an example, but all I know is this: I want to ride in whatever lane of the information superhighway in my browser that I see fit.
http://gigaom.com/mobile/yo-amazon-p...n-kindle-fire/





Bell To Stop Internet Throttling

Bell internet customers will no longer have their file sharing uploads and downloads deliberately slowed down.
Michael Bolen

Bell Canada and Bell Aliant will stop using equipment to selectively slow down file sharing applications on their networks starting March 1, the companies said in a letter to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission on Monday.

That will affect both the companies' own retail internet customers and the customers of independent internet service providers who rent wholesale access to Bell's network in order to connect directly with customers' homes.

Bell and Bell Aliant have been selectively slowing down or throttling peer-to-peer file sharing applications of both its retail and wholesale customers between 4:30 p.m. and 2 a.m. – considered peak times when overall internet traffic is highest – since 2008. They said peer-to-peer traffic is targeted because it is not as time sensitive as other applications, such as video or voice calling.

However, "with the increasing popularity of streamed video and other traffic, P2P file-sharing, as a proportion of total traffic, has been diminishing," said a letter signed by Denis E. Henry, Bell Aliant's vice-president of regulatory, government affairs and public law and Philippe Gauvin, counsel for Bell Canada on regulatory law and policy.

The letter, addressed to Chris Seidl, the CRTC's executive director of telecommunications, added that Bell has made extensive investments in additional network capacity.

The companies have also examined the need for traffic shaping measures in light of the CRTC's new pricing scheme for wholesale internet service, the letter said. The new scheme set by the CRTC in November allows large network providers such as Bell to charge independent ISPs for network access based on either a flat rate, as before, or on the network capacity needed to support a given number of users. Bell said the latter scheme amounts to an economic incentive for managing internet traffic, reducing the need for technical internet traffic management measures.

The letter noted that while Bell isn't required to provide advance notification of changes to a less restrictive method of internet traffic management, it is providing the notice as a courtesy to the CRTC and its wholesale customers. It noted that the change could affect the amount of capacity that independent internet providers need to rent.

Bell had already notified its wholesale customers in October that it was scaling back the throttling of file sharing traffic. Starting in November, it said at the time, it would no longer use equipment to slow down file sharing traffic on newer parts of its network. In the future, it added, it may move customers to parts of the network where throttling isn't applied.

Rogers Faces Competitive Pressure

Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa law professor with a special interest in the regulation of the internet, believes "Bell had little choice" but to end its traffic shaping, given CRTC rules that make it clear the regulator favours network investment and economic means to manage internet traffic.

The regulator had issued new guidelines in September for resolving customer complaints about throttling, including timelines for action by internet service providers. It said ISPs could face a third-party audit or even a public hearing if they did not comply.

"The big question is now how much longer Rogers will maintain its throttling practices," Geist wrote in a blog post Tuesday, noting that most other large Canadian ISPs have already abandoned the practice.

Rogers's throttling practices are currently under investigation by the CRTC's enforcement branch following complaints from Canadian gamers. The gamers allege that equipment that is supposed to target peer-to-peer file sharing traffic inadvertently slows down online games. Rogers has admitted that could happen under certain circumstances.

Lindsey Pinto, spokeswoman for Open Media, a Vancouver-based group that is backing the gamers' complaint and advocates for an open internet, said Canadians have expressed "time and again" that they want access to internet service that doesn't discriminate against certain types of content or applications.

She thinks Bell's decision to give those customers what they want will put pressure on competitors like Rogers.

"Bell is still overcharging customers quite a bit ... so speed isn't the only thing and access to content isn't the only thing," she said. "But this is a step forward.... And we're interested to see how other ISPs follow suit."

Tom Copeland, chair of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, which represents a group of independent ISPs, said Bell's move is good for such ISPs because it will allow them to manage and differentiate their own services as they see fit: "They're not being impacted by the management practices of Bell."
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/12...n_1160416.html





Speech Synthesizer Could ‘Resurrect’ Dead Singers
Rachel Kaufman

Researchers are re-creating the voice of late singer Hitoshi Ueki.

In a few years, you could be listening to an album of new songs featuring a duet between Elvis and Kurt Cobain. No, the two never cut a record together, but engineers and computer programmers are getting closer to being able to “resurrect” any singer’s voice for use in synthesized songs.

Yamaha’s been developing voice synthesizers for years — think Mac’s text-to-speech meets AutoTune — under the brand name Vocaloid. But to build a Vocaloid “voice library,” a singer typically had to sing every possible syllable, one at a time, in the target language. A computer later would synthesize the fragments into songs.

But now the Vocaloid team has announced that it has succeeded in building a library based on the voice of someone who couldn’t participate in the painstaking process: Hitoshi Ueki, a popular Japanese vocalist who died in 2007. The initial results were revealed on a Japanese video-streaming site earlier this year.

“As far as I know, many viewers were satisfied with the result, and so am I,” said Yamaha researcher Hideki Kenmochi in an e-mail to Wired.com. “It really sounds like him, because the creator [the programmer in charge of the voice library] did a good job.”

If perfected, the technology could result in some very uncanny entertainment, with singers, actors and others whose voices have been extensively recorded seeming to speak from beyond the grave. The “resurrected” voice could be employed anywhere computerized speech is heard, from automated customer service to GPS devices (though Yamaha’s mum on where its proof-of-concept technology will end up).

Kenmochi and his team started their ongoing research on Ueki-loid, as the software’s informally called, last year. They built a computer that could “listen” to isolated vocal tracks from several songs by Ueki and pick out the individual syllables. From there, it will be relatively simple to use the library to build new tracks.

The technology isn’t perfect. Listening to a song created by an English-language Vocaloid, it’s often clear that the voice was made by a computer — but there are moments when it’s possible to forget. This near-perfection is known as the “uncanny valley” in English, and “the valley of death” in Japanese, according to Jordi Bonada Sanjaume, part of the music technology team that helped develop the original Vocaloid, at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain.

“When you pretend the synthesis sounds like a real person, any small artifact or unnatural subtle sound will make the whole listening experience frustrating, emphasizing that it sounds synthetic,” Sanjaume said in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Otherwise, if you ’sell’ it as a synthesizer, all those small artifacts or unnatural sounds can be at some point totally ignored during the listening experience, or even wanted and pleasing.”

Kenmochi agreed. “Especially in Japan, Vocaloid is not regarded as a substitute for human singing, but a kind of new musical instrument,” he said.

The software can’t mimic a singer’s delivery yet (think whispers, screams or grunts), but Kenmochi told Wired.com that his team is now studying how to tackle that particular problem. They presented initial results last year, “but it will take some years to put into practical use,” he said.

Since the English language has many more possible sound combinations than Japanese, it may take longer before “Elvis-loid” is available to the public, but Kenmochi said it will certainly be possible.

