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![]() ![]() "[CISPA] will be a much truer test of the Internet's power because there are no big tech companies lining up with the citizen grass-roots groups." – Daniel G. Newman "Basically I am doing this because I am a curmudgeon, and because publishing is like Hollywood — nobody ever does the marketing they promise." – David Mamet "The driver called 911 telling authorities that the two people who had held him up at gunpoint said they were the marathon bombers. The authorities put out an all-points bulletin for the vehicle, and officers in Watertown — 10 miles west of Boston — spotted it just minutes later." – Michael S. Schmidt and Eric Schmitt April 20th , 2013 ![]() Pirate Party Launches File-Sharer Fine Insurance While file-sharing copyrighted movies and music is illegal, it remains popular and file-sharers can now sign up for insurance to fund any fines incurred as a result of getting caught. The idea comes from a similar scheme to pay fines incurred for non-payment of fares in the Stockholm metro system. "On the Internet, it is very difficult to know what is legal and what is not, especially as the copyright law has little basis in public opinion on justice," said Gustav Nipe, chairman of the Pirate Party youth league, Ung Pirat, which is the organisation behind the insurance. "We are therefore seeing to it that internet users can always feel safe on the internet," he said. The insurance concept is inspired by planka.nu, a group which pays fines incurred for getting caught without a ticket in the Stockholm metro. The risks of getting caught while file-sharing remain small with only a small number of people having been prosecuted in recent years. But the risk remains and the insurance is being marketed as an economical way to insurance against financial penalty. Henrik Rasmusson, one of the special prosecutors concerned with file-sharing in Stockholm, pointed out that while the insurance may provide peace of mind against fines, it wouldn't help with probation or even prison. "Some 95 percent of the judgments that have been passed down in file-sharing cases have resulted in probation and you never insurance yourself against a suspended sentence," he said. "In reality it will only be an insurance if the penalty is limited to a fine, which hardly ever happens. The insurance is thus rendered somewhat ineffective." http://www.thelocal.se/47310/20130413/ ![]() Pirate Bay Co-Founder Indicted on Charges of Hacking, Fraud Prosecutor says Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was the "mastermind" of alleged operation. Cyrus Farivar On Wednesday, a Swedish court indicted Gottfrid "anakata" Svartholm Warg—the Pirate Bay founder who has been held in a Swedish detention facility for more than six months. "A large amount of data from companies and agencies was taken during the hack, including a large amount of personal data, such as personal identity numbers (personnummer) of people with protected identities," Swedish prosecutor Henrik Olin said in a statement. Gottfrid was indicted with three other co-defendants, and the four have been charged (Google Translate) with serious fraud, attempted aggravated fraud, and aiding attempted aggravated fraud. The trial has been scheduled for late May in Stockholm. Svartholm Warg’s defense attorney, Ola Salmasson, told Ars that he had not yet seen the specific indictment, so he could not comment. Three alleged hacking incidents The Swedish news website Nyheter 24 reported (Google Translate) that Svartholm Warg has been formally charged with “three counts of computer hacking, one case of serious fraud, and a case of attempted aggravated fraud.” The first count of hacking involves allegedly unlawfully using another person’s username and password to search Infotorg, a well-known massive privately held commercial database of “private individuals, companies, properties and vehicles.” The second count, as previously reported, involves an alleged hack dating back to 2010 of Logica, a Swedish IT firm that contracts with the Swedish tax authority. In March 2012, Logica was hit by an online attack that resulted in around 9,000 Swedes (Google Translate) having their personal identity numbers and names released to the public. Such data is normally made public in Sweden, but there are cases where it can be kept hidden (as it was among the people targeted). However there has been some speculation in the Swedish media about whether that data was genuine. Either way, two Swedes were arrested (Google Translate) last year in connection with this case, one of which was a former member of Piratbyrån (Pirate Bureau), the group that later founded The Pirate Bay. The first two hacking counts are believed to cover a period of January 2010 to April 2012. The third count of hacking, allegedly taking place between July and August 2012, accuses Svartholm Warg of unauthorized access of major Nordic region bank Nordea’s computers. The fraud charges accuse Svartholm Warg of allegedly transferring and attempting to transfer money from Nordea to other unauthorized bank accounts. According to ComputerSweden’s account of the indictment (Swedish), as published by the Swedish prosecutor, Svartholm Warg allegedly tried to transfer 5.7 million Swedish kronor ($900,000) to various accounts. However, only 27,000 kronor (roughly $4,200) belonging to a Danish trade union was actually transferred out. Meanwhile, Olin told the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper (Google Translate) that he believes Svartholm Warg “is the manager and mastermind behind [the] infringements.” Peter Sunde, Pirate Bay co-founder, “seriously questioning the charges” Svartholm Warg was deported from his adopted home of Cambodia in September 2012; he had been living there for the previous four years. The Swedish developer had been convicted along with three others connected with The Pirate Bay before, but he has yet to serve jail time or pay his fines as a result of that case. Those penalties are from a Swedish court conviction in 2009 on the charge of “assisting in making copyrighted content available.” The group was ordered to collectively pay more than $4 million. In 2010, a Swedish appellate court reduced their prison sentences to between four and ten months each, but it increased their collective fine to 46 million Swedish kronor ($6.8 million). In February 2012, the Supreme Court of Sweden declined to hear the case. In March 2013, the European Court of Human rights rejected the appeal of two other Pirate Bay defendants in a unanimous decision, finding that the existing Swedish conviction did not violate their human rights. Not surprisingly, fellow Pirate Bay co-founder Peter “brokep” Sunde called the charges against his friend “bullshit” on Twitter. However, he later clarified: “I'm not saying that Gottfrid is innocent (or guilty). But I'm seriously questioning the charges.” http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...hacking-fraud/ ![]() Massive BitTorrent and Cyberlocker Domain Crackdown Underway (Updated) Andy In what is being described as the biggest domain crackdown since US Homeland Security seized more than 70 domains in 2010, Italy has targeted more than two dozen BitTorrent, cyberlocker and other file-sharing sites. The Public Prosecutor of Rome has ordered the blocking of Rapidgator, Uploaded, BitShare, NowVideo, VideoPremium and many others, warning that he will progress the action internationally in order to properly seize their domains. The action is being billed as “A Monster from Rome” and when you look at the scale and implications that’s hard to contest. The Public Prosecutor of Rome, Italy, has targeted a total of 27 file-sharing related sites, said to include BitTorrent, cyberlocker and other linking services. All of their domains have been blocked at the ISP level and are inaccessible in Italy. The prosecutor has already indicated that he wants to progress the case internationally in pursuit of full-blown domain seizures. Currently a partial list of domains has been released which features Rapidgator, one of the world’s largest file-hosting sites and one that has drawn the ire of key Hollywood and music industry groups in recent times. Also included are Uploaded, BitShare, NowVideo, NowDownload, VideoPremium, QueenShare and ClipsHouse. “The domains of sites linking to torrent files, in order to download illegal copies of music and movies, have been seized [blocked] this week as ordered by Preliminary investigation of the Judge of Rome, at the request of the public prosecutor, following an investigation of the Italian Cybercrime Police,” reads a statement obtained by TorrentFreak. The action is being described as the largest domain-focused crackdown since US Homeland Security seized more than 70 domains in May 2010. TorrentFreak requested a full list of blocked domains but was informed that it’s currently unavailable and will be released in due course. Fulvio Sarzana, a lawyer with the Sarzana and Partners law firm specializing in Internet and copyright disputes, is concerned by the developments. “I think that operations like this one could jeopardize freedom of speech, and endanger legitimate web sites, being also a risk for the civil liberties. Copyright cannot be considered as a more essential right than freedom of expression, or a more important matter than a free and open internet,” he said. While it’s normally presumed that the major movie and record companies sit behind these types of aggressive actions, Sarzana – who has assisted service providers and file-hosting sites in the past – says in this instance the complainant is a small player. “The order of the seizure of the websites has been given at the request of a small Italian distributor for one single cartoon movie: it is clear that there is not any proportion between the seizure of entire sites (and domains) containing millions of legal files and the potential violation of the copyright of a single movie,” he concludes. Update: Contrary to early reports there are no BitTorrent sites included among the 27 sites. The full list is published at the bottom of this article and a complete list of all the blocked sites in Italy can be found here. The domains are currently blocked only on the DNS level which means that if users switch to OpenDNS or Google DNS they can access the sites again. This is the full list of 27 domains: bitshare.com cineblog01.org clipshouse.com cyberlocker.ch ddl-fantasy.org filmfreestream.org filmnuovistreaming.com filmpertutti.tv flashdrive.it flashstream.in freakshare.com gatestreaming.com italiafilm2.com likeupload.net megaload.it nowdownload.co nowvideo.co panicmovie.altervista.org queenshare.com rapidgator.net robin-film.net speedvid.tv streamingworld.forumcommunity.net uploaded.net uploadjet.net videopremium.net yourlifeupdated.it http://torrentfreak.com/massive-bitt...derway-130415/ ![]() Tor Calls for Help as its Supply of Bridges Falters Bridges help users in countries like China and Iran access the network. Sean Gallagher Just like the US highway infrastructure, Tor needs new bridges. The encrypted anonymizing "darknet" that allows activists, journalists, and others to access the Internet without fear of censorship or monitoring—and which has also become a favored technology of underground groups like child pornographers—is having increasing difficulty serving its users in countries that have blocked access to Tor's entry points. Tor bridges are computers that act as hidden gateways to Tor's darknet of relays. After campaigning successfully last year to get more volunteers to run obfuscated Tor bridges to support users in Iran trying to evade state monitoring, the network has lost most of those bridges, according to a message to the Tor relays mailing list by Tor volunteer George Kadiankakis. "Most of those bridges are down, and fresh ones are needed more than ever," Kadiankakis wrote in an e-mail, "since obfuscated bridges are the only way for people to access Tor in some areas of the world (like China, Iran, and Syria)." Obfuscated bridges allow users to connect to the Tor network without using one of the network's known public bridges or relays as an initial entry point. Obfuscated bridges have become a necessity for Tor users in countries with networks guarded by various forms of deep packet inspection technology, where censors have put in place filters that spot traffic matching the signature of a Tor-protected connection. Some of these censors use a blocking list for traffic to known Tor bridges. To circumvent detection, Tor users can use a plugin called a "pluggable transport" to connect to an obfuscated bridge and mask their network signature. To further evade potential censoring, the addresses for obfuscated bridges are not part of Tor's main directory but are stored in a distributed database called BridgeDB. The BridgeDB's interface spoons out addresses two at a time per request in an effort to prevent attacks to expose a full list, and no BridgeDB instance keeps a full list of the available bridges. Additionally, Tor provides "unpublished" bridge addresses to users who request them via e-mail. The Tor Project's support assistants—volunteers who respond to support requests—only respond to requests to e-mails from Gmail and Yahoo e-mail accounts to both deal with the flood of requests and reduce the chance that an attacker will be able to learn the addresses of a large number of bridges. The problem for Tor is that those bridges do get detected by attackers over time, and pluggable transports can eventually be detected. The most widely used pluggable transport in the Tor network, obfs2, no longer works in China. A new plugin, obfs3, will work in China, but it runs only on the latest version of the obfuscated bridge proxy—which was recently rewritten in Python. "Looking into BridgeDB," Kadiankakis wrote in his message to the Tor community, "we have 200 obfs2 bridges, but only 40 obfs3 bridges: this means that we need more people running the new Python obfsproxy! Upgrading obfsproxy should be easy now, since we prepared new instructions and Debian/Ubuntu packages." He added that there is also a particular need for more unpublished bridges. For those who want to donate bridges to the Tor network, the easiest route is to use Tor Cloud, an Amazon Web Service Elastic Compute Cloud image created by the Tor Project that allows people to leverage Amazon's free usage tier to deploy a bridge. http://arstechnica.com/information-t...idges-falters/ ![]() Ninth Circuit: Mobile Providers Are Not Illegal File-Sharing Networks Joey Chindamo We have discussed copyright infringement a number of times recently, but this story is different. This time, the court found in favor of the accused “infringers.” Is this a rare victory for piracy? Not so fast. First, we take you way back . . . to July 2010. Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” was No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The skies over Iceland had finally cleared after volcanic eruptions wreaked havoc for weeks. And American teens everywhere were furiously sending each other multimedia messages, also known as MMS, or the text-message-based precursors to memes. A California-based company called Luvdarts was responsible for much of this MMS content, and in 2010, Luvdarts filed a lawsuit to protect its intellectual property. Luvdarts sued AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile for copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, and constructive trust. Because Luvdarts’ customers could forward their MMS messages around to their friends, Luvdarts claimed that the mobile carriers’ MMS platforms were actually illegal file sharing networks in the same vein as old-Napster, Kazaa, or Megaupload. The original complaint not only seemed to conflate contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, but it also claimed that the mobile carriers did not qualify for the DMCA safe harbor provisions in 17 U.S.C. § 512. As Techdirt discussed in 2011, the U.S. District Court of the Central District of California dismissed Luvdarts’ lawsuit with prejudice for failure to state a claim. The Luvdarts crew promised to appeal and appeal they did. The case landed in the Ninth Circuit, and the appellate panel promptly affirmed the lower court’s dismissal with prejudice. The oral arguments from the appeal demonstrate the Ninth Circuit’s confusion, and exasperation, with the case. A judge asked how the forwarding of an MMS message is different from someone forwarding an e-mail with an attachment (at 9:40 in the video), and the attorney for Luvdarts, Mr. Perrin Disner —an “[o]verall terrific guy,” according to his attorney profile—said, among other things: “This system is not in a vacuum and also not in the untamed wilderness of the Internet. There are dozens and dozens of e-mail providers, and some of them have different options, different encryption options, or any number of different . . . tweaks they could give where . . . a specific email provider could specifically prevent a specific sending. Gmail famously put in a bar to sending emails after 2 a.m. and made you do math problems to make sure you’re not drunk.” Not only was it nonresponsive to the panel’s question, but the lawyer’s response seems to suggest that if cell phones—or more precisely, the mobile carriers—implemented some sort of system like Google’s Mail Goggles to prevent late-night drunk texting, the forwarding of their MMS messages would be OK? Texts From Last Night would have something to say about that. In its opinion, the court took issue with Luvdarts’ approach to vicarious copyright infringement. The Ninth Circuit’s opinion in A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc. states that vicarious liability for infringement requires two elements: (1) the “right and ability to supervise the infringing activity;” and (2) “a direct financial interest” in the infringing activity. The court found that Luvdarts failed on both grounds: “Luvdarts concedes that the Carriers presently have no way of supervising the use of their networks for copyright infringement. Instead, Luvdarts’s complaint alleges only that the Carriers could ‘establish[]. . .a system’ that would give them the right and ability to supervise the infringing activity. Luvdarts argues that this allegation is sufficient to survive a motion to dismiss. Luvdarts fails to cite any authority to support this proposition, which runs contrary to our precedent. . . . [u]nder vicarious liability, [a carrier’s failure to implement such a system] cannot substitute for an allegation of a capacity to supervise. Luvdarts’s failure to allege that the Carriers have at least something like a capacity to supervise is fatal to a claim of vicarious liability.” And so it went for Luvdarts. The court similarly found that Luvdarts failed to establish the elements for its contributory copyright infringement claim when it failed to prove that the carriers had actual knowledge of specific acts of infringement. “Luvdarts argues that the ‘notices’ it sent to the Carriers, referenced in the complaint, sufficed to establish actual knowledge of infringement. However, these notices failed to notify the Carriers of any meaningful fact. The notices were 150-page-long lists of titles, apparently just a transcription of every title copyrighted by Luvdarts, which indicated that they wanted ‘accountability’ for the unauthorized distribution of those titles for the period from May 2008 to November 2009. These notices do not identify which of these titles were infringed, who infringed them, or when the infringement occurred. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (‘DMCA’), by which the notices purport to be governed, clearly precludes notices as vague as the notices here.” The Ninth Circuit’s affirmation of the district court’s dismissal with prejudice means we will not be seeing Luvdarts in court again in this case. The lesson is clear—anyone alleging copyright infringement must meet the legal standards, or suffer the Luvdarts fate. http://www.lexology.com/library/deta...1-e97c65c36c18 ![]() UK Supreme Court Says Unauthorized Browsing Of Copyright Material Online Is OK, But Asks European Court Of Justice Just In Case Glyn Moody The lawsuits brought against the media monitoring firm Meltwater in both the US and the UK have not turned out too well for the company so far. In the US, the district court handed down a summary judgment against Meltwater, while in the UK, two courts came to a particularly worrying conclusion: that simply viewing copyright material online without a license amounted to infringement. Fortunately, this judgment was appealed to the UK Supreme Court, which has just published its ruling. The judges recognized that the central issue is whether the temporary copies held on a computer in its memory cache, which are necessary to view a document stored on the Web, are covered by a clause in UK and European law that exempts temporary copies from needing a license provided certain conditions are met. In the judges' view, copies held purely for browsing were indeed covered, provided they were not saved or printed out. Here's why that is crucial: if it is an infringement merely to view copyright material, without downloading or printing out, then those who browse the internet are likely unintentionally to incur civil liability, at least in principle, by merely coming upon a web-page containing copyright material in the course of browsing. This seems an unacceptable result, which would make infringers of many millions of ordinary users of the internet across the EU who use browsers and search engines for private as well as commercial purposes. That's obviously just common sense -- sadly, a rare commodity when it comes to copyright in the online world. However, the UK Supreme Court has asked the European Court of Justice to offer its own, definitive, ruling so as to settle the law for the whole of Europe. As the judge writing the verdict noted: I recognise the issue has a transnational dimension and that the application of copyright law to internet use has important implications for many millions of people across the EU making use of what has become a basic technical facility. These considerations make it desirable that any decision on the point should be referred to the Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling, so that the critical point may be resolved in a manner which will apply uniformly across the European Union. Of course, the legal status of temporary copies is a crucial question elsewhere, too. For example, in her speech at Columbia University back in March, Copyright Register Maria Pallante spoke of "the confusion over incidental copies", which needed sorting out. More worryingly, one relatively recent leak of the TPP draft seemed to indicate that it would require all temporary copies to be regulated. The fact that we are still having this discussion about a technological necessity some twenty years after the Web was invented, shows just how out of touch with modern reality copyright law remains. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...ust-case.shtml ![]() BitTorrent’s Surf Extension Now In Beta; Use Chrome Or Firefox Like A Desktop Client For Downloading Ingrid Lunden BitTorrent, the content sharing and distribution network with 170 million monthly active users and 85 petabytes of content, continues to roll out more tools for artists and consumers to turn to the service for all their music, video and reading needs. Today BitTorrent is turning its attention to the mechanics of downloading. It is putting its Surf Chrome extension — which effectively turns the browser into a desktop client for downloading content — into beta and adding some new features, including Firefox support and a new recommendation engine. BitTorrent is also taking the opportunity to tie Surf in closer with how it plans to monetize the service more in the future. Included in the recommendation engine will be the content bundles that BitTorrent creates with artists. When a user searches for and starts to download a particular piece of content, other relevant artists, who have placed their work into BitTorrent bundles, will start getting preferential position and appearing near the top of the recommended list. This is something that BitTorrent says will be a hallmark of one of their newest bundle launches, from the DJ Pretty Lights based around his set from this past weekend’s Coachella music festival. As with the book bundles featuring best-selling author Tim Ferriss, Pretty Lights is a safe-ish bet for BitTorrent to try out new things. The musician is one of the most-downloaded artists on the network, with over 5 million downloads in 2012. (By comparison, Death Grips got 34 million; Counting Crows (!) nearly 27 million and DJ Shadow 4.3 million.) BitTorrent, as it continues on the road of distributing legal content further and further from its roots and original reputation as a hotbed of illegal activity, has been putting quite a lot of effort into figuring out how best to package and deliver content bundles as the cornerstone of their business. They have offered advertisers, for example, the chance to include material of their own in the mix, in the case of a DJ Shadow bundle last year, while still keeping them free to artists to upload and free for users to download. A spokesperson for BitTorrent refers to the bundles as a “series of experiments,” with the goal being “a more sustainable distribution model for the Internet’s creators and fans.” And those experiments are set to continue. “There are a lot of possible revenue models for BitTorrent bundles, and we expect to share more on that at a later date,” the spokesperson says. The Surf plug-in, which also offers users a status window to monitor the progress of a download, first launched as a service in alpha in January, as a product out of BitTorrent Labs. As for other browsers beyond these two, “No timing announced today for the others, but we are looking at them,” said the spokesperson. http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/15/bit...r-downloading/ ![]() Napster.fm Is An Open Source Social Music Player That Can Be Hosted By Anyone In Case Of Shutdown Drew Olanoff Anyone who has had a computer and a connection to the Internet in 1999 quickly knew what it felt like to find any song that you wanted, and then listen to it almost immediately. Well, the immediate part wasn’t true, since you had to download the MP3s, which usually took quite a bit of time on a dialup connection. Since Napster, and it getting sued into oblivion (and then acquired for bits and pieces by Best Buy), streaming music has become the technology du-jour. Napster co-founder Sean Parker is now heavily involved with Spotify, which realized the “any song, any time” dream that Napster introduced us to. Today, a service called Napster.fm popped up, and it’s a web-based music player that has some interesting social features. The best part about it is that it’s open source and can be set up by anyone, in case it ever gets shut down. Its creator, Ryan Lester, is a student at Carnegie Mellon who is “taking a few years off to work at SpaceX and do other stuff.” A part of the “other stuff” is clearly Napster.fm. How does it work? Well, after going through the quite FAQ (Lester obviously has a sense of humor), he explains that the service is dependent on “minor inefficiencies in YouTube’s piracy-detection system.” Regardless of where the tracks are coming from, the service actually works. As soon as you visit the site, the song that’s queued up for you is “Never Gonna Give You Up,” which is long-forgotten-once-hated “RickRoll.” The search interface is pretty basic, but once you start adding songs to your playlist, you can share them with friends who have also signed up for the service. Once you’ve done that, you can sync up and listen to exactly what they’re listening to. The “Discovery” tab shows you what everyone has listened to, if you’re in the mood to find something new. You can even create a group of friends that are using the service and someone can play DJ and decide on which tracks will come up next. Sure, these are some of the things that you can do on other services, like Turntable.fm, but the Napster.fm interface is stripped down and basic, not sucking up a lot of resources. The other nice part is that there isn’t a desktop client to worry about, as is the case with Spotify. It’s nice to see that Lester has brought back some of the old Napster features like “Hot List,” which lets you browse your friends’ libraries, as well as the chat and transferring songs to friends. It doesn’t hurt that it’s free and has no playback limit. Will it stay around? It’s hard to say, especially if it completely relies on a YouTube hole, but if the site itself were to get shut down, Lester has put all of his work on GitHub so that anyone can get another version going immediately. If there’s any doubt as to whether Lester is having fun with the project, all you have to do is read this FAQ entry: Will I be sued for using this? Absolutely. Holy shit, seriously? No. http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/14/nap...e-of-shutdown/ ![]() Nokia-Backed VOD Company Launches Legal Film File-Sharing Service LiveShelf, the new service from Sweden's Voddler, will let users share movies with friends worldwide. Scott Roxborough The Swedish-based VOD firm Voddler has launched what it is calling the world's first-ever legal film storage and sharing service. The service, called LiveShelf, rolled out Thursday across Scandinavia and Spain with Europe and Russia to follow set to follow this week. It combines digital locker technology to store films online with file-sharing, which the company says allows users to invite friends to stream their legally acquired films over the Internet – either on PCs or on mobile-connected devices. The file-sharing feature, called ViewShare, allows users to create a limited network of friends who can watch films saved in a customer's LiveShelf online locker – either titles bought or rented digitally or uploaded from a user's own movie file. Voddler CEO Marcus Backlund said the technology “embraces the fact that people have always lent movies to each other. It lets us all continue to invite our friends to watch the films we have on the LiveShelf just like we have always done in the living room." Using ViewShare will not be free, however. Users and any friends wanting to view movies will pay a monthly subscriber fee, money Voddler will split with rights holders. According to the Scandinavian group, which bills itself as a rival in Europe to companies like Netflix and Amazon's LoveFilm, the service will generate new revenue streams for content owners by “monetizing social viewing." The firm said the LiveShelf technology will be partner- and platform-neutral and that content owners worldwide can dictate terms such which territories their films can be viewed. Following LiveShare's European rollout, Voddler says it plans to bow the service worldwide. The Swedish company, founded in 2006 and backed by mobile phone group Nokia and investment firm Cipio Partners, has some 1.2 million registered users across Spain and Scandinavia. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...aunches-442220 ![]() CISPA Is Back and Headed for a Vote This Week Alex Fitzpatrick The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, is headed to a full vote in the House of Representatives Wednesday or Thursday of this week. CISPA passed the House Intelligence Committee last week following a closed-door debate, during which committee members approved four amendments. One particularly significant change was made which disallows the government from using information collected under CISPA for national security purposes — language opponents argued was overly vague and easily manipulatable. However, most of the amendments which would have made a significant impact on CISPA's privacy implications were voted down. Despite the insistence of CISPA authors Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), pictured above, that "multiple amendments were made based on input from privacy and civil liberties groups," many of those groups are still opposing the bill. "The changes to the bill don’t address the major privacy problems we have been raising about CISPA for almost a year and a half," said Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel at the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, in a statement. The Center for Democracy and Technology's Greg Nojeim warns "CISPA could shift control of the federal government’s cybersecurity program for the private sector to a secretive military intelligence agency." Apparently not content to let CISPA opponents dominate the online conversation around the technology policy bill, the House Intelligence Committee published a five-page CISPA Q&A which Ruppersberger referred to on Twitter as a "mythbuster." The document hits back against privacy advocates' most common criticisms of CISPA, claiming the bill "has nothing to do with government surveillance" and that CISPA contains "rigorous" privacy oversight. "During our markup, we added an amendment that expanded our privacy protections and oversight requirements by adding an extra layer of review by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and requiring senior privacy officials from the government agencies to complete annual reviews evaluating the cyber threat information sharing regime’s effect on privacy," reads the document. CISPA would allow private businesses and federal agencies to share cybersecurity information with one another, a practice currently barred by law. CISPA first passed the Republican-controlled House in April 2012, but it wasn't taken up by the Democratic-majority Senate, which was deliberating several cybersecurity bills of its own. Rogers and Ruppersberger (D-Md.) reintroduced the bill in February of this year. Advocates for the bill, generally businesses or business interest groups, argue such information sharing is necessary to ward off attacks in real time. Privacy groups are adamant the information sharing called for by CISPA will compromise Americans' online privacy, particularly if data is shared with military organizations such as the National Security Agency or if companies are immune from liability for privacy transgressions committed in the name of CISPA. https://mashable.com/2013/04/16/cispa-vote-this-week/ ![]() Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Execs Back CISPA Through Trade Group Tech trade group whose members include Eric Schmidt, Marissa Mayer sends letter to House Intelligence panel commending its work on the controversial bill and expressing interest in added privacy protections. Edward Moyer A tech trade group whose guiding lights include executives from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sent a letter to Congress this week in support of CISPA -- the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act -- proposed cybersecurity legislation that's raised privacy concerns among groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union. The letter, from TechNet President Rey Ramsey, is addressed to the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee -- Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D -Md.) -- and commends the committee for providing liability protections to companies that would share data under CISPA and for making an effort to strengthen privacy protections in the legislation. CISPA is designed, its supporters have said, to protect against foreign cyberthreats by allowing private companies to voluntarily share data with government intelligence agencies without fear of being taken to court over privacy issues. CNET's Declan McCullagh has noted that under existing federal law, any person or company who helps someone "intercept any wire, oral, or electronic communication" -- unless specifically authorized by law -- could face criminal charges, but that CISPA would overrule those privacy protections. Tech trade groups, and some tech companies, are backing CISPA not because they necessarily adore it, but because they view it as preferable to a competing bill that's more regulatory. Ramsey's letter includes the membership roster of TechNet's Executive Council, with names such as Yahoo's Marissa Mayer, Google's Eric Schmidt, and Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith. It says CISPA "recognizes the need for effective cybersecurity legislation that encourages voluntary, bi-directional, real time sharing of actionable cyberthreat information to protect networks," but it implies that further work may be needed. "As the legislative process unfolds," the letter says, "we look forward to continuing the dialogue with you and your colleagues on further privacy protections, including discussions on the role of a civilian interface for information sharing." Beltway blog The Hill, which reported on the letter earlier, notes that privacy advocates want to see CISPA amended so a civilian agency such as the Department of Homeland Security would receive cyberthreat data first, before passing it on to an intelligence body such as the National Security Agency. The ACLU has written that in its current form CISPA "empowers the military, including agencies like the NSA, to collect the Internet records of Americans' everyday Internet use" and that "It is a long-established principle that the military is not permitted to spy on Americans." The primary reason CISPA is so contentious is that it overrides every other state and federal law on the books, including laws dealing with e-mail privacy, when authorizing companies to share data with the federal government. Data that can be shared includes broad categories of information relating to security vulnerabilities, network uptime, intrusion attempts, and denial-of-service attacks, with no limit on including personal data. The House Intelligence committee, however, dismisses privacy fears. A "Myth v. Fact" paper prepared by the committee says any claim that "this legislation creates a wide-ranging government surveillance program" is a myth. CISPA won the committee's approval this week, without several proposed privacy amendments, including one that would have limited the sharing of private sector data to civilian agencies and would have specifically excluded the NSA and the Defense Department. The committee's decision advances CISPA to the House floor, with a vote expected as soon as next week. It's a difficult vote to handicap: it could be a reprise of last year, when members approved the legislation by a vote of 248 to 168. On the other hand, if only 40 members switch their votes from yea to nay, CISPA is defeated. Last time around, a formal veto threat by President Obama a day before the House vote helped galvanize Democratic opposition -- Democrats preferred their own legislation, which had a different set of privacy problems. But the White House has not responded to an anti-CISPA petition that topped 100,000 signatures a month ago, and the president's recent signature on a cybersecurity executive order may mean the administration's position on legislation has shifted. Here's the text of Ramsey's TechNet letter, as published by The Hill: Quote:
![]() IBM Executives Head to Washington to Press Lawmakers On Cybersecurity Bill Jennifer Martinez Nearly 200 senior IBM executives are flying into Washington to press for the passage of a controversial cybersecurity bill that will come up for a vote in the House this week. The IBM executives will pound the pavement on Capitol Hill Monday and Tuesday, holding nearly 300 meetings with lawmakers and staff. Over the course of those two days, their mission is to convince lawmakers to back a bill that’s intended to make it easier for industry and government to share information about cyber threats with each other in real time. “We’re going to put our shoe leather where our mouth is,” Chris Padilla, vice president of governmental affairs at IBM, told The Hill. “The message we're going to give [lawmakers] is going to be a very simple, clear message: support the passage of CISPA,” he later added. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and ranking member Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), passed out of committee on an 18-2 vote last Wednesday and is expected to come to the floor for a vote as soon as mid-week. While the bill enjoys strong backing from industry, privacy advocates warn the bill lacks sufficient protections for people’s information online. The White House issued a veto threat against the first iteration of CISPA last year, due in part to privacy concerns. Despite the opposition, CISPA safely passed the House last year on a bipartisan vote—and IBM intends to make sure it does again this week. The technology services company runs the information technology networks of major hospitals, banks and electric companies—key infrastructure that lawmakers and security officials warn are top targets for hostile actors to launch a cyberattack. Big Blue is also the top recipient of U.S. patents and owns a trove of valuable intellectual property that would be enticing to probing hackers looking to siphon valuable proprietary information. A report published by computer security firm Mandiant this year concluded that an elite military unit of Chinese hackers has allegedly cracked into the computer systems of more than 100 U.S. companies and stolen intellectual property. The company believes the best way to thwart a cyberattack is to encourage companies to share more data about malicious source code and other online threats with the government and their private-sector peers so they can take steps to address it, according to Padilla. “It’s our experience that the most effective thing you can do when a cyberattack occurs is to share information quickly between government and industry and between industry actors in real time in order to find where the attack is coming from and to shut it down,” he said. "The key really is when an attack happens—and they will happen—is detecting it, and shutting it down and preventing the loss of data as quickly as possible. That's a question of information and it's a question of speed," Padilla said. "And often, the government will have very timely and critical information that banks or telecommunications companies need to know that there is an attack. Other times, we detect it first and sharing [information] with the government could serve to warn others that there may be an attack." But companies are currently hesitant to share information about cyber threats they spot on computer networks with the government because they fear it may put them at risk for being sued. CISPA would address that concern, Padilla said, by granting companies liability protection from lawsuits if they share threat information with the government, allowing firms to get the assistance and data they need faster. If a cyberattack is launched against a key piece of infrastructure, “you don't want a bunch of lawyers sitting in a room arguing whether to tell the government,” he said. “You want there to be clear and established procedures. CISPA will help facilitate that.” But the cyber information-sharing bill has rankled privacy advocates from Washington to Silicon Valley. One of their chief concerns with the bill is that it would allow companies to share threat information directly with the military, including the National Security Agency, without being required to take steps to remove personally identifiable information from that data. Privacy advocates warn that could lead to people's email and IP addresses, names, and other personal information being inadvertently passed on to the NSA without their knowledge. The American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Democracy and Technology and Electronic Frontier Foundation argue that a civilian agency, namely the Homeland Security Department (DHS), should be the first recipient of cyber threat data from companies. DHS would then pass on that data with other government agencies and departments. Privacy advocates argue that a civilian agency is subject to more oversight relative to the secretive spy agency. Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) proposed a set of privacy-focused amendments during the markup of CISPA last week, which did not receive enough votes to be adopted into the bill. One of the amendments by Schakowsky would have ensured that DHS is the first recipient of threat data from companies and would relay that information to other agencies. "I think if you're looking just to maximize efficiency and you don't care about anything else, then we should give the job to NSA. But we have a separation of civilian and military in this country when you're talking about domestic cyber information," Schiff said at a press conference after the House Intelligence panel's markup of CISPA. "If we wanted efficiency only, then we wouldn't have a Fourth Amendment." CISPA would “shift the control of the cyber program from civilian hands to a secretive military agency," said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, last week. "It'll be very difficult for there to be any transparency or any accountability if that shift happens." Padilla, however, says companies need to be able to share threat data directly with the NSA “because that’s where the expertise is.” “It really is a simple matter. The expertise in the U.S. government on cybersecurity largely rests in one place, and that's the National Security Agency,” he said. “They tend to know the most, the soonest about cyber threats and I think, frankly, there is a certain amount of feeling in the business community that you should be able to work directly and share information directly with the agency that has the most expertise.” He said that IBM is open to working with DHS and other civilian agencies on the company’s cybersecurity efforts, but it believes the NSA has the most expertise at this point. “We don't have a bias. We just want to work with who's got the expertise,” Padilla said. During their fly-in trip, the executives also plan to press lawmakers to pass comprehensive immigration reform, which would include measures aimed at raising the cap for H-1B visas for skilled workers and freeing up more green cards. http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...-advocacy-tour ![]() Cyber Security Bill Pits Tech Giants Against Privacy Activists The two groups joined forces last year to fight the Stop Online Piracy Act. Now the battle over the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, will show each side's clout. Chris O'Brien The escalating cyber attacks on corporate and government computers have provided a rare opportunity for bipartisan legislation to address the problem. But rather than sailing through Congress, the latest cyber security legislation is exposing a fault line in the tech industry. On one side stand some of tech's biggest companies, such as Intel Corp., Oracle Corp. and IBM Corp., which are pressing for more government action. On the other side are thousands of smaller tech firms and privacy activists who have launched online protests to raise the alarm over a bill they say harms privacy and civil liberties. Last year, these two camps joined forces in a powerful protest that stopped a piracy bill favored by the entertainment industry. Now they find themselves pitted against each other, trying to find a middle ground between increased security and protecting privacy. With the bill headed toward a possible vote in Congress next week, the results of this high-tech family feud may demonstrate in stark terms whether the Internet can truly be the great political leveler when going against the more traditional methods of wielding policy influence, such as lobbying and campaign donations. "This is sort of a 'privacy versus big corporation' moment," said Michelle Richardson, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been campaigning against the cyber security bill. This is a striking departure from the much-publicized fight last year over the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, a bill backed by Hollywood and the recording industry. Activists launched a high-profile and sweeping online campaign against the bill. Many hailed it as evidence of the power of Internet activism. But the truth wasn't quite so simple. In that fight, large tech companies largely aligned with those grass-roots activists, bringing their own lobbying might to bear. "This will be a much truer test of the Internet's power because there are no big tech companies lining up with the citizen grass-roots groups," said Daniel G. Newman, president of MapLight, a nonpartisan research organization in Berkeley that tracks the influence of money on politics. This schism emerged over a bill called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2013, or CISPA. On Wednesday, the bill was approved by the House's Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence by a vote of 18 to 2, with two Democrats voting against. It now will move to the full House for a vote that could be held as early as next week. Big tech companies have been clamoring for the government to take a stronger role in cyber security amid the growing number and complexity of cyber attacks in recent years. This battle is causing companies to ramp up spending to defend themselves. In turn, companies have stepped up their own efforts around cyber security policy. According to a recent analysis by Bloomberg, the number of firms and corporations lobbying on cyber security issues has grown to 513 in 2012 from 183 in 2010. This year, the Obama administration issued an executive order that directs the federal government to create voluntary standards for cyber security protections for private-sector companies, while also finding ways to enable companies to share more information about these attacks. The House intelligence committee has received letters of support for the bill from Intel, Oracle, IBM, Juniper Networks Inc. and Motorola Solutions Inc. On Wednesday, TechNet, which represents such companies as Google Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Apple Inc. and Yahoo Inc., issued a letter praising the committee for its work on the bill. "We commend the committee for providing liability protections to companies participating in voluntary information-sharing and applaud the committee's efforts to work with a wide range of stakeholders to address issues such as strengthening privacy protections," TechNet President Rey Ramsey wrote. Still, many of these companies are tiptoeing carefully in their support of the bill, acknowledging the importance of getting the privacy parts of the legislation right. "We are calling for conversation and discussions between folks concerned with privacy and security," said David Hoffman, director of security policy and global privacy officer at Intel. "I would say that we're encouraged by the conversations that have been had." But such talk may not be enough to satisfy the grass-roots activists. These groups say CISPA doesn't do enough to protect personal information while absolving companies of liability over sharing that data. They also argue that such information could be shared directly with the military, and instead should be handled primarily by civilian agencies. "A bill in Congress could kill online privacy as we know it," reads the website at http://www.cispapetition.org, started by San Francisco programmer Daniel Jabbour using the technology that powers online petition site Change.org. "It would allow corporations to share your personal information with the government — without a warrant." The Internet Defense League, a network of small tech businesses and privacy activists, sent out an alert using its "cat signal" urging its members to take action by signing petitions and contacting their representatives. The cat signal is a piece of code the group developed that can be placed on a website. When the IDL activates the program, a banner appears on the websites with information about the issues and instructions for getting involved. "The cat is the unofficial mascot of the Internet," said Evan Greer, campaign manager at Fight for the Future, an Internet activist group that is part of the IDL. "When you take away people's ability to view and share content about cats, they get very upset." http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,5498248.story ![]() Call Now: Tell Congress to Reject CISPA The House is about to vote on the "cybersecurity" bill known as CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. Despite recent amendments, CISPA still features dangerously vague language that could put your personal information in the hands of military organizations like the National Security Agency. While CISPA passed through the House last year, it failed to be enacted after a veto threat. This year's bill fails to solve the fundamental privacy and civil liberties problems with the misguided law. Please speak out! We’re asking individuals to call Representatives and follow up with a tweet. Suggested script: Hello, my name is [YOUR NAME] and I am a constituent of [Congressperson's name]. Please oppose H.R.624, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, also known as CISPA. It is a misguided bill that violates my privacy. I believe that the right cybersecurity solution does not involve sacrificing the privacy rights of Internet users. Thank you for your consideration, and for acting against this dangerous bill. Phone lines closed? If you call and the phone lines are already closed or overwhelmed, please send an email. Spread the word! Excellent! Now that you've made the call, use our Twitter tool to tell key members of Congress to stand up for your privacy and vote NO on CISPA and to help spread the word. https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/...ction_KEY=9202 ![]() House Passes Revamped CISPA Cybersecurity Bill Amidst Warnings of 'Digital Bombs' Fear of cyber attacks trumps privacy concerns Adi Robertson The US House of Representatives has once again passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which died in the Senate last year, by a margin of 288 to 127 after two days of debate. Over several hours, House opinion on the bill boiled down to whether the redesigned CISPA successfully addressed criticism from civil libertarians, and whether the threat of cyberattacks was grave enough to justify overriding lingering concerns. Representative Candice Miller (R-MI), a CISPA supporter, painted a dire picture of North Korean hackers taking down the US power grid, and Rep. Joe Heck (R-NV) warned that "our nation is under attack." Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX) went so far as to urge passage with a comparison to the Boston Marathon bombings: "In the case of Boston they were real bombs, in this case they're digital bombs. And these digital bombs are on their way." Cyberwarfare is seen as a major threat by other parts of the US government. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has testified about the possibility of a major cyber attack, and the NSA has stepped up its cyberwarfare efforts with offensive and defensive teams. President Barack Obama has signed an executive cybersecurity order, and he's urged Congress to pass legislation that would broaden it. At its core, CISPA is meant to make it easier for companies to share information about online attacks between each other and the government, letting them catch hacks early and better defend themselves. But there's disagreement over whether it does so while protecting the privacy of ordinary people whose data is actually at risk of being exposed. While both Facebook and Microsoft have backed away slightly from supporting CISPA, other major tech lobby groups have urged its passage, and only a small number of companies — including Mozilla and Reddit — have actively opposed it. Instead, organized protest has come from advocacy groups like the ACLU or EFF, who warn that the bill's provisions could supersede existing privacy agreements, letting companies share private information about their users with the government. The White House has expressed this concern as well, asking legislators to build stronger protections for users into the bill. After the bill was marked up in committee, several amendments were brought and passed. One, which was filed the day before floor debate, designates the Department of Homeland Security as the central agency for receiving company data, after which it could be passed to other agencies. Early drafts were hailed as a way to limit the scope of government sharing, with the ACLU's Michelle Richardson telling reporters that it was "by far the biggest amendment." Richardson now says, however, that the amendment was stripped of its teeth before being brought to the floor. It does not require companies to report only through the DHS if they want to keep their immunity, instead simply designating the department as a primary point of contact. She also didn't believe the other amendments made much different to the final result: "For all of this floor action, the bill is pretty much the same." Many of them were designed to be clarifications, making it evident that legislators don't intend CISPA to be used for surveillance or searches; unfortunately, unintended consequences or abuses are what opponents worry about. Some legislators protested the fact that oversight amendments were shot down in committee, before the bill came to the floor. Among other things, these amendments could have set further limits to when governments would use shared information, required companies to scrub personal data from the user information they sent, or bound them to abide by privacy contracts with users. Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), a particularly outspoken CISPA critic, said that the bill as written was "wide open to potential abuse," arguing that it could open the door to searching through user data. "There are absolutely no protections with regards to what is done with this information," he said. Rep. Rob Woodall (R-GA) dismissed his concerns, saying that CISPA could not erode existing constitutional protections. "The Fourth Amendment trumps all," he said, adding that foreign cyber threats posed a bigger danger to privacy. Supporters also pointed to amendments that would govern sharing with civilian agencies, limiting it to "cybersecurity" cases. Others criticized the notion that CISPA information-sharing would authorize surveillance or allow companies to break user privacy agreements, calling the latter "misinformation." The bill still has a long road before becoming law. CISPA initially passed in the House last year, but it wasn't taken up by the Senate. Now, it will once again be up to the Senate to craft and pass a companion bill. Whether Obama will support the bill is another matter. While the White House has said repeatedly that it will work with legislators, a statement released yesterday said the Obama Administration would veto CISPA if changes weren't made. Now, it's up to the Senate to determine what its version of the proposed law will look like — and whether it will actually make it through this time. http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/18/42...ses-cispa-2013 ![]() Former DHS Official Says Boston Bombing Proves ACLU & EFF Are Wrong About Surveillance And CISPA Tim Cushing There have been a lot of kneejerk reactions to the Boston Marathon bombing. Between certain politicians and pundits quickly turning the horrific event into makeshift planks to support their pet legislation/conspiracy theories and the New York Post cranking out reports so "exclusive" they weren't even true, the internet and airwaves have been filled with the sort of stupidity we've sadly come to expect when tragedy strikes. Then something comes along that swaggers right up to you and punches you in the face with its breathtaking imbecility. This is Stewart Baker's "contribution" to the national discussion, filed over at the otherwise esteemed Volokh Conspiracy under the heading "Fool Me Once..." When people say, "The stupid! It burns!" they're usually referring to garden variety stupidity or the occasional bit of advanced moronics that momentarily derails entire comment threads. This thing that Baker has cobbled together out of the stuff he likes best -- surveillance and more surveillance -- towers over other moments of burning stupid like a Wicker Man made entirely from straw. The stupid here doesn't simply burn. It immolates the rational person's mind, replacing coherent arguments with searing, nightmarish pain that reduces responses to stunted internet-native declarations like "wat." Baker wants us to believe that the EFF and the ACLU are wrong... in both instances. What it actually shows is the EFF/ACLU's consistency on these issues. Unless Baker has heard otherwise, the EFF and ACLU are still against widespread surveillance (along with CISPA). This event, as terrible as it was, doesn't change that stance. Only someone like Baker, a former DHS "company man" and freelance contributor to the underdeveloped "TSA porn" genre, would take the stance that the FBI's release of camera footage capturing the two bombing suspects' images justifies the massive amount of surveillance many in this country are subjected to in nearly every public space. (His take conveniently ignores the fact that the stills posted by the FBI appear to have been captured by cameras deployed by private businesses.) Only someone who seems to detest the actions of privacy advocates would insinuate through a disingenuous headline ("What they said about street cameras before the bombing") that the EFF and ACLU would change their views on surveillance after an event like this. They won't. Only fair-weather friends of Constitutional rights and civil liberties change their stances after a tragedy like this. (See also: EVERYTHING THE GOVERNMENT HAS ENACTED SINCE SEPT. 11, 2001 THAT DEALS WITH NATIONAL "SAFETY" OR "SECURITY.") And only someone who knows CISPA is a purposely flawed bill aimed at giving the government even more control and surveillance powers would have the gall to cheapen this tragedy by attempting to equate the two using a bullshit "conclusion" hastily MS Painted together and dropped unceremoniously into the blogosphere like a flaming bag of foul-smelling rhetoric on the doormat. One question, though, Stewart, tied into Boston Marathon as you've done with yours: all of this surveillance, all these increased security measures, all this warrantless wiretapping, all these pat downs and scans at the airport, all of these drones flying all over the world, all these double-secret interpretations of super-secret laws, all of these redacted FOIA responses, all of this Cyber Pearl Harbor hand wringing, all of encroachment of the government into every aspect of American existence? What did it prevent? https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...ce-cispa.shtml ![]() Don’t Let Verizon, AT&T Run Roughshod Over Smaller Carriers, DOJ Warns Spectrum auctions should boost competition, antitrust officials tell FCC. Jon Brodkin US antitrust officials today urged the Federal Communications Commission to limit the amount of wireless spectrum Verizon Wireless and AT&T can buy during future auctions. The Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, in a letter sent to the FCC yesterday and made public today, said Verizon and AT&T have more than their share of prime spectrum compared to T-Mobile and Sprint. "[T]he Commission must ensure that the allocation of spectrum at auction does not enable carriers with high market shares to foreclose smaller carriers from improving their customers' coverage," DOJ officials wrote. "Today, the two leading carriers have the vast majority of low-frequency spectrum, whereas the two other nationwide carriers have virtually none. This results in the two smaller nationwide carriers having a somewhat diminished ability to compete, particularly in rural areas where the cost to build out coverage is higher with high-frequency spectrum." The DOJ filing came in response to a notice of proposed rulemaking the FCC issued last September in order to review "policies governing mobile spectrum holdings in order to ensure that they fulfill our statutory objectives given changes in technology, spectrum availability, and the marketplace since the Commission’s last comprehensive review more than a decade ago." With FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski stepping down, the new yet-to-be-named chairperson will likely preside over an auction of spectrum controlled by TV broadcasters. That's low-frequency spectrum in the 600MHz band, attractive because its signals propagate farther than those going over higher-frequency airwaves. In addition to licensing spectrum to cellular providers, the auction could either increase or decrease the amount of unlicensed spectrum available to White Spaces networks. The auction is still in the early planning stages, with no date set. Consumer advocacy groups applauded the DOJ's stance. Public Knowledge said "it is gratifying to see the DOJ take such a strong stand in favor of competition and against the wireless status quo." FCC policies that let a few carriers acquire massive spectrum holdings have limited "the ability of smaller, rural, and regional carriers to provide service," the group continued. "This leads to high prices and limited choice for consumers, and allows the largest carriers to use their power to control handsets and the pace of wireless innovation." http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ers-doj-warns/ ![]() Justice Department Backs Limits on Wireless Companies Edward Wyatt The Justice Department’s top antitrust enforcer said on Tuesday that he supported limits on how much of the nation’s airwaves a single wireless company could hold, a condition that could keep AT&T and Verizon from bidding on certain blocks of airwaves during auctions. William J. Baer, the assistant attorney general who oversees the antitrust division, told a Senate subcommittee that limits were needed to promote competition in the market for wireless broadband service. The remarks echoed comments filed by the Justice Department last week in response to a Federal Communications Commission request for recommendations on how public airwaves, or spectrum, should be allocated. The F.C.C. sought the comments in preparation for the auction, in 2014, of spectrum that it is hoping to reclaim from television broadcasters. In its filing, the antitrust division said it supported auction rules that would ensure smaller carriers could continue to compete for wireless customers, but it avoided saying that a strict limit, or screen, was the best way to go about it. Currently, the F.C.C. looks at acquisitions of new spectrum on a case-by-case basis, seeking to keep any one company from dominating a given market. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, asked Mr. Baer during the hearing if he thought the F.C.C. should put a spectrum screen into effect for the auction. “The answer is yes, Senator,” Mr. Baer said. “We believe that well-defined, competition-focused rules for putting newly available spectrum to use quickly and efficiently is the best way of promoting consumer welfare.” Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, said he believed that an F.C.C. screen could result in the government subsidizing smaller wireless companies. But Mr. Baer replied that the playing field might already be tilted by larger companies buying spectrum simply to keep it out of the hands of competitors. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/t...companies.html ![]() Google Fiber Coming to Provo, Utah Kevin Lo In order to bring Fiber to Provo, we’ve signed an agreement to purchase iProvo, an existing fiber-optic network owned by the city. As a part of the acquisition, we would commit to upgrade the network to gigabit technology and finish network construction so that every home along the existing iProvo network would have the opportunity to connect to Google Fiber. Our agreement with Provo isn’t approved yet—it’s pending a vote by the City Council scheduled for next Tuesday, April 23. We intend to begin the network upgrades as soon as the closing conditions are satisfied and the deal is closed. Provo started building their own municipal network in 2004 because they decided that providing access to high speed connectivity was important to their community’s future. In 2011, they started looking for a partner that could acquire their network and deliver an affordable service for Provoans. We’re committed to keeping their vision alive, and, if the deal is approved and the acquisition closes, we’d offer our Free Internet service (5 Mbps speeds) to every home along the existing Provo network, for a $30 activation fee and no monthly charge for at least seven years. We would also offer Google Fiber Gigabit Internet—up to 100x faster Internet than today’s average broadband speeds—and the option for Google Fiber TV service with hundreds of your favorite channels. We’d also provide free Gigabit Internet service to 25 local public institutions like schools, hospitals and libraries. Over the next few days, we’ll be in and around Provo with Mayor Curtis, attending community meetings and talking to residents about what widespread gigabit connectivity could mean for their community, and the ways in which we’d invest in their iProvo network. If you are a Provoan, we hope to see you there! In the meantime, you can sign up on our website to get updates and more information. http://googlefiberblog.blogspot.com/...on-slopes.html ![]() Sony ISP Launches World's Fastest Home Internet, 2Gbps A Sony-backed ISP in Japan has launched a 2Gbps Internet service, which it said is the world’s fastest for home use. So-net Entertainment began offering its “Nuro” fiber-based service on Monday to homes, apartments, and small businesses in Tokyo and six surrounding prefectures. Nuro will cost ¥4,980 (US$51) per month on a two-year contract, plus a ¥52,500 installation fee that it is currently offering for free for those that apply online. The upload speed is 1Gbps. The company said the service includes rental of an ONU (optical network unit) designed to handle the high speeds. ONU devices are commonly used in homes and business to convert fiber to broadband Internet. Individual users of the service are unlikely to see 2Gbps speeds on their devices, as it exceeds the capacity of most consumer network adaptors. The Japanese government has strongly backed fiber connections to private residences, and the country is now among the world leaders. About 25 percent of Japanese households are currently connected, the second-highest rate in the world, according to data from regional FTTH, or Fibre to the Home, organizations. The UAE is the highest at over 70 percent. Much of Japan’s population in Tokyo and other cities lives in tightly packed apartments, which has made it easier to roll out fiber services. Services offering 1Gbps are now common, with providers slashing prices and offering hundreds of dollars in discounts to draw subscribers. As in other countries, the rollout has been much lower in lower-populated rural areas. So-net said its service uses the GPON, or Gigabit-capable Passive Optics Networks, standard, which supports up to 2.488 Gbps downstream. http://www.pcworld.com/article/20346...net-2gbps.html ![]() The End of Power Moisés Naím Power is shifting—from large, stable armies to loose bands of insurgents, from corporate leviathans to nimble start-ups, from presidential palaces to public squares. It has become harder to wield power and easier to lose it, and the world is becoming less predictable as a result. As people become more prosperous and mobile, they are harder to control and more apt to question authority. Insurgents, fringe political parties, innovative start-ups, hackers, loosely organized activists, upstart citizen media outlets, leaderless young people in city squares, and charismatic individuals who seem to have “come from nowhere” are shaking up the old order. These are the micropowers: small, unknown, or once-negligible actors who have found ways to undermine, fence in, or thwart the megaplayers. Navies and police forces, television networks, traditional political parties, large banks—the large bureaucratic organizations that previously controlled their fields—are seeing their authority undermined. Micropowers should be aberrations. Because they lack scale, coordination, resources, and a pre-existing reputation, they should not even make it into the game, or at least they should be quickly squashed or absorbed by a dominant rival. But the reverse is increasingly true: The micropowers are beating the megaplayers. Javier Solana, the former Spanish foreign minister, secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and European Union foreign policy chief, once told me: “Over the last quarter-century—a period that included the Balkans and Iraq and negotiations with Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian issues and numerous other crises—I saw how multiple new forces and factors constrained even the richest and most technologically advanced powers. They—and by that I mean we—could rarely do any longer what we wanted.” The end of the Cold War and the birth of the Internet helped enable the rise of today’s micropowers, but they were by no means the only important factors. We need to look at deeper transformations in how, where, how long, and how well we live. These changes can be usefully imagined in three categories: the More Revolution, the Mobility Revolution, and the Mentality Revolution. The first is swamping the barriers to power, the second is circumventing them, and the third is undercutting them. The More Revolution Ours is an age of profusion. There are more people, countries, cities, political parties, and armies. More goods and services, and more companies selling them; more weapons and more medicines; more students and more computers; more preachers and more criminals. The world’s economic output has increased fivefold since 1950. Income per capita is three and a half times greater than it was then. Most important, there are more people—2 billion more than there were just two decades ago. By 2050 the world’s population will be four times larger than it was a century before. The More Revolution has progressed in the face of economic recession, terrorism, earthquakes, repression, civil wars, natural disasters, and environmental threats. Without diminishing the urgency or the human and planetary toll of these crises, we can assert that the first decade of the 21st century was arguably humanity’s most successful: As the Center for Global Development scholar Charles Kenny put it, “Best. Decade. Ever.” According to the World Bank, between 2005 and 2008, from sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America and from Asia to Eastern Europe, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty (those with incomes under $1.25 a day) plunged. Given that the decade was marked by the onset of the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929, this progress is even more surprising. The world is expected to reach the Millennium Development Goals on poverty set in 2000 by the United Nations much earlier than originally anticipated. One of the most audacious goals back then was to cut the world’s extreme poverty in half by 2015; that impressive feat was achieved five years early, in 2010. Despite the global financial crisis, the economies of poorer countries continued to expand and create jobs. That trend began three decades ago; 660 million Chinese have escaped poverty since 1981, for example. The share of Asians living in extreme poverty dropped from 77 percent in the 1980s to 14 percent in 1998. This sort of progress is happening not only in China, India, Brazil, and other successful emerging markets but also in the poorest countries of Africa. The economists Maxim Pinkovskiy of MIT and Xavier Sala-i-Martin of Columbia University have shown that between 1970 and 2006 poverty in Africa declined much faster than generally recognized. “All classes of countries, including those with disadvantageous geography and history, experienced reductions in poverty,” they write in a 2010 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. “In particular, poverty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for mineral-rich as well as mineral-poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below- or above-median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade.” Since 2000 child mortality has decreased by more than 17 percent worldwide, and child deaths from measles dropped by 60 percent between 1999 and 2005. In developing countries, the number of people in the “undernourished” category decreased from 34 percent in 1970 to 17 percent in 2008. The World Bank reckons that since 2006, 28 formerly “low-income countries” have joined the ranks of “middle-income” ones. These new middle classes may not be as prosperous as their counterparts in developed countries, but their members now enjoy an unprecedented standard of living. The Brookings Institution’s Homi Kharas, one of the most respected researchers on the subject, told me: “The size of the global middle class has doubled from about 1 billion in 1980 to 2 billion in 2012. This segment of society is still growing very fast and could reach 3 billion by 2020.” The world’s socioeconomic landscape has changed drastically during recent decades: 84 percent of the world’s population is now literate, compared to 75 percent in 1990. Average scores on intelligence tests all over the world are now higher. Meanwhile, combat deaths are down by more than 40 percent since 2000. Life expectancy in countries hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic is starting to rise again. And we are providing for our agricultural needs better than ever: Since 2000 cereal production in the developing world has increased twice as fast as population. Even “rare earths”—the 17 scarce elements used in the manufacture of cellphones and in fuel refining—are not so rare anymore, as new sources and producers enter the market. According to the United Nations Human Development Index, which combines health, education, and income indicators to give a global measure of well-being, standards of living have risen everywhere in the world since 1970. Simply put, billions of people who until recently lived with almost nothing now have more food, more opportunities, and longer lives than ever before. The overall picture of humanity living longer and healthier lives, with basic needs far better addressed than ever, is crucial to understanding today’s shifts and redistributions of power, and to putting into perspective more fashionable explanations of current events. Yes, the Arab Spring and other recent social movements have made spectacular use of modern technologies. But they owe even more to the rapid rise in life expectancy in the Middle East and North Africa since 1980; to the “youth bulge” made up of millions of people under 30 who are educated and healthy, with a long life span ahead of them, yet have no jobs or good prospects; and, of course, to the rise of a politically active middle class. It’s no coincidence that the Arab Spring started in Tunisia, the North African country with the best economic performance and the most success in