Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 29th, '11

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Once you decide to buy advanced technology I.P. from somebody else, you’re going to buy it forever." – Jon Lauckner


"The [UK] Solicitors Regulation Authority and the judges are seemingly uncomfortable with the [robo-lawsuit] speculative invoicing idea and it actually looks as if that route will be closed off altogether." – Sarah Byrt


"The [Egyptian] government has made a big mistake taking away the [Internet] option at people’s fingertips. They’re taking their frustration to the streets." – Prof. Mohammed el-Nawawy
































Drinks All Around

According to yet another in a long line of "research studies" (few of which are taken seriously), an extremely limited number of apparently highly dedicated on-line file sharers is behind the overwhelming majority of content uploaded via the bit torrent file transfer system, and kudos to them I say.

How is it that around 100 users manage to pull off this amazing feat? The paper doesn't exactly say (believe me, I've tried it and it isn't easy), but the theory is that "economic benefits" motivate the kids, although I'm thinking magic and voodoo play large parts too.

Still it's hard to argue with the professors since they used science stuff, like a special "tool that facilitates the gathering of relevant information related to thousands of files." More than 55,000 as a matter of fact. Got it?

Armed with this info the lab coats propose that with just a little legal jujitsu, the world police league could bust these basement dwelling masterminds, since there are so few of them see, and kill off this pesky file sharing fad once and for all. "If these users are eliminated from the system," the profs insist, "BitTorrent’s traffic will be drastically reduced." Presumably making the globe safe for big content again, just like god intended. That could be the voodoo part actually.

The brain trust over at Carlos III University of Spain (and the University of Oregon) based their numbers on Mininova and TPB, and as any filenapper worth his or her harddrive knows, Mini got out of the ah, unlicensed content bidness quite a while ago.

Nevertheless, I'm not here to question their results, just to pass on the news, and let you ponder how it is that millions of files are upped by less people than found in a typical movie theater on a Wednesday night.

It could even be true.

If so, somebody deserves a medal.















Enjoy,

Jack
















January 29th, 2011





The End of the Net as We Know It

ISPs are threatening to cripple websites that don't pay them first. Barry Collins fears a disastrous end to net neutrality

You flip open your laptop, click on the BBC iPlayer bookmark and press Play on the latest episode of QI. But instead of that tedious, plinky-plonky theme tune droning out of your laptop’s speakers, you’re left staring at the whirring, circular icon as the video buffers and buffers and buffers...

That’s odd. Not only have you got a new 40Mbits/sec fibre broadband connection, but you were watching a Full HD video on Sky Player just moments ago. There’s nothing wrong with your connection; it must be iPlayer. So you head to Twitter to find out if anyone else is having problems streaming Stephen Fry et al. The message that appears on your screen leaves you looking more startled than Bill Bailey. “This service isn’t supported on your broadband service. Click here to visit our social-networking partner, Facebook.”

The free, unrestricted internet as we know it is under threat. Britain’s leading ISPs are attempting to construct a two-tier internet, where websites and services that are willing to pay are thrust into the “fast lane”, while those that don’t are left fighting for scraps of bandwidth or even blocked outright. They’re not so much ripping up the cherished notion of net neutrality as pouring petrol over the pieces and lighting the match. The only question is: can they get away with it?

No such thing as net neutrality

It’s worth pointing out that the concept of net neutrality – ISPs treating different types of internet traffic or content equally – is already a busted flush. “Net neutrality? We don’t have it today,” argues Andrew Heaney, executive director of strategy and regulation at TalkTalk, Britain’s second biggest ISP.

“We have an unbelievably good, differentiated network at all levels, with huge levels of widespread discrimination of traffic types. [Some consumers] buy high speed, some buy low speed; some buy a lot of capacity, some buy less; some buy unshaped traffic, some buy shaped.
“So the suggestion that – ‘oh dear, it is terrible, we might move to a two-tiered internet in the future'... well, let’s get real, we have a very multifaceted and multitiered internet today,” Heaney said.

Indeed, the major ISPs claim it would be “unthinkable” to return to an internet where every packet of data was given equal weight. “Yes, the internet of 30 years ago was one in which all data, all the bits and the packets were treated in the same way as they passed through the network,” said Simon Milner, BT’s director of group industry policy. “That was an internet that wasn’t about the internet that we have today: it wasn’t about speech, it wasn’t about video, and it certainly wasn’t about television.

“Twenty years ago, the computer scientists realised that applications would grab as much bandwidth as they needed, and therefore some tools were needed to make this network work more effectively, and that’s why traffic management techniques and guaranteed quality of service were developed in the 1990s, and then deep-packet inspection came along roughly ten years ago,” he added. “These techniques and equipment are essential for the development of the internet we see today.”

It’s interesting to note that some smaller (and, yes, more expensive) ISPs such as Zen Internet don’t employ any traffic shaping across their network, and Zen has won the PC Pro Best Broadband ISP award for the past seven years.

Even today’s traffic management methods can cause huge problems for certain websites and services. Peer-to-peer services are a common victim of ISPs’ traffic management policies, often being deprioritised to a snail’s pace during peak hours. While the intended target may be the bandwidth hogs using BitTorrent clients to download illicit copies of the latest movie releases, legitimate applications can also fall victim to such blunderbuss filtering.

“Peer-to-peer applications are very wide ranging,” said Jean-Jacques Sahel, director of government and regulatory affairs at VoIP service Skype. “They go from the lovely peer-to-peer file-sharing applications that were referred to in the Digital Economy Act, all the way to things such as the BBC iPlayer [which used to run on P2P software] or Skype. So what does that mean? If I manage my traffic from a technical perspective, knowing that Skype actually doesn’t eat up much bandwidth at all, why should it be deprioritised because it’s peer-to-peer?”

Nowhere has the effect of draconian traffic management been felt more vividly than on the mobile internet. Websites and services blocked at the whim of the network, video so compressed it looks like an Al-Qaeda propaganda tape, and varying charges for different types of data are already commonplace.

Skype is outlawed by a number of British mobile networks fearful of losing phone call revenue; 02 bans iPhone owners from watching the BBC iPlayer over a 3G connection; and almost all networks outlaw tethering a mobile phone to a laptop or tablet on standard “unlimited data” contracts.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, has this chilling warning for fixed-line broadband users: “Look at the mobile market, think if that is how you want your internet and your devices to work in the future, because that’s where things are leading.”

Video blockers

Until now, fixed-line ISPs have largely resisted the more drastic blocking measures chosen by the mobile operators. But if there’s one area in which ISPs are gagging to rip up what’s left of the cherished concept of net neutrality, it’s video.

Streaming video recently overtook peer-to-peer to become the largest single category of internet traffic, according to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index. It’s the chief reason why the amount of data used by the average internet connection has shot up by 31% over the past year, to a once unthinkable 14.9GB a month.

Managing video traffic is unquestionably a major headache for ISPs and broadcasters alike. ISPs are introducing ever tighter traffic management policies to make sure networks don’t collapse under the weight of video-on-demand during peak hours. Meanwhile, broadcasters such as the BBC and Channel 4 pay content delivery networks (CDNs) such as Akamai millions of pounds every year to distribute their video across the network and closer to the consumer; this helps avoid bandwidth bottlenecks when tens of thousands of people attempt to stream The Apprentice at the same time.

Now the ISPs want to cut out the middleman and get video broadcasters to pay them – instead of the CDNs – for guaranteed bandwidth. So if, for example, the BBC wants to guarantee that TalkTalk customers can watch uninterrupted HD streams from iPlayer, it had better be willing to pay for the privilege. A senior executive at a major broadcaster told PC Pro that his company has already been approached by two leading ISPs looking to cut such a deal.

Broadcasters willing to pay will be put into the “fast lane”; those who don’t will be left to fight their way through the regular internet traffic jams. Whether or not you can watch a video, perhaps even one you’ve paid for, may no longer depend on the raw speed of your connection or the amount of network congestion, but whether the broadcaster has paid your ISP for a prioritised stream.

“We absolutely could see situations in which some content or application providers might want to pay BT for a quality of service above best efforts,” admitted BT’s Simon Milner at a recent Westminster eForum. “That is the kind of thing that we’d have to explain in our traffic management policies, and indeed we’d do so, and then if somebody decided, ‘well, actually I don’t want to have that kind of service’, they would be free to go elsewhere.”

It gets worse. Asked directly at the same forum whether TalkTalk would be willing to cut off access completely to BBC iPlayer in favour of YouTube if the latter was prepared to sign a big enough cheque, TalkTalk’s Andrew Heaney replied: “We’d do a deal, and we’d look at YouTube and we’d look at BBC and we should have freedom to sign whatever deal works.”

That’s the country’s two biggest ISPs – with more than eight million broadband households between them – openly admitting they’d either cut off or effectively cripple video streams from an internet broadcaster if it wasn’t willing to hand over a wedge of cash.

Understandably, many of the leading broadcasters are fearful. “The founding principle of the internet is that everyone – from individuals to global companies – has equal access,” wrote the BBC’s director of future media and technology, Erik Huggers, in a recent blog post on net neutrality. “Since the beginning, the internet has been ‘neutral’, and everyone has been treated the same. But the emergence of fast and slow lanes allow broadband providers to effectively pick and choose what you see first and fastest.”

ITV also opposes broadband providers being allowed to shut out certain sites or services. “We strongly believe that traffic throttling shouldn’t be conducted on the basis of content provider; throttling access to content from a particular company or institution,” the broadcaster said in a recent submission to regulator Ofcom’s consultation on net neutrality.

Sky, on the other hand – which is both a broadcaster and one of the country’s leading ISPs, and a company that could naturally benefit from shutting out rival broadcasters – raised no such objection in its submission to Ofcom. “Competition can and should be relied upon to provide the necessary consumer safeguards,” Sky argued.

Can it? Would YouTube – which was initially run from a small office above a pizzeria before Google weighed in with its $1.65 billion takeover – have got off the ground if its three founders had been forced to pay ISPs across the globe to ensure its videos could be watched smoothly? It seems unlikely.

Walled-garden web

It isn’t only high-bandwidth video sites that could potentially be blocked by ISPs. Virtually any type of site could find itself barred if one of its rivals has signed an exclusive deal with an ISP, returning the web to the kind of AOL walled-garden approach of the late 1990s.

This isn’t journalistic scaremongering: the prospect of hugely popular sites being blocked by ISPs is already being debated by the Government. “I sign up to the two-year contract [with an ISP] and after 18 months my daughter comes and knocks on the lounge door and says ‘father, I can’t access Facebook any more’,” hypothesised Nigel Hickson, head of international ICT policy at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. “I say ‘Why?’. She says ‘It’s quite obvious, I have gone to the site and I have found that TalkTalk, BT, Virgin, Sky, whatever, don’t take Facebook any more. Facebook wouldn’t pay them the money, but YouTube has, so I have gone to YouTube’: Minister, is that acceptable? That is the sort of question we face.”

Where’s the regulator?

So what does Ofcom, the regulator that likes to say “yes”, think about the prospect of ISPs putting some sites in the fast lane and leaving the rest to scrap over the remaining bandwidth? It ran a consultation on net neutrality earlier this year, with spiky contributions from ISPs and broadcasters alike, but it appears to be coming down on the side of the broadband providers.

“I think we were very clear in our discussion document [on net neutrality] that we see the real economic merits to the idea of allowing a two-sided market to emerge,” said Alex Blowers, international director at Ofcom.

“Particularly for applications such as IPTV, where it seems to us that the consumer expectation will be a service that’s of a reasonably consistent quality, that allows you to actually sit down at the beginning of a film and watch it to the end without constant problems of jitter or the picture hanging,” he said. Taking that argument to its logical conclusion means that broadcasters who refuse to pay the ISPs’ bounty will be subject to stuttering quality.

Broadcasters are urging the regulator to be tougher. “We are concerned that Ofcom isn’t currently taking a firm stance in relation to throttling,” ITV said in its submission to the regulator. The BBC also said it has “concerns about the increasing potential incentives for discriminatory behaviour by network operators, which risks undermining the internet’s character, and ultimately resulting in consumer harm”.

Ofcom’s Blowers argues regulation would be premature as “there is very little evidence” that “the big beasts of the content application and services world are coming together and doing deals with big beasts of the network and ISP world”.

The regulator also places great faith in the power of competition: the theory that broadband subscribers would simply jump ship to another ISP if their provider started doing beastly things – for example, cutting off services such as the iPlayer. It’s a theory echoed by the ISPs themselves. “If we started blocking access to certain news sites, you could be sure within about 23 minutes it would be up on a blog and we’d be chastised for it, quite rightly too,” said TalkTalk’s Heaney.

Yet, in the age of bundled packages – where broadband subscriptions are routinely sold as part of the same deal as TV, telephone or mobile services – hopping from one ISP to another is rarely simple. Not to mention the 18-month or two-year contracts broadband customers are frequently chained to. As the BBC pointed out in its submission to the regulator, “Ofcom’s 2009 research showed that a quarter of households found it difficult to switch broadband and bundled services”, with the “perceived hassle of the switching process” and “the threat of additional charges” dissuading potential switchers.

“Once you have bought a device or entered a contract, that’s that,” argued the Open Rights Group’s Jim Killock. “So you make your choice and you lump it, whereas the whole point of the internet is you make your choice, you don’t like it, you change your mind.”

The best hope of maintaining the status quo of a free and open internet may lie with the EU (although even its determination is wavering). The EU’s 2009 framework requires national regulators such as Ofcom to promote “the ability of end users to access and distribute information or run applications and services of their choice” and that ISPs are transparent about any traffic management.

It even pre-empts the scenario of ISPs putting favoured partners in the “fast lane” and crippling the rest, by giving Ofcom the power to set “minimum quality of service requirements” – forcing ISPs to reserve a set amount of bandwidth so that their traffic management doesn’t hobble those sites that can’t afford to pay.

It’s a concept enthusiastically backed by the BBC and others, but not by the ISPs or Ofcom, which doesn’t have to use this new power handed down by Brussels and seems reluctant to do so. “There doesn’t yet seem to us to be an overwhelming case for a public intervention that would effectively create a new industry structure around this idea of a guaranteed ‘best efforts’ internet underpinned by legislation,” said Ofcom’s Blowers.

It’s an attitude that sparks dismay from campaigners. “Ofcom’s approach creates large risks for the open internet,” said Killock. “Its attempts to manage and mitigate the risks are weak, by relying on transparency and competition alone, and it’s unfortunate it hasn’t addressed the idea of a minimum service guarantee.”

At least the EU is adamant that ISPs shouldn’t be permitted to block legal websites or services that conflict with their commercial interests. “First and foremost, users should be able to access and distribute the content, services and applications they want,” said European Commission vice president Neelie Kroes earlier this year.

“Discrimination against undesired competitors – for instance, those providing voice-over the internet services – shouldn’t be allowed.”

Yet, Ofcom doesn’t even regard this as a major issue. “When VoIP services were first launched in the UK, most [mobile] network operators were against permitting VoIP,” Blowers said. “We now know that you can find packages from a number of suppliers that do permit VoIP services.
So I’m not as pessimistic as some may be that this kind of gaming behaviour around blocking services will be a real problem.”

If the EU doesn’t drag the UK’s relaxed regulator into line with the rest of the world, it will be British internet users who have the real problem.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/3645...-as-we-know-it





A Metered Internet is a Regulatory Failure
David Beers

YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, iPad … and whatever else is about to take the world by storm, making all of those digital breakthroughs seem old news. Surely it’s obvious by now that Canadians are going to be better off if we foster digital media creativity, rather than leaving it to people in other countries.

But tell that to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the body supposedly responsible for regulating electronic media for our well-being. The CRTC has decided to allow Bell and other big telecom companies to change the way Canadians are billed for Internet access. Metering, or usage-based billing (UBB), will mean that service providers can charge per byte in addition to their basic access charges.

The move is sure to stifle digital creativity in Canada while the rest of the world looks on and snickers.

This is not what a lot of small Internet providers who use Bell Canada’s infrastructure wanted. But they are now subject to Bell Canada’s requirements, and will be forced to usage-bill their own customers. That’s how it’s already rippling out to create an entirely different economy of Internet use in Canada. That’s what the big telecoms wanted and the CRTC is in the process of giving it to them.

Throughout, the public has been bamboozled and divided in its opinion by the presentation of easy caricatures. That damn bandwidth hog next door downloading endless porn, shooter games and episodes of NCIS – why not tag him with an extra bill for clogging the pipes? After all, the telecoms can’t be expected to lose money on the guy who comes to the all-you-can-eat buffet and scarfs down all the fried chicken, right?

Officials with smaller service providers say what Bell Canada is charging for “overages” is well beyond, even many times more, what it really costs to provide the extra bytes to customers.

So what’s this really about? Bear in mind that Bell Canada and other big telecoms also are invested heavily in an old-fashioned media-delivery model called television. If you now have to pay by the byte to live your version of a rich digital life on the Internet, maybe the hits to your bank account will push you back in front of the television set.

Except that trying to herd Canadians in 2011 back to commercial-laden programs on TV is like trying to drive back the tide. Anyone with children knows they view the television set as a moribund, one-way screen versus the computer’s portal into a realm of interactivity and content on demand.

That’s the future, and everyone knows it. So why aren’t we preserving the level playing field that has made the Internet such a vibrant cultural commons?

Forget that caricature of the slobbering porn addict next door. Canadians accessed a treasure trove of National Film Board works by the millions of downloads last year. Universities and libraries across the country are working to move priceless archives onto the Internet, where, the idea was, they’d be available to all. Not if it’s too expensive to download them.

Consider the predicament of a small, independent website like mine, The Tyee. Already scraping by on limited resources, but recognizing our audience’s desire for more audio and video, we are working with a network of multimedia producers who really know how to stretch a dollar. But they tell us that UBB threatens to make it too expensive for them to craft their products, considering what they need to download while doing their work, the amounts we can pay and the niche audiences likely to listen and watch.
So there you have it. Just as the world is ready to feast on what Canadians might cook up in the way of multimedia 3.0, Canada decides to meter the Internet, tilting the table sharply towards old-school TV networks and big corporations that can absorb the higher cost of doing business.

NDP digital affairs critic Charlie Angus gets what’s at stake. “We’ve seen this all before with cellphones,” he said last week. “Allowing the Internet Service Providers to ding you every time you download is a rip-off. Canada is already falling behind other countries in terms of choice, accessibility and pricing for the Internet. We need clear rules that put consumers first.”

Forty thousand people have signed an online petition called Stop The Meter. The CRTC’s final decision is likely mere days away. Let’s hope the regulators think creatively and do the right thing.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1881250/





FCC Chairman Takes the Hot Seat at Wireless Gathering
Marguerite Reardon

In his first major address to the wireless industry, the new Federal Communications Commission chairman, Julius Genachowski, offered some good news for wireless operators at the industry's biannual gathering here Wednesday. But he reiterated the FCC's plans to apply new Net neutrality rules to wireless, a plan that has met resistance among the industry's major players.

As part of his speech, Genachowski announced a new initiative to add more spectrum for high-speed Internet access, and he offered assurances that the FCC will help speed up 4G wireless roll-outs by cutting through red tape for new tower deployments.

The industry has applauded these new initiatives. The CTIA, which is the trade organization for the wireless industry, recently sent a letter to the FCC asking it to consider opening up more spectrum for auction to help spur growth. And it has also been urging the FCC to speed up the process for building new towers.

Specifically, Genachowski said that the agency's main priority will be to make more spectrum available to wireless operators. And he said the FCC will impose a "shot clock" timetable for companies seeking permission to build cellular towers in local communities.

But Genachowski also said that he plans to keep the wireless Internet open. And he emphasized that the agency's Net neutrality principles, which will soon become official regulation, will also apply to wireless networks. While this latest bit of his agenda hasn't been popular with wireless operators, Genachowski said the agency's hope is to work closely with the industry.

"When we say that we haven't determined what we are going to do with handset exclusivity and we want your input, we mean it," he said. "The same applies to an open Internet. We want you to be engaged. We need you to be engaged. I am committed to running an expert agency that works for all Americans, that pursues high principles while recognizing the danger of dogma and the power of pragmatism."

Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, said during his keynote address Wednesday that he is happy to work with the FCC. He applauded the agency's efforts to open up more spectrum and to speed up the bureaucratic process for building and expanding wireless networks.

"We welcome the call for a fact-based approach to these issues," he said. "And we are pleased, (Genachowski) wants to listen to us. But in a competitive market, consumers will assess the value of our service. And they will pick the winners and losers. And that is the way it should be."

De la Vega pointed out the company's latest effort to keep its network open by allowing voice over IP services such as Skype to run on the iPhone. AT&T has the exclusive deal in the U.S. to carry the popular Apple smartphone on its network.

Genachowski said he appreciates AT&T's announcement. And he said this was good news for consumers.

But he said more work needs to be done. And even though Net neutrality is a priority at the agency, he said that allocating more spectrum and adding capacity to the wireless network is the No. 1 concern at the agency. He said that mobile data usage is exploding. And by 2013 U.S. consumers will use nearly 400 petabytes per month of wireless data compared with 6 petabytes per month in 2008.

"You don't have to know what a petabyte is to know that that's a game-changing trajectory," he said. "Spectrum is the oxygen of our mobile networks. While the short-term outlook for 4G spectrum availability is adequate, the longer-term picture is very different. I believe that that the biggest threat to the future of mobile in America is the looming spectrum crisis."

He proposed that the FCC will look at secondary markets to add more spectrum and will look to make its spectrum policies more flexible to encourage the use of unlicensed spectrum. He also said the FCC will encourage the use of smart antennas and femtocells.

But most importantly, Genachowski said that the FCC must reallocate spectrum currently being used for other purposes. He said that carriers have told the FCC that they need anywhere from 40MHz to 150MHz each to bring wireless broadband to consumers.

"It takes years to reallocate spectrum and put it to use," he said. "But we have no choice. We must identify spectrum that can best be reinvested in mobile broadband."

Genachowski also said that the FCC has heard the industry's call to help it work with local communities to get new cell phone towers approved much more quickly to help them build their next-generation wireless networks.

"We at the FCC understand the many challenges operators face in (building) networks," he said. "We are ready to help you cut through red tape and overcome these hurdles."

While the industry was happy to hear the good news that the FCC is willing to help it address some of its most pressing issues, leaders such as de la Vega resisted the agency's plans to extend Net neutrality principles to the wireless market.

Genachowski said it was imperative that the agency keep wireless broadband networks open to encourage more innovation. And he tried to allay fears that the FCC would impose arcane rules that would stifle innovation and investment.

"The goal of the proceeding will be to develop sensible rules of the road," he said. "Rules clear enough to provide predictability and certainty, and flexible enough to anticipate and welcome ongoing technological evolution."

But AT&T's de la Vega argued that imposing the same policy rules on wireless networks as it applies to wired networks is not a good idea. And he said that it is unfair for the FCC to impose any rules on wireless operators who have already spent billions of dollars buying licenses for wireless spectrum.

"The rules should not change after the auction," he said. "How can you expect companies to invest billions of dollars if you change the rules? The rules were clear in the 700MHZ auction for the next generation of wireless services. And these rules should not change now after the money has been spent. What would that say about the integrity of the 700MHz auction?"
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-12261_7...-10356022.html





FCC Seeks to Dismiss Challenges to Internet Rules
Sinead Carew and Jasmin Melvin

The Federal Communications Commission filed on Friday to dismiss challenges to its new Internet traffic rules, an agency official said.