The question remains, however, whether that would be desirable. Almost as soon as computers gained the capability to mix and mash up footage, Dirt Devil licensed Fred Astaire clips in order to make him dance with a vacuum cleaner, an advertisement some called one of the worst Super Bowl ads of all time. It’s probably a given that if this technology were expanded commercially, someone would get John Lennon’s voice to endorse cameras, ice cream or Huggies.

There’s also the creep factor.

“I wonder if some people might feel that the singer’s spirit has not been resurrected, but only her/his voice, and that they are listening to some kind of zombie,” Bonada said. “It may be very natural-sounding, but as creepy as a humanlike android might be.”

For the time being, those questions are academic: No other singers have been “brought back” via the Vocaloid technology, and the entire Ueki-loid library won’t be released to the public. That said, Kenmochi’s group plans to release an album as a showcase of their technology, starring Ueki-loid, sometime in the future.
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/...thesizer/all/1





Seeing Terror Risk, U.S. Asks Journals to Cut Flu Study Facts
Denise Grady and William J. Broad

For the first time ever, a government advisory board is asking scientific journals not to publish details of certain biomedical experiments, for fear that the information could be used by terrorists to create deadly viruses and touch off epidemics.

In the experiments, conducted in the United States and the Netherlands, scientists created a highly transmissible form of a deadly flu virus that does not normally spread from person to person. It was an ominous step, because easy transmission can lead the virus to spread all over the world. The work was done in ferrets, which are considered a good model for predicting what flu viruses will do in people.

The virus, A(H5N1), causes bird flu, which rarely infects people but has an extraordinarily high death rate when it does. Since the virus was first detected in 1997, about 600 people have contracted it, and more than half have died. Nearly all have caught it from birds, and most cases have been in Asia. Scientists have watched the virus, worrying that if it developed the ability to spread easily from person to person, it could create one of the deadliest pandemics ever.

A government advisory panel, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, overseen by the National Institutes of Health, has asked two journals, Science and Nature, to keep certain details out of reports that they intend to publish on the research. The panel said conclusions should be published, but not “experimental details and mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.”

The panel cannot force the journals to censor their articles, but the editor of Science, Bruce Alberts, said the journal was taking the recommendations seriously and would probably withhold some information — but only if the government creates a system to provide the missing information to legitimate scientists worldwide who need it.

The journals, the panel, researchers and government officials have been grappling with the findings for several months. The Dutch researchers presented their work at a virology conference in Malta in September.

Scientists and journal editors are generally adamant about protecting the free flow of ideas and information, and ready to fight anything that hints at censorship.

“I wouldn’t call this censorship,” Dr. Alberts said. “This is trying to avoid inappropriate censorship. It’s the scientific community trying to step out front and be responsible.”

He said there was legitimate cause for the concern about the researchers’ techniques falling into the wrong hands.

“This finding shows it’s much easier to evolve this virus to an extremely dangerous state where it can be transmitted in aerosols than anybody had recognized,” he said. Transmission by aerosols means the virus can be spread through the air via coughing or sneezing.

Ever since the tightening of security after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, scientists have worried that a scientific development would pit the need for safety against the need to share information. Now, it seems, that day has come.

“It’s a precedent-setting moment, and we need to be careful about the precedent we set,” Dr. Alberts said.

Both studies of the virus — one at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and the other at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — were paid for by the National Institutes of Health. The idea behind the research was to try to find out what genetic changes might make the virus easier to transmit. That way, scientists would know how to identify changes in the naturally occurring virus that might be warning signals that it was developing pandemic potential. It was also hoped that the research might lead to better treatments.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the research addressed important public health questions, but added, “I’m sure there will be some people who say these experiments never should have been done.”

Dr. Fauci said staff members at the institutes followed the results of the research and flagged it as something that the biosecurity panel should evaluate.

The lead researcher at the Erasmus center, Ron Fouchier, did not respond to requests for an interview. The center issued a statement saying that researchers there had reservations about the panel’s recommendation, but would observe it.

The Wisconsin researcher, Yoshihiro Kawaoka, was out of the country and “not responding to queries,” according to a spokesman for the university. But the school said its researchers would “respect” the panel’s recommendations.

David R. Franz, a biologist who formerly headed the Army defensive biological lab at Fort Detrick, Md., is on the board and said its decision to intervene, made in the fall, was quite reasonable.

“My concern is that we don’t give amateurs — or terrorists — information that might let them do something that could really cause a lot a harm,” he said in an interview.

“It’s a wake-up call,” Dr. Franz added. “We need to make sure that our best and most responsible scientists have the information they need to prepare us for whatever we might face.”

Amy Patterson, director of the office of biotechnology activities at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Md., said the recommendations were a first.

“The board in the past has reviewed manuscripts but never before concluded that communications should be restricted in any way,” she said in a telephone interview. “These two bodies of work stress the importance of public health preparedness to monitor this virus.”

Ronald M. Atlas, a microbiologist at the University of Louisville and past president of the American Society for Microbiology, who has advised the federal government on issues of germ terrorism, said the hard part of the recommendations would be creating a way to move forward in the research with a restricted set of responsible scientists.

He said that if researchers had a better understanding of how the virus works, they could develop better ways to treat and prevent illness. “That’s why the research is done,” he said.

The government, Dr. Atlas added, “is going to struggle with how to get the information out to the right people and still have a barrier” to wide sharing and inadvertently aiding a terrorist. “That’s going to be hard.”

Given that some of the information has already been presented openly at scientific meetings, and that articles about it have been sent out to other researchers for review, experts acknowledged that it may not be possible to keep a lid on the potentially dangerous details.

“But I think there will be a culture of responsibility here,” Dr. Fauci said. “At least I hope there will.”

The establishment of the board grew out of widespread fears stemming from the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States and the ensuing strikes with deadly anthrax germs that killed or sickened 22 Americans.

The Bush administration called for wide controls on biological information that could potentially help terrorists. And the scientific community firmly resisted, arguing that the best defenses came with the open flow of information.

In 2002, Dr. Atlas, then the president-elect of the American Society for Microbiology, objected publicly to “anything that smacked of censorship.”

The federal board was established in 2004 as a compromise and is strictly advisory. It has 25 voting members appointed by the secretary of health and human services, and has 18 ex officio members from other federal agencies.

Federal officials said Tuesday that the board has discussed information controls on only three or four occasions. The first centered on the genetic sequencing of the H1N1 virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic, in which up to 100 million people died, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.

“We chose to recommend publication without any modifications,” Dr. Franz, the former head of the Army lab, recalled. “The more our good scientists know about problems, the better prepared they are to fix them.”

This fall, federal officials said, the board wrestled with the content of H5N1 papers to Science and Nature, and in late November contacted the journals about its recommendation to restrict information on the methods that the scientists used to modify the deadly virus.

