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

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002

































"The 112th Congress began with a historic reading of the U.S. Constitution. Will anyone subscribe to the First and Fourth Amendments tomorrow when the PATRIOT Act is up for a vote? I am hopeful that members of the Tea Party who came to Congress to defend the Constitution will join me in challenging the reauthorization." – U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio


"The dangerous fascination with solving previously intractable social problems with the help of technology allows vested interests to disguise what essentially amounts to advertising for their commercial products in the language of freedom and liberation." – Evgeny Morozov


"Anybody who uses virtual private networking (VPN), who videoconferences site-to-site, or who uses file-sharing software will hit a brick wall. Such technologies simply can't operate if Carrier Grade NAT is in use, because they rely on users having full IP addresses." – Keir Thomas


"I don’t even think about how old these girls are. It’s a completely imaginary world, separate from real life." – Koki Yoshida



































February 12th, 2011




The Internet As We Know It Is Under Attack
Keir Thomas

The Internet was never supposed to be as big or successful as is it today. This has been hammered home by two recent events that show the Net is creaking at the seams. Such weaknesses mean the Net as we know it is open to attack from all sides.

The first issue is that we've run out of Internet addresses. They've all gone--all four billion of them.

At a jolly ceremony last week at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) headquarters in Miami, the last remaining Internet Protocol v4 (IPv4) addresses were handed out to the Regional Internet Registries. The registries will now pass them onto organizations worldwide.

This isn't as desperate as it might sound. The situation is similar to one of manufacturers, wholesalers, and stores. Manufacturing of IPv4 addresses has now ended. Wholesalers hold enough stock to supply stores for around a year. So out on the streets there's no need to panic--yet.

Right now we should all be switching to Internet Protocol v6, where addresses are more than plentiful. Created way back in 1996, IPv6 allows for such a huge number of addresses that it's difficult to write them down. In total there are 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or 340 undecillion).

However, IPv6 just hasn't gotten its act together. Despite so many addresses, only the tiniest fraction is in use right now. Why? Because switching from IPv4 to IPv6 is far from seamless. It's a little like having to swap out the engine in your car to use a different gas station.

Businesses and homes will have to upgrade the firmware in their routers, at the very least, and might need new hardware. It's the same elsewhere on the Internet; all the interconnecting yet invisible devices will need to be upgraded or replaced.

How much do you think has been done so far? If you cynically answered "almost none," you'd be right. To be fair, upgrading crucial Internet hardware presents significant challenges, and that's perhaps the biggest issue. To continue the metaphor, techies have to swap out the engine in the car when it's driving along the highway at 70 miles per hour. We can't simply turn off the Internet for a few hours to make the change.

Operating systems such as Windows and Mac OS X have been IPv6-ready for years but because nobody's actually using it, it's not clear how well they'll work. Put simply, nobody knows how well IPv6 will work when scaled up to planetary level, as it's hoped will happen within just a year or two.

However, there's another solution to the shortage of addresses that Comcast is currently trialing. Other Internet service providers (ISPs) might follow, and it's something we should watch closely because our very Internet freedom is threatened by it.

Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (NAT) allows an ISPs to share one Internet address among many users. An entire neighborhood could share a single address, for example.

Low-level Internet users who do little more than browse the Web or check e-mail won't know any difference after being switched to Carrier Grade NAT. However, anybody who uses virtual private networking (VPN), who videoconferences site-to-site, or who uses file-sharing software will hit a brick wall. Such technologies simply can't operate if Carrier Grade NAT is in use, because they rely on users having full IP addresses.

None of the ISPs want Carrier Grade NAT, or so they say, but the last entry in the above list might give them pause for thought: File sharing. Carrier Grade NAT lets ISPs switch off file sharing under the banner of making a necessary technological fix.

Suddenly, ISPs would no longer be a part of the controversial file sharing debate. They wouldn't have to waste money and time responding to requests from copyright holders to identify file sharers. There'd be no more government pressure.

Sure, business users who want to videoconference or VPN into their workplace will complain at not having "proper" Internet connections, but they can always upgrade to a more expensive "business" package, whereby they get their own IP address. And we know how much ISPs love arbitrary price tiers.

Alongside IP address exhaustion, another warning sign of the times is the proposed expansion of general top-level domains (gTLDs). Top level domains are the endings of Web addresses, such as .com and .org, as well as country-level domains, such as .uk for the United Kingdom, and .de for Germany.

At the moment everybody in the world either has (or wants) a .com address, even though this rarely makes much sense. I've registered my name as a .com (keirthomas.com), for example, even though I'm a human being and not a commercial entity. It'd be much better if there were a .author or .journalist domain for people like me. In fact, there should be top level domains (TLDs) for every profession, type of business, product, and so on.

The whole world relying on grabbing .com addresses is insane, and an anachronism from when the number of Internet-connected computers didn't reach triple digits. There are other TLDs, of course, such as .net, but .com has a stranglehold over the public's imagination.

However, this is set to change. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has finally finished debating a massive expansion of the TLD space, begin in 2008, and will soon be inviting applications for new TLDs. Within a few years we could soon see .music domains, for example. Just about anything is possible.

However, the government isn't entirely happy about this. Actually, it's concerned about offending other governments, as a leaked memo from the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) has revealed. It wants governments to be able to veto new TLDs on grounds of taste or decency or, in fact, whatever reasons they dream up at the time.

The problem is this: What one person in one country finds offensive, somebody in another country might consider healthy. Possibly the most controversial new TLD proposal is .gay, for example, which would represent the interests of the homosexual community. Broadly speaking .gay would be acceptable in the United States and Europe, but could go down badly in countries where homosexuality is outlawed, such as Iran or Saudi Arabia.

On the other hand, if TLDs like .gay came into force, there's a strong chance countries that take offense would simply ban them, and thereby break the Internet's democratic approach. The Internet could become fragmented, with access to domains governed entirely by the sensibilities of the party in power in a country at any given particular time.

It's at times of change that organizations and systems are at their weakest, and it certainly feels as if the Internet is both weakened and under attack at the moment. The Internet we use in just a few years' time might look and operate radically differently compared to what we use today.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente...er_attack.html





U.S. Seeks Veto Powers Over New Domain Names
Declan McCullagh

The Obama administration is quietly seeking the power for it and other governments to veto future top-level domain names, a move that raises questions about free expression, national sovereignty, and the role of states in shaping the future of the Internet.

At stake is who will have authority over the next wave of suffixes to supplement the venerable .com, .org, and .net. At least 115 proposals are expected this year, including .car, .health, .nyc, .movie, and .web, and the application process could be finalized at a meeting in San Francisco next month.

Some are likely to prove contentious among more conservative nations. Two different groups--the dotGAY Initiative and the .GAY Alliance--already have announced they will apply for the right to operate the .gay domain; additional controversial proposals may surface in the next few months. And nobody has forgotten the furor over .xxx, which has been in limbo for seven years after receiving an emphatic thumbs-down from the Bush administration.

When asked whether it supports or opposes the creation of .gay and .xxx, an official at the U.S. Commerce Department replied that "it is premature for us to comment on those domain names." The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit based in Marina del Rey, Calif., that has a contract with the U.S. government to manage Internet addresses, is overseeing the process of adding new domain suffixes.

A statement sent to CNET over the weekend from the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, or NTIA, said its proposed veto procedure "has merit as it diminishes the potential for blocking of top level domain strings considered objectionable by governments. This type of blocking harms the architecture of the DNS and undermines the goal of universal resolvability (i.e., a single global Internet that facilitates the free flow of goods and services and freedom of expression)."

Another way of phrasing this argument, perhaps, is: If less liberal governments adopt technical measures to prevent their citizens from connecting to .gay and .xxx Web sites, and dozens of nations surely will, that will lead to a more fragmented Internet.
In addition, giving governments more influence inside ICANN may reduce the odds of an international revolt that would vest more Internet authority with the not-exactly-business-friendly United Nations. Last year, China and its allies objected to the fact that "unilateral control of critical Internet resources" had been given to ICANN and suggested that the U.N. would be a better fit.

Submitting an application to create and operate a new domain suffix is expected to cost $185,000, ICANN says.

The Obama administration is proposing that domain approval procedures be changed to include a mandatory "review" by an ICANN advisory panel comprised of representatives of roughly 100 nations. The process is open-ended, saying that any government "may raise an objection to a proposed (suffix) for any reason." Unless at least one other nation disagrees, the proposed new domain name "shall" be rejected.

This would create an explicit governmental veto over new top-level domains. Under the procedures previously used in the creation of .biz, .name, and .info, among others, governments could offer advice, but the members of the ICANN board had the final decision.

"It's the U.S. government that's proposing this procedure, and they've shown absolutely no interest in standing up for free expression rights through this entire process," says Milton Mueller, a professor of information studies at Syracuse University and author of a recently-published book on Internet governance. Mueller, who said he expects some Middle Eastern countries to object to .gay, says the Obama administration is "completely disregarding" earlier compromises.

According to the latest version of ICANN's proposed procedure, anyone may file objections to a proposed domain suffix on grounds that it may violate "norms of morality and public order," although there's no guarantee that a suffix would be rejected as a result. Two ICANN spokesmen did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

"NTIA will continue to provide advice on how ICANN can promote competition in the domain name marketplace while ensuring Internet security and stability," NTIA said in a statement. "NTIA continues to support a multi-stakeholder approach to the coordination of the domain name system to ensure the long-term viability of the Internet as a force for innovation and economic growth."

The U.S. proposal will be incorporated into what's being called a "scorecard" that governments are drafting to summarize their concerns with the current process of approving new domain suffixes. The scorecard is expected to be published in two weeks.

Then, at the end of this month, ICANN will hold a two-day meeting in Brussels with representatives of national governments to try to reach a compromise on how to share authority over new domain suffixes. (The language of the official announcement says the purpose is to "arrive at an agreed upon resolution of those differences.") ICANN's next public meeting begins March 13 in San Francisco.

A seven-page statement in December 2010 from the national governments participating in the ICANN process says they are "very concerned" that "public policy issues raised remain unresolved." In addition to concern over the review of "sensitive" top-level domains, the statement says, there are also issues about "use and protection of geographical names." (For instance, should a U.S.-based entrepreneur be able to register .london or .paris, or should those be under governmental control?)

That statement followed years of escalating tensions between ICANN and representatives of national governments, including a 2007 statement stressing the importance of "national sovereignty." A letter sent to ICANN in August 2010 suggested that "the absence of any controversial (suffixes) in the current universe of top-level domains to date contributes directly to the security and stability of the domain name and addressing system." And the German government recently told ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom that there are "outstanding issues"--involving protecting trademark holders--that must be resolved before introducing "new top-level domains."

Steve DelBianco, the executive director of the NetChoice coalition, says that the Obama administration's proposed veto "is not surprising." Governmental representatives "were not happy about .xxx getting through," he says. "They want a better mechanism in the future." NetChoice's members include AOL, eBay, Oracle, VeriSign, and Yahoo.

"They're looking at the rear view mirror at .xxx and looking through the windshield at several hundred new" top-level domain names, DelBianco says. "They want a mechanism that if (they) have concerns, they could stop an objectionable domain."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20030809-281.html





Cisco Linksys Routers Don't Support IPv6
Julie Bort

It's hard to fathom why Cisco hasn't added IPv6 to its Linksys consumer routers yet, but the company has promised support will come this spring.

It's 2011, IPv4 addresses are officially exhausted, and the world's largest router maker, Cisco, still doesn't support IPv6 in its best-selling line of Linksys wireless routers. This is true even for the new E4200 router released just last month (priced at $180). The company has promised to have IPv6 support for the Linksys line by the spring but has not been specific.

The networking world has been aware of the IPv4 address shortage for years. Cisco's competitors D-Link and Netgear, for instance, have been offering certified IPv6 consumer routers for a while. Cisco's enterprise routers support IPv6 (naturally) and have also been certified by the IPv6 Forum. Cisco has been involved in World IPv6 Day trials and last year even began eating its own IPv6 dog food, serving IPv6 content via its Web site www.ipv6.cisco.com. Heck, PC clients have had IPv6 support as an optional add-in since Windows XP SP2 and by default since Vista. Mac OS has supported IPv6 since 2004.

Updated: Cisco did not immediately address those questions, but offered this official statement:

"IPv6 is foundational to the next-generation Internet, enabling a range of new services and improved user experiences. As ISPs begin rolling out IPv6 service to their customers, consumers will need new routers and gateways that support IPv6 to participate in this next generation Internet. Later this spring, Cisco will begin enabling IPv6 across its consumer line of routers including the Linksys E4200 Maximum Performance Dual-Band Wireless-N Router. It is critical that consumers begin looking for products and devices that support IPv6. Cisco has been and will continue to be a leader in the development of IPv6 so consumers can feel confident that products from Cisco will provide top-line performance now as well as providing a foundation for the future."

After reading the statement we asked Cisco if the words, "consumers will need new routers and gateways that support IPv6" meant that Cisco will require its customers to buy new routers with IPv6 support when those routers become available. We asked again if there would be some path for those who have recently bought new routers to get IPv6 when Cisco deploys it, and if those owning older routers will also be offered IPv6 support.

Updated: We received no response. After waiting three business days for a response, Cisco finally told us, "The Linksys E4200 we just launched and Linksys routers that will be launched this year will support iPV6 - out of the box or via a firmware update (free of charge)." Cisco has not yet shared information on if current users of Linksys routers will be offered an upgrade for routers they already own.

When we asked Netgear similar questions, a company spokesperson told us, "Most Netgear routers today not only support IPV6, but are certified as well. We are working on IPv6 support for all our current shipping routers and it will be available to customers in the form of a firmware upgrade."

For example, Netgear's IPv6 Forum's certified routers include the WNDR3700, WNR1000, WNDR3400, WNR3500L and WNR3500. Its new dual-band gigabit router, the WNDR3800, announced at CES and competing with the Linksys E4200, will also support IPv6 when it ships in the spring. Likewise, the IPv6 Forum listed dozens of other consumer routers that are already certified and ready for the day when they would be asked to route an IPv6 address.

In the meantime, might we recommend that you follow Cisco's advice and "begin looking for products and devices that support IPv6"? Just sayin'.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...ksys-ipv6.html





Verizon iPhone Shows You Can’t Win: Carriers Hold the Cards
Brian X. Chen

The launch of the iPhone on Verizon adds to the mountain of evidence that you just can’t trust wireless carriers.

On the day that iPhone preorders began last week, Verizon quietly revised its policy on data management: Any smartphone customer who uses an “extraordinary amount of data” will see a slowdown in their data-transfer speeds for the remainder of the month and the next billing cycle.

It’s a bit of a bait-and-switch. One of Verizon’s selling points for its version of the iPhone is that it would come with an unlimited data plan — a marked contrast to AT&T, which eliminated its unlimited data plans last year.

Verizon incidentally announced a plan for “data optimization” for all customers, which may degrade the appearance of videos streamed on smartphones, for example.

Verizon didn’t send out press releases to alert the public of this nationwide change regarding data throttling and so-called “optimization.” The only reason this news hit the wire was because a blogger noticed a PDF explaining the policy on Verizon’s website, which Verizon later confirmed was official. Obviously it’s bad news, so Verizon wanted to keep a lid on it.

And here we thought Verizon’s network technology was better-prepared than AT&T to handle a big crowd of iPhone customers. While our initial tests showed that Verizon was better at making and holding phone calls, its data speeds are slower than AT&T’s. The company must be worried about the effects of an influx of iPhone customers — otherwise, why would it throttle bandwidth like this?

“We’ve been working on this for a very long time,” John Stratton, Verizon’s CEO, said during the Verizon iPhone press conference last month. “We expect unprecedented demand, bigger than anything we’ve ever seen before. We feel good about being able to handle it.”

Working on what for a very long time? A plan to handle a flood of new data-heavy customers by slowing everybody down? Brilliant.

The throttling policy will impact only a small number of users: Verizon claims only the top 5 percent of data hogs will be throttled. (AT&T also previously claimed that a small number of users were hogging a massive amount of network bandwidth before it dropped unlimited data.) But the “optimization” method involves caching less data and resizing video, which “may minimally impact the appearance of the file as displayed on your device” — and that affects every Verizon customer.

That’s an abuse of the word “unlimited.” Sadly, this Orwellian use of language is becoming a common practice in the broadband arena. Comcast used to promote unlimited data as well, but customers reported their service was cut off after exceeding an invisible limit; the broadband provider later switched to monthly data caps.

Actions such as data throttling are symptomatic of an ugly truth about the broadband industry. Internet providers would much rather slow everybody down than invest in more hardware to support more customers.

“ISPs have a vested interest in trying to extract as much money as they can and changing the net’s architecture to bring them more profits,” Wired.com’s net neutrality expert Ryan Singel recently wrote. “They would rather do that than add more infrastructure to handle the growing traffic.”

Meanwhile, Verizon is advertising an unlimited data plan for the iPhone — which appears to give it a leg up against AT&T, who discontinued unlimited data in 2010 and transitioned to a tiered pricing structure.

But just like AT&T, Verizon plans to switch to tiered pricing in the future, according to Stratton. Verizon’s unlimited data plan, available for a limited time, is just another example of bait-and-switch.

AT&T gets most of the heat because independent tests have shown that its network is less reliable than Verizon’s with handling phone calls. But at the end of the day, we’re dealing with the same evil.

AT&T increased the early-termination fee last June from $175 to $325. Guess what? Verizon, too, doubled its termination fee, to $350.

Verizon used to have a popular “new phone every two years program,” in which customers would receive juicy discounts on new phones every two years as a reward for staying loyal. Days after the Verizon iPhone was announced, Verizon discontinued the discount program. Tough beans.

But above all, Verizon’s data throttling is shady in areas where even AT&T can’t compete. Even when AT&T had unlimited data, the company did not practice throttling, and an independent test showed its unlimited data was truly unlimited.

Transparency is going to be the key issue with data-throttling. How much data is too much? How will Verizon notify customers when they’ve surpassed the limit? How much will they be slowed down?

If Verizon isn’t transparent on each of these issues, the company could quietly slow down anybody’s transfer rates just to cram as many iPhone and Android customers on its network as possible, to maximize profit without doing what it should do: invest heavily in network expansion to provide the fast, reliable network it promised to everybody.

Given its actions, Verizon may be better at holding phone calls, but as a broadband company it sucks at keeping promises.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/...verizon-sucks/





Big Cable Fed Up With Endless P2P Porn Subpoenas
Nate Anderson

The big ISPs, especially Comcast and Time Warner Cable, have intervened for months in massive file-sharing lawsuits, telling judges that they simply can't drop all of their activity for law enforcement in order to spend weeks doing IP address lookups on behalf of pornographers. And, when the ISPs get the chance to make their arguments before judges, they routinely go beyond complaints about the workload and challenge the very basis of the mass lawsuits.

One recent case serves as a good example. Last November, the large New York law firm of Foley & Lardner jumped into the P2P game, filing John Doe lawsuits on behalf of films like Anal Fanatic. A judge granted expedited discovery and subpoenas went out to ISPs—but the ISPs objected.

Comcast tried privately to negotiate a schedule, suggesting that the company could do 25 IP address lookups a month and for $95 apiece (a bargain given the $120 list price). The Foley & Lardner attorneys didn't agree. So Comcast, upset about the pressure it was under, sent one of its lawyers to intervene in the Anal Fanatic case.

Two judges overseeing two similar cases granted Comcast's lawyer a joint hearing. According to Houston attorney Rob Cashman, who was representing one of the defendants, the hearing went quite badly for the plaintiffs:

I have heard that one judge (Judge Thomas P. Griesa) got upset with the plaintiff attorney based on the jurisdiction, joinder, etc. issues with the case, dismissed it, and walked off the bench. The other Digiprotect case with Judge Paul A. Crotty was not dismissed, but the judge was upset about what he heard. I believe Judge Crotty gave the plaintiff attorney a number of days to respond to the issues this attorney brought before the court.

Despite the oral dismissal, Foley & Lardner attorney Britton Payne continued to seek settlements from defendants in the days that followed, including one from Cashman's client.

Cashman didn't like this, even though such oral dismissals are not binding and judges may later change their minds. "I do not believe this changes anything or permits the plaintiff attorney to solicit a settlement offer while the case is in limbo since as it stands, the case is dismissed," he told me a few days ago.

Britton Payne, a recent Fordham law school grad who also illustrates books and sings in a cappella groups, did not respond to questions about the propriety of this approach to settlements.

When we called Judge Griesa's chambers on Thursday, we were told that the case had in fact been orally dismissed back in January at the hearing with Comcast's attorney—but that the judge had just rescinded his own order at another court hearing on Wednesday. Anal Fanatic is back in play, and settlements can continue.

But the ISPs don't intend to let this drop. Time Warner Cable has just asked Judge Griesa to admit one of its own attorneys to the case, and the judge this week agreed. It's safe to say that Time Warner, which was called "a good ISP for copyright infringers" by another P2P attorney last year, won't be on the side of the pornographers.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-subpoenas.ars





Slammed By Judge, ACS:Law Not Allowed To Drop File-Sharing Cases
enigmax

Today, despite the apparent closure of both anti-piracy law firm ACS:Law and its copyright troll partner MediaCAT, the Patents Country Court began yet another hearing to announce how more than two dozen previously filed cases should be handled. Judge Birss QC slammed the scheme operated by the pair and denied them the opportunity to drop the cases.

In a statement read out in the Patents County Court earlier this month, ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley announced that he had quit the file-sharing claims business. Last week TorrentFreak discovered that he had completely closed down his business, along with his client MediaCAT who had also ceased trading. Nevertheless, the companies still have unfinished business – they can’t run away that easily.

On 17th January at the Patents County Court, Judge Birss QC said he was “astonished” by the conduct of the pair as they tried to discontinue cases against 27 alleged file-sharers at the 11th hour. The hearing was eventually adjourned and everyone returned to court 24th January to find solutions to numerous problems, including the joining of copyright owners to the action and the addressing of various procedural failings. After five hours that hearing was also adjourned for deliberations.

Today everyone returned to court to hear the ruling from Judge Birss QC. As was expected, neither ACS:Law’s Andrew Crossley nor MediaCAT’s Lee Bowden bothered to turn up. While ACS:Law had a new barrister in court, MediaCAT had no representation at all.

The court decided that ACS:Law would not be allowed to drop the 26 cases against alleged file-sharers, an answer to one of the key questions from the earlier hearing. While the copyright holders are being given 14 days to join the action, it is doubtful they will. If this happens, all MediaCAT cases against these defendants will be dismissed in March.

Yet again ACS:Law and client MediaCAT were heavily criticized, with the Judge reiterating that both companies have “a very real interest in avoiding public scrutiny” because of the revenue they generated from “wholesale letter writing.”

“Whether it was intended to or not, I cannot imagine a system better designed to create disincentives to test the issues in court,” said the Judge. “Why take cases to court and test the assertions when one can just write more letters and collect payments from a proportion of the recipients?”

The Judge said that the processes employed by the pair were “based on untested legal and factual propositions and issues of technology” and their letters “materially overstate[s] the untested merits of Media CAT’s approach.”

Judge Birss also described ACS:Law’s earlier claim that they could not provide documents for the court’s scrutiny as “extraordinary”.

“A party who keeps key documents which are cited in the Particulars of Claim in storage is not a party anxious to progress their claim in court,” he said.

As reported by Ralli, the lawfirm representing defendants in the case, the Judge was also critical of the involvement of GCB Limited, the company that popped up to carry on the MediaCAT letter writing campaign.

“The GCB episode shows that Mr Crossley’s client had every intention of doing precisely that and that ACS:Law were perfectly well aware of it. It is very difficult not to draw the inference that this was nothing more than a last ditch attempt to make some money from the letter writing exercise.”

The case was adjourned again, this time until 16th March. The issue of wasted costs to be picked up ACS:Law and/or MediaCAT will be heard then.
http://torrentfreak.com/slammed-by-j...-cases-110208/





Police Arrest Five In Operation To Shut Down Popular File-Sharing Forum
enigmax

According to a report from Greek police, one of the country’s most popular Internet forums with hundreds of thousands of members has been closed down following accusations of copyright infringement. In an operation which involved INTERPOL, five individuals were arrested with claims they had made 230,000 euros from advertising and membership fees.

Police are claiming that they have shut down one of Greece’s largest Internet forums. TheGreekz.com, which authorities say had hundreds of thousands of members and 15 million hits per day, is ranked by Alexa as the country’s 61st most-popular site.

According to the report, the Department of Electronic Crime in the capital, Athens, worked with the Department of Electronic Crime in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city. The operation to shut down the site targeted three areas – Athens, Kavala and Florina – with the aim of tracking down seven Greek nationals and one foreigner suspected of helping to run the site.

Five of the individuals were arrested and charged with copyright offenses. INTERPOL is reported as being involved in the search for two other suspects who are believed to be elsewhere in Europe.

The Society for the Protection of Audiovisual Works (EPOE), who have been involved in site takedowns in the past, are said to have filed a lawsuit against the site and were the ones who made the initial complaint to the authorities. The police say that the activities at TheGreekz resulted in “great financial loss” to movie, music, software and games companies.

The operation against the site resulted in the seizure of hardware including 25 hard drives, 5 laptops, CDs and what is described as “a wealth of documentary evidence” that allegedly shows that the site made around 230,000 euros from advertising and membership fees.

This latest anti-piracy action follows a police operation in March last year which aimed to shut down Greece’s largest BitTorrent tracker.
http://torrentfreak.com/police-arres...-forum-110206/





MPAA Sues Hotfile File Sharing Service

Motion picture studios charge the file sharing service with piracy
Joab Jackson

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has filed a lawsuit against the Hotfile file hosting service, charging that it encourages the illegal sharing of copyrighted movies and television shows.

On behalf of U.S. movie studios, the MPAA filed the civil lawsuit against Hotfile and its operator, Anton Titov, in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida, for damages and injunctive relief for violations under the United States Copyright Act of 1976. Hotfile is based in Panama City, Panama.

In a press statement, the MPAA maintains that Hotfile differs from legitimate Internet file-hosting services in that it "encourages and incentivizes users to upload files containing illegal copies of motion pictures and TV shows to its servers."

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The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has filed a lawsuit against the Hotfile file hosting service, charging that it encourages the illegal sharing of copyrighted movies and television shows.

On behalf of U.S. movie studios, the MPAA filed the civil lawsuit against Hotfile and its operator, Anton Titov, in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida, for damages and injunctive relief for violations under the United States Copyright Act of 1976. Hotfile is based in Panama City, Panama.

In a press statement, the MPAA maintains that Hotfile differs from legitimate Internet file-hosting services in that it "encourages and incentivizes users to upload files containing illegal copies of motion pictures and TV shows to its servers."

Frequent users are charged a monthly fee to download material, and the company rewards users who upload the most popular material, the MPAA charges.

A review of the Hotfile website finds that, in addition to a free data hosting service, it offers a number of subscription plans, starting at US$9 per month, aimed at speeding the download process for users. It also offers an affiliate plan that pays out dividends in $15 increments, based on the amount of the participant's material that is downloaded by others. It does not offer any search functionality for finding files on the site, so all sharing of files is done on a peer-to-peer basis.

Amazon-owned Web metrics company Alexa ranks Hotfile as the 57th-most-popular website on the Internet.

"Every day Hotfile is responsible for the theft of thousands of MPAA member companies' movies and TV shows - including movies still playing in theaters," said Daniel Mandil, MPAA general counsel and chief content protection officer, in a statement.

Hotfile did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It does provide a page for copyright owners to register a complaint of copyright infringement. There, the company claims to follow the procedures for removing copyright-infringing material as set forth by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...e-sharing.html





MPAA Snags Google Downloading Torrents, Threatens to Disconnect
Ernesto

In recent months Google has received dozens of copyright infringement warnings from MPAA-affiliated movies studios. While most of these notices are directed at users of Google’s public Wi-Fi service, a few also appear to be directed at employees at Google’s headquarters. The movie studios are not happy and are warning the search giant that it might get disconnected from the Internet.

Every year, the major movie studios and record labels send out tens of thousands of warnings to Internet users who are suspected of sharing their content using BitTorrent. These infringement notices are meant to inform users of their wrongdoings, and to convince the recipients to never download anything again.

The process works as follows. The copyright holders hire companies such as BayTSP and MediaSentry to track down people who share certain titles on BitTorrent and other file-sharing networks. These companies then join the swarm and request files from others. When someone shares a piece of the file with them, they log the IP-address, look up the ISP and send out an infringement notice automatically.

Most of the notices are sent out to the larger ISPs who are then asked to forward them to the customers in question, but search giant Google has also been receiving quite a few. A search on ChillingEffects – a site that collects some of the DMCA notices that are sent to Google – reveals that more than 100 of these automated warnings were sent to Google in the past several months.

Since Google also offers Wi-Fi hotspots in some cities, most of the infringers are not actually sharing material directly from Google headquarters. However, in some cases these warnings do appear to be aimed at Google employees. This is an awkward situation for a company that is trying to help out the entertainment industry, and has even revealed a censorship policy towards certain BitTorrent-related terms.

But there is more. If we believe some of the notices sent to Google, the company is at risk of losing its connection to the Internet.

“Copyright infringement also violates your ISP’s terms of service and could lead to limitation or suspension of your Internet service. You should take immediate action to prevent your Internet account from being used for illegal activities,” the movie companies write in various letters.

The above text is of course intended for average consumers, but in this case it appears to be directed at Google. Not that we (or Google) have to worry about it much. Although the copyright holders use strong language, these kind of notices are nothing more than a warning, and they never lead to legal action.

At the bottom of each notice there is generally some info about the alleged infringer, in the following format.

Infringing Work: The Green Hornet
First Found: 2 Feb 2011 16:57:21 EST (GMT -0500)
Last Found: 2 Feb 2011 16:57:21 EST (GMT -0500)
IP Address: 216.239.XXX.XXX
IP Port: 14077
Protocol: BitTorrent
Torrent InfoHash: 42708AA384CF93EC6B67E6CEFB6E27B32362F689
Containing file(s): The Green Hornet TS(iPod.Zune.PSP).torrent (442,480,008 bytes)

Of the 100 latest infringement notices received by Google for sharing copyright works, most of them are associated with IP-addresses used by Wi-Fi customers while a few point to Google’s headquarters. Even though they are posted on ChillingEffects (some redacted, some with full IPs) it is impossible to tell whether the company has forwarded them to employees, if these are traceable at all.

The movie companies, however, do have some advice for Google.

“An MPAA website, www.respectcopyrights.org, offers step-by-step instructions to ensure that your Internet account is not being used to violate the copyright laws. Also, the site can point you to an array of legal choices for enjoying movies and TV shows online. You can also learn there how theft of motion pictures and TV shows damages our economy and costs thousands of Americans their jobs,” they write.

The most recent notices received by Google were sent on behalf of Paramount Pictures and Columbia Pictures for the illicit sharing of The Fighter and The Green Hornet respectively. In total, Google has published 20+ of these warning letters in the last 30 days.
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-snags-g...onnect-110205/





Chris Dodd Emerges as Front-Runner for Hollywood's Top Lobbying Job
Richard Verrier

Hollywood's seemingly endless search for an industry lobbyist appears to be zeroing in on former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.).

Dodd, a former U.S. Democratic presidential hopeful who recently retired from the Senate, has long been a candidate to head the Motion Picture Assn. of America, replacing former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, who resigned as chief executive a year ago.

But a person close to the MPAA, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak on the matter, said that over the weekend Dodd had emerged as the top contender and was now the only candidate in negotiations for the job, which pays $1.2 million a year.

The Los Angeles Times reported on Friday that Dodd was among three finalists. On Monday, the website Politico said he was the only candidate in negotiations.

Dodd has already been interviewed by several senior studio executives and a deal could be reached in the next several weeks, but it could also fall apart, the source cautioned.

Indeed, Dodd is still weighing his options, a representative said. "He hasn't made any decision yet,'' said Mike McKiernan, a spokesman for Dodd. "He's still talking to people in both the private and public sectors to figure out his next step."

If recent history is any guide, there is good reason for caution. Last summer, the role looked like it was going to be filled by former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.). But the MPAA's board eliminated him from consideration after he expressed last-minute reservations about the job and the prospect of moving to Washington, D.C., from his home in New York.

Other leading candidates have since come and gone, including former Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.). Washington lawyer Antoinette Cook Bush also was considered a finalist as recently as last week.

But the MPAA's search committee was focusing on Dodd because they've been searching for a high -profile candidate who could pull strings in Washington.

Dodd, 66, served five terms in the U.S. Senate where he was known for his expertise on family and children's issues, as well as financial services. He served as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee after an unsuccessful presidential bid in 2008.

But Dodd's political career was also marked by its share of controversy. He took heat for his role in allowing insurance giant AIG to pay $165 million in bonuses in 2009 at a time when the company was receiving federal bailout money.

In 2008, Dodd also was investigated by a Senate ethics panel over allegations that he received improper discounts for mortgages he received from Countrywide Financial Corp. In August 2009, the committee found "no credible evidence" that Dodd had violated any rules but criticized Dodd and his former Senate colleague Kent Conrad of North Dakota for not avoiding the appearance of impropriety.

Though the entertainment industry is new to Dodd, he is not a total stranger to Hollywood. He played himself in the 1993 political satire "Dave."
http://www.courant.com/news/politics...,4292014.story





Netflix Rises as Studios' DVD Money Plunges
Greg Sandoval

Not long ago, ambitious young executives at the six major Hollywood film studios maneuvered to get into the home entertainment divisions.

Nowadays, getting assigned to home entertainment is like being sent to the Eastern front. Better to work in theatrical distribution, international, or maybe studio facilities. Recently, I spoke with an executive from one of the big studios who, while discussing the challenges of working in the film industry, noted there was one silver lining: "At least I don't work in home entertainment."

The studios' home-entertainment divisions typically oversee sales of DVDs and Blu-ray discs as well as Internet distribution. But the DVD has long been synonymous with these units for the simple reason that the discs account for the vast majority of revenues. This week, Sony, Time Warner, Viacom and News Corp., reported earnings and their film divisions continue to see falling DVD sales.

For the quarter ended December 31, Paramount Pictures saw a 44 percent decline in home video revenue from the same period a year ago, according to Viacom, Paramount's parent company (don't people give DVDs as holiday gifts anymore?).

Bad films or dying format?

Time Warner, which owns Warner Bros. Pictures, generated $923 million in revenue from home video and electronic delivery of feature films. That was a 23.5 percent tumble from the $1.23 billion made during the prior-year quarter. Sony and News Corp., which operates 20th Century Fox, don't break out their home video numbers, but they both signaled that DVD sales were ailing. Sony reported that Sony Pictures suffered a 20 percent overall decline in "sales and operating revenue" in the quarter partly due to "lower home entertainment revenues from catalog product."

For two decades, DVDs and before it, VHS tapes, were a huge source of profit for the studios. DVD sales outpaced box office sales between 2002 and 2009. Barry McCarthy, Netflix's former chief financial officer, noted a couple years ago that the DVD was the most successful consumer product launch in history measured by penetration into U.S. households. He said five years after debuting, DVDs could be found in half of all U.S. households. But the garden years appear to be over, as consumers continue to show less and less interest in physical media and turn to the Web for entertainment.

In their earnings report, the studios blamed the poor quarterly performances in home entertainment on the high number of hit films they had during the prior year. The way the studios tell it, they produced a higher number of popular films in 2009 than they did in 2010 and that resulted in lower DVD sales. This explanation, however, doesn't jibe with box-office figures.

Overall ticket sales in 2010 were $10.5 billion, just shy of the record-setting $10.7 billion generated in 2009, according to Boxoffice.com, an online service that tracks theatrical revenue. There were plenty of popular films last year. What this suggests is that in a down economy, people continue to find enough money to go to the movies. What they're apparently cutting back on are DVDs.

Why own movies?

Now, contrast the studios' dismal quarterly numbers with Netflix's performance during the same period. The video-rental service, which mails DVDs to subscribers as well as streams films and TV shows over the Web, added 3 million subscribers in the quarter--largely on the growing popularity of its streaming service, the company said.

It's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but it shows significant numbers of consumers are moving to Netflix, a service that all but eliminates the need to own movies.

Netflix now has 20 million total subscribers, a 60 percent year-over-year increase. If Hollywood wants to know where the DVD money went, this would be a good place to start looking. It shouldn't be hard to figure out that Netflix is thriving because it provides consumers with what they want: convenience, control, and a good price. For $7.99 a month, a Netflix subscriber gets access to all of the service's streaming content. That's just a better deal, when a single DVD often costs twice that amount.

That Netflix offers an alternative to owning movies or paying for cable TV, may explain why Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes has criticized Netflix so much lately. Another reason could be that at this early stage, Web-video distribution doesn't appear to be the cash cow that DVD was in its heyday.