A senior FCC official said the agency filed several motions with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit asking the court to dismiss as premature challenges from Verizon Communications Inc and MetroPCS Communications Inc.

"The rules that govern when and how parties may challenge FCC orders are clear, and Verizon and MetroPCS filed too early when they challenged the Open Internet order," the senior FCC official said in an e-mail.

The order, criticized by opponents as a legally shaky government intrusion into regulating the Internet, would prevent network operators from blocking lawful content but still let them ration access to their networks.

At stake is ensuring consumer access to content such as huge movie files while letting Internet providers manage their networks to prevent congestion.

Last week Verizon filed a case against the FCC in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, arguing that the regulator had overstepped its authority in creating new rules aimed at regulating Internet traffic.

Smaller rival MetroPCS followed with its own lawsuit challenging the new rules.

Verizon, the majority owner of the largest U.S. wireless service, and fifth-ranked MetroPCS, appear to have attempted to anchor their challenges in a venue favorable to them by arguing that the rules would modify their wireless licenses. Such disputes are sent to the D.C. appeals court.

The same court ruled last year that the FCC lacked the authority to stop Comcast Corp from blocking bandwidth-hogging applications on its broadband network, spurring the agency's most recent rulemaking effort.

Attorneys familiar with the open Internet order said it was expected that the FCC would challenge the characterization of the rules as a license modification.

A spokesman for Verizon said the company would respond in due course, while MetroPCS's spokesman said the company was assessing the FCC actions and had no comment.

An FCC official had said last week that Verizon appeared to be premature in filing its appeal as the new rules, which were adopted in December, had not yet been published in the Federal Register.

FCC rulemakings are traditionally challenged during a 60-day window after the rules are published in the Federal Register.

In a 3-2 vote on December 21, the FCC highlighted a huge divide between those who say the Internet should flourish without regulation and those who say the power of high-speed Internet providers to discriminate against competitors needs to be restrained.

(Reporting by Sinead Carew in New York and Jasmin Melvin in Washington)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...70R6PT20110128





Comcast Completes NBC Universal Merger

Comcast Corp has completed its takeover of NBC Universal, creating a $30 billion media behemoth that controls not just how television shows and movies are made but how they are delivered to people's homes.

In a statement on Saturday, Comcast said the transaction closed the previous day. To close the deal, Comcast, the No. 1 provider of video and residential Internet service in the United States, acquired a 51 percent stake in NBC Universal from General Electric Co.

Executives at Comcast spent more than 13 months working on getting the deal through a rigorous U.S. regulatory review process with the Federal Communications Commission and Justice Department.

Regulators, who approved the deal on January 18 with conditions, were concerned that an all powerful Comcast might stifle competition from new online video competitors including Hulu, in which it now owns a stake.

Among the conditions to which Comcast agreed: relinquishing management rights of its minority stake in Hulu. Hulu is co-owned by News Corp, Walt Disney Co and NBC Universal.

The newly created joint venture is called NBCUniversal LLC and its assets include NBC broadcast stations, cable channels like Bravo, USA and E!, the Universal movie studio as well as theme parks among other assets.

Comcast chief executive Brian Roberts said on Saturday that the transaction creates "the ideal entertainment and distribution company."

Comcast sees it as a potent combination alongside its 23 million video subscribers and nearly 17 million Internet subscribers.

The Philadelphia-based company hopes to take advantage of an evolving media world as viewing habits change and audiences expect to find their favorite entertainment on the TV set as well as the PC, tablet and smartphone.

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke and Dan Levine; Editing by Eric Beech)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...70S2WZ20110129





Netflix: ISPs Overcharging Subs With Tiered Data Plans
Ryan Lawler

Netflix posted better-than-expected growth Wednesday, adding 3 million users to top off at 20 million subscribers. But the company said tiered data plans being introduced by ISPs would not only hurt takeup of its online streaming service, but that broadband providers moving to those plans are overcharging their subscribers. In a statement issued along with today’s earnings announcement, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said:

“An independent negative issue for Netflix and other Internet video providers would be a move by wired ISPs to shift consumers to pay-per-gigabyte models instead of the current unlimited-up-to-a-large-cap approach. We hope this doesn’t happen, and will do what we can to promote the unlimited-up-to-a- large-cap model. Wired ISPs have large fixed costs of building and maintaining their last mile network of residential cable and fiber. The ISPs’ costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary. Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced.”

That means that ISPs introducing tiered data plans could be overcharging subscribers by up to 100 percent. Netflix also takes issue with the way that some ISPs treat traffic coming into their network. While Netflix doesn’t call out Comcast by name, the country’s largest cable provider recently got into a spat with Level 3, one of Netflix’s content delivery networks. That fight resulted in Comcast asking Level 3 to pay higher interconnection fees for connecting to Comcast’s last-mile network.

“Delivering Internet video in scale creates costs for both Netflix and for ISPs. We think the cost sharing between Internet video suppliers and ISPs should be that we have to haul the bits to the various regional front-doors that the ISPs operate, and that they then carry the bits the last mile to the consumer who has requested them, with each side paying its own costs. This open, regional, no- charges, interchange model is something for which we are advocating. Today, some ISPs charge us, or our CDN partners, to let in the bits their customers have requested from us, and we think this is inappropriate. As long as we pay for getting the bits to the regional interchanges of the ISP’s choosing, we don’t think they should be able to use their exclusive control of their residential customers to force us to pay them to let in the data their customers’ desire. Their customers already pay them to deliver the bits on their network, and requiring us to pay even though we deliver the bits to their network is an inappropriate reflection of their last mile exclusive control of their residential customers.”

As a provider of streaming video, which consumes large amounts of bandwidth and is a competitive product to many ISP’s pay TV operations, Netflix is a canary in the coal mine when it comes to anti-competitive behavior by ISPs.
http://gigaom.com/broadband/netflix-tiered-data/





Netflix Performance on Top ISP Networks

Hi there. This is Ken Florance, Director of Content Delivery here at Netflix.

As we continue to stream more and more great movies and TV shows, we find ourselves in the unique position of having insight into the performance of hundreds of millions of long duration, high-definition video streams delivered over the Internet.

The throughput we are able to achieve with these streams can tell us a great deal about the actual capacity our subscribers are able to sustain to their homes. In the charts below, we’re using a time-weighted bitrate metric to represent the effective data throughput our subscribers receive over many of the top ISPs.

Currently, our top HD streams are about 4800 kilobits per second. Clients may switch through a number of bitrates as they ramp up to the highest stream, or shift down from the highest stream if they cannot sustain play at that rate due to throughput constraints. No client would sustain a 4800 stream from start to finish (there would at least be a few smaller streams averaged in for startup) but the higher the sustained average, the greater the throughput the client can achieve, and the greater the image quality over the duration of the play.

As we use a number of CDNs, and our clients can adapt to changing network conditions by selecting the network path that’s currently giving them the best throughput, Netflix streaming performance ends up being an interesting way to measure sustained throughput available from a given ISP over time, and therefore the quality of Netflix streaming that ISP is providing to our subscribers. Obviously, this can vary by network technology (e.g. DSL, Cable), region, etc., but it's a great high-level view of Netflix performance across a large number of individual streaming sessions.

In the metric below, we’re filtering for titles that have HD streams available, and for devices capable of playing HD streams (which also filters out mobile networks), to highlight what’s achievable in terms of HD performance on the various ISP networks. As you can see, Charter is in the lead for US streams with an impressive 2667 kilobits per second average over the period. Rogers leads in Canada with a whopping 3020 kbps average.

We'll update these charts monthly, and we welcome questions, comments and suggestions to help improve our understanding of Netflix performance on top ISP networks.
http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/01/...-networks.html





Two-Thirds of U.S. Internet Users Lack Fast Broadband

South Korea, Japan outclass U.S. in Internet speeds
Jon Brodkin

Two-thirds of U.S. Internet connections are slower than 5 Mbps, putting the United States well behind speed leaders South Korea and Japan.

The United States places ninth in the world in access to "high broadband connectivity," at 34% of users, including 27% of connections reaching 5 Mbps to 10 Mbps and 7% reaching above 10 Mbps, Akamai says in its latest State of the Internet Report. That's an improvement since a year ago, when the United States was in 12th place with only 24% of users accessing fast connections. But the United States is still dwarfed by South Korea, where 72% of Internet connections are greater than 5 Mbps, and Japan, which is at 60%. Hong Kong and Romania are the only other countries or regions to hit the 50% mark.

The United States places ninth in the world in access to "high broadband connectivity," at 34% of users, including 27% of connections reaching 5 Mbps to 10 Mbps and 7% reaching above 10 Mbps, Akamai says in its latest State of the Internet Report. That's an improvement since a year ago, when the United States was in 12th place with only 24% of users accessing fast connections. But the United States is still dwarfed by South Korea, where 72% of Internet connections are greater than 5 Mbps, and Japan, which is at 60%. Hong Kong and Romania are the only other countries or regions to hit the 50% mark.

Worldwide, 22% of Internet connections are 5 Mbps or greater, according to Akamai.

The United States ranked even worse in providing connections greater than 2 Mbps. Although 74% of U.S. connections reach this threshold, that's good for only 39th place in the world, out of 200 or so countries and regions. Monaco, Tunisia and the Isle of Man lead the way with at least 95% of users surfing the Web at 2 Mbps speeds.

The U.S. government in April 2009 created the National Broadband Plan with the goal of "bringing the power and promise of broadband to us all."

"Broadband in America is not all it needs to be," the government initiative's Web site states. "Approximately 100 million Americans do not have broadband at home. Broadband-enabled health information technology (IT) can improve care and lower costs by hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming decades, yet the United States is behind many advanced countries in the adoption of such technology. Broadband can provide teachers with tools that allow students to learn the same course material in half the time, but there is a dearth of easily accessible digital educational content required for such opportunities. A broadband-enabled Smart Grid could increase energy independence and efficiency, but much of the data required to capture these benefits are inaccessible to consumers, businesses and entrepreneurs. And nearly a decade after 9/11, our first responders still lack a nationwide public safety mobile broadband communications network, even though such a network could improve emergency response and homeland security."

Akamai's numbers, released Monday in the quarterly State of the Internet report, is based on 533 million unique IP addresses from 233 countries and regions that accessed the Akamai network in the third quarter of 2010. Although two-thirds of U.S. connections are below 5 Mbps, there are enough fast connections to bring the United States' average speed up to the 5 Mbps mark. South Korea leads the way in this category as well, with the average user enjoying speeds of 14 Mbps.

While the FCC defines broadband as download speeds meeting or exceeding 4 Mbps, Akamai defines broadband as 2 Mbps and greater and high broadband as 5 Mbps and greater.

Within the United States, Delaware leads the way at 64% of Internet connections hitting the high broadband mark, with New Hampshire and Rhode Island also surpassing 50%. The District of Columbia and Massachusetts round out the top five at 47% and 45%, respectively, according to Akamai.

"Ideally, these positive trends in high broadband adoption will continue to increase over time, especially as additional funding for broadband programs is awarded by the United States government," Akamai said. "In July, $795 million in 'broadband expansion grants' was awarded to projects in 36 states and the District of Columbia. Additionally, $1.2 billion in funding was awarded by the Rural Utilities Service in August, mostly for rural DSL and wireless expansion."

The Akamai report also details Internet attack traffic patterns, which show the United States accounting for an increasing share of Internet attacks, with 12% of all attack traffic originating from this country.

"The United States remained in first place during this period, responsible for nearly one-eighth of the observed attack traffic -- slightly more than in the prior quarter," Akamai writes.

Previously, the United States accounted for 11% of worldwide attack traffic. Russia, meanwhile, dropped from 10% to 8.9% and China dropped from 11% to 8.2%.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...broadband.html





Hunting Two Bloggers - Capturing 7000

In pursuit of two bloggers who have been critical of a right-extremist group in Italy, the Norwegian police seized about 7,000 people.
Eline Buvarp Aardal

Italian police have asked colleagues in Norway to obtain personal information about the two bloggers from a server in Oslo. Server belong to the organization Autistici , which offers confidential e-mail and blogs for political activists including Norway, Italy, Russia and the Netherlands.

Police took a copy of your entire hard disk, and is thus about political bloggers in all these countries.

Given the information that is on balance this is a potential scandal, "said Torgeir Waterhouse of the ICT-Norway , the IT industry association.

Waterhouse believes this is a frightening example of how the police do not take the risk that sensitive information about your people can go astray, seriously.

You can compare this with the police to confiscate the contents of two safe deposit boxes, and end up with them for safety's sake take the seizure of all bank boxes in the bank, "said Waterhouse.

On the website of Autistici have also published a statement about the Norwegian raid on the server:

"When such things happen in China or Iran are those who care about privacy to the streets to protest against the" regimes "as the spying on citizens. But when it happens right in front of them they become confused, perhaps because the media blows up the petty scandals that happen in this country are insignificant. "

Police: Will the focus on privacy

Police Attorney Kai-Gunnar Nygård Schweder the Oslo police said that they should send away information that is relevant to the Italian authorities. The reason the police took a copy of your entire hard disk, explaining it was that they would otherwise have to perform the time consuming work, where e-mail server was, or the e-mail server is physically in seizures and maintain this until they were finished with the search for what they were for.

–But it is clear that there is no problem, and we will focus on privacy as we answer the letters rogatory, "says Nygård.

In a note to the EU Norway reported that the police here asking for such help from colleagues abroad about 1000 times a year. Meanwhile, the Norwegian police, slightly less than 1000 inquiries a year from their foreign counterparts.

Hans Jørgen Lightning in telecommunications company Runbox often get requests from police to hand over data traffic on its customers. Last, he was asked to freeze the traffic to ensure the track to any orders regarding the disclosure of information.

Sparkle says people must become more aware that this happens - also in Norway.

This case should be a wakeup call for Norwegians, according to Torgeir Waterhouse of the ICT-Norway.

- This is a problem not only exists in the U.S. and other places far away. After that, we do crave NCIS data about customers every day, and they are forwarding requests from foreign police to Norwegian companies.

Police Attorney Nygård says that Norwegian police have a duty to assist foreign law enforcement, and that these cases are given priority.

- It is important that we respond to these inquiries, so we should be able to get help in other countries, "says Nygård.

- The law is set aside

Waterhouse believes that this matter should be a wakeup call for Norwegians.

- It means that the protection of what is yours, and situated in the law to deliberately limit including the police - so you have to go through the right to access - is set aside.

- This is also a clear signal about how it will go with the Data Retention Directive. This shows that there is every reason to have a suspicion that there is a systematic collection of data in case anyone should need it later, "says Waterhouse.
http://translate.google.com/translat...ge%2F1.7472382





Jesse Ventura Sues TSA, Says Body Scans and Pat-Down Searches Violate Rights
Amy Forliti

Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura sued the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration on Monday, alleging full-body scans and pat-downs at airport checkpoints violate his right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

Ventura is asking a federal judge in Minnesota to issue an injunction ordering officials to stop subjecting him to "warrantless and suspicionless" scans and body searches.

The lawsuit, which also names Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and TSA Administrator John Pistole as defendants, argues the searches are "unwarranted and unreasonable intrusions on Governor Ventura's personal privacy and dignity and are a justifiable cause for him to be concerned for his personal health and well-being."

According to the lawsuit, Ventura received a hip replacement in 2008, and since then, his titanium implant has set off metal detectors at airport security checkpoints. The lawsuit said that prior to last November officials had used a non-invasive hand-held wand to scan his body as a secondary security measure.

But when Ventura set off the metal detector in November, he was instead subjected to a body pat-down and was not given the option of a scan with a hand-held wand or an exemption for being a frequent traveler, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit said the pat-down "exposed him to humiliation and degradation through unwanted touching, gripping and rubbing of the intimate areas of his body."

It claims that under TSA's policy, Ventura will be required to either go through a full-body scanner or submit to a pat-down every time he travels because he will always set off the metal detector.

Ventura, who was Minnesota governor from 1999 through 2002 and is now the host of the television program "Conspiracy Theory," did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment.

Napolitano said in December that the new technology and the pat-downs were "objectively safer for our traveling public."

The U.S. attorney's office did not immediately return an e-mail message seeking comment Monday.

The TSA's website says there are nearly 500 full-body scanners in use at 78 airports. The scanners show a traveler's physical contours on a computer screen that's viewed in a private room. Faces aren't shown, and the person's identity is supposedly not known to the screener reviewing the images.

Not all travelers are selected to go through the scanners, but the TSA requires people who decline to submit to pat-downs that include checks of the inside of their thighs and buttocks.
http://www.twincities.com/politics/ci_17186132





"TWO *REAL* GUNS POINTED AT ME": How the FBI Raided Anonymous
Nate Anderson

The FBI yesterday executed 40 search warrants around the US to gather evidence on the Anonymous distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in defense of WikiLeaks last year—attacks which targeted Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Amazon. And when the FBI comes a-knockin', the whole house starts a rockin'.

Ars has seen posts from a private forum in which several targets of the FBI raids offer brief descriptions of the experience, along with the occasional photo of a beaten-in front door. We cannot guarantee the authenticity of these accounts, though we believe them to be genuine.

A note of context: "LOIC" here refers to the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, a software tool used in the Anonymous DDoS attacks that can flood a network connection with data.

I used LOIC during that whole Wikileaks fiasco. The FBI showed up at my door with a search warrant for any electronic devices that may have been used in the attack. That means any and all computers, unless I pointed out to them which one was used in the attack. I'm not retarded, I invoked my 5th amendment rights and didn't say anything so now they are taking everything. Yes, I'm f**king dumb. No, I didn't have time to thermite the hard drive. I'm worried that the FBI might stumble upon this site due to all the :filez: on my computer.

A second account showed a similar level of, err, enthusiasm on the part of the FBI.

6am, door busted down (NOT KIDDING), "FBI FBI FBI POLICE FBI GET YOUR ARMS UP AND DONT MOVE THEM. WALK DOWNSTAIRS RIGHT NOW. DO NOT MOVE YOUR HANDS." --- TWO *REAL* GUNS POINTED AT ME.

me in 1 cop car, gf in other car.

took 3.5 hrs, all electronic devices taken including 3 computers. said nearly nothing. finally left.

On sites like Reddit, hearsay was the norm. "A coworker of mine just came in and said her house got raided by the FBI last night," wrote one poster. "Apparently her son was using a bot, didn't cover his tracks and got caught plain as day… I reiterate my point—nothing will come of their home being raided. The mom wasn't even that upset. More just wanted to know what it was all about and what 4chan and anon are since the FBI was asking her a bunch of questions about it. She had no idea what they were talking about."

The FBI yesterday reminded the public that "facilitating or conducting a DDoS attack is illegal, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, as well as exposing participants to significant civil liability."

Update: as one of our commenters points out, another forum offers even more details about what was taken. The guy who had the *REAL* GUNS pointed him lost his "iphone 4, main computer, media center pc, work laptop x1000, xbox 360, ps3, wii, 3 thumb drives, about 15 burned CDs/DVDs, gf's acer laptop, [and] gf's mom's toshiba laptop."

They started it!

Similar raids took place in the UK, resulting in the detention of five suspects. In response, someone claiming to speak for Anonymous issued a manifesto against the UK government in the name of "us, Anonymous, the people."

The document says that the DDoS attacks were little more than peaceful protests:

As traditional means of protest (peaceful demonstrations, sit-ins, the blocking of a crossroads or the picketing of a factory fence) have slowly turned into nothing but an empty, ritualised gesture of discontent over the course of the last century, people have been anxiously searching for new ways to pressure politicians and give voice to public demands in a manner that might actually be able to change things for the better. Anonymous has, for now, found this new way of voicing civil protest in the form of the DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, attack. Just as is the case with traditional forms of protest, we block access to our opponents' infrastructure to get our message across.

Besides, the main Wikileaks site was hit with a DDoS attack first; are the authorities breaking down doors to solve that case? "We have noted that similar attacks have also been carried out against Wikileaks itself, yet so far, nobody has been arrested in connection with these attacks, nor are there even any signs of an investigation into this issue at all," the manifesto continues. "Yet, we know exactly who was responsible for that attack. Anonymous believes it is unfair and hypocritical to attempt to put these 5 arrested anons to trial without even attempting to find those who DDoS'ed a website which you oppose."

True anonymity on the Internet is tough to come by—even for Anonymous.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-anonymous.ars





Justice Department Seeks Mandatory Data Retention
Declan McCullagh

Criminal investigations "are being frustrated" because no law currently exists to force Internet providers to keep track of what their customers are doing, the U.S. Department of Justice will announce tomorrow.

CNET obtained a copy of the department's position on mandatory data retention--saying Congress should strike a "more appropriate balance" between privacy and police concerns--that will be announced at a House of Representatives hearing tomorrow.

"Data retention is fundamental to the department's work in investigating and prosecuting almost every type of crime," Jason Weinstein, deputy assistant attorney general for the criminal division, will say, according to his written testimony. "The problem of investigations being stymied by a lack of data retention is growing worse."

The Bush Justice Department endorsed such proposals under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Tomorrow's announcement demonstrates that the Obama Justice Department is following suit and appears to be its first public statement embracing mandatory data retention.

That aligns the Justice Department with data retention's more aggressive supporters among House Republicans and places it at odds with privacy advocates, civil libertarians, and the Internet industry. Those groups have questioned the privacy, liability, cost, and scope, including whether businesses such as coffee shops would be required to identify and monitor whoever uses their wireless connections.

Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.), who is convening tomorrow's House crime subcommittee hearing, is a longtime supporter of forcing Internet providers to store additional data about their users. So is the new chairman of the full House Judiciary committee, Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who introduced a data retention bill in an earlier session of Congress.

As a Justice Department official in the 1990s, Attorney General Eric Holder touted the idea of mandatory data retention. In 1999, Holder said "certain data must be retained by ISPs for reasonable periods of time so that it can be accessible to law enforcement."

Weinstein, who has previously testified (PDF) on intellectual property infringement and was chief of the violent crime section of the U.S. Attorney's office in Baltimore, stopped short of offering a specific proposal in his prepared remarks. While the lack of forced data retention can be "extremely harmful," he didn't provide details on duration or scope, including whether Web sites and social networking sites should be swept into any requirements.

Other excerpts from Weinstein's written testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security:

• In one ongoing investigation involving social networking sites allegedly being used to share child porn images, the FBI and other agencies sent 172 requests to Internet service providers to learn the identities behind Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Nineteen percent of the requests could not be fulfilled. (It's not clear, however, whether police simply moved too slowly and didn't send the requests in time.)

• Larger providers have "established policies about how long they retain this data." But smaller providers may not: one unnamed mid-size cell phone company reportedly does not retain any records, and another unnamed cable Internet provider does not keep track of the IP addresses it assigns to customers.

• Internet and cell phone companies' records are vital not just to federal police and prosecutors, but also their state and local counterparts. Those records can aid in investigations of a "wide array of crimes, including child exploitation, violent crime, fraud, terrorism, public corruption, drug trafficking, online piracy, computer hacking."

Also testifying tomorrow is John Douglass, the chief of police for Overland Park, Kansas, on behalf of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. In 2006, the IACP adopted a resolution calling for a "uniform data retention mandate" for "customer subscriber information and source and destination information," which apparently means keeping track of what Web sites every Internet user visits. A representative of the IACP said today it continues to support the resolution.