“The ability of this virus to cross species lines in this manner has not previously been appreciated,” said Dr. Patterson of the National Institutes of Health. “Everyone involved in this matter wants to do the proper thing.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/h...-on-virus.html





Security in Flu Study Was Paramount, Scientist Says
Doreen Carvajal

The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, concerned about bioterrorism and a worldwide pandemic, has for the first time ever urged scientific journals to keep details out of reports that they intend to publish on a highly transmissible form of the bird flu called A(H5N1), which has a high death rate in people. Working with ferrets, researchers on the virus at two medical centers — Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison — are investigating genetic changes that may make the virus more easily transmittable to people. Doreen Carvajal spoke with Ron A. M. Fouchier, the lead researcher at the Erasmus Center. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows.

Q. What was your reaction to efforts to censor the research?

A. The draft recommendations reached us at the end of November, and since that time we have been working with the journals and the international organizations to figure out a way to deal with it, because this is an unprecedented issue in science.

In principle, we of course understand the statement by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity and the United States government. This is dual-use research, meaning research that can be used for good and bad purposes.

The N.S.A.B.B. advice is that we can share this in a restricted form.

We would be perfectly happy if this could be executed, but we have some doubts. We have made a list of experts that we could share this with, and that list adds up to well over 100 organizations around the globe, and probably 1,000 experts. As soon as you share information with more than 10 people, the information will be on the street. And so we have serious doubts whether this advice can be followed, strictly speaking.

Q. So what is the solution?

A. This is very important research. It raises a number of important issues that need to be shared with the scientific community. And because we cannot keep this confidential with such a large group. I think the only solution is to publish in detail.

Q. How do you sum up the most vital information that should be shared?

A. There are three aspects that need to be shared.

The first part of the work can be shared without detail. The message is that H5N1 can go airborne between mammals. Of course, we have also showed how this virus can go airborne, and which mutations cause this virus to go airborne. And those mutations, the info of those mutations, need to come in the hands of people who are doing research — for instance, the people who are doing surveillance in countries affected by H5N1. If those mutations would be detected in the field, then those countries affected should act very aggressively to stamp out the outbreaks, to protect the world.

So if we can stamp this virus out before it actually emerges, then we prevent a pandemic. And I think that is what we all want.

But even if we would not be able to prevent a pandemic — and let’s assume that there is a very small chance that the virus will emerge in nature — then our last resource would be drugs and vaccines.

Now, drugs and vaccines are normally evaluated with bird flu viruses that are not adapted to mammals. Now the questions are whether those vaccines are effective against the mammal-adapted virus. And so by doing this research, we are able to get ahead of this virus emerging in the field to test whether our last resource would be functional.

So the three things are: one is the simple fact that it can go airborne. That means that all the advice from the scientific community to outbreak countries now can be more unanimous that H5N1 is a very big risk to human health. The second thing is surveillance, and the third thing is preparation by evaluating vaccines and antivirals.

Q. What were the precautions that you took, if any, in the course of your research to guard against terrorism?

A. This experiment was not designed overnight. We started planning for these experiments 10 years ago, consulting with experts nationally and internationally about how to do this safely. We built special facilities to protect people against the virus and the virus against the people.

Q. What was special about your facilities, in the Netherlands?

A. The biosafety information can be found on our Web site. The biosecurity, I cannot release any information.

Q. Over that period, were there any safety issues?

A. Everything was smooth. There were layers upon layers upon layers of biosecurity measures. The design of this type of facility was such that it would be very unlikely for all barriers to break at the same time.

Q. How did you conduct the research?

A. I cannot disclose the methods, because the methods are supposed to be a recipe for bioterrorism.

We mutated the virus and then performed a natural selection for additional mutations. We were testing on ferrets. We designed the experiment over the course of 10 years. We have been doing hands-on work on the experiments for the last two years, testing on dozens of ferrets.

Q. Is the research finished?

A. We are continuing the work. We need to evaluate vaccines, and we need to evaluate antiviral drugs and how well they work against this virus. We also need to have a more general understanding of whether this virus could acquire abilities of airborne transmission in other ways.

Q. Have you seen any sign that government authorities or anyone else was monitoring you because of concerns about terrorism?

A. I am sure I am being monitored by many governments. But also the usual states, not only the rogue countries. If they are monitoring me, they are doing a good job of staying out of my sight.

Q. How easy is it to recreate this virus?

A. It is not very easy. You need a very sophisticated specialist team and sophisticated facilities to do this. And in our opinion, nature is the biggest bioterrorist. There are many pathogens in nature that you could get your hands on very easily, and if you released those in the human population, we would be in trouble.

And therefore we think that if bioterror or biowarfare would be a problem, there are so many easy ways of doing it that nobody would take this H5N1 virus and do this very difficult thing to achieve it.

You could not do this work in your garage if you are a terrorist organization. But what you can do is get viruses out of the wild and grow them in your garage. There are terrorist opportunities that are much, much easier than to genetically modify H5N1 bird flu virus that are probably much more effective.

Q. How difficult would it be to recreate it?

A. If we get this in the hands of labs that can already do it — such as the C.D.C. or N.I.H. laboratories — they would be able to repeat our work in a matter of weeks. But for rogue countries or terrorist groups, this would take years of work.

Q. So why such concern — aren’t you offering information that will protect countries?

A. That’s a question you should address to the advisory board. That’s our opinion, and we think this work should have been published in detail.

Q. What is your next step?

A. We will respect this advice, because this is the consensus for now. And we will work toward publishing a manuscript without the details, and we will wait on how the N.S.A.B.B. and the United States government envisages sharing the information in a classified way. As I said, we have doubts this is possible.

Q. Did you consider publishing anyway?

A. Yes, we could even launch it on our own Web site. We could do that. Of course, that’s not the smart way to move. There is an intense debate in our field, and it would be silly for us to act on our own on this. It’s better to have this discussion in the scientific and health community and see where it goes. If everybody agrees that this is the way to go, then we will respect that.

Q. What was the reaction from colleagues?

A. The only people who want to hold back are the biosecurity experts. They show zero tolerance to risk. The public health specialists do not have this zero tolerance. I have not spoken to a single public health specialist who was against publication. So we are going to see an interesting debate over the next few weeks between biosecurity experts and public health experts who think this information should be in the public domain.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/h...tist-says.html





FBI Says Activists Who Investigate Factory Farms Can Be Prosecuted as Terrorists
Will Potter

This recent investigation of a McDonald's egg supplier is an example of the type of activism the FBI calls terrorism.

The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force has kept files on activists who expose animal welfare abuses on factory farms and recommended prosecuting them as terrorists, according to a new document uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act.

This new information comes as the Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a lawsuit challenging the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) as unconstitutional because its vague wording has had a chilling effect on political activism. This document adds to the evidence demonstrating that the AETA goes far beyond property destruction, as its supporters claim.

The 2003 FBI file details the work of several animal rights activists who used undercover investigation to document repeated animal welfare violations. The FBI special agent who authored the report said they “illegally entered buildings owned by [redacted] Farm… and videotaped conditions of animals.”