The good news is that not everybody at the studios sees Netflix and Web distribution as a threat. A group calling itself DECE--made up of film studios, software, and hardware makers and almost everybody else connected to film and TV--is trying to create a set of standards and specifications designed to make approved digital content playable on a wide range of certified devices. The standards are called UltraViolet.

Supporters say this could help mainstream consumers make the jump to streaming distribution. Critics say this is an attempt to wrest control of digital distribution away from users. Regardless of whether UltraViolet works, it's a sign that some at the studios see the end of the DVD coming and are preparing for that day.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20030627-261.html





ComScore: Hulu Is Watched Twice As Much As The 5 Major TV Networks Online Combined
Erick Schonfeld

When it comes to premium video on the Web, Hulu still rules. In the fourth quarter, the U.S. online audience watched 19.4 billin minutes of video on Hulu, which was twice as much as the how much viewers watched on the websites of the five major TV networks combined. Viewers watched another 9.7 billion minutes of online video on the websites of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and the CW. The chart above comes from a new Digital Year in Review report from comScore.

While Hulu still dominates, the individual network sites are growing faster. They grew 82 percent in terms of time spent watching video online, compared to 17 percent growth for Hulu. Taken together, Hulu and the five top networks, saw 33 percent growth in minutes viewed.

Hulu has a love-hate relationship with the TV networks. They realize Hulu is a better distribution channel than their individual sites (people want to find all their shows in one place), but they also don’t want to cede their audiences to Hulu. This tension leads to constant negotiations with the networks and attempts by Hulu to move to a subscription model, at least on new platforms like the iPad.

But as the chart above shows, Hulu isn’t going to be displaced anytime soon. Maybe that is why Viacom recently brought back Colbert and The Daily Show
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/07/com...u-tv-networks/





Apple Still Reigns in Film Downloads, Study Says
Greg Sandoval

Netflix may be the Web's top movie rental service, but nobody sells more download-to-own movies than Apple, according to market research by iSuppli.

Apple's iTunes accounted for 64.5 percent of all the money spent in 2010 on electronic sell through (EIS) and Internet video on demand (IVOD) despite facing increased competitive pressure from Microsoft's Zune (Xbox), Amazon, Sony's Playstation, and Wal-Mart.

"Microsoft in 2010 accounted for 17.9 percent of U.S. movie EST/IVOD consumer spending, up from 11.6 percent in 2009," iSuppli found. "Sony in 2010 maintained the No. 3 position in the U.S. with a 7.2 percent share, up from 5.7 percent in 2009."

Apple, however, did give up some ground last year. In 2009, iTunes held 74.4 market share, and its share fell 9 percent last year, according to iSuppli. The good news is that the overall market grew by more than 60 percent. Could this increase in download sales have hurt DVD sales?

Last week, several of the top Hollywood studios reported dismal disc sales in the holiday quarter.

According to iSuppli, Apple managed to hang on to such a big market lead with the help of the iPad and the upgraded Apple TV, the research firm said.

"We expect that in the United States, Apple's strong performance in IVOD will allow it to continue to bypass the video-on-demand services offered by many major cable operators."

Here's more from iSuppli about how competition is heating up in the sector.

Competition from Microsoft intensified...because of the highly successful launch of its Kinect 3D motion controller system for its Xbox 360. This resulted in a bumper fourth quarter for movie revenue on the Zune Video platform, cementing the No. 2 market rank for Microsoft.

Wal-Mart's aggressive drive for market share for its U.S. online movies service Vudu has generated a spike in consumption for the service starting in the fourth quarter of 2010. The company announced $0.99 promotional pricing on IVOD movies and support for a wider range of living room devices, including Sony's PlayStation 3 video game console.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20030878-261.html





Microsoft’s Zune Video Bites Healthy Chunk Out of Apple’s Online Movie Share
Tom Warren

Microsoft’s Zune Video service gained over 50% more market share in 2010 compared to 2009.

The software giant’s Zune video platform now accounts for 17.9% of the market compared to 11.6% in 2009. Microsoft has successfully cemented its U.S. number two market rank during 2010. Apple’s iTunes still dominates the market with 64.5% market share but due to increased competition from Microsoft, Sony and others, Apple’s share slipped by 13%. U.S. movie EST/iVOD consumer spending on iTunes movies was 74.4% in 2009, meaning Apple’s share has slipped by nearly 10 percentage points.

The figures come courtesy of the latest quarterly analysis from IHS Screen Digest. “Apple faced serious competition from Microsoft’s Zune Video and Sony Corp.’s PlayStation Store, as well as from Amazon and—most significantly—Wal-Mart,” said Arash Amel, research director, digital media, for IHS. Despite Apple’s competition the company still dominates U.S. EST/iVOD movie consumer spending. The company also maintained its control of three quarters of the U.S. EST business in 2010.

Microsoft’s sharp increase can be attributed to the successful launch of the Zune Video services on the Xbox 360. Microsoft launched its Zune Marketplace on the Xbox 360 in November 2009. The service features content from CBS, Fox, NBC, Viacom, PBS and others. Following the success in the U.S. Microsoft expanded its offering in October to additional countries in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. IHS Screen Digest notes that Microsoft’s Kinect launch and its Xbox 360 sales success have helped it gain on Apple. “This resulted in a bumper fourth quarter for movie revenue on the Zune Video platform.”
http://www.winrumors.com/microsofts-...e-movie-share/





YouTube and the Major Film Studios
Martin Anderson

We're (potentially) damned if we do and impersonated if we don't - will there ever be a clear policy on the consumer's re-use of copyrighted movie material..?

Damned if you do - imitated if you don't...

In the course of writing lists or features, it's frequently occurred to myself and other writers to upload a clip from a movie to YouTube, by way of illustrating a point - and embedding it in the article. How often this goes through smoothly and how often it doesn't has become quite interesting in the last few years.

After uploading a short clip from The Exorcist to illustrate an entry in Top 10 most frightening sounds in movies, I was met with the familiar legend Video blocked in some countries text, next to the video in question...

The 'View Copyright Info' link indicated that the uploaded video had been content-matched using YouTube's Content ID tool, and was blocked either worldwide or in enough countries as to make the inclusion of the video-embed undesirable.

(Interestingly there appears to actually be no 'blocked' icon at YouTube in such cases. Instead there is the 'world' icon sitting next to the word 'Public' - even when the 'some countries' that the video is blocked in transpire to be 'every country on Earth'. Maybe you can watch such a video offworld..?)

Unusually, I didn't bother to delete the now-useless (except for my own personal viewing) video, and chanced to see it again in the list today, while researching this article. Apparently the devil has overcome his shyness...

The warning had been changed to Matched third party content, and the 'Copyright info' page informed me that though Warner Bros. Entertainment were registered as the owners of the original content (via the video/audio-matching algorithms it supplied to youTube's Content ID program for The Exorcist), "No action is required on your part. Your video is still available worldwide".

Who knows what changed Warner Bros.' mind this time? The expiry of a bulk-sold collection of TV viewings to network/cable? The start of a bulk-sold collection of TV viewings to network/cable? A new blanket policy that lengthens the permitted run-time for unauthorised uploads of their content? A 3-month dip in DVD and/or Blu-ray sales for The Exorcist? Or perhaps they think Shadowlocked is cool and are giving us special dispensation..?

Meanwhile, back on Earth: once a copyright holder has the YouTube 'address' of any upload that contains its content, it only has to rewrite the general or film-specific policy to change how available - or not - your previously uploaded version of their content is. The conglomeration of studios and corporate media concerns combines with lack of communication between their legal and marketing departments to leave so many productions in such a tangled web of internally contrary policies regarding redistribution...that even Google, owners of YouTube, can't keep up:

Some copyright holders want control over every use of their creation. Many professional artists and media companies post their latest videos without telling us, while some home video-makers don't want their stuff online. Some legal departments take down a video one day and the marketing department puts it up the next. Which is their right, but our community can’t predict those things, and neither can we...

The confusion arguably set in around 2008, when the movement to monetise (instead of take down) unauthorised content left CBS embracing the prospect of user-generated publicity on YouTube while sister-company Viacom was still in the middle of a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against the video-sharing site. CBS was joined in that period by the likes of Universal Music, Lionsgate, Electronic Arts, and subsequently by many other major names - as we shall see shortly.

It was the time of Facebook-for-everyone, the time when 'viral marketing' transited from the water-cooler to the company policies of PR sites; a time when it began to occur to the major studios that they might consider the harsh object-lesson learnt by the music companies' eternal take-down war with the MP3 uploaders - particularly since their own product could not be encapsulated in the 10-minute limits of a YouTube upload (recently extended to 15 minutes for many users, though to little practical difference, in these circumstances).

Young people, people far cooler than they were, the very people whose wallets, purses and general esteem the media giants were desperate to invade, were out there doing work and getting product-coverage that their own marketing departments would have killed to achieve by conventional methods. They weren't getting a dime for all this work, and to boot they could now be completely controlled by the Content ID architecture.

The trouble was, this relaxation could never be implicit. Technically, there's no ambiguity that we are 'doing wrong' in uploading our favourite film clips to YouTube.

Posting copyright-infringing content can lead to the termination of your account, and possibly monetary damages if a copyright owner decides to take legal action (this is serious—you can get sued!).

On the other hand, actually, there might be a little bit of ambiguity...

It's possible that you may be permitted to include small excerpts from copyrighted material in your video if what you intend to use is insubstantial or is incidentally included, or where the intended use you have for the copyrighted material falls within a exception or limitation to copyright under the law in your country.

We can't give you advice on either of these topics, and if you do plan to use even a small portion of copyright material in your video we'd strongly advise you to take legal advice first.

Fair Use could in theory protect a lot of fan-edits and similar mash-ups or montage clips on YouTube that were blanket-blasted by the major studios, and even complete clips from movies; but Fair Use only ever shows up in court - and no matter how viral your 'Donate To My Legal Funds!' campaign has gone, you'd inevitably be up against deeper pockets than your own.

The YouTube electric fence. But is it turned on? And if so, is it turned on all the way along..?

So yes, it's naughty. Don't do it.

Well, not for TV shows, anyway - see the standard warning of YouTube's upload page on the right, and search in vain for any mention of movies.

Movies don't have to worry, since they are implicitly included in the general warnings about copyright (see above) - and yet it is noteworthy how they are not explicitly mentioned in the standard warning.

The legal position of someone who uploads copyrighted movie clips to YouTube - for fun or educational purposes - is a very murky one in the light of the 'grey area' from which the majors now want to exert control of their user-uploaded content, via the algorithm-matching of the Content ID tool. From one point of view, if you really can 'get sued' (see first quote above) for doing this, allowing any exceptions presents a climate of tacit invitation to do so - with the content-owner reserving all rights to 'release the hounds' at any time in the future, while palpably encouraging select abuse of copyright laws that it will not qualify in any meaningful way. Content owners are watching us from the edge of the playground with a loaded rifle, but for the most part they're just ignoring us from the corner of their eye.

The amazing thing is that even commercials are included in the same upload-page warning that fails to mention movie clips.

The most interesting aspect of YouTube's Content ID tool providing the ability for "Rights owners...to block, track or monetise their content" is the 'track' aspect. Apart from facilitating the future enhancement or negation of rights to feature sections of particular movies on YouTube, this system provides content-owners with a useful and free-of-charge barometer to gauge market-interest in their output; spikes in readership on particular video-posts can prove useful in locating and then quashing or encouraging the hot source-pages which embedded them.

As an exercise to give a glimpse at the current state of policy by the major studios regarding the uploading of their content., I decided to upload a number of video-clips from movies to YouTube and see what the Content ID tool decided to do about algorithm matches.

I was immediately interested to see how the company with (historically) the most ferocious protectionist policies outside of the Hefner empire would react to an upload. Unfortunately I'm not a huge fan of The Mouse in general - at least in Disney's traditional animated and CGI output. But I can tell you that Walt isn't worried about 1943's Victory Through Air Power hitting YouTube...

Victory Through Air Power (1943) - No algorithm match at YouTube

The clip from this wartime Disney propaganda movie wasn't flagged as recognised content - although doubtlessly The Mouse, like all Content ID participants, has discretion to not make the uploader aware of the content match. In any case, no match was signalled. I decided to check out the state of Disney clip uploads on YouTube, expecting a barren wilderness of gunned-down attempts to share The Joy Of Walt, a tundral expanse of mere trailers and PR clips...

Wow, wrong:

Toy Story 2 clip with a million+ views - YouTube

And wronger...

Toy Story 2 clip with a million and a half views - YouTube

Stealth marketing, perhaps? Is the vaguely-named RandomMiss1995 genuine, a LonelyGirl15-style Disney construct, a favourite of the company...or perhaps a PR with an astroturfing remit? If Disney haven't shot her down after a million and a half hits, it's a fair bet they're not planning to anytime soon.

MadGirls?Well, a look at the eye-watering jpeg background of RandomMiss1995's YouTube channel profile (wherein we find the words 'Mad Girl Productions' nestling in with girly vibe-words like 'joyful', 'hysterically' and 'priceless') reveals all. The cute text-speak illiteracy of the profile blurb ("Okay just kno you are awesome for viewing ma channel i hope u check out ma videoss you see i am a simple girl really i Luv RNB and i am gaga for lady gaga i luv beyonce wiv all ma heart she is awesome") is thrown into sharp relief by the official website of the marketing company that Disney has 'allowed' to post this clip. I'm willing to bet that in spite of the year mentioned in the uploader's moniker, there aren't any sixteen year-olds working at that firm. I'm also willing to bet it's no coincidence that this video was uploaded on exactly the same day that Toy Story 2 got a new disc release.

[ Note also the use of 'Part 1' and 'HQ' in the title of RandomMiss1995's post above; these are both frequent search-terms for YouTubers who are looking for complete movies that have been uploaded in a sequence of 10-minute segments - even though the three videos posted by 'RandomMiss1995' amount to less than 30 minutes of Toy Story 2's 92 minutes runtime. ]

I downloaded the FLV file of an official Disney clip from the company's YouTube channel and reuploaded it to YouTube without the upload getting flagged - or without, in any case, being informed that it had been flagged. But for all I know, the ID checksum of that particular clip has been pre-approved site-wide on YouTube.

Another part of the problem of determining whether a particular film is content-monitored on YouTube is the absence of any knowledge of the content-holder's policy related to the movie and the (by experience, fairly slim) possibility that a clip is not long enough to get 'recognised'.

Uploading a 31-second clip of the Wachowski brothers' 2008 release Speed Racer got me no warnings or caveats at all.

Uploading an extended version of the clip (1:24) got me flagged, but with no bans...

Does this indicate that Warner Bros. Entertainment are okay with clips under a minute in length (or with clips from Speed Racer in that range, anyway)..? Or that the recognition algorithm failed, with only 31 seconds to operate in?

I rather doubt the latter - try uploading even a few seconds of any movie in the Alien franchise and marvel at how little YouTube's Content ID-matcher really needs to recognise a film. Warners definitely have a Content ID profile uploaded for Speed Racer, but they only bothered to even clear their throats at me when my clip went above a minute. What sense does that make when both my uploaded Speed Racer clips are available publicly at the time of writing?

One possibility is that Warners' content policy for Speed Racer is currently set to 'ignore' clips of less than a minute, either because prosecuting such a miniscule snippet of a movie would be worse PR for Warners than suffering it, or for reasons of resource conservation on the part of Warners legal department, YouTube's servers - or both. Also, sub-minute clips may be considered 'promotional' and post-minute clips heading towards 'infringement'.

Under 'Invalid reasons to dispute a claim' (i.e. to dispute a worldwide or country-specific block on an uploaded video) comes the caveat about the way not all uploaders are treated equally...

Copyright is all about the owner's right to decide who can use their content. Someone else's use doesn't give you permission.

The official YouTube channel of any number of major film-sites are often stuffed with copyrighted videos provided by PRs acting on behalf of the movie studio or distributor. Sometimes these are 'ex-exclusive' videos, wherein the outlet was provided with a world-unique promotional clip from a movie and given exclusivity of it for a short period of time, usually hosting it locally to maximise inbound referrers. Once the exclusivity expires, there's no percentage for the 'favoured' site in paying for the streaming bandwidth any longer, and the local video-embed gets switched to a self-administered YouTube embed - or for an embed code provided by a PR.

That's all via 'official' channels. What about the apparently individual uploaders who succeed in getting major content past the Content ID checkpoint and go on to accrue hundreds of thousands - or even in excess of a million - hits..?

Well, you could try Five Tips For Stealth Marketing On The Local Web for an insight into what the benefits are of infiltrating the cliques of 'the kids'. Here you'll find all the creepy terms you love and some you maybe never even heard of (such as 'Duct Tape Marketing' - which basically means getting someone who you can profit from to like you), all in the pursuit of covert viral campaigning on YouTube, Facebook and other supposedly 'organic' sites. Or marvel at the full range of 'StealthBomber' software that can make you thousands of profitable YouTube buddies over at this site.

It's getting to be so that the hipper they are, the harder they are to believe. Returning briefly to Speed Racer (not a movie I have even seen, incidentally), it's interesting to note the activity of the YouTube user 'SpeedRacerCrap', who decided during that movie's junket period to post 11 clips from the film, the most successful of which has racked up a quarter of a million hits.

Additionally, SpeedRacerCrap admits in their profile that this is not their real YouTube channel, which is actually this one...

The Channel 4 content I can't see here in the UK

[ As if to continue the theme of confusion, the Channel 4 video featured on this user-page is not visible to me here in the UK, even though Channel 4 is a British broadcaster. I had to ask fellow Shadowlocked editor Gabe Ruzin in Denver what it is I was missing. It's a Bjork video... ]

I'm not casting any suspicion on the fan-led integrity of video-posts by Tripp393 - it just seemed odd to me that a YouTube poster would spontaneously create a new channel for the release of one movie during the crucial phase of its major PR-blitz; and that casual search results for the movie on YouTube only show actual clips from the film that are either uploaded by SpeedRacerCrap or (presumably via overt PR arrangement) the Reelzchannel account. Click through to later results and there are some exceptions, such as this post by KingKam362; he may have only posted 4 videos, but they are all promotional in nature and have collectively racked up over 2 and a half million hits. Interesting.

Video posts by 'The Man' (i.e. official channels) have a taint of monotonous regularity for spoiler-loving, authority-loathing geeks - problems which PR companies rarely have to face for a new Sex And The City movie. What conclusion can you come to once you realise that there are some 'intruders' in the house? You either consider everyone suspect, or (as stealth marketers would prefer), take the posts on trust.

Returning to my upload test and checking out the major studios' content on YouTube, the individuation of joint rights-holders has a pretty distinct influence on what major studio output is and isn't blocked. Columbia's output varies enormously in accessibility on YouTube, but their association with Marvel Studios makes any Stan Lee-inspired output hard to find.

Except that when you do find it, the numbers from apparently user-uploaded clips seem quite phenomenal. For instance a search on YouTube for Spider-Man 3 unearths mostly the dross of trailers, extras and the odd fan mash-up. Until you come to YouTube user SenrabMas, who not only succeeds in getting an HD Spider-Man 3 clip to 618,240 views at the time of writing, but seems to be going out of his way to look like a naughty boy by calling the post 'Spider-Man 3 - Eddie Brock Becomes Venom DVD Rip'. Looks bad? But no, wait...

...I must be wrong - click on another of this user's Spider-Man 3 videos and we see that Sony (Marvel/Columbia, etc) have blocked it:

So the video 'Spider Man 3 jazz club scene DVD rip' - which reached 410,000+ views - is blocked, and another left standing with 600,000+ views in hi-definition and with the words 'DVD rip' also plastered all over it. Is this some disinformation in order to increase the credibility of the other post, or are Sony really oblivious to a huge, immensely popular and pretty long (2:26) HD extract from Spider-Man 3 - by a user they have already banned once for posting from that film? I honestly don't know. If it's stealth marketing and astroturfing, then I guess it's working.

[ Incidentally, all of the SenrabMas Spider-Man 3 posts occurred 4-5 months after the theatrical release, but in the month's lead-up to the Blu-ray/DVD release for the movie, as well as the October 2-disc edition, Limited Edition and Trilogy. ]

On the 007 franchise, Casino Royale (co-produced with Revolution Studios, EON Productions and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) has gone the monetisation route in this clip, with featured music also flagged in it. Columbia's extremely recent release The Social Network seems to be unimpeded at this post, and the company seems to have found a less protective partner than Marvel in Relativity Media, with whom it released Zombieland. Columbia's international propriety of 2009's Terminator Salvation has allowed this clip to get to over 800,000 hits (though this may have been by arrangement, and I don't know what the video looks like from the US side, where Warner Bros, have the rights), while a Pineapple Express clip (suspiciously, from a YouTube user who has posted nothing else) has a robust 137,648 views at the time of writing this.

Warner Brothers, who have so kindly released my Exorcist clip in recent weeks, seem to have no problem with this extract from Tim Burton's Beetlejuice, which has garnered over 900,000 views despite being in high quality and featuring a copyrighted song (and interestingly, posted once again by a 'hit-and-run' YouTube account with only two uploaded videos to its credit).

Paramount seems hamstrung by its association with Marvel Studios on Iron Man 2, with S. Lee and friends preferring to handle their own uploading, apparently, and seem equally constrained by Dreamworks for How To Train Your Dragon.

20th Century Fox seem to have let a few stragglers through Minority Report's Content ID filter, and my attempt to upload a clip from Jonathan Frakes' Thunderbirds resulted in a post that is only visible in the UK, where Granada retain the European rights to the franchise (and most other Gerry Anderson franchises).

NBC Universal's North American stake on the excellent 2008 black comedy In Bruges meant that my clip upload was blocked in the US, while Lionsgate decided to monetise my uploaded clip of 2003's The Grudge by adding commercials. NBC Universal banned my uploaded clip of Jurassic Park: The Lost World all over the world, though they seem able to tolerate a 16-second clip. A commenter at this 45-second clip from Lost World claims that the video has been flipped. If so, might that have foiled the recognition algorithm?

Paramount, Dreamworks and Spyglass seem of a mind that Ricky Gervais' 2008 Ghost Town not have any clip presence on YouTube, while Dreamworks and Universal roundly rejected my 3:48 Gladiator (2000) clip whilst allowing this popular 15-second excerpt.

Substantial clips of mine that were not flagged, monetised or hamstrung included the Dimension/Alliance David Cronenberg outing eXistenZ (1999), the Miramax Films/Entertainment Film Distributors (UK) Scorsese film Gangs Of New York (2002), Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964, Columbia), Screen Gems' (USA) and PolyGram Pictures' Arlington Road (1999), MTV Films and Lakeshore Entertainment's Æon Flux (2005) and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982, via The Ladd Company, Tandem Productions and Sir Run Run Shaw).

Films San Frontiere banned my clip of Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), but only in the French region in which they currently hold the copyright for the movie, while Warner Brothers flagged my clip of 1957's The Curse of Frankenstein without monetising or impeding it...

...and so it goes on. In terms of trying to comprehend policy, it's a mess. Absolutely none of it is technically allowed - and if it wasn't for the aggregate force of grass-roots' spending power, none of it would be happening.

But as Lionsgate Entertainment's president of digital media Curt Marvis told the New York Times when Content ID kicked in back in 2008 "we...don’t like the idea of keeping fans of our products from being able to engage with our content...For the most part, people who are uploading videos are fans of our movies. They’re not trying to be evil pirates, and they’re not trying to get revenue from it”.

If most of the other major studios feel the same - and YouTube product manager David King reported a 90% conversion rate in the same article cited above, indicating pretty strongly that they do - it might be in their interest to emerge from the slightly-cowardly vagueness that makes 'Fair Use' too unreliable a defence for the 'hip' uploaders (that the studios ironically court - and perhaps imitate) to bypass the blanket copyright warnings plastered over YouTube. If we're helping, they ought to take the gun-sights off us and set some fair and clear rules.
http://www.shadowlocked.com/20110211...m-studios.html





In Praise Of Piracy
Jon Evans

I’ve had to think a lot about digital rights management lately. Not that I wanted to. But I recently did some eye-opening contract software development for a DRM-heavy media app, just as our government up here in the Great White North introduced a new and extremely DRM-friendly copyright law, and links to Don’t Make Me Steal started popping up all over the Internet.

You probably don’t realize, unless you actually work on a software project laden with DRM, just how much Sisyphean effort goes into it. I estimate fully a quarter of the developer-hours that went into the app in question were devoted to building or dealing with the DRM, meaning a quarter of the total effort did not go into crafting a killer app. Similarly, the countless hours and dollars Sony spent on CD rootkits and impressively inept PS3 encryption did not go into building better products. All this effort lavished on restriction rather than creation reminds me of the great Ryszard Kapuściński‘s depiction of the Soviet economy:

One can assume that a significant portion of the Soviet metallurgical industry is devoted to producing barbed wire … For the matter does not end with the wiring of borders! How many thousands of kilometres of wire were used to fence in the gulag archipelago? … If one were to multiply all this by the number of years the Soviet government has been in existence, it would be easy to see why, in the shops of Smolensk or Omsk, one can buy neither a hoe nor a hammer, never mind a knife or spoon: such things could simply not be produced, since the necessary raw materials were used up in the manufacture of barbed wire.

DRM is the barbed wire of the media world. Nobody likes it except manufacturers, publishers, producers, and copyright holders … a group which includes, er, me. I’ve been stubborn and lucky enough to have had a clutch of novels published around the world—and, inevitably, pirated. As a “content producer,” I’m generally expected (especially by my publishers) to be a staunch supporter of DRM, and piracy’s sworn enemy.

It’s easy to see why. Most of the arguments that echo around the Net in favor of unlimited copying range from “intellectually lazy” to “wilfully deluded.” Yes, musicians make up for much of their piracy losses with performance income, but no, the same is not possible for all other pursuits. Yes, Cory Doctorow does very well, but he’s an extreme outlier who markets himself on one of the world’s most popular blogs and has $10,000 lunches with Mark Shuttleworth. No, “real artists” will not keep at it regardless of whether they’re paid; passion is only loosely correlated with talent, and those who make a full-time living from their work do more and better than they would as hobbyists. Yes, obscurity is any creator’s primary enemy, but that doesn’t make piracy a friend. No, The Pirate Bay is not just like a library or secondhand shop. Yes, all of these arguments sound like “I want the fruits of your years of hard work, but I don’t want to reward you in any meaningful way!” wrapped in an extremely thin rationalization.

Although it pains me to say this, it’s the pirates who are on the right side of history. Empires built on barbed wire inevitably collapse, and the sooner the better; while this one reigns, it perpetuates yesterday’s regimes, and squelches innovation and progress. Is piracy wrong? Yes, but that’s the wrong question. The right question is, which is worse: widespread piracy, or the endless and futile attempt to preserve DRM everywhere? So long live the pirates. Those jerks. Please don’t make me say it again.

Ironically, it’s Apple who gives me hope. Yes, Apple, who—unlike Amazon—refuse to sell DRM-free ebooks. But I take heart in knowing that people have bought billions of songs from iTunes (a clumsy, irritating tool which offers by far the worst user experience of Apple’s entire product suite) even though they could easily have downloaded them for free. Most people don’t want to steal. If we content producers make our goods cheap enough, and the process easy enough, they’ll be willing to buy them. I hope. So I’ve released two of my books under Creative Commons licenses, and I’m trying to talk the major publisher who’s agreed to re-e-publish a third to do so without any DRM. So far they’re reluctant: but it’s a leap of faith that all of today’s defenders of DRM will ultimately have to make.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/05/in-praise-of-piracy/





Consumers Prefer Legal Content, New Study Suggests
Rahul Gaitonde

A recent report commissioned by NBC Universal shows that if given the opportunity, consumers prefer to obtain content online legally.

The report, by the Cambridge, U.K.-based internet monitoring and research group Envisional, examined four main methods of sharing copyrighted material online: BitTorrent, cyberlockers, video-sharing sites and other peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa or eDonkey.

The report showed that films make up the largest single category of pirated content at 69 percent, followed by television at 11 percent on the BitTorrent tracking site PublicBT, one of the most popular of such sites online.

BitTorrent is the most popular form of file sharing globally, with more than 100 million users worldwide, according to Envisional. It is so large that on its own BitTorrent traffic accounts for 14.6 percent of all internet traffic.

The protocol transfers bits of files between peers, or users, and the rate at which file transfers happen is correlated with how many people there are sharing the content — the more the better and faster the transfers.

It appears that if users are able to obtain their content in a simple way legally online they will do so rather than trying to find illegal copies that are of questionable quality: In the United States, Hulu makes it easy for users to access a large amount of television for free viewing online, and purchasing content on iTunes or Amazon’s Video on Demand service is easy and cheap.

The data shows that music is not a big factor on BitTorrent, and that file sharing on networks like Kazaa has plunged. This suggests that piracy may not be as a big factor online as the music industry claims. This makes sense given the cheap and easy availability of music online via iTunes, or via internet radio services like Pandora.

One of the newest methods of file sharing is cyberlockers. They make up the smallest method of sharing of pirated material. They only make up 3 percent of the internet’s traffic. These sites work by offering users a cheap place to host data and share it anonymously.

Individuals search message boards and cyberlocker index sites for files; these sites do not host the content but rather simply offer links to files which are hosted by cyberlockers.

While these sites are currently small, they continue to grow. The largest cyberlocker RapidShare currently gets more page views than The Pirate Bay, the most popular BitTorrent site. Hotfile, another popular cyberlocker, has recently been targeted by the MPAA.

Video sharing sites, which contain large amounts of user-generated content, have long been plagued with hosting illegal content. YouTube, the world’s most popular video sharing site, accounts for 5 percent of global bandwidth alone.

To prevent the sharing of copyrighted material, YouTube has implemented a number of preventative measures. These measures include the limiting of video length to 15 minutes and installing copyright filters that scan videos.

A number of smaller online video sharing sites such as LetMeWatchThis, ZMovie, and Movie2K appear to be geared toward the sharing of illegal content.

These sites have become the target for Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). The two agencies have teamed up and have gone after a number of popular video sharing sites. Last week, ICE and HSI shut down 10 of the most popular sites including Atdhe.net, Channelsurfing.net, and HQ-streams.com.

In the wake of the fall of Napster and Kazaa, P2P networks that used to be the most popular forms of file sharing have dropped off precipitously, according to Envisional.

These sites now only account for less than six percent of all internet traffic — the smallest compared to the other three forms analyzed.
http://broadbandbreakfast.com/2011/0...tudy-suggests/





Recording Industry Persecution Complex: Claiming EMI's Plight Is Due To File Sharing
Mike Masnick

Bas points us to a bizarre opinion piece for NME (which is usually a bit better than this) in which recording industry insider Alan McGee posts a near factless diatribe claiming that EMI's recent takeover by Citigroup proves that "downloading has murdered the music business." There's almost nothing accurate in McGee's piece. It's fantasy-world writing where people just make up stuff. Let's dig in a bit:

First things first: EMI is still a great British label. I mean, it owns the Beatles back catalogue! So why is it in the hands of a bank? It’s just economics. Guy Hands bought it in 2007, at the height of the market, when people were paying stupid prices for everything, not just labels.

Ok. So we agree. Guy Hands (well, really his firm Terra Firma) paid way too much for EMI in 2007. Frankly, that's the reason for EMI's plight today. Terra Firma got infatuated with the names on EMI's roster, didn't understand the recording industry at all, and got suckered into paying way over a reasonable price, and then couldn't handle the debt load. It had nothing to do with people paying stupid prices in 2007. People weren't paying stupid prices for record labels -- just Terra Firma. And that's because they didn't really understand what they were buying.

The trouble is, now everyone has woken up to the reality, which is that illegal downloading is murdering the music business.

So much incorrect in such a short sentence. First, I don't think anyone views the industry's situation much different in 2011 as they did in 2007. File sharing was rampant then as it is now. The struggles the recording industry were facing were already quite clear in 2007 (hell, they were clear in 1997 to people paying attention). Second, the only part of the "music business" struggling is the record labels. Nearly every other part of the music business has grown massively over the last decade. Third, there is little to no evidence that "illegal downloading" is the cause of any serious problems. Yes, it does act as a substitution in some cases, but as we've seen over and over again, when musical acts embrace file sharing in conjunction with a smart business model, they end up making more money. So, no, "illegal downloading" is not the cause of EMI's problems. EMI's inability to adapt to a changing market, combined with a massive debt overload was the issue.

I actually think Guy Hands didn’t do a bad job. He was just personally unfortunate. He came along at the wrong time. Shit happens. It was a time of affluence of abundance. Then the world economy turned upside down, Lehman Brothers went broke, and the world changed. The market crashed.

Huh? The market crash had nothing to do with the troubles facing EMI. Nor does McGee show how the two are connected. As with his earlier claims, he just insists it's true with no proof.

EMI's problems should be a wake-up call. How did they get into this mess? It all comes back to the impact of illegal downloading. We have to change the legislation in this country and come down much harder on piracy.

First up, we've already discussed why the impact of unauthorized file sharing was not the problem, but more importantly, countries around the world have been changing legislation plenty over the last decade to come down much harder on "piracy" and it's done nothing to improve the lot of the record labels. Is McGee totally unaware of the Digital Economy Act in the UK? Rather than recognize that such laws have been passed and have not helped the record labels, McGee just wants more protectionism. That old line about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results may apply...

Otherwise guys in little bands starting out now are never going to be the next Rolling Stones.

Wait, so the only options are failure or the Rolling Stones? And that state is a ridiculous one either way. What we've seen (and been documenting for years) is that things are much better for bands starting out today than in the past because they don't need to win over the gatekeepers. They can find their own audience. They can create their own business models and make a living -- unlike under the old system, where you either hit it big or you gave up and went back to your day job. As for who will be the next Rolling Stones, I have little fear that the general nature of human psyche will continue to find new acts to turn into superstars.

And, should we even mention just how much money the Rolling Stones make from touring, which is an industry that has actually been helped by unauthorized downloads in building up larger fanbases of various bands?

When you download an album illegally, it's not the record company guys that get fucked -- those people are still on massive salaries -- it's 19-year-old kids, it's guys in bands making £100 a gig.

Wait, what? In this very same paragraph you claimed the totality of EMI's problems were due to unauthorized file sharing, but then just a few sentences later you claim the record labels aren't impacted. Keep it together, McGee. As for the impact on the 19-year-old kids making £100 per gig, they can actually be massively helped by file sharing, because the more people who know and like their music, the more people will be willing to come out to their gigs, so maybe they'll start making more than that £100.

When I came along in the 80s and 90s, I was lucky to be in a market where people bought music. Now If I wanted an album, I could just go on some torrent site and download it. You've got to give bands a chance, let them develop. In the 80s, bands started dodgy, then they got good. The bands I worked with – Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine, even Oasis -- it took them a few years to go from being OK to being good. These days bands don't get the chance, they just get dropped.

Again these are statements that appear to imply some sort of causal relationship, but fail to show any. What does the fact that people bought CDs have to do with letting a band develop? I mean, if it really takes so much time for a band to develop, then doesn't that mean people shouldn't be buying their early music anyway? And the final light highlights the crux of the problem: it assumes that the only way to succeed today is by signing to some big label. So if that label drops you, you're screwed. And yet, we're seeing over and over again that musical acts are being amazingly successful without a label (since they don't need to make nearly as much money as they have to on a label to make a damn good living). In fact, we're seeing bands celebrate being dropped from their labels, because it means more freedom to develop and the ability to make more money.

There's only one independent label, post-Creation, that's really been phenomenal, and that's Domino. Laurence (Bell, owner) is a genius. He's touched with gold dust. Whether it sells or not, he's got the magic touch.

This is a total non sequitur. What does the fact that there's been a good indie label have to do with file sharing or EMI?!? Furthermore, "whether it sells or not," seemed to be the whole point earlier in the article. Now it doesn't matter? Finally, to say that there's only been one good indie record label suggests a level of ignorance to what's actually going on in the music world today. There are a bunch of fantastic indie labels out there. Perhaps McGee should get out more.

As for me, if I ran EMI, I'd get legislation changed and make a profit by stopping piracy.

Can someone -- anyone -- explain how getting people to stop downloading creates a profit anywhere? Getting people to stop downloading doesn't magically make them start buying. And it's not like EMI hasn't been among the efforts by all the major record labels to get legislation changed for years, and all of that has done absolutely nothing to stop file sharing. It's pure folly to suggest that there's some sort of magical legislative move that will stop unauthorized file sharing and create "profits" at the same time.

What will do that, however, is smarter business models -- something that McGee never even seems to consider. Thankfully, reading through the comments on that article, nearly everyone is pointing out all of these points to McGee, though I doubt he'll ever read any of them.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...-sharing.shtml





Warner Music Draws Potential Buyers: Report

Warner Music Group, the world's No. 3 music company, has attracted more than 20 interested parties since putting itself up for sale, the New York Post said, citing sources.