Douglass will ask Congress for "clear guidance and regulations on data retention," according to a source familiar with the IACP's testimony. Like the Justice Department, the IACP will not offer specifics but instead will recount how criminal investigations have been hindered to date.

For now, the scope of any mandatory data retention law remains hazy. It could mean forcing companies to store data for two years about what Internet addresses are assigned to which customers. (Comcast said in 2006 that it would be retaining those records for six months.)

Or it could be more intrusive, sweeping in online service providers, and involve keeping track of e-mail and instant-messaging correspondence and what Web pages users visit. Some Democratic politicians have previously called for data retention laws to extend to domain name registries and Web hosting companies and even social-networking sites. An FBI attorney said last year that the bureau supports storing Internet users' "origin and destination information," meaning logs of which Web sites are visited.

AOL said today that "we are waiting to see the proposed legislation to understand what data needs to be retained and for what time period."

These concepts are not exactly new. In June 2005, CNET was the first to report that the Justice Department was quietly shopping around the idea, reversing the department's previous position that it had "serious reservations about broad mandatory data retention regimes." Despite support from FBI director Robert Mueller and the Bush Justice Department, however, the proposals languished amid worries about privacy and the cost of compliance.

"Retention" versus "preservation"

At the moment, Internet service providers typically discard any log file that's no longer required for business reasons such as network monitoring, fraud prevention or billing disputes. Companies do, however, alter that general rule when contacted by police performing an investigation--a practice called data preservation.

A 1996 federal law called the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act regulates data preservation. It requires Internet providers to retain any "record" in their possession for 90 days "upon the request of a governmental entity."

Because Internet addresses remain a relatively scarce commodity, ISPs tend to allocate them to customers from a pool based on whether a computer is in use at the time. (Two standard techniques used are the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet.)

In addition, an existing law called the Protect Our Children Act of 2008 requires any Internet provider who "obtains actual knowledge" of possible child pornography transmissions to "make a report of such facts or circumstances." Companies that knowingly fail to comply can be fined up to $150,000 for the first offense and up to $300,000 for each subsequent offense.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20...=2547-1_3-0-20





UK ISPs Moot Anonymous Internet Solution to Circumvent New Data and Piracy Laws
MarkJ

A Swedish ISP that is also responsible for hosting WikiLeaks, Bahnhof, has this week triggered a fresh debate into internet privacy by announcing its intention to avoid the new European Data Retention Directive and stick all of its customers behind an effectively anonymous Virtual Private Network (VPN).

Most VPN's act as private networks that piggyback the public internet and are traditionally used to help employees stay connected with their work while away from the office. They can also have many other uses, such as allowing virtual Local Area Network (LAN) connections between users.

Crucially a good VPN will encrypt your internet activity and provide a secure way of working, which is essential for office networks. As a by-product this also means that end-users are often able to surf the internet with relative anonymity, both from other surfers and your own ISP.

The move could of course present some problems for new UK and European data retention and anti-piracy laws, the latter of which (Digital Economy Act 2010) relies upon copyright owners being able to identify "suspected" unlawful file sharing p2p activity from publicly available IP details; a feat that is already extremely unreliable.

Bahnhof believes that by cloaking its users behind a VPN, admittedly not the cheapest of solutions, their connectivity logs would end up being both significantly smaller and useless for identifying end-user activity. Naturally we wanted to know what UK ISPs thought of this.

The Director of AAISP UK, Adrian Kennard, told ISPreview.co.uk:

"There are, of course, a whole string of loop holes.

I doubt you need to go to VPN as such. In fact, something ISPs will be doing anyway, carrier grade NAT, will create a similar anonymity as there is no requirement to log NAT sessions.

The data retention stuff is badly drafted and only means keeping what you already process for a year, not logging and new stuff. Even then it is a very narrow set of things to log, and some are badly worded at best. It is much more relevant for telephone call logging.

The DEA is the bigger issue. So far OFCOM say it will relate to the few big ISPs, but that threshold could so easily change, hence interest from ISPs of all sizes."

VPN is of course a perfectly legitimate service, although some might rightly fear that following by Bahnhof's example could carry with it a number of technical and political concerns. Indeed sometimes the very fear of being identified is what deters internet abusers from doing something bad in the first place.

Adrian Kennard continued:

"ISPs are not trying to encourage piracy, obviously, even if it does mean customers paying more for bandwidth. But ISPs are not police (not that "police" is relevant in most of these civil cases anyway). ISPs just want to get on with running a network and not be involved in a lot of paperwork and costs and bad will be caused by things like the DEA. IMHO."

It is perhaps a simple truth that, due to how the open internet works, end-users already have a multitude of ways in which they can stay anonymous while online (i.e. buying your own VPN, proxy servers etc.). However the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for business ISP Timico UK, Trefor Davies, cautions that taking the VPN tunnel may not always be plain sailing.

Timico's CTO, Trefor Davies, added:

"It would be a pretty costly project for all ISPs to implement such a system. It would also bring with it risks – suddenly it becomes a lot easier for governments to start monitoring all your traffic because it all goes through a single point (or at least a few points) on the network. In the UK the Data Protection Act if applied to an ISP would also prevent them from offering such an anonymizing service because legally they would be obliged to provide the logs.

This doesn’t stop us from aspiring to a scenario where there is an internet out there which protects your right to privacy. Unfortunately, regardless of the technical issues involved, Big Government and Big Business are likely to get in the way. Governments love to control and business wants as much information about you as it can lay its hands on."

Simon Davies, IDNet UK's Director, told ISPreview.co.uk:

"We piloted this a while ago but found that most of our customers want a real, static, routable IP address. We may offer it as an opt-in for customers in the future which might appeal to those who are unable to migrate to IPv6."

At the extreme end of the spectrum AAISP suggests that one way to circumvent the problem set out by Timico might be to simply create a "friendly society - a private club - and only provide services to the members of that club. Then we are not a public operator at all ... That would be a fun approach."

We expect to update this article in the near future as several other UK ISPs have also been asked for their feedback. So far most of the big providers have, understandably, declined to comment.

UPDATE 29th January 2011

Comments from Entanet UK.

Darren Farnden, Head of Marketing at wholesale communications provider Entanet, said:

"Without reading the technical detail behind the Swedish ISP's use of a VPN to hide its customers, it doesn't seem a sensible step to take because it potentially focuses liability for any infringement directly onto the ISP. Why invite that sort of attention?

As a responsible communications provider, we don't advocate any steps to proactively create the ability to avoid the identification of parties who are deliberately committing acts of data piracy. In reality, as a CP focused in the main on serving business customers via a channel of partners, this really isn't an issue.

A few of our partners do serve non-business customers though and, where we receive notification from a rights holder of an alleged copyright infringement, we already communicate with the user by email. Secondary and tertiary notifications from the right holder result in further emails and ultimately blocked access. We don't however use any tools to monitor the user between notifications.

The DEA takes a similar step in requiring ISPs to write to alleged offenders when presented with a Court Order. The detail is well documented. What amazes us is the Government's latest announcement that it thinks it is 'fair to everyone' that ISPs pay for 25% of the costs of pursuing alleged offenders even though it acknowledges that 'rights holders will be the main beneficiaries'."
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/201...racy-laws.html





In U.S. Courts, Facebook Posts Become Less Private
Brian Grow

It's the latest litigation tactic in the online age: U.S. lawyers are trying to mine the private zones of Facebook and other social-media sites for photos, comments, status updates and other tidbits that might contradict what their opponents are saying in court. And increasingly, judges in civil cases are granting access to online caches that had formerly been considered off-limits.

Defense lawyers in personal-injury cases, in particular, are finding social networks to be a rich source of potentially exculpatory evidence. In one recent case, a New York woman who claimed to be bedridden after falling off a defective chair showed up in family Facebook photos smiling happily in front of her house.

While judges have long allowed information gleaned from public portions of networking sites to be used as evidence in civil trials, materials that are password-protected or reserved for selected "friends" have been given a greater level of protection. But in recent months, two state courts have granted defendants broad access to "private" photos and comments. A federal court issued a similar ruling in 2009.

This shifting legal balance between privacy and evidence-gathering reflects the broader debate that has been raging over what level of privacy, if any, citizens can expect as they put more and more personal information online. And privacy, at least on this front, seems to be losing. "This is beginning to catch on across the country," said Jim Dempsey, vice president of public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a liberal think tank. "You do have a right of privacy in your private Facebook postings. But in the context of litigation, that right can be overcome."

Court-Ordered Consent

Postings on social networks are generally governed by the federal Stored Communications Act, which regulates how private information can be disseminated in non-criminal matters. The law has been interpreted to mean that the sites don't have to hand over users' personal data in response to a civil subpoena. Defense lawyers, though, have devised a strategy to work around this roadblock: They ask judges to order plaintiffs to sign consent forms granting defendants access to their private material. The defendants then attach these consent forms when they subpoena the sites. In these subpoenas, the plaintiffs are essentially authorizing the sites to hand over printouts of the private portions of their pages to the defendants.

A personal-injury case in Erie, Pennsylvania, shows how online musings intended as private can now make their way into litigation. In 2007, a racecar driver named Bill McMillen sued the owners of a local track, Hummingbird Speedway, claiming that he was seriously injured and lost "the enjoyment of life" as a result of an accident on the track. The lawyer for the speedway, Gary Bax, said he checked out McMillen on Facebook and found comments and photos suggesting that after the accident, McMillen went on a fishing trip to Florida and attended the Dayton 500.

Bax filed a motion to compel McMillen to turn over his Facebook and MySpace user names and passwords, so Bax could dig deeper. In September, Jefferson County Court of Common Pleas Judge John Henry Foradora granted the motion, noting that Facebook and News Corp's MySpace are specifically designed for sharing personal information. "While it is conceivable that a person could use them as forums to divulge and seek advice on personal and private matters," Judge Foradora wrote, "it would be unrealistic to expect that such disclosures would be considered confidential." A trial has not yet been scheduled.

Smiley Faces

A similar ruling was handed down in the case involving the woman who claimed she fell off a defective chair. Kathleen Romano alleges she suffered "serious permanent personal injuries" due to the negligence of Grand Rapids, Michigan-based furniture company Steelcase. But according to Steelcase lawyer James Gallagher, Romano's MySpace postings regularly included smiley faces, suggesting that she was happy. Gallagher, a partner at Gallagher & Faller in Garden City, New York, said he also tracked down the Facebook page of Romano's daughter, which, he said, included postings and photos indicating that the family had traveled to Florida, contradicting Romano's claims that she is homebound. "We figured something smells here," Gallagher said, "and we wanted to see what else was in there."

New York Supreme Court Judge Jeffrey Arlen Spinner granted Gallagher's motion to compel Romano to provide access to the private portions of her Facebook and MySpace pages. "Plaintiffs who place their physical condition in controversy," Judge Spinner wrote, "may not shield from disclosure material which is necessary to the defense of the action."

Defense lawyers in both the Romano and McMillen cases said they will file subpoenas with Facebook and MySpace that incorporate the consent forms. Romano's attorney, Robert S. Kelner, said that if the case doesn't settle, he will appeal Judge Spinner's decision as overly broad. "If you have a private page, you may invite very few people and you may disclose very few things," Kelner said. "That is not something that should ever be open to a blanket authorization."

In this case, Facebook is trying to stay out of it: The company filed a motion arguing that defense lawyers should seek access to plaintiff's online material directly -- and not via a subpoena to the site. Facebook acknowledges, though, that litigants can be compelled to turn over private communications. "If a person believes that their Facebook materials are relevant to a case, they may have a duty to preserve and produce those materials," company spokesman Andrew Noyce said in an e-mail to Reuters Legal. MySpace did not file a response to the motion in the Romano case and did not respond to a request for comment.

In his September ruling, Judge Spinner cited a 2009 decision in U.S. District Court in Colorado involving two repairmen who sued Wal-Mart after an electrical accident in one of the company's stores. In the federal case, Magistrate Judge Michael J. Watanabe ruled that the plaintiffs' private comments on Facebook, MySpace and Meetup.com were subject to subpoenas sought by Wal-Mart. The content of the sites are not protected by doctor-patient privilege or subject to a protective order, Judge Watanabe ruled, because the subpoenas were "reasonably calculated" to discover evidence that might be relevant to the lawsuit.

To be sure, not all defense requests for access to private postings are being granted. In November, a New York State Appeals Court denied a defense request to compel the plaintiff in an insurance dispute to turn over photographs from the private portion of her Facebook profile. The court found that the request amounted to a "fishing expedition," though it ruled that a more narrowly targeted request could be filed.

Still, the cases seem to be trending in favor of the defense, and defense lawyers are expected to keep pressing. Steelcase attorney Gallagher said he has received about a dozen requests from other defense attorneys for his briefs. "This is a wave that is going to explode all over plaintiffs' law," he said.

(This article first appeared on Westlaw News & Insight, www.westlawnews.com

(Reporting by Brian Grow of Reuters Legal; Editing by Eric Effron and Amy Stevens)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70Q7EG20110127





With Storage on the Line, Google Supports Copyright Lawsuit
Alex Williams

This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Intel and VMware can help you simplify cloud deployments. Find out how by attending this webinar Thursday, January 27 at 11 AM (PST).

Google recently joined a lawsuit as a friend of MP3tunes, a service that will face off on Friday against EMI, the giant record label that seems to be in continual financial distress.

The lawsuit will unfold in a New York federal courtroom, with a band of lawyers from EMI squaring off against an online service that provides storage in the cloud for media.

According to MP3tunes Founder Michael Robertson, at stake in this case is whether a corporation can store digital assets for a consumer to access later. Google is supporting MP3tunes as its services depend on the ability for its users to store document, media files and associated data.

MP3tunes' service is not that different from services offered by Google, Dropbox, Hewlett-Packard and the multitude of other service providers that provide customers with the space to keep their files.

In its support briefing, Google points to the sheer volume of data it processes through its online services:

* On Blogger, 270,000 words are written each minute.
* In total, this includes 380 million words written each day.
* On these services, there are thousands of links to music or as Google states, sound recordings, posted by music fans.
* YouTube customers post more than 35 hours of video every minute.

Google cites its protection under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act's safe harbor provisions as why its services can work freely for users. Users are mostly free to store and transmit media files. But if a media company can prove that the service provider is liable then there's the potential Google could be hampered in what services it offers.

The DMCA also benefits the copyright owners. Under the DMCA they can ask the courts for considerable fines and closure of a service that is violating its copyright.

That's the other aspect of the DMCA that gets online music services shut down all the time. The media company can ask for immediate shut down. And it works. Limewire is just the latest to be closed for allowing people to download music from its service. It's a stifling environment but yet we continue to notice any variety of innovative music technologies emerging to provide a new way to explore and create.

Google maintains in its briefing that innovation could be slowed considerably due to concerns about litigation:

If Plaintiffs' views are allowed to prevail, many companies undoubtedly will conclude that the risk of litigation under unpredictable state common law principles warrants diverting resources away from the user-focused collaborative models that today are giving users unprecedented power and choice, and that are currently driving innovation and investment. The burden of this legal uncertainty will fall especially heavily on new start-up innovators--stripped of the legal certainty provided by the DMCA's safe harbors, the next innovation like YouTube might never get off the ground in the first place.

That's the heart of it. The major music labels will continue to join forces to quiet services like MP3Tune. These services have a lot to potentially lose in face of lawsuits over copyright issues.

In its defense, the labels have its own cadre of supporters, including the RIAA.

This case represents what will come to be a continuous friction with the media companies. It will affect all aspects of the technology market. Consumer online services, SaaS providers and any variety of online content offerings have been able to operate freely, making them popular with millions of people. But if the law shifts for the media companies then the outlook changes.

The largest market growth will be in the amount of storage that it is possible for people to transmit. Google is expected to be the leader in the tablet market by 2015. It will continue to offer gigabytes of storage as does Hewlett-Packard with its new tablet offerings. This data storage service will amount to a substantial amount of revenues in the years ahead.

It's un-gated now by protection under the DMCA. And the entire online services industry wants to keep it that way.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/20...line-googl.php





Google Starts Censoring BitTorrent, RapidShare and More
Ernesto

It’s taken a while, but Google has finally caved in to pressure from the entertainment industries including the MPAA and RIAA. The search engine now actively censors terms including BitTorrent, torrent, utorrent, RapidShare and Megaupload from its instant and autocomplete services. The reactions from affected companies and services are not mild, with BitTorrent Inc., RapidShare and Vodo all speaking out against this act of commercial censorship.

The entertainment industries’ quest to root out piracy on the Internet has yet again resulted in commercial censorship. A few weeks ago Google announced that it would start filtering “piracy related” terms from its ‘Autocomplete‘ and ‘Instant‘ services and today they quietly rolled out this questionable feature.

Without a public notice Google has compiled a seemingly arbitrary list of keywords for which auto-complete is no longer available. Although the impact of this decision does not currently affect full search results, it does send out a strong signal that Google is willing to censor its services proactively, and to an extent that is far greater than many expected.

Among the list of forbidden keywords are “uTorrent”, a hugely popular piece of entirely legal software and “BitTorrent”, a file transfer protocol and the name of San Fransisco based company BitTorrent Inc. As of today, these keywords will no longer be suggested by Google when you type in the first letter, nor will they show up in Google Instant.

All combinations of the word “torrent” are also completely banned. This means that “Ubuntu torrent” will not be suggested as a user types in Ubuntu, and the same happens to every other combination ending in the word torrent. This of course includes the titles of popular films and music albums, which is the purpose of Google’s banlist.

TorrentFreak contacted BitTorrent Inc. for a reaction, and Simon Morris told TorrentFreak that he believes the scope of this filter is too broad.

“We respect Google’s right to determine algorithms to deliver appropriate search results to user requests. That being said, our company’s trademarked name is fairly unique, and we’re pretty confident that anyone typing the first six or seven letters deserves the same easy access to results as with any other company search,” Morris said.

“A quick search for ‘BitTorrent’ currently returns a variety of legitimate and useful links, including company information, our software, our open-source protocol, and more. What Google may not realize is that our technology is used for many purposes that provide significant value to the technology industry, companies, artists and consumers at large,” he added.

What is most surprising about the new filter is that the keywords appear to be picked arbitrarily. It includes BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent and Xunlei, but not BitComet and Vuze. While cyberlockers such as RapidShare and Megaupload are banned, prominent sites such as 4shared, HotFile and MediaFire are not.

In addition, all the names of popular torrent sites including The Pirate Bay are not included in Google’s banlist either. BitTorrent’s Simon Morris agrees that this is odd, to say the least.

“There’s no reason for Google to throttle search results for our trademarks, including BitTorrent, µTorrent and torrent. Indeed, they do still enable autocomplete for many third-party clients that use the BitTorrent protocol, including BitComet, BitLord, and even sites like The Pirate Bay and Isohunt.”

Morris further points out that the inclusion of Xunlei is a little hypocritical since Google is one of the investors in the Chinese BitTorrent client.

“We’d also like to point out that while Google doesn’t enable autocomplete for Xunlei (China’s largest software client that uses the BitTorrent protocol) Google did invest $5 million in the company in 2006, according to reports,” Morris says, adding, “We sincerely hope Google will recognize the value of BitTorrent and reevaluate this decision expeditiously.”

RapidShare is not pleased with Google’s new filter either, at least not with its current scope in today’s roll-out.

“We knew about Google’s plans for quite a few weeks now. We embrace that certain search suggestions will not put a wrong complexion on RapidShare anymore, but we are concerned that at the same time the legitimate interests of our users will also be affected. We believe it was the wrong decision to remove the term ‘RapidShare’ from the search suggestions,” RapidShare told TorrentFreak.

“RapidShare is one of the most popular websites worldwide. Every day hundreds of thousands of users rely on our services to pursue their perfectly legitimate interests. That is why Google has obviously gone too far with censoring the results of its suggest algorithm. A search engine’s results should reflect the users’ interests and not Google’s or anybody else’s,” the company added.

Indeed, RapidShare has certainly touched a nerve here. It is clear that this filter is the result of pressure from the entertainment industries, which is not at all in the interests of users. Now that Google has begun proactively censoring their services for commercial reasons, more companies will demand the same. At the same time, the entertainment industries will continue to pressure Google to go even further, and censor the actual search results.

Apparently Google has decided that its users should not be searching for the keyword BitTorrent, so why list any results then? It’s the beginning of the end.

Jamie King, the founder of Vodo – a platform where artists can share their work with million of people at no cost – agrees with this assessment. Searching for one of their perfectly legal releases on Google used to suggest the word “torrent” with a link to the download page, but not anymore.

“Google already showed it will censor for the highest bidder — China Inc. springs to mind. Now it’s doing it for MPAA & Co.,” King told TorrentFreak.

“I guess it’s simple: our favorite search monopoly cares less about helping the thousands of independent creators who use BitTorrent to distribute legal, free-to-share content than they do about protecting the interests of Big Media in its death throes.”

Indeed, Google is going down the wrong path by willingly and broadly censoring its services to please a few big companies. This is not the way to get rid of piracy, it’s the way to a corporate controlled Internet. Google may have been proud to leave China because of its political censorship, but it should be ashamed of promoting commercial censorship worldwide.
http://torrentfreak.com/google-start...d-more-110126/





MPAA Shuts Down 50+ Torrent Sites in Global Sting
Jolie O'Dell

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), with the cooperation of Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, has quietly shuttered 12 torrent websites in the U.S. and at least 39 sites abroad by filing copyright violation complaints with the sites’ hosting providers.

The names of the sites themselves remain unknown; so far, however, the major players seem to be unaffected.

The specific URLs are not being released because frequently the affected sites will spring up elsewhere online under a different TLD (e.g., TorrentMovies.com becomes TorrentMovies.info). Releasing the names of the sites would make it much easier for users to find their new URLs in the future.

This news, while interesting and concerning, is a far cry from the 70-plus sites shut down by the Department of Homeland Security last November, the culmination of a brewing crackdown effort.

Some torrent and file-sharing sites, including RapidShare, have even taken to hiring lobbyists of their own. A company spokesperson told Mashable recently, “Given the fact that the U.S. government is currently undertaking great efforts to fight copyright infringements on the Internet, our having a voice in Washington could be beneficial for us as well as for the U.S. government.”

According to TorrentFreak, BREIN “has (temporarily) disabled more than 1,000 torrent sites in The Netherlands, and they are now helping the MPAA towards doing the same in the U.S.”

In a BREIN release, the organization stated that it helped the MPAA take down around 29 sites last year; and earlier this month, it shut down 39 sites in the Netherlands for the MPAA, as well.

BREIN also conducts these anti-piracy “stings” in 11 other countries, including Germany, France, Britain and Canada. Its director, Tim Kuik, said in the statement (via Google Translate), “There will be new sites, but we take them down fast so they cannot grow.”
http://mashable.com/2011/01/27/mpaa-...-global-sting/





Music Industry Braces for the Unthinkable
Eric Pfanner

After another year of plunging music sales, record company executives are starting to contemplate the unthinkable: The digital music business, held out as the future of the industry, may already be as big as it is going to get.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade group based in London, said last week that sales of music in digital form had risen only 6 percent worldwide in 2010, even as the overall music market had shrunk 8 percent or 9 percent, extending a decade-long decline.