The animal activists caused “economic loss” to businesses, the FBI says. And they also openly rescued several animals from the abusive conditions. This was not done covertly in the style of underground groups like the Animal Liberation Front — it was an act of non-violent civil disobedience and, as the FBI agent notes, the activists distributed press releases and conducted media interviews taking responsibility for their actions.

Based on these acts — trespassing in order to photograph and videotape abuses on factory farms — the agent concludes there “is a reasonable indication” that the activists “have violated the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, 18 USC Section 43 (a).”

The file was uncovered through a FOIA request by Ryan Shapiro, who is one of the activists mentioned. The file is available for download here. [Please note that this document has additional redactions in order to protect the identities of the other activists, at their request.] Shapiro is now a doctoral candidate at MIT.

“It is deeply sobering to see one’s name in an FBI file proposing terrorism charges,” he said in an email. “It is even more sobering to realize the supposedly terroristic activities in question are merely exposing the horrific cruelty of factory farms, educating the public about what goes on behind those closed doors, and openly rescuing a few animals from one of those farms as an act of civil disobedience.”

When I testified before Congress against the AETA in 2006, one of the primary concerns I raised is that the law could be used to wrap up a wide range of activity that threatens corporate profits. Supporters of the AETA have repeatedly denied this, and said the law will only be used against people who do things like burn buildings.

So how do we explain that such a sweeping prosecution was being considered in 2003, under the law’s somewhat-narrower precursor?

One possibility is that FBI agents lack training, education, and oversight. They are spying on political activists without understanding or respecting the law.

Another explanation is that this document is no mistake, nor is it an isolated case. It is a reflection of a coordinated campaign to target animal rights activists who, as the FBI agent notes, cause “economic loss” to corporations.

At the state, federal, and international levels, corporations have orchestrated an attempt to silence political activists, and a key target has been undercover investigators. For example:

• An “Ag Gag” bill has been introduced in Florida to criminalize investigations. Its lead sponsor calls these investigations “terrorism.” Four similar attempts failed in other states this year.
• These state bills are similar to model “eco-terrorism” legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate front group.
• A recent EUROPOL report on international terrorism includes a section on undercover investigations by animal rights and environmental activists.
• 12 Spanish activists have been charged with terrorism for their investigations.
• Two activists in Finland faced similar charges.

The FBI makes clear that the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is not about protecting public safety; it is about protecting corporate profits. Corporations and the politicians who represent them have repeatedly lied to the American public about the scope of this legislation, and claimed that the law only targets underground groups like the Animal Liberation Front. The truth is that this terrorism law has been slowly, methodically expanded to include the tactics of national organizations like the Humane Society of the United States.

This document illustrates how the backlash against effective activism has progressed within the animal rights movement. However, if this type of legislation is not overturned, it will set a precedent for corporations to use this model against Occupy Wall Street and anyone else who threaten business as usual.
http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog...rism-act/5440/





WikiLeaks “Spyfiles” Reveal Covert Surveillance Industry

Earlier this month WikiLeaks launched its latest campaign, releasing hundreds of documents that reveal the extent of sophisticated surveillance technology that has been used by both oppressive rulers and Western democracies; the more than 287 files expose the work of roughly 160 companies operating in twenty-five countries and their concerted effort to market technology that allow governments or law enforcement agencies to track and monitor individuals

Earlier this month WikiLeaks launched its latest campaign, releasing hundreds of documents that reveal the extent of sophisticated surveillance technology that has been used by both oppressive rulers and Western democracies.

The more than 287 files expose the work of roughly 160 companies operating in twenty-five countries and their concerted effort to market technology that allow governments or law enforcement agencies to track and monitor individuals via their mobile phones, e-mail, and Internet browsing histories.

“Today we release over 287 files documenting the reality of the international mass surveillance industry — an industry which now sells equipment to dictators and democracies alike in order to intercept entire populations,” said Julian Assange during a press conference to unveil the documents.

Jacob Appelbaum, a former WikiLeaks spokesman and computer expert at the University of Washington, said the documents indicate a frightening change in government surveillance tactics and capabilities.

“These systems that are revealed in these documents show exactly the kind of systems that the Stasi (East Germany’s secret police) wished they could have built,” Appelbaum said. “These systems have been sold by Western companies to places for example like Syria, and Libya and Tunisia and Egypt. These systems are used to hunt people down and to murder.”

The files contain information on companies like Trovicor, a former subsidiary of Nokia Siemens Networks, which supplied the Bahraini government with interception technologies to track human rights activist Abdul Ghani al Khanjar. According to WikiLeaks, government interrogators showed him details from personal conversations before beating him during questioning last winter.

Meanwhile Amesys, a French firm, has come under fire for assisting former Libyan dictator Moamer Gadhafi spy on exiled opposition figures in Britain.

The company supplied Gadhafi’s regime with its Eagle system which allows intelligence agencies to intercept e-mails, Webmail, VOIP calls, instant messages, and search engine requests.

In the past, Gadhafi has been accused of harassing Libyans living in exile and even killing opposition leaders.

In defense of its actions, Amesys said Libya had not been under a trade embargo since 2003 and many other French firms had also done business with Gadhafi’s regime.

“Amesys delivered the Libyan authorities equipment and had no control over the use to which it was put,” the company said.

Security experts involved with the release of the spy documents say they indicate a covert industry that is entirely unregulated.

“Western governments cannot stand idly by while this technology is still being sold,” said Eric King, from the Privacy International campaign group.

According to King, in the past ten years the surveillance industry expanded beyond just Western government intelligence agencies like the NSA in the United States and the U.K.’s GCHQ to become a massive international business.
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire....lance-industry





More Predator Drones Fly U.S.-Mexico Border
William Booth,

In the dead of night, from a trailer humming with surveillance monitors, a pilot for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency was remotely flying a Predator drone more than 1,000 miles away.

From an altitude of 15,000 feet, over the desert ranchlands of Arizona, the drone’s all-seeing eyeball swiveled and powerful night-vision infrared cameras zeroed in on a pickup truck rattling along a washboard road.

“Hey, where’s that guy going?” the mission controller asked the drone’s camera operator, who toggled his joystick, glued to the monitors like a teenager with a Christmas morning Xbox.

This is the semi-covert cutting edge of homeland security, where federal law enforcement authorities are rapidly expanding a military-style unmanned aerial reconnaissance operation along the U.S.-Mexico border — a region that privacy watchdogs say includes a lot of American back yards.

Fans of the Predators say the $20 million aircraft are a perfect platform to keep a watchful eye on America’s rugged borders, but critics say the drones are expensive, invasive and finicky toys that have done little — compared with what Border Patrol agents do on the ground — to stem the flow of illegal immigrants, drug smugglers or terrorists.

Over Arizona, the Predator circled a ranch, as unseen and silent as a hunting owl. On a bank of computer screens, the monitoring team watched the truck, which appeared in ghostly infrared black and white, turn and pull up by a mobile home. In the yard, three sleeping dogs quickly woke up, their tails wagging.