Warner Music, which is looking to sell itself before rival EMI's recorded music and music publishing assets are formally auctioned, is asking bidders to submit their bids by month end, the Post said.

In January, Reuters, citing a source, reported that the company was looking for potential buyers and that Goldman Sachs was advising on the process.

Warner Music was not available to comment.

(Reporting by Fareha Khan; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7173S120110211





War Looms as Sony Hints that it Will Abandon iTunes
Julian Lee

SONY has signalled it may withdraw its artists from Apple's iTunes store and withhold its games from the iPhone in a sign the two companies are on the brink of all-out war.

Sony plans to open a competitor to iTunes, a music streaming service called Music Unlimited, in Australia soon.

Another service launching later this year will enable mobile phone users to pay and play first generation PlayStation games on their handsets. The head of Sony's games unit in Australia said it was unlikely to be available on the iPhone or through iTunes.
Two weeks ago Apple blocked Sony's electronic book application from the iPhone because it would have bypassed Apple's system for buying content.

The new Sony music service, which opened in Europe last year, will have a library of 6 million tracks and users will be able to stream songs to Sony TVs, PlayStation3 consoles, PSP portable game players and Blu-Ray players.

The chief executive officer of Sony Computer Entertainment, Michael Ephraim, said music streaming was a ''new technology'' that gave consumers greater freedom to play their music on a variety of devices.

Because Sony's service will be stored on servers, users will be able to more freely access songs from any device, which Mr Ephraim said was in contrast to Apple's system, which relies on users to transfer their library across devices such as the iPod or iPhone.

If Music Unlimited becomes popular it will provide a credible alternative to iTunes for music publishers, including Sony Music Entertainment, which includes Bob Dylan, Beyonce, Guy Sebastian and Delta Goodrem in its stable of artists.

''If we do [get mass take up] then does Sony Music need to provide content to iTunes?'' Mr Ephraim asked. ''Currently we do. We have to provide it to iTunes as that's the format right now.

''Publishers are being held to ransom by Apple and they are looking for other delivery systems, and we are waiting to see what the next three to five years will hold.''

Music Unlimited would eventually move to portable devices such as Sony's PlayStation Portable and Sony Ericsson phones, Mr Ephraim said, but the company is not saying whether that will include devices made by competing manufacturers.

Later this year Sony will launch PlayStation Suite, which brings early games such as Crash Bandicoot to portable devices and phones such as Samsung's Galaxy and Motorola's Defy powered by Google's Android operating system.

Mr Ephraim said it was another example of Sony ''opening up'' its content to other platforms. In 2009 it opened up PlayStation 3 to allow users to watch the ABC's iView.

Mr Ephraim said PlayStation Suite was unlikely to operate on Apple's iPhone. ''We are not as closed as Apple is. It's the first time in the gaming industry it's non-proprietary. With the proliferation of devices [PlayStation Suite] could be an indication of where things are going.''
http://www.theage.com.au/digital-lif...210-1aonn.html





Sony Lawyers Expand Dragnet, Targeting Anybody Posting PlayStation 3 Hack
David Kravets

Sony is threatening to sue anybody posting or “distributing” the first full-fledged jailbreak code for the 4-year-old PlayStation 3 gaming console.

What’s more, the company is demanding that a federal judge order Google to surrender the IP addresses and other identifying information of those who have viewed or commented about the jailbreak video on a private YouTube page. The game maker is also demanding that Twitter provide the identities of a host of hackers who first unveiled a limited version of the hack in December.

Sony’s aggressive pretrial discovery demands come in its lawsuit against George Hotz. The 21-year-old New Jersey hacker, who is well known in the jailbreaking community, published the finished PlayStation 3 code and a how-to YouTube video last month. The code enables the Playstation 3 to play pirated and homebrewed games.

Sony wants the information “to determine the identities of third parties hosting and distributing the circumvention devices” so Sony can send them a DMCA notice to remove the material “and, if necessary, seek appropriate relief from this court.”

“The discovery they call for in my opinion is overbroad,” Hotz’ attorney, Stewart Kellar, said in a telephone interview.

Sony declined to comment.

A hearing is tentatively set for Wednesday. Sony filed its documents about 7:30 p.m. PST on Friday.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ordered Hotz to remove the YouTube video and the code from his personal website — orders with which Hotz complied with last week. Ahead of an unscheduled trial in which Sony is seeking unspecified damages from Hotz, Illston had concluded that Hotz likely breached the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He did so by publishing or “distributing” a hack designed to circumvent software meant to protect copyrighted material, the judge said.

Hotz, by order of Illston, is also scheduled to surrender his computer gear to Sony by Thursday. Kellar is trying to convince Judge Illston to back away from allowing Sony to examine his drives and other devices.

Sony is also trying to haul into court the so-called “fail0verflow hacking team.”

But first, Sony needs to learn the identities and whereabouts of the group’s members. They are accused of posting a rudimentary hack in December. It was refined by Hotz weeks later when he accessed the console’s so-called “metldr keys,” or root keys that trick the system into running unauthorized programs

Toward getting the fail0verflow defendants to appear into court, Sony is demanding that Twitter divulge the personal account information behind the usernames of @KaKaRoToKS, @gnihsub, @pytey, @bl4sty, @marcan42 and @fail0verflow.

Sony claims the hacks will eat into game sales for the 41 million PS3 units sold.

The DMCA makes it either a civil or criminal offense to traffic in wares meant to circumvent devices protecting copyrighted works.

Ironically, performing a similar hack on a mobile phone is lawful.

Last summer, the U.S. Copyright Office exempted cell phone jailbreaking from being covered by the DMCA. The decision means consumers may run the apps of their choice on mobile phones without fear of being civilly or criminally liable for a DMCA breach.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...wsuit-factory/





PS3 'Jailbreak Code' Retweeted by Sony's Kevin Butler, No Punchline Needed
Ross Miller

Oh, honey. Sony PlayStation's (entirely fictional) Kevin Butler holds many (also fictional) positions within the company, but apparently none of them require him to keep up with (very real) news events. Travis La Marr (aka @exiva) tweeted the now-infamous PS3 METLDR root key towards Butler with the challenge to "Come at me." What's a spokeperson to do but confuse it for a Battleship reference and retweet the entire code? Obviously someone let him in on the joke, as the tweet's since been removed (original URL can be found as More Coverage below). At least Sony won't have to subpoena for his info here. Geohot, we hope you're laughing.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/09/p...ler-no-punchl/





Sony Loses Bid To Pull Twitter, YouTube User Info In PS3 Case
Jesse Emspak

A Federal court in California has denied Sony's motion to pull the personal information of Twitter and YouTube users who might have downloaded code that allows
Sony lost its bid to subpoena user information from Twitter and YouTube in its case against a hacker who published a method of circumventing copy protections on the PlayStation 3.

The company had filed a motion for discovery, asking for the personal information of users of Twitter and YouTube who might have a connection with George Hotz, who had published a piece of code on his Web site that allowed a PlayStation 3 to run other operating systems as well as pirated games. Sony was, in essence, asking for the contact information of people who had commented on the video Hotz posted showing how he used the code, as well as people he may have corresponded with via Twitter.

The judge in the case, Susan Illston, denied the motion. Hotz is still under a restraining order that forbids him from offering any methods or software that allow people to modify their Sony PlayStations. Nor is he allowed to provide links to sites that offer such methods or software. He is also ordered to turn over his computers to Sony.

It wasn't clear that Sony Computer Entertainment America, which filed a lawsuit against Hotz in January, would get its restraining order, as the company had to show that the court had jurisdiction over Hotz. But Sony was able to satisfy the judge that Hotz had harmed the company's business by promoting his jailbreaking software and encouraging others to use it.

Sony's original lawsuit says Hotz, Hector Martin Cantero, Sven Peter, and John Does one through 100 violated copyright, the computer fraud and abuse act and California law. Sony's complaint also says Hotz, Cantero and Peter acted to circumvent the copy protections built into the device and "trafficked in circumvention devices and components thereof." The trafficking refers to Hotz publishing the code on his blog.

Hotz's lawyer, Stewart Kellar, had filed an objection stating that Sony has no jurisdiction in the case, as Hotz lives in New Jersey and the complaint was filed in California. He also argued that the restraining order is too broad, as taking away Hotz's computers (as well as his PS3) would affect his ability to make a living as well as compromise data that might be private.

A video of the jailbreak was released by Hotz, who goes by the user ID geohot, on YouTube. On his blog he had a link to the software, which can be loaded on to any PS3. The front page of the site currently only has text, with no links.

Hotz has argued that the software he wrote only restores functions to the PS3 that were there before, as earlier versions of the firmware allow it to run other operating systems. Current versions do not allow this.

Sony is facing its own set of problems. A Sony employee accidentally re-tweeted the code key to the PlayStation 3, which would allow any user to get around the very copy protections Sony is currently arguing about in court.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/1112...-user-info.htm





LG Attempting to Stop the Sale of PS3 in U.S.
Don Reisinger

LG Electronics wants the U.S. International Trade Commission to bar the import of the PlayStation 3 into the United States, according to a complaint.

The complaint, filed Friday with the ITC and first reported by Bloomberg yesterday, claims that the Blu-ray player in the PlayStation 3 violates several of LG's patents. The company cited Sony, Sony Corporation of America, Sony Electronics, Sony Computer Entertainment, and Sony Computer Entertainment America in the complaint, according to the docket page on the ITC's Web site.

The ITC 337 Law Blog, which is run by a private law firm, posted the complaint documents yesterday.

According to the documents, LG said it holds two patents that it believes Sony violates in the PlayStation 3 related to the way a Blu-ray player reproduces data from a Blu-ray disc. The company cited another patent that covers the "reproduction of multiple data streams" by way of multiple camera angles. LG also said Sony violates a patent it holds on the display of text subtitles on Blu-ray.

LG's decision to take aim at Sony follows a complaint filed by Sony with the ITC in late December. In that complaint, Sony said that LG violates patents it holds for mobile phones. The company asked the ITC to bar LG from selling its mobile phones in the United States.

For its part, LG wants the ITC to launch an "immediate investigation" into Sony's use of the Blu-ray player in the PlayStation 3. The company wants the ITC to bar Sony from importing the PlayStation 3 into the United States. It also wants the console to be banned from any marketing or repair efforts Sony might engage in.

Neither Sony nor LG immediately responded to request for comment.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20030963-17.html





Innovation Far Removed From the Lab
Patricia Cohen

Daniel Reetz loves trash bins. A big one in Fargo, N.D., was where he found most of the materials he used to build a scanner that was fast enough to scan a 400-page book in about 20 minutes without cracking the binding. The two Canon PowerShot A590 cameras and two lights that he lashed together with a few pieces of acrylic and wood cost him about $300 in all, considerably less than the $10,000 commercial book scanners that were on the market.

When he was finished, Mr. Reetz, now 29 and working at Disney Research’s laboratories, put his 79-step how-to guide on a Web site. Since the post went up nearly two years ago, about 1,000 people have joined Mr. Reetz’s forum, and about 50 have built their own scanners from castoff furniture, aircraft aluminum, whiskey boxes and plastic foam.

Do-it-yourselfers like Mr. Reetz may not know it, but their tinkering is challenging a deeply entrenched tenet of economic theory: that producers, not consumers, are the ones who innovate.

Since the Austrian economist Joseph A. Schumpeter published “The Theory of Economic Development” in 1934, economists and governments have assumed that the industrial and business sectors are where ideas for products originate. A complex net of laws and policies, from intellectual property rights to producer subsidies and tax benefits, have flowed from this basic assumption.

However, pathbreaking research by a group of scholars including Eric A. von Hippel, a professor of technological innovation at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, suggests that the traditional division of labor between innovators and customers is breaking down.

Financed by the British government, Mr. von Hippel and his colleagues last year completed the first representative large-scale survey of consumer innovation ever conducted.

What the team discovered, described in a paper that is under review for publication, was that the amount of money individual consumers spent making and improving products was more than twice as large as the amount spent by all British firms combined on product research and development over a three-year period.

“We’ve been missing the dark matter of innovation,” Mr. von Hippel said from his office in Cambridge, Mass. “This is a new pattern for how innovations come about.”

Carliss Y. Baldwin, a business administration professor at the Harvard Business School, called the research remarkable, adding: “What makes Eric’s work so significant is that it is unprecedented to try to measure the extent of user innovation. He shows that we’ve had on a set of mental blinders.”

To Ms. Baldwin and others who study innovation, the results point to the necessity of rethinking patent law as well as government incentives for research and open sourcing. As Stian Westlake, executive director of policy and research at the British National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, put it in a report: “This democratization of innovation has potentially critical implications for innovation policy.”

The types of product modifications and innovations that Mr. von Hippel’s group found among the nearly 1,200 people surveyed ranged from the most elementary to the complex. One woman colored two halves of a clock dial different shades to teach her children how to tell time; a man concocted a device made from a fishing rod and a large hook to trim his treetops; another reprogrammed his GPS unit to make it easier to use and tailored to his needs.

The Internet is an obvious engine of consumer innovation in the digital realm. Twitter’s List and Retweet features, for example, were inspired by users. While consumers have always fiddled with products, the Web makes it so much easier for people with similar interests to come together and form online communities like DIYbookscanner.

The very study of collaborative user innovation is a relatively new phenomenon that began only in the mid-1990s when advocates for open-source software began to argue that computer code should be freely available for thousands of independent minds to play with and improve. “They overturned the widely held model,” Ms. Baldwin said.

The Western tradition of the isolated heroic genius toiling away in a lab or study is based on myth as much as fact, she added. That model has had a powerful impact, helping to discount the more collaborative aspects of innovation, but it is “completely dated,” Ms. Baldwin said.

Mr. von Hippel, who has been researching innovation for 30 years, estimates that when it comes to scientific instruments 77 percent of the innovations come from users. Fields like medicine can be particularly fertile for creative tinkering. A classic example of user innovation is the heart-lung machine. In the late 1930s Dr. John Heysham Gibbon approached manufacturers about building one, but they did not know how to do it or whether there was a market for it. So Dr. Gibbon spent years developing one himself before this essential device was manufactured commercially.

Sport enthusiasts, like windsurfers, cyclists and fly fishermen, commonly modify equipment. William W. Fisher III, a Harvard law professor and an active ice climber, was one of the enthusiasts who in the 1970s had the idea of adding a leash to ice hammers and axes so they could hang on them while climbing frozen waterfalls. Other climbers followed suit. In time, manufacturers incorporated the leashes into their products.

As consumer innovators proliferate, the tensions with producers have escalated, and the courts are increasingly going to be called in to adjudicate, Mr. Fisher predicted. He is skeptical that easing intellectual property law would significantly spur economic efficiency, but he does say it would foster creativity and community. In a recent article in the Minnesota Law Review, Mr. Fisher argues that altering equipment — like music, novels and other cultural artifacts — is a way of expressing creativity, and that the law should take that into account. “User innovation,” he writes, “offers opportunities for self-fulfillment.”

Mr. von Hippel said that the Finnish and Portuguese governments were financing him to conduct research similar to the British survey. As for the United States, he said, “there doesn’t seem to be as much interest here.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/ar...nnovative.html





1Gbps Wi-Fi Soon Coming To a Billion Devices
Julie Bart

Not only is 1Gbps heading for your Wi-Fi network by next year, it will be instantly über popular. The new 802.11ac 1G Wi-Fi standard hasn't even been ratified by the IEEE yet and In-Stat predicts that by 2015, consumers will have bought nearly 1 billion devices that use it. 1G Wi-Fi, which will use radio spectrum in a range below 6GHz, will be embedded in mobile phones, e-readers and automotive infotainment systems, the study reports. It further predicts:

* Mobile devices with embedded Wi-Fi will make up most of the market. In 2015, shipments of mobile phones with embedded Wi-Fi are projected to approach 800 million.
* By 2015, In-Stat projects that 100% of mobile hotspot shipments will be 802.11ac-enabled.
* E-readers Wi-Fi attach rates will increase from 3% in 2009 to 90% by 2015.
* In 2012, Wi-Fi automotive shipments will reach nearly 20 million.

Think of all the fun you and this Borg could have with 1G Wi-Fi.

Note that the standard that will bring all this speedy delirium to mobile device users is still very much a work in progress.

"The timing for 802.11ac approval is to have a draft standard created by 2011 and have the first 802.11ac products out by the end of 2012," said Frank Dickson, In-Stat vice president of research in a statement. "The technology behind 802.11ac has not been finalized. However, it will likely involve bonding four or even eight channels together and some tweaks to the modulation scheme."

As appealing as that bandwidth sounds, not many consumers will be able to take full advantage of it by 2015. That's because the choke point will be the wire leading into the house. High-speed DSL tends to top out at 3 to 7 Mbps and although cable claims to offer up to 20 Mbps, it often hovers nearer to 5 Mbps. Even if your house regularly achieves max speeds of 20 Mbps, that's still a far cry from 1000.

On the other hand, if it doesn't cost a premium to get 802.11ac on your device, it's worth having, if only to stream your own stored media around the house at super-fast speeds, and to claim my- Wi-Fi-is-faster-than-yours bragging rights.
http://hothardware.com/News/1Gbps-Wi...llion-Devices/





F.C.C. to Propose Expanding Broadband Service to Underserved Areas
Edward Wyatt

The Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday will propose the first steps toward converting the $8 billion fund that subsidizes rural telephone service into one for helping pay to provide broadband Internet service to underserved areas, according to commission officials.

The F.C.C. chairman, Julius Genachowski, is expected to outline the proposal in a speech on Monday, the officials said.

Most of the money under discussion involves a longstanding subsidy known as the Universal Service Fund, which is paid for through fees tacked onto most consumers’ phone bills and distributed among telephone companies to subsidize the high costs of providing service to rural areas.

Mr. Genachowski will propose phasing out the payments between phone companies, which he says create “inefficiencies and perverse incentives” that result in waste in the fund. The F.C.C. will also propose consolidating existing methods of paying for rural phone service into a new pool to be called the Connect America Fund, to be used for helping pay for making broadband available to underserved areas.

The current Universal Service Fund and its spending methods are “unsustainable,” according to a draft of Mr. Genachowski’s remarks prepared for Monday. “It was designed for a world with separate local and long-distance telephone companies, a world of traditional landline telephones before cellphones or Skype, a world without the Internet — a world that no longer exists.”

“At the end of this transition, we would no longer subsidize telephone networks; instead we would support broadband,” which then could be used for phone service, Mr. Genachowski plans to say. He will make the remarks in a speech to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan research institute in Washington.

In some cases, the Universal Service Fund pays more than $20,000 a year just to connect a single rural household to telephone service. But in some local markets that still receive such subsidies, four or more companies are competing to provide service — indicating that it would be economically feasible to serve those areas without tapping the fund. Mr. Genachowski says that more than $100 million a year from the fund now goes to such areas.

Still, in an interview last Thursday, Mr. Genachowski said he rejected the idea, supported by some members of Congress, that the fund should simply be eliminated. Doing so, he said, would let the broadband revolution bypass a substantial portion of the 24 million Americans who the commission says lack access to high-speed Internet connections.

The F.C.C.’s proposed changes would deal with one portion of the Universal Service Fund known as the high-cost program, which typically accounts for about 55 percent of the fund’s annual disbursements, which totaled an estimated $8 billion last year.

Some other portions of the program already have been partially updated, including the E-Rate program, which helps provide faster Internet connections to schools and libraries, and the rural health program, which provides high-speed Internet connections to rural clinics so they can establish remote consultations with medical specialists.

Next month, the commission is expected to recommend changes to the Lifeline and Link-Up programs, which provide assistance to low-income households to help them pay for installation and monthly charges for telephone service.

But the F.C.C. is several months away from addressing what could be one of the toughest aspects of the fund to revamp — its financing. The program currently is paid for by telecommunications companies, which are required to contribute a percentage of their long-distance revenues to the fund. Telephone companies have long passed on to customers the cost of those mandatory contributions.

The contribution rates have risen sharply in recent years, as long-distance prices and therefore revenues — which are the benchmark measure for determining contribution rates — have fallen.

The contribution factor, as the rate is known, has increased to 15.5 percent, up from 7.3 percent at the beginning of 2003. Trying to thwart misuse of the funds, Congress has introduced bills in the last two sessions to overhaul the program — some of which would expand universal service and others that would limit its growth. Those efforts are expected to be revived in the current session.

So far, the F.C.C. has outlined efforts to expand broadband availability only though wired connections. But commission officials say that they will almost certainly look at whether it makes sense to try to use the growth of wireless Internet service as a spur to expand high-speed Internet access for underserved areas.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/business/07fcc.html





FCC Eyes Reducing Barriers to Broadband Buildout

The Federal Communications Commission will launch an initiative on Wednesday to spur broadband deployment by reducing regulatory barriers.

The Broadband Acceleration Conference to be held Wednesday morning at the agency will kick off an aggressive agenda to expand the reach and reduce the cost of broadband deployment.

"It has been estimated that removing red tape and expediting approval processes could unleash $11.5 billion in new broadband infrastructure investment over two years," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski told Reuters on Tuesday.

Accessing utility poles, rights-of-way, and sites for wireless towers are among the barriers companies seeking to establish broadband networks must contend with.

These and other regulatory roadblocks account for 20 percent of the cost of broadband buildout, Genachowski said.

The agency is expected in April to vote on an order to streamline access to pole attachments and to seek comment on rights-of-way practices that may be standing in the way of investment.

The FCC is seeking more concrete ideas that it can move forward with or recommend to Congress and other agencies to speed the deployment of broadband while reducing costs, Genachowski said.

Wednesday's conference will bring together federal, state and local governments as well as industry stakeholders, including broadband providers, utility companies and telecommunications carriers.

An internal FCC working group will ultimately use what is learned at the conference and other meetings to lay out specific goals and a timeframe for swiftly curbing barriers to broadband buildout.

A separate working group of industry and technology leaders formed last year is slated to unveil in March the steps it believes the FCC can take to spur broadband buildout.

The agency has already moved to eliminate some of the hurdles associated with broadband buildout.

The FCC took action in 2009 to speed up permitting of cell towers that were too often held up by local zoning authorities simply not making a decision, Genachowski said. The agency created a "shot clock" that put a 90-day time limit on permitting decisions.

The FCC on Tuesday proposed reforms to transition funding from a rural phone subsidy program thought to be broken and inefficient to a new Connect America Fund that would support the buildout of high-speed Internet services in rural areas.

An FCC fact sheet said shifting $5 billion from the landline phone subsidy to broadband could indirectly create 75,000 jobs due to broadband's implications for health care, smart grid, education and small business.

Additionally, President Barack Obama called for deployment of high-speed wireless services to virtually all Americans within five years during his annual State of the Union speech to the U.S. Congress last month.

Investing in the 40,000 towers needed to expand mobile broadband to virtually all Americans could create 53,000 jobs, an FCC fact sheet said.

Genachowski said unleashing spectrum for mobile broadband, transforming the universal service fund to support broadband and removing regulatory barriers are atop his agenda for speeding the deployment of broadband.

(Reporting by Jasmin Melvin; Editing by Bernard Orr)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7180J820110209





Wireless Advances Could Mean No More Cell Towers
Peter Svensson

As cell phones have spread, so have large cell towers - those unsightly stalks of steel topped by transmitters and other electronics that sprouted across the country over the last decade.

Now the wireless industry is planning a future without them, or at least without many more of them. Instead, it's looking at much smaller antennas, some tiny enough to hold in a hand. These could be placed on lampposts, utility poles and buildings - virtually anywhere with electrical and network connections.

If the technology overcomes some hurdles, it could upend the wireless industry and offer seamless service, with fewer dead spots and faster data speeds.

Some big names in the wireless world are set to demonstrate "small cell" technologies at the Mobile World Congress, the world's largest cell phone trade show, which starts Monday in Barcelona, Spain.

"We see more and more towers that become bigger and bigger, with more and bigger antennas that come to obstruct our view and clutter our landscape and are simply ugly," said Wim Sweldens, president of the wireless division of Alcatel-Lucent, the French-U.S. maker of telecommunications equipment.

"What we have realized is that we, as one of the major mobile equipment vendors, are partially if not mostly to blame for this."

Alcatel-Lucent will be at the show to demonstrate its "lightRadio cube," a cellular antenna about the size and shape of a Rubik's cube, vastly smaller than the ironing-board-sized antennas that now decorate cell towers. The cube was developed at the famous Bell Labs in New Jersey, birthplace of many other inventions when it was AT&T's research center.

In Alcatel-Lucent's vision, these little cubes could soon begin replacing conventional cell towers. Single cubes or clusters of them could be placed indoors or out and be easily hidden from view. All they need is electrical power and an optical fiber connecting them to the phone company's network.

The cube, Sweldens said, can make the notion of a conventional cell tower "go away." Alcatel-Lucent will start trials of the cube with carriers in September. The company hopes to make it commercially available next year.

For cell phone companies, the benefits of dividing their networks into smaller "cells," each one served by something like the cube antenna, go far beyond esthetics. Smaller cells mean vastly higher capacity for calls and data traffic.

Instead of having all phones within a mile or two connect to the same cell tower, the traffic could be divided between several smaller cells, so there's less competition for the cell tower's attention.

"If it is what they claim, lightRadio could be a highly disruptive force within the wireless industry," said Dan Hays, who focuses on telecommunications at consulting firm PRTM.

Rasmus Hellberg, director of technical marketing at wireless technology developer Qualcomm Inc., said smaller cells can boost a network's capacity tenfold, far more than can be achieved by other upgrades to wireless technology that are also in the works.

That's sure to draw the interest of phone companies. They've already been deploying older generations of small-cell technology in areas where a lot of people gather, like airports, train stations and sports stadiums, but these are expensive and complicated to install.

In New York City, AT&T Inc. has started creating a network of outdoor Wi-Fi hotspots, starting in Times Square and now spreading through the midtown tourist and shopping districts. Its network has been hammered by an onslaught of data-hungry iPhone users, and this is one way of moving that traffic off the cellular network.

Smaller cells could do the same job, but for all phones, not just Wi-Fi enabled ones like the iPhone. They could also carry calls as well as data.

San Diego-based Qualcomm will be at the Barcelona show with a live demonstration of how "heterogeneous networks" - ones that mix big and small cells, can work. A key issue is minimizing radio interference between the two types of cells. Another hurdle is connecting the smaller cells to the bigger network through optical fiber or other high-capacity connections.

"That's an impediment that we're seeing many operators struggling with right now as data volumes have increased," Hays said.

LM Ericsson AB, the Swedish company that's the largest maker of wireless network equipment in the world, is also introducing a more compact antenna at the show, one it calls "the first stepping stone towards a heterogeneous network."

Small cellular base stations have already penetrated hundreds of thousands of U.S. homes. Phone companies like AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. have for several years been selling "femtocells," which are about the size of a Wi-Fi router and connect to the phone company's network through a home broadband connection.

The cells project radio signals that cover a room or two, providing five bars of coverage where there might otherwise be none.

British femtocell maker Ubiquisys Ltd. will be in Barcelona to demonstrate the smallest cell yet. It's the size of a thumb and plugs into a computer's USB drive. According to Ubiquisys, the idea is that overseas travellers will plug it into their Internet-connected laptops to make calls as if they were on their home network, but there are potential problems with interference if used that way.

According to Rupert Baines, marketing head of Picochip Ltd., a more realistic application for a tiny plug-in cell is to make it work with cable boxes or Internet routers, to convert them into femtocells.

A key part of the "small cell" idea is to take femtocells outside the home, into larger buildings and even outdoors.

Picochip, a British company that's the dominant maker of chips for femtocells, will be in Barcelona to talk about its chips for "public-access" femtocells, designed to serve up to 64 phone calls at a time, with a range of more than a mile. They could be used not just to ease wireless congestion in urban areas, but to fill in dead spots on the map, Baines said.

For instance, a single femtocell could provide wireless service to a remote village, as long as there's some way to connect it to the wider network, perhaps via satellite.

Analyst Francis Sideco of research firm iSuppli pointed out a surprising consumer benefit of smaller cells: better battery life in phones.

When a lot of phones talk to the same tower, they all have to "shout" to make themselves heard, using more energy. With a smaller cell, phones can lower their "voices," much like group of people moving from a noisy ballroom to a smaller, quieter room.

"Ultimately, what you end up with is a cleaner signal, with less power," Sideco said.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-...ll-towers.html





China to Convert Phone Booths to Wifi Hotspots
Marshall Kirkpatrick

With mobile phones nearing 100% market penetration, the Chinese government appears determined to transform the country's widespread telephone booths into wifi hotspots. "Telecom operators are also trying to setup hotspots in restaurants, hotels, sport facilities, and so on," writes Asian tech blogger Sherman So. "If the idea is really implemented, they will turn every city in China into a giant Wi-Fi network for fast internet connection." So's post was picked up today by design blog PSFK.

Though the plan raises concerns about the consequences for the disenfranchised, it's not hard to imagine big benefits for economic development. Ubiquitous wifi seems like one of the prerequisites for bringing a country's whole population online and onboard a new economy based largely on the Internet. Imagine everyone not just reading, but writing to the web from any street corner they like.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...i_hotspots.php





What Is Artificial Intelligence?
Richard Powers

IN the category “What Do You Know?”, for $1 million: This four-year-old upstart the size of a small R.V. has digested 200 million pages of data about everything in existence and it means to give a couple of the world’s quickest humans a run for their money at their own game.

The question: What is Watson?

I.B.M.’s groundbreaking question-answering system, running on roughly 2,500 parallel processor cores, each able to perform up to 33 billion operations a second, is playing a pair of “Jeopardy!” matches against the show’s top two living players, to be aired on Feb. 14, 15 and 16. Watson is I.B.M.’s latest self-styled Grand Challenge, a follow-up to the 1997 defeat by its computer Deep Blue of Garry Kasparov, the world’s reigning chess champion. (It’s remarkable how much of the digital revolution has been driven by games and entertainment.) Yes, the match is a grandstanding stunt, baldly calculated to capture the public’s imagination. But barring any humiliating stumble by the machine on national television, it should.

Consider the challenge: Watson will have to be ready to identify anything under the sun, answering all manner of coy, sly, slant, esoteric, ambiguous questions ranging from the “Rh factor” of Scarlett’s favorite Butler or the 19th-century painter whose name means “police officer” to the rhyme-time place where Pelé stores his ball or what you get when you cross a typical day in the life of the Beatles with a crazed zombie classic. And he (forgive me) will have to buzz in fast enough and with sufficient confidence to beat Ken Jennings, the holder of the longest unbroken “Jeopardy!” winning streak, and Brad Rutter, an undefeated champion and the game’s biggest money winner. The machine’s one great edge: Watson has no idea that he should be panicking.

Open-domain question answering has long been one of the great holy grails of artificial intelligence. It is considerably harder to formalize than chess. It goes well beyond what search engines like Google do when they comb data for keywords. Google can give you 300,000 page matches for a search of the terms “greyhound,” “origin” and “African country,” which you can then comb through at your leisure to find what you need.

Asked in what African country the greyhound originated, Watson can tell you in a couple of seconds that the authoritative consensus favors Egypt. But to stand a chance of defeating Mr. Jennings and Mr. Rutter, Watson will have to be able to beat them to the buzzer at least half the time and answer with something like 90 percent accuracy.

When I.B.M.’s David Ferrucci and his team of about 20 core researchers began their “Jeopardy!” quest in 2006, their state-of-the-art question-answering system could solve no more than 15 percent of questions from earlier shows. They fed their machine libraries full of documents — books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, databases, taxonomies, and even Bibles, movie scripts, novels and plays.

But the real breakthrough came with the extravagant addition of many multiple “expert” analyzers — more than 100 different techniques running concurrently to analyze natural language, appraise sources, propose hypotheses, merge the results and rank the top guesses. Answers, for Watson, are a statistical thing, a matter of frequency and likelihood. If, after a couple of seconds, the countless possibilities produced by the 100-some algorithms converge on a solution whose chances pass Watson’s threshold of confidence, it buzzes in.

This raises the question of whether Watson is really answering questions at all or is just noticing statistical correlations in vast amounts of data. But the mere act of building the machine has been a powerful exploration of just what we mean when we talk about knowing.

Who knows how Mr. Jennings and Mr. Rutter do it — puns cracked, ambiguities resolved, obscurities retrieved, links formed across every domain in creation, all in a few heartbeats. The feats of engineering involved in answering the smallest query about the world are beyond belief. But I.B.M. is betting a fair chunk of its reputation that 2011 will be the year that machines can play along at the game.

Does Watson stand a chance of winning? I would not stake my “Final Jeopardy!” nest egg on it. Not yet. Words are very rascals, and language may still be too slippery for it. But watching films of the machine in sparring matches against lesser human champions, I felt myself choking up at its heroic effort, the size of the undertaking, the centuries of accumulating groundwork, hope and ingenuity that have gone into this next step in the long human drama. I was most moved when the 100-plus parallel algorithms wiped out and the machine came up with some ridiculous answer, calling it out as if it might just be true, its cheerful synthesized voice sounding as vulnerable as that of any bewildered contestant.

It does not matter who will win this $1 million Valentine’s Day contest. We all know who will be champion, eventually. The real showdown is between us and our own future. Information is growing many times faster than anyone’s ability to manage it, and Watson may prove crucial in helping to turn all that noise into knowledge.

Dr. Ferrucci and company plan to sell the system to businesses in need of fast, expert answers drawn from an overwhelming pool of supporting data. The potential client list is endless. A private Watson will cost millions today and requires a room full of hardware. But if what Ray Kurzweil calls the Law of Accelerating Returns keeps holding, before too long, you’ll have an app for that.

Like so many of its precursors, Watson will make us better at some things, worse at others. (Recall Socrates’ warnings about the perils of that most destabilizing technology of all — writing.) Already we rely on Google to deliver to the top of the million-hit list just those pages we are most interested in, and we trust its concealed algorithms with a faith that would be difficult to explain to the smartest computer. Even if we might someday be able to ask some future Watson how fast and how badly we are cooking the earth, and even if it replied (based on the sum of all human knowledge) with 90 percent accuracy, would such an answer convert any of the already convinced or produce the political will we’ll need to survive the reply?

Still, history is the long process of outsourcing human ability in order to leverage more of it. We will concede this trivia game (after a very long run as champions), and find another in which, aided by our compounding prosthetics, we can excel in more powerful and ever more terrifying ways.

Should Watson win next week, the news will be everywhere. We’ll stand in awe of our latest magnificent machine, for a season or two. For a while, we’ll have exactly the gadget we need. Then we’ll get needy again, looking for a newer, stronger, longer lever, for the next larger world to move.

For “Final Jeopardy!”, the category is “Players”: This creature’s three-pound, 100-trillion-connection machine won’t ever stop looking for an answer.

The question: What is a human being?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/opinion/06powers.html





The Answers Are Out There, and New Q. and A. Sites Dig Them Up
Jenna Wortham

In Internet circles, the hunt is always on for the next big thing. But lately an older idea is enjoying a renaissance: sites where users ask and answer questions. A flurry of start-ups in this field are gathering speed and attracting the eyes and wallets of venture capitalists.

The genre has long been dominated by high-traffic incumbents like WikiAnswers and Yahoo Answers, which each attracted close to 50 million unique visitors in the United States in December, according to the analytics firm comScore. But these sites are often cluttered with repetitive questions, and the quality of the answers can vary wildly.

The entrepreneurs behind the newer sites say there is a big opportunity to be captured in revamping the question-and-answer model, and each is taking a slightly different approach.

Quora, the site that is getting the most attention, lets people find and follow the activity of their friends, as on Twitter. Stack Exchange is a network of Web sites focused on questions in specific categories like programming, cooking and photography, while VYou requires its members to post their questions and responses in video clips.

Hipster, a mysterious start-up that is said to tie questions to particular locations, has stirred up interest among the early adopters ahead of its formal introduction later this month.

The need for these new services stems from a desire to fill in the information gaps that a Web search cannot satisfy, said Joel Spolsky, one of the founders of Stack Exchange.

“You can read the Wikipedia page about Egypt, but it might not answer an actual question someone has about what’s going on there right now,” he said. “But an expert, a historian or someone with specific knowledge would be able to.”

Stack Exchange, which started two years ago with a single site where programmers could share technical expertise, has since expanded to 41 separate topic-specific sites. Mr. Spolsky said that to keep the community tightly knit and maintain the quality of answers, the company builds new sites in “overlapping circles.”

“We started with programmers, but many of them take pictures,” he said. “So we expanded to photography, which then began to take off and attract photographers that aren’t programmers.”

In the last year, the company raised $6 million from the well-known investment firm Union Square Ventures, and attracted more than 700,000 people to write a question or leave an answer on its site.