In each of the past two years, the rate of increase in digital revenue has approximately halved. If that trend continues, digital sales could top out at less than $5 billion this year, about a third of the overall music market but many billions of dollars short of the amount needed to replace long-gone sales of compact discs.

“Music’s first digital decade is behind us and what do we have?” said Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Forrester Research. “Not a lot of progress.”

“We are at one of the most worrying stages yet for the industry,” he continued. “As things stand now, digital music has failed.”

Music executives disagree, saying there is hope, as long as they can come to grips with piracy, which according to the industry federation accounts for the vast majority of music distributed online.

Stronger measures to crack down on unauthorized copying are taking effect in a number of countries, executives note, and even as the authorities wield a heavier stick, the complementary carrots are appearing, too, in the form of innovative digital services.

“The challenging environment continues, but we have some grounds for optimism,” said Frances Moore, chief executive of the music federation.

Ms. Moore said the recent introduction of tough anti-piracy laws in South Korea and France, which authorize cutting off the Internet connection of repeat offenders, showed that stricter enforcement could persuade listeners to seek out legal alternatives to unauthorized file-sharing services.

In South Korea, where the music business has long been blighted by piracy, digital music sales rose 14 percent in the first half of last year, after the new law went into effect in 2009, the federation said. The first account suspensions occurred in the autumn, and the group said the publicity surrounding the crackdown should help convert more consumers.

Max Hole, chief operating officer of Universal Music Group International, said his company, the biggest of the four major record companies, was so encouraged by the signs of a turnaround in South Korea that it had decided to start investing in the development of new music acts again, after suspending operations in South Korea several years ago.

France has also implemented a so-called graduated response system. In the French system, cutting Internet access is preceded by several warnings. While the authorities say they have sent out hundreds of thousands of e-mails to suspected copyright cheats, nobody’s connection has yet been cut.

Record company executives said they were also encouraged by recent legal action in the United States to cripple the file-sharing service LimeWire, as well as by the progress in the U.S. Senate of a bill to give law enforcement officials more power to shut down file-sharing services.

In Europe, the industry has notched legal victories against other sites accused of abetting piracy, including The Pirate Bay and Mininova.

Industry executives say they are encouraged by the development of new digital services, particularly those that embrace the principles of cloud computing. These services can provide unlimited amounts of music to listeners on demand, through a variety of devices, from mobile phones to televisions.

“The television is a great opportunity,” said Thomas Hesse, head of the digital business at Sony Music Entertainment. “We haven’t innovated in the living room for many years.”

Around the world, 10 million people have already signed up for subscription-based online services from Spotify, Rdio and Deezer, some of which have attracted additional millions of users with free, advertising-supported services. Many executives hope the growth of offerings like these can reduce the industry’s dependence on sales of individual tracks through digital stores like Apple iTunes, a model that has attracted little interest from young music fans, particularly outside the United States.

Yet some services that were hailed as potential iTunes challengers when they were introduced are fading from the scene. Nokia, the mobile phone manufacturer, said this month that it was sharply scaling back a service that gives buyers of certain phones free, unlimited music downloads. Sky, the British pay-television and broadband provider, recently canceled a subscription music service.

Music executives say Internet service providers hold the key to solving the piracy problems and helping the music companies recoup lost revenue. For the most part, providers have balked at taking stronger action against file-sharing, saying they do not want to snoop on their customers.

But one provider in Ireland, Eircom, recently started instituting its own version of a graduated response system. Customers who illegally download music face a “graduated response” similar to the one in France, but they can avoid the threat of disconnection by using a new music service from Eircom that offers free, unlimited streaming.

Mr. Mulligan said tougher enforcement would succeed only if music companies and other rights holders, including collecting agencies that represent artists and composers, embraced digital services that met the needs and interests of consumers, particularly teenagers and young adults.

Rights holders have grown more flexible as industry sales have collapsed, but they remain reluctant to license their music to some services. For example, Spotify, a popular streaming service in Europe, has yet to sign the record company deals it needs to open a U.S. site. Meanwhile, Internet companies like YouTube have sometimes struggled to reach agreements to show music videos in Europe.

The industry has also balked at the unlimited MP3 format, which comes with no copy restrictions, allowing people to share music with friends or provide soundtracks for their own videos, or post songs to social networking sites.

With growth in digital revenue slowing nearly to a standstill, analysts say, it is no surprise that talk of mergers and buyouts is again swirling around some of the Big Four music companies — Universal, Sony, Warner Music Group and EMI. Warner, for example, is said to have hired bankers to explore a sale of the company or a purchase of EMI.

“What has been keeping labels afloat has been the digital story,” said Mr. Mulligan, of Forrester Research. “If, all of a sudden, what they have been telling the market is the future turns out to be a failure, that radically changes the conversation.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/te...y/24music.html





The Music Bay: Pirate Bay Crew Instill More Fear Into The Music Industry
Ernesto

For years The Pirate Bay has been a thorn in the side of the music industry, but things could be about to take a turn for the worse. Over the past days rumors of a new project titled “The Music Bay” have been circling, and now a Pirate Bay insider has just confirmed to TorrentFreak that the major record labels have good reason to be afraid, very afraid.

A few years ago the Pirate Bay crew registered a domain name that until now hasn’t been very active, themusicbay.org. At the time it was registered there were plans to create the most efficient music sharing system ever built, but these were put aside as other projects needed more urgent attention.

In recent days, however, rumors started to grow that The Music Bay domain might be put to use after all. It is currently setup to serve ads for The Pirate Bay website, but this spring it could be hosting a special surprise for the music industry.

The currently active subdomain fear.themusicbay.org is currently displaying a “comming soon” [sic] title so TorrentFreak caught up with a Pirate Bay insider to learn more about the plans for the site. Although the Pirate Bay crew is reluctant to release any specific details, their intentions are obvious.

“The music industry can’t even imagine what we’re planning to roll out in the coming months. For years they’ve complained bitterly about piracy, but if they ever had a reason to be scared it is now,” TorrentFreak was told. “It will be a special surprise for IFPI’s 78th birthday, and we’re thinking of organizing a huge festival in Rome where IFPI was founded.”

IFPI is of course the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, one of the most active anti-piracy outfits and a long-time adversary of The Pirate Bay. Formed under Italy’s fascist government of Benito Mussolini in 1933, IFPI will turn 78 in April of 2011.

TorrentFreak did ask for more details about “The Music Bay”, but the above is all we are able to reveal at this stage. What’s clear from the conversation we had, however, is that the major record labels are in for a big surprise. More details are expected to follow in the near future.

Without any hard evidence all the above can of course be interpreted in a million ways. We simply don’t know what the announced project will be, who will run it and what it will do. For all we know the entire project is nothing more that a domain name, registered and used just for the purpose to put fear into the already quite paranoid music industry.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-music-ba...te-bay-110122/





25% of Files Downloaded from The Pirate Bay are Fakes
Nate Anderson

For years, antipiracy companies like MediaDefender have scratched out a living by flooding peer-to-peer file-sharing networks with bad data. While the techniques differ, the goal is the same: to make online piracy just enough of a hassle that legal alternatives look good by comparison.

This attempt at poisoning the P2P well started a quiet war between the file-swappers and the antipiracy groups, each escalating the arms race by rolling out new weapons and new countermeasures. File-swappers began blocking known IP ranges that served fake files, and sites like The Pirate Bay worked to remove bad links to fake content and to ban the user accounts of those who uploaded the listing information.

And yet, despite years of this sort of sniping, P2P networks remain flooded with fake files. New research suggests that nearly a third of the files at big BitTorrent trackers are bogus.

A group of European academics, most of them from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, presented a paper at an Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) conference last month in Philadelphia that tries to quantify the motives of the biggest BitTorrent seeders. Most seeders turn out to have less-than-altruistic motives, instead using their uploads to advertise faster private trackers or advertising-funded websites. But one major group of seeders had a different economic incentive: making money from record labels and movie companies for disrupting P2P networks.

A huge dataset from popular BitTorrent search engines The Pirate Bay and Mininova showed that antipiracy agencies managed to upload an amazing 30 percent of all files in the study group (which comprised 55,000 top files shared by 35 million IP addresses). And these files weren't simply ignored by users; even taking the countermeasures deployed by search sites and their users into account, fake files made up 25 percent of actual user downloads.

Poisoning the well

The paper concludes that "major BitTorrent portals are suffering from a systematic poisoning index attack that affects 30 percent of the published content.

As for the effectiveness of countermeasures: "The portals fight this phenomenon by removing the fake content as well as the user accounts used to publish them. However, contrary to what has been reported in previous studies, this technique does not seem to be sufficiently effective since millions of users initiate the download of fake content."

Not all of these fake publishers are antipiracy groups; some are just criminals. The two dominant categories of content from the "fake publishers" are movies and software—in fact, the "fake publishers" upload more software than any other group. The study's authors conclude that most of the video content from fake publishers comes from antipiracy groups, but that the software is more likely to be from malicious users out to spread a computer virus or promote a botnet.

Compared to legitimate files, the fake files are unpopular—for obvious reasons—and so are not redistributed by many users. That means the fake publishers need to stay connected for long periods of time to fully seed their files. Researchers found, in fact, that they spend the most time connected "due to their obligation to continuously seed their content to keep it alive." And most of these fake connections come from only three Web hosts: tzulo, FDC Servers and 4RWEB.

Still, this "unpopularity" is relative. The antipirates have managed to make one out of every four downloads from The Pirate Bay an unsatisfying experience—which must be quite satisfying indeed to those paid to cause this sort of confusion.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-are-fakes.ars





Obama Nominates RIAA Lawyer for Solicitor General
David Kravets

President Barack Obama nominated former Recording Industry Association of America lawyer Donald Verrilli Jr. on Monday to serve as the nation’s solicitor general.

If confirmed by the Senate, Verilli, now the White House deputy counsel, would assume the powerful position left vacant by Elena Kagan, who was elevated to the Supreme Court. Obama said he was “confident” Verrilli, one of five former RIAA attorneys appointed to the administration, would “serve ably.”

The solicitor general is charged with defending the government before the Supreme Court, and files friend-of-the court briefs in cases in which the government believes there is a significant legal issue. The office also determines which cases it will bring to the Supreme Court for review.

Verrilli is best known for leading the recording industry’s legal charge against music- and movie-sharing site Grokster. That 2003 case ultimately led to Grokster’s demise, when the U.S. Supreme Court sided with a lower court’s pro-RIAA verdict.

Until recently, Verrilli also was leading Viacom’s ongoing and flailing $1 billion copyright-infringement fight against YouTube.

A court dismissed the case last year, a decison Viacom is appealing. Viacom claims YouTube committed copyright infringement because it did not police the video-sharing site for copyright works uploaded by its users.

And in 2008, Verrilli told a federal judge in Minnesota that merely making copyright works available on file sharing networks amounted to copyright infringement — and that no proof of somebody else downloading those files was required.

That argument came in the first of three iterations of the infamous Jamie Thomas file sharing case brought by the RIAA. The judge eventual declared a mistrial of the first jury’s $220,000 civil judgment for sharing 24 songs on Kazaa.

Two more trials later, a third jury has rendered an almost $2 million verdict against Thomas for sharing the same two dozen tracks.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...citor-general/





ACS:Law Drops File Sharing Court Actions

Solicitor at controversial law firm cites personal safety concerns
Dan Worth

ACS:Law has announced that it will stop pursuing alleged file sharers after the law firm's anti-piracy chief claimed that he had been "subject to criminal attack".

Andrew Crossley said in a statement read out by Tim Ludbrook, a barrister employed by ACS:Law client MediaCAT, that he has been threatened on a number of occasions, according to a report on the BBC.

"I have ceased my work. I have been subject to criminal attack. My emails have been hacked. I have had death threats and bomb threats. It has caused immense hassle to me and my family," the statement read.

ACS:Law's tactic of sending letters to alleged file sharers demanding payment of fines has come under heavy scrutiny, and Crossley has been under investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

Judge Birss, who is presiding over 27 cases brought by ACS:Law on behalf of MediaCAT at the patent court in London, said that he is sceptical of the change of heart.

"I want to tell you that I am not happy. I am getting the impression with every twist and turn since I started looking at these cases that there is a desire to avoid any judicial scrutiny," he said.

Crossley has denied that he did not intend fully to pursue the 27 cases, but said that the actions on behalf of MediaCAT will be his last in this area.

"It has always been my intention to litigate and, but for the fact that I have ceased this work, my intention was to litigate forcefully in these 27 cases," his statement explained.

ACS:Law's entire email database was posted online in September as the company tried to recover from a distributed denial-of-service attack carried out by web group Anonymous as part of Operation Payback.

The Information Commissioner's Office is also investigating the incident.
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2274401/...-sharing-fines





Top Chinese File-Sharing Site VeryCD Nixes Illicit Downloads
Mark Hefflinger

Veteran Chinese file-sharing service VeryCD stripped itself of copyrighted music and video files over the weekend, TorrentFreak reported.

Launched in 2003, VeryCD had amassed "millions" of users.

"7 years of hard work and accumulation, that will now shut off, the end is the end. No one wanted this, but we had expected this moment would suddenly come," founder Huang Yimeng wrote on the site's official blog.

"Although we have been preparing for this event, the required adjustment was very urgent. This lead us to adjust rather quickly to delete the content of copyright-related disputes."

The Chinese government recently detailed new penalties for online copyright infringement, promising 3-7 years in prison for those operating sites offering more than 500 copyrighted works; serving more than 50,000 downloads of unauthorized copyrighted content; or that count more than 1,000 members.

TorrentFreak reports that VeryCD intends to seek an official license from the government to offer content licensed by copyright holders.
http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2011/01...icit-downloads





Listening Room Lets You Share Music in Real-Time Across the Web
Kevin Purdy

Listening Room Lets You Share Music in Real-Time Across the WebIf you're trying to decide on a background track, wedding reception picks, or other crucial tunes, you don't have to be in-person to get instant reactions. Listening Room lets anyone upload tracks for playing in real time to anyone with the link.

One person heads to Listening Room, creates a room with a name, then sends the link, or just the name, to anyone else they want to be listening. Click the record player, pick an MP3 from your system, and it starts playing as it uploads. Everyone else "in the room" hears the same track, too, at roughly the same time. You can chat about the track in the right-hand with your name attached, or post the link publicly and let folks jump in and heard you DJ. It's a bit safer from the usual label/lawyer/licensing issues, too, as nobody can download the tracks, or even adjust their playback.

Listening Room is a free service. On an outside guess, it's also a passion project, so it might get overwhelmed by traffic at first, so give it some time if it doesn't respond.
http://lifehacker.com/5742031/listen...across-the-web





Top Court Rules Forwarding TV Shows Illegal

Japan's supreme court ruled Tuesday that a service which transfers TV programs to overseas viewers via the Internet is illegal, and sent the case back to the Intellectual Property High Court for damages to be calculated.

The ruling overturned previous judgements by lower courts, which ruled that the service does not violate copyright law.

Japan Broadcasting Corp. and five Tokyo-based local TV broadcasting firms sued computer company Nagano Shoten, demanding the firm's service be terminated for copyright violation and seeking damages.

The service, which the supreme court judged transmission of intellectual property to the public, distributes TV programs to customers' computers via the Internet, using an image-forwarding device embedded with a TV tuner made by Sony Corp. (6758).
http://e.nikkei.com/e/fr/tnks/Nni20110118D18SS211.htm





News Corp. Admits: Fox News Is "Opinionated News"
Sarah Pavlus

Buried deep in a 216 page report News Corp. submitted to the U.K. government earlier this month is an unusual acknowledgment from the company: News Corp.-owned Fox News is "opinionated news."

The description flies in the face of what Fox News executives have been telling U.S. audiences and advertisers about the channel for years: that while certain Fox News shows like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity have an editorial slant, a significant chunk of programming -- 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. -- is objective news.

For example, in 2009 The New York Times reported, "Fox argues that its news hours -- 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. on weekdays -- are objective," and quoted Michael Clemente, the channel's senior vice president for news, as saying: "The average consumer certainly knows the difference between the A section of the newspaper and the editorial page."

As I've written before, this is apparently an argument that works only on the very gullible, and on advertisers who want to pretend that by confining their ad buys to the channel's "news hours" they are not financially supporting very damaging conservative lies and smears.

Fox News' claims of a clear division between its opinion and objective programming became even more absurd after Media Matters published an internal email from Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon to his news staff directing them to call into question indisputable scientific fact in Fox's climate change reporting.

Now we know that over in the U.K. -- where News Corp. is frantically jumping through regulatory hoops in an effort to buy out BSkyB, the largest pay-TV broadcaster -- News Corp. isn't even pretending Fox News provides objective reporting.

Last year, News Corp. commissioned Perspective Consulting to prepare a report that, among other things, described the relative unpopularity of Fox News Channel in the U.K. in comparison to Sky News, which apparently provides more impartial coverage. Earlier this month, News Corp. submitted that report to the U.K. government as part of a lengthy filing defending its proposed BSkyB takeover. From the report [emphasis added]:

Audience expectations of balance and impartiality

As well as determining the look and feel of television news, the context also shapes the audiences' expectation about the balance of views they expect to see represented. Audiences to television news expect it to deliver impartial news and measure the performance of a news channel against an impartiality yard-stick: Ofcom's research for its review of the future provision of news showed that 87% of audiences thought it important to deliver television news impartially, and an even higher percentage (93%) gave the same importance to the accuracy of television news. UK TV audiences have shown little interest in more opinionated news - Fox News achieves average audiences of 740 people for instance (compared to an average audience of approximately 57,000 for Sky News).

But while TV audiences may insist on impartiality, these same people nevertheless widely expect to consume opinionated news from other providers, such as newspapers - and who indeed choose their newspaper based on its editorial stance.

Yes, there you have it, straight from News Corp. itself: Fox News is "opinionated news."

So, how long will Fox News executives in the U.S. pretend otherwise?
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201101260032





Exclusive: Brown Asks Scotland Yard to Investigate if He was Hacked

Murdoch flies in for high-level meetings as Yard faces new questions about its conduct
James Hanning and Matt Chorley

Gordon Brown has asked the police to investigate whether he was the victim of phone hacking, The Independent on Sunday has learnt. Mr Brown has written at least one letter to the Metropolitan Police over concerns that his phone was targeted when he was Chancellor, during the latter stages of Andy Coulson's reign as editor of the News of the World. Mr Brown's aides last night declined to comment. It is understood that Scotland Yard sought clarification from the former prime minister after his request.

Sources have told The IoS that Tony Blair, his predecessor as prime minister, had also asked police some months ago to investigate whether messages left by him had been the subject of hacking (he did not have his own mobile phone until after he left No 10). Mr Blair and his wife, Cherie Booth, were notably keen to preserve their privacy during their time in Downing Street. Blair's solicitor, Graham Atkins, of Atkins Thomson, declined to comment yesterday, but late last night the former PM's official spokesman denied the story.

The news comes as growing criticism of the Met's investigation into widespread mobile phone message interception by the News of the World is mounting. This week, senior Scotland Yard officers are expected to come under fire when they are questioned about the hacking row by London's police authority. MPs will separately take evidence for a parliamentary inquiry into the scandal and the DPP is to meet top Met officers to discuss existing and new evidence.

Demands will also be made for the force to face questions about its use of undercover officers, the policing of violent student-fee demonstrations and the suspension of a bodyguard for an alleged affair with the wife of former shadow chancellor Alan Johnson.

Two days ago, Mr Coulson said he was quitting as David Cameron's director of communications after allegations about his time as NoW editor threatened to overshadow the Government's work. He denies having any knowledge of illegal practices during his time in charge, but said continued coverage made it "difficult for me to give the 110 per cent needed in this role".

Downing Street strenuously denies claims that his resignation was demanded by Rupert Murdoch, who owns the NoW. Mr Murdoch's arrival in London is expected imminently.

Mr Brown and Mr Blair are the most senior political figures to be linked to the phone-hacking scandal. In September, The IoS revealed that Lord Mandelson's mobile-phone details and an invoice for research on him were among files seized by police investigating illegal activity by NoW reporters when Mr Coulson was editor. Other Labour figures understood to have been targeted include Lord Prescott, David Blunkett, Tessa Jowell and Chris Bryant.

Alastair Campbell, the former Labour spin-doctor, told the BBC the controversy had now gone beyond the issue of Mr Coulson's future and "the role of the police in this is now going to become centre stage".

The lawyer Mark Lewis yesterday revealed he was acting for four people who believe they were targeted by newspapers other than the NoW, which has been under intense scrutiny since its royal editor, Clive Goodman, was jailed in 2007 for plotting to intercept messages left for aides to Prince William. Mr Lewis successfully represented Gordon Taylor, head of the Professional Footballers' Association, in a damages claim against the NoW. There are at least five other lawyers bringing similar cases.

Scotland Yard today faces serious criticism from Chris Huhne for its handling of the case – and its "astonishing" use of undercover officers to target eco-activists. Mr Huhne, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, told The IoS that the recent suspension of the NoW executive Ian Edmondson had "dramatically changed the situation, and clearly the police and the Met in particular need to get to the bottom of this".

Mr Huhne also said he and Vince Cable, the Secretary of State for Business, will write to the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Sir Hugh Orde, after being told they were added to a secret police database of criminal suspects after speaking at a green protest. He also suggested that the police have "invented" the threat posed by green campaigners to justify ongoing resources.

Scotland Yard is also still trying to contain the fallout from the revelation that Mr Johnson's surprise resignation from the Labour front bench was triggered by his wife's alleged affair with his former police bodyguard.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...d-2192041.html





World's First Hack-Free Software 'Developed'
Press Trust Of India

Scientists have developed what they claim is the world's first hack-free software which can protect systems from failure or malicious attacks. The 'seL4' microkernel has been developed by a team led by Australia's ICT Research Centre of Excellence's spinout company -- Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs). It
is a small operating system kernel which regulates access to a computer's hardware.

Its unique feature is that it has been mathematically proven to operate correctly, enabling it to separate trusted from untrusted software, protecting critical services from a failure or a malicious attack, say the scientists.

In future applications, seL4 could ensure that trusted financial transaction software from secure sources like banks or stock exchanges can operate securely on a customer's mobile phone alongside "untrusted" software, such as games downloaded from the Internet, according to its developers.

It could also provide a secure and reliable environment for mission-critical defence data, operating on the same platform as everyday applications like email. Or, it could protect the life-supporting functions of an implanted medical device, such as a pacemaker, from hacking, they say.

"Our seL4 microkernel is the only operating system kernel in existence whose source code has been mathematically proven to implement its specification correctly. Under the assumptions of the proof, the seL4 kernel for ARM11 will always do precisely what its specification says it will do," lead scientist Gerwin Klein said.

Added another scientist Gernot Heiser: "Verification of operating-system kernels has been attempted since the 1970s -- we pulled it off!"
http://www.hindustantimes.com/World-...e1-655632.aspx





Why Using 2 or 3 Simple Words May Be the Best Password Protection of All
Alex Williams

What makes a great password may not be its complexity but how many words you want to string in a row.

Passwords get hacked in five basic ways, writes Thomas Baekdal in a blog post on the topic:

* The hacker asks for the password through a scam of some sort.
* The hacker guesses. People like to use simple things they remember, like their birthday. That makes it easier to hack.
* The hacker does a brute force attack. A hacker simply attempts to sign-in using different passwords one at the time.
* The hacker attempts to sign-in using a list of common words.
* The hacker uses the dictionary approach by using the full dictionary of words to try and access the network.