“Welcome home,” one of the agents said.

A popular security solution

Eight Predators fly for the Customs and Border Protection agency — five, and soon to be six, along the southwestern border. After a slow rollout that began in 2005, drones now patrol most of the southern boundary, from Yuma, Ariz., to Brownsville, Tex.

For supporters, Predators are the new, sexy, futuristic fix for immigration control. They are irresistible to border hawks and the “Drone Caucus” in Congress, who consider the aircraft a must-have technology to meet the threat of spillover violence — yet unrealized — from Mexican drug cartels.

Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.) has said that the drones are so popular that a Predator could be elected president. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Tex.) pronounced domestic drones “invaluable.” Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) called them “ideal for border security and counter-drug missions.” Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a GOP presidential contender, argues that the solution to security along the frontier is not a border fence but more Predators.

In his trips to testify on Capitol Hill, Michael Kostelnik, the retired Air Force general and former test pilot who runs the Office of Air and Marine for the CBP, said he has never been challenged in Congress about the appropriate use of domestic drones. “Instead, the question is: Why can’t we have more of them in my district?” Kostelnik said.

Planning documents for the CBP envision as many as 24 Predators and their maritime variants in the air by 2016, giving the agency the ability to deploy a drone anywhere over the continental United States within three hours.

The drones, though operated by the CBP, have been deployed to assist sister law enforcement agencies. This month, the Los Angeles Times reported that Predators were used in North Dakota to help police run down a trio of ordinary crime suspects in a cow pasture.

These unarmed Predator B’s are the same as the aircraft known for lethal hunter-killer missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, except they don’t carry the missile package.

One of the first Predators deployed by the border service crashed in 2006 when its remote pilot, a contractor for the plane manufacturer General Atomics, turned off the engine by mistake. The plane missed a residential area by 1,000 feet as it plunged.

U.S. protocols require the drones to stay on the American side of the Rio Grande. “We don’t do Mexico,” said Lothar Eckardt, director of the Homeland Security Department’s National Air Security Operations Center in Corpus Christi.

But the aerial platforms do peer a little over the fence into Mexico.

What can they see? “We can see cows, pigs, coyotes, sometimes rabbits,” Lothar said. “At 20,000 feet, you can see windshield wipers, you can see if a person is running or walking, you can see backpacks sometimes. We can see Border Patrol, but not their uniforms, and so we can communicate with them and say, ‘Wave your arms,’ and that way we can distinguish between our guys and the bad guys.”

Privacy and cost concerns

Privacy watchdogs are concerned about the use of drones over domestic airspace. “The loss of privacy is real. You want to sunbathe in the nude on your own property? Now you can’t be sure nobody is watching you,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Americans will have to wonder if our enthusiasm for catching illegal immigrants is worth sacrificing our freedoms.”

U.S. courts allow law enforcement to conduct surveillance from helicopters and airplanes, and privacy protections end when the public ventures outdoors. The domestic Predator’s surveillance cameras do not allow them to see through windows.

Despite its initial reluctance, the Federal Aviation Administration allows the drones to fly a high-altitude corridor along the Mexican and Canadian borders but forbids them over congested urban areas — for safety, not privacy, concerns. Because of the orientation of the runway at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, the Predators are grounded when the wind direction requires them to pass over a neighboring suburb.

The mission over the Arizona ranchlands last month was typical. The Predator was searching for scouts who hide in the brush and signal with a cellphone when smugglers can attempt to cross with a load of marijuana or humans. The drone did not find any scouts that night. The night before, however, they helped the Border Patrol in Texas capture a dozen illegal migrants.

The Predators reached a milestone in June, having flown 10,000 hours. The Homeland Security Department reported that their drone operations have led to the apprehension of 4,865 undocumented immigrants and 238 drug smugglers since the program began.

Those numbers are not very impressive. A total of 327,577 illegal migrants were caught at the southwestern border in fiscal 2011, meaning the drones have contributed only to a fraction of arrests.

With an hour of flight time costing $3,600, it costs about $7,054 for each illegal immigrant or smuggler caught, based on numbers calculated from a recent Government Accountability Office report to Congress. The government has spent $240 million buying and maintaining its domestic drones, not including their operation.

It is hard to put a dollar value on the services the Predators can supply, Kostelnik said, citing as an example a scenario in which a nuclear reactor, like the one in Japan damaged by the earthquake and tsunami in March, needed to be inspected from the air.

“What is the value of a ‘can’t be seen, can’t be heard’ technology when you absolutely, really need it?” Kostelnik said. “The unmanned aircraft does things nothing else can do.”

The authors of the GAO report were not so sure.

They highlighted an obscure program called “Big Miguel” run by the Joint Task Force North out of the Army’s Biggs Field in El Paso that leased a piloted Cessna with an infrared sensor that cost $1.2 million for the year and assisted in the capture of 6,500 to 8,000 undocumented immigrants and seizure of $54 million in marijuana, according to defense officials. That would make the Big Miguel cost per illegal immigrant caught about $230.

“Congress and the taxpayers ought to demand some kind of real cost-benefit analysis of drones,” said Tom Barry, director of the TransBorder Project at the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank, who has studied the domestic Predator program. “My sense is that they would conclude these aircraft aren’t worth the money.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...z8O_story.html





Smoke Screening

As you stand in endless lines this holiday season, here’s a comforting thought: all those security measures accomplish nothing, at enormous cost. That’s the conclusion of Charles C. Mann, who put the T.S.A. to the test with the help of one of America’s top security experts.

Not until I walked with Bruce Schneier toward the mass of people unloading their laptops did it occur to me that it might not be possible for us to hang around unnoticed near Reagan National Airport’s security line. Much as upscale restaurants hang mug shots of local food writers in their kitchens, I realized, the Transportation Security Administration might post photographs of Schneier, a 48-year-old cryptographer and security technologist who is probably its most relentless critic. In addition to writing books and articles, Schneier has a popular blog; a recent search for “TSA” in its archives elicited about 2,000 results, the vast majority of which refer to some aspect of the agency that he finds to be ineffective, invasive, incompetent, inexcusably costly, or all four.

As we came by the checkpoint line, Schneier described one of these aspects: the ease with which people can pass through airport security with fake boarding passes. First, scan an old boarding pass, he said—more loudly than necessary, it seemed to me. Alter it with Photoshop, then print the result with a laser printer. In his hand was an example, complete with the little squiggle the T.S.A. agent had drawn on it to indicate that it had been checked. “Feeling safer?” he asked.

Ten years ago, 19 men armed with utility knives hijacked four airplanes and within a few hours killed nearly 3,000 people. At a stroke, Americans were thrust into a menacing new world. “They are coming after us,” C.I.A. director George Tenet said of al-Qaeda. “They intend to strike this homeland again, and we better get about the business of putting the right structure in place as fast as we can.”