Of course, many people poll their online contacts for advice or information through sites like Facebook and Twitter. But the answers are not organized in any way, as they typically are on dedicated question-and-answer sites, and there is no way to archive those answers for later reference, or for someone else who could benefit from them.

Now Facebook itself is hoping to cash in on the trend. The company has been slowly introducing a feature on its site that allows users to pose and answer questions. A company spokeswoman, Meredith Chin, declined to discuss details of the service; a note on the site says that it “will be available to everyone in the U.S. within the next few weeks.”

The older question-and-answer sites are often full of questions that a skilled Web user could quickly answer with a search engine, like the recent WikiAnswers query about the most popular games for the PlayStation 3. One challenge for the new sites is striking the delicate balance between attracting a broader, more mainstream audience and keeping the quality of the content high. But doing so could unlock a lucrative business model centered on advertising.

“Targeting a consumer seeking a very specific type of answer could be very valuable to advertisers,” said Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research. “But devising a system both capable of tapping into that and being easy to use may be more difficult.”

Some of that can be solved with moderators, who weed out duplicate questions and unhelpful answers. Features that allow members to vote for the best answers can also help.

But another crucial component is knowing a little bit about who is answering the question, said Charlie Cheever, who created Quora with Adam D’Angelo. Quora asks its users not to hide behind pseudonyms.

“The shift in the way that people use and feel comfortable with their real names on the Internet has made our job a little bit easier,” Mr. Cheever said.

Mr. Cheever knows a thing or two about the importance of using a real identity online: Before Quora, he was an engineer and project manager at Facebook. There he oversaw the creation of Facebook Connect, which allows members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook ID.

Quora allows the option of asking and answering questions anonymously, Mr. Cheever said. But “when you’re interacting with someone you don’t know, having their real name gives a better perspective on why you should pay attention or what their bias may be,” Mr. Cheever said.

Knowing, for example, that the person weighing in on a question about brain disease is a scientist, or that a noted chef is contributing her two cents about the perfect temperature at which to bake a pizza, can give those answers more credibility.

Quora also has community moderators who govern the site — for example, removing “spam” posts and marking answers that don’t actively respond to the posed question as “not helpful.” “It’s governed in a way that isn’t wholly different from Wikipedia,” Mr. Cheever said.

At the moment, most questions on Quora have a heavy emphasis on technology. A typical recent question asked how to promote one’s start-up company at the South by Southwest technology conference.

But Quora stands out in the way that it has attracted many notable venture capitalists and technology luminaries as users.

In the case of the South by Southwest query, Evan Williams, one of the founders of Twitter, which exploded in popularity at the conference in 2007, jumped into the fray and talked about how the company had set up screens in the hallways to show live Twitter messages.

Those prominent participants helped Quora secure $11 million in venture financing from Benchmark Capital, putting its estimated valuation at $86 million.

The site is still small in terms of traffic. ComScore says Quora first came onto its radar in December, registering 164,000 visitors that month in the United States. Quora says its internal numbers are higher, but would not provide specifics.

Mr. Cheever said signups spiked in December and the discussion topics on the site were beginning to widen.

“In the last six months, we’ve seen political questions, local questions about cities,” he said. “Even farming questions.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/te...7question.html





Cyberactivists Warned of Arrest
Joseph Menn

An international investigation into cyberactivists who attacked businesses hostile to WikiLeaks is likely to yield arrests of senior members of the group after they left clues to their real identities on Facebook and in other electronic communications, it is claimed.

Supporters of the internet group - known as Anonymous, which gained wide attention after it co-ordinated attacks that crashed the websites of some businesses that had broken ties with WikiLeaks - have continued to ambush high-profile targets, recently forcing government sites in Egypt and Tunisia to close.

However, a senior US member of Anonymous, using the online nickname Owen and evidently living in New York (Xetra: A0DKRK - news) , appears to be one of those targeted in recent legal investigations, according to online communications uncovered by a private security researcher.

A co-founder of Anonymous, who uses the nickname Q after the character in James Bond, has been seeking replacements for Owen and others who have had to curtail activities, said researcher Aaron Barr, head of security services firm HBGary Federal.

Mr Barr said Q and other key figures lived in California and that the hierarchy was fairly clear, with other senior members in the UK, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Australia.

Of a few hundred participants in operations, only about 30 are steadily active, with 10 people who "are the most senior and co-ordinate and manage most of the decisions", Mr Barr told the Financial Times. That team works together in private internet relay chat sessions, through e-mail and in Facebook groups. Mr Barr said he had collected information on the core leaders, including many of their real names, and that they could be arrested if law enforcement had the same data.

Many other investigators have also been monitoring the public internet chats of Anonymous, and agree that a few seasoned veterans of the group appear to be steering much of its actions.

But he does not plan to give specifics to police, who would face hurdles in using some of the methods he employed, including creating false Facebook profiles.

In their main online chat rooms, which are accessible to anyone, Anonymous members have affected an air of bravado, apparently believing that if enough ordinary computer users download the tools to make their cyberattacks on websites simultaneously, only a small minority will face prosecution.

Behind the scenes, however, key Anonymous figures are fretting that they will soon face charges, which can bring sentences as long as 10 years, it is claimed.

Officials last month said they had arrested five suspected UK members of Anonymous in the UK while 40 court-authorised searches in the US were carried out, with few details.

Anonymous presents itself as a loose collective and polls its members about which websites should be hit with what are known as denial-of-service attacks.

Ordinary members take charge of specific projects, such as Twitter postings on Tunisia or closed Facebook chats on strategy for harassing the Egyptian government's online presence.

Mr Barr said he penetrated Anonymous as part of a project to demonstrate the security risks to organisations from social media and networking. He is presenting his research later this month at a conference in San Francisco.

HBGary Federal is part-owned by HBGary, run by Greg Hoglund, a respected security researcher based in California.

The FBI declined to comment on the research or the timing of arrests.

Using LinkedIn, Classmates.com, Facebook and other sites, Mr Barr also burrowed deep enough into a US military group and a US nuclear plant that he could trick workers there to click on web links that, if they had been malicious, could have installed spying software on their computers. Such "social engineering" hacks are a major vulnerability for companies targeted in industrial espionage.

The Anonymous effort was similar but included such tricks as comparing the times that members logged on to Facebook and to Internet Relay Chat to make educated guesses as to which electronic identities belonged to the same person.
http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/Cyb...487898538.html





Data Intelligence Firms Proposed a Systematic Attack Against WikiLeaks
Steve Ragan

After a tip from Crowdleaks.org, The Tech Herald has learned that HBGary Federal, as well as two other data intelligence firms, worked to develop a strategic plan of attack against WikiLeaks. The plan included pressing a journalist in order to disrupt his support of the organization, cyber attacks, disinformation, and other potential proactive tactics.

The tip from Crowdleaks.org is directly related to the highly public attack on HBGary, after Anonymous responded to research performed by HBGary Federal COO, Aaron Barr. Part of Anonymous’ response included releasing more than 50,000 internal emails to the public. For more information, the initial coverage is here.

What was pointed out by Crowdleaks is a proposal titled “The WikiLeaks Threat” and an email chain between three data intelligence firms. The proposal was quickly developed by Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies, after a request from Hunton and Williams, a law firm that currently counts Bank of America as a client.

The law firm had a meeting with Bank of America on December 3. To prepare, the firm emailed Palantir and the others asking for “…five to six slides on Wikileaks - who they are, how they operate and how this group may help this bank.”

Hunton and Williams were recommended to Bank of America’s general council by the Department of Justice, according to the email chain viewed by The Tech Herald. The law firm was using the meeting to pitch Bank of America on retaining them for an internal investigation surrounding WikiLeaks.

“They basically want to sue them to put an injunction on releasing any data,” an email between the three data intelligence firms said. “They want to present to the bank a team capable of doing a comprehensive investigation into the data leak.”

Hunton and Williams would act as outside counsel on retainer, while Palantir would take care of network and insider threat investigations. For their part, Berico Technologies and HBGary Federal would analyze WikiLeaks.

“Apparently if they can show that WikiLeaks is hosting data in certain countries it will make prosecution easier,” the email added.

In less than 24-hours, the three analytical companies created a presentation filled with publically available information and ideas on how the firms could be “deployed” against WikiLeaks “as a unified and cohesive investigative analysis cell.”

On January 2, The New York Times wrote about a late night conference call held by Bank of America executives on November 30. The reason for the call was to deal with a statement given by WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange on November 29, where he said that he intended to “take down” a major American bank. The country’s third largest financial institution needed to get the jump on WikiLeaks, so they started scouring thousands of documents, and auditing physical assets.

Shortly after the late night conference call, the email from Hunton and Williams was sent. Booz Allen Hamilton, according to the Times, was the firm brought in to help manage the bank’s internal review.

A month after the proposal for the initial December meeting on WikiLeaks was created, email messages from HBGary Federal show plans for a meeting with Booz

Allen Hamilton. The meeting was set after Barr emailed Hunton and Williams about information he was gathering on WikiLeaks and Anonymous. Later, this information would be the direct cause of Anonymous’ attack on HBGary.

On page two you will find an overview of the proposal developed by the three data intelligence firms.

Note: There were several drafts of the proposal created before the sixth and final version was delivered. The emails released by Anonymous contain each of them.
Most of the changes are formatting related and minor corrections.

The proposal starts with an overview of WikiLeaks, including some history and employee statistics. From there it moves into a profile of Julian Assange and an organizational chart. The chart lists several people, including volunteers and actual staff.

One of those listed as a volunteer, Salon.com columnist, Glenn Greenwald, was singled out by the proposal. Greenwald, previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York, has been a vocal supporter of Bradley Manning, who is alleged to have given diplomatic cables and other government information to WikiLeaks. He has yet to be charged in the matter.

Greenwald became a household name in December when he reported on the “inhumane conditions” of Bradley Manning’s confinement at the Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia. Since that report, Greenwald has reported on WikiLeaks and Manning several times.

“Glenn was critical in the Amazon to OVH transition,” the proposal says, referencing the hosting switch WikiLeaks was forced to make after political pressure caused Amazon to drop their domain.

[Earlier drafts of the proposal and an email from Aaron Barr used the word "attacked" over "disrupted" when discussing the level of support.]

The proposal continues by listing the strengths and weaknesses of WikiLeaks. For the strong points, there is the global WikiLeaks following and volunteers. Outlining the weaknesses, the proposal lists financial pressure - due to the companies refusing to process WikiLeaks’ donations at the time - and discord among some of the WikiLeaks members.

“Despite the publicity, WikiLeaks is NOT in a healthy position right now,” an early draft of the proposal noted. “Their weakness [sic] are causing great stress in the organization which can be capitalized on.”

Some of the things mentioned as potential proactive tactics include feeding the fuel between the feuding groups, disinformation, creating messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization, and submitting fake documents to WikiLeaks and then calling out the error.

“Create concern over the security of the infrastructure. Create exposure stories. If the process is believed to not be secure they are done. Cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters. This would kill the project. Since the servers are now in Sweden and France putting a team together to get access is more straightforward.”

After the tactics are discussed, the proposal outlines the highlights for each of the three data intelligence firms. From there, it concludes that in the new age of mass social media, the insider threat represents an ongoing and persistent threat “even if WikiLeaks is shut down.”

“Traditional responses will fail; we must employ the best investigative team, currently employed by the most sensitive of national security agencies.”

The emails released by Anonymous make no mention of the proposal’s success or failure. Aside from a single meeting confirmation with Booz Allen Hamilton, and an email that expressed hope that HBGary was going to “close the BOA deal”, there is no other data available.

Since the attack on their company, HBGary has issued a single statement via their website, and declined to comment when questioned by several news organizations.

“HBGary, Inc and HBGary Federal, a separate but related company, have been the victims of an intentional criminal cyberattack. We are taking this crime seriously and are working with federal, state, and local law enforcement authorities and redirecting internal resources to investigate and respond appropriately,” the statement reads.

“To the extent that any client information may have been affected by this event, we will provide the affected clients with complete and accurate information as soon as it becomes available. Meanwhile, please be aware that any information currently in the public domain is not reliable because the perpetrators of this offense, or people working closely with them, have intentionally falsified certain data.”

While some of the information in the public domain may be false, the emails and documents seen by The Tech Herald certainly look legitimate. It is unlikely that Anonymous would bother to forge 50,000 emails, in addition to the screen shots of internal software, PDF files, Word Documents, or PowerPoint slides released to the public.

However, on Tuesday evening, HBGary’s accusal that Anonymous was falsifying information started another round of rage on IRC, where some who associate under the banner of Anonymous gather.

As a result, there are rumors that more emails will be released in the coming days, including those belonging to Greg Hoglund, the co-founder of HBGary.

Update:

The Tech Herald was able to get in touch with Glenn Greenwald for his reaction to being singled out in the WikiLeaks proposal. He called the report creepy and disturbing. Moreover, he commented that the suggestions for dealing with WikiLeaks, along with the assumption that the organization could be undermined, were “hard to take seriously.”

The listed mitigations, such as disinformation or submitting false documents, have been discussed before. In 2008, the Pentagon had similar ideas, so that aspect of the document was nothing new.

Greenwald, as a journalist, is a prolific writer on media topics. He is a harsh critic of political figures and the mainstream media. The suggestion made by the proposal that he would pick career over cause is “completely against” what he is about, he told us.

“The only reason I do what I do is because im free to put cause before career,” he said.

Pointedly, he reminded us that his work includes taking aim at political figures, which could be a source of professional leverage with scoops or favors, as well as news organizations who could offer him gainful employment. None of these actions paints a picture of a man who would pick career over his passion.

Update 2:

WikiLeaks is hosting an official mirror of the sixth and final draft of the report. You can see a copy here.
http://www.thetechherald.com/article...inst-WikiLeaks





How One Man Tracked Down Anonymous—and Paid a Heavy Price
Nate Anderson

Aaron Barr believed he had penetrated Anonymous. The loose hacker collective had been responsible for everything from anti-Scientology protests to pro-Wikileaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa, and the FBI was now after them. But matching their online identities to real-world names and locations proved daunting. Barr found a way to crack the code.

In a private e-mail to a colleague at his security firm HBGary Federal, which sells digital tools to the US government, the CEO bragged about his research project.

"They think I have nothing but a heirarchy based on IRC [Internet Relay Chat] aliases!" he wrote. "As 1337 as these guys are suppsed to be they don't get it. I have pwned them! :)"

But had he?

"We are kind of pissed at him right now"

Barr's "pwning" meant finding out the names and addresses of the top Anonymous leadership. While the group claimed to be headless, Barr believed this to be a lie; indeed, he told others that Anonymous was a tiny group.

"At any given time there are probably no more than 20-40 people active, accept during hightened points of activity like Egypt and Tunisia where the numbers swell but mostly by trolls," he wrote in an internal e-mail. (All e-mails in this investigative report are provided verbatim, typos and all.) "Most of the people in the IRC channel are zombies to inflate the numbers."

The show was run by a couple of admins he identified as "Q," "Owen," and "CommanderX"—and Barr had used social media data and subterfuge to map those names to three real people, two in California and one in New York.

Near the end of January, Barr began publicizing his information, though without divulging the names of the Anonymous admins. When the Financial Times picked up the story and ran a piece on it on February 4, it wasn't long before Barr got what he wanted—contacts from the FBI, the Director of National Intelligence, and the US military. The FBI had been after Anonymous for some time, recently kicking in doors while executing 40 search warrants against group members.

Confident in his abilities, Barr told one of the programmers who helped him on the project, "You just need to program as good as I analyze."

But on February 5, one day after the Financial Times article and six days before Barr's sit-down with the FBI, Anonymous did some "pwning" of its own. "Ddos!!! Fckers," Barr sent from his iPhone as a distributed denial of service attack hit his corporate network. He then pledged to "take the gloves off."

When the liberal blog Daily Kos ran a story on Barr's work later that day, some Anonymous users commented on it. Barr sent out an e-mail to colleagues, and he was getting worked up: "They think all I know is their irc names!!!!! I know their real fing names. Karen [HBGary Federal's public relations head] I need u to help moderate me because I am getting angry. I am planning on releasing a few names of folks that were already arrested. This battle between us will help spur publicity anyway."

Indeed, publicity was the plan. Barr hoped his research would "start a verbal braul between us and keep it going because that will bring more media and more attention to a very important topic."

But within a day, Anonymous had managed to infiltrate HBGary Federal's website and take it down, replacing it with a pro-Anonymous message ("now the Anonymous hand is bitch-slapping you in the face.") Anonymous got into HBGary Federal's e-mail server, for which Barr was the admin, and compromised it, extracting over 40,000 e-mails and putting them up on The Pirate Bay, all after watching his communications for 30 hours, undetected. In an after-action IRC chat, Anonymous members bragged about how they had gone even further, deleting 1TB of HBGary backup data.

They even claimed to have wiped Barr's iPad remotely.

The situation got so bad for the security company that HBGary, the company which partially owns HBGary Federal, sent its president Penny Leavy into the Anonymous IRC chat rooms to swim with the sharks—and to beg them to leave her company alone. (Read the bizarre chat log.) Instead, Anonymous suggested that, to avoid more problems, Leavy should fire Barr and "take your investment in aaron's company and donate it to BRADLEY MANNINGS DEFENCE FUND." Barr should cough off up a personal contribution, too; say, one month's salary?

As for Barr's "pwning," Leavy couldn't backtrack from it fast enough. "We have not seen the list [of Anonymous admins] and we are kind of pissed at him right now."

Were Barr's vaunted names even correct? Anonymous insisted repeatedly that they were not. As one admin put it in the IRC chat with Leavy, "Did you also know that aaron was peddling fake/wrong/false information leading to the potential arrest of innocent people?" The group then made that information public, claiming that it was all ridiculous.

Thanks to the leaked e-mails, we now have the full story of how Barr infiltrated Anonymous, used social media to compile his lists, and even resorted to attacks on the codebase of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon used in attacks—and how others at his own company warned him about the pitfalls of his own research.

"I will sell it"

Barr had been interested in social media for quite some time, believing that the links it showed between people had enormous value when it came to mapping networks of hackers—and when hackers wanted to target their victims. He presented a talk to a closed Department of Justice conference earlier this year on "specific techniques that can be used to target, collect, and exploit targets with laser focus and with 100 percent success" through social media.

His curiosity about teasing out the webs of connections between people grew. By scraping sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, Barr believed he could draw strong conclusions, such as determining which town someone lived in even if they didn't provide that information. How? By looking at their friends.

"The next step would be ok we have 24 people that list Auburn, NY as their hometown," he wrote to the programmer implementing his directives. "There are 60 other people that list over 5 of those 24 as friends. That immediately tells me that at a minimum those 60 can be tagged as having a hometown as Auburn, NY. The more the data matures the more things we can do with it."

The same went for hackers, whose family and friends might provide information that even the most carefully guarded Anonymous member could not conceal. "Hackers may not list the data, but hackers are people too so they associate with friends and family," Barr said. "Those friends and family can provide key indicators on the hacker without them releasing it…"

His programmer had doubts, saying that the scraping and linking work he was doing was of limited value and had no commercial prospects. As he wrote in an e-mail:

Step 1 : Gather all the data

Step 2 : ???

Step 3 : Profit

But Barr was confident. "I will sell it," he wrote.

To further test his ideas and to drum up interest in them, Barr proposed a talk at the BSides security conference in San Francisco, which takes place February 14 and 15. Barr's talk was titled "Who Needs NSA when we have Social Media?" and his plan to draw publicity involved a fateful decision: he would infiltrate and expose Anonymous, which he believed was strongly linked to WikiLeaks.

"I am going to focus on outing the major players of the anonymous group I think," he wrote. "Afterall - no secrets right? :) We will see how far I get. I may focus on NSA a bit to just so I can give all those freespeech nutjobs something… I just called people advocating freespeech, nutjobs - I threw up in my mouth a little."

With that, the game was afoot.

"I enjoy the LULZ"

Barr created multiple aliases and began logging on to Anonymous IRC chat rooms to figure out how the group worked. He worked to link these IRC handles to real people, in part using his social networking expertise, and he created fake Twitter accounts and Facebook profiles. He began communicating with those he believed were leaders.

After weeks of this work, he reported back to his colleagues on how he planned to use his fake personas to drum up interest in his upcoming talk.

I have developed a persona that is well accepted within their groups and want to use this and my real persona against eachother to build up press for the talk. Pre-talk plan.

I am going to tell a few key leaders under my persona, that I have been given information that a so called cyber security expert named Aaron Barr will be briefing the power of social media analysis and as part of the talk with be dissecting the Anonymous group as well as some critical infrastructure and government organizations

I will prepare a press sheet for Karen to give to Darkreading a few days after I tell these folks under persona to legitimize the accusation. This will generate a big discussion in Anonymous chat channels, which are attended by the press. This will then generate press about the talk, hopefully driving more people and more business to us.

Barr then contacted another security company that specializes in botnet research. He suspected that top Anonymous admins like CommanderX had access to serious Internet firepower, and that this probably came through control of bots on compromised computers around the world.

Barr asked if the researchers could "search their database for specific targets (like the one below) during an operational window (date/time span) to see if any botnet(s) are participating in attacks? Below is an attack which is currently ongoing." (The attack in question was part of Anonymous' "Operation Payback" campaign and was targeted at the government of Venezuala.)

The report that came back focused on the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, a tool originally coded by a private security firm in order to test website defenses. The code was open-sourced and then abandoned, but someone later dusted it off and added "hivemind mode" that let LOIC users "opt in" to centralized control of the tool. With hundreds or thousands of machines running the stress-test tool at once, even major sites could be dropped quickly. (The company recorded only 1,200 machines going after MasterCard on December 11, for instance.)

To boost the credibility of his online aliases, Barr then resorted to a ruse. He asked his coder to grab the LOIC source code. "I want to add some code to it," Barr said. "I don't want to distribute that, it will be found and then my persona will be called out. I want to add it, distribute it under a persona to burn and then have my other persona call out the code."

The code to be added was an HTTP beacon that linked to a free website Barr had set up on Blogspot. He wanted a copy of the altered source and a compiled executable. His programmer, fearing Anonymous, balked.

On January 20, the coder wrote back, "I'm not compiling that shit on my box!" He even refused to grab a copy of the source code from message boards or other IRC users, because "I ain't touchin' any of that shit as those are already monitored."

"Dude," responded Barr. "Anonymous is a reckless organization. C'mon I know u and I both understand and believe generally in their principles but they are not a focused and considerate group, the[y] attack at will and do not care of their effects. Do u actually like this group?"

The coder said he didn't support all they did, but that Anonymous had its moments. Besides, "I enjoy the LULZ."

"Dude—who's evil?"

At one time, Barr supported WikiLeaks. When the site released its (edited) "Collateral Murder" video of a US gunship killing Reuters photographers in Iraq, Barr was on board. But when WikiLeaks released its huge cache of US diplomatic cables, Barr came to believe "they are a menace," and that when Anonymous sprang to the defense of WikiLeaks, it wasn't merely out of principle. It was about power.

"When they took down MasterCard do u think they thought alright win one for the small guy!" he asked. "The first thought through most of their malcontented minds was a rush of power. That's not ideals."

He continued in this philosophical vein:

But dude whos evil?

US Gov? Wikileaks? Anonymous?

Its all about power. The Wikileaks and Anonymous guys think they are doing the people justice by without much investigation or education exposing information or targeting organizations? BS. Its about trying to take power from others and give it to themeselves.

I follow one law.

Mine.

His coder asked Barr how he slept at night, "you military industrial machine capitalist."

"I sleep great," Barr responded. "Of course I do indoor [enjoy?] the money and some sense of purpose. But I canget purpose a lot of places, few of which pay this salary."

The comments are over the top, of course. Elsewhere, Barr gets more serious. "I really dislike corporations," he says. "They suck the lifeblood out of humanity. But they are also necessary and keep us moving, in what direction I don't know.

"Governments and corporations should have a right to protect secrets, senstive information that could be damage to their operations. I think these groups are also saying this should be free game as well and I disagree. Hence the 250,000 cables. WHich was bullshit… Society needs some people in the know and some people not. These folks, these sheep believe that all information should be accessible. BS. And if they truly believe it then they should have no problem with me gathering information for public distribution."

But Anonymous had a bit of a problem with that.

The hunter and the hunted

As Barr wrapped up his research and wrote his conference presentation, he believed he had unmasked 80-90 percent of the Anonymous leadership—and he had done it all using publicly available information.

"They are relying on IP for anonymity," he wrote in a draft of his presentation. "That is irrelevant with social media users. U use IRC and FB and Twitter and Forums and Blogs regularly… hiding UR IP doesn't matter."

Barr would do things like correlate timestamps; a user in IRC would post something, and then a Twitter post on the same topic might appear a second later. Find a few of these links and you might conclude that the IRC user and the Twitter user were the same person.

Even if the content differed, what if you could correlate the times that someone was on IRC with the times a Facebook user was posting to his wall? "If you friend enough people you might be able to correlate people logging into chat with people logging into Facebook," Barr wrote.

The document contained a list of key IRC chatrooms and Twitter accounts. Facebook groups were included, as were websites. But then Barr started naming names. His notes are full of comments on Anonymous members. "Switch" is a "real asshole but knows what he's talking about," while "unbeliever" might be "alexander [last name redacted]."

In the end, Barr determined that three people were most important. A figure called Q was the "founder and runs the IRC. He is indead in California, as are many of the senior leadership of the group." Another person called Owen is "almost a co-founder, lives in NY with family that are also active in the group, including slenaid and rabbit (nicks)." Finally, CommanderX can "manage some significant firepower." Barr believed he had matched real names to each of these three individuals.

He wasn't doing it to actually expose the names, though. "My intent is not to do this work to put people in jail," Barr wrote to others in the company. "My intent is to clearly demonstrate how this can be effectively used to gather significant intelligence and potentially exploit targets of interest (the other customers will read between the lines)."

He then revealed himself on Twitter to the person he believed was CommanderX. "I am not going to release names," Barr said on February 5, using the alias Julian Goodspeak. "I am merely doing security research to prove the vulnerability of social media." He asked for Anonymous to call off its DDoS attack on HBGary Federal, an attack that had begun earlier that day.

Some of the responses from CommanderX were a bit chilling. Late in the conversation, CommanderX warned Barr "that your vulnerabilities are far more material. One look at your website locates all of your facilities. You might want to do something about that. Just being friendly. I hope you are being paid well."

Then came an IRC log that Barr sent around, in which a user named Topiary tried to recruit him (under the name CogAnon) for "a new operation in the Washington area" where HBGary Federal has its headquarters. The target is "a security company."

By late afternoon on the 5th, Barr was angry and perhaps a little scared, and he asked his PR person to "help moderate me because I am getting angry. I am planning on releasing a few names of folks that were already arrested." It's not clear that Barr ever did this, however; he admitted in another e-mail that he could get a bit "hot" in private, though he would generally cool down before going public.

Hours later, the attack escalated from some odd DDoS traffic to a full-scale break-in of HBGary Federal systems, one that showed tremendous skill. "What amazes me is, for a security company - you had such a basic SQL vulnerability on your website," wrote one Anonymous member later.

Days afterward, the company has still not managed to restore its complete website.

"Danger, Will Robinson!"

Throughout Barr's research, though, the coder he worked with worried about the relevance of what was being revealed. Barr talked up the superiority of his "analysis" work, but doubts remained. An email exchange between the two on January 19 is instructive:

Barr: [I want to] check a persons friends list against the people that have liked or joined a particular group.

Coder: No it won't. It will tell you how mindless their friends are at clicking stupid shit that comes up on a friends page. especially when they first join facebook.

Barr: What? Yes it will. I am running throug analysis on the anonymous group right now and it definately would.

Coder: You keep assuming you're right, and basing that assumption off of guilt by association.

Barr: Noooo….its about probabilty based on frequency...c'mon ur way smarter at math than me.

Coder: Right, which is why i know your numbers are too small to draw the conclusion but you don't want to accept it. Your probability based on frequency right now is a gut feeling. Gut feelings are usually wrong.

Barr: [redacted]

Coder: [some information redacted] Yeah, your gut feelings are awesome! Plus, scientifically proven that gut feelings are wrong by real scientist types.

Barr: [some information redacted] On the gut feeling thing...dude I don't just go by gut feeling...I spend hours doing analysis and come to conclusions that I know can be automated...so put the taco down and get to work!

Coder: I'm not doubting that you're doing analysis. I'm doubting that statistically that analysis has any mathematical weight to back it. I put it at less than .1% chance that it's right. You're still working off of the idea that the data is accurate. mmmm…..taco!

Later, when Barr talks about some "advanced analytical techniques" he's been pondering for use on the Anonymous data, the coder replies with apparent frustration, "You keep saying things about statistics and analytics but you haven't given me one algorithm or SQL query statement."

Privately, the coder then went to another company official with a warning. "He's on a bad path. He's talking about his analytics and that he can prove things statistically but he hasn't proven anything mathematically nor has he had any of his data vetted for accuracy, yet he keeps briefing people and giving interviews. It's irresponsible to make claims/accusations based off of a guess from his best gut feeling when he has even told me that he believes his gut, but more often than not it's been proven wrong. I feel his arrogance is catching up to him again and that has never ended well...for any of us."

Others made similar dark warnings. "I don't really want to get DDOS'd, so assuming we do get DDOS'd then what? How do we make lemonade from that?" one executive asked Barr. The public relations exec warned Barr not to start dropping real names: "Take the emotion out of it -> focus on the purpose. I don't see benefit to you or company to tell them you have their real names -- published or not."

Another internal warning ended: "Danger Will Robinson. You could end up accusing a wrong person. Or you could further enrage the group. Or you could be wrong, and it blows up in your face, and HBGary's face, publicly."

"Quite simply, nonsense"

But Barr got his Financial Times story, and with it the publicity he sought. He also made clear that he had the real names, and Anonymous knew he would soon meet with the FBI. Though Barr apparently planned to keep his names and addresses private even at this meeting, it was easy to see why Anonymous would have doubts.

When HBGary President Penny Leavy, who was an investor in separate company HBGary Federal, waded into IRC to reason with Anonymous, she pleaded ignorance of Barr's activities and said that they were "for security research only; the article was to get more people to the [BSides] event." To which someone responded, "Penny: if what you are saying is tree [true] then why is Aaron meeting with the FBI tomorrow morning at 11am? PLEASE KEEP IN MIND WE HAVE ALL YOUR EMAILS." (The answer from the e-mails is that Barr was trying to drum up business with the feds, not necessarily take down Anonymous.)

As for the names in Barr's BSides presentation, Anonymous insisted that they were wrong. "Penny please note that the names in that file belong to innocent random people on facebook. none of which are related to us at all," said one admin.

Another user complained to Leavy that "the document that [Barr] had produced actually has my girlfriend in it. She has never done anytihng with anonymous, not once. I had used her computer a couple times to look at a group on facebook or something."

In the note posted on HBGary Federal's website when it was taken over, Anonymous blasted Barr's work. "You think you've gathered full names and addresses of the 'higher-ups' of Anonymous? You haven't. You think Anonymous has a founder and various co-founders? False…. We laughed. Most of the information you've 'extracted' is publicly available via our IRC networks. The personal details of Anonymous 'members' you think you've acquired are, quite simply, nonsense."

Oh—and remember the threatening IRC log above, the one "recruiting" Barr to attack a DC security company? Anonymous says that it was all a joke.

"I mean come on, Penny," wrote Topiary in an IRC chat, "I messaged Aaron in PM [private message] and told him about a 'secret' Washington OP, then he emailed the company (including you) being entirely confident that we were directly threatening you, and he thought we didn't know who he was.

"He seriously works at a security company?"

Never forgive, never forget

Anonymous doesn't like to let up. Barr's Twitter account remains compromised, sprinkled with profane taunts. The HBGary websites remain down. The e-mails of three key players were leaked via BitTorrent, stuffed as they were with nondisclosure agreements, confidential documents, salary numbers, and other sensitive data that had nothing to do with Anonymous.

And they have more information—such as the e-mails of Greg Hoglund, Leavy's husband and the operator of rootkit.org (which was also taken down by the group).

When Leavy showed up to plead her case, asking Anonymous to at least stop distributing the e-mails, the hivemind reveled in its power over Leavy and her company, resorting eventually to tough demands against Barr.

"Simple: fire Aaron, have him admit defeat in a public statement," said Topiary, when asked what the group wanted. "We won't bother you further after this, but what we've done can't be taken back. Realize that, and for the company's sake, dispose of Aaron."

Others demanded an immediate "burn notice" on Barr and donations to Bradley Manning, the young military member now in solitary confinement on suspicion of leaking classified documents to Wikileaks.

The hack unfolded at the worst possible time for HBGary Federal. The company was trying to sell, hopefully for around $2 million, but the two best potential buyers started to drag their heels. "They want to see delivery on pipeline before paying those prices," Leavy wrote to Barr. "So initial payout is going to be lower with both companies I am talking with. That said our pipeline continues to drag out as customers are in no hurry to get things done quickly so if we dont sell soon and our customers dont come through soon we are going to have cash flow issues."

And being blasted off the 'Net by Anonymous is practically the last thing a company in such a situation needs. After the attacks, Leavy told the Financial Times that they cost HBGary millions of dollars.

“I wish it had been handled differently,” she added.

Hacked by a 16-year old girl

And who were Barr and his company up against in all this? According to Anonymous, a five-member team took down HBGary Federal and rootkit.com, in part through the very sort of social engineering Barr had tried to employ against Anonymous.

One of those five was allegedly a 16-year old girl, who "social engineered your admin jussi and got root to rootkit.com," one Anonymous member explained in IRC. Another, pleased with power, taunted Penny Leavy and her husband, who sat beside her during the chat: "How does it feel to get hacked by a 16yr old girl?"

The attackers are quintessentially Anonymous: young, technically sophisticated, brash, and crassly juvenile, all at the same time. And it's getting ever more difficult to dismiss Anonymous' hacker activity as the harmless result of a few mask-wearing buffoons.

Perhaps the entire strange story can be best summed up by a single picture, one that Barr e-mailed to two of his colleagues back on January 28. "Oh fuck," it says beneath a picture of an Anonymous real-world protest. "The Internet is here."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...eavy-price.ars





Anonymous Claims Possession Of Insidious Stuxnet Virus
Chris Barth

Houston, we have a problem. Or should I say, “Iran, we have your problem?” Last night, a member of hacker group Anonymous – a devious 4chan-spawned Internet coalition known for increasingly serious web-based attacks – announced on Twitter that the group was in possession of the Stuxnet virus.

Stuxnet is one of the more powerful viruses to ever spread across the internet. As Bruce Schneier detailed for Forbes, the worm crippled Iran’s nuclear facility by infiltrating a Siemen’s control system for industrial centrifuges. As I wrote late last year, the Stuxnet virus is a stark example of how cyber attacks can affect brick and mortar institutions.

“Anonymous is now in possession of Stuxnet – problem, officer?” tweeted user by the name of Topiary. Topiary’s profile describes the user as an online activist and a “Supporter of Anonymous Operations, WikiLeaks, and maintaining freedom on the Internet.”

To me, two huge questions arise from Anonymous’ claim:

1. Are they actually in possession of Stuxnet?
2. Can they do anything with it?

The answer to both questions, of course, is maybe. But let’s dive a little deeper.

Recently, Anonymous has been in the news for its high profile attacks on software security firm HBGary, after Aaron Barr, the CEO of HBGary’s sister firm HBGary Federal, claimed to have acquired the names of senior Anonymous members and threatened to release them to the public. Forbes’ Parmy Olson has done a fantastic job covering that affair.

This is where the possibility for Anonymous getting its hands on Stuxnet increases. In a post this morning, Olson quotes a source from Anonymous who briefly rattles off the contents of a slew of emails uncovered during the HBGary takedown. “Three different malware archives, two bots, an offer to sell a botnet, a genuine stuxnet copy, and various malware lists,” are supposedly among the contents.

Could this be pure posturing? Sure. But it doesn’t seem out of the question that a security firm would have high level information on one of the most threatening viruses out there.

So let’s pretend that Anonymous does, in fact, have a copy of the Stuxnet worm in their possession. Can they do anything with it? We’ve already seen Stuxnet’s efficacy in attacking Siemens Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems attached to very specific industrial machinery. The complexity of the worm allowed it to infiltrate deep into Iran’s nuclear facilities before unleashing its payload. A report by Symantec today updated their September dossier on the virus and revealed that the attacks started in June of 2009 and ended in May 2010, around a month before the attacks were even noticed.

The worm’s complexity, however, could also render it mostly useless in Anonymous’ hands. I’ll let Schneier get into the weeds on some of the details, since he does a great job of explaining:

Here’s what we do know: Stuxnet is an Internet worm that infects Windows computers. It primarily spreads via USB sticks, which allows it to get into computers and networks not normally connected to the Internet. Once inside a network, it uses a variety of mechanisms to propagate to other machines within that network and gain privilege once it has infected those machines. These mechanisms include both known and patched vulnerabilities, and four “zero-day exploits”: vulnerabilities that were unknown and unpatched when the worm was released. (All the infection vulnerabilities have since been patched.)

