Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 4th, '11

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Our approach to countering piracy is to incorporate superior value in the legal version. This means it has to be superior in every respect: less troublesome to use and install, with full support, and with access to additional content and services. So, we felt keeping the DRM would mainly hurt our legitimate users." – Adam Badowski


"This is what repressive governments do. This is what people who don’t want information out in the world do — they try to shut the presses." – David Fanning, Frontline


"Now you can hijack Twitter profiles as you stroll by Starbucks and it'll just look like you're sending a text message." – Terrence O'Brien


"Could file-sharing be a mental illness?" – Violet Blue



































June 4th, 2011




German Rights Holders Go After 300,000 P2P Users Per Month
Janko Roettgers

German ISPs are handing out data on about 300,000 subscribers per month to content owners, according to new data from the country’s Internet industry association ECO. The numbers show that the chances of getting caught for illegal file sharing have increased, the association said in a press release.

ECO published the numbers to make the case against mandates that would force ISPs to block access to torrent sites and other infringing services. European Union politicians have been discussing such measures in recent months, and rights holders have made inroads into a number of European countries with lawsuits against ISPs aimed at forcing them to block access to file sharing sites.

Rights holders have long pursued countless German file sharers with legal means, often going after tens of thousands of users at a time. Initially, this was done through ordinary lawsuits, but revisions to local copyright law now make it possible to simply get court approval for requests to ISPs to unveil a subscriber’s identity. Content owners then send threatening letters to alleged infringers, asking them to pay anywhere between €300 to €1200 ($430 to $1720 USD) per unlawfully-shared file.

Critics have long argued that legal measures like these have become a cash cow for content owners. Activists estimated earlier this year that rights holders could have made as much as €165 million in 2010 through these lawsuits. ECO board member Oliver Süme agreed that some of these cash demands are excessive. “A stern warning letter would be enough in most cases,” he was quoted in the press release, adding: “You don’t always have to demand several hundred Euros.”

U.S. file sharers increasingly find themselves targeted by similar lawsuits. Porn studios have sued tens of thousands of BitTorrent users in recent months, and the producers of the indie movie The Hurt Locker sued close to 25,000 file sharers last week. However, rights holders have had mixed success with these measures, and a number of courts have thrown out lawsuits for a variety of procedural reasons.
http://gigaom.com/broadband/germany-mass-p2p-lawsuits/





Scotland Gets its First File Sharing Conviction
Katie Scott

The first person to be convicted in Scotland of illegal file sharing is a 58-year old nurse.

Anne Muir has been sentenced to three years on probation by Sheriff Court in Ayr just weeks after she pleaded guilty to the charge of illegal file sharing. Her conviction follows an investigation by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

The two organisations passed on her details to Strathclyde police officers, who raided the nurse's home in 2008 and discovered 7,493 digital music files and 24,243 karaoke files on her computer. The files were being made available to others through a P2P network.

BPI Director of Communications, Adam Liversage, told Wired.co.uk that his organization was asked to place a value on Muir's music collection and estimated the retail value of the digital music files to be around £54,000.

This is the fifth conviction in the UK for filesharing. Four of the five man team behind the BitTorrent tracker OiNK pleaded guilty to filesharing in early 2010. Liversage could not reveal how many other investigations the BPI is currently involved in, but said that he does, however, believe the Muir case will be a deterrent to others: "Today the Court has recognised that illegal filesharing on a massive scale is a serious matter and has imposed a sentence aimed at preventing such behaviour in future."

The Pirate Party UK, however, has damned the verdict as an attack on "vulnerable people" - a reference to Muir's lawyer's statement that the nurse suffers from depression. The organisation' s leader and self-coined "intrepid provider of music solutions" Loz Kaye told Wired.co.uk on Twitter: "In our opinion this is part of a pattern of targeting vulnerable people. The evidence should have been tested in court."
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/...ing-conviction





Arrested File-Sharing Admins Face Years in Prison, $700,000 Fines
enigmax

The alleged operators of one of France’s most popular file-sharing links forums have been arrested. The site, known as Liberty Land, had been in operation since 2009 and had 800,000 members. It provided links to a wide variety of material including movies, music and software. Three men, aged between 25 and 30, now face jail sentences of up to 5 years and fines of $700,000.

Due to the way copyright law is structured in Canada, it has become the preferred home for dozens of file-sharing sites. Indeed, because of this tolerance and favorable legal status, some hosts happily play home to dozens of BitTorrent sites, a situation mirrored in few other places on the planet.

One site which utilized Canadian hosting was the French site Liberty Land (LL). Listed among France’s top 200 sites, Liberty Land carried estimated 30,000 links to albums and 100,000 links to movies and TV shows. This material was not hosted by the site, but made available from services such as MegaUpload and RapidShare.

However, despite the perceived legality of mere links – even when coupled with friendly Canadian hosting – in May 2010 rightsholder groups SACEM and ALPA filed a complaint against Liberty Land with the French authorities.

Last week, police described the subsequent investigation as “difficult” due to a combination of Canadian hosting and measures put in place by the site’s operators to remain anonymous. Nevertheless, an operation against Liberty Land went ahead.

According to a report, its alleged operators have now been arrested. It is being suggested that an investigation into one of the site’s major link uploaders led police to the men.

Jean-Philippe Vidal, the chief police officer leading the operation, said three men aged between 25 and 30 were arrested in Marseille, near Le Havre and in the Paris suburb of Montreuil.

Some reports are indicating the trio generated up to $285,300 in revenue from banner advertising on the site, an accusation which has led to them being charged with organised counterfeiting.

The men have been released pending a trial, where they face a possible five years in jail and fines of up to $700,000.

Liberty Land is currently down and there are no indications it is set to return.
http://torrentfreak.com/arrested-fil...-fines-100530/





Senators Want To Put People In Jail For Embedding YouTube Videos
Mike Masnick

Okay, this is just getting ridiculous. A few weeks back, we noted that Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Cornyn and Christopher Coons had proposed a new bill that was designed to make "streaming" infringing material a felony. At the time, the actual text of the bill wasn't available, but we assumed, naturally, that it would just extend "public performance" rights to section 506a of the Copyright Act.

Supporters of this bill claim that all it's really doing is harmonizing US copyright law's civil and criminal sections. After all, the rights afforded under copyright law in civil cases cover a list of rights: reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works or perform the work. The rules for criminal infringement only cover reproducing and distributing -- but not performing. So, supporters claim, all this does is "harmonize" copyright law and bring the criminal side into line with the civil side by adding "performance rights" to the list of things.

If only it were that simple. But, of course, it's not. First of all, despite claims to the contrary, there's a damn good reason why Congress did not include performance rights as a criminal/felony issue: because who would have thought that it would be a criminal act to perform a work without permission? It could be infringing, but that can be covered by a fine. When we suddenly criminalize a performance, that raises all sorts of questionable issues.

Furthermore, as we suspected, in the full text of the bill, "performance" is not clearly defined. This is the really troubling part. Everyone keeps insisting that this is targeted towards "streaming" websites, but is streaming a "performance"? If so, how does embedding play into this? Is the site that hosts the content guilty of performing? What about the site that merely linked to and/or embedded the video (linking and embedding are technically effectively the same thing). Without clear definitions, we run into problems pretty quickly.

And it gets worse. Because rather than just (pointlessly) adding "performance" to the list, the bill tries to also define what constitutes a potential felony crime in these circumstances:

the offense consists of 10 or more public performances by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copyrighted works

So yeah. If you embed a YouTube video that turns out to be infringing, and more than 10 people view it because of your link... you could be facing five years in jail. This is, of course, ridiculous, and suggests (yet again) politicians who are regulating a technology they simply do not understand. Should it really be a criminal act to embed a YouTube video, even if you don't know it was infringing...? This could create a massive chilling effect to the very useful service YouTube provides in letting people embed videos.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...e-videos.shtml





UN: Disconnecting File-Sharers Breaches Human Rights
enigmax

According to a report set to be adopted today by the UN’s Human Rights Council, anti-filesharing provisions such as those outlined in the UK’s Digital Economy Act are disproportionate and should be repealed. The provisions, which include disconnecting Internet users for violating the rights of the music and movie industries, breach human rights, the report concludes.

According to a UN report published in May and set to be adopted today, tough provisions in the UK’s Digital Economy Act and and France’s ‘Hadopi’ legislation breach human rights.

The Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression details concern for measures being put in place by various governments to punish online copyright infringement. In many cases those measures include the draconian step of denying citizens’ Internet access.

“While blocking and filtering measures deny users access to specific content on the Internet, States have also taken measures to cut off access to the Internet entirely,” says the report.

“The Special Rapporteur considers cutting off users from Internet access, regardless of the justification provided, including on the grounds of violating intellectual property rights law, to be disproportionate and thus a violation of article 19, paragraph 3, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”

The report highlights the legislation adopted by France and the UK, noting that the author of the report, Frank La Rue, is “alarmed” by proposals to severely punish Internet users if they violate intellectual property rights.

“This also includes legislation based on the concept of ‘graduated response’, which imposes a series of penalties on copyright infringers that could lead to suspension of Internet service, such as the so-called “three-strikes-law” in France and the Digital Economy Act 2010 of the United Kingdom,” notes the report.

In addition to calling on governments to maintain Internet access “during times of political unrest,” the report goes on to urge States to change copyright laws, not in favor of the music and movie industries as has been the recent trend, but in keeping with citizens’ rights.

“In particular, the Special Rapporteur urges States to repeal or amend existing intellectual copyright laws which permit users to be disconnected from Internet access, and to refrain from adopting such laws,” the report adds.

Whether or not the report will carry any influence with these so-far stubborn governments remains to be seen, but the Open Rights Group are keeping up the pressure on UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt. ORG have written to Hunt asking for his reaction to the Special Rapporteur’s report and his recommendation that the Digital Economy Act’s disconnection provisions should be repealed.
http://torrentfreak.com/un-disconnec...rights-110603/





Spain to Clamp Down on File-Sharers
Ana Garcia

A bill that would allow Spain’s authorities to close down illegal websites with limited judicial oversight has caused anger among the country’s Internet users.

The law, known as Sinde’s bill (after the current culture minister Ángeles González-Sinde) is designed to close the loophole that sharing sites such as Roja Directa have exploited.

If you go to the website today, you will find a pithy warning against Internet piracy, courtesy of the U.S. authorities. The U.S. has exerted considerable pressure on Spain over what it sees as Madrid’s failure to tackle Internet piracy.

A banner with the seals of the U.S. Department of Justice, plus two other bureaucracies, informs Internet users that the Spanish domain name, formerly a hub of illegal sports content, has been seized in accordance with U.S. copyright law.

But if you do a search, it takes very little to realize that Roja Directa is alive and kicking. It just has been moved somewhere else and, much like Sweden’s The Pirate Bay, continues to put global file-sharers in contact, so they can download recent sports games, movies and more from each others’ computer.

Before the U.S. authorities shut down its main website in February, Roja Directa survived a legal challenge in Spain, as a local judge ruled that the website doesn’t break the law by putting file-sharers in contact with each other.

The Spanish authorities are getting fed up with this kind of thing. So despite some serious backlash from organized Internet users, they are set to make Sinde’s bill into law over this summer, aiming to get the ultimate tool to get rid of the likes of Roja Directa, and other notorious file-sharers.

“This is clear breach of the separation of powers,” says Enrique Dans, a professor in Madrid’s prestigious IE Business School.

The bill has had a troubled birth. A previous attempt to introduce the bill at the end of last year faltered after the government failed to attract enough support, as critics zeroed in on a proposal to let the government shut down the website without judicial oversight. Having watered down this proposal—a judge will now have to approve the government’s decision before it’s implemented—the government is confident it can secure enough support to pass the bill.

Alejandro Ramos, an Internet security expert in the SecurityByDefault website, estimates that 41% of the 517 webpages engaging in some sort of file-sharing in Spain will come under threat from the new law.

Those opposed to the law note that it comes on top of existing copyright regulations, which are among the most restrictive, and widely flouted, in the developed world. For years, Spain has been adding a surcharge on the price of CDs and DVDs payable to the country’s powerful artists’ unions.

The government’s anxiety over piracy may be explained by a desire to keep in with these unions, as they have a knack for making political statements.