The United States tried to do just that. Federal and state governments embarked on a nationwide safety upgrade. Checkpoints proliferated in airports, train stations, and office buildings. A digital panopticon of radiation scanners, chemical sensors, and closed-circuit television cameras audited the movements of shipping containers, airborne chemicals, and ordinary Americans. None of this was or will be cheap. Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent more than $1.1 trillion on homeland security.

To a large number of security analysts, this expenditure makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as “security theater”: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe.

The first time I met Schneier, a few months after 9/11, he wanted to bet me a very expensive dinner that the United States would not be hit by a major terrorist attack in the next 10 years. We were in Washington, D.C., visiting one of the offices of Counterpane Internet Security, the company he had co-founded in 1999. (BT, the former British Telecom, bought Counterpane seven years later; officially, Schneier is now BT’s chief security technology officer.) The bet seemed foolhardy to me. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had just told The Washington Times that al-Qaeda was dispersing its killers all over the world.

From an airplane-hijacking point of view, Schneier said, al-Qaeda had used up its luck. Passengers on the first three 9/11 flights didn’t resist their captors, because in the past the typical consequence of a plane seizure had been “a week in Havana.” When the people on the fourth hijacked plane learned by cell phone that the previous flights had been turned into airborne bombs, they attacked their attackers. The hijackers were forced to crash Flight 93 into a field. “No big plane will ever be taken that way again, because the passengers will fight back,” Schneier said. Events have borne him out. The instigators of the two most serious post-9/11 incidents involving airplanes— the “shoe bomber” in 2001 and the “underwear bomber” in 2009, both of whom managed to get onto an airplane with explosives—were subdued by angry passengers.

Schneier’s sanguine views had little resonance at a time when the fall of the twin towers was being replayed nightly on the news. Two months after 9/11, the Bush administration created the Transportation Security Agency, ordering it to hire and train enough security officers to staff the nation’s 450 airports within a year. Six months after that, the government vastly expanded the federal sky-marshal program, sending thousands of armed lawmen to ride planes undercover. Meanwhile, the T.S.A. steadily ratcheted up the existing baggage-screening program, banning cigarette lighters from carry-on bags, then all liquids (even, briefly, breast milk from some nursing mothers). Signs were put up in airports warning passengers about specifically prohibited items: snow globes, printer cartridges. A color-coded alert system was devised; the nation was placed on “orange alert” for five consecutive years. Washington assembled a list of potential terror targets that soon swelled to 80,000 places, including local libraries and miniature-golf courses. Accompanying the target list was a watch list of potential suspects that had grown to 1.1 million names by 2008, the most recent date for which figures are available. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security, which absorbed the T.S.A. in 2003, began deploying full-body scanners, which peer through clothing to produce nearly nude images of air passengers.

Bruce Schneier’s exasperation is informed by his job-related need to spend a lot of time in Airportland. He has 10 million frequent-flier miles and takes about 170 flights a year; his average speed, he has calculated, is 32 miles and hour. “The only useful airport security measures since 9/11,” he says, “were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can’t break in, positive baggage matching”—ensuring that people can’t put luggage on planes, and then not board them —“and teaching the passengers to fight back. The rest is security theater.”

Remember the fake boarding pass that was in Schneier’s hand? Actually, it was mine. I had flown to meet Schneier at Reagan National Airport because I wanted to view the security there through his eyes. He landed on a Delta flight in the next terminal over. To reach him, I would have to pass through security. The day before, I had downloaded an image of a boarding pass from the Delta Web site, copied and pasted the letters with Photoshop, and printed the results with a laser printer. I am not a photo-doctoring expert, so the work took me nearly an hour. The T.S.A. agent waved me through without a word. A few minutes later, Schneier deplaned, compact and lithe, in a purple shirt and with a floppy cap drooping over a graying ponytail.

The boarding-pass problem is hardly the only problem with the checkpoints. Taking off your shoes is next to useless. “It’s like saying, Last time the terrorists wore red shirts, so now we’re going to ban red shirts,” Schneier says. If the T.S.A. focuses on shoes, terrorists will put their explosives elsewhere. “Focusing on specific threats like shoe bombs or snow-globe bombs simply induces the bad guys to do something else. You end up spending a lot on the screening and you haven’t reduced the total threat.”

As I waited at security with my fake boarding pass, a T.S.A. agent had darted out and swabbed my hands with a damp, chemically impregnated cloth: a test for explosives. Schneier said, “Apparently the idea is that al-Qaeda has never heard of latex gloves and wiping down with alcohol.” The uselessness of the swab, in his view, exemplifies why Americans should dismiss the T.S.A.’s frequent claim that it relies on “multiple levels” of security. For the extra levels of protection to be useful, each would have to test some factor that is independent of the others. But anyone with the intelligence and savvy to use a laser printer to forge a boarding pass can also pick up a stash of latex gloves to wear while making a bomb. From the standpoint of security, Schneier said, examining boarding passes and swabbing hands are tantamount to performing the same test twice because the person you miss with one test is the same person you'll miss with the other.

After a public outcry, T.S.A. officers began waving through medical supplies that happen to be liquid, including bottles of saline solution. “You fill one of them up with liquid explosive,” Schneier said, “then get a shrink-wrap gun and seal it. The T.S.A. doesn’t open shrink-wrapped packages.” I asked Schneier if he thought terrorists would in fact try this approach. Not really, he said. Quite likely, they wouldn’t go through the checkpoint at all. The security bottlenecks are regularly bypassed by large numbers of people—airport workers, concession-stand employees, airline personnel, and T.S.A. agents themselves (though in 2008 the T.S.A. launched an employee-screening pilot study at seven airports). “Almost all of those jobs are crappy, low-paid jobs,” Schneier says. “They have high turnover. If you’re a serious plotter, don’t you think you could get one of those jobs?”

The full-body-scanner program—some 1,800 scanners operating in every airport in the country—was launched in response to the “underwear bomber” incident on Christmas Day in 2009, when a Nigerian Muslim hid the plastic explosive petn in his briefs and tried to detonate it on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. It has an annual price tag of $1.2 billion. The scanners cannot detect petn directly; instead they look for suspicious bulges under clothing. Because petn is a Silly Putty–like material, it can be fashioned into a thin pancake. Taped flat to the stomach, the pancake is invisible to scanning machines. Alternatively, attackers could stick gum-size wads of the explosive in their mouths, then go through security enough times to accumulate the desired amount.

Staffing the airport checkpoints, at least in theory, are “behavioral detection officers,” supposedly trained in reading the “facial microexpressions” that give away terrorists. It is possible that they are effective, Schneier says—nobody knows exactly what they do. But U.S. airlines carried approximately 700 million passengers in 2010. In the last 10 years, there have been 20 known full-fledged al-Qaeda operatives who flew on U.S. planes (the 9/11 hijackers and the underwear bomber, who was given explosives by a Yemeni al-Qaeda affiliate). Picking the right 20 out of 700 million is simply not possible, Schneier says.