Stuxnet doesn’t actually do anything on those infected Windows computers, because they’re not the real target. What Stuxnet looks for is a particular model of Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) made by Siemens (the press often refers to these as SCADA systems, which is technically incorrect). These are small embedded industrial control systems that run all sorts of automated processes: on factory floors, in chemical plants, in oil refineries, at pipelines–and, yes, in nuclear power plants. These PLCs are often controlled by computers, and Stuxnet looks for Siemens SIMATIC WinCC/Step 7 controller software.

If it doesn’t find one, it does nothing.

So, unless the Anonymous hackers want to control industrial centrifuges, we should be alright? Not so fast. Theoretically, it would be possible to dismantle the virus and implant a separate payload, effectively piggy-backing another virus on the Windows-based attack code. This is no walk in the park coding exercise, to be sure, but Anonymous has proven their impressive abilities in the past. If such a deconstruction and reconstruction were to be pulled off, it could have wide-reaching consequences. In August 2010, the Stuxnet virus was reportedly infecting over 60,000 computers in Iran, not causing any harm but eager to spread until it found a place to release its payload.

For now, we’re largely dealing in hypotheticals. Since Stuxnet has been discovered, efforts are being put against it at high levels to prevent such attacks in the future. But if Anonymous does, in fact, have possession of the worm, it could have massive repercussions for both online and offline security. As Mort Zuckerman said late last year, though, “Malicious programmers are always able to find weaknesses and challenge security measures. The defender is always lagging behind the attacker.”
http://blogs.forbes.com/chrisbarth/2...stuxnet-virus/





WikiLeaks Crippled by Ex-Associates, Sources Say
Mark Hosenball

WikiLeaks's ability to receive new leaks has been crippled after a disaffected programer unplugged a component which guaranteed anonymity to would-be leakers, activists and journalists who have worked with the site say.

Details of the breakdown are contained in a book by estranged Assange collaborator Daniel Domscheit-Berg which is due to be published on Friday, a source familiar with the contents of the book told Reuters.

Neither Wikileaks's embattled Australian founder, Julian Assange, nor members of his entourage responded to an e-mailed request from Reuters for comment but a WikiLeaks spokesman confirmed the website's submission system was being overhauled.

Domscheit-Berg also took a backlog of leaks sent to the WikiLeaks website with him when he left, the source familiar with the contents of "Inside WikiLeaks: My Time With Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website," said.

In a statement issued to the Forbes website on Wednesday, Kristinn Hrafnsson, a WikiLeaks spokesman, said the website was suing Domscheit-Berg, who with Assange served until late last year as one of WikiLeaks's two principal spokesmen.

"In (his) book Domscheit-Berg confesses to various acts of sabotage against the organization. The former WikiLeaks staffer admits to having damaged the site's primary submission system and stolen material," Hrafnsson's statement said.

"The sabotage and concern over motives led to an overhaul of the entire submission system, an ongoing project that is not being expedited due to its complex nature and the organizations need to focus its resources on publication and defense," Hrafnsson added.

Crippled For Months

The activists and journalists who have worked with WikiLeaks and Assange, who faces a sexual misconduct investigation in Sweden, say the website's ability to receive new leaks of data has been crippled, if not totally disabled, for months.

Domscheit-Berg recently announced that he was creating a WikiLeaks spinoff or rival called OpenLeaks.org with support from a former WikiLeaks programer, believed to be a German, whose programing skills are more dazzling than Assange's.

Precisely how much material sent in to WikiLeaks is now under the control of Domscheit-Berg and the programer, known only as "The Architect," is unclear.

Domscheit-Berg has not publicly characterized the subject matter or volume of material he has stashed away, though he has indicated that at some point, he might be willing to cede control over it back to Assange.

In an e-mail to Reuters, Domscheit-Berg said he planned to offer a public clarification of what happened at a news conference scheduled for Thursday.

To avoid what Domscheit-Berg has condemned as Assange's dictatorial leadership of WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks will be a more decentralized organization, he has said.

The new website will not itself publish or analyze leaks which it receives but instead with serve as a conduit to relay the information to partners in the website, who could include media outlets, NGO groups, and labor unions.

WikiLeaks insiders say Assange still has control over substantial quantities of data leaked to the website before the WikiLeaks founder became entangled last August in a sexual misconduct case in Sweden. He has said in the past this includes a huge cache of data from the hard-drive of a Bank of America executive.

In an interview with the German weekly magazine Stern, Domscheit-Berg is quoted saying that Assange's cache of bank data is old and "completely unspectacular."

(Editing by Philippa Fletcher)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7193Y120110210





Internet is Easy Prey for Governments
Douglas Rushkoff

Editor's note: Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist and the author of "Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age" and "Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take it Back."

For all that the revolution in Egypt tells us about the power of networked media to promote bottom-up change, it even more starkly reveals the limits of our internet tools and the ease with which those holding power can take them away.

Yes, services such as Twitter and Facebook give activists the means to organize as never before. But the more dependent on them we become, the more subservient we are to the corporations and governments that control them.

Some of us might like to believe that the genie is out of the bottle and that we all have access to an unstoppable decentralized network. In reality, the internet is entirely controlled by central authorities.

Old media, such as terrestrial radio and television, were as distributed as the thousands of stations and antennae from which broadcast signals emanated, but all internet traffic must pass through government and corporate-owned choke points.

That's why President Hosni Mubarak's regime had so little trouble shutting down his citizens' networks when he wanted to. One phone call to each of the four internet service providers in his country was all it took. And while we might like to believe that couldn't happen in the United States, we should remember that all it took was a call from Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Connecticut, to Amazon for the corporation to shut down WikiLeaks' website recently.

Meanwhile, UK's Vodafone complied with Mubarak's orders first to turn off cell phone use in Egypt, and later to flood cell phone users with incendiary pro-government messages.

More virtual ink was spilled in the United States about Vodaphone-partner Verizon's version of the iPhone than on Vodafone's utter complicity in the violence fomented by the commands it promoted through its networks. Although Vodafone continues to apologize publicly for its ongoing policy of serving the goon squads of a dictatorial regime, it has also continued to follow that regime's orders.

If bottom-up networks are this dependent on the good graces of top-down authorities for their very functioning, then how bottom-up are they? While in the United States we may have policies protecting free speech and open communication, it is these laws -- and not some feature of our internet -- that prevent the kinds of censorship we are witnessing in Egypt.

And, as we saw when push came to shove over WikiLeaks in the United States, how quickly this very same authority can be used to cut off "enemies of the state" from access and funding.

Good, you might say. We don't want people to be able to connect and communicate about anything at all, do we? Isn't it good to have a circuit breaker somewhere? A trusted authority in charge who can prevent people from saying the wrong things to each other? Perhaps.

But if we believe our society is capable of engaging in the democratic process, we must trust its people to share their thoughts and ideas -- their words -- directly with one another, no matter how threatening to those currently in power.

The vulnerability of today's communications infrastructure to the whims of the governments and corporations who administrate it makes it an unsuitable platform for this process to occur.

We might better use the lessons of the internet to build a communications infrastructure that cannot be controlled from the top. For while the internet may have been built with an underlying architecture of central servers, corporate-owned pipelines and government-managed indexes, there are many less centralized alternatives, some of which have been used successfully in the past.

Back before the internet, many of us early computer hobbyists networked on something called Fidonet. It was a simple peer-to-peer network where users' computers would just call each other at night through their old-fashioned modems, exchange information and then move on. It was slow -- e-mail could take a day or two to reach someone under this scheme -- but it suggested a way of doing things independent of a centralized authority.

Today, faced with the limits of the internet, digital activists are reviving such ideas. One of them, "mesh networking," would let people connect simply by opening their Wi-Fi networks to incoming traffic. The inhabitants of an entire city could be connected to one another, without anyone even having an internet service provider. Then that city can connect to another, and so on.

Until we choose to develop such alternative networks, our insistence on seeing the likes of Facebook and Twitter as the path toward freedom for all people will only serve to increase our dependence on corporations and government for the right to assemble and communicate.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/02/0...gypt.internet/





Movement Began With Outrage and a Facebook Page That Gave It an Outlet
Jennifer Preston

If there is a face to the revolt that has sprouted in Egypt, it may be the face of Khaled Said.

Mr. Said, a 28-year-old Egyptian businessman, was pulled from an Internet cafe in Alexandria last June by two plainclothes police officers, who witnesses say then beat him to death in the lobby of a residential building. Human rights advocates said he was killed because he had evidence of police corruption.

The Egyptian police and security services have a well-earned reputation for brutality and snuffing out political opposition. But in Mr. Said, they unwittingly chose the wrong target.

Within five days of his death, an anonymous human rights activist created a Facebook page — We Are All Khaled Said — that posted cellphone photos from the morgue of his battered and bloodied face, and YouTube videos played up contrasting pictures of him happy and smiling with the graphic images from the morgue. By mid-June, 130,000 people joined the page to get and share updates about the case.

It became and remains the biggest dissident Facebook page in Egypt, even as protests continue to sweep the country, with more than 473,000 users, and it has helped spread the word about the demonstrations in Egypt, which were ignited after a revolt in neighboring Tunisia toppled the government there.

“There were many catalysts of the uprising,” said Ahmed Zidan, an online political activist marching toward Tahrir Square for a protest last week. “The first was the brutal murder of Khalid Said.”

The Tunisian rebellion was set off after a fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, burned himself to death after being humiliated by the police. His desperate act led to protests, which were recorded on mobile phones, posted on the Internet, shared on Facebook and eventually broadcast by Al Jazeera.

But Mr. Said’s death may be the starkest example yet of the special power of social networking tools like Facebook even — or especially — in a police state. The Facebook page set up around his death offered Egyptians a rare forum to bond over their outrage about government abuses.

“Prior to the murder of Khaled Said, there were blogs and YouTube videos that existed about police torture, but there wasn’t a strong community around them,” said Jillian C. York, the project coordinator for the OpenNet Initiative of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard University. “This case changed that.”

While it is almost impossible to isolate the impact of social media tools from the general swirl of events that set off the popular uprisings across the Middle East, there is little doubt that they provided a new means for ordinary people to connect with human rights advocates trying to amass support against police abuse, torture and the Mubarak government’s permanent emergency laws allowing people to be jailed without charges.

Facebook and YouTube also offered a way for the discontented to organize and mobilize — and allowed secular-minded young people to seize the momentum from Egypt’s relatively neutered, organized opposition.

Far more decentralized than political parties, the strength and agility of the networks clearly caught Egyptian authorities — and American intelligence analysts — by surprise, even as the Egyptian government quickly attempted to shut them down.

Mr. Said, who was from a middle-class family and worked in the import-export business, was not an activist or involved in politics. But human rights advocates said he was killed because the local police believed he had shot a video showing officers with illegal drugs. Such a video did eventually show up on YouTube.

The police had told Mr. Said’s family that he was involved in drugs and died of asphyxiation from swallowing a package of marijuana while in police custody. But witnesses denied that account, telling their stories in YouTube videos.

“What made this case different is that Khaled Said was just an ordinary person,” said Gamal Eid, 47, a lawyer and executive director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information in Cairo. “He was just a guy who found evidence of corruption and he published it. Then when people learned what happened to him, when people saw pictures of his face, people got very angry.”

Mr. Eid said that Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and cellphones made it easy for human rights advocates to get out the news and for people to spread and discuss their outrage about Mr. Said’s death in a country where freedom of speech and the right to assemble were limited and the government monitored newspapers and state television.

“He is a big part of our revolution,” said Hudaifa Nabawi, a 20-year-old student in Tahrir Square on Saturday. “Khalid Said was a special case. He didn’t belong to any faction, and he didn’t do anything wrong. He became the way to focus our perceptions around the oppression that all the youth all face. You can consider him a symbol.”

Facebook has been the social networking tool of choice for human rights activists in Egypt. There are five million Facebook users in Egypt, the highest number in any Middle Eastern or North African country.

Its power and importance has been building for years. In 2008, the April 6 Youth Movement used Facebook to gain more than 70,000 supporters to help raise awareness for striking workers in Mahalla al-Kobra, Egypt.

In the last two years, that movement and other human rights advocates have also turned to Twitter and to YouTube, the third most visited Web site in Egypt after Google and Facebook. YouTube, which human rights advocates have used to upload dozens of videos showing Egyptian police torture and abuse, has evolved as an enormously powerful social media tool as more people have been able to capture and share video on cellphones.

When video of the corrupt police officers with drugs attributed to Mr. Said was uploaded on YouTube on June 11, 2010, a member of the April 6 Youth Movement left a message in Arabic on the video that said: “We are Khaled. Each one of us can be Khaled.”

The message urged people to stand up against police abuse and torture and say no to “bullying police.” This single video has been viewed more than 500,000 times since June and spawned dozens more videos about Mr. Said, including rap songs and more solemn presentations with haunting music.

Last June, besides providing regular Facebook updates about the stalled police investigation into Mr. Said’s death, the anonymous administrator of the Facebook page began posting invitations to join street protests and silent protests in Alexandria and Cairo, which spread to nine other cities. Mohamed ElBaradei, the former chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was among thousands attending the protest in Alexandria.

With the conversation on social networks translating into street protests — and with the well-documented evidence of the police abuse posted online for hundreds of thousands to see — prosecutors were forced to arrest the two police officers in early July in connection with Mr. Said’s death. But the case remains unresolved.

Other Egyptians died at the hands of the police last summer. The protests continued, first every week or so, and then sporadically last fall, until Tunisia fell and then the April 6 Youth Movement Facebook group and the We Are All Khaled Said Facebook page began inviting Egyptians to a protest on Jan. 25.

Signaling the Mubarak government’s growing awareness about the powerful role that social media are playing in Egypt, pro-Mubarak supporters began jumping into the Khaled Said Facebook page’s conversation soon after access to the Internet was restored last week.

There are now wall posts and comments on the page, blasting antigovernment supporters, demanding that Mr. Mubarak be given a chance and spreading disinformation, including that the “day of departure” protest on Friday was canceled.

But that did little to deter the protesters. “If you think you can go on Facebook and tell the people to go home, it’s too late for that,” said Omar Ghoneim, 32, who walked to Friday’s protest, wearing two bandages on his right hand from, he said, throwing tear gas canisters back at the police.

David D. Kirkpatrick, Kareem Fahim and Anthony Shadid contributed reporting from Cairo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/wo...st/06face.html





Twitter Can’t Save You
Lee Siegel

THE NET DELUSION

The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

By Evgeny Morozov

408 pp. PublicAffairs. $27.95.

Just a few years ago, all anyone could talk about was how to make the Internet more free. Now all anyone can talk about is how to control it.

Book and newspaper publishers look for ways to protect their original content. Parents seek to shield their children from cyberbullying. Legislators explore mechanisms that will defend people’s privacy. Governments try to find the means to keep classified materials from leaking onto the Web. Entrepreneurs and public figures struggle to keep rivals or enemies from slandering them or their businesses. And more and more of us are terrified of being watched, filmed and uploaded, about as terrified as other people are titillated by watching, filming and uploading.

The miraculously convenient technology of the Internet has created an unprecedented simultaneity of moral functions. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is like an incarnation of Shiva, the Hindu god of creation and destruction. It turns out that what was recently considered a brave new age of information was actually the first spasm in a long process of cultural realignment. We are all used to thinking of Google as though it were synonymous with the word “future.” In 50 years, people will be talking about Google the way we talk about the East India Company. We are still wobbling in the baby steps of the Internet age.

As Evgeny Morozov demonstrates in “The Net Delusion,” his brilliant and courageous book, the Internet’s contradictions and confusions are just becoming visible through the fading mist of Internet euphoria. Morozov is interested in the Internet’s political ramifications. “What if the liberating potential of the Internet also contains the seeds of depoliticization and thus dedemocratization?” he asks. The Net delusion of his title is just that. Contrary to the “cyberutopians,” as he calls them, who consider the Internet a powerful tool of political emancipation, Morozov convincingly argues that, in freedom’s name, the Internet more often than not constricts or even abolishes freedom.

Morozov recounts a speech given by Hillary Clinton a year ago in which she proclaimed the power and the glory of the Internet, speaking of “harnessing the power of connection technologies” to “put these tools in the hands of people around the world who will use them to advance democracy and human rights.” Clinton was perhaps not aware that, as Morozov wryly puts it, “the most popular Internet searches on Russian search engines are not for ‘what is democracy?’ or ‘how to protect human rights’ but for ‘what is love?’ and ‘how to lose weight.’ ” And she had perhaps forgotten the speech she herself made in 2005. On that occasion, she characterized the Internet as “the biggest technological challenge facing parents and children today,” calling it “an instrument of enormous danger.”

Clinton’s strange double perspective, in which the Internet is liberating in undemocratic societies yet fraught with potential harm here, is the kind of contradiction Morozov is out to expose. He labels it “digital Orientalism,” the belief that in repressive societies, the Internet can be a force only for benevolent political change.

He quotes the political blogger Andrew Sullivan, who proclaimed after protesters took to the streets in Tehran that “the revolution will be Twittered.” The revolution never happened, and the futilely tweeting protesters were broken with an iron hand. But Sullivan was hardly the only one to ignore the Iranian context. Clay Shirky, the media’s favorite quotable expert on all things Internet-related, effused: “This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.”

Two decades of inane patter about the magical powers of a technology of mere convenience had transformed Twitter — once the domain of “a bunch of bored hipsters who had an irresistible urge to share their breakfast plans,” as Morozov mordantly writes — into an engine of political revolution. Or as Jon Stewart put it, mocking the belief in the Internet’s ability to transform intractable places like Iraq and Afghanistan: “Why did we have to send an army when we could have liberated them the same way we buy shoes?”

The Iranian protests against what the protesters believed was a corrupt election were brutally crushed because, as Morozov unsentimentally says, “many Iranians found the elections to be fair.” The elements of a successful revolution — the complicity of the military, of a powerful political class, of an almost universally discontented population — simply weren’t there. But the Internet boosters, from journalists to officials in the State Department, succumbed, Morozov says, to “the pressure to forget the context and start with what the Internet allows.” These people think only in terms of the Internet and are “deaf to the social, cultural and political subtleties and indeterminacies” of a given situation.

What was broadcast on Twitter and elsewhere was repression of the revolution. The Iranian regime used the Web to identify photographs of protesters; to find out their personal information and whereabouts (through Facebook, naturally); to distribute propagandistic videos; and to text the population into counterrevolutionary paranoia.

Nor did it help when a young State Department official named Jared Cohen asked Twitter to postpone planned maintenance work on its site to avoid interrupting the flow of messages from the protesters. Word of Twitter’s immediate compliance got out, thus increasing Iran’s, China’s and other repressive regimes’ resolve to exploit the Internet to their political ends.

In Morozov’s eyes, this sort of backlash to Internet “freedom” is routine. Polygamy may be illegal in Turkey, but that doesn’t stop Turkish villagers from using the Internet to find multiple wives. Mexican crime gangs use social networking sites to gather information about their victims. Russian neofascists employ the Internet to fix the positions of minorities in order to organize pogroms. President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela wrote to a young critic on Twitter, “Hello Mariana, the truth is I’m an anti-dictator.” LOL!

As Morozov points out, don’t expect corporations like Google to liberate anyone anytime soon. Google did business in China for four years before economic conditions and censorship demands — not human rights concerns — forced it out. And it is telling that both Twitter and Facebook have refused to join the Global Network Initiative, a pact that Morozov describes as “an industrywide pledge . . . to behave in accordance with the laws and standards covering the right to freedom of expression and privacy embedded in internationally recognized documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

Morozov urges the cyberutopians to open their eyes to the fact that the #asocial pursuit of profit is what drives social media. “Not surprisingly,” he writes, “the dangerous fascination with solving previously intractable social problems with the help of technology allows vested interests to disguise what essentially amounts to advertising for their commercial products in the language of freedom and liberation.” In 2007, when he was at the State Department, Jared Cohen wrote with tragic wrongheadedness that “the Internet is a place where Iranian youth can . . . say anything they want as they operate free from the grips of the police-state apparatus.” Thanks to the exciting new technology, many of those freely texting Iranian youths are in prison or dead. Cohen himself now works for Google as the director of “Google Ideas.”

For Morozov, technology is a vacuum waiting to be filled with the strongest temperament. And the Internet, he maintains, is “a much more capricious technology” than radio or television. Neither radio nor TV has “keyword-based filtering,” which allows regimes to use URLs and text to identify and suppress dangerous Web sites, or, like marketers, to collect information on the people who visit them — a tactic Morozov sardonically calls the “customization of censorship.”

Morozov, born in Belarus, writes about the optimism of the cyberutopians the way Soviet dissidents once wrote about the optimism of Communist utopians. He also exhibits traces of the Eastern European intellectual’s fatalist gloom, from time to time seeming so overwhelmed by the fact of human nature that he despairs over the invention of any type of technology that might improve our lot. “Technology changes all the time,” he writes, “human nature hardly ever.”

For example, one way around the danger of a government’s confiscating a dissident’s hard drive would be to store information on the Internet, “in the cloud.” All you would need to gain access to your files would be your password. Even this does not reassure Morozov, however, who concludes that a repressive regime could always “learn the password by torturing the system administrator.” But this is like saying that because planes crash one must never fly.

For Morozov, the prospect of unintended consequences may alone discredit any type of purpose. Take the case of Andrew Sullivan. Hardly a political naïf, Sullivan responded to the Iranian protests out of an engaged commitment to human freedom. When the Iranian regime began its repression, he tirelessly documented the horror. Such bitter memories, now digitally preserved, give longevity to hope.

Morozov is vulnerable on another front as well. Making an argument similar to one put forth by Theodor Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School nearly a century ago, Morozov bemoans what he cutely calls “slacktivism,” the tendency of the Internet to distract a population from any type of serious political engagement. But the Internet’s infinite diversions have not kept Russian neofascists and Japanese nationalists from persecuting ethnic minorities, as Morozov documents. In some respects, a universal passiveness induced by distraction is a historical godsend.

And Morozov is too impressed by Kierkegaard’s essay “The Present Age,” in which the philosopher excoriated the rise of mass journalism. Kierkegaard was prescient in much of his critique, but he left out one important fact. Mass journalism and democracy are inextricably entwined. Henry Luce and Comrade Stalin are two diametrically opposed animals.

But the pendulum has swung so far and so long to the cyberutopians’ side that a little extremism is needed to correct the imbalance. Morozov has dared to argue that the Internet has exposed democracy’s Achilles’ heel. Too often the morally malleable Web has the effect of crushing community under the weight of bad pluralisms and atrocious diversities. In that regard, the Internet is creating an egalitarian antidemocracy in which the strongest inhumanity tramples on the most eloquent rationality and decency.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/bo.../Siegel-t.html





The State of the Internet
Anna G. Eshoo

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, the Internet is no longer an optional resource. It is a fundamental tool encountered in every aspect of our daily lives. We rely on it for business, information, education, communication and personal expression. We use it at our offices, in our homes, on desktops and laptops and even on our phones. The vibrancy of our nation's economy increasingly depends on the growth and utilization of this transformative technology.

In Silicon Valley, the innovation capital of our country, startups have become billion-dollar businesses by leveraging the power of the Internet. These companies are transforming our society, making our economy grow and creating hundreds of thousands of domestic jobs.

As President Obama noted in his State of the Union address, the federal government has played a crucial role in the growth of the Internet and our most innovative businesses. The technology at the Internet's core was funded by a Defense Department program, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Silicon Valley has been a substantial beneficiary of federal research funding, and the dividends are apparent. Giants like Google, Cisco and Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle) all emerged from federally funded research projects.

But as the Internet continues to grow in prevalence and complexity, what can we do to replicate our past two decades of success?

It begins with an investment in basic research. The private sector has always been the engine of American job creation and innovation, and the federal government has provided the resources and incentives necessary for our businesses to innovate and compete. While the United States still leads the world in funding basic research, China and other nations are working aggressively to catch up. We must continue to invest in research and preserve our advantage in this critical area.

The Research and Development Tax Credit is another essential economic tool, because it directly rewards business investment in new technologies, but the tax credit has been renewed only on a short-term basis. During my 18 years in Congress and three administrations, I've worked to make the tax credit permanent. Last February, I led a bipartisan effort of 120 members of Congress in urging the expansion of the credit. There are few easy answers to improving the economy of our nation, but the R&D tax credit is one of them. It needs to be made permanent.

A climate of openness and innovation has been the hallmark of the Internet. A decade ago, it's what allowed a startup named Google to compete with better-funded, less technologically advanced competitors. Today, Congress has the responsibility to preserve this climate for the next Google, and for the consumers and the economy that will benefit from its success.

This begins with broadband availability, ensuring that every community has access to affordable high-speed Internet. In a recent poll conducted by Cisco Systems and the Saïd Business School, the United States ranked 15th in the world in broadband quality. We must close these gaps, and quickly.

All available options should be on the table. In the last Congress, I sponsored legislation calling for the installation of broadband channels when the ground is already being torn up for construction and transportation projects. The Federal Highway Administration estimates it is 10 times more expensive to dig up and then repair a road to lay fiber than to dig a channel for it when the road is being fixed or built. This is a simple, inexpensive method to increase our broadband capacity, and it should be a priority for Congress to pass this year.

Increasing our wireless broadband capacity is equally critical. It's clear that wireless is the future of the Internet, but it relies on airwaves - just like over-the-air television and radio - and there is only a finite amount available. To meet current demand and promote future innovation, Congress needs to allocate the necessary airwaves, supporting faster speeds, greater capacity and increased competition.

With expanded broadband comes a growing need for an open and free environment, one that allows technologies to develop and consumers to have access to a wealth of information, websites and applications. Until the FCC voted in December, there were no rules in place to prevent a broadband provider from blocking access to the legally acquired content of competitors. These rules are an important first step, but they need to apply equally to all forms of broadband, including mobile and the thousands of mobile-based applications and services.

The Internet might be the most powerful economic tool since the invention of the printing press. We need to provide businesses and consumers with the right policies to leverage it for the future. Once these policies are in place, we will have laid the groundwork for a new decade of job growth, innovative technologies and economic success for all Americans.

Anna G. Eshoo represents Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Menlo Park in the U.S. House of Representatives. She co-chairs the Congressional Internet Caucus.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...INEI1H56JG.DTL





A Father Knows Best: Vint Cerf Re-Thinks The Internet in Stanford Talk

He helped develop the Internet in the 1970s while at Stanford. Now, Vint Cerf is thinking about how to improve his creation that's become the greatest communication force of our time.
Andrew Myers

To most, a wine cellar is just a cool place to keep some vintage vino. For Vint Cerf, the revered former Stanford engineering professor and graduate of the university, it is a portal into the future. His wine cellar is networked. Cerf can monitor and control the temperature, humidity and other important information from his smartphone.

Welcome to the "Internet of things," a much-discussed vision of a tomorrow in which virtually every electronic device – ovens, stereos, toasters, wine cellars – will be networked.

Improving Internet security requires a delicate balance between freedom and control, Vint Cerf told the audience at Stanford Engineering's 'Heroes' Day.'

Cerf, who is now vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, laid out that vision as the guest of honor at Stanford Engineering's first "Heroes' Day." The former professor's lone request on his day of honor was to be with students. His topic: re-thinking the Internet.

And when one of the so-called "Fathers of the Internet" says we need to re-think his baby, people listen. Cerf addressed a standing-room crowd in the NVIDIA Auditorium at Stanford's Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center on Tuesday. Hundreds more tuned in via live webcast.

As Cerf held forth, those in the house and online would discover that re-thinking the Internet will take a lot of thinking.

Rules of the road

Back in the mid-1970s, when Cerf was a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford, he and a partner at the Department of Defense, Bob Kahn, were assigned to create a system of data transfer between computers that could withstand the sort of Cold War imaginings that dominated the day. They essentially had to make sure that if the world came to an end, data would get through.

What the pair came up with was the basic architecture of the Internet and TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), the "rules of the road" that govern how all those ones and zeroes get addressed, subdivided, sent packing and somehow arrive where they are supposed be and get put back together as they should.

It was a divide-and-conquer, redundant-path model that turned the Internet into an unstoppable force and made it virtually impossible to bring the system down.

Why, then, does Cerf think we must re-think his handiwork, the greatest communication force of our time?

"The Internet was just not designed for the way we use it today," he said. "In the 1970s, we were only trying to link a few sites together – a few universities, a couple military bases. We had no way to anticipate billions of personal computers, much less smartphones that are far smarter and infinitely more mobile than the classroom-size computers of the time."

First off, the naming system developed by Cerf and Kahn – known as IP addressing – is proving inadequate. Their system allowed for about a billion IP addresses. With personal computers and smartphones becoming more ubiquitous, the world will need billions of IP addresses.

We have simply run out of ways to address all our machines, Cerf said.

And there are more machines coming if the Internet of things comes to fruition.

A looming cloud

Security, however, is the real looming cloud, Cerf said. The defense mechanism to date has been to circle the wagons by creating firewalls to protect us from attack by outside forces. But firewalls are leaky and prone to attack from within by viruses, malware, spyware and worse. We are left with billions of devices vulnerable to attack.

But improving security requires a delicate balance between freedom and control, Cerf said. He was careful to delineate that our need for stronger authentication should not limit online anonymity. The fact that the Internet allows people to gather and publish information with the option to remain anonymous has been a driving force behind the Internet, Cerf said.

The hard, hard problems

These technical issues do not even begin to get at the monumental policy issues facing a new Internet that must work across borders and political realities.

"As we are seeing in China and Egypt and elsewhere, the Internet is an undeniable social force," Cerf said. "This is a threat to some. Yes, the Internet is free and open today, but there are no guarantees. It might not always be so."

Such complex policy issues will no doubt need to be resolved.

"These are hard, hard problems and we haven't even talked about the commercial questions – who gets to make money and how are they going to make it," he asked, hinting at the vastness of the task ahead.

Innovation and revolution

Our reward for re-thinking the Internet is that there is room not only for innovation but for revolution.

"The way things are today doesn't always have to be so," Cerf said. "We can imagine a better Internet and we can make it happen."

This Internet of things, for instance, could help us meet the challenges of energy efficiency through improved production and storage of electricity, and smarter power management could greatly smooth the peak-and-valley pattern of energy production and demand.

A nod to Stanford

Looking back at his life and his invitation to join the faculty at Stanford, Cerf was humble.

"I turned them down," he said. "I didn't think I was smart enough to be teaching such smart students. But when the people who wrote the textbooks I was learning from, Don Knuth and others, kept calling, I couldn't say no. Stanford was great for two reasons: freedom and very, very smart students. I always knew I had a smart kid sitting in front of me helping me out."

And he waxed philosophical when talking about his latest project – an often misunderstood undertaking he calls the "Interplanetary Internet."

"Some people don't want me to talk about the Interplanetary Internet," he said. "They think I've gone off the deep end, but we're not talking about communicating with aliens here. I wouldn't even know how to do that, but if we are to someday travel across the vast distances of the galaxy, we will need to learn how to communicate over long stretches of space and time."

As he tells it, the Interplanetary Internet is just one more extension of his life's work. "It's about ensuring that our messages make it to their intended audiences, that they are intelligible, and that they are whole when they get there."

These are the lessons Vint Cerf has learned best of all.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/f...et-021111.html





Get Internet Access When Your Government Shuts It Down

Does your government have an Internet kill-switch? Read our guide to Guerrilla Networking and be prepared for when the lines get cut.
Patrick Miller, David Daw

These days, no popular movement goes without an Internet presence of some kind, whether it's organizing on Facebook or spreading the word through Twitter. And as we've seen in Egypt, that means that your Internet connection can be the first to go. Whether you're trying to check in with your family, contact your friends, or simply spread the word, here are a few ways to build some basic network connectivity when you can't rely on your cellular or landline Internet connections.

Do-It-Yourself Internet With Ad-Hoc Wi-Fi

Even if you've managed to find an Internet connection for yourself, it won't be that helpful in reaching out to your fellow locals if they can't get online to find you. If you're trying to coordinate a group of people in your area and can't rely on an Internet connection, cell phones, or SMS, your best bet could be a wireless mesh network of sorts--essentially, a distributed network of wireless networking devices that can all find each other and communicate with each other. Even if none of those devices have a working Internet connection, they can still find each other, which, if your network covers the city you're in, might be all you need. At the moment, wireless mesh networking isn't really anywhere close to market-ready, though we have seen an implementation of the 802.11s draft standard, which extends the 802.11 Wi-Fi standard to include wireless mesh networking, in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO laptop.

However, a prepared guerrilla networker with a handful of PCs could make good use of Daihinia ($25, 30-day free trial), an app that piggybacks on your Wi-Fi adapter driver to turn your normal ad-hoc Wi-Fi network into a multihop ad-hoc network (disclaimer: we haven't tried this ourselves yet), meaning that instead of requiring each device on the network to be within range of the original access point, you simply need to be within range of a device on the network that has Daihinia installed, effectively allowing you to add a wireless mesh layer to your ad-hoc network.

Advanced freedom fighters can set up a portal Web page on their network that explains the way the setup works, with Daihinia instructions and a local download link so they can spread the network even further. Lastly, just add a Bonjour-compatible chat client like Pidgin or iChat, and you'll be able to talk to your neighbors across the city without needing an Internet connection.

Back to Basics

Remember when you stashed your old modems in the closet because you thought you might need them some day? In the event of a total communications blackout--as we're seeing in Egypt, for example--you'll be glad you did. Older and simpler tools, like dial-up Internet or even ham radio, could still work, since these "abandoned" tech avenues aren't being policed nearly as hard.

In order to get around the total shutdown of all of the ISPs within Egypt, several international ISPs are offering dial-up access to the Internet to get protesters online, since phone service is still operational. It's slow, but it still works--the hard part is getting the access numbers without an Internet connection to find them.

Unfortunately, such dial-up numbers can also be fairly easily shut down by the Egyptian government, so you could also try returning to FidoNet--a distributed networking system for BBSes that was popular in the 1980s. FidoNet is limited to sending only simple text messages, and it's slow, but it has two virtues: Users connect asynchronously, so the network traffic is harder to track, and any user can act as the server, which means that even if the government shuts down one number in the network, another one can quickly pop up to take its place.

You could also take inspiration from groups that are working to create an ad-hoc communications network into and out of Egypt using Ham Radio, since the signals are rarely tracked and extremely hard to shut down or block. Most of these efforts are still getting off the ground, but hackers are already cobbling together ways to make it a viable form of communication into and out of the country.

Always Be Prepared

In the land of no Internet connection, the man with dial-up is king. Here are a few gadgets that you could use to prepare for the day they cut the lines.

Given enough time and preparation, your ham radio networks could even be adapted into your own ad-hoc network using Packet Radio, a radio communications protocol that you can use to create simple long-distance wireless networks to transfer text and other messages between computers. Packet Radio is rather slow and not particularly popular (don't try to stream any videos with this, now), but it's exactly the kind of networking device that would fly under the radar.

In response to the crisis in Egypt, nerds everywhere have risen to call for new and exciting tools for use in the next government-mandated shutdown. Bre Pettis, founder of the hackerspace NYC Resistor and creator of the Makerbot 3D printer, has called for "Apps for the Appocalypse," including a quick and easy way to set up chats on a local network so you can talk with your friends and neighbors in an emergency even without access to the Internet. If his comments are any indication, Appocalypse apps may be headed your way soon.

Tons of cool tech are also just waiting to be retrofitted for these purposes. David Dart's Pirate Box is a one-step local network in a box originally conceived for file sharing and local P2P purposes, but it wouldn't take much work to adapt the Pirate Box as a local networking tool able to communicate with other pirate boxes to form a compact, mobile set of local networks in the event of an Internet shutdown.

Whether you're in Egypt or Eagle Rock, you rely on your Internet access to stay in touch with friends and family, get your news, and find information you need. (And read PCWorld, of course.) Hopefully with these apps, tools, and techniques, you won't have to worry about anyone--even your government--keeping you from doing just that.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/21815...s_it_down.html





Algeria Shuts Down Internet and Facebook as Protest Mounts

Internet providers were shut down and Facebook accounts deleted across Algeria on Saturday as thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators were arrested in violent street demonstrations.
Nabila Ramdani

Plastic bullets and tear gas were used to try and disperse large crowds in major cities and towns, with 30,000 riot police taking to the streets in Algiers alone.

There were also reports of journalists being targeted by state-sponsored thugs to stop reports of the disturbances being broadcast to the outside world.

But it was the government attack on the internet which was of particular significance to those calling for an end to President Abdelaziz Boutifleka's repressive regime.