However, there are more direct concerns—according to the Paris-based consultancy TERA Consultants—Spain’s creative industries generate about €62 billion in annual added value for Spain’s €1 trillion economy. They also employ 1.2 million, in a country with five million unemployed, just over 21% of the working-age population.

All the same, Sinde’s law will only affect Spanish-based websites, which may dampen its impact. As for Roja Directa, it’s been overseas for a while, and its email contact has an Indian domain extension.

David Roman contributed to this report
http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/201...-file-sharers/





“Karaoke Grandma’s” Criminal Conviction: Could File-Sharing Be A Mental Illness?
Violet Blue

This week a 58-year-old grandmother was convicted for sharing music, sentenced to three years’ probation and must attend cognitive behavioral therapy sessions as part of her criminal file-sharing sentence. To find out if file-sharing might now be considered a disorder, I asked psychologist Dr. Keely Kolmes, PsyD, to explain this unusual new twist in criminal file-sharing prosecution.

Anne Muir is a nurse and grandmother of eight who is said to have collected and shared over 7,000 music files and more than 24,000 karaoke files - making her one fun grandma to spend a Saturday night with.

BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) and IFPI (International Federation for the Phonographic Industry) didn’t see it that way.

Characteristically going after someone with few resources to fight back, Scotland’s first illegal music sharing conviction had BPI and IFPI estimating she’d made £54,000 worth of copyrighted music files available to others via a peer-to-peer file sharing application.

Despite raiding her home based on complaints from BPI and IFPI, “Ms Muir did not make any money. What she did was not commercial,” said the Sheriff.

Anne Muir admitted distributing the files.

And that - the sharing part - is what’s most important when trying to understand why sentencing a file-sharer to cognitive behavioral therapy (in this case, for OCD) is pretty problematic.

Grandmother Gets File-Sharing Conviction: But Does It Mean She’s Mentally Ill?

It’s not just us tech geeks that joke about “having OCD” when it comes to our passions, especially as we love to chase down things that aren’t on the roads most traveled.

Anne Muir was a prolific user of a particular file sharing network - her lawyer didn’t tell us how (surely) awesome she is a karaoke, but he did say that Ms. Muir had used the network to build up her self-esteem after suffering from depression for a number of years.

Ms. Muir is currently the one person convicted in the UK for online copyright infringement. In addition to being sentenced to three years of probation, she has been ordered to attend mandatory cognitive therapy treatment sessions for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Joking about OCD is one thing. A criminal conviction with sentenced treatment isn’t funny.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and The File-Sharer

Muir’s treatment is specifically for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder with hoarding. The court is saying that her hoarding behavior accounts for the acquisition of the files.

Dr. Keely Kolmes, PsyD, is widely recognized as one of the leading voices in American psychotherapy in regard to its emergent roles in the digital frontier. The author of A Psychotherapist’s Guide to Facebook and Twitter, she also recently wrote a NY Times Op-Ed on the challenge of consumer review sites for mental health professionals.

At first glace on Ms. Muir’s sentence Dr. Kolmes remarked, “One wonders if sharing files is antithetical to hoarding behavior. Typically, with hoarding the items are stored but not used.”

Dr. Kolmes unpacked the Court’s alleged relationship between file-sharing and OCD as seen in its ruling on Ms. Muir,

Actually, the hoarding behavior is a criterion for Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder, but not OCD. (See item 5 in the list below).

Diagnostic criteria for 301.4 Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder

A pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control, at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by four (or more) of the following:

(1) is preoccupied with details, rules, lists, order, organization, or schedules to the extent that the major point of the activity is lost

(2) shows perfectionism that interferes with task completion (e.g., is unable to complete a project because his or her own overly strict standards are not met)

(3) is excessively devoted to work and productivity to the exclusion of leisure activities and friendships (not accounted for by obvious economic necessity)

(4) is overconscientious, scrupulous, and inflexible about matters of morality, ethics, or values (not accounted for by cultural or religious identification)

(5) is unable to discard worn-out or worthless objects even when they have no sentimental value

(6) is reluctant to delegate tasks or to work with others unless they submit to exactly his or her way of doing things

(7) adopts a miserly spending style toward both self and others; money is viewed as something to be hoarded for future catastrophes

(8) shows rigidity and stubbornness

Reprinted with permission from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision. Copyright 2000, American Psychiatric Association.

Dr. Kolmes tells us,

“Cognitive therapy would address the hoarding, through looking at thoughts and beliefs that support the behavior (e.g. someone may have ideas that surrounding themselves with objects eases their anxiety or fears). This treatment would look at the ideas related to the acquisition of objects.”

So, I don’t think we’ll be seeing file-sharers on “Hoarders” anytime soon. Or will we? The court may not have illustrated whether Ms. Muir’s karaoke collection - and devotion to sharing it - was any more excessive than other file sharers. Dr. Kolmes continues,

“If the accumulation of a large number of computer files is now enough to meet the criteria for hoarding, then this would seem to be a new feature of the diagnosis and it would seem that a lot of generally high functioning computer folks would falsely qualify for the diagnosis without meeting the rest of the criteria.

Typically, the criteria includes holding on to worthless objects that take up space and create clutter or an unhealthy living environment.”

Which begs the question, of who, exactly, file-sharing was unhealthy for.

Case Prosecutor Mirian Watson stated that, “Illegally flouting copyright laws is tantamount to theft and not only deprives legitimate companies and artists of earnings, but also undermines the music industry as a whole.

We will continue to work effectively with law enforcement in this area and to apply our robust prosecution policy,” she added.

I don’t know about you, but this kind of law enforcement, prosecution, and sentencing is enough to make me crazy.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue...al-illness/414





Judge Approves Settlement in Music Royalties Class Action
Christine Dobby

A judge has given the go-ahead to a $50-million settlement in a copyright infringement lawsuit brought against four Canadian record labels for unpaid royalties.

Judge George Strathy of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice approved the settlement of the proposed class action in Toronto on Monday, but not before a bit of family drama played out.

The estate of jazz legend Chet Baker was the original lead plaintiff, representing songwriters and music publishers with outstanding royalty claims against the record companies for unlicenced use of their work. But a dispute between the deceased trumpeter’s widow and his son over the estate’s involvement in the case slowed the settlement’s approval earlier this year.

“The solution was simply to substitute the lead plaintiff,” Jon Foreman, a partner at Harrison Pensa LLP, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, told the court on Monday.

The judge approved an order substituting Craig Northey, a founding member of the Odds — which had a number of hit singles in the 1990s including “Someone Who’s Cool” and “Make You Mad” — as lead plaintiff. More recently, Mr. Northey has performed on Hockey Night in Canada during Vancouver Canucks games.

The defendants, Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., EMI Music Canada Inc., Universal Music Canada Inc. and Warner Music Canada Inc. admit no liability. But they agreed to the settlement in exchange for a full release of the plaintiffs’ claims for use of work listed on what are known in the Canadian recording industry as “pending lists.” These lists, accumulated over many years, contain works for which no licence was obtained and no compensation paid. (The action applies only to physical recordings, not online or digital products.)

According to the original statement of claim, filed in 2008, there were more than 300,000 works on the pending lists. With statutory damages for use of unlicenced work ranging from $500 to $20,000 — and with the plaintiffs claiming the maximum end of that range — the action could have been worth up to $6-billion.

But, in what was described in court as a contentious and heated process that included eight court-assisted mediation meetings and numerous case management appearances, the parties reached an agreement that includes the financial settlement as well as a process for dealing with future use of unlicenced work.

“The result overall is approximately $50.2-million in settlement benefits to the class,” Mr. Foreman said. “I believe it’s a strong financial resolution to the case.” He noted that while the class is still undefined, it likely numbers in the thousands, but not the full 300,000, as many rights holders would have multiple works on the list.

The Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency (CMRRA) and the Society for Reproduction Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (SODRAC), which represent most publishers and songwriters in the country and were also parties to the case, will be tasked with administering the new system for payment of royalties to music rights holders.

“The practices which gave rise to the pending list in the past will end,” said Tim Pinos, counsel for the CMRRA and SODRAC.

He said the new process will first ensure efforts are made to find the rights holders and, if not found, the record companies may apply for an unlocatable licence and the money for that licence will be paid into trust held by CMRRA and SODRAC.

The fee to be paid to plaintiffs’ counsel out of the settlement funds has yet to be determined. Plaintiffs’ counsel has undertaken to stay on to get the word out to rights holders who may be eligible for compensation under the settlement.
http://business.financialpost.com/20...-class-action/





Lady Gaga Album Zooms to Megahit Status
Ben Sisario

Little Monsters, rejoice: Lady Gaga’s new “Born This Way” is officially the fastest-selling album in six years.

“Born This Way” (Interscope), released on May 23, sold 1.108 million copies in the United States, Billboard reported on Tuesday evening, citing data from Nielsen SoundScan. That is the biggest take any album has had since 50 Cent sold 1.141 million copies of “The Massacre” in March 2005.

For Lady Gaga, the figures are both slightly less and a lot more than had been predicted. Going into the week of release, industry projections were about 700,000, but once Amazon put the album on sale for 99 cents — a surprise to Lady Gaga’s record label and management, in addition to her fans — expectations shot past a million; if the album had scanned 1.15 million copies, as Billboard thought it might, it would have been the best-selling release since Eminem’s album “The Eminem Show” nine years ago.

Sales of “Born This Way” were also helped by a blitz of marketing through big-box retailers, traditional media outlets like HBO and lots of new media partnerships, and by a strategy of stocking the album at thousands of nontraditional retail outlets, like Hudson News, Walgreens and CVS. The idea, as Troy Carter, Lady Gaga’s manager, said in an interview on Tuesday, was to make the album available everywhere.

“To purchase a CD now, there aren’t a lot of places you can go,” Mr. Carter said. “It’s Best Buy, it’s Target, it’s Wal-Mart. So our thing was, with Gaga being such a household name, being able to put her in places where people shop. To be on an endcap at Whole Foods, if you see a Gaga CD, you might be familiar with her as an artist, and you might give it a chance.”
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...hit-status/?hp





Apple Pays Music Bigs $100M+
Claire Atkinson

Apple will fork over between $100 million and $150 million in advanced payments to the four major music labels in order to get its iCloud off the ground, three separate sources told The Post.

The Cupertino, Calif., tech giant has agreed to pay the labels between $25 million to $50 million each, as an incentive to get on board, depending on how many tracks consumers are storing.

The size of the advance payments have been a major hold-up for Google, which had been negotiating with the music companies and now will likely have to pony up higher fees to get a rival cloud service into action, said music industry sources.

A Google cloud service could now be in the offing as soon as September, said sources familiar with the talks. Steve Jobs is expected to unveil Apple's iCloud service, a Web storage offering that frees space on hard drives and makes music available to Apple's many devices, on Monday at its developer conference.

One executive explained that the cloud service will initially be free to people who bought their music from Apple's iTunes store, but Apple is said to be considering a $25 a year charge in the future.

The music companies will divide the fee with Apple, with the tech firm taking a 30 percent cut, 12 percent going to music publishers, and the rest to the labels to divide with their artists.

Apple yesterday finalized its cloud deals with all labels and their publishing
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/busines...E0P5P9vzosxtyK





Entertainment Industry Lawyer: The Public Domain Goes Against Free Market Capitalism
Mike Masnick

We've been doing a series of posts about the Copyright Office's hearings on copyright for pre-1972 recordings, where we already noted with some amusement how the RIAA is suddenly afraid of federal copyright law, preferring the ridiculously more draconian state copyright laws that avoid both the public domain and termination rights. On top of that, we've pointed out that the RIAA's representative flat out claimed that there's no value in the public domain.

From Copycense's tweets, there was one other attendee who seemed to be even more extreme: Ivan Hoffman. Frankly, I'd never heard of the guy before, but you can visit his masterful website here, which looks like it was designed in the early 1990s and never updated. However, I must warn you that in the mind of Ivan Hoffman, you may be violating his copyrights just visiting the site. That's because, at the bottom of the website, it states:

© Copyright 1992-2011 by Ivan Hoffman. All Rights Reserved. No portion of this site, including this home page and any of the separate pages, may be copied, retransmitted, reposted, duplicated or otherwise used without the express written permission of the copyright proprietor. This site is the subject of registered copyrights.