lifting its poor into the middle class. When people are more numerous and living fuller lives, they become more difficult to regiment and control. The exercise of power in any realm involves, fundamentally, the ability to impose and retain control over a country, a marketplace, a constituency, a population of adherents, a network of trade routes, and so on. When the people in that territory—whether potential soldiers, voters, customers, workers, competitors, or believers—are more numerous, in fuller possession of their means, and functioning at ever-greater levels of ability, they become more difficult to coordinate and control, let alone dominate. The Mobility Revolution Not only are there more people today, living fuller and healthier lives; they also move around a lot more, making them harder to manage. This trend changes the distribution of power within and among populations, whether through the rise of ethnic, religious, and professional diasporas or through individual vectors of ideas, capital, and faiths that can be either destabilizing or empowering. The United Nations estimates that there are 214 million migrants across the globe, an increase of 37 percent during the last two decades. The number of migrants during that period grew by 41 percent in Europe and 80 percent in North America. Immigrants are changing the businesses, religions, and cultures of the countries in which they settle. In the United States, the Hispanic population grew from 22 million in 1990 to 51 million in 2011; one of every six Americans is now Hispanic. In Dearborn, Michigan, the world headquarters for the Ford Motor Company, 40 percent of the population is Arab-American. Such enclaves are bound to transform coalitions and voting patterns as well as business strategies and even religious competition. Political parties, politicians, businesses, and other institutions increasingly face competitors that have deeper roots and a better understanding of this new population. The same thing is happening in Europe, as governments have proven unable to stem the tide of immigrants from Africa, Asia, or other, less wealthy, European countries. An interesting case in point: In 2007 a Nigerian-born man was elected in Portlaoise, Ireland, a commuter town west of Dublin, as that country’s first black mayor. Immigrants send billions of dollars in remittances to their home countries every year, promoting economic growth and development. Worldwide, they wired, mailed, or carried home $449 billion in 2010. (In 1980 remittances totaled less than one-fourth of that in inflation-adjusted dollars.) Nowadays, remittances are more than five times larger than the world’s total foreign aid and larger than the annual total flow of foreign investment to poor countries. In short, workers who live outside their home country, who are often very poor themselves, send more money to their country than foreign investors and more than rich countries send as financial aid. For many countries, remittances have become the biggest source of hard currency and, in effect, the largest sector of the economy. Perhaps the most aggressively power-transforming aspect of the Mobility Revolution is urbanization. More people have moved, and continue to move, from farms to cities than ever before, particularly in Asia. In 2007, for the first time in history, more people lived in cities than in rural areas. The U.S. National Intelligence Council reckons that “every year 65 million people are added to the world’s urban population, equivalent to adding seven cities the size of Chicago or five the size of London annually.” Internal migration—especially population shifts from farms to cities—can be as disruptive to power as international migration. A newer form of mobility is also reshaping the landscape of power: brain circulation. Poor nations tend to lose many of their skilled and better-educated citizens to richer countries, which attract them with visions of a better life. This well-known “brain drain” deprives nations of nurses, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and other professionals who are expensive to train. In recent years, however, increasing numbers of these professionals have been returning to their countries of origin and upending business as usual in industries, universities, the media, and politics. AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, has found that Taiwanese, Indian, Israeli, and Chinese immigrants who worked in California’s Silicon Valley often became “angel investors” and “venture capitalists” in their old countries, starting up companies and eventually either moving back or traveling frequently between their old and new countries. In so doing, they transfer the culture, approaches, and techniques they learned in the United States. Inevitably, the dynamic, competitive, and disruptive business culture common in entrepreneurial hubs clashes with the monopolistic and traditional ways of doing business often found in developing countries. These migrations are occurring in the context of a vast increase in the movement of goods, services, money, information, and ideas. The trade in goods was barely slowed by the recession that started in 2008. In 1990 the world’s total exports and imports amounted to 39 percent of the global economy; by 2010 they had risen to 56 percent. And between 2000 and 2009, the total value of merchandise traded across borders nearly doubled, from $6.5 trillion to $12.5 trillion (in current dollars), according to the United Nations. Total exports of goods and services in that period jumped from $7.9 trillion to $18.7 trillion, according to the International Monetary Fund. Money also has become more mobile. The stock of foreign direct investment measured as a percentage of the world’s economy jumped from 6.5 percent in 1980 to a whopping 30 percent in 2010, while the volume of currency that moved internationally every day grew sevenfold between 1995 and 2010. In the latter year, more than $4 trillion changed hands across international borders each day. The ability to move information around has expanded even faster. Somalia epitomizes the concept of “failed states,” societies in which citizens lack access to basic services that most of us take for granted. Yet even there, 21st-century mobile telephony is widely available. In 1990 across the globe, the number of mobile cellular subscriptions per 100 people was 0.2. By 2010 it had exploded to more than 78. The International Telecommunications Union reports that in 2012 subscriptions to mobile telephony exceeded 6 billion—equivalent to an astonishing 87 percent of the world’s population. In 1990 the number of Internet users was insignificant—a mere 0.1 percent of the world’s population. That number rose to 30 percent by 2010 (and to more than 73 percent in developed countries). By 2013 nine-year-old Facebook had nearly 1 billion users, more than half of whom access the social network via mobile phones and tablets. We should consider the impact of another tool that does not get the credit it deserves for changing the world: the prepaid phone card. The growth of calling-card usage leaves the Internet’s growth in the dust. Now prepaid calling cards are giving way to prepaid mobile phones. Prepaid cellphones have displaced those that require a long-term subscription and bind the user to a service provider through an elaborate contract. The less-well-off who choose to leave home for opportunities further afield no longer face as stark a choice between staying close to their families and improving their fortunes. The two characteristics shared by all of these mobility-enhancing technologies are the speed and extent of the drop in costs of moving goods, money, people, and information. Airline tickets that used to cost thousands of dollars 20 or 30 years ago can now be had at a fraction of the cost. Transporting a ton of cargo today costs one-tenth what it did in the 1950s. Wiring money from California to Mexico in the late 1990s cost about 15 percent of the transferred sum; today the charge is less than 6 percent. Mobile phone platforms through which money can be transferred from one cellphone to another will soon make remittances almost cost-free. The Mobility Revolution has had a profound effect. Power needs a captive audience. In situations where citizens, voters, investors, workers, parishioners, or customers have few or no alternatives, they have little choice but to consent to the terms of the institutions they face. But when borders become porous, and the governed—or controlled—population becomes more mobile, entrenched organizations have a harder time retaining their dominance. The Mentality Revolution The More and Mobility Revolutions have created a new, vast, and fast-growing middle class whose members are well aware that others have even more prosperity, freedom, and personal fulfillment than they do. These new members of the global middle class hope and expect to catch up. These expectations, and the discontent they breed among those left behind, are now global. They affect rich and poor countries alike; indeed, the overwhelming majority of the world’s population lives in what could now be called rapidly changing societies. The embattled middle classes take to the streets and fight to protect their living standards while the expanding middle classes protest to get more and better goods and services. This is a new mind-set—a change in mentality—that has profound consequences for power. The Muslim world is a rich source of examples of how the Mentality Revolution is transforming long-held traditions, from the rise of a fashion industry aimed at hijabi (veiled or covered) women to the spread of no-interest banking in Western countries that have large Muslim immigrant communities. In India, the transformation in attitudes is spreading back from the young generation to their elders. A country where divorce was once considered shameful—and women, in particular, were discouraged from remarrying—now has an increasingly robust matrimonial advertising industry devoted to listings by divorced senior citizens, some in their 80s or even 90s, seeking love late in life and without embarrassment. Mature adults are leaving the arranged marriages into which they were inducted when they were teens or young adults. Global public opinion surveys provide a clearer picture of the extent and velocity of these attitudinal changes. Since 1990 the World Values Survey (WVS) has been tracking changes in people’s attitudes in more than 80 countries, containing 85 percent of the world’s population. WVS Director Ronald Inglehart and several of his co-authors have documented profound changes in attitudes concerning gender differences, religion, government, and globalization. One of their key findings is a growing global consensus regarding the importance of individual autonomy and gender equality, along with a corresponding popular intolerance for authoritarianism. Globalization, urbanization, changes in family structure, the rise of new industries and opportunities, the spread of English as a global lingua franca—these have had consequences in every sphere of modern life, but their effect has been most important at the level of attitudes. The more contact we have with one another, the greater our aspirations. One of the best examples of all three revolutions working simultaneously is the Indian outsourcing industry. Young, educated Indians who belong to the country’s burgeoning middle class have flocked to work at urban call centers and other business-process outsourcing companies, which in 2011 generated $59 billion in revenue and directly and indirectly employed almost 10 million Indians. Although the jobs pay relatively well, they plunge young Indians into a welter of contradictions and competing aspirations—that is, aspirations to succeed in an Indian social and economic context while sublimating their cultural identities with fake accents and names, and dealing with abuse and exploitation at the hands of affluent customers a continent away. For young urban Indian women in particular, the jobs have provided opportunities and economic benefits they might not otherwise have had, leading to lasting behavioral changes that are upending cultural norms. Never mind the lurid newspaper articles about call centers as “a part of India where freedom knows no bounds, love is a favourite pastime, and sex is recreation,” as an article in the India Times put it in 2004. Closer to the mark is a recent survey by India’s Associated Chambers of Commerce finding that young working married women in Indian cities are increasingly choosing to put off having children in favor of developing their careers. Revolutionary Consequences The More, Mobility, and Mentality Revolutions challenge the traditional model of power. In that model, large, centralized, coordinated organizations deploy overwhelming resources and crushing force to obtain and retain power. As the three revolutions continue to progress, organizations that rely on coercion face ever-increasing costs simply to maintain market share and patrol their boundaries. The inability of the United States or the European Union to curb illegal immigration or illicit trade is a good example. Walls, fences, border controls, biometric identification documents, detention centers, police raids, asylum hearings, deportations—these are just part of an apparatus of prevention and repression that has thus far proven to be extremely expensive and largely futile. The United States has failed utterly to curb the inflow of drugs from Latin America despite a longstanding and enormously expensive interdiction effort. Power exercised through code or moral obligation also faces challenges as the three revolutions advance. Traditions embedded in family or tightly knit communities help people who live short lives marked by disease and poverty to cope, share support, and accept harsh realities. But as their material comforts increase and they gain access to more alternatives, the world’s lower classes become less dependent on their inherited belief systems and more open to experimentation. Consider the crisis of the Catholic Church, which is having more and more difficulty recruiting priests who accept the vow of celibacy and competing with small evangelical churches that can tailor their messages to the culture and concrete needs of specific communities. Power that operates through persuasion, such as advertising campaigns or political patronage, is also challenged by the three revolutions. Imagine a political candidate or party trying to drum up votes through a combination of messages, advertising, and promises of rewards in the form of constituent services and jobs. The More Revolution is creating better-educated and better-informed pools of constituents who are less likely to passively accept government decisions, more prone to scrutinize authorities’ behavior, and more active in seeking change and asserting their rights. The Mobility Revolution is making the demographics of the constituency more diverse, fragmented, and volatile. The Mentality Revolution breeds increasing skepticism of the political system in general. By no means is big power dead. The big, established players are fighting back, and in many cases are still prevailing. Dictators, plutocrats, corporate behemoths, and the leaders of the great religions will continue to be the defining factors in the lives of billions of people, even as they slowly lose market share. But these megaplayers are more constrained in what they can do than they used to be, and their hold on power is less secure. The More, Mobility, and Mentality Revolutions are attacking the model of organization so persuasively advocated by Max Weber and his followers in sociology, economics, and other fields, and they are attacking it precisely at the points where it once drew strength. Large organizations were more efficient because they operated with lower costs, thanks to economies of scale. Today, however, the costs of maintaining order and control are going up. The profound changes in the way power is gained, used, and lost drive many of the trends that are changing the world. Some of these trends are welcome and worthy of celebration: more competition in business, politics, or the sciences, tyrants and tycoons who are now less secure in their dominant position, more meritocracy and opportunity for those with talent, grit, and ambition. But the decay of power drives unwelcome trends as well: the inability to contain carbon emissions, reach a reasonable political deal about the budgetary choices of the American government, the failure to stop the carnage in Syria, and Europe’s economic catastrophe. We have entered an era where many players have just enough power to veto, undermine, or dilute the initiatives of others but no single player has enough unconstrained power to push through an agenda. Many democratic countries are overdosing on checks and balances and the resulting gridlock, dilution, and delays in governmental decision-making have become dangerously common. This can and will change. In the next decade or so, the wave of innovation that has revolutionized communications, medicine, and physics will inevitably drastically transform the way we govern ourselves. http://reason.com/archives/2013/04/14/the-end-of-power ![]() This Incredibly Boring House Is a U.K. Terror Suspect’s Lockdown Pete Brook The Global War on Terror has been presented in the media mostly with images of nighttime tracer fire, IED explosions, fatigued soldiers and Guantanamo razor wire — depicting a spectacle easily dismissed as happening “over there,” far from western suburbia. By contrast, Edmund Clark‘s photographs of an unremarkable British semi-detached home makes the amorphous war relateable. Control Order House is a top-to-bottom survey of a three-bedroomed residence in which a pre-trial, UK terror suspect lives under house arrest. Control orders are a Parliament-sanctioned form of detention without trial which were introduced in Britain as part of the 2005 Prevention of Terrorism Act. Between 2005 and January 2012, 52 men were placed under control orders and subject to various constraints including 16 hour daily curfews, electronic tagging and daily in-person reporting to a police station or by phone to a security switchboard. Controlled persons were also ordered to remain within predetermined geographies which could be as small as a few square miles or as large as UK borders. Control Order House is the only existing photographic study of a residence occupied by a person under a UK control order. It is not an exposé, however. Given the legal sensitivities, every image was vetted by UK government officials. Clark was not allowed to reveal the identity of the terror suspect — referred to in legal documents as “CE” — nor his location. “To reveal CE’s identity would be an offence and in breach of the court-imposed anonymity order,” says Clark. “All the photographs I took or the documents I wanted to use had to be screened by the Home Office.” Strategically, Clark has decided to release Control House Order as a book. In addition to redacted legal documents, handwritten notes from CE and architectural plans of the house, the book reproduces contact sheets of all 500+ images made in the house and presents them in the order they were made. The book — which Clark refers to as “an object of control” — is an exploration of the evidentiary nature of images and documents. Clark moved through the house almost forensically, documenting the hitherto invisible space. His methodology is embedded in the images’ order. “The photographs evoke both surveillance and claustrophobia,” says Clark of the book. “It gives form to one of the locations where the control order experience took place. We are looking at the control imposed by the state on an individual and the implications this has for his personal and familial stability.” It’s