IT security professionals encourage people to use complex passwords. Those are difficult to break. The problem is people write those passwords down on pieces of paper. That's not very secure.

But what you really need are passwords that you can memorize but are also difficult enough that it's not worth the time for the hacker to try to crack them.

Using more than one common word would take a hacker months to guess. Three common words and it's nearly impossible to crack.

Baekdal:

It would take:

* 1,163,859 years using a brute-force method
* 2,537 years using a common word attack
* 39,637,240 years using a dictionary attack

It is ten times more secure to use "this is fun" as your password, than "J4fS<2".

Now what can the provider do to make the network more secure?

1. Add a time-delay between sign-in attempts. Instead of allowing people to sign-in again and again and again. Add a 5 second delay between each attempt.

It is short enough to not be noticeable (it takes longer than 5 seconds to realize that you have tried a wrong password, and to type in a new one). And, it forces the hacker to only be able make sign-in requests 1 every 5 seconds (instead of 100 times per second).

2. Add a penalty period if a person has typed a wrong password more than - say - 10 times - of something like 1 hour. Again, this seriously disrupts the hacking script from working effectively.

By adding the time delay, the provider now protects the user and rewards the one who uses the method for stringing together multiple words.

Passwords are notoriously easy to crack. But it does not have to mean remembering strings of random letters and numbers. As Baekdal points out, a hacker can hack the password "alpine fun" in only 2 months if he is able to attack your server 100 times per second. But, with the penalty period and the 5 second delay, the same password can suddenly sustain an attack for 1,889 years.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterpri...mple-words.php





Exclusive: Apple Taps Former Navy Information Warrior for Global Director of Security
Arik Hesseldahl

Apple has tapped security expert and author David Rice to be its director of global security, several sources have confirmed to me. He’s expected to start at Apple in March.

Apple hasn’t returned calls seeking comment.

There’s no word yet about what precisely Rice’s job will entail, and knowing secrecy-obsessed Apple, there likely won’t be. But it’s not hard to make a reasonable guess.

With iPhones and iPads penetrating the enterprise in ever more impressive numbers, companies want to know they’re secure.

Late last year Apple started working with Unisys to help it sell Apple products to corporations and government agencies, all of which are concerned about the security implications of iPhones and iPads running on their networks.

Those who know Rice describe him as a deeply respected name in IT security circles who not only can speak the kind of language that makes CIOs comfortable, but can also back up that language with the skills and knowledge to match.

Rice hasn’t yet responded to my messages seeking comment, but his bio is fascinating. He’s a 1994 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and has a master’s degree in Information Warfare and Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School. He served as a Global Network Vulnerability analyst for the National Security Agency and as a Special Duty Cryptologic officer for the Navy.

His LinkedIn profile says he’s executive director of the Monterey Group, a cybersecurity consulting firm. He’s also on the faculty of IANS, an information security research company.

He also works with the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit organization that researches the potential for cyber attacks and their impact. Before that he worked for the security firm Neohapsis.

His 2007 book, “Geekonomics,” has been described as the software industry’s equivalent of Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe at Any Speed.” In it he argues that software is modern infrastructure–just like a bridge (hence, the picture on the cover)– and if it’s poorly made or insecure, it constitutes a public hazard.

Those who buy software–consumers, corporations and governments–end up being “crash test dummies” for an industry with no accountability for losses incurred by their customers, he argues.

He goes on to peg the costs of patching faulty software at $180 billion a year, and says that’s probably conservative. Patching software for security weaknesses takes capital that might be used for other, more productive, things.

His solution? Taxes. In a 2008 interview with Forbes, he compared security vulnerabilities in software to the unavoidable pollution emitted by factories. Since software can never be perfect, a “bug tax” keyed to the number and severity of software bugs discovered would create an incentive for better quality control.

Rice would be the latest in a string of high-profile security hires at Apple.

Last March, it hired Window Snyder, the former security chief at Mozilla, as its senior product manager for security, and in 2009 it hired Ivan Krstić, the former head of security for the One Laptop Per Child project, to work on core security for Mac OS X. Jon Callas, the former CTO of encryption software maker PGP, now a unit of Symantec, joined Apple last year.
http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/...r-of-security/





Computer Code an Increasingly Precious E.V. Commodity
Lindsay Brooke

BATTLES over the ownership of innovations and product designs have raged in the auto industry since the first horseless carriages sputtered out of inventors’ garages. In 1911, Henry Ford won a highly publicized eight-year court battle with George Selden, who tried to patent the automobile even though he had never sold one.

Subsequent disputes have kept lawyers busy for a century. While the court actions once related mostly to hardware — a new wrinkle in carburetors or a better method to stamp fenders, perhaps — the advent of electrified vehicles is changing the game. Valuable trade secrets now lie in the electronic controls that regulate the operation of motors, generators and batteries, in that shifting territory known as intellectual property.

That shift in the qualities that define a competitive advantage for hybrid and electric vehicles was underscored last week by the firing of three top Renault executives amid accusations that they had passed information to a “an organized international network.”

While the French carmaker, which has a partnership with Nissan, maker of the Leaf, has said no crucial technology leaked, the stakes in automotive intellectual property are high, experts say. And the valuables are not blueprints or styling sketches, but the huge volume of computer instructions required by these cars: the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid uses about 10 million lines of computer code to shunt power seamlessly among the car’s battery pack, power inverter, drive motor, gas engine, generator and other subsystems.

By comparison, Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner relies on a mere eight million lines of code.

Automakers therefore view leadership in control software as strategically vital, said Eric Fedewa, head of powertrain forecasting at IHS Automotive, a consulting firm based in Englewood, Colo.

“The next generation of vehicle propulsion is going to be very tightly integrated into the other electronic capabilities of the vehicle,” he said. Because of this, “the strategic importance of controllers and code is going to expand exponentially.”

Electronic-control I.P. already accounts for a sizable portion of United States patent applications related to E.V.’s and hybrids; Toyota has applied for more than 1,000 patents related to its current-generation Prius.

Other automakers and their suppliers are similarly raising their game in creating and protecting their electric-car I.P.

“It’s a little like the wild, wild West right now,” said Jon Lauckner, president of General Motors Ventures, the automaker’s new venture capital group. As an engineer who helped to conceive the Volt’s propulsion system, Mr. Lauckner says he believes the battle for electric-vehicle I.P. will only get more bare-knuckled in the next decade.

“I think the ball is up in the air regarding who has the intellectual property to actually take leadership,” he said. “When you talk about electrically driven vehicles, the 100 years of I.P. that came before is largely useless. Unless you possess a certain level of expertise in storage devices, power electronics and motors, you won’t control your own destiny.

“Once you decide to buy advanced technology I.P. from somebody else,” Mr. Lauckner added, “you’re going to buy it forever.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/au...s/23SPIES.html





Cellcom and Iway Launch Internet System for Cars
Tova Cohen

Start-up Iway Mobile and Cellcom, Israel's largest mobile phone operator, launched on Sunday a communications, Internet and entertainment system for the automobile.

While the Comodo Console will be sold first in February in Israel, where it will be marketed exclusively by Cellcom, Iway is in talks to sell the product to cellular operators in other countries over the next six months.

Iway founder and Chief Executive Danny Knafou said the first countries would likely be France, Russia and China.

"We are in talks with SFR, China Mobile and MTS," Knafou told Reuters on the sidelines of a news conference.

The operating system is programed for 20 languages, including Russian, Arabic and Chinese, and more will be added.

Comodo includes a 4.3 inch touchscreen, speakerphone, a rear camera to increase security when in reverse, a GPS antenna and a cellular modem for an always-on connection to the Internet via a 3G cellular network. The driver can listen to radio stations from around the globe.

"There is one world that hasn't yet been captured by the Internet revolution, and that is the automobile," said Adi Cohen, head of marketing at Cellcom.

While mobile handset makers are focused on developing phones that are faster, smaller and better designed, Iway said it concentrated on giving the driver a different experience.

To ensure drivers' safety, videos can be watched only when the car is not moving, and emails can be received but not sent. Text messaging and chatting services are not available, and the 80 applications can be activated with two clicks.

Knafou said he did not know of any other similar product.

The three-dimensional navigation system warns drivers when approaching a dangerous road or intersection and can alert when the driver is exceeding the speed limit or to problems up ahead, such as camels on the road.

Iway, which is based in the southern city of Beersheba, far from Israel's high-tech center, invested millions of dollars in private funds to develop the product.

Knafou said the firm's next fund raising would be an initial public offering in Tel Aviv during 2011.

When asked whether Cellcom might invest in Iway, Cellcom CEO Amos Shapira said: "Until today it has not been Cellcom's strategy to make financial investments."

The console sold by Cellcom will cost 109 shekels ($23.5) a month for 36 months, and the service package without the music costs 20 shekels a month and another 14.9 shekels for the music.

The design and development of the console was done in Israel, while the assemblage is carried out in China and Taiwan.

(Editing by Will Waterman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70M0VK20110123





As Citizens United Turns 1, U.S. Supreme Court Considers Corporate Personhood Again
Marian Wang

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments today on a case between AT&T and the Federal Communications Commission, revisiting the legal concept of “corporate personhood” last strengthened under the court’s Citizen United ruling on corporate campaign spending. (That controversial ruling has its first anniversary this week.)

The case before the court focuses on whether AT&T, a corporation, can stop government agencies from releasing information obtained for law enforcement purposes by claiming such disclosures would violate the company’s “personal privacy.”

The phrase is included as an exemption in the text of the Freedom of Information Act, a federal law that instructs government agencies on what information to make public. As the SCOTUS blog notes, however, there’s no specific definition of the words “personal privacy,” so it’s not clear whether a corporation can qualify as a person in this case.

The lower court, the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, sided with AT&T in an earlier ruling, stating that corporations are capable of being embarrassed, harassed and stigmatized by public disclosures. If the Supreme Court agrees, it could limit how much information federal agencies are able to release about the companies they've investigated. (Here's Bloomberg, with more background.)

In the appeal before the high court, a review of the briefs in support of each side shows a number of news organizations and government openness and watchdog groups backing up the FCC. Major business groups—namely the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable—have filed briefs in support of AT&T.

Justice Elena Kagan, it’s worth noting, was solicitor general at the time when the FCC and U.S. government petitioned the Supreme Court to review the AT&T case. She has had to recuse herself from considering it, and should the court split 4-4 without her, the lower court’s decision would stand.

Kagan’s successor as solicitor general, Neal Katyal, has argued that “a corporation itself can no more be embarrassed, harassed, or stigmatized than a stone.”

According to early reports on the day’s proceedings, the high court showed signs that it agreed. A transcript [PDF] of the oral arguments has also been made available.
http://www.propublica.org/blog/item/...ate-personhoo?





Is Pink Necessary?
Annie Murphy Paul

CINDERELLA ATE MY DAUGHTER

Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture

By Peggy Orenstein

244 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99.

The “princess phase.” So inevitable is this period in the maturation of girls today that it should qualify as an official developmental stage, worthy of an entry in Leach or Brazelton: first crawling, then walking, then the urgent desire to wear something pink and spark#ly. Whether we smile indulgently or roll our eyes at the drifts of tulle and chiffon that begin accumulating in our daughters’ rooms around age 4, participation in these royal rituals has come to seem necessary, even natural.

Yet the princess phase, at least in its current hyper-feminine and highly commercial form, is anything but natural, or so Peggy Orenstein argues in “Cinderella Ate My Daughter.” As she tells the story, in 2000 a Disney executive named Andy Mooney went to check out a “Disney on Ice” show and found himself “surrounded by little girls in princess costumes. Princess costumes that were — horrors! — homemade. How had such a massive branding opportunity been overlooked? The very next day he called together his team and they began working on what would become known in-house as ‘Princess.’ ” Mooney’s revelation yielded a bonanza for the company. There are now more than 26,000 Disney Princess items on the market; in 2009, Princess products generated sales of $4 billion.

Disney didn’t have the tiara market to itself for long. Orenstein takes us on a tour of the princess industrial complex, its practices as coolly calculating as its products are soft and fluffy. She describes a toy fair, held at the Javits Center in New York, at which the merchandise for girls seems to come in only one color: pink jewelry boxes, pink vanity mirrors, pink telephones, pink hair dryers, pink fur stoles. “Is all this pink really necessary?” Orenstein finally asks a sales rep.

“Only if you want to make money,” he replies.

The toy fair is one of many field trips undertaken by Orenstein in her effort to stem the frothy pink tide of princess products threatening to engulf her young daughter. The author of “Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap,” among other books, Orenstein is flummoxed by the intensity of the marketing blitz aimed at girls barely old enough to read the label on their Bonne Bell Lip Smackers. “I had read stacks of books devoted to girls’ adolescence,” she writes, “but where was I to turn to under#stand the new culture of little girls, from toddler to ‘tween,’ to help decipher the potential impact — if any — of the images and ideas they were absorbing about who they should be, what they should buy, what made them girls?”

She turns, like many a journalist before her, to the child pageant circuit, the world of sequined “cupcake dresses” and custom-made “flippers” (dental prosthetics that disguise a gap-toothed smile) that has proved irresistible to reporters since the killing of the 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey in 1996. To her credit, Orenstein recognizes this as well-trodden ground. “It would be easy pickin’s for me to attack parents who tart up their daughters in hopes of winning a few hundred bucks and a gilded plastic trophy; who train them to shake their tail feathers on command, to blow kisses at the judges and coyly twirl their index fingers into their dimpled cheeks,” she writes. “But really, what would be the point? That story has been told, to great success and profit.”

Such meta-observations, which appear throughout the book, are part of Orenstein’s method: she argues with herself, questions her own assumptions, ventures an assertion and then has second thoughts — all in full view of the reader. At times, her assiduously cultivated ambivalence seems to paralyze her; she gets stuck between competing concerns, unable to say anything definitive about what she believes. By and large, however, Orenstein’s reflexive self-interrogation is a good match for her material. It allows her to coax fresh insights from the exhaustively analyzed subject of gender and its discontents.

In the case of child beauty pageants, Orenstein offers a shrewd critique of why media exposés of the phenomenon are so perennially popular. They “give viewers license, under the pretext of disapproval, to be titillated by the spectacle, to indulge in guilty-pleasure voyeurism,” she observes. “They also reassure parents of their own comparative superiority by smugly ignoring the harder questions: even if you agree that pageant moms are over the line in their sexualization of little girls — way over the line — where, exactly, is that line, and who draws it and how?” Orenstein allows us to watch her struggle with these questions, and when she arrives at a few answers, they feel well earned.

Orenstein finds one such enlightening explanation in developmental psychology research showing that until as late as age 7, children are convinced that external signs — clothing, hairstyle, favorite color, choice of toys — determine one’s sex. “It makes sense, then, that to ensure you will stay the sex you were born you’d adhere rigidly to the rules as you see them and hope for the best,” she writes. “That’s why 4-year-olds, who are in what is called ‘the inflexible stage,’ become the self-#appointed chiefs of the gender police. Suddenly the magnetic lure of the Disney Princesses became more clear to me: developmentally speaking, they were genius, dovetailing with the precise moment that girls need to prove they are girls, when they will latch on to the most exaggerated images their culture offers in order to stridently shore up their femininity.” For a preschool girl, a Cinderella dress is nothing less than an existential insurance policy, a crinolined bulwark to fortify a still-shaky sense of identity.

Orenstein is especially sharp-eyed on the subject of what comes after the princess phase, for in the micro-segmented world of marketing to children, there is of course a whole new array of products aimed at girls who begin to tire of their magic wands. These include lines of dolls with names like Moxie Girlz and Bratz: “With their sultry expressions, thickly shadowed eyes and collagen-puffed moues, Bratz were tailor-made for the girl itching to distance herself from all things rose petal pink, Princess-y, or Barbie-ish,” Orenstein notes. “Their hottie-pink ‘passion for fashion’ conveyed ‘attitude’ and ‘sassiness,’ which, anyone will tell you, is little-girl marketing-speak for ‘sexy.’ ”

As Orenstein forges on, braving Toys “R” Us, the American Girl doll store and a Miley Cyrus concert, the reader may occasionally wonder: Is she reading too much into this? After all, it’s just pretend; it’s just play. “To a point I agree,” Orenstein half-concedes, equivocal as ever. “Just because little girls wear the tulle does not mean they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. Plenty of them shoot baskets in ball gowns or cast themselves as the powerful evil stepsister bossing around the sniveling Cinderella.” By this point the reader knows what’s coming. “Yet even if girls stray from the prescribed script, doesn’t it exert its influence? Don’t our possessions reflect who we are; shape, even define, our experience?”

The author’s process of restless self-examination continues, all the way to the book’s open-ended conclusion. Orenstein has done parents the great favor of having this important debate with herself on paper and in public; she has fashioned an argument with its seams showing and its pockets turned inside out, and this makes her book far more interesting, and more useful. Because the thing about a phase is: kids grow out of it. (The marketers are counting on that.) But parents’ internal deliberations about what’s best for their children are here to stay.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/bo...ew/Paul-t.html





Make It Funny, Make It Work, Make It Quickly
Joe Rhodes

THE members of the studio audience, if there had been one, would probably have erupted with screams and howls, incited by giant blinking “applause” signs, manic warm-up comedians and baskets of free candy. They’d have been thrilled to discover that the special guest on this episode of the new CMT sitcom, “Working Class,” starring the former “Reba” sidekick Melissa Peterman — was none other than Reba McEntire herself, making a surprise entrance from behind a strategically placed armload of piled-high presents. Giddiness would have ensued.

But there was no studio audience in Stage 8 of the Warner Brothers lot on this drizzly Thursday morning, just a small and exhausted crew, cranking out its 12th episode in nine weeks, doing its best to simulate the crowd reaction that would have to be laugh-tracked in later.

“They are calibrating by the output of their laughs how good you were on that last take,” said Ed Asner, who plays Ms. Peterman’s crusty co-worker and neighbor on the show. “They are undoubtedly forcing them sometimes, but its always an indication of whether you hit the joke or didn’t.”

Ms. Peterman chimed in: “I always play to Vince the camera guy. I know if I got Vince, it’s gold.”

When it has its debut Friday on CMT, the cable channel formerly known as Country Music Television, “Working Class” will look and sound like all the classic multi-camera comedies it wants to emulate, a throwback to the traditional couch-and-kitchen sitcom styles of “Roseanne” and “Everybody Loves Raymond” and, yes, “Reba”: working-class comedies that still flourish in syndicated reruns but have largely disappeared from broadcast network prime-time lineups.

And that, CMT executives hope, represents an opportunity for the channel, which started out as a country music version of MTV, to broaden its audience appeal. “The channel’s viewership is extremely flexible,” said Brian Philips, president of CMT, who was onstage to watch the episode being taped. “And they are long over the idea that it needs to be three-and-a-half minute music videos played back to back. We’re in 90 million homes, and most of them are not in rural areas. Every focus group we do with viewers in Charlotte or Columbus, we ask, ‘Should CMT do sitcoms?’ And the answer is: ‘Yes. Oh, yes.’ ”

So it is, starting with “Working Class,” in which Ms. Peterman, already familiar to CMT viewers as host of its highest-rated show, “The Singing Bee,” plays a struggling single mom, trying to raise her three kids in a suburban Chicago neighborhood she can’t really afford. If the show succeeds, CMT hopes to roll out as many as three other sitcoms within the next few months. Next up, most likely, would be a show built around the comedian (and ex-husband of Roseanne) Tom Arnold.

“We’ll ramp up fast,” Mr. Philips said.

It’s not uncommon for networks to diversify their offerings in an attempt to reach a broader audience. Larry Gerbrandt, principal analyst for Media Valuation Partners, said, “If you’ve pushed your genre as far as you can go, and you can’t figure out how to grow the ratings, you’ve got to try something new.”

“The sitcom genre has been largely ignored in the last few years by broadcasters, and the cable networks haven’t gone heavily into it,” he said. “It’s all in the execution, but they’ve picked an area that is not particularly expensive to create and is definitely advertiser friendly.”

Although “Working Class” and the sitcoms to follow are meant to look and feel traditional, the way in which they are developed and produced has been far from it. Brad Johnson, a former comedy executive at Universal and 20th Century Fox, was hired last year as CMT’s senior vice president for comedy development and asked to develop network-quality sitcoms within the constraints of cable budgets.

Which is why there is no studio audience on “Working Class,” why the seven-member writing staff is half the size of that for a network show and, most important, why each episode is produced — from first table read to final shot — in three days. Traditional sitcoms have five-day production schedules, with crew and cast rehearsing all week, blocking out scenes and making changes, then filming in front of an audience, usually on Friday night.

“We don’t think we’re sacrificing comedy or quality at all,” said Mr. Johnson, whose development résumé includes shows like “Major Dad” and “Coach” and who was on the set every day, a hands-on intermediary between the producers — including Jill Cargerman, the show’s creator (also a first-time show runner) — and the network. “But we found some ways to cut corners. And it kept us in L.A. Otherwise we’d have shot this in Atlanta or Canada. Because that’s what we could have afforded.”

In an even more radical cost-cutting move Mr. Johnson did not order full pilots for the CMT sitcom scripts — all domestic comedies — he was considering, including “Working Class.” After reading 350 scripts and deciding on the 4 he liked best, he ordered second scripts of each show and then, instead of pilots, shot what amounted to 15-minute screen tests with prospective casts, using leftover sets from failed pilots that other networks were about to throw out — interchangeable living rooms and kitchens — where actors from all four shows could shoot their scenes.

“Where the networks make a mistake — and believe me, I made it too — is they immediately shoot a pilot and spend $2 million,” said Mr. Johnson, a former executive at Fox and Showtime. “This way we had four 15-minute presentations for considerably less than that, including the development and writing costs.

“We found an NBC pilot set that they were about to tear down, and we used it. We didn’t spend a nickel on construction. Anywhere there were lights, we used them. Networks routinely spend $250,000 on construction for sets that almost always get knocked down and thrown away.”

Ms. Cargerman, who wrote for the network sitcoms “Gary Unmarried” and “Spin City,” said the compressed production schedule fostered “an energizing combination of panic and adrenaline.”

“I’m still a little bit shocked by how productive and proficient we became, and that we were successful in creating episodes that I think look and feel just as satisfying as anything I’ve done on a network before,” she said.

Not that there weren’t downsides. “We felt we were walking on a tightrope a lot of the time because any misstep might have caused everything to fall into chaos,” she said. “And I wondered, since it hadn’t been done before, if we could do it.

“But the longer we went, the more people rose to the challenge, and it became clear there are great advantages to doing it like this. You can fix scenes on the fly in a way you can’t if you’re in front of an audience. But you can’t drop any balls, because there is no time to recover.”

Which kept the pressure on Ms. Peterman, who is in practically every scene, many of them filled with just-added dialogue and physical comedy — falling into mud pits, stumbling around after too much dentist-administered laughing gas. Producers admitted that a less enthusiastic (or more temperamental) star would have ground the production to a halt.