A couple things on this. First, the statement borders on copyfraud (some might say it goes beyond the borders), in that copyright does not allow the rights he has claimed. You absolutely can copy portions of his website if you're using them (as I am here) in a manner consistent with fair use, or if the specific content copied is not actually subject to copyright (and one can make an argument as to whether or not the copyright statement above, itself, is actually subject to copyright). But, even more to the point, if you simply visit his website, you have "copied," "duplicated" and "otherwise used" his website without the express written permission. I'm sure someone could argue the retransmission and reposting too. After all, when you click on the link above (I hope that's not retransmitting or "otherwise using!") you are instructing your computer to make a local copy on your hard drive... all without his express written permission.

So, anyway, that gives you a sense of who we're dealing with here.

What did Hoffman have to say? Well, there were two separate points that seemed worth covering, which I've embedded below via Copycense's tweets, and assuming that Copycense's reporting is accurate (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), it makes you wonder why the Copyright Office would have someone like him speak at their hearings. Specifically, he appears to claim that there should be no public domain, that copyright should last forever, and the very idea of the public domain is anti-free market. The specific statements in Copycense's tweets:

Hoffman: We don't take houses or cars back, but we take back copyrights. Why?

Hoffman: All of this is contrary to free market capitalism

This is, of course, hogwash that anyone who actually understands either the history and intention of copyrights or basic economics would recognize makes no sense. On the reason for the public domain, there's a rather excellent book on the subject that Hoffman might want to read. But the shorthand reason should be clear to anyone who understands copyright: it was to "promote the progress of science," by which the purpose is to benefit the public by giving them access to more content. Arguing contrary to that is simply twisting copyright law away from its core purpose. Furthermore, the basic ingredients of culture and content are earlier works. If we locked up everything, we'd have a lot less content and culture, entirely contrary to the Constitutional reasons behind copyright law. That a copyright lawyer would argue otherwise, to the Copyright Office, no less, is stunning.

And don't get me started on the ridiculous suggestion that putting works into the public domain is "contrary to free market capitalism." Which sounds more like free market capitalism: a world in which there is no government monopolies and interference for people to create and build... or one in which there's a central authority granting monopolies and changing those terms at will?

I asked Copycense if he could clarify what Hoffman was saying, and if (maybe? please?) these statements were sarcastic. Copycense says he's positive they were not sarcastic, and thinks Hoffman just meant that changing the copyright terms on anyone violates the Constitution. In fact, in support of that position, Hoffman also provided this lovely nugget, apparently:

Hoffman: "I have a problem in abrogating contract rights that have been in place for 30, 40, 50 years"

He, of course, is talking about the idea of moving pre-1972 works away from their current status and over to existing federal copyright law. But... if he's so against abrogating contract rights, then, um, shouldn't he be hopping mad about all of the retroactive copyright extension out there? Shouldn't he note that the composition copyrights on all of those songs should be in the public domain? After all, the contract offered to the musicians, at the time those songs were written, was that they would be getting exclusivity on the work for 28 years, followed by another 28 years if they reregistered. In exchange for granting them this monopoly, the public would get the work at the end of that period of time. And yet... with the 1976 Copyright Act, the government totally "abrogated" the contractual rights of the public, and unilaterally extended the copyright. It's really quite incredible that one can claim, with a straight face, that lengthy copyright on old works through extension is fine, but a minor move to put certain works under copyright is somehow violating contract law.

So, it appears that he thinks copyright should last forever... and he's against changing the "contract" on copyright related terms... unless the change screws over the public and completely tramples the existing agreement they had.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...pitalism.shtml





Tapping Into File Sharing with HTML5
Mahesh Sharma

Few services can claim to have generated 100,000 visitors in three weeks with no advertising and minimal promotion, but this milestone is just the beginning for 23-year-old Aussie developer Dominic Holland.

During a 15-minute phone interview, another 1500 visitors came to the site for zero-click web-based file sharing service Fyels.com, taking the day's total to 28,500 visitors. So far, there have been about 30,000 files shared, generating a combined 70,000 downloads, according to Holland. By the end of June, he aims to hit the million-download milestone, which he describes as an "overly conservative goal".

The service is hosted on Amazon's EC2 storage cloud, and the front-end has been built using HTML5, despite the fact that this can't be accessed by all browsers. The use of HTML5 allows people to drag-and-drop files directly into the browser, which then provides a link that can be used to directly download the file.

"Initially, the whole idea of Fyels was creating the world's simplest file sharing service," Holland said.

"To get files from your computer to another computer should be simple. Other services introduce financial difficulties, or waiting time to download files, and are slow and cumbersome."

So far, there has been no evidence that the service is being used to share and download pirated material, and he is keen to work with rights holders if required.

About 4000 people have signed up for a free file drive — a new product launched about five days ago that offers unlimited storage and sharing, and users can register using their Twitter accounts.

Holland's next target is to become the most widely used file sharing service for social media, displacing the likes of Twitpic and yFrog.

"We have a faster, simpler product, so we aim to steal a lot of market share from Twitpic and yFrog and converting most Twitter users onto our file sharing service."

His strategy for success is to "reinvent the market" and then make money by outsmarting the competition.

"It's about developing the best monetisation strategy to match," he said, pointing out competitors who used advertising, membership system or pay-per-download models.

SWOT analysis

Strengths

Based on HTML5, zero-click enables the simplest user experience.

Weaknesses

There's no monetisation strategy, and there are potential piracy threats.

Opportunities

There is growing demand to share files over social media, with no dominant leader in the space. The other offerings have shortcomings and limitations.

Threats

It would be very tough to compete if another popular provider extended existing services to offer this functionality, for example, Google, Amazon, Facebook or Twitter, the latter of which will launch such a service this week, a report has said.

Conclusion

The use of HTML5 provides a simple and easy experience, and the figures show that users are responding. It looks likely that the company will take a stake in the growing file-sharing market.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/tapping-into...-339315894.htm





Download From RapidShare Without Waiting With Tucan Manager
Justin Pot

Sites like RapidShare are a great way to quickly download files of any size, but they aren’t without their downsides. Downloaders usually need to wait for an arbitrary time before a download will begin, while advertisements for wait-free memberships look increasingly tempting. It’s not only annoying; the interface for doing so is usually downright confusing.

Skip this nonsense and get your files. Tucan Manager makes downloading files from single-click file sharing sites as simple as using BitTorrent to download files. The program bypasses the requirement to wait a minute or two before clicking on a download link, and can even queue multiple files for successive downloads if you like.

With support for 13 different single-click sharing sites, Tucan Manager will quickly become your go-to tool for downloading from sites like MegaUpload and MediaFire. Go ahead and download Tucan Manager for Linux, Mac and Windows, but keep reading to see what this program can do.

Using The Application

So you have a link to a file on the likes of RapidShare, but don’t have time to babysit the downloading process. No problem. Just file up Tucan Manager and click “Add Downloads“.

As you can see, all you need to do is paste your link. You can even post multiple links, if you want, with the use of a comma. Once you’ve entered your links you can test to make sure they work:

This will let you know whether the link you’ve copied is valid or not. Some files are taken down from these services (particularly illegal ones), so that might be the explanation for an error. If not, check to make sure your link is a valid one by visiting it with your browser. If this is possible but Tucan doesn’t work, keep reading to find out how to update your services.

Anyway, assuming your links are valid, Tucan will start downloading. The obligatory waiting period still happens:

But, unlike when you use RapidShare with your browser, you don’t need to wait until the waiting period is over. Heck, the program will even solve any captchas for you. Your download will happen automatically:

If you have multiple files set to download Tucan will work through them all in order without your input. This can make using these sites a lot easier, so enjoy!
Supported Sites

Which sites, you ask? Well, as mentioned, Tucan Manager supports 13 different sites as of this writing. These sites include:

4shared
megaupload.com
sendspace.com
zshare.net
filefactory.com
uploading.com
rapidshare.com
hotfile.com
badongo.com
fileserve.com
mediafire.com
depositfiles.coms
easy-share.com

Tucan Manager includes a nifty internal updating feature, meaning the scripts that enable downloading from these different sites are kept working for you. If one of these sites isn’t working check the “Service Configuration” panel in your preferences. If updates are available you’ll find them there.
Coming Features

What else could this program do? Well, uploading files.

The team at Tucan Manager say this feature is in the works, and there’s even a button on the main toolbar for doing so. Here’s hoping uploading is added soon, and Tucan becomes a complete manager for all things related to file sharing.

I always like finding programs that make life simpler, and Tucan certainly counts. If you want the hassle to be taken out of downloading certain files I highly recommend it. Do you like Tucan? Let us know in the comments below, and also feel free to recommend any other simple file sharing services.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/downloa...tucan-manager/





iTransmission Is A Fully Featured BitTorrent Client For Your iPhone
Whitson Gordon

There are a lot of ways to monitor your PC’s BitTorrent downloads from your phone, but if you want to actually download files to your device, iTransmission is a real live iOS BitTorrent client that will do it for you.

While torrenting huge files seems a little silly on an iPhone or iPad, it makes sense for certain things, like music — especially if you don’t have a computer around to download, import and sync with iTunes. For some reason, the developer has pulled it from Cydia, however, so you’ll have to download the .ipa file from its Google Code page (linked below) and install it manually. To do so, you’ll need to install Installous from the cydia.hackulo.us repository in Cydia. Then, download the iTransmission IPA file from the link below, and double-click on it to open it up with iTunes. It should sync to your device just like a normal app bought from the App Store.

iTransmission works like most other torrent clients. Just find a torrent on the net, copy the link to the .torrent file or copy its magnet link, and hit the plus sign in iTransmission to add it. It will download the files to your phone, which you can then retrieve later with something like iFile, which you can get from Cydia. And, just like desktop BitTorrent clients, you can set speed limits, automatically forward ports, and edit how many people can connect to you. You can also download from 3G or Wi-Fi only, if you don’t want to go over your data cap (by default, it’s set as Wi-Fi only).

iTransmission is a free download, works on iOS 4 and above. Note that it’s still in beta, so a few features aren’t yet implemented, but overall it works quite well for downloading torrents to your phone.
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/06...r-your-iphone/





The Witcher 2 Patch Removes DRM, Improves Framerate
Andrew Webster

A little over a week after its release, The Witcher 2 is getting its first patch, and with it all versions of the game will now be DRM free.

Though the game was initially slated to be DRM free from the beginning, when it was released the only version of The Witcher 2 without any form of copy protection was the one sold on Good Old Games. With version 1.1, however, it will be removed from every version of the game. The main reason for the decision to remove the DRM seems to be that the copy protection was causing performance issues for many users.

"Our approach to countering piracy is to incorporate superior value in the legal version," explained development director Adam Badowski. "This means it has to be superior in every respect: less troublesome to use and install, with full support, and with access to additional content and services. So, we felt keeping the DRM would mainly hurt our legitimate users. This is completely in line with what we said before the release of The Witcher 2. We felt DRM was necessary to prevent the game being pirated and leaked before release.

"This purpose has been served, so we are pleased to let our users enjoy the full freedom of game usage they deserve."

The patch also reportedly improves the game's framerate by up to 30 percent and it includes the first free DLC called "Troll Trouble." Though it was just released, developer CD Projekt has already run into issues with the patch on Steam, where it's a rather sizeable download, reportedly coming in at over 9GB for some users. This issue is expected to be fixed by Monday.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2...-framerate.ars





Tenn. Passes Web Entertainment Theft Bill
Sheila Burke and Lucas L. Johnson II

State lawmakers in country music's capital have passed a groundbreaking measure that would make it a crime to use a friend's login — even with permission — to listen to songs or watch movies from services such as Netflix or Rhapsody.

The bill, which has been signed by the governor, was pushed by recording industry officials to try to stop the loss of billions of dollars to illegal music sharing. They hope other states will follow.

The legislation was aimed at hackers and thieves who sell passwords in bulk, but its sponsors acknowledge it could be employed against people who use a friend's or relative's subscription.

While those who share their subscriptions with a spouse or other family members under the same roof almost certainly have nothing to fear, blatant offenders — say, college students who give their logins to everyone on their dormitory floor — could get in trouble.