not the first time Clark has focused on domestic interiors to jolt viewers from assumptions about given topics. Guantanamo: If The Light Goes Out juxtaposed images of Guantanamo Bay detention camps with shots of the interior of a former detainee’s UK home. Similarly, Still Life: Killing Time focused on the medical aids and personal belongings of infirm inmates in the geriatric wing of a British prison. “I see images as visual histories which explore these issues in terms of the impact on the individuals concerned,” says Clark. “By using the prism of home to question representations of ‘them’ and ‘us,’ in wider social and political terms.” At a point, Clark accepted that, with so many attached limitations, his photography was almost an extension of the state power he was documenting. All of his equipment had to be itemized and registered with the UK Home Office before his visit. “Even CE’s lawyers made it clear to me that the I had to careful about what I spoke to him about because the house was (very probably) bugged and that my telephone communication with him would be monitored,” explains Clark. “All my material, even my words here [in this interview] could become part of CE’s case.” It took two years of negotiations until Clark secured access, an outcome many thought unlikely. Eventually, a barrister who was familiar with Clark’s Guantanamo work introduced Clark to the solicitor representing CE. The solicitor made the approach on Clark’s behalf. “Once CE agreed to work with me I could apply to the Home Office for access. The protocol was that the request had to be done by CE via his lawyers,” says Clark. “I think the Home Office let me do it because they couldn’t stop me once CE had applied without adding to his control conditions and without risking a potentially difficult public legal wrangle.” Front and back elevations of the house in which CE resides. The front elevation is on the front cover of Clark’s book. Likewise, the back elevation is on the back cover. Clark did not record an interview with CE as any recording would be subject to Home Office scrutiny and the case as a whole. At the request of CE’s lawyers, Clark also has not divulged any details of what CE said about his experience living under the control order. “CE is invisible, but he haunts the images like a ghost,” says Clark. “CE’s cat is the only living presence in the images. The cat had the freedom to come and go as it pleased through an upstairs back window.” Clark’s images were shot in December 2011 and January 2012, right about when control orders were replaced by Terrorist Prevention and Investigation Measures (TPIMs), to which eight men are currently subject. Control orders never existed without controversy. Dozens of men, including CE, were relocated in a process that critics condemned as “internal exile.” Under a control order, a person could go to a designated place of worship but not to airports or ports, travel agents or money transfer bureaus. Suspects required prior permission for social gatherings and were prohibited from contact with other named individuals. Controlled persons were issued Home Office mobile phones for calls and denied home internet access. TPIMs are considered less onerous in the restrictions placed on the individual, but the application of TPIMs can still “hinge on secret evidence” according to Clark. Approvals are often informed by closed judgments, based on closed materials which are not seen by lawyers for the defense. “The outline case against CE reads persuasively. It is hard not to have a suspicion,” says Clark who came to know his subject’s case inside and out. “A suspicion is all the judge and Home Secretary had to think [to approve the order].” During the high court proceedings, a judge may not hear evidence tested or challenged as it would be in a common law trial. “Evidence heard in private was either too incomplete to present in court, or came from sources that were inadmissible or could not be revealed e.g. from phone taps, bugging, paid informants, covert personnel or foreign intelligence sources the Home Office did not wish to compromise,” explains Clark. “CE’s lawyers were effectively trying to disprove a suspicion – without knowing where the evidence had come from or what it was.” As familiar as Clark became with CE’s case, he is not an advocate for CE or others like him. He accepts that photography is only one way to interrogate the issue of control orders, homeland security and the contested legal territories of the Global War on Terror. “There are arguments for and against the necessity, effectiveness and fairness of control orders and TPIMs. I do not seek to persuade the reader one way or another; it is for politicians, lawyers and activists to argue their cases,” he says. http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2013/04...l-order-house/ ![]() Crowdsourcing or Witch Hunt? Reddit, 4chan Users Try to ID Boston Bomb Suspects Social-media users take the FBI's request for photo clues one step further by attempting to ID suspects without hard evidence or legal procedure. Chenda Ngak As the search continued Wednesday for clues as to the person or persons behind the Boston Marathon bombings, hypothetical suspects and crime scenarios began popping up via online crowdsourcing. After 24 hours passed without an arrest in the attack, the Federal Bureau of Investigations said Tuesday that the "range of suspects and motive remains wide open" and asked the public to submit photos, videos or anything suspicious that they may have seen or heard. Members of the link-sharing community Reddit launched a sub-section called "findbostonbombers" late Tuesday to collect clues. "Sometimes the rules change. Sometimes dogma needs to be flipped: 'Shut up and let the cops do their job' in the case of a terrorist attack is exactly wrong," Jason Calacanis, Internet entrepreneur, said in a blog post. Calacanis suggests that investigators should be combing through services like Twitter and video-sharing app Vine for clues. Reddit users targeted at least three men, based purely on speculation. A link posted from photos-sharing site Imgur showed photos of the men collected on the Web site 4chan. Crowdsourcing advocates have gone so as far as to say that hackers can do a better job than police because they are not restricted by considerations for people's civil liberties -- such as warrants. Meanwhile, critics warn of the temptation to turn data collecting into a witch hunt. The top post in the Reddit's "findbostonbombers" thread warns of falsely accusing people of crimes they have not committed. "Labeling people as 'suspicious' based on the scantest evidence can do real damage, writes Slate staff writer Will Oremus. And vetting photos, videos, and accounts posted to social media can be a Herculean task. Some of the allegations and conspiracy theories circulating online about the Boston attack have already been debunked. One thread on Reddit accuses a man in a blue robe of holding a backpack in a suspicious manner, while another thread adamantly says: "That dude is wearing a fleece, not a robe." Photos of the man in blue were widely circulated online without evidence on any wrongdoing. The social-news service Storyful is in the business of checking photos and videos posted on social media to provide proper attribution for its clients. Storyful editorial director David Clinch stressed the importance of knowing where a photo came from, its authenticity and the story behind the picture before assessing if it's relevant. "They don't tell you were they come from," Clinch told CBSNews.com. "They don't source the image." Clinch doesn't discount sites like Reddit or 4chan, but believes taking a measured approach is a better way to make use of photos and videos spread on social media. "It's very important to us that we don't get confused," Clinch says. "If there's anything interesting to follow up on, we'll use it." As for the group of photos circulated by Reddit and 4chan Wednesday, Clinch says, "the photos are interesting but right now we believe they are not useful." http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-...bomb-suspects/ ![]() This Is the Modern Manhunt: The FBI, the Hive Mind and the Boston Bombers In an earlier era, law enforcement might not have identified the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing so rapidly. Spencer Ackerman When the smoke literally cleared on Monday, investigators had a huge problem and nearly no leads. No individual or organization claimed responsibility for the bombings that killed three and wounded more than 180. So they took a big leap: They copped to how little they knew, and embraced the wisdom of The Crowd. Hiding in plain sight was an ocean of data, from torrents of photography to cell-tower information to locals’ memories, waiting to be exploited. Police, FBI, and the other investigators opted to let spectator surveillance supplement and augment their own. When they called for that imagery, locals flooded it in. They spoke to the public frequently, both in person and especially on Twitter. All that represented a modern twist on the age-old law enforcement maxim that the public’s eyes and ears are crucial investigative assets, as the Internet rapidly compressed the time it took for tips to arrive and get analyzed. But the FBI and police have been reluctant to embrace what the hive mind can provide: it implies the authorities don’t always have the answers. Veteran law enforcement officers remember cases from the ’90s when the bureau clammed up to the public and local cops, at the expense of receiving greater public cooperation. “If law enforcement didn’t share any information — [as with bombers] Terry Nichols, Ted Kaczynski — if your intel is shared with no one, that is the consummate investigative challenge,” says Mike Rolince, a retired FBI special agent who set up Boston’s first Joint Terrorism Task Force. As of this writing, police, FBI agents, National Guardsmen and state troopers are still combing the streets of Watertown, trying to find 19-year old University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth student Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. His older brother, Tameran, a former boxer, lies dead after a chaotic pre-dawn chase with police. But they might never have been identified so rapidly, the ex-investigators tell Danger Room, had investigators not decided that their best resource wasn’t in their own pockets. It was in everyone else’s. “The great advantage here is the number of cameras out there,” Rolince says. “Without the cameras, I don’t know where we are.” The cameras were everywhere. It wasn’t just the surveillance cameras looming on the tops of buildings at Copley Square. Bostonians and out-of-towners who came to the Marathon, one of the most celebrated civic events in the city, pulled their phones out throughout the race to feed their Instagram addictions and keep their Flickr pages current. It would become a reminder that the public enthusiasm for documenting their lives can outpace even the vast surveillance apparatus of the government. On Monday, the FBI-led investigation had little more than a crime scene, one that had just been trampled by thousands of people attempting to flee Copley Square after the twin bombs detonated. An intact, pristine crime scene is something investigators desperately want and too rarely find. “Twenty thousand people milling around screws it up,” says Juliette Kayyem, a former homeland security adviser to Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. Yet first responders very rapidly cleared the square of people. The area was filled with clues. One of them would be crucial: the remnants of a dark backpack near the blast scene. The day after the bombing, FBI Special Agent in Charge Rick DesLauriers made a critical decision. He and his team called for “assistance from the public” to submit any and all types of media taken by Marathon spectators. The team set up a website for tip submissions. DesLauriers confessed that it would “take some time” for leads in the case to develop. DesLauriers might have wanted to level with the public, but the statement raised some anxieties that the investigation was far behind the curve. If so, the call for public assistance helped get it over the hump. Within two days, DesLauriers received what he would describe as “thousands” of photos and videos, showing different vantage points of the Copley Square spectators. Once investigators arranged them by the time they were taken, they could piece together a mosaic of the scene, allowing them to check behavior they considered suspicious — and apply imaging tools to focus the accumulation of data. Numerous law-enforcement sources were reluctant to get specific about those tools. (“We wouldn’t discuss this specific detail at this stage,” FBI spokesman Paul Bresson demurred.) But a former FBI technology official who didn’t want to be quoted by name cautioned that there isn’t a tech-intensive secret sauce behind the manhunt. Facial-recognition tools may be growing more advanced, but their limits are still on display: “If you don’t have a high-quality photo, you can’t use that,” the ex-official says. But there’s “all different types of [relevant] data — pixels, the cell tower data, any records that might exist.” What agents can do instead is assemble the public’s pictures digitally and dig through them to find patterns of suspicious behavior — someone with a backpack; someone with a backpack who might be milling about; someone with a backpack who might be milling about in a certain pattern; all of which intersects with the scene of the blast. “Twenty years ago, we had to put a photo spread together using hands-on-pics, pasted together,” the ex-official says. The actual secret sauce remains what it’s been for years: “blood, sweat and tears” of FBI investigators, Rolince says. “The most effective thing is put your eyes on it and review it.” The threat of a big-data problem is evident — the military confronts it every day, from terabytes of aerial surveillance data — but investigators “working backward” from the imagery of the crime scene at the time of the explosion are trained to focus on things they perceive as anomalous once the mosaic of what’s normal at the scene emerges from the crowd-provided images. “Now the digital technology allows us to disseminate that stuff much more rapidly and efficiently,” the ex-FBI technology official says. By Thursday, investigators believed they had clear pictures from a Lord & Taylor surveillance camera showing their two suspects. DesLauriers again called on the public to help identify and locate the two men, publishing the images and relying on the Internet to spread the equivalent of a Wanted poster far and wide. Several law enforcement sources told Danger Room that DesLauriers would not have made that decision without the blessing of FBI Director Robert Mueller and possibly Attorney General Eric Holder. Rolince believes that the furious outpouring of public photography and videography meant that if the two suspects were still in the Boston area, putting their photos on the Internet meant they would be tracked down in a matter of hours — if the suspects didn’t make a hasty error to expose themselves to law enforcement first. “Someone lives next to him, works with him, his kids play soccer with him,” he says. “Once you got that first photo out, it’s only a short amount of time before more photos come in.” Reportedly, the FBI tracked down the names of the Tsarnaev brothers with the aid of State Department immigration records. There was another element to the modern manhunt: the Boston Police’s social media presence. All through the week, the @Boston_Police Twitter account has provided surprisingly rapid factual information about the manhunt. Yael Bar-Tur, a social media and law-enforcement consultant, says Boston bucked a trend among cop shops to shy away from the unfamiliar terrain of Twitter and Facebook. “It’s so unusual for police departments to do this,” she says. “I live in New York City. There are 40,000 cops here, and none of my friends know any of them. There’s huge disconnect between regular people and police,” she continues. So when something suspicious happens, they’re “not going to call the police unless there’s familiarity.” By putting out regular Twitter updates, the Boston police department opened a new avenue of communication, one that Bar-Tur believes got information back to the Boston police rapidly. “The community trust is incredible,” she says, noting that @Boston_Police now has over 200,000 followers. All of this is a modern update to a very old story. Law enforcement has always relied on tips to do its job. It’s always had to balance the needs of transparency and operational security. The Boston manhunt is nowhere near over, as the ongoing clampdown on the city shows. And there are messy precedents emerging from mass photo and video data emerging from an era of ubiquitous cellphone cameras augmenting police surveillance: the ex-FBI technology official says that “legal and ethical questions” cause investigators to hesitate before launching big data-mining projects, even with all the broad leeway they have to violate citizens’ privacy. That hesitation doesn’t have to apply when citizens volunteer the data. “Nothing has really changed,” Bar-Tur says, “just the medium has changed.” That might be enough for a new model manhunt to emerge. http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013...