“The schedule was brutal for everyone,” Ms. Peterman admitted. “And I missed having a studio audience, but not as much as I thought I was going to miss it. I got so used to shooting it this way that after a while it felt normal. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

“But the advantage is we were working in a way that everyone felt invested in the project. You could talk to the writers about the dialogue, and everyone’s opinion mattered. There just wasn’t a lot of red tape. If I had a question, I was able to just call Brian Philips on the phone. What other network president would even give me their real number?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/ar...23working.html





Why 3D Doesn't Work and Never Will. Case Closed.
Roger Ebert

I received a letter that ends, as far as I am concerned, the discussion about 3D. It doesn't work with our brains and it never will.

The notion that we are asked to pay a premium to witness an inferior and inherently brain-confusing image is outrageous. The case is closed.

This letter is from Walter Murch, seen at left, the most respected film editor and sound designer in the modern cinema. As a editor, he must be intimately expert with how an image interacts with the audience's eyes. He won an Academy Award in 1979 for his work on "Apocalypse Now," whose sound was a crucial aspect of its effect.

Wikipedia writes: "Murch is widely acknowledged as the person who coined the term Sound Designer, and along with colleagues developed the current standard film sound format, the 5.1 channel array, helping to elevate the art and impact of film sound to a new level. "Apocalypse Now" was the first multi-channel film to be mixed using a computerized mixing board." He won two more Oscars for the editing and sound mixing of "The English Patient."


"He is perhaps the only film editor in history," the Wikipedia entry observes, "to have received Academy nominations for films edited on four different systems:

• "Julia" (1977) using upright Moviola
• "Apocalypse Now" (1979), "Ghost" (1990), and "The Godfather, Part III" (1990) using KEM flatbed
• "The English Patient" (1996) using Avid.
• "Cold Mountain" (2003) using Final Cut Pro on an off-the shelf PowerMac G4.


Now read what Walter Murch says about 3D:

Hello Roger,

I read your review of "Green Hornet" and though I haven't seen the film, I agree with your comments about 3D.

The 3D image is dark, as you mentioned (about a camera stop darker) and small. Somehow the glasses "gather in" the image -- even on a huge Imax screen -- and make it seem half the scope of the same image when looked at without the glasses.

I edited one 3D film back in the 1980's -- "Captain Eo" -- and also noticed that horizontal movement will strobe much sooner in 3D than it does in 2D. This was true then, and it is still true now. It has something to do with the amount of brain power dedicated to studying the edges of things. The more conscious we are of edges, the earlier strobing kicks in.

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the "convergence/focus" issue. A couple of the other issues -- darkness and "smallness" -- are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen -- say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.

But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point.

If we look at the salt shaker on the table, close to us, we focus at six feet and our eyeballs converge (tilt in) at six feet. Imagine the base of a triangle between your eyes and the apex of the triangle resting on the thing you are looking at. But then look out the window and you focus at sixty feet and converge also at sixty feet. That imaginary triangle has now "opened up" so that your lines of sight are almost -- almost -- parallel to each other.

We can do this. 3D films would not work if we couldn't. But it is like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, difficult. So the "CPU" of our perceptual brain has to work extra hard, which is why after 20 minutes or so many people get headaches. They are doing something that 600 million years of evolution never prepared them for. This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix. Nothing will fix it short of producing true "holographic" images.

Consequently, the editing of 3D films cannot be as rapid as for 2D films, because of this shifting of convergence: it takes a number of milliseconds for the brain/eye to "get" what the space of each shot is and adjust.

And lastly, the question of immersion. 3D films remind the audience that they are in a certain "perspective" relationship to the image. It is almost a Brechtian trick. Whereas if the film story has really gripped an audience they are "in" the picture in a kind of dreamlike "spaceless" space. So a good story will give you more dimensionality than you can ever cope with.

So: dark, small, stroby, headache inducing, alienating. And expensive. The question is: how long will it take people to realize and get fed up?

All best wishes,

Walter Murch

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/01/post_4.html





Sean Parker: The Social Network is a Complete Work of Fiction

Sean Parker and Paulo Coelho‘s two man panel at DLD raised a number of interesting points about the future of content but it was Coelho’s question to Parker on his thoughts on the The Social Network, that grabbed everyone’s attention.

Parker said he enjoyed the movie, thought it was beautifully shot and had great respect for director David Fincher but, in his own words, the movie is “a complete work of fiction.”

Scenes involving drug use and Victoria Secret models?

“I wish my life was that cool.”

Parker elaborates, “The part of the movie that frustrated me most was when the character played by Justin Timberlake who just happens to have my name – writes a cheque to Eduardo who I remain in contact with and consider a friend, and throws it at his face and has him thrown out of the building. That’s just rude. I mean who would do that?”
http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2011/...rk-of-fiction/





WikiLeaks: the Movie to Blow Whistle on 'Most Dangerous Man in the World'

Film studio secures screen rights to forthcoming biography about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
Ben Child

It has all the ingredients for a big-screen tale of intrigue and conspiracy: the plucky underdog vying to buck the system, sexual complications and powerful government forces with secrets to hide.

WikiLeaks: the Movie moved a step closer to reality yesterday after studio executives picked up the screen rights to the forthcoming Julian Assange biography The Most Dangerous Man in the World by award-winning Australian writer Andrew Fowler. The book details Assange's life from his childhood on Magnetic Island in Queensland, Australia, all the way through to his founding of the whistleblower website in 2006 to publish classified material.

Assange has been labelled "a high-tech terrorist" by his foes and "the internet's freedom fighter" by his supporters. In November, WikiLeaks scored its most high-profile coup to date when it partnered with the Guardian to publish over 250,000 secret US diplomatic cables. The full story story of the WikiLeaks scandal is covered in WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, a behind-the-scenes account by the Guardian's investigation editor David Leigh and Moscow correspondent Luke Harding. The WikiLeaks book will be published by the Guardian on February 10.

Assange incurred the ire of US authorities by publishing cables concerning American involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has also revealed details of toxic waste dumping in Africa and Guantánamo Bay procedures, as well as putting the contents of Church of Scientology manuals online.

The journalist and publisher remains on bail awaiting the outcome of an extradition request from Swedish authorities who want to question him over allegations of a sexual nature by two women. He is also writing an autobiography after agreeing to a $1m deal in December – in part to offset his mounting legal costs.

Producers Barry Josephson and Michelle Krumm, who have optioned The Most Dangerous Man in the World, say they are planning a "suspenseful drama" in the vein of All the President's Men and with the thrill of a Tom Clancy novel. "As soon as I met Andrew and read a few chapters of his profound book, I knew that – with his incredibly extensive depth of knowledge – it would enable us to bring a thought-provoking thriller to the screen," Krumm told Variety.

As yet no director is attached to the project and there are no cast details.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/...julian-assange





OpenLeaks, A WikiLeaks Alternative, Just Went Live
Steven Campbell

OpenLeaks, an alternative to WikiLeaks, which is a site that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources and news leaks, has officially gone live. WikiLeaks, as you may know, fell under harsh criticism and faced a lot of pressure from various governments and organizations because of material “leaked” via the website.

In light of this, OpenLeaks is set to fill the void left by WikiLeaks. They intend to do this by providing “dedicated and generally free services to whistleblowers and organizations interested in transparency.” The site seeks to create a knowledge base aiming to provide a comprehensive reference to all areas surrounding whistleblowing. Let’s take a look at how they are going about circumventing the WikiLeaks problem.

How is OpenLeaks different from WikiLeaks?

As stated by Ars Technica, OpenLeaks confirmed that it doesn’t plan to publish information itself, but rather help third parties get access to leaked documents, which then would be shown to the public. Third parties would include non-profit and news organizations. Half of these “members” are to be handpicked by the OpenLeaks community, while the other half will be able to go through a public application process of sorts.

The site is not yet fully operational, but they have released a “first draft” video, shown below. It explains the process of leaking and publishing as it will be supported by OpenLeaks, and it visualizes how OpenLeaks works differently from other platforms.

If you have any further questions about what OpenLeaks is or who it’s for, as well as what the legal implications of this type of site are, check out the OpenLeaks FAQ page. There’s a lot of good information there. What do you think of the new OpenLeaks platform?
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/openlea...ive-live-news/





Domestic Use of Aerial Drones by Law Enforcement Likely to Prompt Privacy Debate
Peter Finn

The suspect's house, just west of this city, sat on a hilltop at the end of a steep, exposed driveway. Agents with the Texas Department of Public Safety believed the man inside had a large stash of drugs and a cache of weapons, including high-caliber rifles.

As dawn broke, a SWAT team waiting to execute a search warrant wanted a last-minute aerial sweep of the property, in part to check for unseen dangers. But there was a problem: The department's aircraft section feared that if it put up a helicopter, the suspect might try to shoot it down.

So the Texas agents did what no state or local law enforcement agency had done before in a high-risk operation: They launched a drone. A bird-size device called a Wasp floated hundreds of feet into the sky and instantly beamed live video to agents on the ground. The SWAT team stormed the house and arrested the suspect.

"The nice thing is it's covert," said Bill C. Nabors Jr., chief pilot with the Texas DPS, who in a recent interview described the 2009 operation for the first time publicly. "You don't hear it, and unless you know what you're looking for, you can't see it."

The drone technology that has revolutionized warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is entering the national airspace: Unmanned aircraft are patrolling the border with Mexico, searching for missing persons over difficult terrain, flying into hurricanes to collect weather data, photographing traffic accident scenes and tracking the spread of forest fires.

But the operation outside Austin presaged what could prove to be one of the most far-reaching and potentially controversial uses of drones: as a new and relatively cheap surveillance tool in domestic law enforcement.

For now, the use of drones for high-risk operations is exceedingly rare. The Federal Aviation Administration - which controls the national airspace - requires the few police departments with drones to seek emergency authorization if they want to deploy one in an actual operation. Because of concerns about safety, it only occasionally grants permission.

But by 2013, the FAA expects to have formulated new rules that would allow police across the country to routinely fly lightweight, unarmed drones up to 400 feet above the ground - high enough for them to be largely invisible eyes in the sky.

Such technology could allow police to record the activities of the public below with high-resolution, infrared and thermal-imaging cameras.

One manufacturer already advertises one of its small systems as ideal for "urban monitoring." The military, often a first user of technologies that migrate to civilian life, is about to deploy a system in Afghanistan that will be able to scan an area the size of a small town. And the most sophisticated robotics use artificial intelligence to seek out and record certain kinds of suspicious activity.

But when drones come to perch in numbers over American communities, they will drive fresh debates about the boundaries of privacy. The sheer power of some of the cameras that can be mounted on them is likely to bring fresh search-and-seizure cases before the courts, and concern about the technology's potential misuse could unsettle the public.

"Drones raise the prospect of much more pervasive surveillance," said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. "We are not against them, absolutely. They can be a valuable tool in certain kinds of operations. But what we don't want to see is their pervasive use to watch over the American people."

The police are likely to use drones in tactical operations and to view clearly public spaces. Legal experts say they will have to obtain a warrant to spy on private homes.

FAA authorization

As of Dec. 1, according to the FAA, there were more than 270 active authorizations for the use of dozens of kinds of drones. Approximately 35 percent of these permissions are held by the Defense Department, 11 percent by NASA and 5 percent by the Department of Homeland Security, including permission to fly Predators on the northern and southern borders.

Other users are law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, as well as manufacturers and academic institutions.

For now, only a handful of police departments and sheriff's offices in the United States - including in Queen Anne's County, Md., Miami-Dade County, Fla., and Mesa County, Colo. - fly drones. They so do as part of pilot programs that mostly limit the use of the drones to training exercises over unpopulated areas.

Among state and local agencies, the Texas Department of Public Safety has been the most active user of drones for high-risk operations. Since the search outside Austin, Nabors said, the agency has run six operations with drones, all near the southern border, where officers conducted surveillance of drug and human traffickers.

Some police officials, as well as the manufacturers of unmanned aerial systems, have been clamoring for the FAA to allow their rapid deployment by law enforcement. They tout the technology as a tactical game-changer in scenarios such as hostage situations and high-speed chases.

Overseas, the drones have drawn interest as well. A consortium of police departments in Britain is developing plans to use them to monitor the roads, watch public events such as protests, and conduct covert urban surveillance, according to the Guardian newspaper. Senior British police officials would like the machines to be in the air in time for the 2012 Olympics in London.

"Not since the Taser has a technology promised so much for law enforcement," said Ben Miller of the Mesa County Sheriff's Office, which has used its drone, called a Draganflyer, to search for missing persons after receiving emergency authorization from the FAA.

Cost has become a big selling point. A drone system, which includes a ground operating computer, can cost less than $50,000. A new police helicopter can cost up to $1 million. As a consequence, fewer than 300 of the approximately 19,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States have an aviation capability.

"The cost issue is significant," said Martin Jackson, president of the Airborne Law Enforcement Association. "Once they open the airspace up [to drones], I think there will be quite a bit of demand."

The FAA is reluctant to simply open up airspace, even to small drones. The agency said it is addressing two critical questions: How will unmanned aircraft "handle communication, command and control"? And how will they "sense and avoid" other aircraft, a basic safety element in manned aviation?

Military studies suggest that drones have a much higher accident rate than manned aircraft. That is, in part, because the military is using drones in a battlefield environment. But even outside war zones, drones have slipped out of their handlers' control.

In the summer, a Navy drone, experiencing what the military called a software problem, wandered into restricted Washington airspace. Last month, a small Mexican army drone crashed into a residential yard in El Paso.

There are also regulatory issues with civilian agencies using military frequencies to operate drones, a problem that surfaced in recent months and has grounded the Texas DPS drones, which have not been flown since August.

"What level of trust do we give this technology? We just don't yet have the data," said John Allen, director of Flight Standards Service in the FAA's Office of Aviation Safety. "We are moving cautiously to keep the National Airspace System safe for all civil operations. It's the FAA's responsibility to make sure no one is harmed by [an unmanned aircraft system] in the air or on the ground."

Officials in Texas said they supported the FAA's concern about safety.

"We have 23 aircraft and 50 pilots, so I'm of the opinion that FAA should proceed cautiously," Nabors said.

Legal touchstones

Much of the legal framework to fly drones has been established by cases that have examined the use of manned aircraft and various technologies to conduct surveillance of both public spaces and private homes.

In a 1986 Supreme Court case, justices were asked whether a police department violated constitutional protections against illegal search and seizure after it flew a small plane above the back yard of a man suspected of growing marijuana. The court ruled that "the Fourth Amendment simply does not require the police traveling in the public airways at this altitude to obtain a warrant in order to observe what is visible to the naked eye."

In a 2001 case, however, also involving a search for marijuana, the court was more skeptical of police tactics. It ruled that an Oregon police department conducted an illegal search when it used a thermal imaging device to detect heat coming from the home of an man suspected of growing marijuana indoors.

"The question we confront today is what limits there are upon this power of technology to shrink the realm of guaranteed privacy," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the 2001 case.

Still, Joseph J. Vacek, a professor in the Aviation Department at the University of North Dakota who has studied the potential use of drones in law enforcement, said the main objections to the use of domestic drones will probably have little to do with the Constitution.

"Where I see the challenge is the social norm," Vacek said. "Most people are not okay with constant watching. That hover-and-stare capability used to its maximum potential will probably ruffle a lot of civic feathers."

At least one community has already balked at the prospect of unmanned aircraft.

The Houston Police Department considered participating in a pilot program to study the use of drones, including for evacuations, search and rescue, and tactical operations. In the end, it withdrew.

A spokesman for Houston police said the department would not comment on why the program, to have been run in cooperation with the FAA, was aborted in 2007, but traffic tickets might have had something to do with it.

When KPRC-TV in Houston, which is owned by The Washington Post Co., discovered a secret drone air show for dozens of officers at a remote location 70 miles from Houston, police officials were forced to call a hasty news conference to explain their interest in the technology.

A senior officer in Houston then mentioned to reporters that drones might ultimately be used for recording traffic violations.

Federal officials said support for the program crashed.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012204111.html





Internet 'Kill Switch' Bill Will Return
Declan McCullagh

A controversial bill handing President Obama power over privately owned computer systems during a "national cyberemergency," and prohibiting any review by the court system, will return this year.

Internet companies should not be alarmed by the legislation, first introduced last summer by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), a Senate aide said last week. Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

"We're not trying to mandate any requirements for the entire Internet, the entire Internet backbone," said Brandon Milhorn, Republican staff director and counsel for the committee.

Instead, Milhorn said at a conference in Washington, D.C., the point of the proposal is to assert governmental control only over those "crucial components that form our nation's critical infrastructure."

Portions of the Lieberman-Collins bill, which was not uniformly well-received when it became public in June 2010, became even more restrictive when a Senate committee approved a modified version on December 15. The full Senate did not act on the measure.

The revised version includes new language saying that the federal government's designation of vital Internet or other computer systems "shall not be subject to judicial review." Another addition expanded the definition of critical infrastructure to include "provider of information technology," and a third authorized the submission of "classified" reports on security vulnerabilities.

The idea of creating what some critics have called an Internet "kill switch" that the president could flip in an emergency is not exactly new.

A draft Senate proposal that CNET obtained in August 2009 authorized the White House to "declare a cybersecurity emergency," and another from Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) would have explicitly given the government the power to "order the disconnection" of certain networks or Web sites. House Democrats have taken a similar approach in their own proposals.

Lieberman, who recently announced he would not seek re-election in 2012, said last year that enactment of his bill needed to be a top congressional priority. "For all of its 'user-friendly' allure, the Internet can also be a dangerous place with electronic pipelines that run directly into everything from our personal bank accounts to key infrastructure to government and industrial secrets," he said.

Civil libertarians and some industry representatives have repeatedly raised concerns about the various proposals to give the executive branch such broad emergency power. On the other hand, as Lieberman and Collins have highlighted before, some companies, including Microsoft, Verizon, and EMC Corporation, have said positive things about the initial version of the bill.

But last month's rewrite that bans courts from reviewing executive branch decrees has given companies new reason to worry. "Judicial review is our main concern," said Steve DelBianco, director of the NetChoice coalition, which includes eBay, Oracle, Verisign, and Yahoo as members. "A designation of critical information infrastructure brings with it huge obligations for upgrades and compliance."

In some cases, DelBianco said, a company may have a "good-faith disagreement" with the government's ruling and would want to seek court review. "The country we're seeking to protect is a country that respects the right of any individual to have their day in court," he said. "Yet this bill would deny that day in court to the owner of infrastructure."

Other industry representatives say it's not clear that lawyers and policy analysts who will inhabit Homeland Security's 4.5 million square-foot headquarters in the southeast corner of the District of Columbia have the expertise to improve the security of servers and networks operated by companies like AT&T, Verizon, Microsoft, and Google. American companies already spend billions of dollars on computer security a year.

"Declaration of a national cyber emergency"

The revised Lieberman-Collins bill, dubbed the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, works this way: Homeland Security will "establish and maintain a list of systems or assets that constitute covered critical infrastructure" and that will be subject to emergency decrees. (The term "kill switch" does not appear in the legislation.)

Under the revised legislation, the definition of critical infrastructure has been tightened. DHS is only supposed to place a computer system (including a server, Web site, router, and so on) on the list if it meets three requirements. First, the disruption of the system could cause "severe economic consequences" or worse. Second, that the system "is a component of the national information infrastructure." Third, that the "national information infrastructure is essential to the reliable operation of the system."

At last week's event, Milhorn, the Senate aide, used the example of computers at a nuclear power plant or the Hoover Dam but acknowledged that "the legislation does not foreclose additional requirements, or additional additions to the list."

A company that objects to being subject to the emergency regulations is permitted to appeal to DHS secretary Janet Napolitano. But her decision is final and courts are explicitly prohibited from reviewing it.

President Obama would then have the power to "issue a declaration of a national cyberemergency." What that entails is a little unclear, including whether DHS could pry user information out of Internet companies that it would not normally be entitled to obtain without a court order. One section says they can disclose certain types of noncommunications data if "specifically authorized by law," but a presidential decree may suffice.

"No amount of tightening of what constitutes 'critical infrastructure' will prevent abuse without meaningful judicial review," says Berin Szoka, an analyst at the free-market TechFreedom think tank and editor of The Next Digital Decade book. "Blocking judicial review of this key question essentially says that the rule of law goes out the window if and when a major crisis occurs."

For their part, Lieberman and Collins say the president already has "nearly unchecked authority" to control Internet companies. A 1934 law (PDF) creating the Federal Communications Commission says that in wartime, or if a "state of public peril or disaster or other national emergency" exists, the president may "authorize the use or control of any...station or device."

In congressional testimony last year, DHS Deputy Undersecretary Philip Reitinger stopped short of endorsing the Lieberman-Collins bill. The 1934 law already addresses "presidential emergency authorities, and Congress and the administration should work together to identify any needed adjustments to the act," he said, "as opposed to developing overlapping legislation."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20029282-281.html





Egypt Cuts Off Most Internet and Cell Service
Matt Richtel

Autocratic governments often limit phone and Internet access in tense times. But the Internet has never faced anything like what happened in Egypt on Friday, when the government of a country with 80 million people and a modernizing economy cut off nearly all access to the network and shut down cellphone service.

The shutdown caused a 90 percent drop in data traffic to and from Egypt, crippling an important communications tool used by antigovernment protesters and their supporters to organize and to spread their message.

Vodafone, a cellphone provider based in London with 28 million subscribers in Egypt, said in a statement on its Web site that “all mobile operators in Egypt have been instructed to suspend services in selected areas.” The company said it was “obliged to comply” with the order.

Egypt, to an unprecedented extent, pulled itself off the grid.

“In a fundamental sense, it’s as if you rewrote the map and they are no longer a country,” said Jim Cowie, the chief technology officer of Renesys, a company based in New Hampshire that tracks Internet traffic.



“Almost nobody in Egypt has Internet connectivity,” Mr. Cowie added. “I’ve never seen it happen at this scale.”

In the Internet era, governments have found many ways to control the flow of information — or at least to try to do so — by interfering with digital communications or limiting them.

Few governments have cut off access entirely; Myanmar did so in 2007, as did Nepal two years earlier. But at least 40 countries filter specific Internet sites or services, as China does by prohibiting access to some foreign news sources, said Prof. Ronald Deibert, a political scientist and director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, which tracks the intersection of technology and politics.

“It’s almost become de rigueur during events like this — elections or political demonstrations — to tamper with the Internet,” Professor Deibert said. But he added that the shutdown in Egypt was “unprecedented in scope and scale.”

Like other groups that track Internet traffic, Professor Deibert’s organization found that Internet access in Egypt dropped off sharply around 12:30 a.m. Friday in Cairo, or about 5:30 p.m. Thursday New York time.

Some Internet traffic remained flowing on Friday, allowing access to and from the country’s stock exchange and some government agencies, according to researchers.

A Facebook spokesman, Andrew Noyes, said the company had seen a drop in traffic from Egypt on Thursday and only minimal traffic on Friday. “Although the turmoil in Egypt is a matter for the Egyptian people and their government to resolve, limiting Internet access for millions of people is a matter of concern for the global community,” he said in a statement.

Online activists inside and outside the country passed along information about how to work around the shutdown, like using dial-up Internet connections in other countries.

Professor Deibert said that a government that chooses to tamper with the Internet — let alone shut it off — incurs potentially serious diplomatic, political and economic costs. Citizens and businesses, he noted, have become increasingly dependent on Internet communication and transactions, and doubtless are putting pressure on the Egyptian government to relent.

Curiously, Internet experts said, the ease with which Egypt shut down communications networks may be a result of its historical lack of repressiveness when it comes to telecommunications access.