"What becomes not legal is if you send your user name and password to all your friends so they can get free subscriptions," said the bill's House sponsor, Rep. Gerald McCormick.

Under the measure, download services that believe they are getting ripped off can go to law enforcement authorities and press charges.

The bill expands an existing law used to prosecute people who steal cable television or leave restaurants without paying for their meals. It adds "entertainment subscription service" to the list of services protected by the law.

Tennessee would become the first state to update its theft-of-cable laws for the 21st century and address the new trend toward Internet delivery of entertainment, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

"I think it's stupid," college student Josh Merbitz said of the law. The 20-year-old music education major at Middle Tennessee State University said he watches Netflix movies online using the password of his friend's father, with the father's permission.

Stealing $500 or less of entertainment would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine of $2,500. Theft with a higher price tag would be a felony, with heavier penalties.

Republican Gov. Bill Haslam told reporters earlier this week that he wasn't familiar with the details of the legislation, but given the large recording industry presence in Nashville, he favors "anything we can do to cut back" on music piracy.

The recording industry, a major taxpayer in Tennessee, loses money when users share accounts for music services instead of paying separately.

Mitch Glazier, executive vice president of public policy for the RIAA, said the bill is a necessary protective measure as digital technology evolves. The music industry has seen its domestic revenue plunge by more than half in 10 years, from $15 billion to $7 billion, he said.

Bill Ramsey, a Nashville lawyer who practices both entertainment law and criminal defense, said that he doubts the law would be used to ban people in the same household from sharing subscriptions, and that small-scale violations involving a few people would, in any case, be difficult to detect. But "when you start going north of 10 people, a prosecutor might look and say, `Hey, you knew it was stealing,'" Ramsey said.

Music industry officials said they usually catch people who steal and resell logins in large quantities because they advertise.

Among the measure's critics is public defender David Doyle, who said the wording is too vague and overly broad. He said an "entertainment subscription" could be interpreted to mean a magazine subscription or a health club membership.

Kelly Kruger, an 18-year-old aerospace major at Middle Tennessee State University, said she likes to watch Netflix movies online in her dorm by logging in with her mother's account information. Kruger said she hands out the login information to friends who don't live with her.

Even with a law against it, "I think people will keep doing it, like illegal downloading," Kruger said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110601/...ring_crackdown





Cisco: Web Traffic to Quadruple by 2015, Filesharing Cut in Half
Matthew DeCarlo

Cisco has released its fifth annual Visual Network Index Forecast, predicting a rapid growth in Internet traffic and connected devices in the coming years. By 2015, the company believes global Web traffic will quadruple, reaching 966 exabytes per year. Cisco estimates that global Internet traffic between 2014 and 2015 will increase by 200 exabytes, which is said to be greater than the total amount of traffic generated in 2010. Mobile broadband will increase 26 times to 75 exabytes a year.

Such incredible growth is attributed to four primary factors -- though none are particularly shocking, with the most obvious contributor being the proliferation of handsets, tablets and other consumer electronics. While full-fledged PCs accounted for 97% of consumer Internet traffic in 2010, users will gradually rely more on mobile devices and Web-enabled appliances. By 2015, PC traffic will fall to 87%, while Web-enabled TVs will represent 10% of all Internet traffic and 18% of video traffic.

Network-connected devices will outnumber the world's population two to one in less than four years. More devices equals more users and Cisco estimates that there will be some three billion Web-goers by 2015, or 40% of the world's population. The company also predicts that the average fixed broadband speed will increase four-fold from 7Mb/s to 28Mb/s. If that sounds hard to believe, Cisco noted that the average broadband speed has actually doubled from 3.5Mb/s to 7Mb/s in the last year.

Armed with media-friendly companion devices and speedier connections, Cisco projects that people will consume more Web-based videos. By 2015, the Internet video community will receive 500 million new users and over 1.5 billion people will stream one million video minutes (674 days) every second. Traffic associated with "advanced videos" such as those that offer high-definition or 3D visuals will increase 14 times. Interestingly, filesharing traffic is expected to decline by a whopping 40%.
http://www.techspot.com/news/44053-c...t-in-half.html





Sprint, AT&T Trade Fire Over T-Mobile Deal as FCC Deadline Passes
Sam Gustin

It’s no secret that Sprint, the nation’s third largest mobile service provider, opposes AT&T’s proposed $39 billion takeover of T-Mobile. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse testified before Congress earlier this month that the deal could do “irreparable harm” to consumers by creating a “1980s-style duopoly” in which two giants, AT&T and Verizon, would dominate the market.

Now, Sprint has formally registered its objections with the Federal Communications Commission, which is scrutinizing the deal along with the Justice Department.

In a 377-page Petition to Deny (.pdf) filed Tuesday, Sprint warned that the deal, which would create the largest mobile provider in country, would “stunt investment and innovation” and result in “less choice for consumers and higher prices.”

Hours after Sprint made its filing, AT&T struck back, accusing its competitor of “confusing the public interest with their own particular corporate interest.”

The arguments against the deal are familiar. In addition to Sprint, several consumer groups have loudly protested the proposed deal. At the Senate hearing, Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a Washington public-interest group that opposes the deal, went so far as to produce a Wall Street–era Gordon Gecko–style Motorola DynaTac 8000X in order to evoke the bleak future critics say lies ahead if the deal is approved.

In short, critics argue that reducing the number of nationwide mobile providers from four to three would put too much market power in the hands of AT&T and Verizon, which would control 80 percent of the market. This market power could be used to raise prices for consumers or muscle out smaller competitors, especially regional carriers.

The deal is so bad, Sprint and other critics argue, that even if regulators applied conditions or required AT&T to give up certain assets, the merger would still be unacceptable.

In particular, Sprint attacked AT&T’s claim that it needs T-Mobile to expand its network capacity in order to provide better service for its customers.

“Like any other carrier, AT&T can invest in new cell sites and network technologies to maximize efficient use of its spectrum to meet consumer demand for its services,” Sprint said in the filing. “AT&T has made the business decision not to do so. That decision may mean higher dividends for its investors, but it also has resulted in the worst customer-satisfaction ratings among all major wireless carriers.”

“In effect, AT&T is seeking a bailout for problems of its own making, with the cost of the bailout paid by consumers in terms of higher prices, less innovation and poor service,” Sprint added.

For its part, AT&T dismissed Sprint’s criticism. In a blog post, AT&T public policy chief Jim Cicconi described opposition to the deal as “unsurprising, underwhelming and unpersuasive.”

“Even if combined with those few groups who routinely oppose every merger, this opposition pales in comparison with the scale of public-interest support we are already starting to see … and which we have every reason to feel will continue to grow,” Cicconi wrote.

Cicconi characterized public support for the merger as, “perhaps the broadest, deepest range of public-interest support ever filed at the FCC in support of any transaction.”

Cicconi listed supporters including the AFL-CIO, NAACP, Microsoft, the National Grange, the Cattlemen’s Association, state chapters of the Farm Bureau, and the Rural Health Association.

But critics of the deal aren’t backing down.

“A combined AT&T, along with Verizon, would control nearly 80 percent of the wireless market, with free reign [sic] to squash competitors and limit consumer choice,” said a statement from Craig Aaron, CEO of Free Press, a public-interest group opposed to the deal. “It would be like [sic] if ExxonMobile merged with BP, Shell, Chevron-Texaco and Citgo, and then forced you to sign a contract to buy only Exxon’s gas for the next two years.”

Tuesday was the deadline for comments in the proceeding, FCC 11-65. The deadline for “reply comments” is June 20.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/05/sprint-att-fcc/





EFF Files Petition Opposing Proposed AT&T/T-Mobile Merger
Abigail Phillips

EFF today filed a petition with the Department of Justice and the FCC asking the administration to deny AT&T Inc.’s proposed takeover of T-Mobile USA, based on concerns about the risk of non-neutral behavior as a result of decreased competition. You can read EFF’s letter here.

As we said:

EFF has maintained that the preferable way to avoid discriminatory conduct and achieve network neutrality by carriers is through fostering competition and preventing the consolidation of market power. Thus, if the administration, both the Department of Justice and the FCC, seeks to support a more neutral, more innovation-friendly communications infrastructure, it should use its efforts to assist in the creation of more competitors, rather than fewer. The merger represents a step in the wrong direction.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/0...roposed-merger





Study: 60% of Generation Y Leaning Toward Cutting the Cord
Dan Rowinski

A survey released today aims to show cable providers how they can keep losing their and influential viewers from cutting the cable. Ideas and Solutions, a Los Angeles-based consultant group for media and technology companies, says that 60% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 were either leaning towards or seriously considering giving up paid television.

The Ideas and Solutions report, which is greatly skewed to the point of view of the paid television operators, puts the so-called Generation Y demographic of 70 million TV watchers into three groups - "loyalists," "leaners" and "at-risk." Not surprisingly, the "at-risk" group were early adopters of technology much more likely to gravitate towards services like Hulu and Netflix. What category do you fall in?

"While the media has focused much of its reporting on the extent of cord-cutting overall, there is little mention of the behaviors and attitudes of vulnerable groups within this key constituency. This is the demographic that completely transformed the music and the phone business and has already started to dramatically reshape the pay-TV ecosystem," Friedman said.

According to Ideas and Solutions market breakdown, I would fall in to the "at-risk" group, as would probably most employees at ReadWriteWeb.

"It's not that the sky is falling, but it certainly warrants a lot of attention, and the subscription-based pay-TV providers, along with the programmers who rely on them for distribution, should really invest the time and the resources to get to know this audience better," Glen L. Friedman, president and founder of Ideas and Solutions, said in a release.

Why Gen Y Is Leaning Away From Paid Television

The report notes that consumers loyal to paid television were sports fans who found the billing cycle convenient. It says that marketers can keep subscribers by attuning television more to "at-risk" and "leaners" preferences such as on-demand, DVR options and programming more aligned with their interests.

Cost was the major factor in cord-cutters decisions, with 69% "at-risk" and 61% of "leaners" citing it as the primary reason for cutting the cord. "Other ways I can watch entertainment content" was at 36% and 35% for the two groups respectively.

Nearly 50% of those at risk of cutting the cord are Netflix and Hulu users as opposed to 29% of "loyalists" and 42% of "leaners."

Ideas and Solutions suggests that paid television providers become "need to be cognizant of their pricing and packaging models and face the challenge that many 'Gen Ys' want the features they need at affordable price points because they are willing, ready and able to turn to alternative options, no matter what their level of loyalty to pay-TV," the report says.

The was an "integrated qualitative and quantitative study of 500 aged 18 to 19 who were current pay-TV subscribers. Friedman has developed product strategy for DirectTV and held senior positions at Time Warner Cable and Century Cable.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...ing_the_co.php





Hollywood Starts to Worry as 3-D Fizzles in U.S.
Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply

Has the 3-D boom already gone bust? It’s starting to look that way — at least for American moviegoers — even as Hollywood prepares to release a glut of the gimmicky pictures.

Ripples of fear spread across Hollywood last week after “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” which cost Walt Disney Studios an estimated $400 million to make and market, did poor 3-D business in North America. While event movies have typically done 60 percent of their business in 3-D, “Stranger Tides” sold just 47 percent in 3-D. “The American consumer is rejecting 3-D,” Richard Greenfield, an analyst at the financial services company BTIG, wrote of the “Stranger Tides” results.

One movie does not make a trend, but the Memorial Day weekend did not give studio chiefs much comfort in the 3-D department. “Kung Fu Panda 2,” a Paramount Pictures release of a DreamWorks Animation film, sold $53.8 million in tickets from Thursday to Sunday, a soft total, and 3-D was 45 percent of the business, according to Paramount.

Consumer rebellion over high 3-D ticket prices plays a role, and the novelty of putting on the funny glasses is wearing off, analysts say. But there is also a deeper problem: 3-D has provided an enormous boost to the strongest films, including “Avatar” and “Alice in Wonderland,” but has actually undercut middling movies that are trying to milk the format for extra dollars.

“Audiences are very smart,” said Greg Foster, the president of Imax Filmed Entertainment. “When they smell something aspiring to be more than it is, they catch on very quickly.”