After the airport checkpoint, an additional layer of security is provided, in theory, by air marshals. At an annual cost of about $1.2 billion, as many as 4,000 plainclothes police ride the nation’s airways—usually in first class, so that they can monitor the cockpit. John Mueller, co-author of Terror, Security, and Money, a great book from which I drew much information for this article, says it's a horrible job. “You sit there and fly and you can’t even drink or listen to music, because you can’t have headphones on. You have to stay awake. You are basically just sitting there, day after day.” Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of turnover—“you’re constantly training people, which is expensive.” Worse, the program has had no measurable benefit. Air marshals have not saved a single life, although one of them did shoot a deranged passenger a few years ago.

Has the nation simply wasted a trillion dollars protecting itself against terror? Mostly, but perhaps not entirely. “Most of the time we assess risk through gut feelings,” says Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon who is also the president of Decision Research, a nonprofit R&D organization. “We’re not robots just looking at the numbers.” Confronted with a risk, people ask questions: Is this a risk that I benefit from taking, as when I get in a car? Is it forced on me by someone else, as when I am exposed to radiation? Are the potential consequences catastrophic? Is the impact immediate and observable, or will I not know the consequences until much later, as with cancer? Such questions, Slovic says, “reflect values that are sometimes left out of the experts’ calculations.”

Security theater, from this perspective, is an attempt to convey a message: “We are doing everything possible to protect you.” When 9/11 shattered the public’s confidence in flying, Slovic says, the handful of anti-terror measures that actually work—hardening the cockpit door, positive baggage matching, more-effective intelligence—would not have addressed the public’s dread, because the measures can’t really be seen. Relying on them would have been the equivalent of saying, “Have confidence in Uncle Sam,” when the problem was the very loss of confidence. So a certain amount of theater made sense. Over time, though, the value of the message changes. At first the policeman in the train station reassures you. Later, the uniform sends a message: train travel is dangerous. “The show gets less effective, and sometimes it becomes counterproductive.”

Terrorists will try to hit the United States again, Schneier says. One has to assume this. Terrorists can so easily switch from target to target and weapon to weapon that focusing on preventing any one type of attack is foolish. Even if the T.S.A. were somehow to make airports impregnable, this would simply divert terrorists to other, less heavily defended targets—shopping malls, movie theaters, churches, stadiums, museums. The terrorist’s goal isn’t to attack an airplane specifically; it’s to sow terror generally. “You spend billions of dollars on the airports and force the terrorists to spend an extra $30 on gas to drive to a hotel or casino and attack it,” Schneier says. “Congratulations!”

What the government should be doing is focusing on the terrorists when they are planning their plots. “That’s how the British caught the liquid bombers,” Schneier says. “They never got anywhere near the plane. That’s what you want—not catching them at the last minute as they try to board the flight.”

To walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier is to see how much change a trillion dollars can wreak. So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost. And directed against a threat that, by any objective standard, is quite modest. Since 9/11, Islamic terrorists have killed just 17 people on American soil, all but four of them victims of an army major turned fanatic who shot fellow soldiers in a rampage at Fort Hood. (The other four were killed by lone-wolf assassins.) During that same period, 200 times as many Americans drowned in their bathtubs. Still more were killed by driving their cars into deer. The best memorial to the victims of 9/11, in Schneier’s view, would be to forget most of the “lessons” of 9/11. “It’s infuriating,” he said, waving my fraudulent boarding pass to indicate the mass of waiting passengers, the humming X-ray machines, the piles of unloaded computers and cell phones on the conveyor belts, the uniformed T.S.A. officers instructing people to remove their shoes and take loose change from their pockets. “We’re spending billions upon billions of dollars doing this—and it is almost entirely pointless. Not only is it not done right, but even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do.”
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/fe...nsanity-201112





Australian Communication Authority Finds Facebook Photos are Not Private

Users offered no safety from Facebook-trawling.
Brett Winterford

Australia’s communications regulator has ruled that television networks are not breaking the industry’s code of practice when publishing photos lifted from a public Facebook profile.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) determined that Channel Seven did not breach the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice when it accessed and broadcasted photographs – specifically in the case of a deceased person lifted from a Facebook tribute page, and another which broadcasted the name, photograph and comments penned by a 14-year old boy.

The decision will have broad ramifications for the media industry, and will put greater pressure on Australia's new federal Attorney-General, Nicola Roxon, to address online privacy directly in law.

“The ACMA found that due to the open nature of the tribute page, the absence of privacy settings and the non-sensitive nature of the photographs, Seven did not breach the privacy provisions of the code,” the ACMA noted in a press statement.

That said, the ACMA said it was not open slather for journalists to rip materials from social networks.

The regulator has already established guidelines around the exploitation of children, teens and Australians with special needs, and is establishing its own privacy guidelines in tandem with the Attorney-General.

Channel Seven would have breached the code had the report disclosed sensitive information concerning the health or welfare of the child, or if it reported on a criminal matter involving his immediate family.

The ACMA was begrudgingly unable to guarantee that users marking content as “private” on a social network could be safe guarded from broadcasters and publishers making it public, at least under the industry code of practice.

“The ACMA made it clear that while it considers the use of privacy settings an important consideration when assessing material obtained from social networking sites, the actual settings are not determinative,” the regulator noted.

Instead, the regulator will determine matters taken before it on a case-by-case basis.

“In each case, the ACMA will assess a licensee’s compliance with its privacy code obligations having regard to the specific circumstances of the broadcast.”

Consultant Roger Clarke, currently chair of the Australian Privacy Federation, told iTnews that he personally felt the decision was "typical of the failure of regulators to take meaningful action".

"The breaches have been completely tolerated, without chastisement, without the extraction of meaningful undertakings, without any penalties being imposed, and without even any 'suspended sentence' approach being adopted," he said.

"It appeared for a while that the current [guideline] review might result in improvements, but there remain some serious problems with their proposal amendments, which we're in ongoing discussions with them about.

"The behaviour of both the Privacy Commissioner and the ACMA is such that you have to conclude that they see their role as being to protect the interests of corporations, not privacy."

The ACMA’s CyberSmart web site advises that “even if your profile is private, you can’t control what your friends do with the information you post".

"Don’t post photos or information that you wouldn’t want anyone else to see," it states.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/284896...t-private.aspx





A More Secure SD for HD Content
Lori Grunin

Panasonic, Samsung, SanDisk, Sony, and Toshiba today announced an agreement to develop new content-protection technology for SD cards and embedded flash.

Dubbed "Next Generation Secure Memory Initiative," the press release claims the as-yet undeveloped technology will be based around public key encryption. Based on the release's limited information, it sounds like it will create unique IDs that will tie a variety of fixed and mobile CE devices to you, making content producers less nervous about allowing you to download--rather than just stream--DRM'd content to devices they currently can't control, like phones and tablets.