Protesters mobilising through the internet were largely credited with bringing about revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia.

"The government doesn't want us forming crowds through the internet," said Rachid Salem, of Co-ordination for Democratic Change in Algeria.

"Security forces are armed to the teeth out on the street, and they're also doing everything to crush our uprising on the internet. Journalists, and especially those with cameras, are being taken away by the police." President Hosni Mubarak had tried to shut down internet service providers during 18 days of protest before stepping down as Egyptian leader on Friday.

Mostafa Boshashi, head of the Algerian League for Human Rights, said: "Algerians want their voices to be heard too. They want democratic change.

"At the moment people are being prevented from travelling to demonstrations. The entrances to cities like Algeria have been blocked."

At least five people were killed in similar protests in Algeria in January, when the Interior Ministry said 1000 people were arrested.

On Saturday at least 500 had been arrested by early evening in Algiers alone, with hundreds more in Annaba, Constantine and Oran taking part in the so-called February 12 Revolution.

"The police station cells are overflowing," said Sofiane Hamidouche, a demonstrator in Annaba.

"There are running battles taking place all over the city. It's chaos. As night falls the situation will get worse."

Algeria has the eighth largest reserves of natural gas in the world, and is also oil-rich, but its youthful population suffers mass unemployment, a chronic lack of housing, and widespread poverty. Political corruption is also endemic.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...st-mounts.html





U.S. Has Secret Tools to Force Internet on Dictators
Spencer Ackerman

When Hosni Mubarak shut down Egypt’s internet and cellphone communications, it seemed that all U.S. officials could do was ask him politely to change his mind. But the American military does have a second set of options, if it ever wants to force connectivity on a country against its ruler’s wishes.

There’s just one wrinkle. “It could be considered an act of war,” says John Arquilla, a leading military futurist.

The U.S. military has no shortage of devices — many of them classified — that could restore connectivity to a restive populace cut off from the outside world by its rulers. It’s an attractive option for policymakers who want an option for future Egypts, between doing nothing and sending in the Marines. And it might give teeth to the Obama administration’s demand that foreign governments consider internet access an inviolable human right.

Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, spent years urging the military to logic-bomb adversary websites, disrupt hostile online presences, and even cause communications blackouts to separate warring factions before they go nuclear. What the military can turn off, he says, it can also turn on — or at least fill dead airspace.

Consider the Commando Solo, the Air Force’s airborne broadcasting center. A revamped cargo plane, the Commando Solo beams out psychological operations in AM and FM for radio, and UHF and VHF for TV. Arquilla doesn’t want to go into detail how the classified plane could get a denied internet up and running again, but if it flies over a bandwidth-denied area, suddenly your Wi-Fi bars will go back up to full strength.

“We have both satellite- and nonsatellite-based assets that can come in and provide access points to get people back online,” Arquilla says. “Some of it is done from ships. You could have a cyber version of pirate radio.”

Then there are cell towers in the sky. The military already uses its aircraft as communications relays in places like Afghanistan. Some companies are figuring out upgrades: FastCom, an effort led by the defense firm Textron, is a project that hooks up cellular pods to the belly of a drone, the better to keep cellular and data connections in the air without pilot fatigue. Underneath the drones, a radius of a few kilometers on the ground would have 3G coverage.

Sharon Corona, a spokeswoman for the project, says that there’s an obstacle to using a technology like FastCom for an Egypt-like situation: The recipient devices need to be able to talk with the cell and data signal. But compliant phones or netbooks — small and lightweight — could conceivably be smuggled into a denied area.

Alternatively, operatives could smuggle small satellite dishes into a country. Small dishes were crucial to getting the internet back running in Haiti after last year’s earthquake. It’s how cameramen in war zones rapidly transmit high quality video from the middle of nowhere.

Of course, slow-flying drones or a broadcasting center in the sky have an inherent weakness: They’re sitting ducks for any half-decent air defense system. (And did we mention that Hosni Mubarak became a national hero for his air defense prowess in the 1973 war against Israel?)

That leads to another possibility: “Just give people Thuraya satellite phones,” says John Pike of Globalsecurity.org. The cheapish phones hunt down signals from space hardware.

Even expanding access to the military’s own satellite communications networks is theoretically possible, Arquilla says. But he won’t say more than that: “Let’s just say that’s an area decided at the level of the commander-in-chief.”

In the absence of those options, there’s always the old-school methods of jamming a government’s communication frequencies and broadcasting favorable messages. That’s the Commando Solo’s specialty. “Jamming is something we think about in the context of shooting wars,” says Arquilla, but “it may have its place in social revolutions as well.”

The trouble is, if a government follows Egypt’s lead and turns off the internet, it’s not going to be keen to see a meddling foreign power turn it back on.

That act might not be as provocative as sending in ground troops or dropping bombs. But it’s still an act of what you might call forced online entry — by definition, a hostile one.

In situations like Egypt, siding with an uprising against a longtime ally is a difficult choice, whether analog or digital.

That might be why the military hasn’t done it. Asked about whether the Pentagon would consider deploying mobile connectivity to restore internet access for a social uprising, all a senior official would say is that such a situation was “hypothetical.”

And all that underscores how Egypt’s internet shutoff pushed the poorly defined limits of cyber hostilities. Foreign actors don’t really have a blueprint for responding. The U.S. military “has a great deal of expertise on rebuilding communications network, but that’s … very different when the government is interested in resisting,” Arquilla says. “This is far less an engineering problem and far more a political one.”
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011...ols-force-net/





Air Force to Deploy Surveillance Supercomputer Aboard Superblimp

The U.S. Air Force is developing a massive blimp to gather and process all intelligence feeds from Afghanistan; the air ship will be longer than a football field and seven times the size of the Goodyear Blimp and will be able to stay afloat for nearly a week at nearly four miles up; the key feature of the ship will be its sophisticated supercomputer which can process 300 terabytes of data an hour; this computer will help limit data overload as surveillance sensors become increasingly complex; it currently takes fourteen analysts to monitor a single feed from a predator and the next generation drones will have ninety-six cameras; the blimp's first test flight is scheduled for 15 October

As police departments in the United States continue to float the idea of using blimps as surveillance vehicles, the Air Force is pressing ahead with its plan to launch a massive blimp that would function as a centralized intelligence command center in Afghanistan.

The air ship, seven times the size of the Goodyear Blimp, would fly at 20,000 feet and collect data from the various unmanned surveillance drones patrolling the skies. The supercomputer housed aboard the blimp will sift the various data streams and automatically direct sensors to collect critical information.

The Air Force already monitors all the video and audio streams from surveillance drones, but the time it takes to personnel to determine which bits of information are critical have sometimes allowed the enemy to escape.

The supercomputer is designed to cut down on this lag time and feed coordinated information to troops on the ground in less than fifteen seconds.

Lt. Gen. David Deptula, the recent head of the Air Force’s intelligence operations believes the project “could change the nature of overhead surveillance.” He says, “There’s huge potential there.”

The next generation of surveillance equipment, Gorgon Stare and wide-area airborne surveillance systems (WAAS), use hives of a dozen cameras to film areas within a 2.5 mile radius. With as many as ninety-six cameras, these drones can cause massive data overloads for both human operators and digital networks.

It currently requires nineteen analysts to watch a single feed from a Predator drone. With the next generation surveillance equipment, a single drone would generate 274 terabytes of data every hour from its ninety-six cameras.

Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that he would need 2,000 analysts to process the information collected by a single drone using WAAS sensors.

To prevent this information overload from overwhelming intelligence analysts, the Air Force is designing the supercomputer to be housed aboard the Blue Devil.

The computer will have the equivalent of 2,000 single-core servers and process up to 300 terabytes an hour. Instead of sending all of this processed information to troops, like with today’s sensors, the Blue Devil’s processors will calculate the data and filter it into an easily searchable format. Troops on the ground will then be able to search the ship’s computer for relevant information.

Lt. Gen. Deptula explains that this process will reduce bandwidth consumption.

“People ask: ‘With all these sensors, how’re you gonna transmit all that data down to the ground?’ Well, we don’t necessarily need to send it all down,” said Deptula.“ A potential solution is to process part of the data on-board, and only send what is of interest. That reduces the bandwidth requirements.”

The ambitious project dubbed “Blue Devil” will cost $211 million and is currently in its second phase of development.

According to Wired Magazine’s Danger Room, a source close to the project says the Blue Devil will be “one of the largest airships produced since World War II.”

“It’s freakishly large,” the source adds.

When completed, the airship will be longer than a football field at 350 feet and seven times the size of the Goodyear Blimp at 1.4 million cubic feet.

The blimp’s unprecedented size will help it carry enough fuel and helium to stay afloat for as long as a week at nearly four miles up. Most blimps fly at 3,000 feet or less.

The U.S. Army is also at work on a competing airship project, the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, that could stay afloat for nearly three weeks thanks to a sophisticated hybrid hull.

The Air Force is focusing its efforts on designing a complex set of onboard sensors and a supercomputer, rather than concentrating on hull design.

In addition to the supercomputer, the airship will carry on-board listening devices, a WAAS system, day and night cameras, and communications relays and receivers for ground sensors.

The Blue Devil’s first test flight is scheduled for 15 October.
http://homelandsecuritynewswire.com/...ard-superblimp





TorChat, Anonymous and Secure Messaging and File Transfers
Sebastian Anthony

Using the Tor network of virtual tunnels, TorChat is a small, portable and open-source IM client that allows for completely anonymous and secure communications and file sharing. It works on both Windows and Linux.

If you're on Windows, all you have to do is download, unzip, and run torchat.exe. It will automatically connect to the Tor network -- which will take a few minutes -- but then it operates just like a normal IM client. Once your name goes green on the contact list, you're good to go. You can add contacts (you will need their random string of 16 numbers and letters), and give them nicknames. You can even set an avatar and give yourself a short profile description. File sharing is simply a matter of dragging and dropping a file into a chat window.

Feature-wise, TorChat isn't remarkable -- instead, it's the simplicity and ease of configuration that makes TorChat so awesome. Because it's portable and your buddy list is stored in plain text, you can put yourself into the buddy list -- and then zip it up and put it on your website. If someone wants to communicate with you securely, they only have to download the bundle, run torchat.exe, and they'll be securely and anonymously talking to you within minutes. Read the TorChat site for more configuration info.

The Tor network is already used extensively for sensitive communication, such as whistleblowing, and with TorChat it makes the process a two-click affair. If you're in a line of work that requires you to keep your sources protected, TorChat is the best and easiest solution that we've seen.
http://downloadsquad.switched.com/20...ile-transfers/





Research Problem: Measuring the Safety of the Tor Network
arma

We need a better understanding of how much anonymity the Tor network provides against a partial network adversary who observes and/or operates some of the network. Specifically, we want to understand the chances that this class of adversary can observe a user's traffic coming into the network and also the corresponding traffic exiting the network.

Most of our graphs historically have looked at the total number of relays over time. But this simple scalar doesn't take into account relay capacity, exit policies, geographic or network location, etc.

One concrete problem from this bad metric is that when many new relays show up (e.g. due to a political event), we really don't have any insight about how the diversity of the new relays compares to the rest of the network. The simplistic metric also gets misused in academic research papers to produce misleading results like "I can sign up 2% of the Tor relays and capture 50% of the paths," when what they mean is "I can provide half the capacity in the Tor network and capture half the paths."

There are four parts to this research problem. First, we need a broad array of metrics that reflect various instances of our partial network adversary. Second, we need to understand for each metric how stable it is (sensitivity analysis) and what changes in the Tor network would efficiently improve (or harm) it. Third, we should make the calculations as realistic as possible based on actual Tor client behavior. Last, we need a better infrastructure for comparing the safety impact from alternate design scenarios, for example different path selection or route balancing algorithms.

We'd love to work with you to help answer these questions.

Part one: new metrics

The network graphs on our metrics site show the number of relays and advertised capacity over time. More importantly, we've archived all the relay descriptors and network consensus documents going back to 2004. So now we can ask some questions to better capture the safety of the network over time.

What is the entropy of path selection over time? When we add really fast relays, the capacity of the network goes up but the safety of the network can go down because it gets less balanced. We can start with a simple approximation of a Tor client's path selection behavior — e.g., choose the first hop randomly weighted by bandwidth, and choose the final hop randomly weighted by bandwidth from among the nodes that can exit to port 80. I'm particularly interested in the entropy of the first hop and the third hop, since those are the key points for the anonymity Tor provides against a partial network adversary. Calculating entropy on the probability distribution of possible first hops is easy (as is last hops), and it's worth looking at these individual components so we have better intuition about where our anonymity comes from. Then we'd also want to look at the unified metric (probability distribution of first cross last), which in the simple approximation is the sum of the two entropies.

Then we should do the same entropy calculations, but lumping relays together based on various shared characteristics. For example, country diversity: what's the entropy of path selection over time when you treat all relays in Germany as one big relay, all relays in France as one big relay, etc? How about autonomous system (AS) based diversity, where all the relays in AT&T's network are lumped together?

Another angle to evaluate is what expected fraction of paths have the first and last hop in the same country, or the same AS, or the same city, or the same continent. What expected fraction of paths cross at least one ocean? How about looking at the AS-level paths between relays, like the research from Feamster or Edman? What user locations are more safe or less safe in the above metrics?

It's plausible to imagine we can also gain some intuition when looking at the possible diversity rather than the entropy. How many ASes or countries total are represented in the network at a given time?

The goal here isn't to come up with the one true metric for summarizing Tor's safety. Rather, we need to recognize that there are many threat models to consider at once, so we need many different views into what types of safety the network can offer.

Part two: how robust are these metrics?

For each of the above metrics, how stable are they when you add or remove a few relays? Are certain relays critical to the safety of the Tor network? One way to look at this question is to graph the fall-off of safety as you remove relays from the network, in one case choosing victims randomly and in another choosing them to optimally harm the network. In the latter case, I expect it will look pretty dire. Then look at the same scenario, but now look at the safety of the network as you remove capacity from the network. For example, consider that the adversary's cost of removing a relay is equal to its capacity. Then explore these attacks again, but rather than looking at attacking individual relays look at attacks on ASes, countries, or continents.

Then look at the robustness over time: is an adversary that can knock out X% of the capacity in the network (for various values of X) getting more or less influential as the network grows? How about an adversary who can knock out an absolute capacity of K bytes for various values of K?

From the other direction, are there certain geographic or network locations where adding relays with a given capacity will most influence your safety metrics? This influence could be positive ("where should I put my relay to best help the Tor network?") or negative ("where should I put my relay to best attack users?").

Is there any relationship between the rate of new relay arrival (e.g. during political events or after popular conferences) and the level of diversity of these relays?

Part three: how good was the simple approximation?

While the above calculations assume a simplified path selection model, the reality is more complex. Clients avoid using more than one relay from a given "/16" network or family in their paths. They only use relays with the Guard flag for their first hop. They read weighting parameters from the consensus and use them to avoid Guard-flagged nodes for positions other than the first hop and avoid Exit-flagged nodes for positions other than the last hop, in proportion to how much capacity is available in each category. They track how long it takes them to build circuits, and preemptively discard the slowest 20% of their paths.

Accounting for all of these behaviors (especially the last one) will be hard, and you'll want to work closely with the Tor developers to make sure you're moving in the right direction. But even if you don't handle all of them, having a more realistic sense of how clients behave should allow you to better capture the safety in the live Tor network. If you want extra feedback, you can compare your path selection predictions with paths that Tor chooses in practice (full data here).

We should rerun the above experiments with the more accurate client behavior, and see if any of the results change substantially, and if so, why. These changes are great places to recognize and reconsider tradeoffs between what we should do for maximum safety according to these metrics vs what we should do to optimize other metrics like performance and vulnerability to other attacks. Some of these differences are intentional; for example, we don't give the Guard flag to every relay because we want to reduce the churn of entry guards. But others are due to design mistakes; for example, we are probably not giving the Guard flag out as broadly as we should, and I imagine that really hurts the network's safety.

How far away is the "optimal" approximation curve you produced in part one from the "in practice" curve here? How does the divergence from the optimal look over time? That is, were we at 50% of optimal back in 2007, but now we're only at 20%?

Part four: consider alternate designs

Once we've looked at how safe the Tor network has been over time for our broad array of metrics, we should do experiments to evaluate alternate network designs.

Examples include:

A) If we give out Guard flags according to some other algorithm, how much safety can we get back?

B) In Tor 0.2.1.x we started load balancing based on active bandwidth measurements, so we use the bandwidth weights in the network consensus rather than the weights in each relay descriptor. We know that change improved performance, but at what cost to safety?

C) What happens to the network diversity if we put a low cap on the bandwidth weighting of any node that hasn't been assigned a measurement by the bandwidth authorities yet, to protect against relays that lie about their bandwidth? If there's no real effect, we should do it; but if there's a large effect, we should find a better plan.

D) If we move forward with our plans to discard all relays under a given bandwidth capacity, how will various choices of bandwidth threshold impact the network's safety?

E) How about if we discard the X% of paths with the highest expected latency, as suggested by Stephen Rollyson?

F) What if some Tor users choose their paths to optimize a different network property (like latency or jitter), as suggested by Micah Sherr? The infrastructure you've built to measure diversity here should apply there too.

G) If only a given fraction of exit relays support IPv6, how much does it reduce your anonymity to be going to an IPv6-only destination?

We've put a lot of effort in the past year into understanding how to improve Tor's performance, but many of these design changes involve trading off safety for performance, and we still have very little understanding about how much safety Tor offers in the first place. Please help!

If you like Java, check out the metrics database tool (and its manual) that Karsten maintains.
http://blog.torproject.org/blog/rese...ty-tor-network





At CIA, Grave Mistakes, Then Promotions
Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo

In December 2003, security forces boarded a bus in Macedonia and snatched a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri. For the next five months, el-Masri was a ghost. Only a select group of CIA officers knew he had been whisked to a secret prison for interrogation in Afghanistan.

But he was the wrong guy.

A hard-charging CIA analyst had pushed the agency into one of the biggest diplomatic embarrassments of the U.S. war on terrorism. Yet despite recommendations by an internal review, the analyst was never punished. In fact, she has risen to one of the premier jobs in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, helping lead President Barack Obama's efforts to disrupt al-Qaida.

In the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, officers who committed serious mistakes that left people wrongly imprisoned or even dead have received only minor admonishments or no punishment at all, an Associated Press investigation has revealed. The botched el-Masri case is but one example of a CIA accountability process that even some within the agency say is unpredictable and inconsistent.

Though Obama has sought to put the CIA's interrogation program behind him, the result of a decade of haphazard accountability is that many officers who made significant missteps are now the senior managers fighting the president's spy wars.

The AP investigation of the CIA's actions revealed a disciplinary system that takes years to make decisions, hands down reprimands inconsistently and is viewed inside the agency as prone to favoritism and manipulation. When people are disciplined, the punishment seems to roll downhill, sparing senior managers even when they were directly involved in operations that go awry.

Two officers involved in the death of a prisoner in Afghanistan, for instance, received no discipline and have advanced into Middle East leadership positions. Other officers were punished after participating in a mock execution in Poland and playing a role in the death of a prisoner in Iraq. Those officers retired, then rejoined the intelligence community as contractors.

Some lawmakers were so concerned about the lack of accountability that last year they created a new inspector general position with broad authority to investigate missteps in the CIA or anywhere else in the intelligence community.

"There are occasions when people ought to be fired," former Sen. Kit Bond said in November as he completed his tenure as the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "Someone who made a huge error ought not to be working at the agency. We've seen instance after instance where there hasn't been accountability."

---

In a makeshift prison fashioned out of an abandoned Afghan brick factory, CIA officers left terrorism suspect Gul Rahman overnight in an unheated cell as the early morning temperature hovered around freezing.

Known as Salt Pit, the jail was the precursor to the CIA's secret network of overseas prisons. Guards wore masks. There, stripped half naked, Rahman froze to death in November 2002.

The CIA's inspector general launched an inquiry. The results have never been made public but were summarized for AP by former officials who, like most of the dozens of people who discussed the CIA's disciplinary system, insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.

The investigation determined that the CIA's top officer at the prison, Matt, displayed poor judgment by leaving Rahman in the cold. The report also expressed concerns about the role of Paul, the CIA station chief in Afghanistan, and later placed some blame on agency management at headquarters.

The AP is identifying Matt, Paul and other current and former undercover CIA officers - though only by partial names - because they are central to the question of who is being held accountable and because it enhances the credibility of AP's reporting in this case. AP's policy is to use names whenever possible. The AP determined that even the most sophisticated commercial information services could not be used to derive the officers' full names or, for example, find their home addresses knowing only their first names and the fact of their CIA employment. The AP has withheld further details that could help identify them.

The CIA asked that the officers not be identified at all, saying doing so would benefit terrorists and hostile nations. Spokesman George Little called the AP's decision "nothing short of reckless" but did not provide any specific information about threats. The CIA has previously provided detailed arguments in efforts to persuade senior executives at the AP and other U.S. news organizations to withhold or delay publishing information it said would endanger lives or national security, but that did not happen in this case.

The CIA regularly reviews books by retired officers and allows them to identify their undercover colleagues by first name and last initial, even when they're still on the job. The CIA said only the agency is equipped to make those decisions through a formal review process.

After the inspector general reviewed the Rahman case, he referred the matter to the Department of Justice for the first of several legal reviews. Though current and former officials say it was a close call, prosecutors decided not to bring charges.

Next, a review board comprised of senior officers examined the case and found a number of troubling problems. The board was conflicted.

Matt was a young spy operating a prison in a war zone with little guidance about what was and wasn't allowed. The CIA had never been in the interrogation and detention business, so agency lawyers, President George W. Bush's White House and the Justice Department were writing the rules as they went.

A former Naval intelligence officer, Matt had repeatedly asked the CIA for heaters and additional help, but his requests were ignored by headquarters and by Paul, who was in charge of all CIA operations in Afghanistan but who had no experience in a war zone.

"How far do you go to sanction a person who made a mistake with one hand tied behind his back?" one former intelligence officer asked, recalling the board's discussions only on condition of anonymity because they are private.

Finally, more than three years after the inquiry began, the board recommended Matt be disciplined. Though the board believed he had not intended to kill Rahman, it determined that as the head of the prison, he was responsible. The board did not recommend punishing Paul. And nobody at headquarters was to be disciplined.

The recommendations were viewed as unfair by some in the CIA. A young officer was about to be disciplined while his supervisors all got a pass.

In the end, it turned out, everyone was treated the same. The CIA's No. 3 employee, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, reviewed the recommendations and decided nobody would be punished. Foggo was later imprisoned in an unrelated corruption case.

In another case involving detainee mistreatment, a CIA interrogator named Albert put an unloaded gun and a bitless drill to the head of an al-Qaida operative at a secret prison in Poland. The inspector general labeled this a "mock execution" - something the U.S. is forbidden to do. Albert was reprimanded. His boss, Mike, who ran the secret prison, retired while the case was under investigation.

Albert returned to the agency as a CIA contractor and helped train future officers. Ron, the Poland station chief who witnessed the mock execution but did not stop it, now runs the Central European Division and oversees all operations in Russia.

Since Rahman's death, Paul's career has advanced quickly. He is chief of the Near East Division, the section that oversees spy operations in Iraq, Iran and other Middle East countries. It's one of the most important jobs in the agency. Matt has completed assignments in Bahrain, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he was deputy chief of tribal operations.

Little, the CIA spokesman, said the agency's internal review process was vigorous and thorough. In other cases, CIA Director Leon Panetta has fired employees for misconduct, he said.

"Any suggestion that the agency does not take seriously its obligation to review employee misconduct - including those of senior officers - is flat wrong," Little said.

---

The CIA wants its officers to take chances. Spying is a risky business and, as former CIA Director Michael Hayden told Congress, the agency wants its officers operating so close to the legal boundaries that they get "chalk on their cleats."

When officers cross those lines, discipline is usually handled internally, which usually means secretly. In complicated cases, the director can convene a group of senior officers to review the matter, a panel known as an accountability board. But the board can only make recommendations. It's up to the director whether to accept them.

These layers of review, along with parallel Justice Department and congressional investigations, can drag on for years, leaving careers in limbo. And the results can leave veteran officers confused about why some people were disciplined and others were not.

"It's unpredictable and scattershot," said John Maguire, a former senior operations officer who spent 23 years at the CIA.

There are four branches of the CIA, but one commands more attention and wields more clout than the others. The National Clandestine Service conducts espionage and runs secret operations. It's the stuff of spy novels and Hollywood movies. It's also the place most likely to get into high-profile trouble.

So when disciplinary issues arise, a politically appointed CIA director faces a dilemma. Cracking down on missteps might earn the director some praise on Capitol Hill, but it's also likely to cause grousing within the clubby, tight-knit spy community.

Directors who broadened the reach of the clandestine service, like William Casey under President Ronald Reagan, are part of CIA lore. Those who tried to rein in the spies, like John Deutch under President Bill Clinton, are still disparaged internally, years later.

The 9/11 Commission Report faulted the CIA for being "institutionally averse to risk" before the terrorist attacks. In the post-9/11 CIA, officials say, nobody wants to be accused of discouraging risk taking.

There's a built-in tension between supporting officers who make difficult decisions and holding them responsible when those decisions are incorrect, former CIA Director James Woolsey said in an interview.

"If you don't want to deal with that tension, you should find another government job, one where you're not faced with judging people who have made life and death decisions," Woolsey said.

---

The fallout from the bungled el-Masri kidnapping is an example of that tension.

At the Counterterrorism Center, some had doubts that el-Masri was a terrorist, current and former U.S. officials said. But Frances, a counterterrorism analyst with no field experience, pushed ahead. She supported el-Masri's rendition - in which the CIA snatches someone and takes him to another country. The AP agreed to the CIA's request to refer to Frances by her middle name because her first is unusual.

Senior managers knew what was happening, and a lawyer in the Counterterrorism Center, Elizabeth, signed off on the decision, former officials said.

Once el-Masri arrived in Afghanistan, however, questions persisted. A second detainee in U.S. custody looked at a picture of el-Masri and told CIA officers that they'd grabbed the wrong man. Perhaps most glaring, el-Masri had a German passport. The man the CIA was looking for was not a German citizen.

El-Masri says he was beaten, sodomized and drugged.

Even after the CIA confirmed that the German passport was authentic, Frances was not convinced, former officials said. She argued against freeing el-Masri, saying his phone had been linked to terrorists. For weeks, the U.S. knowingly held the wrong man, as top CIA officers tried to figure out what to do.

Five months after the abduction, the U.S. privately acknowledged to the Germans what had happened. El-Masri was quietly released.

"I was blindfolded, put back on a plane, flown to Europe and left on a hilltop in Albania - without any explanation or apology for the nightmare that I had endured," el-Masri wrote in The Los Angeles Times in 2007.

The CIA's inspector general opened an investigation and determined there had been no legal justification for el-Masri's rendition. It was a startling finding. Though the inspector general does not make legal conclusions, the CIA's watchdog had essentially said the agency acted illegally.

The document has never been released but its findings were summarized by people who have seen it. The report came down hard on Frances. She had been warned about the uncertainties surrounding el-Masri's identity. There hadn't been enough evidence for a rendition, the report said, but Frances pushed ahead.

"You can't render people because they have called a bad guy or know a bad guy," a former U.S. intelligence official said, describing the investigation's findings on condition of anonymity because the report still has not been released. "She was convinced he was a bad guy."

Nobody in management was singled out for discipline.

The inspector general's report posed a dilemma for senior managers. Even before the el-Masri case, station chiefs had complained to top CIA officials raising concerns about Frances' operational judgment. But she was one of the few analysts who had a deep knowledge of al-Qaida before 9/11, working in a former unit known as Alec Station created to track down Osama bin Laden.

In the nascent war on terrorism, Frances and her team were essential and had racked up successes. She was a tireless worker who made the wrong call under intense pressure. Would disciplining her send a message that the best way to handle a tough decision was not to make one?

The report also faulted Elizabeth, the lawyer. The inspector general said her legal analysis was flawed. Elizabeth has a reputation in the agency as a diligent and cautious lawyer. Before she agreed to conduct any legal analysis on interrogation tactics, for instance, she insisted on being waterboarded, current and former officials said.

Hayden reviewed the report and decided Elizabeth should be reprimanded. Frances, however, would be spared, current and former officials said.

Hayden didn't believe that two people who made similar mistakes had to be treated the same way. Job titles and morale mattered. He told colleagues that he gave Frances a pass because he didn't want to deter initiative within the counterterrorism ranks, a former senior intelligence official recalled.

Hayden would not discuss any specific cases, but he said in an AP interview, "Beyond the requirements of fairness and justice, you always made these decisions with an eye toward the future health and operational success of the institution."

The disciplinary action made Elizabeth ineligible for bonuses and pay increases worth thousands of dollars. But it didn't stall her career. She was promoted to the senior ranks in 2005 and is now legal adviser to the CIA's Near East division.

While the inspector general was investigating the mishandled el-Masri case, congressional investigators discovered several other CIA renditions that seemed to rest on bad legal footing, a U.S. intelligence official said. The CIA looked into them and conceded that, yes, the renditions had been based on faulty analysis.

But the agency said the renditions would have been approved even if the correct analysis had been used, so nobody was disciplined.

Frances now runs the CIA's Global Jihad unit, the counterterrorism squad dedicated to hunting down al-Qaida worldwide. She regularly briefs Panetta, making her an influential voice in Obama's intelligence circle.

---

As evidence mounted of U.S. abuse of prisoners in the prison in Iraq, the CIA cleaned house at its station in Baghdad. Many former officers point to that upheaval as an example of accountability at work.

That's only partially true, AP's investigation found.

The Baghdad case is also a prime example of how peculiar the CIA's disciplinary system can be.

U.S. authorities at Abu Ghraib forced prisoners to pose naked, wear leashes and perform sexual acts. And in 2003, an Iraqi prisoner named Manadel al-Jamadi died in a shower room under CIA interrogation.

Al-Jamadi was one of the CIA's "ghost" prisoners, those men who were captured and interrogated but whose names were never entered in the Army's books. His head was covered by a hood. His arms were shackled behind his back, then were bound to a barred window. That way, he could stand without pain but if he tried to lower himself, his arms would be painfully stretched above and behind him.

About a half hour later, a CIA interrogator called for military guards to reposition al-Jamadi. He was slouching over, his arms stretched behind him. The CIA believed al-Jamadi was playing possum, investigative documents show.

He was dead.

An Army autopsy report labeled al-Jamadi's death a homicide. He had been badly injured during a struggle with the Navy SEALs who captured him, doctors said. But those injuries alone wouldn't have killed him, the medical examiner said. The strained position and the bag over his head contributed to his death, the doctor said.

The scandal at Abu Ghraib became a rallying point for anti-U.S. sentiment abroad. Eleven soldiers were convicted of wrongdoing at the prison. All were publicly tried and were kicked out of the Army.

The CIA would face no such public scrutiny. Like its ghost prisoners, the CIA might as well have never been at Abu Ghraib.

Steve, a CIA officer who ran the detainee unit there, received a letter of reprimand, former officials said. Steve processed al-Jamadi into prison after the Navy SEALs captured him. Investigators found that Steve violated procedure by not having a doctor examine al-Jamadi. That decision delayed important medical care for a man who would be dead within an hour.

Some on the Abu Ghraib review board believed Steve should have gotten a harsher punishment, according to former senior intelligence officers privy to the board's decisions. Steve retired and is now back at CIA as a contractor.

A CIA review board also faulted Baghdad's station chief, Gerry Meyer, and his deputy, Gordon. But they were not blamed just for the problems at Abu Ghraib. The review panel said they were too inexperienced to run the busy Baghdad station. As the situation in Iraq worsened, the station ballooned from dozens of officers into a staff of hundreds. Senior CIA managers left Meyer and Gordon in place until they were over their heads, the review panel said.

Meyer resigned rather than take a demotion. His name and job title have been identified in many books and articles since his resignation.

Gordon was temporarily barred from going overseas and sent to a training facility. But he salvaged his career at the agency, rising within the Counterterrorism Center to run the Pakistan-Afghanistan Department. In that role, Gordon, whom former colleagues describe as a very capable officer, has briefed Obama.

---

Since 9/11, retired CIA officers have published a variety of books opining on what ails the CIA. Their conclusions differ, but they are in nearly unanimous agreement that the system of accountability is broken.

There are accounts of womanizing CIA managers who repeatedly violated the agency's rules, only to receive a slap on the wrist, if anything, followed by promotion. Officers who were favored by senior managers at headquarters were spared discipline. Those without such political ties were more likely to face punishment.

In his book "Beyond Repair," longtime CIA officer Charles Faddis contrasted the CIA with the military, where he said officers are held responsible for their mistakes and the mistakes of their subordinates.

"There is no such system in place within the CIA, and the long-term effect is catastrophically corrosive," Faddis wrote.

On Panetta's watch, about 100 employees, including about 20 senior officers, have been subjected to disciplinary review, a U.S. intelligence official said. Of those, most were disciplined and more than a third were fired or resigned, said the official.

Last year, Panetta finally punished 16 current and former officers involved in a mishap in Peru nearly a decade ago. A civilian airplane that was misidentified as a drug flight was shot down, killing an American missionary and her young daughter.

The current officers received "administrative penalties." And though there's no formal way to discipline a retired officer, Panetta canceled a consulting contract for one of the former officials involved.

Still, the case lasted for years as the CIA and Justice Department investigated, leaving careers in question as officers wondered what would happen to them. Officers who were ultimately exonerated had to wait for the process to play out.

Panetta was forceful in his handling of the Peru case. He was far less harsh in his response to a deadly attack at a CIA base more recently in Khost, Afghanistan.

Humam al-Balawi, a supposed al-Qaida turncoat whom the CIA codenamed "Wolf," had promised to lead the U.S. to Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. But al-Balawi was really a double agent, and as the CIA ushered him onto its base in December 2009, he detonated a suicide bomb. The explosion killed five CIA officers, including the base chief, and two contractors. Six other people were injured in an attack that led to criticism in and out of the CIA that the officers had violated basic rules.

In the face of that criticism, Panetta quickly defended his fallen officers. In a Washington Post op-ed written days after the attack, he said the CIA would learn from the lessons of Khost. But he said little was to be gained by accusations of bad spycraft.

"No one ignored the hazards" of bringing the Jordanian man to the CIA base, Panetta said.

Nine months later, a CIA review determined the opposite. Warnings had, in fact, been ignored. Jordanian intelligence had raised concerns about al-Balawi. But the promise of killing or capturing al-Zawahiri clouded the agency's decision-making, the review found. Security protocols weren't followed. Officers displayed bad judgment.

Many former officers were angry at that outcome. Some took the unusual step of speaking publicly about it. They said CIA managers should be held responsible. Officers in the field don't make decisions in a vacuum, they said, and you can't blame the dead for everything that went wrong that day. The planning for the operation, for instance, was directly overseen by Stephen Kappes, the agency's now-retired second in command, and by Mike, the longtime chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center who helped Frances and the Khost base chief rise through the ranks despite their operational inexperience.

"It's not about retribution," Maguire, the retired veteran CIA officer said. "It's about maintaining discipline and order and responsibility up and down the command chain. Otherwise trust is eroded."

Panetta agreed there were widespread problems. But, in a move that's been compared to former CIA Director Porter Goss' decision not to hold an accountability review for the failures before 9/11, Panetta opted not to punish anyone.

The director explained his reasoning to journalists in October.

"The conclusion was that the blame just didn't rest with one individual or group of individuals," Panetta said. "That there were some systemic failures that took place here."

It was a collective failure, Panetta said. So nobody was held accountable.

---

AP's Washington investigative team can be reached at DCinvestigations(at)ap.org
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...02-09-02-09-23





Former FBI Agent Turned ACLU Attorney: Feds Routinely Spy on Citizens

Domestic spying on citizens is done by too many federal agencies, targeting people based on religion and political activity.
Ms. Smith

Too often, we've seen U.S. Intelligence agencies whose actions are cloaked in secrecy until someone uncovers governmental abuse that places innocent people under surveillance or on watchlists. It's truly scary to ponder how much more stays hidden. I'd love to interview an FBI agent with in-depth national security and intelligence experience, but one who would answer truthfully and believes in privacy. It is with delight that I interviewed Mike German, formerly a 16-year veteran as an FBI special agent who became ACLU's Policy Counsel on National Security, Immigration and Privacy.

What was the final straw that led you to quit the FBI and start at the ACLU?

German: I left the FBI when the DOJ Inspector General failed to investigate an FBI cover-up of a failed FBI counterterrorism investigation I reported, or protect me from official retaliation that resulted. I reported the information to Sen. Grassley and resigned. Grassley put pressure on the IG, so almost two years later the IG issued a report that showed the FBI falsified and backdated records about the case and retaliated against me for reporting it. I joined the ACLU two years later because I knew from my counterterrorism work that protecting civil liberties and keeping law enforcement accountable is what keeps America safe from terrorism and other crime.