Muddying the picture is a contrast between the performance of 3-D movies in North America and overseas. If results are troubling domestically, they are the exact opposite internationally, where the genre is a far newer phenomenon. Indeed, 3-D screenings powered “Stranger Tides” to about $256 million on its first weekend abroad; Disney trumpeted the figure as the biggest international debut of all time.

With results like that at a time when movies make 70 percent of their total box office income outside North America, do tastes at home even matter?

After a disappointing first half of the year, Hollywood is counting on a parade of 3-D films to dig itself out of a hole. From May to September, the typical summer season, studios will unleash 16 movies in the format, more than double the number last year. Among the most anticipated releases are “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” due from Paramount on July 1, and Part 2 of Part 7 of the “Harry Potter” series, arriving two weeks later from Warner Brothers.

The need is urgent. The box-office performance in the first six months of 2011 was soft — revenue fell about 9 percent compared with last year, while attendance was down 10 percent — and that comes amid decay in home-entertainment sales. In all formats, including paid streaming and DVDs, home entertainment revenue fell almost 10 percent, according to the Digital Entertainment Group.

The first part of the year held a near collapse in video store rentals, which fell 36 percent to about $440 million, offsetting gains from cut-price rental kiosks and subscriptions. In addition, the sale of packaged discs fell about 20 percent, to about $2.2 billion, while video-on-demand, though growing, delivered total sales of less than a quarter of that amount.

At the box office, animated films, which have recently been Hollywood’s most reliable genre, have fallen into a deep trough, as the category’s top three performers combined— “Rio,” from Fox; “Rango,” from Paramount; and “Hop,” from Universal — have had fewer ticket buyers than did “Shrek the Third,” from DreamWorks Animation, after its release in mid-May four years ago.

“Kung Fu Panda 2” appears poised to become the biggest animated hit of the year so far; but it would have to stretch well past its own predecessor to beat “Shrek Forever After,” another May release, which took in $238.7 million last year.

For the weekend, “The Hangover: Part II” sold $118 million from Thursday to Sunday, easily enough for No. 1. “Kung Fu Panda 2” was second. Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” was third with $39.3 million for a new total of $152.9 million. “Bridesmaids” (Universal Pictures) was fourth with $16.4 million for a new total of about $85 million. “Thor” (Marvel Studios) rounded out the top five with $9.4 million for a new total of $160 million.Studio chiefs acknowledge that the industry needs to sort out its 3-D strategy. Despite the soft results for “Kung Fu Panda 2,” animated releases have continued to perform well in the format, overcoming early problems with glasses that didn’t fit little faces. But general-audience movies like “Stranger Tides” may be better off the old-fashioned way.

“With a blockbuster-filled holiday weekend skewing heavily toward 2-D, and 3-D ticket sales dramatically underperforming relative to screen allocation, major studios will hopefully begin to rethink their 3-D rollout plans for the rest of the year and 2012,” Mr. Greenfield said on Friday.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/b...a/30panda.html





Jann Wenner: Magazines' Rush to iPad Is 'Sheer Insanity and Insecurity and Fear'

Successful migration to tablet editions will take 'decades,' Rolling Stone co-founder says in interview
Nat Ives

Nobody mistakes Jann Wenner -- whose Wenner Media publishes Rolling Stone, Us Weekly and Men's Journal -- for a digital fanboy. He was lukewarm enough on the internet to let another company license and run RollingStone.com from 2003 through 2010. Last year he orchestrated a magazine industry ad campaign promoting the "power of print."

But his tentative take on even the iPad may dismay the big publishing powers, which hope tablets will deliver a better kind of digital platform for magazines, one that means significant business in a matter of years. He thinks it will be decades. "You're talking about a generation at least, maybe two generations, before the shift is decisive," he said.

In a conversation with Ad Age that ranged from media to politics to music, aboard his private jet en route to a Detroit Adcraft Club event, he identified "insanity" in magazines' rush to the iPad, explained why magazines are not going the way of the CD and broke down President Obama's decisions to release his birth certificate but withhold a post-mortem photo of Osama bin Laden. Here's the talk, lightly edited.

Advertising Age: You started Rolling Stone when you were 20. What would it be like to start an independent magazine today?

Jann Wenner: When I started we were able to get it off the ground for $7,500. But we were operating out of a rent-free loft over a printer in San Francisco. The six people working on it all worked free, were all volunteers. There was no overhead and we put it out on newsprint.

Today to start a magazine, I mean, if you do it in New York, it's millions and millions of dollars and it's not that easy to assemble that. You start off with market testing and all kinds of research and rounds of investors and prospectuses. We did none of that. It was just really enthusiasm and seat of the pants. There was no methodology to it. It would really be impossible to do that again today.

Ad Age: Independents who might have once started a magazine are tempted now to do a website instead. But big magazine publishers have found the web to be so difficult. You can build this audience but it's flighty, the ad rates compared to print are abysmal and the competition a click away is essentially infinite. What should print magazines be doing online?

Mr. Wenner: The most important thing a magazine can do online is maintain its brand and be very strong in terms of delivering on that brand. And then link it to the magazine in such a way -- or at least this is going to be our strategy -- link it to the magazine in such a way that it does things in the same field with the same brand and the same point of view, but not things you can do in print.

Now I think that you can build both successfully -- make the whole experience more exciting for your print reader and vice versa -- and then it's easier to sell to advertisers, I think, packages as well as the raw sheer buying that they do for tonnage.

But I think it's a mistake to think that you should put your magazine itself online. As you point out, there's not enough audience, the numbers are not there for ad sales, you're not going to get a lot of money on that.

The magazine business, or at least the leaders of the magazine business, have been struggling for a long time, they've invested millions upon millions of dollars because they've had their heads in the sand about this whole thing. And maybe they're figuring it out now. We never have gone that route. We've just been making money.

Ad Age: You are a big believer in print obviously and had a leading role in that ad campaign --

Mr. Wenner: That was my idea. A leading role? It was my campaign. My idea for it, my idea how it execute it, and I led it.

Ad Age: So what are print's chief assets today, more than 10 years after you made Us into a weekly only to see the web rise up and made everything hourly?

Mr. Wenner: The challenges are different to different kinds of magazines. News magazines, magazines that have high frequency and news, are going to be challenged, heavily challenged, not just by the internet but by the whole 24-hour news cycle which has just been getting enhanced. Cable has been really supercharged. So it really impacts magazines like Time and Newsweek and so forth as we can clearly see. And they're struggling to find what it is they can do in this age.

Magazines that depend on photography, and design, and long reads, and quality stuff, are going to do just fine despite the internet and cable news. Because in those areas there's a real advantage to getting a print product and having something you can hold and that of course is portable and has a luxurious feeling and is comfortable and immersive and you can spend time with it and it's organized for you.

In the age of the 24-hour news cycle and the availability of the internet you have to focus on those qualities in your magazine even more. Really you have to deliver quality more than ever. And unless you can deliver something that's quality and really compelling there's just too many fucking media choices around now. Unless you're really good you're in trouble.

Ad Age: Rolling Stone showed it's possible to still make news in print with its coverage of the investment banks and Gen. Stanley McChrystal last summer.

Mr. Wenner: How about that? Rolling Stone, a rock and roll magazine, is doing the best coverage of military affairs and financial affairs. Isn't that something?

Ad Age: Did you have any involvement in that McChrystal article? Were you surprised at the effect it had?

Mr. Wenner: I approved the assignment but I didn't make the assignment and I hadn't met the writer. It was handled by one of our top editors. I was briefed along the way as to what was developing here and I was told we had some very controversial stuff, and shown it, but like everybody else I failed to perceive just how controversial it was.

The remarks were a little bit controversial, what McChrystal had to say, but what it was that really brought him down was that the article showed that he was an inept commander for that particular job. The strategy wasn't working, his soldiers were all in revolt against him, he'd lost the confidence of his soldiers and he'd alienated all his allies. They had to fire him. This article plainly pointed it out and really gave Obama a chance to get someone more appropriate to run the war.

Ad Age: Speaking of the president, whom you've interviewed for Rolling Stone, what do you see his decision to release his long-form birth certificate but not a photo of Osama bin Laden's corpse?

Mr. Wenner: They were the right decisions. It was time to put the first one, the birth certificate, to rest. I think that he brought it just to the point that it destroyed all the crazy people and let them look silly. The rope got long enough and then he pulled it. And I agree with him on the picture of Osama bin Laden. What purpose does it serve? Everybody says well it serves the purpose of convincing people he's dead. It's not going to convince anybody who's not convinced.

Ad Age: What's your take on selling magazines on the iPad and other tablets?

Mr. Wenner: It's the same pretty much as I've said about the web. The tablet itself is a really fun device. Some people are going to enjoy it a lot and use it. Some people aren't. On this plane one person's traveling with a tablet, one's not. There's a certain trendiness to the thing. And it's a great thing. But is it a good magazine thing?

It's a good magazine reading device, absolutely. And where it becomes more convenient to read the magazine on that, that's got the advantage. But that's more convenient only if you're traveling, if you're away from home. Otherwise it's still easier to read the physical magazine, which is widely available on newsstands, at airports, and everywhere. You can still subscribe to get it and get it on time. You still get all the value of the magazine.

I don't think that gives you much advantage as a magazine reader to read it on the tablet -- in fact less so. It's a little more difficult.

From the publisher's point of view I would think they're crazy to encourage it. They're going to get less money for it from advertisers. Right now it costs a fortune to convert your magazine, to program it, to get all the things you have to do on there. And they're not selling. You know, 5,000 copies there, 3,000 copies here, it's not worth it. You haven't put a dent in your R&D costs.

So I think that they're prematurely rushing and showing little confidence and faith in what they've really got, their real asset, which is the magazine itself, which is still a great commodity. It's a small additive; it's not the new business.

Ad Age: Well, you think for now, or you think forever?

Mr. Wenner: Oh I think down the road. Who knows how far down the road -- years though and possibly decades.

Ad Age: Not months.

Mr. Wenner: Not months. Decades, probably. People's habits will shift, they'll make improvements in the delivery system, the screen will change, it will get lighter, whatever, and new people growing up will find that as a habit. But you're talking about a generation at least, maybe two generations, before the shift is decisive.

Look at the music industry as an example. I think it's split about 50-50 between CDs and digital delivery. There is a place where there are extraordinary advantages in the distribution delivery system. Otherwise the products are indistinguishable; there's no difference in the physical products as there is here.

And yet it's still a generational shift going on. And we're far away from that. We have a much different and more unique product than just the CD.

Ad Age: I was talking to the publisher of Popular Science, which has sold more than 16,000 iPad subscriptions, so he's happy. But that's a small proportion for now of 1.2 million print subscriptions, and he also said if digital grew enough he was less likely to increase his overall circulation than to cut back the print component, because paper, postage and printing cost so much. Do you think you would embrace that strategy?

Mr. Wenner: No, I don't. First of all Popular Science is probably a magazine that's more suitable for the iPad, because of the audience it represents, the more techie thing and all that. And as you point out if it's selling 16,000 on a million-plus rate base, it's like nothing.

And I just don't think the shift will happen that way. While paper, printing and all that are expensive, we still get a nice profit margin, far larger than anything I can contemplate that's in the foreseeable future by using the iPad as a substitute. As long as people want the magazine product we'll deliver it. I think that's going to be for a long time to come.

People cherish it. There's something to hold onto. It's everything that I said or we said in that ad campaign for magazines.

The strategy we're going to announce is that we're just going to give free access to the current issue on the web or the iPad, and our archives, to anyone who's already a subscriber. So if you're a paid subscriber to Rolling Stone you can get it on any platform you want.

Ad Age: Will there be a Rolling Stone edition for the iPad?

Mr. Wenner: You can get it through Zinio or through our website and our archives are available on the website. At some point I'm sure it will be on the iPad but I'm not in any rush to break what I consider fundamental principles of what the magazine industry has to have and make a deal with Apple that will mortgage me into the future on the basis of getting 2,000 copies sold a month.

I think that rush is so premature. I've sat down and talked with the assembled heads of the industry about the whole thing and everybody has misgivings but some are, you know, more insecure than others.

Ad Age: Have you talked to Apple about this?

Mr. Wenner: I have not had a direct conversation with Apple. Their story is simple. They want to go knock off the weakest of the big guys and then use that as a lever. They were having no success with Time Inc., because they weren't going to give, so they went to Hearst. And really Hearst has just given them a couple of titles.