They expect to see implementations arrive in 2012, and given Panasonic and Sony's intimate involvement with Blu-ray, that's likely.

But it's also likely that it won't quite be "the solution that enables the effortless consumption of online and offline content across multiple device platforms" for consumers that SanDisk's Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer Sumit Sadana claims it will be. Because no matter how you spin it, DRM is designed to mollify the seller, not improve the experience for the buyer, and usually just annoys the latter. Basing it around the public-key infrastructure does sound less problematic than proprietary solutions like UltraViolet (read the comments), though this "solution" will likely work in conjunction with that.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-...or-hd-content/





Hard Drive Manufacturers Slash Warranty Periods

Seagate cuts warranties from five years to one for certain desktop and laptop drives
Lucas Mearian

Seagate and Western Digital are cutting back on hard drive warranties, in some instances from five years to one, in order to save money or redirect it to product development.

Seagate's warranties on certain drives will be reduced as of Dec. 31, and WD will follow beginning Jan. 2. All drives shipped prior to those dates will continue to carry the current warranty term associated with the products.

The warranty period reductions, first reported by The Register, mean some of Seagate's and WD's most popular drives for desktops and laptops will no longer carry three- or five-year warranties.

In an email response to Computerworld, Seagate said it was reducing warranty periods as a way to standardize its terms "to be more consistent with those commonly applied throughout the consumer electronics and technology industries.

"By aligning to current industry standards, Seagate can continue to focus its investments on technology innovation and unique product features that drive value for our customers," the company said.

In other words, Seagate is redirecting money previously spent on upholding longer warranties in order to invest in product development.
Momentus XT
Seagate is even cutting back the warranty on its hybrid drive, The Momentus XT, which combines NAND flash-based solid state storage with spinning disk.

Seagate's new warranties apply to internal hard drives designed for laptops, desktops and consumer electronics devices. Seagate said there is no warranty change to "mission critical enterprise drives," such as its Cheetah line, or Seagate external drives.
Seagate said it is reducing its warranty periods from five years to three years for nearline products, such as the Constellation 2 series. Even Seagate's new hybrid drive, the Momentus XT, is seeing its warranty period cut from five to three years.

In a more radical move, Seagate will also be changing its warranty policy from five years to one year for certain desktop and notebook drives, such as the Barracuda and Barracuda Green 3.5-inch drives and the Momentus 2.5-inch (5400 and 7200rpm):

Seagate's nearline drives, the Constellation 2 and ES.2 drives, are moving from five- to three-year warranties.

A WD spokesperson, meanwhile, said the company "is continually evaluating the best mix of product and service features that benefit our customer base as a whole."

WD would not give a reason for its warranty change, but the spokesperson denied it had anything to do with flooding in Thailand, which has severely affected the company's ability to manufacture products.

WD is reducing the warranties on its Caviar Blue, Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue drives from three years to two.

"Standard PC warranties are one year. Even so, WD will continue to maintain five-year warranties on its premium desktop/notebook products, including the WD Caviar Black, WD Scorpio Black and WD VelociRaptor products," a spokesperson wrote in an email reply.

The company is also expected to begin charging for extended warranties, according to a WD distributor's letter to customers.
https://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...rranty_periods





Samsung Hard Drives Now Belong to Seagate
Brian X. Chen

Seagate Technology, a major maker of hard drives, said Tuesday that it had closed on the acquisition of the hard drive business of Samsung Electronics for $1.4 billion.

The merger, which was announced in April, is both a talent and product acquisition, Seagate said. The agreement gives Seagate select elements of Samsung’s hard drive business, including Samsung’s high-capacity M8 hard drives and semiconductors used to make solid-state drives, (known in the industry as S.S.D.’s). Some senior managers and design engineers of Samsung will join Seagate.

Stephen J. Luczo, Seagate’s chief executive, said in a statement that Seagate and Samsung had aligned product development to get new products ready faster. “It is an exciting time in the industry with rapidly evolving opportunities in many markets, including mobile computing, cloud computing and solid state storage,” he said.

The acquisition will benefit Seagate in light of this year’s Thailand floods, which destroyed factories that produced hard drive parts, said Steve Duplessie, an analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group.

“Most of the world’s disk drives are not able to be built because Thailand is underwater,” Mr. Duplessie said, but Samsung’s production chain was for smaller, consumer disk drives, and it was not affected by the flood. Seagate should have an advantage against its major competitor, Western Digital, he said.

Samsung’s specialty in producing flash memory (also known as NAND) is another crucial benefit for Seagate, said Jim Kelleher, an analyst with Argus Research. Newer, thinner notebooks, like Apple’s MacBook Air and ultrabooks made by PC makers like Hewlett-Packard, use flash memory for storage.

Mr. Kelleher said, “This is a good deal for Seagate, as it provides a link with a leader in NAND flash at a time when Seagate must move into S.S.D.’s.” He said that without the deal, Seagate risked losing its dominance in supplying drives for PCs.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/1...g-acquisition/





Hard Drive Prices Slide as Thai Flood Aftermath Subsides

And SSD prices have dropped by 23% over the past year
Lucas Mearian

The price of the most popular hard disk drives are beginning to drop as inventories climb out of a deep hole that began in October after massive flooding shut down major production sites in Thailand.

Drive maker Western Digital was hardest hit by the flooding, with research firm IDC predicting that up to 75% of the company's production lines were temporarily shut down.

According to new information from ecommerce tracking site Dynamite Data, the top 50 hard drives on sites such as Newegg.com and Tigerdirect.com, leaped in price by 50% to 150% after the flooding. The price jump was kicked off in October when drive inventory levels plummeted 90% in less than a week, according to Kristopher Kubicki, data architect at Dynamite Data.

"The first flooding was Oct. 8 and within a week, two weeks at the most, almost all that inventory at distribution had dried up," Kubicki said. "I'm not sure if that was distributors getting the inventory recalled from them or if it was getting purchased that fast. I think consciously people moved it out of distribution and into system manufacturers."

Over the past few weeks, hard drive prices have leveled off and have begun to drop slowly, according to Dynamite's data.

"For first time, less than week after Western Digital's first [fabrication plant] went back on line, drive inventory began increasing at both distributors and ecommerce sites, and index prices began coming down a little too," Kubicki said.

IDC has predicted that hard disk drive supply shortages in the wake of Thailand flooding would affect consumers, computer system manufacturers and corporate IT shops into 2013.

Fang Zhang, an analyst with market research firm IHS iSuppli, said he also saw "a few" HDD price drops -- especially in the retail market this month -- from the historical highs after the floods.

However, Zhang cautioned that certain drive inventories are still short, such as 500GB and 1TB capacity models for both desktop and notebook PCs.
https://www.computerworld.com/s/arti...rmath_subsides
















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

December 17th, December 10th, December 3rd, November 26th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black