Bill Woodcock, research director of the Packet Clearing House, a company that supports and studies Internet infrastructure around the world, said the Egyptian government had led the way in promoting the development of the Internet within the country.

As a result, he said, the companies that provide Internet service have had little reason to expect a shutdown, and so did not prepare alternative communications channels or workarounds.

By contrast, Mr. Woodcock said, Internet service providers in places like Cambodia have a much more tense relationship with the government and have readied themselves for potential tampering.

The shutdown in Egypt “is a tragedy, and it is a colossal mistake on the part of a government that has historically been way out in front in terms of the Internet,” he said. “It’s been a liberal vanguard in a region that is otherwise very conservative.”

Egypt has only a handful of major Internet access providers, so it would take just a few phone calls to get them to stop the flow of traffic. That would not be possible in countries with more complex networks.

The shutdown may actually be creating more unrest, said Prof. Mohammed el-Nawawy of the communications department at Queens University of Charlotte. Professor el-Nawawy, a native of Egypt who has been studying its blogging culture, said he had been talking by land line to activists in the country who told him that people who might have otherwise expressed their frustration on blogs or Facebook were heading outside instead.

“The government has made a big mistake taking away the option at people’s fingertips,” he said. “They’re taking their frustration to the streets.”

He added: “Blogs are not important right now. Things have moved beyond that point.”

Miguel Helft contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/29/te.../29cutoff.html





Cairo Mania: Egypt Cuts Off the Net
Robert X. Cringely

In an historic move, Egypt has unplugged itself from the Internet [1]. In Cairo, the Web has gone as silent as a Sphinx. Protestors who've been using Twitter, Facebook, and email to organize street demonstrations against the 30-year regime of Hosni Mubarak are now up the Nile without a cable modem.

Per the BBC [2]:

According to internet monitoring firm Renesys, shortly before 2300 GMT on 27 January virtually all routes to Egyptian networks were simultaneously withdrawn from the Internet's global routing table.

That meant that virtually all of Egypt's Internet addresses were unreachable.

Mobile providers like Vodafone were also ordered to stop data services to Egyptian customers, cutting off another possible route to the Net.

There have been a few instances where countries disappeared briefly from the InterWebs due to a mistake. In October 2009, Sweden disappeared for about 90 minutes [5] due to a missing dot in its DNS records. Services like Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo Mail have been periodically blocked by repressive regimes in Pakistan, Turkey, Tunisia, Iran, and China. Myanmar briefly yanked the Internet plug [6] during a period of unrest in 2007, but at the time only about 1 percent of its population had Net access. Now, some 20 million Egyptians have been cut off -- making it the largest instance of a modern country withdrawing entirely from the Net.

Naturally, the rest of the Web sees this as a call to arms, as well they should.

According to Time's Techland blog [7], ham radio operators are being recruited to provide an alternative communications network for Egyptian protesters. Shervin Pishevar [8], founder of mobile games company SGN, is trying a slightly geekier approach, seeking volunteers to build mobile ad hoc mesh networks to get the signal to and from Egypt. Naturally he's doing it via Twitter [9].

A Twitter user calling himself "Bruce Wayne" is tweeting from the account @EgyptFreedomNow [10] that people can still access the Net via dial-up connections [11]. Now that would be ironic -- a revolution that takes place at 56Kbps. Holy AOL, Batman.

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, WikiLeaks has unveiled a series of new U.S. diplomatic cables [12] documenting the repressive police state policies of the Mubarak regime -- promoted, again, via Twitter [13]. At least the Egyptians outside Egypt can read them [14].

It's a fascinating study of how crucial communications technology is to government -- or, for that matter, freedom from government -- and how people can find work-arounds to almost any technological barrier the forces of evil put in their way. Once again it demonstrates that Twitter is good for more than just inane nattering about one's cat and/or lunch. It's also one of those examples where the collective hive mind of the InterWebs works for the general good, as opposed to, say, watching Lady Gaga videos on YouTube.

Could an Egyptian-style Internet blackout happen here? Most observers say no [15], given the dozens of fiber backbones and Tier 1 service providers available in the United States. I'm not so sure.

Last June, a Senate committee approved the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act (PCNAA) [16], a bill sponsored by Connecticut "independent" Joe Lieberman that would essentially give the president an off switch for the Net [17].

That bill prompted howls of protests from both sides of the aisle. That doesn't mean something like it won't eventually get passed -- especially if a cyber threat arises where a general Net shutdown would be the only way of stopping some malicious Worm on Steroids from infecting every system on the grid. And then the potential for abuse is ever present, no matter whether a donkey or an elephant occupies the White House.

At which point, maybe the newly freed citizens of Egypt will step in and try to help us organize a protest.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventure...ts-the-net-807





Despite Distinctions, Los Angeles Times Loses Standing at Home
Jeremy W. Peters

Big city newspapers all across the country have suffered one indignity after another in the last few years. But few of them have been as hard hit — or gotten as much grief for it — as The Los Angeles Times.

Here in the city that has always strived to show how a sense of sophistication lies beneath the silicone and the superficial, The Times has joined the city’s impossible freeway traffic as a unifying force of complaint.

On a recent weekday evening, Edie Frère, owner of a stationery store in the city’s quaint Larchmont Village section, wistfully recalled reading The Times as a young girl, captivated by the old Hollywood starlets and socialites who graced the society pages.

“We need a paper that’s more, and this is less,” said Ms. Frere, 66. “I think it’s just not a world-class paper, no matter how you cut it. It used to be a world-class paper.”

Never mind that The Times is considered a front-runner to win a Pulitzer Prize this year for its coverage of city officials in Bell who gave themselves enormous salaries, a story that tapped into a growing national outrage over wasteful government spending.

Or that it still maintains, despite all the bloodletting since the paper was bought in 2000 by the Tribune Company, 13 foreign bureaus, more than any other large metropolitan daily except The Washington Post.

Or that it is the only big city daily that still employs a battalion of correspondents stationed in cities across the country.

In the sidewalk cafes, coffee shops, hair salons and studio lots of this sprawling metropolis, the notion that The Times remains one of the best newspapers still in business is a foreign one.

“When I came here back in ’74, it would take me all day to read the paper. Now it takes me 10 minutes — tops,” said Quintin Cheeseborough, 57, who is self-employed and comes to the Los Angeles Central Library occasionally to read The Times. On a recent morning, he was reading The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, but not The Los Angeles Times.

Since The Times was sold to Tribune, its newsroom staff has been cut in half. For many Angelenos, the downsizing is just one more sign that their city is losing stature. Add it to the list of other ego-bruising blows, like the loss of its professional football team, the flight of Fortune 500 companies from the city limits and a failed bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics.

“We don’t even have a football team. So what does that tell you?” said Mr. Cheeseborough, a note of resignation in his voice.

The Times’s weekday circulation has been nearly halved since 2000, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, falling to just over 600,000 — a far steeper rate of decline than at many other big dailies like The Chicago Tribune, The Detroit Free Press and The Washington Post.

To identify where all the local harrumphing comes from, it helps to understand just how closely the rise of The Times is associated with the rise of Los Angeles as a capital of culture and commerce.

The paper’s founding families, the Otises and the Chandlers, used their fledgling publication to push for the development that helped give rise to modern Los Angeles. Water was first piped into the San Fernando Valley because they arranged for it. Los Angeles Harbor was built in part because of their backing.

Not that everyone shares such a dim view of the paper. Bill Mullins, 55, an equipment clerk at the city’s Central Library, said that despite the cutbacks, he still thinks The Times invests in the kind of journalism most news organizations have eliminated.
“The L.A. Times will do stuff that I love, like a story on a Los Angeles boy who went to Iraq. And it will start on the front page and jump to Page 12, and then take up all of Page 13,” Mr. Mullins said. “I mean, you can’t get that kind of stuff in three minutes on NBC or ABC.”

Still, seeing the paper sold to a bottom-line-driven corporate owner from Chicago was a major blow to many here. Even Mr. Mullins said that he thought the sale to Tribune would be the paper’s “death knell.”

And what Tribune did to local coverage after acquiring the paper only reinforced those concerns.

Times bureaus and printing facilities in Orange County and the San Fernando Valley once employed hundreds of people to publish separate editions, each with a locally tailored front page.

John S. Carroll, a former Times executive editor, recalled that each of those operations was like a separate paper. “It was like going to a newspaper in a medium-size city,” Mr. Carroll recalled of visiting there. “It was really something.”

Those operations are no more. Breaking local news no longer appears on the front page, because to save money it moved up its deadlines and moved late-breaking local, national and foreign news to a separate section.

The paper’s absence in the community is felt in ways beyond what it no longer covers. The Chandler family, apart from its role in city commerce and politics, was also a cultural force in Los Angeles.

“The intertwinement with the community was much greater when the Chandlers owned the paper, with their charitable contributions, their contributions to the arts,” said Leo Wolinsky, who left the paper in 2008 after holding a number of top jobs there, including executive editor. “If you walk around downtown L.A., The Los Angeles Times and the Chandler name is on everything. When the Tribune Company came, that got cut back severely.”

More than just cutbacks have left many Angelenos with a dim view of their paper. Under its current publisher, Eddy W. Hartenstein — a former DirecTV chief executive who became the fourth publisher under Tribune — The Times has run a number of ads on its front page and on the fronts of other sections that many here felt cheapened the paper. One ad that ran last summer, for a King Kong feature at Universal Studios, declared: “Universal Studios Hollywood Partially Destroyed.”

That ad prompted outrage from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, who took the highly unusual step of writing a letter to Tribune’s chairman, Samuel Zell, accusing him of making “a mockery of the paper’s mission.”

Mr. Hartenstein, who through a spokeswoman said he would “pass” on a request to be interviewed for this article, defended the ad at the time, saying it met the paper’s standards.

Mr. Hartenstein appears somewhat aware that he has some community relations mending to do. He wrote a letter to readers on Dec. 26 saying that the paper would remain committed to hard-hitting local coverage. But that is a complicated task.

Harvey Levine, 48, a television stage manager who lives on the city’s West Side, ended his subscription after unread copies began piling up at home. “The L.A. Times should be the paper that I trust and go to daily, and it’s not,” said Mr. Levine, a native of Canada who as a young man dreamed of a career in Hollywood and bought copies of the weekend Times in Toronto.

“I know they have a lot of really good writers and they win lots of awards, but I thought it just wasn’t enough,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/bu...24latimes.html





DLD11: James Murdoch On The Daily, Paywalls, Google And Apple
Robin Wauters

James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch and currently Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, Europe and Asia, was interviewed on stage at the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany.

Murdoch touched on everything from its relationship with Google and Apple, to paywalls for online newspapers, iPad applications and more.

These are my notes:

Q: When is The Daily going to launch?

So first, The Daily is going to be a very exciting digital publication, which I think should be launching in the next few weeks, I hope.

It’s going to be a brand new piece of journalism. We want to get out there quickly, at a good price, and I think it will surprise people. I also think it will succeed or fail on the journalism part, not the bells and whistles.

You already employ about 126 people on the journalistic side for The Daily, and the price will be 99 US cents. Is that sufficient?

Well, we wanted it to have a very good price, affordable for most people, at 99 cents a week.

It lowers the barrier for people to enjoy high quality journalism. We realize the pricing models for apps and paid journalism as a whole is still developing, whether it will be bundled or tiered, and so on.

What we’re focused on is making the experience super simple, at great value, without stopping us from investing in really unique journalism. You know, as opposed to taking your RSS feeds, cutting and pasting wires like other publications. We want to break out of that.

How many The Daily editions do you have to sell to call it a success?

We’re taking this milestone by milestone, and we don’t know what pace to expect, and how the dynamics with the weekly subscription will work.

We have high hopes for the US marketplace in particular, though.

You’re now a big part of management at News Corp. How does it feel to be the future of the company?

Not just me – I think a lot of people will be the future of News Corp, but it’s an exciting company, I believe we’re really unique. We’re a mix of media businesses, and we’re truly global.

If you look at our breadth of businesses, we’re clearly about storytelling. For digital, this is definitely the best and at the same time most challenging time for the news business.

You obviously still deliver news on paper, so what I’m wondering is whether you consider News Corp to be and old economy company or a new economy company?

I think the distinction between that ‘old’ and ‘new’ economy needs to be broken down. When we think about our business, storytelling, we don’t see it that way, and it shows in our investments in the space.

You’ve talked about apps, where it’s really a mixture of things – games, music, social networks, etcetera. It’s a frictionless environment, and as copyrighted content owners we’re in a really good position there.

Also, we see that the cost of distributing those ones and zeros continues to go down. We look at tablets, and for a journalistic product like The Daily, we acknowledge that it’s transformational. In the end, journalistic quality is key to everything.

How much of your revenues are digital as opposed to traditional?

We don’t break it out that way, but I can tell you that the vast majority comes from digital and paid television. On a combined basis, in Europe for example, over 70 percent comes from our digital TV business. These are new, 21st century businesses, with brand new technologies, in voice, broadband, with content at its heart.

The paper-based part of our business is about 15 percent, maybe less.

Would you still invest in paper?

Well, we are, and yes, I think we will in the future. The Sun just had a record Christmas, and we build on our relationship with our readers and our advertisers, who are still responding really well to paper products. Our books business is thriving as well.

Of course, we had the economic crisis, and there’s this perception of decline in the newspaper business. But Big franchises tend to still do really well. The scarcity of great brands is going up, which means the value increases along with it. This is a critical factor. The middleground I think is currently suffering, not the top players or the great niche players.

Which areas of this world are you investing in? What are your preferred marketplaces?

It depends largely on the business. We like to have thinks like the National Geographic channel in lots and lots of markets. But when we dig in, with big operations and lots of investments, we’re forced to pick and choose. We like market that a big of scale, transparency, little regulatory uncertainties, but also where there’s potential for real penetration.

We like India a lot from a profit perspective, but we also like being in Western Europe, and Germany, Italy and the UK in particular. It remains an enormous playing field.

In the end, we invest in giving people choice, quality, great storytelling, simple to use but solid technology at a fair price. We tend to choose carefully, but when we look at Europe and Asia, the transparency is the key filter.

How do you evaluate chances versus risks? What kind of risks would you not take when entering a new market?

What we’d like to do, is making success and failure our own making. If we mess it up, to be able to bet on ourselves to not mess up too badly. But when you depend on other parties, like politicians and regulations, it gets really hard. That part of the equation still remains a mystery for me.

What about Turkey?

You would know more about that than I do. I think Turkey is a great marketplace, and we’re proud of what we’ve done there so far. Turkey is an exciting marketplace, but the question is which opportunities at which price. The country is reasonably transparent, but you have to layer on top of that: value.

Last year at the Monaco Media Forum, you were quoted on your ‘first rule of monetization’: you said “if you’re going to monetize something online, don’t give it away for free”. The Times, and The Sunday Times, now have a paywall.

What are your experiences so far?

The experience has been pretty good. The point that I was trying to make when I said that, was that you can sell quality content to customers. Today, in europe, 70 percent of our revenue comes directly from the customer.

That’s a durable and powerful business, that lets you avoid cycles. Online, this is particularly true, because with all that inventory you lose the pricing power, because it’s impossible to create scarcity. Selling something at a fair price to fewer customers is a better place to be in.

The reaction from our readers has been very positive. Obviously, we have the experience with the Wall Street Journal in the US, which has been very successful in selling bundled subscriptions.

The Times and Sunday Times come from a different place, as they were free before, so our audience has undeniably contracted, but our readers are happy and advertisers are positive.

The numbers are looking very good, we’ll release some of them in a month and a half. The iPad app part of the publication is drawing a frequency of reading that has surprised us a lot. With the app, we’re seeing dedicated readers spending 30-40 minutes, downloading content on a daily basis.

Of course, these are the people that stop buying the newspaper, so that’s somewhat of a problem. The substitution is much more stark than website vs. newspaper.

Are you going to put The Sun behind a paywall at some point?

I think it’s a real question for the big popular papers, on how to tackle this. The customer for that publication is of course very different, so I think we have to be very cautious there. We have another tabloid behind a paywall, and we’re looking at the metrics very closely.

You will see the online strategy of The Sun develop very quickly, and I think there will be a strong paid component in it. But we have to take care.

How do you see Google? Is it a thief, or a reliable partner for the perfect news kiosk?

Look, there are a lot of questions on what Google’s relationship is with copyright owners, and what it will be like in the future. But the company is very engaged, there’s a dialogue – we don’t have any answers yet but negotiations are underway.

The question we ask is: how do you get compensated for copyrighted content. That notion of getting paid either a wholesale price relative to how much Google gets paid, or other payment options, these are now on the table. Not too long ago, they weren’t.

Today, I think the conversation with Google is much more constructive. Whether it comes to a good conclusion, we’ll see. We’re very happy to work through different structures to see what will work. Maybe it won’t work at all, so then we’ll need to evaluate what we do. But every party at the table wants to get good results, in good faith.

The good news is that there’s enough out there to create a good dynamic. The fundamental thing is we need publishers to start asserting the value of copyrighted content much more, in general. Because if publishers end up no longer investing in quality journalism, the media will be up for grabs for governments and oligarchs, and who wants that?

Eric Schmidt will soon be on stage here. Anything you wish from him?

Wait, don’t I have to talk to Larry now?

Let’s move on to Apple, with whom you’ve been working together. Is it a good partner for you?

We partner with them in a variety of areas, from iBooks to iTunes for our movie and TV shows business, so we have constant discussions about pricing and distribution methods. The interesting thing is that we create copyrighted content across the board, so we’re all learning our way through in different areas.

With Apple, there’s positive engagement, we get a huge amount of support from them on The Daily for example. Obviously, we’ll have arguments with them in the future, on pricing, rules, and so on. But I would call it a positive relationship.

When is News Corp going to launch its own tablet?

Not right now.

What’s the most frightening thing you’ve witnessed in the last six months?

I think the most frightening thing for me was press freedom being eroded in the Western world. We see rules getting introduced in places like Eastern Europe, in some regions a system of regulation around libel labs, etcetera. This is encroaching on investigative journalism, with state media taking over in some parts of the world. That needs to be rolled back.

How many journalists do you think you will need in the future?

Hopefully more. There needs to be an incentive to invest in journalism – I would say professional journalism is more important than ever.

It’s really the only way that you can have a true dialog in a democracy.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/25/dld...gle-and-apple/





Italy Sues Microsoft for Box-Bundling Bungling

Windows tax is unfair
John Oates

The Italian consumer watchdog is suing Microsoft over the "Windows Tax" – the near impossibility of an ordinary user getting a refund if they decide to delete Microsoft's software from a new computer or laptop.

The class action case says Microsoft makes it too difficult for people who buy a computer with Microsoft software on it to remove that software and get their money back. Most users do not realise that starting the software means you have accepted the end user licence.

The statement from the Italian authorities made it clear that they do not believe that hardware manufacturers are entirely blameless, but said: "the principal cause of the failure is Microsoft itself..."

The Associazion per i diritti degli utenti e consumatori (ADUC) has filed a case in Milan and invited anyone who might have paid the tax to join up.

ADUC noted that it had already won a "pilot case" – against HP.

ADUC is calling for private users who bought a computer bundled with MS software, and then did not use the Microsoft software – but presumably installed Linux or their own alternative operating system – to contact it. Such users are supposed to be entitled to a full refund on the cost of the products.

The battle to win Windows Tax refunds has been a long-running bugbear for techies. The victory of a Reg reader who finally squeezed some money out of Dell for deleting Microsoft's crud might bolster the regulator's case.

The consumer watchdog's statement is here in Italian, or Google Translate's version of Italian class action against Microsoft is here.
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/201...sue_microsoft/





Brian Rust, Father of Modern Discography, Dies at 88
Margalit Fox

Brian Rust, a discographic detective who compiled comprehensive guides to recorded jazz and other popular music, in the process setting the standard for the modern field, died on Jan. 5 in Swanage, in southern England. He was 88.

The cause was complications of prostate cancer, said his son, Victor, who was named for the RCA Victor record label. (The elder Mr. Rust, according to family oral tradition, declined a friend’s suggestion that he name Victor’s twin sister Decca.)

Often described as the father of contemporary discography, Mr. Rust embarked in the 1940s on a rigorous, deeply personal project that continued long afterward as he haunted archives and hunted down artists to reconstitute long-vanished recording sessions on paper.

He was best known for “Jazz Records,” first published in 1952 and reissued many times since. It is currently available in a two-volume, 1,971-page version titled “Jazz and Ragtime Records, 1897-1942” (Mainspring Press, 2002), edited by Malcolm Shaw.

For decades, “Jazz Records” — known to jazz mavens simply as “J. R.” — has been the de facto standard reference work in the field, furnishing meticulous information on session dates, personnel and much else for tens of thousands of recordings.

Aimed at scholars and aficionados, the book has also been the starting point for countless reissues of early-20th-century jazz.

“Discography is a road map to the recorded past,” said Tim Brooks, who collaborated with Mr. Rust on “The Columbia Master Book Discography,” a four-volume work published in 1999. “Virtually any historical jazz reissue goes back first to Rust to find out what to look for — what recordings an artist made, how many versions of each that artist made and where they might have been issued, so you can get your hands on it. And he would trace all of that.”

“All of that” is now standard information in discographies across musical genres, and it is to Mr. Rust, colleagues say, that such comprehensiveness is owed.

“Jazz research at its beginnings was the purview of dedicated amateurs,” Bill Kirchner, a jazz musician and historian, said in an interview. “There was no precedent to dictate what the nature of it was going to be, and what the details were going to be. And he was really one of those people who decided, ‘This is what it should encompass.’ ”

Brian Arthur Lovell Rust was born in London on March 19, 1922. As a boy, he became enraptured by the jazz he heard on the radio and was soon spending all his pocket money on secondhand recordings.

At its height, his collection comprised 8,000 to 10,000 records — a somewhat modest haul by the standards of truly obsessed collectors. With benevolent indifference to the ravages of summer heat and winter cold, Mr. Rust stored them in an extension behind his garage.

“He was not a particularly painstaking person in terms of caring for stuff, though his mental work was extremely painstaking,” Mr. Shaw said.

As a young man, Mr. Rust took a job as a clerk in the Bank of England, which pleased his mother though not him. A conscientious objector, he was a firefighter in London during the Blitz.

After the war, he joined the staff of the BBC Gramophone Library, where he worked until about 1950. It was there, wishing to improve on the scanty discographies then available, that Mr. Rust began his private research in earnest.

Reconstructing a long-ago recording session is like trying to grasp a fistful of quicksilver. Mr. Rust first scoured record-company archives to compile his data; because files were often lost or incomplete, he eventually left the BBC, packed a suitcase full of rare European jazz records and set out for the United States.

Arriving in 1951, he sold the recordings to American collectors and used the money for bus fare, traveling the country in search of aging jazzmen, whom he proceeded to debrief. The result was “Jazz Records,” originally issued by Mr. Rust as a mimeographed loose-leaf volume.

In the decades that followed, Mr. Rust devoted his life to freelance music writing and discography, an unremunerative, solitary but, to him and his fellow travelers, deeply necessary enterprise. He worked quietly, away from the limelight, from his home in Swanage, a coastal town in Dorset.

“Brian lived sort of a hermit’s life,” Mr. Shaw said. “He was quite content with his own company and the company of other collectors and his family.”