Ad Age: It sounds like Hearst and Conde Nast are pretty fully signed up for the Apple terms if I understand correctly.

Mr. Wenner: It's hard to know between what they won't disclose and what they're afraid to disclose and what they're embarrassed to disclose. We'll see.

Ad Age: Music obviously went through a lot in terms of the transition to digital and there's this conventional narrative now about how they got screwed by Apple. What do you think Apple meant for the music business, and what are the lessons for magazines as they get involved in iTunes and Apple?

Mr. Wenner: The music business more screwed itself than Apple screwed it. The music business refused to embrace internet technology when it first was introduced just as they first tried to fight and stop CDs, just as they used to fight and try to stop home taping, all of which was known to spread it. So now you have an ironic situation where music is more ubiquitous than ever -- everybody in the world has access to everything -- my kids can listen to the Beatles because they don't have to pay $15 to buy an album, they can either get it free or buy a Beatles song for a buck if they want.

So it's the music business's fault more than anything else. And then their failure to develop what Apple did develop, which was a good convenient easy delivery system. They fell on their own sword, you know?

I think Apple's within its rights to do what they decided to do. They wanted to control pricing. The music business failed to do those things.

But the lesson for magazine publishing business is not to rush like the music business should have done, because it's a different product. Music is really easily reducible to digital. There's a different beat to it.

Be attuned. Get ready to make the moves. Be adept at moving quickly to the changes. But to rush to throw away your magazine business and move it on the iPad is just sheer insanity and insecurity and fear. And because it coincided with the ad recession, they conflated the two events until they themselves believed that magazines are dead. Part of what we did in this ad campaign was partially to address the magazine business itself, to say hey boys, girls, you've got great values, you should learn about them yourself -- as well as tell advertisers.

Because up until that point they'd been rushing out to sell the iPad, a nonexistent business, and saying we admit it, we're dead. So hopefully that is all turning around. People have dialed back considerably.
http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/...ecades/227827/





Is Every Browser Unique? Results Fom The Panopticlick Experiment
Technical Analysis by Peter Eckersley

Today we are publishing a report of the statistical results from the Panopticlick experiment on web browser fingerprintability.

The results show that the overwhelming majority of Internet users could be uniquely fingerprinted and tracked using only the configuration and version information that their browsers make available to websites. These types of system information should be regarded as identifying, in much the same way that cookies, IP addresses, and supercookies are.

In our analysis of anonymized data from around half a million distinct browsers, 84% had unique configurations. Among browsers that had Flash or Java installed, 94% were unique, and only 1% had fingerprints that were seen more than twice. However, our experiment only studied a limited number of variables, and the companies that offer specialized fingerprinting services are likely to use a wider and therefore more powerful range of measurements.

While almost all browsers are uniquely fingerprintable, there were four special categories that were comparatively resistant to fingerprinting:

1. Those with JavaScript disabled (possibly using a tool like NoScript)
2. Those that use TorButton, which successfully anticipated and defended against many fingerprinting measurements.
3. Mobile devices like Androids and iPhones (unfortunately, these devices tend not to have good interfaces for controlling cookies, and so may be trackable by that method)
4. Corporate desktop machines that are precise clones of one another (Such systems appeared to constitute around 3-4% of the visitors to Panopticlick; unfortunately, there are some fingerprinting techniques like CPU clock skew measurement which would will work against these systems. commercial fingerprinting services employ those techniques).

Ultimately, browser developers will need to take the lead in defending their users against this particularly troublesome form of tracking. That won't be easy, but our article includes a number of recommendations about how to start.

These results will be presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in July.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/0...m-panopticlick





FaceNiff Makes Facebook Hacking a Portable, One-Tap Affair
Terrence O'Brien

Remember Firesheep? Well, the cookie snatching Firefox extension now has a more portable cousin called FaceNiff. This Android app listens in on WiFi networks (even ones encrypted with WEP, WPA, or WPA2) and lets you hop on to the accounts of anyone sharing the wireless connection with you.

Right now it works with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Nasza-Klasa (a Polish Facebook clone), but developer Bartosz Ponurkiewicz promises more are coming.

You'll need to be rooted to run FaceNiff -- luckily, we had such a device laying around and gave the tap-to-hack app a try. Within 30 seconds it identified the Facebook account we had open on our laptop and had us posting updates from the phone. At least with Firesheep you had to sit down and open up a laptop, now you can hijack Twitter profiles as you stroll by Starbucks and it'll just look like you're sending a text message (but you wouldn't do that... would you?).
http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/02/f...ap-affair-vide





New MacDefender Defeats Apple Security Update
Matt Liebowitz

Apple released a security update yesterday (May 31) designed to rid Macs of the menacing MacDefender malware that has plagued users for nearly a month. But mere hours after the update, cybercriminals released a new variant of the malware that easily defeated Apple's belated security efforts.

Security Update 2011-003, available for Mac OS X 10.6.7 and Mac OS X Server 10.6.7, includes a malware removal tool that searches for and removes "known variants of the MacDefender malware," as Apple wrote on its support page.

These known variants include MacProtector and MacSecurity; both Trojans have been infecting Mac users since early May, trying to convince them to buy bogus antivirus software and often hijacking their Web sessions until they comply.

"Files downloaded via applications such as Safari, iChat, and Mail are checked for safety at the time that they are opened," Apple wrote. "If a file is identified as containing known malware, the system will display a dialog that alerts you to move it to the Trash. You should empty the Trash to finalize the removal of the file."

Apple's official security update came the same day that researchers spotted MacDefender spreading under the guise of a fake Facebook video of the scandal-ridden former IMF Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Yet it appears Apple's fix isn't going to hold, at least not permanently.

Just hours after Apple's update, ZDNet security researcher Ed Bott found a MacDefender variant capable of bypassing Apple's defenses.

The malware, called Mdinstall.pkg, is "specifically formulated to skate past Apple's malware-blocking code," Bott wrote.

Bott tested Mdinstall.pkg on a Mac running Safari, and the malware installed itself without a password.

Apple's new malware removal tool does allow for periodic updating of "definitions," malware profiles that let the software identify individual Trojans and viruses. That's exactly how commercial anti-virus software for Windows-based PCs works, and one would expect Apple to update the definitions to include this new variant very soon.

It's not clear how Apple will keep ahead in what may become a drawn-out game of digital whack-a-mole. Hopefully the new definitions will be incorporated into the malware removal tool without requiring that a Mac reboot itself.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/...securityupdate





Lockheed Says Thwarted "Tenacious" Cyber Attack
Jim Wolf

Lockheed Martin Corp., the U.S. government's top information technology provider, said on Saturday it had thwarted "a significant and tenacious attack" on its information systems network a week ago but was still working to restore employee access.

No customer, program or employee personal data was compromised thanks to "almost immediate" protective action taken after the attack was detected May 21, Jennifer Whitlow, a company spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement.

She said the company, the world's biggest aerospace company and the Pentagon's No. 1 supplier by sales, was working around the clock to restore employee access to the targeted network while maintaining the highest security level.

The U.S. Defense Department said in statement late Saturday night that it was working with Lockheed to determine the scope of the attack.

The incident's impact on the department is "minimal and we don't expect any adverse effect," Air Force Lieutenant Colonel April Cunningham said by email.

She declined to specify the nature of the impact, saying that as a matter of policy, the department does not not comment on operational matters.

The Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, said that it and the Defense Department had offered to help curb the risk from the incident.

Lockheed is the maker of the F-16, F-22 and F-35 fighter jets as well as warships and other multibillion-dollar arms systems sold worldwide.

There was no word on where the attack may have originated. Military contractors' systems contain technical specifications on weapons under development as well as those currently in use.

The U.S. government has offered to help Lockheed analyze "available data in order to provide recommendations to mitigate further risk," Chris Ortman, a DHS official, said in an e-mailed reply to a query from Reuters.

A person with direct knowledge told Reuters on Friday that unknown attackers had broken into sensitive networks of Lockheed and several other U.S. military contractors.

Boeing Co and Northrop Grumman, the Pentagon's No. 2 and No. 3 suppliers respectively, declined to discuss matters involving corporate security.

Cyber Espionage

U.S. officials may investigate a cyber breach at a company's request. DHS, the lead agency for securing federal civilian networks, can deploy a team to analyze infected systems, develop mitigation strategies, advise on efforts to restore service and make recommendations for improving overall network security.

Several top cybersecurity experts with extensive government dealings said they were in the dark about the origin of the attack.

"I think it tells us that DHS doesn't know much about what's going on either," said Anup Ghosh, a former senior scientist at the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency who worked on securing military networks.

Ghosh, who now runs Invincea, a software security company, said there had been a string of intrusions against defense contractors, security companies and U.S. government labs, including the U.S. Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, since the start of this year.

These attacks typically were carried out through so-called "spear-phish" inducements to click on a certain link to web sites or through emailed attachments carrying malicious code.

Once so compromised, a computer can surreptitiously download other code that can log a victim's key strokes, giving an attacker a path to potentially wide network access.

"Defense industrials is where our military technology secrets are," Ghosh said in an email interview. "What's happening here is nothing short of theft of a nation."

The person with direct knowledge told Reuters on Friday that an intrusion at Lockheed was related to a recent breach of "SecurID" token authentication technology from EMC Corp's EMC.N RSA security division.

Cyber intruders were reported in 2009 to have broken into computers holding data on Lockheed's projected $380 billion-plus F-35 fighter program, the Pentagon's costliest arms purchase.

A series of once-secret U.S. diplomatic cables released by the WikiLeaks website suggests that China has jumped ahead of the United States when it comes to cyber espionage.

More than 100 foreign intelligence organizations are trying to break into U.S. networks, Deputy U.S. Secretary of Defense William Lynn wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs last fall. Some already have the capacity to disrupt U.S. information infrastructure, he wrote.

(Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa and Jim Finkle; Editing by Paul Simao)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...74Q6VY20110529





Stolen Data Is Tracked to Hacking at Lockheed
Christopher Drew

Lockheed Martin said Friday that it had proof that hackers breached its network two weeks ago partly by using data stolen from a vendor that supplies coded security tokens to tens of millions of computer users.

Lockheed’s finding confirmed the fears of security experts about the safety of the SecurID tokens and heightened concerns that other companies or government agencies could be vulnerable to hacking attacks.

The tokens, which are used to protect remote access to computer networks, are sold by the RSA Security Division of the EMC Corporation. RSA officials said Friday that they accepted Lockheed’s findings and were working with customers to offset the risks through other measures.

RSA disclosed in March that hackers had stolen data that could compromise a company’s SecurID system in a broader attack, and the breach of Lockheed, the nation’s largest defense contractor, is the first time that is known to have occurred.

A rash of prominent breaches has brought new attention to an increase in the frequency and sophistication of computer hacking. Google said this week that it believed an effort to steal hundreds of Gmail passwords for accounts of prominent people, including senior American government officials, had originated in China.

The Pentagon, which has long been concerned about efforts by China and Russia to obtain military secrets, announced separately that it would soon view serious computer attacks from foreign nations as acts of war that could result in a military response.

RSA officials noted that Lockheed said it planned to continue using the SecurID tokens, and they said they believed other customers would as well. But security experts said RSA’s reputation had most likely been seriously damaged, and many of its 25,000 customers, including Fortune 500 companies and government agencies around the world, could face difficult decisions about what to do next.

RSA’s prospects for holding on to some of those customers “certainly seems bleak,” said Harry Sverdlove, the chief technology officer at Bit9, a firm that provides other types of security products and does not compete with RSA.

He and other experts said RSA might need to reprogram many of its security tokens or create an upgraded version to rebuild confidence in its systems.

In response to questions on Friday, Lockheed said in an e-mail that its computer experts had concluded that the breach at RSA in March was “a direct contributing factor” in the attack on its network. Government and industry officials said the hackers had used some of the RSA data and other techniques to piece together the coded password of a Lockheed contractor who had access to Lockheed’s system.

Lockheed, which makes fighter planes, spy satellites and other confidential equipment, said it had detected the attack quickly and blocked it before any important data was compromised.