Are you followed, tracked or otherwise under scrutiny from any U.S. intelligence agency for the work you have done in revealing what is really happening in America?

German: I don't know. Much of my work is public, so it's not hard to find out what I'm doing. But one of the problems is that intelligence surveillance is conducted in such secrecy that it's virtually impossible to know whether illegal surveillance is taking place.

What is the most disturbing fact(s) that you have uncovered?

German: The most disturbing thing we've uncovered is the scope of domestic intelligence activities taking place today. Domestic spying is now being done by a host of federal agencies (FBI, DOD, DHS, DNI) as well as state and local law enforcement and even private companies. Too often this spying targets political activity and religious practices. We've documented intelligence activities targeting or obstructing First Amendment-protected activity in 33 states and DC.

What do you see as the biggest threat to U.S. citizens' rights that is happening in our country?

German: The biggest threat is that the increase surveillance of political activity will create a chilling effect that will dissuade people from exercising their rights, which will cause significant harm to participatory democracy.

Do you believe the War on Terror will continue to be an excuse to violate the rights of American citizens?

German: Unfortunately, yes.

Is there a clear-cut list of what places people on watchlists or makes them suspicious?

German: No. The FBI claims it needs only a reasonable suspicion to place people on watchlists, but there's significant evidence (including IG reports) documenting that people are improperly placed on watchlists for improper reasons.

Can people get off of a watchlist?

German: The FBI won't even confirm if you are on a watchlist. Many times when we bring suits challenging a person's suspected placement on a watchlist, it results in the travel problems being resolved, without explanation.

Are they specific keywords that are considered hot and not wise to include in email or chats without triggering scrutiny?

German: Not that I know of.

Your thoughts on TSA "enhanced pat-downs" and body scanners?

German: They are unreasonable invasions of privacy that do not enhance security.

Do you believe fusion centers keep data permanently on people?

German: Federal regulations require purging data in criminal intelligence systems every 5 years unless it is re-validated. The problem is the FBI is now collecting SAR reports from fusion centers, and it keeps this info indefinitely.

[Note: Fusion centers are where intelligence agencies collect information to fight terrorism, but many innocent people have ended up on watchlists. The SAR (suspicious activity reports) nationwide database is supposed to "connect the dots" in order to find terrorists.]

Do you believe "See Something, Say Something" can have potential benefits or land more innocent people on watchlists?

German: Yes, it suggests innocuous and ubiquitous activities like taking photos or videos, taking notes, taking measurements, raising money for charity and espousing extreme beliefs were inherently suspicious and related to terrorism. All of us engage in these behaviors and are vulnerable to erroneous reporting that creates a false suspicion of dangerousness.

[Note: "If You See Something, Say Something" program asks untrained people to report any suspicious activity which then can go into the SAR database.]

Do you believe U.S. intelligence agencies are in a position to investigate the influx of more suspicious reports in the SAR database, those that coming in by people reporting suspicious activity?

German: No, the problem has long been that too much information is collected by these agencies, and they can't possibly manage it all, so critical information isn't addressed in a timely manner.

Is there anything that journalist, bloggers, people on the Internet could do that might ease up on law enforcement's increasing desire to monitor America?

German: Report the costs of all this surveillance and point out that there's no evidence any of it actually make us safer. We've sacrificed our privacy for no security benefit.

Stay tuned for the next post where I'll take Mike German up on his suggestion to report the costs of domestic spying on Americans.
http://www.networkworld.com/communit...t_daily_am_201





Obama Assertion: FBI Can Get Phone Records Without Oversight
Marisa Taylor

The Obama administration's Justice Department has asserted that the FBI can obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process or court oversight, according to a document obtained by McClatchy.

That assertion was revealed — perhaps inadvertently — by the department in its response to a McClatchy request for a copy of a secret Justice Department memo.

Critics say the legal position is flawed and creates a potential loophole that could lead to a repeat of FBI abuses that were supposed to have been stopped in 2006.

The controversy over the telephone records is a legacy of the Bush administration's war on terror. Critics say the Obama administration appears to be continuing many of the most controversial tactics of that strategy, including the assertion of sweeping executive powers.

For years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the FBI sought and obtained thousands of telephone records for international calls in an attempt to thwart potential terrorists.

The bureau devised an informal system of requesting the records from three telecommunications firms to create what one agent called a "phone database on steroids" that included names, addresses, length of service and billing information.

A federal watchdog later said a "casual" environment developed in which FBI agents and employees of the telecom companies treated Americans' telephone records so cavalierly that one senior FBI counter-terrorism official said getting access to them was as easy as "having an ATM in your living room."

In January 2010, McClatchy asked for a copy of the Office of Legal Counsel memo under open records laws after a reference to it appeared in a heavily excised section of a report on how the FBI abused its powers when seeking telephone records.

In the report, the Justice Department's inspector general said "the OLC agreed with the FBI that under certain circumstances (word or words redacted) allows the FBI to ask for and obtain these records on a voluntary basis from the providers, without legal process or a qualifying emergency."

In its cover letter to McClatchy, however, the OLC disclosed more detail about its legal position, specifying a section of a 1978 federal wiretapping law that the Justice Department believes gives the FBI the authority. That section of the law appears to be what was redacted from the inspector general's report and reveals the type of records the FBI would be seeking, experts said.

"This is the answer to a mystery that has puzzled us for more than a year now," said Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney and expert on electronic surveillance and national security laws for the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"Now, 30 years later, the FBI has looked at this provision again and decided that it is an enormous loophole that allows them to ask for, and the phone companies to hand over, records related to international or foreign communications," he said. "Apparently, they've decided that this provision means that your international communications are a privacy-free zone and that they can get records of those communications without any legal process."

That interpretation could be stretched to apply to e-mails as well, he said.

However, Bankston said, even if the law allows the FBI to ask for the records — an assertion he disagrees with — it would prohibit the telecommunication companies from handing them over.

Meanwhile, the refusal to provide to McClatchy a copy of the memo is noteworthy because the Obama administration — in particular the OLC — has sought to portray itself as more open than the Bush administration. The decision not to release the memo means the details of the Justice Department's legal arguments in support of the FBI's controversial and discredited efforts to obtain telephone records will be kept from the public.

The FBI and Justice Department have refused to comment on the matter.

For years, the Bush administration had refused to release the memos that provided the legal underpinning for harsh interrogations of overseas terror suspects, citing national security, attorney-client privilege and the need to protect the government's deliberative process.

In April 2009, the Obama administration released four of the Bush-era memos that detailed many of the controversial interrogation methods secretly authorized by the Bush administration — from waterboarding to confining prisoners in boxes with insects.

Experts that track government spying and the Freedom of Information Act said the refusal to release the FBI memo to McClatchy appears to be improper and contrary to the intent of FOIA.

Since the memo appears to be exclusively on the OLC's legal justification for getting the phone records, the Justice Department should be able to release at least portions of it, experts said.

"It's wrong that they're withholding a legal rationale that has to do with the authorities of the FBI to collect information that affects the rights of American citizens here and abroad," said Michael German, a former FBI agent of 16 years who now works for the American Civil Liberties Union. "The law should never be secret. We should all understand what rules we're operating under and particularly when it comes to an agency that has a long history of abuse in its collection activities."

Sens. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., demanded more than a year ago that Attorney General Eric Holder release a copy of the memo.

The Justice Department has responded, Wyden said this week, but he declined to elaborate on the exchange.

"I do think the level of secrecy that surrounds the executive branch's interpretation of important surveillance law is a serious problem," he told McClatchy, "and I am continuing to press the executive branch to disclose more information to the public about what their government thinks the law means."

When President Barack Obama authorized the release of the interrogation memos, he said at the time that he was compelled to release them in part because of an open records lawsuit by the ACLU.

"While I believe strongly in transparency and accountability, I also believe that in a dangerous world, the United States must sometimes carry out intelligence operations and protect information that is classified for purposes of national security," he said.

Obama said he'd concluded the documents could be released because they wouldn't jeopardize national security and because the interrogation techniques described in the memos had been widely reported. By then, the practices were no longer in use.

The FBI's activities discussed in the most recent and still secret OLC memo also have been widely publicized. An inspector general report that revealed the existence of the FBI memo was one in a series on the FBI's informal handling of telephone records and it concluded the bureau had committed egregious violations of the law.

When revealing the existence of the OLC memo, the inspector general described it as having "significant policy implications that need to be considered by the FBI, the Department, and the Congress."

Since 2006, it appears the bureau has refrained from using the authority it continues to assert, according to another heavily redacted section of the inspector general's report.

"However, that could change, and we believe appropriate controls on such authority should be considered now, in light of the FBI's past practices and the OLC opinion," the inspector general warned.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/02/1...get-phone.html





House Rejects Measure That Would Extend Key Patriot Act Provisions Through December
Felicia Sonmez

A measure to extend key provisions of the Patriot Act counterterrorism surveillance law through December failed the House Tuesday night, with more than two-dozen Republicans bucking their party to oppose the measure.

The House measure, which was sponsored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and required a two-thirds majority for passage, failed on a 277-to-148 vote. Twenty-six Republicans voted with 122 Democrats to oppose the measure, while 67 Democrats voted with 210 Republicans to back it. Ten members did not vote.

The measure would have extended three key provisions of the Patriot Act that are set to expire on Monday, Feb. 28, unless Congress moves to reauthorize them. One of the provisions authorizes the FBI to continue using roving wiretaps on surveillance targets; the second allows the government to access "any tangible items," such as library records, in the course of surveillance; and the third is a "lone wolf" provision of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act that allows for the surveillance of targets who are not connected to an identified terrorist group.

The vote came as several tea party-aligned members of the new freshman class had been expressing doubts about the measure.

Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who highlighted his opposition to the law during his upstart 2010 Senate campaign, signaled Monday that he may vote ultimately vote against an extension when the measure comes up in the Senate, likely later this month.

"I've had a lot of reservations about the Patriot Act," Paul said when asked whether he's leaning toward voting for an extension. "We're reviewing it and we're going over it, and we will have something out probably in the next couple of days," he added. "We won't be shy about it when it comes out."

Paul's father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), was among the trio of Republican lawmakers who opposed the Patriot Act when the House approved it in October 2001.

Some young conservative lawmakers, including Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), had not yet decided how they would vote ahead of Tuesday night; Chaffetz later said in an interview after the vote that he had indeed decided to support the measure. A spokesperson for Chaffetz's Utah colleague, conservative freshman Sen. Mike Lee (R), did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, one of the Senate's newly-elected moderate Republicans, Sen. Mark Kirk (Ill.), said Monday that he's likely to vote in favor of extending the Patriot Act provisions, adding that "it would be smart" for the Senate to back a three-year extension.
"Having it disappear is not the right answer," Kirk said.

Some Democrats opposed to the Patriot Act had seized on Tuesday's vote as an opportunity to question tea-party-backed lawmakers' reverence for the Constitution.

Ohio Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who voted against the measure in 2001, released a statement Monday calling Tuesday's House vote "the tea party's first test."

"The 112th Congress began with a historic reading of the U.S. Constitution," Kucinich said. "Will anyone subscribe to the First and Fourth Amendments tomorrow when the PATRIOT Act is up for a vote? I am hopeful that members of the Tea Party who came to Congress to defend the Constitution will join me in challenging the reauthorization."

The Patriot Act has long been an issue that has not divided neatly along party lines. Former Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold was the only senator to originally vote against the measure in 2001 and was among the law's most outspoken opponents. But as portions of the law have come up for reauthorization over the years, its opponents have often included both Republican and Democratic members.

The White House on Tuesday said in a statement that it "does not object" to extending the three Patriot Act provisions until December 2011 although it "would strongly prefer" an extension until December 2013, noting that the longer timeline "provides the necessary certainty and predictability" that law enforcement agencies require while at the same time ensuring congressional oversight by maintaining a sunset.

In addition to the House legislation, the Senate is considering three competing timelines, including proposals that would permanently extend the three provisions or extend them through 2013. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), both of whom have introduced competing proposals, said Monday that committee members continue to work toward an agreement but declined to speculate as to the end result.

"We're working on that this week," Leahy said. "It's got to be done. ... I don't want it to be a situation where none of them go through."
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/...vote-some.html





Hackers Build Android Encryption Apps For Egypt
Andy Greenberg

Cellphones may be helping to connect and organize the pro-democracy protesters massing in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria. But they’re also offering a new method for authoritarians to track those protesters and monitor their communications.

So one company, Whisper Systems, is releasing a new way for Egyptians to thwart wiretaps on their smartphones. On Thursday, it launched an Egypt-specific version of two applications for Android devices: RedPhone, an encrypted voice-over-Internet calling app, and TextSecure, which encrypts users’ text messages. The Egyptian versions of the apps are available at Whispersys.com.

“When the protests started in Egypt, we stepped up our efforts to get it working there,” says a well-known hacker and spokesperson for Whisper who goes by the name Moxie Marlinspike. “Now we’re ready to release, and hopefully enable some pro-democracy advocates to communicate and coordinate without being surveilled.”

Cellphone carriers in Egypt haven’t admitted to monitoring Egyptian protesters in the recent unrest or handing over their data to the government. But a Vodafone official in 2009 confessed that the company was legally required to give up data on a group of Egyptian dissidents in 2008 who had pulled down a large poster of president Hosni Mubarak. Last week the company said that it had been forced by the Egyptian government to use its network to send out propaganda text messages to users. And when I asked the company if it was giving up users’ data, it responded only that it had “already made made a number of statements in relation to the situation in Egypt facing all of the mobile operators” and would “not comment on national security measures.”

“It’s not a stretch to think they’re monitoring calls,” says Marlinspike, a security researcher and outspoken privacy advocate. “It would be easy for them to do so. They’re likely using the same telecommunications equipment sold to carriers in the U.S., with the same backdoors.”

One major problem for the Egyptian impact of Whisper Systems’ apps: They only run on Android, which has a 3% marketshare in the country according to the research firm Canalsys, compared with the 91% share of Nokia’s far simpler Symbian operating system. But Android is taking marketshare quickly around the globe–Canalsys says it’s now overtaken Nokia’s platform worldwide–and Whisper’s the team is also working to bring RedPhone and TextSecure to other platforms.

Beta versions of RedPhone and TextSecure launched in May of last year, but have only been available in the U.S. so far, where RedPhone has about 20,000 users and TextSecure has close to 30,000. To bring the apps to Egypt, Whisper Systems had to redesign parts of its VoIP protocol and negotiate the bureaucracy of U.S. export restrictions on encryption.

Other countries with higher rates of Android use and invasive, repressive authorities–China comes to mind–need cell phone encryption, too, and Marlinspike says that his team is working to create more international versions. “But it seemed timely to get this to Egypt now,” he says, “So that the people in the most demanding circumstance get something secure.”
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenber...pps-for-egypt/





Evetone Labs Releases Hidden HD for iPad – Hides Photos and Videos
Press release

Vologda, Russia – Evetone Labs today is pleased to announce the release of Hidden HD 1.0. Hidden HD is an iPad app that allows to hide one’s private photos and videos behind a password, and focuses on ease of use and the freedom to manipulate the files inside it.

The app features iTunes File Sharing support to allow for importing multiple files from a computer. Photos and videos that are being imported appear inside the app instantly without having to relaunch it. Photos can also be imported from the device media library.

The app allows to export files back as well. Photos and video can be copied to iTunes, and photos can also be copied to the device media library. Files do not lose in quality during importing and exporting.

Hidden HD features proper multitasking support. It asks for the password every time the app is being switched to, not only when it’s being launched for the first time.

Password recovery functionality is supported through the use of a recovery question and the answer to it.

The app features integrated help on how to use iTunes File Sharing to import files from a computer and in-app email support for both photos and videos.

Device Requirements
* Compatible with iPad
* iOS 4.2 or later

Pricing and Availability

Hidden HD 1.0 is $2.99 USD (or equivalent amount in other currencies) and available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Utilities category. Free review copies are available upon request.
http://ipadmodo.com/10828/evetone-la...os-and-videos/





IPhone Attack Reveals Passwords in Six Minutes
Martyn Williams

Researchers in Germany say they've been able to reveal passwords stored in a locked iPhone in just six minutes and they did it without cracking the phone's passcode.

The attack, which requires possession of the phone, targets keychain, Apple's password management system. Passwords for networks and corporate information systems can be revealed if an iPhone or iPad is lost or stolen, said the researchers at the state-sponsored Fraunhofer Institute Secure Information Technology (Fraunhofer SIT).

It is based on existing exploits that provide access to large parts of the iOS file system even if a device is locked.

In a video that demonstrates the attack, the researchers first jailbreak the phone using existing software tools. They then install an SSH server on the iPhone that allows software to be run on the phone.

The third step is to copy a keychain access script to the phone. The script uses system functions already in the phone to access the keychain entries and, as a final step, outputs the account details it discovers to the attacker.

The attack works because the cryptographic key on current iOS devices is based on material available within the device and is independent of the passcode, the researchers said. This means attackers with access to the phone can create the key from the phone in their possession without having to hack the encrypted and secret passcode.

Using the attack, researchers were able to access and decrypt passwords in the keychain, but not passwords in other protection classes.

Among passwords that could be revealed were those for Google Mail as an MS Exchange account, other MS Exchange accounts, LDAP accounts, voicemail, VPN passwords, WiFi passwords and some App passwords. Researchers published a paper with full details of the attack's results.

"As soon as attackers are in the possession of an iPhone or iPad and have removed the device's SIM card, they can get a hold of e-mail passwords and access codes to corporate VPNs and WLANs as well," said the researchers in a statement. "Control of an e-mail account allows the attacker to acquire even more additional passwords: For many web services such as social networks the attacker only has to request a password reset."

The attack has particular significance for companies that allow employees to use iPhones on corporate networks, because it can reveal network access passwords.

"Owner's of a lost or stolen iOS device should therefore instantly initiate a change of all stored passwords," said Fraunhofer SIT. "Additionally, this should be also done for accounts not stored on the device but which might have equal or similar passwords, as an attacker might try out revealed passwords against the full list of known accounts."

Researchers at Fraunhofer SIT have previously revealed security problems with other operating systems. In late 2009 they published multiple attack scenarios criminals could use to access files protected by Microsoft's BitLocker disk-encryption technology. Last year the institute began selling a Java phone application for securely storing passwords.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/219245/





This Text Message Will Self Destruct In 60 Seconds
Mike Melanson

The self-destructing message, whether a piece of paper that mystically disintegrates at the appropriate moment or the microfiche that goes up in a poof of smoke, is a staple of any spy movie and a childhood wish of my own. TigerText, a private SMS app, has made my childhood dream a reality.

The company, which has had a free app available, has brought this spy-novel feature to the enterprise with this week's release of an enterprise app.

According to TechCrunch, the app lets users determine when and how the messages are deleted.

As we reported last year, TigerText's mobile apps allows users to send text messages or photos that can then be deleted off both the sender's and receiver's phone after a selected period of time. Once a sender selects the message lifespan (from 1 minute up to 30 days), expired messages are not only deleted from both phones, but are not stored on any server and they cannot be retrieved once expired. Users can also select a "Delete on Read" option, which will delete the text 60 seconds after the recipient opens the message.

The latest version of the app caters to businesses by allowing users to perform a one-time login to authenticate with the company. TigerText describes the app as "a cross-platform collaboration tool for your organization that allows you to deploy your own private, secure mobile network where your employees can safely communicate on their existing mobile devices within your company."

"Text messaging, just like email, can be used against your organization," writes the company on its website. "If the messages no longer exist, there is no risk of data breach or exposure."

The app is available on iOS, Android and Blackberry platforms and administrators can manage user settings from the Web. It enters an increasingly crowded space, with apps like Kik, Beluga and GroupMe entering the free message game, but this one has that special spin for the security-minded.

From what we can tell, however, the app is missing one huge feature - the little whisp of smoke, wafting out the crack of your phone case whenever a message is deleted.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...60_seconds.php





Making JPEG Images Copy-Evident
Dennis Fisher

A group of academic researchers at the University of Cambridge has developed a new technique for making JPEG images copy-evident, so that users can tell whether an image has been recompressed and copied.

The technique, presented in a paper by Andrew B. Lewis and Markus G. Kuhn, relies on a complex method for inserting a large message into an image, which will only become visible once the image is copied and recompressed at a different level of quality. The idea is to help make it obvious to human eyes that the JPEG they're seeing isn't an original.

In a blog post explaining the paper and the technique, Lewis said that the idea came from observing the techniques used to protect paper money and other valuable documents.

"Our algorithm works by adding a high-frequency pattern to the image with an amplitude carefully selected to cause maximum quantization error on recompression at a chosen target JPEG quality factor. The amplitude is modulated with a covert warning message, so that foreground message blocks experience maximum quantization error in the opposite direction to background message blocks. While the message is invisible in the marked original image, it becomes visible due to clipping in a recompressed copy," Lewis wrote.

The technique could be used to help copyright owners enforce their rights over specific images if they're clearly being copied and used for prohibited activities.

"Ideally, we would even like to have control over the conditions under which the embedded mark becomes visible. In some applications we prefer a targeted mark, which only becomes visible when one particular a priori known processing step is applied. (Imagine a video that shows a warning if it has been uploaded to a particular website where all material is recompressed with fixed settings.) In other applications, we might prefer an untargeted mark, which becomes visible with high probability as soon as any of a number of possible processing parameters are applied," Lewis and Kuhn write in their paper.

The unauthorized use of material such as pictures, video and text has been a major problem online basically since the inception of the Internet. Copyright owners, media companies and others have tried various techniques--mainly variations of one kind or another on digital rights management--most of which have failed badly and quickly. The method developed by Lewis and Kuhn isn't designed specifically for the purpose of protecting copyrighted material, and it's not a protection method in the way that DRM techniques are. But it could have applications in that domain.
https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/m...evident-020711





Japan Debates Depictions of Young Girls in Comics
Hiroko Tabuchi

In a manga comic book that is well known here, “My Wife Is an Elementary School Student,” a 24-year-old teacher marries a 12-year-old girl as part of a top-secret social experiment.

There is no depiction of actual sex. But the teacher’s steamy fantasies fill the comic’s pages in graphic detail, including a little naked girl with sexually suggestive props. Meanwhile, in a widely available new DVD, a real-life Japanese model poses in a tiny white bikini. She makes popcorn in a maid’s costume. She plays with a beach ball while being hosed down with water.

The model, Akari Iinuma, is 13 years old.

Japan, which has long been relatively tolerant of the open sale and consumption of sexually oriented material, has developed a brisk trade in works that in many other countries might be considered child pornography. But now some public officials want to place tighter restrictions on the provocative depictions of young girls — referred to as “junior idols”— that are prevalent in magazines, DVDs and Web videos.

One particularly big target is manga comic books that depict pubescent girls in sexual acts. They are a lucrative segment of the ¥450 billion, or $5.5 billion, industry for manga, illustrated books drawn in a characteristic Japanese comic-book style.

An ordinance newly revised by Tokyo’s metropolitan government to restrict the sale of such material has prompted a national debate between its publishers and critics inside and outside Japan, who say the fare exploits children and may even encourage pedophilia. Other local and regional governments, including the prefecture of Osaka, are considering similar restrictions.

“These are for abnormal people, for perverts,” said Tokyo’s governor, Shintaro Ishihara, angrily throwing two comic books to the floor during an interview. Mr. Ishihara spearheaded the ordinance changes, which take effect in July.

While the revised law applies to an area containing only about a tenth of Japan’s population, Tokyo is the nation’s media capital and a de facto arbiter of the country’s pop culture boundaries. “There’s no other country in the world that lets such crude works exist,” Mr. Ishihara said.

To protest the ordinance, 10 of the country’s biggest publishers have said they will boycott the Tokyo International Anime Fair next month, Japan’s premier event for manga and animated films.

The law specifically bars only the sale of the restricted comics and videos to minors. But industry executives say it would essentially end publication of the material by discouraging risk-averse publishers and booksellers from handling it at all.

“There are no victims in manga — we should be free to write what we want,” said Yasumasa Shimizu, vice president at Kodansha, Japan’s largest publishing company by revenue, which is participating in the boycott. “Creativity in Japanese manga thrives on an ‘anything goes’ mentality.”

Manga taps into a history of erotica that dates at least as far back as the ukiyo-e prints of 17th- to 19th-century Japan, including Hokusai’s famous portrayal of a fisherwoman and octopuses in a salacious encounter. But it was as recently as the 1980s that comic magazines like Lemon People introduced a wider audience to sexual manga featuring young girls.

“There is a culture, an industry that worships youth and innocence,” said Mariko Katsuki, who published a book last year chronicling adults who are attracted to small children. “Much of the attraction is nonsexual, but sometimes it becomes a dangerous obsession.”

The Tokyo law, which applies to anyone younger than 18, bans the sale of comics and other works — including novels, DVDs and video games — that depict sexual or violent acts that would violate Japan’s national penal code, as well as sex involving anyone under age 18. The ordinance also requires guardians to prevent children younger than 13 from posing for magazines or videos that depict them in sexually suggestive ways.

Legal experts say that Japanese laws against child pornography are lax by international standards. Japan has banned the production or distribution of any sexually explicit, nude images of minors since 1999, when Parliament passed a child pornography law in response to international criticism of the wide availability of such works in the country. But even now, unlike the United States and most European countries, Japan does not ban the possession of child pornography.

The authorities in the United States and Sweden have recently made arrests over manga books imported from Japan depicting sexual abuse of children. A U.S. manga collector, Christopher Handley, pleaded guilty in 2009 to violating the 2003 Protect Act, which outlawed cartoons or drawings that depict minors in sexually explicit ways.

Japan’s 1999 law has also helped stamp out a formerly popular genre of photo books depicting nude underage girls. One of the genre’s best-selling books, published in 1991, featured nude photos of the actress Rie Miyazawa, who was not yet 18 at the time the pictures were taken.

But in the last five or six years, books and videos have emerged that sidestep the law by featuring girls, some as young as age 6, posing in swimsuits that stop short of full nudity. The models, who are paid about ¥200,000 a shoot, often dream of careers in acting or music, industry insiders said.

Junior idol photo books and DVDs are widely available on Web sites like Amazon.co.jp and in specialized bookstores. There are at least eight magazines devoted to such photos, including Sho-Bo, which features girls of elementary school age.

“I loved the white bikini,” Ms. Iinuma, the 13-year-old model, told the adult male fans who turned out at the Sofmap electronics store in Tokyo for an event to promote the release of her second DVD, “Developing Now.” It is a plotless 70 minutes of Ms. Iinuma in various costumes and poses.

At the gathering, Ms. Iinuma performed a short dance, spoke about the video shoot, then posed as men approached her to snap photos, while her mother looked on from the back of the room.

Hiromasa Nakai, a spokesman for the Japan Committee for Unicef, said the abundance of child pornography in Japan made it even easier for those who would normally not be considered to have clinical pedophilia, a psychiatric disorder characterized by a sexual obsession with young children, to develop a sexual interest in children.

“To a degree, it has become socially accepted to lust over young girls in Japan,” Mr. Nakai said. “Condoning these works has meant more people have access to them and develop an interest in young girls.”

There have been earlier moves to regulate pedophilic material in Japan, especially after the killings of four young girls in 1988-89 by a man the police described as a pedophile. The case spurred local governments across Japan to adopt ordinances setting some limits to sales of pedophilic works, including a loose ratings system for explicit manga books imposed by the publishers themselves, and also set the stage for the 1999 child pornography law.

The Tokyo government already checks for “unwholesome” manga titles and can order publishers to label the titles as for adults only. But supporters of more regulation say those efforts have been sporadic.

“We believe that when the rights of adults or businesses violate children’s rights, children must come first,” said Tamae Shintani, head of the parent-teacher association for Tokyo’s elementary schools. “But we also respect free speech, so the least we can ask is people keep their fetishes under wraps.”

The industry’s defenders say comparing manga to pedophilia involving real children is absurd. “Depicting a crime and committing one are two different things. It’s like convicting a mystery writer for murder,” said Takashi Yamaguchi, a Tokyo lawyer and manga expert.

Mr. Yamaguchi and others also contend that the Tokyo government pushed through the new regulations without adequate debate. Some also worry that stronger regulations will harm an industry that has already seen its fortunes decline in recent years; sales of comic magazines, in particular, have fallen by a third during the last decade, to $24.3 million in 2008.

The manga artist Takeshi Nogami, whose best-known work features high school girls riding military tanks, said he sensed a disdain among policy makers toward manga itself. “They think reading manga makes you dumb,” he said.

In late December at the Comic Market, a fair for self-published comic books that is held twice a year in Tokyo and attended by more than 500,000 people, manga titles depicting adults having sex with minors were on open display. And they were readily available to fans like Koki Yoshida, 17.

“I don’t even think about how old these girls are,” Mr. Yoshida said. “It’s a completely imaginary world, separate from real life.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/bu...l/10manga.html





Outrage Over Swedish Teens' Sex Dream Essays

A class of grade eight students in southern Sweden was asked to write essays about their sexual fantasies and experiences for a school assignment.

"Just the thought that a teacher would sit and ask about their sexual fantasies makes me sick," one parent told the local Ystads Allehanda newspaper.

The comments came after a class consisting primarily of 14-year-old students from the Kastanje school in Tomelilla received a rather unusual writing assignment for their Swedish lesson.

Entitled "The First Time" (Första gången), the assignment instructed students to imagine they were talking to a close friend and write about the past sexual escapades they might divulge in confidence.

Other options included making up a story about their first sexual experience, writing about the first time they had sex or how they hoped their first time would be.

Getting high marks required writing at least a half page and with "passion," according to the parent. The assignment made several students so uncomfortable, they told their parents about the request to write sexually themed essays.

"Can they really do this? As a parent, it doesn't feel right and it irritates me that we're talking about a graded assignment in a Swedish-language lesson," said the parent, who wished to remain anonymous.

A teacher from the school expressed surprise that the assignment had upset parents, claiming that most students appreciated the exercise, which was part of a cooperative effort between the biology, sex and well being, and Swedish-language departments.

However, Maria Ahnlund told the newspaper she took the criticism "very seriously" and said she would review the assignment next year to see if there is a more "neutral" approach to the topic.

A spokesperson for teachers' union Lärarförbundet emphasised the importance of addressing student concerns.

"Obviously, if students feel like the assignment violated their privacy, that criticism must be taken seriously," Lärarförbundet spokesperson Claes Nyberg told The Local.

Nyberg added, however, that the union didn't have a position on the case, explaining that too few details were known to make a proper assessment.
http://www.thelocal.se/31916/20110208/





Wannabe Cool Kids Aim to Game the Web's New Social Scorekeepers

Sites use secret formulas to rank users' online 'influence' from 1 to 100; 'It's an ego thing'
Jessica E. Vascellaro

When Katie Miller went to Las Vegas this Thanksgiving, she tweeted about the lavish buffets and posted pictures of her seats at the aquatic spectacle "Le Rêve" at the Wynn Las Vegas hotel.

A week later, the 25-year-old account executive at a public-relations firm got an email inviting her to a swanky holiday party on Manhattan's West Side.

"At first I was confused," Ms. Miller said. She read on to learn that she had been singled out as a "high-level influencer" by the event's sponsors, including the Venetian and Palazzo hotels in Las Vegas, and a tech company called Klout, which ranks people based on their influence in social-media circles. "I was honored," she said, sipping a cocktail at the $30,000 fete.

So much for wealth, looks or talent. Today, a new generation of VIPs is cultivating coolness through the world of social media. Here, ordinary folks can become "influential" overnight depending on the number and kinds of people who follow them on Twitter or comment on their Facebook pages.

People have been burnishing their online reputations for years, padding their resumes on professional networking site LinkedIn and trying to affect the search results that appear when someone Googles their names. Now, they're targeting something once thought to be far more difficult to measure: influence over fellow consumers.

The arbiters of the new social hierarchy have names like Klout, PeerIndex and Twitalyzer. Each company essentially works the same way: They feed public data, mostly from Twitter, but also from sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, into secret formulas and then generate scores that gauge users' influence. Think of it as the credit score of friendship or, as PeerIndex calls it, "the S&P of social relationships."

The companies say their aim is to provide benchmarks to help people figure out whom to trust online and a way for marketers to spot people eager to evangelize their brands. Their efforts have ignited a race among social-media junkies who, eager for perks and bragging rights, are working hard to game the system and boost their scores.

Casie Stewart, a 28-year-old social-media consultant from Toronto, has earned a free Virgin America flight, a shopping splurge at Mark's Work Wearhouse and an all-expenses-paid trip to New Zealand fashion week thanks to her prolific tweeting and blogging about her life.

"Just got shot by fashion photographer @raphaelmazzucco in the Diesel Lounge," she tweeted recently.

Klout dubbed Ms. Stewart a "networker" and awarded her a score of 74 (out of 100). As her score climbed, she gained the attention of a range of brands and public-relations firms who hooked her up with prizes, says Ms. Stewart, who has more than 5,000 Twitter followers. She says she tweets to build her "personal brand," and getting perks from companies to tweet or blog about helps: "I always wanted to be well-known for being really good at something."

Celebrities are seeking an edge, too.

Last year, Britney Spears' managers, Adam Leber and Larry Rudolph, requested a meeting with Klout Chief Executive Joe Fernandez in San Francisco. Over a lunch of Chinese food, they grilled Mr. Fernandez on why Ms. Spears' Klout score, then around 64, was lower than Lady Gaga's 78 and Ashton Kutcher's 77.

"What are these people doing better than us?" Mr. Fernandez says they asked.

Mr. Fernandez says he advised them to tell Ms. Spears to tweet more frequently and to send more tweets herself instead of having others tweet on her behalf.

Mr. Leber says Ms. Spears took some of Mr. Fernandez's advice, such as making sure to blast her updates across multiple services like Twitter and Facebook. But, he says, he's reluctant to inundate Ms. Spears' followers with too many tweets because celebrities shouldn't be that accessible.

"You want to leave them wanting more," he says. Today, Ms. Spears's score is 87. Lady Gaga's is 90.

Zach Bussey, a 25-year-old consultant, started trying to improve his social-media mojo last year. "It is an ego thing," says Mr. Bussey, who describes himself as a social-media "passionisto."

One of the services he turned to was TweetLevel, created by public-relations firm Edelman. It grades users' influence, popularity, trust and "engagement" on a scale of 1 to 100.

He decided to try to improve his score by boosting the ratio of people who follow him to the number he follows. So he halved the number of people he was following to 4,000. His TweetLevel score rose about 5 points and his Klout score jumped from a 51 to a 60.

"The change gave me more legitimacy," he says. But, he warns, you can't get lazy: "If you go on vacation for a week and can't tweet every hour of the day, you better be prepared to see your scores drop."

Even politicians are subject to the new pecking order. The Twitter accounts for President Barack Obama and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez are both registered on Klout, with scores of 90 and 80, respectively.

A spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, which runs the @barackobama Twitter feed, didn't comment. The Venezuelan embassy in Washington didn't respond to requests for comment.

Seeking more traffic to his marketing blog, "The Internet Vision," Gabriel Elliott of Vancouver, Wash., attempted to dissect Twitalyzer, which provides users with a suite of scores free. It also sells packages for as much as $99.99 a month with extras like daily email alerts that track scores over time.

Mr. Elliott tried to manipulate individual variables, tweaking his frequency of tweeting, while keeping other things, like his rate of retweeting—or tweeting others' tweets and giving them credit—constant. He determined that the biggest overall contributors to his score were retweeting and mentioning other users in his tweets. He raised his scores in both areas from 5 to 25 and gained about 1,500 followers over the next two months. "It took burning both ends of the candle," he says.

While the companies encourage users to maximize their scores, some have had to crack down on behavior they deem unsportsmanlike.

Klout employees recently neutralized a tactic they dubbed "the one-night stand," in which people follow lots of people on Twitter, hoping they'll follow them back, then dump them a day later.

"Users are a crafty bunch," says Mr. Fernandez.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...466417382.html





Online Plagiarism and Cybercheating Still Strong – 61.9%
Richard N. Landers

In a study of 1222 undergraduates, Selwyn[1] examined differences in cybercheating levels between a variety of majors and student types. Overall results? 61.9% of students cybercheat.

Before getting into this, it’s important to distinguish cybercheating/online plagiarism and cheating in online courses. These are not the same. Cybercheating can be defined as cheating enabled by the internet – so cybercheating can occur in any course. For example, one variety of cybercheating is the use of “paper mills.” These websites employ people to write papers for undergraduates for a fee. A student might pay $2 per page for a term paper, for example. But such papers can be used in either in-person or online courses. This is not in any way unique to online courses.