-data-manhunt/ ![]() Teen Stunned at Portrayal as Mass. Bombing Suspect Jay Lindsay A teenager said he is scared to go outside after he was portrayed on the Internet and on the front page of the New York Post as connected to the deadly Boston Marathon bombings. Photos of Salah Eddin Barhoum, 17, and friend Yassine Zaime were posted on websites whose users have been scouring marathon finish line photos for suspects. The two were also on the Post's front Thursday with the headline: "Bag men: Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon." The Post reported later Thursday that the pair weren't considered suspects, and the FBI has since identified two other men as suspects in Monday's bombings, which killed three people and injured more than 180. But Barhoum, a track runner at Revere High School, said he is convinced some will blame him for the bombings, no matter what. He said he was so fearful on Thursday that he ran back to the high school after a track meet when he saw a man in a car staring at him, talking into a phone. He said he won't feel safe until the bombers are caught. "I'm going to be scared going to school," Barhoum said. "Workwise, my family, everything is going to be scary." Attempts to reach Zaime were not immediately successful. Barhoum's father, El Houssein Barhoum, who moved his family from Morocco five years ago, said he is worried his son will be shot and fears for his wife and two young daughters. He said he can't go to his job as a baker in Boston. "Right now, we are not secure," he said. "So, the news (media), when they put something, they should be sure about the information." In a statement, New York Post editor Col Allan said, "We stand by our story. The image was emailed to law enforcement agencies yesterday afternoon seeking information about these men, as our story reported. We did not identify them as suspects." The photos show Barhoum with a black Nike athletic bag, wearing a blue and black track suit. Zaime is carrying a black backpack, wearing a white cap and black track clothes. Men with bags at the marathon have been a focus of Internet scrutiny, because officials believe that's how the bombers carried in the explosives. Barhoum said there are only two reasons he's been labeled a suspect: his bag and his brown skin. Barhoum said he was at the marathon with Zaime, a friend from the running club, hoping to run a portion of it behind the official field. They took the subway, and Barhoum's bag was for his running gear. But the pair got the address wrong and ended up at the finish line instead of where they wanted to start the race. Barhoum said they decided to stick around to see the top runners, then left. Barhoum said that late Wednesday, friends started flagging the online photos and commenters started their work. He said he was so upset, he visited police early Thursday to clear his name. He said they advised him to restrict access to his Facebook account. When the Post published the photo later Thursday, a bad situation got worse, Barhoum said. "It hurts because the person who did it must be happy right now, looking at the people who are getting blamed," he said. "And I'm one of them." http://www.newstimes.com/default/art...ct-4446148.php ![]() Manhunt’s Turning Point Came in the Decision to Release Suspects’ Images Michael S. Schmidt and Eric Schmitt By that afternoon, however, the promising leads had collapsed, and officials confronted a risky decision: proceed without the help of the public to avoid tipping off the culprits or publicize images of the suspects and risk driving them deeper into hiding or worse. F.B.I. officials — who had been debating all week whether to go to the public — were ultimately convinced they had to release the images because the investigation was stalling and bureau analysts had finally developed clear images of the suspects from hours of video footage. “We didn’t want to drive them underground,” said a senior law enforcement official. “We ran down a lot of leads and tips, and we still couldn’t identify them. We were working the videos, and the footage was getting better and better as the week went on, and by Thursday we got a good frontal facial shot. That tipped it.” The official added, “With that type of quality photo, there was no doubt about who they were. We had these murderers on the loose, and we couldn’t hold back and we needed help finding them.” The decision — which involved Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I. — was one of the most crucial turning points in a remarkable crowd-sourcing manhunt for the plotters whose bombings killed three people and wounded more than 170. While the decision to publicize the suspects’ identities resulted in the arrest of one of the men, it set in motion a violent string of events that lasted for 26 hours. Over that time, a police officer was killed, one of the suspects died, several officers sustained life-threatening injuries and one of the country’s major cities was shut down. On Saturday morning, the younger of the two suspects, 19-year-old Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, remained in serious condition at a Boston hospital. His brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, died early Friday morning after a shootout with the police. The authorities knew that broadly distributing the images — some captured by ubiquitous surveillance cameras and cellphone snapshots and winnowed down using sophisticated facial-recognition software — would accelerate the digital dragnet, but they did not realize the level of chaos it would create. Intelligence and law enforcement officials said the authorities in Boston weighed the risks of some mayhem against their growing fear that time was slipping away, and that heavily armed and increasingly dangerous men, and possibly accomplices, could wage new attacks in the Boston area or beyond. “Their posting of that video and photographs speaks to the fact they likely felt they had run into a dead end,” said Mitchell D. Silber, a former senior intelligence official in the New York Police Department, now with the investigative firm K2 Intelligence. Federal authorities involved in the investigation had briefed administration and Congressional officials on their hopes to arrest the suspects early Thursday without revealing their hand. “We thought we had good leads,” said one senior law enforcement official. “We were working on some stuff, and we got to a point where it leveled off, and then there was nothing imminent, so we moved with what we thought would result in identifying them.” Many unanswered questions remain about the motive for the attack, any accomplices and what radicalized the suspects to take up arms at one of the nation’s premier sporting events. A six-month trip that Tamerlan Tsarnaev took to Russia last year is coming under intense scrutiny to determine whether he met with any extremist groups or received any training, current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials said. The authorities first developed information about the suspects’ whereabouts late Thursday night when one of them was seen in video footage from a convenience store in Cambridge that had just been robbed. Shortly after the suspects left the store, the authorities received a report that a police officer at M.I.T. had been ambushed and killed. And then, for two hours, there was no sign of the suspects. It was only after the brothers decided not to kill the owner of a sport utility vehicle that had been carjacked and instead threw him out of his car around 1 a.m. that the suspects re-emerged on the authorities’ radar. The driver had called 911 shortly after he was dumped from his car, telling the authorities that the two people who had held him up at gunpoint had said they were the marathon bombers. The authorities put out an all-points bulletin for the sport utility vehicle, and officers in Watertown — 10 miles west of Boston — spotted it just minutes later. A chaotic chase ensued, with the suspects throwing pipe bombs out of the speeding vehicle. Of the five that were thrown, three exploded, injuring officers. The suspects were ultimately cornered by the police and engaged in a shootout in the middle of Watertown. Several more officers were hurt, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was strapped with explosives, was killed as he approached the officers. The younger brother, who was at that point low on ammunition, shifted to the driver’s seat of the car from the passenger’s seat, slammed it in reverse, ran over his brother and sped away. From that point until he was captured roughly 20 hours later, he was again off the authorities’ radar. Soon after the shootout, officers in Watertown found the sport utility vehicle nearby. It was only at that point — with one dead suspect and an abandoned vehicle — that the authorities learned their identities. The F.B.I. and other investigators began an intensive search of databases, and agents fanned out to interview family members and others who might have known them. That led the authorities to uncover files from two years ago revealing the Russian government’s request that the F.B.I. conduct a background check on the older brother to determine if he had been radicalized. The F.B.I. had determined he was not a threat, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev traveled to the Dagestan and Chechnya regions of Russia in early 2012. By early Friday morning, Watertown had been transformed into an armed camp, with hundreds of police officers and agents searching house by house. But by 6 p.m. Friday, there was still no sign of the young fugitive, and Gov. Deval Patrick lifted the restrictions, allowing people to leave their homes. That order allowed a Watertown resident to go outside for the first time all day, where he spotted blood on a boat in his backyard. He pulled back the tarp on top, peered in and saw a young man covered in blood. Within minutes, police cars were screaming toward the home. A police helicopter hovering overhead threw its spotlight on the boat. Shots were fired. By 8:45 p.m., Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who had been wounded at some point in the chaos, was in custody and being rushed to the hospital. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/u...s-release.html ![]() Windows: It's Over Summary: You can think Windows 8 will evolve into something better, but the numbers show that Windows is coming to a dead end. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols Most people in our recent debate over the future of Windows 8 thought that the operating system could be saved. I'm sure many people in 1491 thought that the Earth was flat, too. If Windows 8 continues the way it has been, it will be the end of Windows. The very day the debate came to an end, this headline appeared: IDC: Global PC shipments plunge in worst drop in a generation. Sure, a lot of that was due to the growth of tablets and smartphones and the rise of the cloud, but Windows 8 gets to take a lot of the blame too. After all, the debate wasn't whether or not Windows 8 was any good. It's not. The debate was over whether it could be saved. Indeed even Microsoft defenders are no longer talking about Windows 8 in terms of a stand-alone project but instead they're spinning it as Windows 8 being "more like a living organism, made partly from familiar bits that have evolved over the last two decades, with several new strands of DNA tossed in. It’s due to be updated for more often, and it’s part of a much larger hardware-apps-services ecosystem that is also changing quickly." Please. Changing too fast for the user-base was what turned many former Windows fans into Windows 8 haters. Some people think I've put too much emphasis on Windows 8's dismal Metro interface for why Windows 8 has failed. I don't think so. This isn't a matter of judging a book by its cover; the user interface (UI) is everything for computer users. If the UI alienates users, you lose them. It's as simple as that. My comrade pointed out that I declared Vista dead six years ago, but that the Aero interface, which I like, started there. True, but that wasn't the point. I was right. Vista did die. Microsoft had to bring back XP to stop users from fleeing to Linux on netbooks. Now, Microsoft could revive Windows 7 sales, or make Aero Windows 8.x's interface, but from everything we can see about Windows 8.1, aka Blue, that's not what they're doing. Instead, Microsoft seems to be doubling down on Metro. Idiots. You think the least they could do is give users a choice between a real Aero interface and Metro, but no, they won't do that. I don't know what it is, but lately, UI "experts" seem to want to create interfaces that only appeal to their builders and not to any of their users. It's not just Microsoft with Aero. In Linux, GNOME made similar blunders with its 3.x line and many former Ubuntu Linux users think Canonical went on the wrong track with Unity. Yes, we are entering a post-PC world. Tablets and smartphones are becoming more important... to sales. PCs are no more going to go away than mainframes did. We're still going to be using them in offices and homes for the foreseeable future. They let us easily do things that we need to do every day that we can't easily do with a tablet or a phone. Perhaps most of our computing will move to the cloud, but you know what device we'll still be using for most of our interactions? It will be a PC, simply because it's easier to enter data with a real keyboard than any other interface. True, it would be great if you could use one operating system for your PC, tablet, and smartphone. Besides Microsoft with Windows 8.x, Canonical with Ubuntu, Mozilla with Firefox OS, and Google with Android/Chrome are all making similar bets. But I don't think that's essential. I think Microsoft could continue to dominate the important, but no longer growing, desktop market for years, even decades to come. However, I don't think they will. It looks like Microsoft is betting all its chips on the silly notion that Metro will be the one true interface for its entire PC and device line. There's only one little problem with this idea. Sorry, but I have to say it again, look at the numbers: Metro-interface operating systems have already failed. Fewer people than with any previous edition of Windows want Windows 8. Vista actually looks successful when you compare it to Windows 8! As for tablets and smartphones, I think my ComputerWorld colleague Preston Gralla summed it up nicely in his analysis of ABI Research's report on 2013's tablet market: "Windows tablets don't even rate a blip in the $64 billion tablet market." So, what do the numbers show? Not what do you want them to show, and not what would your faith in Microsoft would have you believe, but what do they actually add up to? The sum is that Microsoft is failing to hold on to the desktop market and that it has no impact whatsoever on smartphones and tablets. Windows 8 may not just be a failure in and of itself. Unless Microsoft changes course, this may be the end of the Windows domination period in end-using computing. Indeed, some major financial firms, such as Goldman Sachs and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), already believe that Windows has crested and that it's all downhill from here. http://www.zdnet.com/windows-its-over-7000013964/ ![]() More Cracks Undermine the Citadel of TV Profits David Carr For the longest time in the media business, the concept of the bundle has been foundational. Ads go with editorial content in print, commercials go with programming on television and the channels you desire are paired with ones you did not in your cable package. People were free to shop for what they wanted, as long as they were willing to buy a bunch of other stuff they did not. The box score last night for your home team? It was wrapped inside a bundle of paper that included everything from foreign news to ads for lingerie. If you liked a song, you generally had to buy an album full of others to get the goods. As for advertisers, the audience they wanted was bundled inside a much larger audience of people they did not. To get at the milk, both consumers and businesses had to buy the cow. Television has thrived on this kind of systematic stacking, but though bundles may be a handy way of protecting things, they also tend to obscure the weaknesses within. Those flaws are becoming more apparent as the practice of bundling comes under attack. Networks are stepping up the fight against Dish Network’s Hopper, which automatically skips the commercials in network programming. Aereo won a court decision on April 1, letting it continue its rollout of a service through which consumers can access broadcast signals online without Aereo paying any of the estimated $3 billion that broadcasters will take in from retransmission fees by 2015. And tellingly, there has been some breaking of ranks between the companies that make content and the people who send it through the pipes to consumers. Most notably, Cablevision filed an antitrust suit against Viacom challenging its requirement that the cable company carry rarely viewed channels to get access to Viacom’s more popular ones. (Verizon did not join the lawsuit, but is also asking for less bundling and more options.) Finally, there is the success of Netflix’s “House of Cards,” original programming delivered over the Internet, with no cable required. The company announced on Facebook that customers had watched four billion hours of streaming video in the first three months of the year. As Peter Kafka pointed out in AllThingsD, Richard Greenfield of BTIG Research calculated that eye-popping number would make it the most-watched cable television network. Except it isn’t on cable, isn’t on television and isn’t a network. Those initiatives represent assaults on different parts of the business, but each is an attack on the bundle, and the legacy industry is reacting ferociously. Aereo is a finger in the eye of broadcasters, prompting some to suggest they might turn off their broadcast signals and become cable channels — as Fox threatened last week. (The biggest losers in that situation would be the more than 11 million cable-less households that still depend on antennas.) Charles Ergen, the chairman of Dish Network, was recently called the “most hated man in Hollywood” by The Hollywood Reporter because he dared to give consumers the ability to unbundle advertising and programming with a touch of a button using Hopper. It brings to mind the scene from Ken Auletta’s book “Googled,” when Mel Karmazin, then chief executive of Viacom, visited Google and saw a demonstration of the company’s ability to target ads. He declared that the company was, um, messing “with the magic.” That’s because media companies have another word for those consumer inefficiencies: profits. “The bundle is the Gibraltar of the media business,” said Tim Wu, the author of “The Master Switch,” a history of media revolutions. “It keeps the entire ecosystem alive, which is why it is so heavily and successfully defended. But there are hairline fractures beginning to appear, and you are seeing alliances shift.” Historically, once the consumer decides, it doesn’t matter what stakeholders want. They can’t stop what’s coming. The advent of the Internet presented an existential challenge to bundles. Once consumers got their hands on the mouse and a programmable remote, they began to attack the inefficiencies of the system. When seeking information, they sought relevant links, not media brands. And DVRs put them in the control room of their own viewing universe. Susan Crawford, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and the author of “Captive Audience,” says she thinks television bundles will be with us for a while — six to eight years — regardless of what the consumer wants. “It’s like the picked-on kid who tries to get home to his front porch; he has to make it past all the bullies first,” she said. “We have a heavily defended, heavily concentrated programming industry and a monopoly in distribution, with none of the big players willing to act like a maverick. No one wants to break ranks because the current system has been so lucrative.” Of course, the government could get involved, as it did in breaking up Hollywood’s closed system of production and distribution in the 1930s and ’40s. The result was a lot of disruption, a blossoming of cinema in the ’60s and ’70s, and by the way, a movie industry that still has scale and profits. But government intervention doesn’t seem likely, given the current bent of the Federal Communications Commission. A senior executive at a cable company who did not want to speak for attribution at a delicate time for the industry said that the government has already done plenty — by ensuring that telecommunication companies like Verizon were allowed to compete in the television business, and by empowering programmers in negotiations with cable providers. But other sources of pressure are being brought to bear. Producers of content can put distributors and programmers over a barrel because the public has an expectation of what will be there when they turn on their televisions. Programming like the Olympics, the Oscars and the National Football League are all seen as almost inalienable viewing rights. Then again, some of the big attractions on network television are becoming content providers themselves. Like many Americans, I spent this weekend watching the fight to wear a green jacket at the Masters. But a funny thing happened on the way to the clubhouse at Augusta, Ga.: I took a detour. The Masters app, which let me omnisciently check the leader board, scan for my own highlights and toggle between specific groups or holes, sucked me in. The second screen experience slowly replaced the first — I barely looked up at the television. CBS’s reverent, almost whispered coverage took a back seat as I programmed my version of the Masters. The function that would have allowed me to throw the Internet coverage to my big-screen television was not enabled, but that’s only a matter of time. Change often comes very slowly, but then happens all at once. CBS paid dearly for rights to the Masters, marketers ponied up to advertise in limited spots and my cable provider paid a hefty toll in terms of retransmission fees, but there I was, staring at the device on my lap, looking at a bright future — no cable, no commercials, no bundle required. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/b...ess-model.html ![]() Broadcasters Ask for New Hearing in Aereo Case Ted Johnson Seeking a rehearing of an appellate court’s decision in favor of Aereo, Fox and other broadcasters said that the startup’s ability to continue offering unauthorized streams of their signals “will swallow the entire retransmission licensing regime.” In a petition for an en banc hearing of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, the broadcasters said that “faced with losing a revenue stream critical to supporting free, over-the-air television,” some “have been forced to consider converting their broadcast networks to subscription-based cable channels.” That was a suggestion floated last week by News Corp. COO Chase Carey as well as Univision, which is also part of the litigation against Aereo. The broadcasters also noted that cable and satellite companies like Time Warner Cable and Dish Network “are threatening to partner” with Aereo or other startups. Last month, in a 2-1 decision, the 2nd Circuit refused to reverse a lower court ruling that allows Aereo to continue its operation. Much of its rationale is based on a 2008 2nd Circuit decision that backed Cablevision’s offering of a remote DVR, ruling that such copies did not make for a public performance in violation of the Copyright Act. The appellate court have credence to Aereo’s offering of broadcast streams to dime-sized devices assigned to individual subscribers. They cited the fact the fact that Aereo made a separate copy of the programming for each subscriber during the process of retransmitting the broadcast signal. “The Court needs to rectify this ruling now,” the broadcasters said. “Otherwise, the loophole it creates will swallow the entire retransmission licensing regime.” In their brief, filed on Tuesday, they said that one of the “express purposes” of the Copyright Act of 1976 was to establish that “any service engaged in retransmission of copyrighted television programming to the public is ‘publicly performing’ the programming and therefore must pay copyright royalties.” In a statement, the broadcasters said that the petition for rehearing “is an important next step in ensuring the protection of our copyrighted material.” Paramount, Warner Bros., the DGA, IATSE, SAG-AFTRA, the Writers Guild of America, West, the Independent Film & Television Alliance and MGM also filed an amicus brief in support of the broadcasters. They argued that the court’s reliance on the Cablevision decision was misguided, as it involved “a very different service.” A spokesman for Aereo said it had no comment. http://variety.com/2013/digital/news...se-1200375116/ ![]() Canadian Trio Creates Angel-Funded PaintBottle, A Porn Site For The 21st Century John Biggs Three Canadian entrepreneurs from Montreal, John Phillips, Craig Hensley, and Amy Ambrose, wanted to fix what was wrong in porn. As you can imagine, their site – which I’ll link to after this so you don’t have to be polluted by its influence – is amazingly NSFW. Luckily, it’s also amazingly cool. Phillips programmed the site and Ambrose is the lead multimedia designer. Hensley is the money man. Luckily for them, Montreal is home to Manwin and Gamma, two huge porn companies and is also the spot online gamblers go to open accounts due to restrictions on U.S. online gaming. Before we get into functionality, let’s let Phillips tell the funding story. “Porn is a very small industry – an oligarchy, really – so we don’t want to adversely affect our perceptions by announcing the amount of funding,” he said. “However, the source of our funding is much more interesting: We are funded exclusively by the best high-stakes heads-up poker players in the world. Several of them grouped together and invested in Paint Bottle. This is their first investment in a startup. We met them through Craig, who opened their Canadian bank accounts when Black Friday happened to poker, resulting in a mini-exodus in which many top players moved to Montreal.” Luckily, it’s not all about Casino-style backroom deals. The technology behind the site is solid and it’s surprisingly pleasant to use (and I’ve used a few of these, let me tell you.) Primarily, PaintBottle (Seriously: NSFW. If you’re offended, why are you still reading?) is a discovery engine. To look at videos you simply scroll through a curated, filtered list. All of the content I saw is, shall we say, first rate, although arguably I grew bored after about three minutes of browsing. Best of all, the interface offers ability to fast forward through movies, Dish Hopper style, to various “positions” in the film. You can also filter by film types, although the filter is fairly limited right now. The interface is simple and easy to use with, ahem, one hand. The company has seen about 20,000 visits so far after a bit of coverage on Hacker News. They have also noted that their average time on site is 40% higher than the time on site at other “tube” sites. While competitors usually see an ATOS of seven minutes, PaintBottle sees 9.25 minutes, which either suggests more stamina or the positive influence of the site’s clean design and curation. Philips notes that the site will feature no huge banner ads and is dedicated to sourcing good content. “All content featured on Paint Bottle is fully licensed through content partners; we will never accept user-submitted videos nor do we “crawl” videos from other sites. Consequently, the studios respect what we’re doing because our solution, while expensive for us, eliminates the piracy issue. We also have a vastly improved user experience that doesn’t make you feel ashamed e.g. no silly video titles, and the complete opposite of the typical grungy porn aesthetic.” “Half of the Internet-connected populous watches porn. That’s more than the viewership for Netflix, Hulu, HBO GO, Amazon Instant Video, and all other forms of TV-on-the-Web entertainment combined. Yet, Internet porn sites are still shameful artifacts of a decade past — from when the Internet was a collection of websites featuring low-resolution images and oversized banner ads. Worse yet, Internet porn sites are still ideologically stuck in a decade past: From top to bottom, they’re designed for a campy male viewership – specifically, for a macho-man ideal of a male that reacts gleefully toward misogyny and sexual buzzwords. Yet, as cultural taboos continue to erode and Internet access becomes increasingly omnipresent, porn viewership is skyrocketing among women,” he said. In short, the team wants to bring porn out of the 1980s. I would agree that they have, at the very least, brought it into the 2000s. While their business is obviously a bit risqué, Phillips is proud of the business. “For over a decade now, we’ve lived in a digital world where everyone is watching porn, yet the experience has remained awful. Paint Bottle is designed to finally change that. This marks the end of browsing through 500,000 VHS-quality adult videos to find something worth watching, and the end of wading through pop-ups and giant flashing banner ads.” http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/17/can...-21st-century/ ![]() New Publisher Authors Trust: Themselves Leslie Kaufman When the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author David Mamet released his last book, “The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture,” with the Sentinel publishing house in 2011, it sold well enough to make the New York Times best-seller list. This year, when Mr. Mamet set out to publish his next one, a novella and two short stories about war, he decided to take a very different path: he will self-publish. Mr. Mamet is taking advantage of a new service being offered by his literary agency, ICM Partners, as a way to assume more control over the way his book is promoted. “Basically I am doing this because I am a curmudgeon,” Mr. Mamet said in a telephone interview, “and because publishing is like Hollywood — nobody ever does the marketing they promise.” As digital disruption continues to reshape the publishing market, self-publishing — including distribution digitally or as print on demand — has become more and more popular, and more feasible, with an increasing array of options for anyone with an idea and a keyboard. Most of the attention so far has focused on unknown and unsigned authors who storm onto the best-seller lists through their own ingenuity. The announcement by ICM and Mr. Mamet suggests that self-publishing will begin to widen its net and become attractive also to more established authors. For one thing, as traditional publishers have cut back on marketing, this route allows well-known figures like Mr. Mamet to look after their own publicity. Then there is the money. While self-published authors get no advance, they typically receive 70 percent of sales. A standard contract with a traditional house gives an author an advance, and only pays royalties — the standard is 25 percent of digital sales and 7 to 12 percent of the list price for bound books — after the advance is earned back in sales. ICM, which will announce its new self-publishing service on Wednesday, is one of the biggest and most powerful agencies to offer the option. But others are doing the same as they seek to provide additional value to their writers while also extending their reach in the industry. Since last fall, Trident Media Group, which represents 800 authors, has been offering its clients self-publishing possibilities through deals negotiated though online publishers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, in a system very similar to the one ICM is setting up. Robert Gottlieb, chairman of Trident, says that 200 authors have taken advantage of the service, though mostly for reissuing older titles, the backlist. Another literary agency, InkWell Management, has helped the romance novelist Eloisa James reissue many of her backlist titles, as well as her newer books overseas, this way. She usually turns out her best sellers through HarperCollins, and in a telephone interview she said she would not leave Harper completely because she loves her editor. But she added that published authors talked about the “self-pubs” all the time and had learned a lot from those writers’ efforts. “They treat it like a small business,” she said, “and they are geniuses at discoverability.” Sloan Harris, co-director of ICM’s literary department, said his agency signed a deal with a company called Argo Navis Author Services, a self-publishing service created by the Perseus Book Group, because he decided it was time to give his clients more options than the standard big publishing houses. For certain clients, Mr. Harris said, self-publishing “returns a degree of control to authors who have been frustrated about how their ideas for marketing and publicity fare at traditional publishers.” Both Mr. Harris and Mr. Mamet said that the big publishers focused mostly on blockbuster books and fell short on other titles — by publishing too few copies, for instance, or limiting advertising to only a short period after a book was released. “Particularly for high-end literary fiction, their efforts too often have been very low-octane,” Mr. Harris said of the traditional publishers. Although Mr. Mamet will be the best known of the agency’s clients to use the new service, he is not the only one: two older books by ICM clients that have gone to backlist, “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” by Fred Waitzkin, and “Ghosts of Mississippi,” by Maryanne Vollers, will also be reissued this way. And Mr. Harris said more would come. “We will pay ever more attention project by project, author by author, as to what our options are,” he said. If an author self-publishes, what, then, is the role of a literary agency? Mr. Gottlieb of Trident said it made sense for his clients to self-publish through the agency, which charges a standard commission on sales, instead of going directly to Amazon themselves because the agency brought experience in marketing and jacket design. It also has relationships with the digital publishers that give their clients access to plum placement on sites that self-published authors can’t obtain on their own. Self-publishing services also offer varying levels of editing services, though many writers hire their own editors if they self-publish. Once a small backwater of vanity presses for authors who could not get contracts with mainstream houses, self-publishing now accounts for more than 235,000 books annually, according to Bowker, a book research firm. Big houses like Penguin and Harlequin have opened their own self-publishing divisions because they see it as a profit center of the future. Although a vast majority of self-published books will never find much of an audience, a surprising number have become best sellers, especially in genres like romance and science fiction. Self-published titles made up roughly one-quarter of the top-selling books on Amazon last year, the company said. Argo Navis’s standard deal, for example, allows for publication digitally and in paperback by demand, as well as distribution, in return for 30 percent of all sales. (It would not be unusual, however, for a big author using an agent to negotiate better terms.) The deal also comes with basic marketing, like listings in digital catalogs. “Increasingly, agents and authors tell us they are looking for options, and this model offers them a lot more than one size fits all,” said David Steinberger, chief executive of Perseus Books. With this system, he added, “they make the decisions.” Most top-flight authors have so far eschewed such deals because they are paid advances that are large enough to compensate for lower royalties. In addition, traditional publishers have experienced editors to whom writers become attached, sometimes for decades. And they still provide support services like marketing and publicity, even if these services are sometimes not to the authors’ liking. For these reasons, said Peter Turner, a former publishing executive and founder and chief executive of the industry consulting company Ampersand Publishing & Marketing Solutions, he did not think a flood of big names would follow Mr. Mamet, at least not right away. “It puts so much more of the risk on the author and agent,” he said. Still, with the publishing world transforming rapidly and with more books than ever being sold online, many writers have concluded that they must at least consider self-publishing. For his part, Mr. Mamet cites horror stories that fellow authors have suffered at the hands of publishing houses. He says he has faith that his new book is good enough to sell big, even without a traditional publisher. “I am going to promote the hell out of it,” he says gamely, “even though I’ll probably make my own mistakes.” https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/b...f-publish.html ![]() Anonymous Raises over $54,000 for Dedicated Your Anon News Website Ravi Mandalia Anonymous knocked the doors of Indiegogo in a bid to raise some crowd-sourced dough to expand its news coverage by establishing a dedicated site instead of tweets and tumblor blog posts and has managed to raise 27 time as much money as initially targeted. The initial target was to raise $2000 to fund the site development work as well as pay for initial hoosting instead of which the hacktivist group has raised $54,798 as of this writing. $2000 may not have been the actual target funding and is very well below what Anonymous would have actually wanted to sustain the site for long term, but having raised more than $54k from 1309 backers does indicate that Your Anon News site will already have a following at the time of its launch. Anonymous is planning to host news, reports and blogs from independent online reporters under its, already in use, Your Anon News brand. Anonymous aims to “provide feeds for citizen journalists who livestream events as they are taking place, instead of the 10-second sound bites provided by the corporate media.” Even though Anonymous is a hacking collective it has never been missed a chance to demonstrate publicly in matters of civil unrest, political tyranny, social security issues and the likes and has remained in main stream media for quite a long time now. Anonymous has been very vocal about the mainstream media citing traditional structure which according to the group has inherent constraints and has even went onto the extent of dubbing main stream media as nothing but “political and celebrity gossip.” http://paritynews.com/web-news/item/991-anonymous-raises-over-$54000-for-dedicated-your-anon-news-website ![]() The Tiny News Startup That Crashed the Pulitzer Prizes Jeff Bercovici On the 12th floor of a none-too-modern office building in downtown Brooklyn are the offices of the law firm Kornblau & Kornblau. Tucked away deep in this warren of dim rooms is the brain center of InsideClimate News, the newest member of the elite fraternity of Pulitzer Prize winners. How small an operation is InsideClimate News? Well, when I visited publisher and founder David Sassoon there Tuesday afternoon, I doubled the occupancy rate. The five-year-old nonprofit has seven employees total, but the other six are scattered across the Western Hemisphere, from Tel Aviv to San Diego. “If we get somebody in Hawaii or Australia or Japan, we’ll have the globe covered,” Sassoon says. In winning the Pulitzer for national reporting for a series on the poor regulation of oil pipelines, ICN beat out the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, two newspapers with around 900 journalists between them — not to mention all the news organizations that didn’t make it to the finalists’ circle. How could a crew of seven beat behemoths that live for Pulitzer day? “When you do have huge operations, you’re being pulled in lots of directions,” says Sassoon. “We’re covering one thing. We’ve been doing this 24/7 for five years.” A small budget is only a handicap if you’re trying to attack the problem in the same way as news organizations with big budgets, he says: I don’t know why it has to be that expensive. We probably spent 10% of what a big, well-endowed newsroom would spend, and that’s in terms of salaries and everything. We didn’t do a lot of traveling. We didn’t have the money, so we didn’t think about it. We were just figuring out out how do we get the story. I think it’s possible to do a lot of journalism on low budgets without necessarily feeling like you can’t do the job you want to do. Maybe a lot of the newsrooms can do it more efficiently than they think they can. There are plenty of individuals, newsrooms, little ones here and there, that can do this kind of work. That said, ICN wants to be a slightly larger news organization. “We think to do our job fully, we need to be 20 to 25 people,” says Sassoon. “As we work out our plan, I want to have a newsroom in New York. We need a hub.” Joining the Pulitzer club ought to help with that, indirectly. While the $10,000 in prize money will be shared among the reporters who worked on the winning series, the award could be worth many times that amount as a calling card for fundraising and sponsorship sales. “I think it’s a game changer. I think the Pulitzer Committee probably knew that,” says Sassson. “We earned the award. It’s great work we did. But I think they would understand how validation from them, the top honor in journalism, would make a big difference to us as a tiny startup.” http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffberc...litzer-prizes/ Until next week, - js. ![]() Current Week In Review ![]() Recent WiRs - April 13th, April 6th, March 30th, March 23rd 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 |
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