Lockheed said it was replacing 45,000 SecurID tokens held by workers who need to log into its system from customer offices, hotels or their homes. It also required its employees to change their passwords, and it added a step to its sign-on process.

One top RSA official, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity on Friday because of customer relationships, acknowledged that some customers would lose confidence in the devices. “It’s certainly going to have an initial impact,” he said.

He said the company would discuss reprogramming tokens with companies. But, he said, in some cases that may require more work than other measures they could take to beef up different parts of their security systems.

RSA, based in Bedford, Mass., has declined to specify what data was stolen in March. It has also said that it detected the attack as the hackers were removing the data and that the attack was only partly successful.

But independent security experts have speculated that the hackers obtained at least part of the databases holding serial numbers and other critical data for the tens of millions of tokens, and Lockheed’s confirmation that the stolen data played a role in its attack supported that theory.

The RSA tokens provide security beyond a user name or password by requiring users to enter a unique number generated by the token each time they connect to their networks.

But to make use of the data stolen from RSA, security experts said, the hackers would also have needed the passwords of one or more users on Lockheed’s network. RSA has said that in its own breach, the hackers accomplished this by sending “phishing” e-mails to small groups of employees, including one worker who opened an attached spreadsheet that contained a previously unknown bug.

This let the hacker monitor the worker’s passwords. Security specialists suspect that something similar happened in the Lockheed attack, with the hackers using the data stolen from RSA to predict the security codes that the token would generate.

Mr. Sverdlove said that in mounting attacks, many hackers now studied Facebook and other social media for information to personalize their phishing e-mails and increase the odds they will be opened. He said that over the last two years, there had been “an exponential increase” in these attacks.

Security experts said that the alternatives to the tokens, including computerized smart cards and biometric tools, tended to be more expensive. They said Northrop, another giant military contractor, was shifting from SecurID tokens to smart cards.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/t...4security.html





U.S. Arms Makers Said to be Bleeding Secrets to Cyber Foes
Jim Wolf

Top Pentagon contractors have been bleeding secrets for years as a result of penetrations of their computer networks, current and former national security officials say.

The Defense Department, which runs its own worldwide eavesdropping, spying and code-cracking systems, says more than 100 foreign intelligence organizations have been trying to break into U.S. networks.

Some of the perpetrators "already have the capacity to disrupt" U.S. information infrastructure, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn, who is leading remedial efforts, wrote last fall in the journal Foreign Affairs.

Joel Brenner, the National Counterintelligence executive from 2006 to 2009, said most if not all of the big defense contractors' networks had been pierced.

"This has been happening since the late '90s," he told Reuters Tuesday. He identified the main threats as coming from Russia, China and Iran.

"They're after our weapons systems and R&D," or research and development, said Brenner, now with the law firm of Cooley LLP in Washington.

Lockheed Martin Corp, the Pentagon's No. 1 supplier by sales, said on Saturday that it had thwarted "a significant and tenacious" attack on its information systems network that it detected May 21. Ten days later, the company says its still working to restore full employee access to the network while maintaining the highest level of security.

Lockheed, which is also the government's top information technology provider, said it had become "a frequent target of adversaries from around the world." A spokeswoman said it said it used the term "adversaries" only in a general sense.

Lockheed builds F-16, F-22 and F-35 fighter jets as well as Aegis naval combat system, THAAD missile defense and other big-ticket weapons systems sold to U.S. allies. It has not disclosed which of its business units was targeted.

Cyber intruders were reported in 2009 to have broken into computers holding data on Lockheed's projected $380 billion-plus F-35 fighter program, the Pentagon's costliest arms purchase.

Other big Pentagon contractors include Boeing Co, Northrop Grumman Corp, General Dynamics Corp, BAE Systems Plc and Raytheon Co. Each of these declined to comment on whether it believed its networks had been penetrated.

James Miller, the principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, said last May that the United States was losing terabytes of data in cyber attacks, enough to fill "multiple Libraries of Congress." The world's largest library, its archive totaled about 235 terabytes of data as of April, the Library of Congress says on its web site.

"The scale of compromise, including the loss of sensitive and unclassified data, is staggering," Miller told a Washington forum.

U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who led a Senate Intelligence Committee cyber task force last year, said in March that cybercrime has put the United States "on the losing end of what could be the largest illicit transfer of wealth in world history."

Retired Air Force General Michael Hayden, a former director of central intelligence and ex-head of the Pentagon's National Security Agency, said no network was safe if it had Internet access.

"You can isolate a network, a classified network," he told Reuters in an interview last year. "Maybe you can get a certain level of confidence that you are not penetrated. But if you are out there connected to the world wide web you are vulnerable all the time."

Anup Ghosh, a former senior scientist at the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, said there had been a string of intrusions into networks of U.S. defense contractors, security companies and U.S. government labs, including the U.S. Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, since the start of this year.

The advantage is with the intruders, said Ghosh, who worked on securing military networks for DARPA from 2002 to 2006 and now heads Invincea, a software security company.

"We've failed to innovate in the area of information security," he said in an email Tuesday. "We're fighting today's battles with the equivalent of cold-war era defenses."

(Reporting by Jim Wolf; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...74U76X20110531





North Korea Hacker Threat Increases as Cyber Unit Grows-Defector

Secretive North Korea is scouring its universities for computer prodigies to send overseas for training as part of a plan to expand its cyber warfare unit, a defector said on Wednesday, underscoring the increased risk of cyber attacks.

The South has accused the North of being responsible for a number of computer hacking incidents this year, including an "unprecedented act of cyber terror" in April that brought down the network of a leading South Korea bank.

The two Koreas are still technically at war, having only signed a truce to end the 1950-53 Korean War.

"North Korea last year raised the status of its cyber warfare unit under the Reconnaissance General Bureau and increased the number of troops in the unit from 500 to about 3,000," Kim Heung-kwang told a cyber terrorism seminar in Seoul.

Kim, who escaped from the North in 2003 and now heads a defectors' group called North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity, said the reclusive state is seeking out young electronic whizzes to train as hackers.

"These prodigies are provided with the best environment, and if they graduate with top grades, their parents in the provinces are given the opportunity to live in Pyongyang," Kim, who had worked as professor at colleges in the North and has maintained contacts since then, said.

"After studying at local universities, these students are given the special privilege of continuing their studies abroad."

Analysts have warned the North may carry out more unconventional attacks against the South rather than traditional military assaults such as the shelling of a South Korean island last year that killed four people.

Seoul has vowed to hit back hard if Pyongyang launches another direct military assault, saying it will retaliate with air power and bombs.

A South Korean defense white paper released earlier this year warned that the cyber threat from the North had increased, saying they had become more intelligent and virulent.

Last month, the South blamed the North for the computer crash at Nonghyup bank that affected millions of customers who were unable to use the bank's credit cards and ATMs for more than a week.

The North rejected the accusation.

South Korean prosecutors said the same North Korean hackers were also to blame for other strikes on government and corporate sites, exposing the South's heavily wired financial system's vulnerability.

(Reporting by Jeremy Laurence)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7501U420110601





China PLA Officers Call Internet Key Battleground
Chris Buckley

China must make mastering cyber-warfare a military priority as the Internet becomes the crucial battleground for opinion and intelligence, two military officers said on Friday, two days after Google revealed hacking attacks that it said came from China.

The essay by strategists from the People's Liberation Army's Academy of Military Sciences did not mention Google's statement that hackers apparently based in China had tried to steal into the Gmail accounts of hundreds of users, among them U.S. officials, Chinese rights activists and foreign reporters.

Google said on Wednesday that the attacks appeared to come from Jinan, capital of China's eastern Shandong province, home to a signals intelligence unit of the People's Liberation Army.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Thursday dismissed Google's statement as groundless and motivated by "ulterior motives."

The essay by two PLA scholars, Senior Colonel Ye Zheng and his colleague Zhao Baoxian, in the China Youth Daily nonetheless stressed that Beijing is focused on honing its cyber-warfare skills, and sees an unfettered Internet as a threat to its Communist Party-run state.

"Just as nuclear warfare was the strategic war of the industrial era, cyber-warfare has become the strategic war of the information era, and this has become a form of battle that is massively destructive and concerns the life and death of nations," they wrote in the Party-run paper.

The Chinese military has been conducting simulated cyber battles pitting the "blue army" against "red teams" using virus and mass spam attacks, the PLA newspaper Liberation Army Daily said last month.

Last year, contention over Internet policy became an irritant between Beijing and Washington after the Obama administration took up Google's complaints about hacking and censorship from China. Google partly pulled out of China, the world's largest Internet market by users, after the dispute.

So far, neither Google nor Washington has outright blamed China for the hacking attacks. Both governments have sought to steady their relations after last year's turbulence, and they may want to avoid another escalating feud.

But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Thursday that the "allegations are very serious."

Domino Effect

The PLA scholars, Ye and Zhao, said China has its own fears about the Internet being wielded as a tool for political challenges, and pointed to the anti-authoritarian uprisings across the Arab world as an alarming example.

"The targets of psychological warfare on the Internet have expanded from the military to the public," they wrote.

The Internet "has become the main battleground of contention over public opinion," they said, citing the "domino effect" across the Middle East and north Africa.

China's ruling Communist Party fears it could become one of those dominoes, despite robust economic growth and stringent domestic security and censorship.

In February, overseas Chinese websites, inspired by the "Jasmine Revolution" across the Arab world, called for protests across China, raising Beijing's alarm about dissent and spurring a burst of detentions of dissidents and human rights lawyers.

Three Chinese dissidents told Reuters their Google email accounts had been infiltrated, although eight others who were contacted said they had no problems.

China has also tightened censorship of the Internet, and it already blocks major foreign social websites such as Facebook and Twitter. The PLA scholars said the threats to China come from more than sophisticated intelligence operations on the Internet.

"Cyberware is an entirely new mode of battle that is invisible and silent, and it is active not only in wars and conflicts, but also flares in the everyday political, economic, military, cultural and scientific activities."

The latest Google hacking attempt follows a series of high-profile hacking cases, including an attack on the U.S. defense giant Lockheed Martin. A U.S. official familiar with progress on the investigation said there was increasing suspicion that attack originated with "someone in China."

(Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7520OV20110603





Pentagon Declares Cyberattack an Act of War
Curt Hopkins

Cyberattacks are part of the defense landscape and have been for a while. Among the more high-profile instances in the last year are the Stuxnet attack by the U.S. and Israel on Iranian nuclear facilities, the attacks by the Chinese government on Google and even a hack of a Pentagon project.

Now, the Wall Street Journal says a soon-to-be-released Pentagon policy document will announce officially that a cyberattack can be a jus ad bellum, or act of war.

In addition to the Pentagon's Joint Strike Fighter project being compromised, a main military supplier, Lockheed Martin, was hacked earlier this month. The military felt that an ad hoc response was no longer adequate, hence, this official policy was drafted.

The finding of a cyberattack as an act of war is one that "for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force."

"If you shut down our power grid," one unnamed military official told the Journal, "maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks."

That's not just chest-beating. The notion of "equivalency" is based on the internationally-accepted Laws of War (formed from such agreements as the Geneva Conventions). This equivalency seem to be integral to the U.S. military's new official approach to cyber-threats.

However, retribution will depend on how closely the attack or the tools used to make it can be traced to a government entity. That will be the element of the report critics will probably focus on the most. What mechanisms will the military put in place to make legitimate determinations of blame?

The Pentagon will release the 12 unclassified pages of the 30-page document next month.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...act_of_war.php





E-Mail Fraud Hides Behind Friendly Face
Matt Richtel and Verne G. Kopytoff

Most people know to ignore the e-mail overture from a Nigerian prince offering riches in exchange for a bank account number. That is a scam, plain to the eye.

But what if the e-mail appears to come from a colleague down the hall? And all he asks is that you add some personal information to a company database?

This is spear phishing, a rapidly proliferating form of fraud that comes with a familiar face: messages that seem to be from co-workers, friends or family members, customized to trick you into letting your guard down online. And it has turned into a major problem, according to technology companies and computer security experts.

On Wednesday, Google disclosed that it had discovered and disrupted an effort to use such pinpoint tactics to steal hundreds of Gmail passwords and monitor the accounts of prominent people, including senior government officials. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that the F.B.I. would investigate Google’s assertion that the campaign originated in China.