His other work includes “The American Dance Band Discography 1917-1942” (1975), “British Music Hall on Record” (1979), “Discography of Historical Records on Cylinders and 78s” (1979) and legions of liner notes.

In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Mr. Rust played the drums in the Original Barnstormers Spasm Band, a British skiffle band.

In addition to his son, Victor, Mr. Rust is survived by his wife, the former Mary Denning; two daughters, Angela Kidd and Pamela Jackson-Cooke, (who escaped being named Decca); three grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

He is also survived by Brian, a discographic software program named for him. “Which is ironic,” Mr. Brooks said in an interview, “because he himself hated computers and never used them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/ar...ic/25rust.html





The End Of Facebook and Free Software's Quiet Revolution
Michael Chisari

These journalists, they got it all wrong, I tell ya. They’re waiting for a spectacle, where intrepid new entrepreneurs launch an insurgent website (bookface?) and the disaffected masses desert Facebook like rats on a sinking ship. The users are getting restless, that’s for sure, but nobody is sure about the next step.

And so article after article, blog after blog, the tech press looks for their savior. Who will be the next Mark Zuckerburg? Who will build a new empire with an historic trillion dollar valuation? Who is the David willing to challenge Goliath in a pay-per-view televised match to the death?

For a New York minute, it seemed as though Diaspora* was the perfect narrative: Young college students with a dream, the attention of the press and the support of the internet. They had a story, they had the gumption, and they had momentum. All they needed was code.

And therein, as the Bard would tell us, lies the rub: This is not a story of startups and entrepreneurs. This is not a story about who will become the next ~363kg gorilla. This is not a tale of who will next be crowned king.

This is a story about… Wait for it… Server-side software implementations and open, documented protocols.

It’s not easy to write an article about how there won’t be another Facebook. It’s more of a challenge to write an article about how Facebook will be brought down by an RPC or a REST API.

Facebook is a walled garden, and a walled garden is simply a proprietary system in a networked world. To understand how Facebook’s story ends, you have to understand how free software succeeds against it’s non-free competition. There has been some discussion about AOL and CompuServe as a historical precedence, but let’s try another one: Microsoft.

In the before times, in the long, long ago, Microsoft was a juggernaut. IBM before them, but they had won the belt, and wore it loudly. Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft. They had all kinds of ideas about how you would use your computer to search for information, and connect to the world. Very few of their ideas, however, were open.

Around that same time, a handful of developers few had heard of, with no major institutional funding or backing, began work on the Apache web server software. It was free of charge, open source (sorry, Richard, free software), and it worked well. Microsoft tried to compete with IIS, but they had to play by the rules set forth by Apache, which was open protocols in an open web.

Many started hearing about the web, but who heard about Apache? Only those who needed to. It was a quiet revolution, with little attention from the mainstream tech press, and to this day, few users of the web know what Apache is. And yet, Apache served almost 67% of the busiest websites in the world.

Other examples are Joomla! and Drupal, two content management systems that power millions of website. Yet most users have no idea what they are. They don’t have to. They displaced proprietary systems without a dot-com launch party. Another quiet revolution.

Social networking is following these templates. An open, free alternative being built today will quietly replace the walled gardens. Starting with niche communities, building up to institutions like schools and employers, and eventually someone will build a popular hub that gets some press and is touted as the next big thing, although by that point, the “next big thing” will mean something completely different.

At some point, Facebook will decide that they will have to play along, and connect into a decentralized, open social network. Many Facebook users will barely know this has happened, only that some of their friends on their network don’t have an @facebook.com in their profile. Facebook won’t ever die out, but they will have to operate in an eco-system as a player amongst many, respecting open standards, and supporting the open social web, even if they’d rather not.

And that’s when we’ve won.
http://developer.appleseedproject.or...f5cf7a43ea5db6





Orange HD Voice Service and Handsets Go Live in the UK, We Go Ears-On (Video)
Richard Lai

Digg Good news for UK mobile addicts: Orange's long-anticipated HD Voice service has officially made it to the Land of Hope and Glory. Starting today, British customers can pick up a HD Voice-enabled handset -- including the Nokia 5230, X6, E5 and Samsung Omnia Pro at launch -- from Orange, and start buttering their ears with "crystal clear" phone calls while within the carrier's 3G coverage. Prior to the launch, we were fortunate enough to try out the new service on a couple of Nokia E5 prototypes in Piccadilly Circus, and boy, that was some pretty impressive stuff there -- the wider speech bandwidth really added a lot of clarity to the caller's voice, and additionally, the noisy traffic from the caller's end was well suppressed at where it'd otherwise crackle over a normal call. Perhaps the easiest way to put it is that this is much like jumping from a bad FM radio broadcast to some sweet CD audio, thus making conversations a lot easier to interpret, even if the recipient is in a noisy environment or has hearing problem (as proven by Orange's public trial). As always, hearing is believing, so do check out our sample audio clips after the break.

While Orange remains a dominant driving force behind this mobile revolution, the carrier assured us that it expects other companies to pick up this open standard. That said, it's rather disappointing that current owners of the aforementioned handsets won't be getting a software patch for the HD upgrade (we were told that no extra hardware is involved), but we can understand -- the manufacturers do need to sell new phones to stay alive in this rapidly changing market. Anyhow, here's hoping that the forthcoming flagship Android and Windows Phone 7 devices will also get a taste of this crystal clear call quality.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/01/o...e-uk-we-go-ea/





Yahoo: 86% Use Mobile Devices While Watching TV
Mike Melanson

More and more, both TV networks and app developers are relying on the fact that watching TV is no longer a passive act to which we apply our undivided attention. From check-in apps like Miso and Get Glue to TV shows like Glee and Community, they want to assure that we watch our TV with our smartphone or tablet in hand, a-tweeting and a-checking in all the while.

According to a recent study by Yahoo's advertising division, the TV watching crowd is ripe for this type of prime time interactivity, with 86% of mobile Internet users fondling their mobile device while watching the old boob tube.

Yahoo interviewed 8,384 U.S. residents age 13-64, with 5,313 of those being mobile Internet users. Of that 5,313, 86% said they used their device while watching TV. That number grows even higher, to 92%, when you look at the 13-24 year old bracket. Of those using their mobile device, 25% say they are browsing content related to the program they are watching. Take a look at Yahoo's breakdown:

Last week, we looked at how the TV show Glee's use of in-show, character tweeting had caused viewers to rally around watching the show in real-time, instead of time-shifting it by recording it on their DVR and watching it later. With this many viewers watching TV with their mobile device in hand, expect tactics like this to be on the increase.

As Yahoo notes, this presents "a compelling opportunity for content providers and advertisers alike to complement the viewing experience on the mobile platform."

Yahoo, of course, wants a piece of our divided attention. Its upcoming Internet TV product, which we saw at CES, works to create an interactive experience that you can experience using both your smartphone and your tablet.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...atching_tv.php





States’ Lawmakers Turn Attention to the Dangers of Distracted Pedestrians
Susan Saulny and Matt Richtel

Many joggers don earbuds and listen to music to distract themselves from the rigors of running. But might the Black Eyed Peas or Rihanna distract them so much that they jog into traffic?

That is the theory of several lawmakers pushing the latest generation of legislation dealing with how devices like iPods and cellphones affect traffic safety. The ubiquity of interactive devices has propelled the science of distraction — and now efforts to legislate against it — out of the car and into the exercise routine.

In New York, a bill is pending in the legislature’s transportation committee that would ban the use of mobile phones, iPods or other electronic devices while crossing streets — runners and other exercisers included. Legislation pending in Oregon would restrict bicyclists from using mobile phones and music players, and a Virginia bill would keep such riders from using a “hand-held communication device.”

In California, State Senator Joe Simitian, who led a successful fight to ban motorists from sending text messages and using hand-held phones, has reintroduced a bill that failed last year to fine bicyclists $20 for similar multitasking.

“The big thing has been distracted driving, but now it’s moving into other ways technology can distract you, into everyday things,” said Anne Teigen, a policy specialist for the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks legislative developments.

Exercising in Central Park on Tuesday, Marie Wickham, 56, said she understood what all the fuss was about: “They’re zigging, they’re zagging, they don’t know what’s around them. It can definitely be dangerous.”

But Ms. Wickham added that she would be opposed to any ban of such devices. “I think it’s an infringement on personal rights,” she said. “At some point, we need to take responsibility for our own stupidity.”

Pedestrian fatalities increased slightly for the first time in four years in the first six months of 2010, according to a report released last week by the Governors Highway Safety Association, an organization based in Washington that represents state highway safety agencies.

Among the states, Arizona and Florida had the largest increases in pedestrian fatalities, followed by North Carolina, Oregon and Oklahoma. Nationally, pedestrian traffic fatalities had dropped to 4,091 in 2009 from 4,892 in 2005, the report stated.

“One of the reasons we think the trend may be turning negatively is because of distracted pedestrians,” said Jonathan Adkins, spokesman for the safety group.

The New York bill was proposed by State Senator Carl Kruger, a Brooklyn Democrat who has grown alarmed by the amount of distraction he sees on the streets in his neighborhood and across New York City. Since September, Mr. Kruger wrote in the bill, three pedestrians have been killed and one was critically injured while crossing streets and listening to music through headphones.

“We’re taught from knee-high to look in both directions, wait, listen and then cross,” he said. “You can perform none of those functions if you are engaged in some kind of wired activity.”

Hal Pashler, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, said that listening to sounds through two earbuds creates a particularly powerful kind of “auditory masking” that drowns out external sounds. Such masking not only goes directly into the ear, it also is involuntary in the sense that the sound floods the brain even when a person tries to listen to something else — say, traffic.

“It’s even more overwhelming than the kind of muiltitasking costs we normally talk about,” Mr. Pashler said.

As it is written, Mr. Kruger’s proposal, which was first introduced in 2007, would apply only to cities with populations of one million or more. But Mr. Kruger would like to expand the bill to cover even smaller cities. Violators would face a civil summons and a $100 fine.

“This is not government interference,” he said. “This is more like saying, ‘You’re doing something that could be detrimental to yourself and others around you.’ ”

But some outdoor exercisers who rely on music for a boost see the proposals as little more than a distraction for law enforcement officials. “Chasing down the runner who has his headphones in instead of chasing down the driver who’s been at the local pub sounds like they’re trying to pick the low-hanging fruit,” said John Wiant, 43, a runner from Newport Beach, Calif.

In Arkansas, an avalanche of criticism on Tuesday led a legislator to withdraw a proposal that would have banned pedestrians from wearing headphones in both ears. Other lawmakers have tried to strike some sort of balance between public safety and the gravity of the offense.

In California, Mr. Simitian is proposing the $20 fine on bicyclists who send text messages and a $30 increase on the existing $20 penalty for doing the same activity while driving a car, a difference that he said reflects the relative risk the behavior poses to others.

“At some point,” he said, “you do have to simply rely on the good judgment of folks as they go through their daily lives.”

Mr. Simitian added that he believed that efforts to legislate against distraction outside the car could diminish the seriousness of hard-fought campaigns and laws meant to curb distracted driving.

“Is there a problem out there with distracted pedestrians? I’d be the first to acknowledge it,” he said. But, he added, “It’s appropriate to distinguish between 4,000 pounds of steel and glass coming at you and a pedestrian who may well put themselves at risk but probably poses less of a risk to the general public.”

Andrew Keh, Ian Lovett and Evin Demirel contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/us/26runners.html





BitTorrent Keeps File-Sharing Going Strong
Emily Elias

Ellis Ly has amassed an eclectic catalogue of movies and TV shows on his computer. Over the years, he’s used dozens of peer-to-peer file-sharing programs and systems to download content. The Simon Fraser University computing-science student says that over the years he’s come to prefer BitTorrent.

“I do recommend people use it,” Ly told the Georgia Straight by phone. “There are good [BitTorrent] applications out there. And most of them are all open-source, so it doesn’t cost you anything.”

The BitTorrent protocol arrived on the Internet in 2001, around the time that Napster, the pioneering file-sharing service, shut down after losing a legal battle with the music industry. According to an October report by Sandvine, an Ontario-based network-equipment company, BitTorrent is now the dominant file-sharing protocol “everywhere except Latin America”.

Using BitTorrent is relatively simple. Floating around the Internet are copies of myriad movies, TV episodes, and songs. Through a BitTorrent search engine, such as the Pirate Bay, people find links to them and then use free software, like Vuze, to download the files. The more people “seeding” a particular file from their computer back onto the web, the faster the downloads.

Even though peer-to-peer file-sharing systems offer copyrighted material, that hasn’t stopped BitTorrent from flourishing.

“Since elementary school, even kindergarten, we were taught that sharing is caring. So what exactly is wrong to share what we have with others?” Ly said. “File-sharing is something that everyone can get ahold of. It’s just that there are a lot of people out there that are still not aware of it, but it’s not that hard to use.”

Although Ly favours BitTorrent for sharing files on the Internet, there are alternatives. Millions turn to peer-to-peer network Gnutella to share files through software like the now-defunct LimeWire.

LimeWire was one of the most popular file-sharing applications until it shut down in October. That’s when more than a dozen record companies, including Warner Bros. Records, won a court injunction in the U.S. ordering it to cease operations because copyrighted material was being shared on the service without their permission.

Soon after LimeWire’s servers went dormant, clones like FrostWire began to fill the void.

Vancouver-based isoHunt has had its share of legal woes. The site functions as a search engine that allows peer-to-peer users to connect with each other and find BitTorrents to download. In December 2009, a U.S. court ruled that the site was infringing on copyright laws and demanded that it shut down.

“In the U.S., we are going to appeal,” isoHunt founder Gary Fung told the Straight by phone. “Right now, there is not much to say than the appeal is getting started. In Canada, we are also fighting the Canadian recording industry, and we are also starting [legal] action in that.”

Fung insists that his site operates as a search engine like Google and that the company can’t control the nature of the content found through it. He believes information should flow freely online.

“File-sharing gives people the freedom to share what they want,” Fung said. “File-sharing is logically the next step in the Internet’s evolution, in the sense that it decentralizes distribution. Anyone that wants to distribute can distribute whatever they want.”

According to Fung, although there has been bad blood between file-sharing services and the film, television, and music industries, in the end everyone will have to kiss and make up.

“File-sharing will become more mainstream and all the lawsuits being launched against users or people like us, the technologists, well, we will have to find a way to reconcile our differences,” Fung said. “And find a new means of distributing content not just for independents but for the big companies that are suing us.”

While big companies are not on board with free access to their copyrighted material, they are cuddling up to the iTunes Store as a means of selling their content digitally. Since 2003, more than 10 billion songs have been sold through Apple’s online media store.

Richard Rosenberg, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of British Columbia, told the Straight more and more people are willing to pay for content. He believes it will continue to get harder for people to share copyrighted content online.

If the federal Conservative government’s Bill C-32—which seeks reforms to Canada’s Copyright Act that are favoured by the music and film industries—becomes law, he would be right. In the future, Rosenberg said file sharers will have to get used to the idea of buying content from online stores.

“The business world is not going to be sleeping,” Rosenberg said by phone from his Vancouver home. “The bigger it [file-sharing] gets and the more of a threat it becomes to traditional marketplaces, the more effort is devoted to passing laws and creating structures which allow people who think they should or who created the material to control it.”

However, Fung maintained that every time one file-sharing service is killed, another will replace it.

“With any file-sharing site you try to shut down, a new file-sharing site is bound to pop up, and that has happened in the past—with Napster, then Kazaa,” Fung said. “There is no way you can shut file-sharing down.”
http://www.straight.com/article-3705...g-going-strong





Illegal Filesharing: is this the End of 'Speculative Invoicing'?

ACS:Law made controversial payment demands to thousands of suspected filesharers – but such tactics could be on the way out

The London-based law firm at the heart of a huge row over illegal filesharing this week turned off its overworked photocopier, and vowed to no longer pursue the tens of thousands of Britons it suspects of copyright infringement.

From its Hanover Square office, ACS:Law has led the charge in sending letters demanding payment from alleged illicit filesharers, attracting unwanted attention from online activists, industry regulators and privacy commissioners along the way.

In a matter of months, the Andrew Crossley-fronted firm may have singlehandedly changed the game for prosecuting infringers in the UK, experts say.

The controversial method of so-called "speculative invoicing", in which law firms acting on behalf of copyright owners demand payment from thousands of people accused of illegal filesharing, has found itself in the dock as the industry and law courts scrutinise closer the process of bringing copyright infringers to justice. Judge Birss QC, currently ruling in the case against 27 people brought by the pornography licensee MediaCAT, this week toyed with the unprecedented idea of banning indefinitely that company – and, by implication, its client ACS:Law – from sending out such letters. It would be an "extraordinary order" in "extraordinary circumstances", he said.

"The interesting legal point here is that the Solicitors Regulation Authority [SRA] and the judges are seemingly uncomfortable with the speculative invoicing idea and it actually looks as if that route will be closed off altogether," says Sarah Byrt, an intellectual property partner at the law firm Mayer Brown.

"The technology has made it easy to infringe without fear of being caught which in turn is harming creative industries. The SRA and the courts will want to avoid lawyers pursuing a course of action that looks heavy handed."

The SRA is presently investigating the practice as employed by ACS:Law – but speculative invoicing is by no means unique to Crossley's solicitors. Davenport Lyons, Gallant Macmillan and others have in the past 12 months targeted thousands of suspected infringers on behalf of their media clients. A large number of the accused claim to be wrongly identified, though it is not clear how many have paid up to avoid the potential for further prosecution.

Only 27 of the "tens of thousands" of those accused by ACS:Law have been brought to court, and MediaCAT even attempted an 11th-hour abortion of these Patents County Court proceedings earlier this month. Judge Birss called the situation "absolutely extraordinary", and pointed to the law firm's lucrative commercial arrangement with MediaCAT. ACS:Law keeps 65% of the fines paid by accused infringers, while MediaCAT takes the remaining 35%, it was revealed in court (hours before Crossley revealed his company was quitting copyright litigations altogether because of "death threats" to his family).

"The court was told [on Monday] that ACS:Law, GCB Ltd and all other companies have stopped sending out letters to consumers. This is a welcome step forward, but we also need some comfort for the many people who have already received a letter and continue to protest their innocence," said Michael Forrester, a partner at Ralli Solicitors, which is advising a number of the 27 defendants in the ongoing case.

"The court may find a way of permanently stopping these firms from pursuing claims of copyright infringement in this way," he said. "We are dealing with cases where consumers have explained how they cannot possibly have uploaded or downloaded copyright protected material, but they are still pursued.

"The legal basis for the claims made against these alleged file sharers involves complex legal and technical principles. These are extremely difficult for a lay person to understand and can mean an innocent person is being pursued."

But it's not just the courts and regulators that are looking closer at these methods. Most of the UK's largest internet providers, including BT and Sky, threw a significant stumbling block into the law firms' paths in October, when they refused to hand over more customer information to law firms after the personal details of thousands of Britons leaked online during a crippling attack on ACS:Law's website. The leak, which is being investigated by the information commissioner, exposed the details of people suspected of illicit filesharing of music, films and pornography.

Behind the scenes, these providers are showing a rare united front against such practices, and believe that more needs to be done before Norwich Pharmacal Orders (NPOs) – the court orders used by these firms to obtain customer information for invoicing – become once again viable methods for pursuing filesharers.

Firstly, they say, more needs to be done to show that these firms genuinely intend to take the cases to court – not just extract as many fines as possible and drop the rest. Secondly, that the customer information received by these companies is held safely and securely. Thirdly, the thousand-strong "speculative invoicing" claims need to stop – they should focus on the serious infringers, those whose IP address is linked to a generous amount of unlawful uploading/downloading, rather than the odd Lady Gaga number.

So, what next? Well, the patents court is expected to rule later this week on whether ACS:Law and MediaCAT should be allowed to discontinue those 27 cases, and whether the copyright owner – understood to be Sheptonhurst, the owner of the UK's biggest sex shop chain, Private – has to join proceedings as a claimant. That could really change the game.

After that, there's the small matter of the Digital Economy Act's judicial review, expected 22-24 March. Sit back and enjoy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...sharing-acslaw





The PirateBox is the Coolest File Sharing Lunchbox Ever
George Wong

A professor from NYU Steinhardt named David Darts has come up with a file sharing box called the PirateBox. Inspired by the free culture and pirate radio movements, the PirateBox uses Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) to create a wireless network that users can connect to and anonymously share digital files such as music, video, and images.

All users have to do is connect to it, launch their web browser (which should automatically redirect them to the PirateBox page) and start uploading or downloading files. The PirateBox doesn’t connect to the internet – to subvert tracking and preserve user privacy so users can be sure that they won’t get into any trouble using the network.

The best part about the PirateBox is that anybody can build it, and David Darts has even shared the instructions online for anyone to use. Watch a video demo of the PirateBox in action after the break.
http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/01/pir...-file-sharing/





Will Google's New Hamfisted Censorship On Autocomplete Raise Questions Of Human Meddling?
Mike Masnick

One of the key arguments that critics have often made against Google is that the company "meddles" in search results, effectively "picking winners and losers." Google's -- quite reasonable -- response for years has been that it's all in the algorithm, rather than any personal choices. And, the algorithm was just trying to recommend the best result, no matter what that might be. Indeed, this is a perfect and sensible response. However, after lots of pressure from the entertainment industry (and politicians closely associated with the entertainment industry), last month Google announced plans to start censoring "autocomplete" results, such that "terms that are closely associated with piracy" don't appear.

As we noted when the announcement was made, this is really difficult to do in any reasonable manner. What's "closely associated with piracy," one day becomes a legitimate format the next. Take MP3s for example. Five or six years ago, if Google had made this decision, you would imagine that Google might have decided to block "mp3" from autocomplete -- and yet, now, MP3 is the standard that is used around the world in all sorts of legitimate online music stores, including iTunes and Amazon. We pointed out that blocking things like "bittorrent" or just "torrent" would be a mistake of the same nature -- as it's just a standard that has plenty of legitimate uses, even if it's frequently used for unauthorized copying today.

Unfortunately, whoever was in charge of handling this at Google went for a simplistic sledge hammer approach, with the company now dropping a variety of terms, many of which have perfectly legitimate uses. Many of the choices seem totally arbitrary. As expected, BitTorrent and torrent are now blocked -- despite plenty of legal uses, and the fact that BitTorrent itself is a perfectly legal company with tons of companies using its technology for completely noninfringing purposes. In the TorrentFreak link above, there are reactions from a variety of companies, including BitTorrent Inc., RapidShare and Vodo, who all note that this move appears to hurt their legitimate businesses.

And that's where I wonder if this move will backfire in a big way on Google. While the concept of "search neutrality" may be one of the more ridiculous ideas to come out of Google-haters for years, the fact that the company is now clearly hand-picking "winners and losers" when it comes to searches on these kinds of technologies and services seems like something that will be used as evidence against Google at some point.

Google had a strong defense in the past to complaints of bias, in that it was focused on not meddling with its results. However, while this move doesn't directly mess with the actual results, by mucking with autocomplete, it is likely to have an impact on the kinds of searches that people do, driving them away from many perfectly legitimate solutions, for no reason other than that the company caved to pressure based on no legal rationale. All this really does is now open the door for others to demand that Google adjust its search recommendations and results in their favor as well. I'm really surprised Google would agree to do this in the first place, let alone do it in such a... simplistic and overly broad fashion.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...meddling.shtml
















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