According to Selwyn, estimates thus far vary a great deal as to what percentage and types of students engage in cybercheating, but they are all a little depressing:

* In a US study, 50% of students admitted to cybercheating at some point while they were in college.
* In another 30-40% of students admitted to copying text from the internet into their own work without citing the source. 10-20% did so for large sections of their assignments (i.e. more than a sentence here and there).
* About 25% of graduate students engage in these same behaviors.
* Typical profile of the most likely cybercheater: young male underclassmen experienced with the Internet

There is some disagreement as to why students engage in these behaviors. Some blame higher expectations for high grades, while others blame a changing youth culture where the copying of intellectual property is simply not seen as an important concern.

So how bad was it in Selwyn’s sample? 61.9% (757 students) admitted to engaging in online plagiarism. 59% copied a few sentences, 30% copied a few paragraphs, 12% copies a few pages, 4% copied entire documents, and 3% purchased essays. 22.3% admitted to engaging in such behaviors regularly.

Cybercheating rates were higher for males and for poor students. Contrary to prior research, rates were higher for more experienced students. Perhaps most interesting to me was the rate breakdown by field of study. Here they are in rank order of prevalence of at least a few sentences copied:

1. Engineering and technology (72%)
2. Computer sciences and mathematical sciences (71%)
3. Social studies (64%)
4. Business and administrative studies (63%)
5. Law (62%)
6. Creative arts and design (61%)
7. Architecture, Building and Planning (60%)
8. Medicine (58%)
9. Natural sciences (57%)
10. Humanities (46%)

Students with greater perceived Internet competency were also more likely to cybercheat, though not by a wide margin (about 8 percentage points across 4 categories of expertise).

The study also examined “traditional” plagiarism and found similarly high levels – again, 61.9% of the sample reported some type of plagiarism, though this time from books and articles. I am not wholly convinced that the researchers adequately differentiated “online articles” and “offline articles” (students may consider these to be the same thing), but there is not enough detail reported on their method to be sure either way.

I find this quote from a student particularly interesting (from p.473):

Things are a lot easier to get away with on the internet if you wanted to (giving false information for example.) But copying work without sourcing it is easier from books in my opinion, as universities have methods of screening essays for plagiarised work through the internet. (Female, 19 years, social studies, year 1)

It seems like this student has taken the time to reason through how she might cheat in the course and the relative risks of being caught. This is not a desperate student driven to cheat with a paper due at the last minute; this is premeditated.

We also get a window into why faculty are so bitter about online education in general. Consider these students (from p. 475):

… it’s easier to claim ignorance on a computer if you get caught doing something bad. (Male, 20, humanities, year 2)

As more and more people are using the Internet illegally (i.e. limewire etc.), I feel that the chances of being caught or the consequences of my actions are almost insignificant. So I feel no pressure in doing what ever everybody else is doing/using the Internet for. (Male, 19 years, engineering, year 1)

Again, purposeful deception, and not much regret over it.

All in all, these results are not all that surprising given previous research in this domain, but it does not seem as if things are getting any better. People wonder why I worry about cheating on hiring tests; well, where do you think these students go after they graduate?
http://neoacademic.com/2011/02/04/on...-still-strong/





New Mexico Bill Seeks to Protect Anti-Science Education
Dave Mosher

If educators in New Mexico want to teach evolution or climate change as a “controversial scientific topic,” a new bill seeks to protect them from punishment.

House Bill 302, as it’s called, states that public school teachers who want to teach “scientific weaknesses” about “controversial scientific topics” including evolution, climate change, human cloning and — ambiguously — “other scientific topics” may do so without fear of reprimand. The legislation was introduced to the New Mexico House of Representatives on Feb. 1 by Republican Rep. Thomas A. Anderson.

Supporters of science education say this and other bills are designed to spook teachers who want to teach legitimate science and protect other teachers who may already be customizing their curricula with anti-science lesson plans.

“These bills say, ‘Oh we’re just protecting the rights of teachers,’ which on the face of it isn’t wrong. But they draw big red circles around topics like evolution and climate change as topics to be wary about,” said Joshua Rosenau, a policy and projects director at the National Center for Science Education. “It suggests this kind of science is controversial, and would protect teachers who want to teach anti-evolution and climate-change-denying lessons in classrooms.”

The bill is one of five already introduced to state legislatures this year. While more than 30 such bills have been introduced since 2004, only Louisiana adopted one as law in 2008.

Rosenau said House Bill 302 will probably never see the light of day, as New Mexico’s representatives have bigger issues to deal with, such as their constituents’ financial hardships. If it does come to a vote, however, he said its chances are slim.

“These bills are written in such a way that voting ‘nay’ on them looks bad. Legislators may vote yes to maintain an agreeable voting record, but they often find ways to kill them procedurally,” he said.

The bill’s introduction comes at a time when, according to a recent study in Science, only 28 percent of U.S. teachers overtly teach scientific concepts of evolution and 13 percent advocate creationism. Some 60 percent water down teaching evolution to avoid confrontation by students and parents.

“Supporters of anti-science education are trying to give cover to what’s already happening out there,” Rosenau said.

Anderson did not return Wired.com’s phone calls or e-mails in time for publication of this report.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...nce-education/





Press Poses Wrinkle for Critics of Campaign Ruling
Adam Liptak

In the year since the Supreme Court handed down its 183-page decision in Citizens United, the liberal objection to it has gradually boiled down to a single sentence: The majority was wrong to grant First Amendment rights to corporations.

That critique is incomplete. As Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged in his dissent, the court had long recognized that “corporations are covered by the First Amendment.” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, listed more than 20 precedents saying that.

But an old and established rule can still be wrong, and it may be that the liberal critique is correct. If it is, though, it must confront a very hard question. If corporations have no First Amendment rights, what about newspapers and other news organizations, almost all of which are organized as corporations?

The usual response is that the press is different. The First Amendment, after all, protects “the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Since “the press” is singled out for protection, the argument goes, media corporations enjoy First Amendment rights while other corporations do not.

But the argument is weak. There is a little evidence that the drafters of the First Amendment meant to single out a set of businesses for special protection. Nor is there much support for that idea in the Supreme Court’s decisions, which have rejected the argument that the institutional press has rights beyond those of the other speakers.

There is a practical problem, too, especially in the Internet era. Who, after all, is “the press”? Anyone with a Twitter account?

Consider this telling exchange between Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and a lawyer for the Obama administration at the first of two arguments in Citizens United. The lawyer, Malcolm L. Stewart, said Congress had the power to regulate corporate speech about political candidates under the First Amendment.

“Most publishers are corporations,” Justice Alito said. “And a publisher that is a corporation could be prohibited from selling a book?”

It was a hypothetical question, but it cut to the core of the meaning of the press clause of the First Amendment. There was a lot of back and forth, and other justices jumped in. In the end, though, Mr. Stewart gave a candid answer.

“We could prohibit the publication of the book,” he said. (The government backed away from that position at the second argument, but not very far.)

Mr. Stewart could have given a different sort of answer, one he hinted at it but did not embrace.

“The First Amendment refers both to freedom of speech and of the press,” he said at one point. “There would be a potential argument that media corporations, the institutional press, would have a greater First Amendment right.”

In his dissent, Justice Stevens called that question “interesting and difficult,” and he did not quite embrace special protection for the institutional press either. “One type of corporation, those that are part of the press, might be able to claim special First Amendment status,” he wrote.

Justice Antonin Scalia reviewed the historical evidence in his concurrence.

“It is passing strange,” he wrote, “to interpret the phrase ‘the freedom of speech, or of the press’ to mean, not everyone’s right to speak or publish, but rather everyone’s right to speak or the institutional press’s right to publish. No one thought that is what it meant.”

In a 2008 book, “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate,” Anthony Lewis, a former Supreme Court reporter and columnist for The New York Times, reached the same conclusion. “The amendment surely meant to cover both oral and written expression,” he wrote, rather than “a specially protected institution.”

The Supreme Court’s decisions interpreting the press clause have also said that the institutional press has no special status.

“There is no precedent supporting laws that attempt to distinguish between corporations which are deemed to be exempt as media corporations and those which are not,” Justice Kennedy wrote in Citizens United. The decision lifted restrictions on corporate spending in candidate elections.

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has reviewed the historical evidence. The bottom line, he said, is this: “If ordinary business corporations lack First Amendment rights, so do those business corporations that we call media corporations.”

That may leave supporters of strict campaign finance laws in a bind.

The proper treatment of media corporations, said Richard L. Hasen, a leading election law specialist, is “among the most difficult questions for supporters of reasonable campaign finance reform.”

He added that the issue is these days doubly hypothetical. Citizens United ensured that all corporations can say what they like. And even before Citizens United, the McCain-Feingold law contained an exemption for news reports, commentaries and editorials.
There are good arguments both ways about whether corporations ought to be covered by the First Amendment. But it is harder to say that some corporations have First Amendment rights and others do not.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/us/08bar.html





Facebook Firing Case Reaches Settlement
Mara Lee

The ambulance company that fired Dawnmarie Souza after she commented on her Facebook page that "Frank" was a jerk has settled the case with the National Labor Relations Board.

The groundbreaking case was scheduled to go to a hearing Tuesday, where the NLRB would have argued that Souza's December 2009 firing was improper — in part because her remarks about her supervisor outside the workplace were protected, even those posted on the Internet.

Instead, American Medical Response of Connecticut Inc. agreed to revise its rules so that employees can discuss working conditions outside work without fear of discipline or termination. NLRB had said AMR's rules were "overly broad … regarding blogging, Internet posting, and communications between employees."

The NLRB's complaint in October against the New Haven company marked the first time the agency, which enforces laws that protect the right to organize, has argued that an employee could be protected from firing for this kind of Internet post.

Souza, a paramedic for AMR in New Haven, posted the comment on her Facebook page on the same day she was suspended from work after refusing her supervisor Frank Filardo's request to write up a report on a complaint about her performance. Management rejected her request for union representation.

The NLRB complaint has also charged that AMR "illegally denied union representation to the employee during an investigatory interview shortly before the employee posted the negative comments on her Facebook page."

Under the terms of the settlement approved Monday by Hartford NLRB Regional Director Jonathan Kreisberg, AMR promised, in addition to changing its rules on employee complaints, that it would not deny employee requests for union representation and would not threaten employees with discipline for requesting representation.

The company did not respond late Monday to a question about whether Souza will be rehired, and had said in the past that her firing was not for her Facebook post, but for "multiple, serious issues."

In the three years before her firing Souza had missed a lot of work because of treatments and follow-up surgeries for breast cancer. Her illness was not part of the NLRB's case.

Legal experts have said the Souza-AMR case would be groundbreaking for unionized workers, but would probably not affect the rights of most nonunion workers, who typically are employed "at will," meaning they can be fired for any reason as long as it does not illegally target them on the basis of race, age or other protected categories.

Terms of the settlement, including payments to Souza and conditions she must meet, were not made public by the NLRB, which announced the settlement. The deal cancels a scheduled hearing before an administrative law judge of the NLRB, who would have decided on the NLRB's complaint.

Souza declined to comment Monday after the settlement was announced.
http://www.courant.com/business/hc-f...,2901900.story





Bucks Co. Teacher Suspended Over Blog About Students
Natalie Munroe

This is a clear case of what happens online, stays online.

The Central Bucks School District has suspended a high school English teacher after parents complained to administrators about her blog in which she railed on her students for more than a year.

Phrases on the blog include; “Frightfully dim,” “Rat-like,” “Am concerned your kid is going to open fire on the school,” “I hate your kid,” and “Seems smarter than she actually is.”

Those are the words of teacher Natalie Munroe, according to the Central Bucks School District.

School district spokeswoman Carol Counihan says Munroe admitted to writing the blog.

“I think she should be fired. Hopefully that is what will happen,” said parent Wendy Yazujian.

Munroe reportedly wrote the rant, and others like it, a year or more ago.

Sources say a parent, who saw the blog and recently posted her words on their Facebook page, called school officials to complain. The district says Munroe, who started teaching at the high school in 2006, has been suspended pending an investigation.

“I thought she was smarter than that, to put that on the internet for everyone to see that and let her kids read that,” said student Shannon Carroll.

“It’s hard to know that you sat in her class for an hour and a half a day and for her to feel that way it is like, it is an awful feeling,” student Alli Woloshyn said.

In a post from January of last year, Munroe talks about some of the comments she would like to write about her students on their report cards in place of what she calls the “canned comments” which are provided by the school district.

The comments include “lazy,” “sneaky” and “rude.”

“For a teacher to be like that is just beyond me. Why would you be with children if you are feeling that negative about everything they do? Basically she was bashing all the kids,” said Kelly Woloshyn a parent.

When approached for comment, Munroe directed Eyewitness News to speak to her attorney. Munroe’s lawyer did not immediately return phone calls.

The blog has since been shut down.
http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/201...bout-students/





BBC To Delete 172 Websites Due to Budget Cuts, Geek Saves Them for $3.99
Audrey Watters

The BBC announced last month that it would be slashing much of its online programming due to severe budget cuts. As part of the cutbacks, it planned to axe jobs and websites. Some 172 of those websites are scheduled to not just go dormant but to actually be deleted within the coming year.

But one good online citizen - an anonymous one at that - has taken the time to spider and archive the endangered content and provide the material in a BitTorrent file.

It's an act, s/he says, that points to the continuing decline of online storage. "The purpose of this project is to show how the entire 172 public facing websites that are earmarked for deletion have been copied, archived, distributed and republished online - independently - for the price of a cup of Starbucks coffee (around $3.99)." In other words, the cost-savings from the BBC's gutting of its online presence: minimal.

The act also has a political side. "The purpose of this project is to expose the 'cost savings' of this proposed exercise as nothing more than a charade to appease the detractors to a strong BBC and to curry favour with the current government. BBC's current senior management has demonstrated a lack of leadership and a lack of courage in pushing back on these demands."

Political or not, the archivists of the Internet are thankful. Perhaps the accountants at the BBC should be too.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives..._cuts_geek.php





AOL to Buy The Huffington Post for $315 Million
Anthony Boadle

AOL Inc has agreed to buy The Huffington Post, the influential and rapidly growing news, analysis and lifestyle website, for $315 million, the struggling U.S. Internet company announced on Monday.

The move will create a media group that will have a combined base of 117 million visitors a month in the United States, and reach 270 million people globally, AOL said in a statement.

The deal follows efforts by AOL's chief executive Tim Armstrong to turn around the dial-up Internet access business by trying to turn it into a media and entertainment powerhouse, despite difficulties in attracting investors.

AOL suffered sharp declines in advertising sales and dial-up subscriptions in the fourth quarter of 2010, driving overall revenue down 26 percent.

Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post, said on her blog that she would lead a newly formed The Huffington Post Media Group, which will integrate all Huffington Post and AOL content, as its president and editor-in-chief.

"By combining HuffPost with AOL's network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus and international reach, we know we'll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform," she said.

Approximately $300 million will be paid in cash in the purchase, which has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies and shareholders of The Huffington Post, though it still needs government approvals, AOL said.

The deal, expected to be closed in the late first, or early second quarter of 2011, will combine AOL's infrastructure and scale with The Huffington Post's pioneering approach to news and innovative community building, AOL said.

"The acquisition of The Huffington Post will create a next-generation American media company with global reach that combines content, community and social experiences for consumers," Armstrong said in the statement.

Huffpost Expansion

AOL said the acquisition would accelerate its strategy to deliver an array of premium news, analysis and entertainment.

The Huffington Post, started in 2005, has grown into one of the most heavily visited news websites in the United States.

"The Huffington Post has already been growing at a prodigious rate. But my New Year's resolution for 2011 was to take HuffPost to the next level -- not just incrementally, but exponentially," Huffington said in her blog.

She said the Huffington Post decided early this year to expand into more local news coverage, launch international sections (starting with HuffPost Brazil) and increase original video content.

Purchase by AOL, with its network of blogs such as AutoBlog, Music, AOL Latino, Black Voices, its local news operation Patch.com and new video-production studios, will allow these goals to be met, she said.

"Far from changing our editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, this moment will be for HuffPost like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet," she said.

"We're still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we're now going to get there much, much faster."

(Additional reporting by Sakthi Prasad in Bangalore; writing by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Will Waterman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7160RR20110207





Tear Down This PDF
Frédéric Filloux

The PDF document format is digital publishing’s worst enemy. For a large part, the news industry still relies on this 18-year-old format to sell its content online. PDF is to e-publishing what the steam locomotive is to the high-speed train. In our business, progress is called XML and HTML5.

Picture today’s smartphone reading experience. We’ll start with a newspaper purchased on a digital kiosk. For a broadsheet, a format still largely used by dailies, the phone’s “window” covers 1/60th of the paper’s page. Multiply by 30 pages of news. You’ll need 1800 pans and zooms to cover the entire publication (plus, each time time you pinch out, you can take a leisurely sip of your coffee as the image redraws).

Next, we have two iPhone screen captures of American Photo, purchased on Zinio. The more compact magazine format doesn’t help. Note that you need to scroll laterally to read a full line (as for the “Text” function, meant to insure easier reading, it is ineffective) :

Am I being too derisive, or can we say this is not the best way to read?

The battle for online news will be won on mobility. We’re just at the beginning of the smartphone era. We can count on better screens, faster processors combined to extended battery life, more storage, better networks… The bulk of news consumption will come from people on the move, demanding constant updates and taking a quick glance at what is stored in their mobile device — regardless of networks conditions. Speed, lightness and versatility will be key success factors. There won’t be much tolerance for latency.

In that respect, PDF is just a lame duck.

Back in 1993, the Portable Document Format was a fantastic digital publishing breakthrough. All of a sudden, using a sophisticated mathematical description of images, texts, typefaces, layout elements, the most complex graphic creation could be encapsulated into a single file. Large font sets and dedicated software were no longer needed. The PDF reader, licensed from Adobe Systems under the name of Acrobat, soon became free or pre-loaded in various OS platform. PDF became an open standard in 2008. As for the performance, it was stunning: see a 6400% magnification below:

Great for high-quality book publishing… And a completely pointless stunt for a mobile news product.

The newspaper industry jumped on PDF. The new format let a production crew send the full publication to the printing plant using huge, high definition PDF files directly transferred to the printing plates. When the web arose, the industry kept using the same format to make the publication available for downloading. After years of file optimization, a newspaper or a magazine still weighs 20 to 50 megabytes. The download is manageable over ADSL or cable, but impractical on a mobile network. But wait, it can get worse: on the Android platform, for example, the reader can actually ad weight to the original PDF file. This is the consequence of a good intention: giving the publisher the choice between a finished product that is easier to leaf through, but requires a heavier file, and one that downloads faster, but is more difficult to read.

Publishers’ inclination to keep using PDF is based on one idea: the graphical elements of a publication — layout, typefaces — are an essential component of a printed brand. By extension this visual identity is seen as a “label of trust” for the news brand, with the design-perfect PDF being the medium of choice.

Now, three things:

#1, this widely shared assertion is not supported by strong facts. There is no survey (to my knowledge) that links visual identity to reader loyalty, to feelings of trust;
#2, on this matter, if there remains any lingering bond with readers, it will fade away with the new generation of news consumers: they are much less sensitive than their elders to the notion of “trusted brand”, let alone to any design associated to it;
#3, the web has evolved. The HMTL5 standard has shown the ability to render any graphic design without the PDF format’s downsides.

Why not, therefore, jumping off the PDF train? The short answer is XML management. Our techiest Monday Note readers will forgive this shortcut: the Extensible Markup Language is a version of the web language readable by both machines and humans. An article encoded in XML is not an image but a set of character strings associated to various “tags” that describe what they are, where they belong; the description also provides contextual information to be retrieved at will. In theory, any publishing system, big or small, should be able to produce clean XML files. It should also be able to generate a “zoning file” that maps the coordinates of a story, or any other element in the page (see the red box below that indicates the position of the story in a newspaper front page). Armed with such position data, smartphone software can provide the right reading experience, limiting the need for the painful panning and zooming I mentioned above.

Unfortunately, no one lives in theory’s wonderland.

In fact, very few newspapers are able to produce usable XML or zoning files. Part of the reason lies in outdated editorial systems that were not designed (not upgraded either) to handle such sophisticated, web-friendly files. IT managers have been slow to embrace the web engineering culture and it didn’t occur to publishers than a “human upgrade” was badly needed deep in the bowels of their company… (This, by the way, leaves another wide open field to internet pure players and their web-savvy tech teams).
This backwardness has created its own ecosystem… in low-wage countries. Every night, all over the world, highly specialized contractors collect the PDF files of hundreds of newspapers and send them to India, Romania or Madagascar. Down there, it takes a few hours to electronically dismantle the image files and to convert them to dynamic XML text files, with proper tagging and zoning. Thanks to the time difference, the converted static newspaper is sent back to the publishers by dawn, ready to be uploaded on an internet platform, right before the physical version hits the streets.

Many will find these shortcomings appalling. For a large part it is. The good news is the evolution has merely begun. Still, very few publishers realize that upgrading of their production chain is a crucial competitive asset. As for the PDF, it remains immensely useful for many applications, but it is no longer suitable for news content that thrives on nomadic uses.
http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/02/07...down-this-pdf/





Google Android Widens Lead on Apple's iPhone in US Smartphone Market
Josh Ong

New data released Monday revealed that Google's Android mobile OS has widened its lead on Apple's iPhone and gained significantly on Research in Motion, the top smartphone platform in the US.

According to a comScore report released Monday, smartphone ownership in the US grew 60 percent year over year to 63.2 million owners in the three months ending in December 2010. Google saw the biggest gains, climbing within several points of BlackBerry maker RIM.

Meanwhile, Apple grew 0.7 percent from 24.3 percent of total smartphone subscribers in the US in the September 2010 quarter to a 3 month average of 25 percent in December 2010.

Google, which leapt past Apple to take the No. 2 spot in November, continued its rapid growth, posting 7.3 percent growth from last quarter in its platform market share. As of December 2010, the Android maker had taken 28.7 percent of the US smartphone market share, compared to 21.4 percent in the third quarter of 2010.

RIM saw its share of US smartphone subscribers plummet from 37.3 percent in September 2010 to 31.6 percent as of December 2010. With sales of Blackberry smartphones slowing in the US, the Waterloo, Ontario-based company has shifted its focus to international markets as of late, resulting in just one-third of its revenue coming from the US last quarter.

Microsoft saw its share of subscribers drop from 9.9 percent in September 2010 to 8.4 percent in the December quarter, as Windows Phone 7 failed to gain traction. Palm also continued to lose share, dropping from 4.2 percent to 3.7 percent over the same period.

Last month, research firm Canalys reported that the Google platform, which includes Android as well as Chinese variants OMS and Tapas, had overtaken Nokia to become the top smartphone platform maker in the world.

According to data published Monday by IDC, Apple still holds its position as the No.2 worldwide smartphone maker, though top Android vendors, such as Samsung and HTC, did see impressive growth.

The iPhone maker may post significant gains in market share this quarter with the release of the iPhone 4 on Verizon. The nation's largest wireless network announced last week that presales of the iPhone 4 beat the carrier's previous sales records in just two hours. According to one analyst, the preorder and launch supply of CDMA iPhone 4s could include as many as 2 million units.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles... _market.html





How The FCC Plans To Destroy GPS – A Simple Explanation
Leszek Pawlowicz

If anyone had told me three months ago that a company was going to propose a system that would fully disable GPS in areas that cover most of the population of the US, I would have ignored them. If someone told me two months ago that the FCC would give this proposal serious consideration, I would have laughed. If someone had told me a month ago that the US Federal Communications Commission would actually approve this scheme, I would have considered them crazy. And yet, that’s exactly what’s happened; the FCC has given conditional approval to LightSquared’s 4G LTE proposal (PDF link) . If implemented as planned, all current GPS receivers will no longer operate correctly in areas covered by their system, which include the overwhelming majority of the US population. I wish I were kidding, but I’m not. There’s a lot of technical jargon used in discussing this issue, so in this post I thought I’d try to explain the issues with a somewhat less technical, and hopefully more accessible approach. Technical nitpickers may see some oversimplification, for which I apologize … not at all.

At their most basic level, GPS receivers are pretty close to FM radios. So to explain some of these principal issues behind the GPS problem in understandable terms, I’ll use the basics of FM radio broadcasting. To tune in an FM radio station, you turn your radio’s dial or push the buttons until the receiving frequency of the radio is set to that of the station: 89.5, 101.7, 104.1, and so on. Those numbers refer to the number of cycles per second of the frequency in millions, so that 101.7 is a radio signal operating at 101.7 million cycles per second, abbreviated as 101.7 MegaHertz (MHz) for short. But that’s just the main frequency, sometimes referred to as the central “carrier wave”; receiving a signal at just at frequency wouldn’t give you any signal information, like music/talk/news. To encode that signal, the frequency of that carrier wave is varied, or “modulated”, by the signal; your radio then monitors those variations in frequency around the central carrier wave’s frequency, and then converts them back to the original signal, music/talk/news. Frequency being modulated = Frequency Modulation = FM.

If you had two stations broadcasting in the same area on the same frequency, they would interfere with each other, making both of them unlistenable. If the frequency is only slightly different, they will also interfere with each other. To prevent this, the FCC licenses broadcasters to transmit on a specific frequency, and also makes sure that the frequencies are far enough apart so that one station’s broadcasts won’t interfere with another station. In the original days of FM, the minimum spacing for FM frequencies was 800 thousand cycles per second (800 KiloHertz or KHz, 0.8 MHz); so if one station was at 90.1 MHz, the closest frequencies allowable to that station would be 89.3 MHz and 90.9 MHz, offset 0.8 MHz up and down from the center one.

With time, the FCC has loosened that frequency spacing requirement up a bit, taking into account factors like improved FM radio technology, the broadcast power of the station, and the distance from other stations assigned the same frequency. For the most part, the system works, but you’ve probably experienced occasions when you’ve been listening to one FM station, only to have a second signal cut in and interfere with the first station’s signal. This is especially noticeable if you drive right by an FM radio broadcast antenna; the signal from that station can be so strong, it wipes out reception from any stations that are even marginally close to it in frequency. Because a station requires about 150 KHz of frequency modulation bandwidth to carry its signal, the FCC has also mandated that all standard FM tuning signals need to be at least 200 KHz apart; that’s why your FM tuner jumps from 100.1 to 100.3 to 100.5, bypassing 100.2, 100.4; those frequencies need to be kept free to make sure stations don’t “step” on each other’s signals.

OK, so back to GPS. While GPS doesn’t technically use frequency modulation, it uses a closely-related system called “phase modulation“, which also relies on a carrier wave. The main signal broadcast by GPS satellites, and used by the overwhelming majority of GPS receivers for determing position, is the “L1” frequency, with the carrier wave 1.57542 billion cycles per second (aka a GigaHertz, or GHz); including the total frequency band required for phase modulation, the range is 1.559 GHz to 1.610 GHz. Phase modulation is used to transmit digital information at 1 MHz per second from the satellites to your GPS receiver; the receiver takes this data from multiple satellites, and uses it to calculate your position. This frequency was defined in the late 1970s, and has been used continuously for GPS operations since the system went operation early in the 1990s, twenty years now. This frequency band is also part of a larger range of frequencies designated for use in satellite broadcasting. As with FM radio, you need to separate the frequency bands far enough apart so that the signals don’t interfere with each other; you also need to make sure that a signal at one frequency isn’t broadcast at such a high power that it will interfere with signals broadcast at neighboring frequencies. The latter isn’t usually a problem – the signal strength from satellites 12,000 or 23,000 miles above the earth is usually so low that interference between adjacent frequency bands is infrequent.

So, enter LightSquared. LightSquared wants to build a high-speed wireless broadband network on the cheap. Problem is, the FCC holds regular auctions for frequency space, with all the big wireless players (Verizon, ATT, Cingular, Google) bidding billions of dollars for this frequency space to carry their traffic; a smaller company like LightSquared can’t compete financially. But LightSquared came up with several clever workarounds to get past this issue. Satellite frequencies are also regulated and auctioned by the FCC, but they usually go for prices far lower than terrestrial frequency space. LightSquared acquired a small satellite company called SkyTerra that already owned frequency rights for 1.525 GHz to 1.559 GHz, directly adjacent to the frequency band designated for GPS. They then announced plans to develop a satellite-based Internet access service using those frequencies. Satellite signals by themselves would be so weak, that Internet speeds would likely be limited to no more than a few megabits per second, comparable to current 3G wireless network speeds. But FCC regulations have a loophole that allows satellite services to broadcast stronger signals terrestrially to supplement satellite coverage in those areas where coverage might be weak. This terrestrial broadcast signal can be as strong as the FCC allows, and is covered by the satellite auction price paid by the licensee.

So LightSquared announces a “satellite Internet access” service, but one supplemented by free use of terrestrial transmitters. But these terrestrial transmitters aren’t intended merely to fill in gaps in satellite coverage; these are high-power transmitters that allow LightSquared to offer the equivalent of 4G wireless Internet speeds (up to 100 Mbps), without paying for terrestrial spectrum. So that’s how LightSquared plans to do high-speed wireless broadband on the cheap – they don’t have to pay for the frequency spectrum they’re using. It’s a clever use of loopholes, and one I wouldn’t have a problem with, except that they will be broadcasting at high-power at a frequency that will interfere with GPS signals to the point that GPS receivers will no longer operate correctly. And this isn’t just a few transmitters – LightSquared’s plans are to install 40,000 transmitters to cover areas that contain most of the US population.

This GPS interference isn’t just a hypothesis. Members of the US GPS Industry Council, Trimble and Garmin met with the FCC on January 19th to present and discuss Garmin’s tests of the LightSquared proposal (PDF link), and its potential for interference with GPS receivers. Garmin used LightSquared’s own proposed transmitter power levels to evaluate the effects of this transmitters on an automotive GPS (Garmin nuvi 265W) and an avionic GPS (GNS430W). Here are screen captures summarizing the effects of the LightSquared transmitters on GPS receiver performance at different distances:

If you get within 0.66 miles of a LightSquared transmitter in open conditions, you’ll lose your position fix with the automotive nuvi 265W, further away in a city environment like New York or Chicago. The results are even worse for the aviation GPS. The FAA has essentially discontinued support for the old LORAN electronic navigation system in favor of GPS, and now LightSquared has proposed a system that essentially disables GPS in exactly the areas aviation needs it most. Garmin’s conclusion, shared by other industry proponents:

The operation of so many high powered transmitters so close in frequency to the GPS operating frequency (1575.42 MHz) will create a disastrous interference problem to GPS receivers to the point where GPS receivers will cease to operate (complete loss of fix) when in the vicinity of these transmitters.

Other government agencies are also concerned. In a January 12th letter to the FCC, Lawrence Strickland, the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (a branch of the Department of Commerce) wrote:

Grant of the LightSquared waiver would create a new interference environment and it is incumbent on the FCC to deal with the resulting interference issues before any interference occurs. Several federal agencies with vital concerns about this spectrum band, including the Departments of Defense, Transportation and Homeland Security, have informed NTIA that they believe the FCC should defer action on the LightSquared waiver until these interference concerns are satisfactorily addressed.

And yet, on January 26th, waiving many of their standard procedures, the FCC gave conditional approval to LightSquared’s proposal (PDF link). The only bone thrown to the GPS community was the requirement that LightSquared work with the GPS community to resolve these interference issues. But since LightSquared is funding the study, there are concerns about how unbiased the results will be. Unless you can change the laws of physics, and principles of electrical engineering, you can’t resolve this problem directly with existing GPS equipment as-is. LightSpeed acknowledged as much when they stated that they saw the main purpose of this joint effort as seeing how to modify GPS equipment to implement “filtering so that they don’t look into our band”. There are only two ways to implement this:

* Retrofit current GPS equipment with improved electronics; possible but expensive for high-end equipment, impossible at a reasonable cost for consumer-grade equipment
* Replace all current incompatible GPS receivers with new ones that have improved filtering. While the marginal cost increase on a GPS receiver is likely to be low, the requirement that you have to replace the entire unit will make this staggeringly expensive. Every GPS receiver (automotive, aviation, handheld, mobile phone) would need to be replaced.

There’s additional fodder for conspiracy theorists as well. LightSquared filed its proposal on November 18, 2010, right before Thanksgiving. The FCC fast-tracked its proposal, and limited the comment period to December 2-9, 2010, over the objections of the GPS industry and other opponents. In approving LightSquared’s proposal, they acknowledge waiving some of their requirement s (PDF link). And for the real conspiracy fans, the principals behind LightSquared may have political connections deep inside the current adminstration (PDF link). In normal circumstances, I would dismiss all this as nonsense, but the FCC’s decision is blatantly crazy, I have to wonder.

If it weren’t for its detrimental consequences on GPS, I’d think that LightSquared’s system would be a great idea – high-speed wireless Internet access in most populated places, and lower-speed access anywhere in the world by satellite. And if the FCC wants to propose regulations requiring better frequency band filtering in GPS receivers, and other types of satellite-band-based systems, to allow exactly these kind of systems to be developed in the future, I could get on board with that as well. But it should be up to LightSquared to prove that their system won’t interfere with GPS the way it is right now. GPS is the established system – twenty years of operation, hundreds of millions of receivers, uncountable numbers of applications. If LightSquared interferes with GPS, it should be required either to fix the problem itself, or be denied permission to function. That the FCC would even consider LightSquared’s proposal without modification, much less approve it, is astonishing.

If you’re interested in letting the government know how you feel, GPS World has a page on how to contact the relevant members of the House and Senate. GPS World is also the go-to source for coverage of this issue:

* FCC Requested to Authorize a Terrestrial Service That Has the Potential for Widespread Interference of GPS in Affected Urban Areas in the United States
* GPS Community Urged to Contact Congress Regarding FCC Proposal
* FCC Grants Go-Ahead to Potential Interferer with GPS Signal
* Data Shows Disastrous GPS Jamming from FCC-Approved Broadcaster

http://freegeographytools.com/2011/h...le-explanation





Ahumanright.org Plans to Buy Satellite and Provide Free Internet Access for Entire World
Ben Coxworth

For those of us who live in the developed world, internet access has become pretty much a given. It’s become so ubiquitous that we almost expect to have it at all times and in all places, but even in this “Information Age,” the majority of the world’s population lacks access to the internet – either because service isn’t available where they are, or they can’t afford it. Kosta Grammatis has a plan, however. Through his charity group ahumanright.org, Grammatis aims to set up a network of satellites that will provide free internet access to everyone in the world. He’s starting by attempting to buy a single used satellite that’s already in orbit and moving it to a location above a developing country.

The spacecraft in question is the Terrestar-1 communications satellite. Given that the company that owns it, Terrestar, has recently filed for bankruptcy, it may soon be up for sale. Grammatis’s plan is to raise US$150,000, so that his group can put together a business plan for funders, process the legal and business aspects of submitting a bid, and hire engineers to figure out how to move and repurpose the satellite. At the time of this publishing, he has raised a total of $37,687.

Once it has the money, ahumanright.org will make a bid on Terrestar-1, begin developing a low-cost modem, acquire an orbital parking spot and radio wave spectrum, and draw up plans with partner governments. The final phase of the project would involve actually moving the satellite into position over a partner country or countries, distributing the modems, and beginning service.

Grammatis told Gizmag that the idea first came to him at Palomar 5, a think tank for 30 people under the age of 30 that took place in Berlin. There, he heard the story of Malawi’s William Kamkwamba.

“Re-inventing the wheel isn't something we would wish upon anyone, but William Kamkwamba's story provides an example of the information disparity slowing down progress for the brightest minds,” said Grammatis. “William couldn't afford the US$80 per year it cost to attend school so he spent his time at the library instead ... over the span of four years he re-invented the windmill to provide himself with electricity. He shared his first Google experience with journalists: ‘He said, Do you know Google? and I said, What animal is a Google? And when I Googled windmill I found there was millions of applications! I said, Where was this Google all this time?!’”

While some people might worry that free web access for all would put internet providers out of business, Grammatis doesn’t think it would be a problem. “All over the world free television and radio is beamed to millions of people,” he said. “It's free, and that service has never threatened cable or satellite TV, in fact, people are happy to pay a premium for a premium service. We have the same vision – basic internet access would be free. It wouldn't be great, but it would do the job.”

While there is currently no price tag attached to Terrestar-1, ahumanright’s Buy This Satellite fundraising website points out that a used Iridium communications satellite was sold in 2000 for $23 million – a steal, considering it reportedly cost $5 billion to build new. Still, the whole venture sounds quite daunting, and it likely wouldn’t be possible without the help of highly-motivated volunteer “ambassadors” who are promoting the charity around the world.

“We're not going to do this alone, and the response has been outstanding,” said Grammatis. “If we all sat around and waited for someone to solve our problems, we'd be waiting a long time.”

What a fantastic idea! Good luck.
http://www.gizmag.com/ahumanright-wo...-access/17820/


















Until next week,

- js.



















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