Such tactics were also used in an attack on a company called RSA Security, which security experts say may have given hackers the tools to carry out a serious intrusion last month at Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest military contractor.

The security specialists say these efforts are a far cry from more standard phishing attempts, which involve spraying the Internet with millions of e-mails that appear to be from, say, Citibank in the hope of snaring a few unfortunate Citibank customers. Spear phishing entails sending highly targeted pitches that can look authentic because they appear to come from a trusted source and contain plausible messages.

As such, the specialists say, the overtures are becoming very difficult for recipients to detect.

“It’s a really nasty tactic because it’s so personalized,” said Bruce Schneier, the chief security technology officer of the British company BT Group. “It’s an e-mail from your mother saying she needs your Social Security number for the will she’s doing.”
Mr. Schneier said the attacks are more like a traditional con game than a technically sophisticated intrusion. “This is hacking the person,” he said. “It’s not hacking the computer.”

Symantec, the computer security firm, said it intercepted around 85 targeted attacks a day in March, including efforts to steal personal information through phishing or with links to nefarious software that could ultimately expose corporate files. The only month with more attacks was March 2009, when there was a surge that coincided with a G20 summit meeting.

Symantec said the most common targets were government agencies and senior managers and executives; the phishing of such big game is commonly referred to as “whaling.” Manufacturing firms were the targets of 15.9 percent of the attacks, compared with 8 percent for the financial sector and 6.1 percent for technology companies, Symantec said. Hackers taking aim at corporations are often seeking new product designs and may focus on engineers at a defense contractor, for example, to get data they can sell on the black market.

Enrique Salem, Symantec’s chief executive, gave the example of an e-mail sent to the head of a company that appears to be from the Internal Revenue Service. The message raises questions about the tax implications of an acquisition, and the chief executive passes the message to others inside the company. Someone opens the attachment, giving the attacker access to the company’s internal network.

“It’s about getting you to do something to compromise the system,” Mr. Salem said.

In the case of the Gmail attacks, Google said they appeared to originate from Jinan, China, and were aimed at users like Chinese political activists, military personnel, journalists and South Korean officials.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Thursday that the government had no involvement in any such attacks, and that it “consistently opposes any criminal activities that damage the Internet and computer networks including hacking, and cracks down on these activities according to law.”

It is not clear how the attackers obtained the Gmail addresses they used, although they could have been found inside other compromised accounts, including corporate or government accounts whose addresses are often easier to guess.

The attackers may have hoped to find some work-related e-mail in their victims’ personal Gmail accounts.

Mila Parkour, an independent security researcher who helped alert Google to the attacks, said she was tipped off to the campaign when one of the victims let her examine some suspicious messages.

That led her to discover a fake but convincing Gmail login screen that attackers used to dupe targets into submitting their passwords. She said the messages indicated that the phishing attempts had begun at least a year before she learned of them — early in 2010.

“I thought it was interesting because they did it for so long,” Ms. Parkour said. She said she also saw screens that mimicked the login pages for the Web portals of corporate e-mail systems.

Companies and individuals can take steps to head off these attacks. For instance, Google encourages people to use a two-step process that sends a special code to their cellphone when they log into Gmail. The Defense Department asks its personnel to use a “digital signature” on their e-mails that verifies their identity.

The momentum is on the side of the attackers, given that their forgeries can be realistic and thus irresistible, according to Lt. Col. Gregory Conti, a computer security expert at West Point. He said one reason the problem was getting harder to parry was that the people sending the messages use the Internet, specifically social networks like Facebook, to gather so much personal information about potential targets.

“What’s ‘wrong‘ with these e-mails is very, very subtle,” he said, adding: “They’ll come in error-free, often using the appropriate jargon or acronyms for a given office or organization.”

The way to stop such efforts is not clear, Mr. Conti said: “It’s an open problem.”

Victims of spear phishing include people who oversee corporate security, said Larry Ponemon, chairman of the Ponemon Institute, a research company in Traverse City, Mich., that focuses on data security. He gave the example of a security technology executive who received an e-mail from what appeared to be his employer’s human resources department that asked for personal information to make a payment.

Mr. Schneier of BT said he did not believe there was an easy and universal fix for the problem, any more than there was for car theft. He said the personal nature of the attacks makes them too seductive.

“Welcome to the world. You cannot stop it,” he said. “Live with it.”

John Markoff contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/03/t...gy/03hack.html





Anthony Weiner: Hackers Posted Lewd Photos on Twitter
Jonathan Allen & Ben Smith

Rep. Anthony Weiner says social networking identity hacking is to blame for the lewd material that a conservative news website reported was sent from his Twitter and yfrog handles to an unidentified woman in Seattle.

The New York Democrat told POLITICO he thought it “obvious” that his account had been taken over, and he tweeted that his Facebook account had been hacked with the abbreviation “FB hacked.”

A photo of a man’s bulging gray boxer-brief underwear was posted to Weiner’s account with yfrog — an online image-sharing site — on Saturday night, according to biggovernment.com, which is run by Andrew Breitbart. The photograph is from the waist down, and shows no face.

“The weiner gags never get old, I guess, ” the veteran lawmaker emailed a POLITICO reporter in response on Saturday.

“This evening a photo surfaced on Congressman Weiner’s yfrog account and in his verified Twitter timeline of a man in his underwear with an erection,” Publius, the handle for the site’s editors wrote. “The photo was reportedly sent to a woman on Twitter. We’ve protected her name and her account, which was at one time verified to be active but has since been deleted after the photo in question was deleted. Coincidentally, the rest of the photos in the congressman’s alleged yfrog account were also deleted around 11 p.m. eastern.”

Biggovernment.com writes that the woman in question is a college student who lives in Seattle and notes that another Weiner tweet from Friday, about an upcoming appearance on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC program, made reference to when the program would air in Seattle.

After the incident, Weiner continued to tweet.

“Thanks to all my new followers im drawing close to Bachmann. #ScrappyChasingCrazy,” he wrote at 6:35 p.m. Saturday, in the last posted tweet.

Weiner’s office — generally one of the most press friendly around — did not respond to a request for comment on whether he has contacted federal authorities to report the alleged cyber-attack, which could fall under laws prohibiting cyberhacking and impersonating federal officials.

Whatever the case with the Weiner incident, it’s clear that the age of electronic communication is leaving politicians with even less privacy than they had in the past.

Earlier this week in Weiner’s home state, a special election was held to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of married Republican Rep. Chris Lee, who sent a shirtless photo of himself to a woman he met on Craigslist. Previously, Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate, was the victim of a cyber-attacker who hacked into her e-mail account and published the contents online.

In the Palin case, the hacker was convicted on two federal charges, including gaining unauthorized access to a computer, and sentenced to a year and a day in prison.

And if true, Weiner certainly would not be the first high-profile person to have his Twitter hacked — celebrities from conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly to pop star Britney Spears have had rogue messages posted to their accounts.

Weiner, 46, was first elected to Congress in 1998 after serving six years on the New York City Council. He ran for mayor in 2005 and is seen as the presumptive frontrunner for the 2013 race.

Weiner married Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in 2010 at a ceremony in the garden at Oheka Castle in Huntington, Long Island.

In recent years, the quick-witted congressman has become a hero to liberal activists, particularly those who supported including a public option in last year’s overhaul of the health care system. Though he didn’t win that battle, his constant presence on cable news programs boosted his following around the country.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/55877.html





NATO Report Threatens to 'Persecute' Anonymous

Hacktivist grouped named as threat by military alliance
James Nixon

NATO leaders have been warned that Wikileaks-loving 'hacktivist' collective Anonymous could pose a threat to member states' security, following recent attacks on the US Chamber of Commerce and defence contractor HBGary - and promise to 'persecute' its members.

In a toughly-worded draft report to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, General Rapporteur Lord Jopling claims that the loose-knit, leaderless group is "becoming more and more sophisticated", and "could potentially hack into sensitive government, military, and corporate files".

The group demonstrated its capabilities in February, says the report, when it hacked into US-based defence contractor HBGary. Documents stolen in the attack lifted the lid on the US military's plans to use social network surveillance software, code-named 'Metal Gear' by the online hive-mind, which could control an army of fake profiles, collecting data from disparate sites and piecing together an individual's identity by analysing linguistic traits and other details.

Describing the rise of the group from its beginnings on internet picture message board 4chan, via campaigns against the Church of Scientology and, more recently, in support of whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, the report continues: "Today, the ad hoc international group of hackers and activists is said to have thousands of operatives and has no set rules or membership."

The report goes on to lay out a stark warning to the group's nameless participants:

"It remains to be seen how much time Anonymous has for pursuing such paths. The longer these attacks persist the more likely countermeasures will be developed, implemented, the groups will be infiltrated and perpetrators persecuted."

Reacting to the extraordinary threat in a post on micro-blogging site Twitter, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an MP in NATO member Iceland, said she was "seeking input". Jónsdóttir claimed the report of "falsifies facts" about WikiLeaks - for whom she was formerly an activist - and Bradley Manning, the US Army private accused of leaking the US government's so-called 'Cablegate' diplomatic memos.

NATO's threat follows a recent toughening of governmental stances against hacking on both sides of the Atlantic, with major NATO players the US and the UK outlining their strategies for what appears a forthcoming age of cyber-warfare.

A policy document released last month and signed by President Obama issued an oblique threat of military retaliation against hackers, if legal and political measures prove fruitless.

"The United States will ensure that the risks associated with attacking or exploiting our networks vastly outweigh the potential benefits," the document said.

Yesterday, the UK's coalition government unveiled plans to recruit 'hundreds' of cyber-soldiers into a new defence task force aimed at combating online attacks.

"Our forces depend on computer networks, both in the UK and in operations around the world. But our adversaries present an advance and rapidly developing threat to these networks," the MoD said in the statement.

The UK government's statement didn't name who those adversaries were. In the light of Lord Jopling's report, perhaps it is now a little clearer just who they may have in mind.
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/6/1/nato...ute-anonymous/





Anonymous Steals 10,000 Iranian Government Emails, Plans DDoS Attack

Anonymous has hacked into Iranian government servers and procured over 10,000 email messages from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Ministry’s website is still down as of this writing, and the servers are under Anonymous control. One of the Iranian members of Anonymous involved with the operation sent me a message from the compromised email servers as evidence that they were still under Anonymous control.

While email addresses can be spoofed, the collection of 10,000 emails is a pretty good indication that they have no need for spoofing.

The email archive includes approvals and rejections for a variety of visas and passports, among other requests and correspondence.

“It’s near the election’s anniversary. We had to do something,” said one of the Iranian members of Anonymous from #OpIran.

He said they take down Iranian government servers on a regular basis for operation days, but that obviously retrieving information required a different approach to the group’s signature DDoS attack.

He also indicated an as-yet unannounced attack. “For the election’s anniversary, we have a complete DDoS attack day” planned, he said.

It’s not clear who the specific target of the day will be, but it will be part of the Iranian government.

“We don’t attack the media,” said my source, though he indicated that propaganda masquerading as news was fair game. For instance, this site publishes photographs of “rioters”, asking other citizens to identify them so the government can subject them to any of a number of horrific punishments.

If you need to get into Iran, now would be a good time to talk to Anonymous. “Are you sure you don’t want a visa?” was the last thing my source said to me.
http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/...s-ddos-attack/





PBS Hacked in Retribution For Frontline Wikileaks Episode
Xeni Jardin

The PBS.org website, and data associated with the PBS television network, its programs, and its affiliate stations, appear to have just been hacked by an entity calling itself LulzSec (or "The Lulz Boat"). The hack was made public around 1130pm ET, Sunday, May 29, and included cracking the PBS server, posting a bogus news story and some defacements, and publishing what appear to be thousands of passwords.

The information compromised and published included network, server, and database details and logins, as well as user login data for some PBS staff and contractors. As of 3:24am ET Monday, some defacements are still live on pbs.org.

The group that carried out the hack claims they are not affiliated with "Anonymous", and that the action is retribution for the recent "Wikisecrets" episode on Wikileaks, which was perceived by Wikileaks and its supporters to be unfair to Wikileaks.

According to an article in the Australian edition of IT security publication SC Magazine, LulzSec has gone after other media entities in recent weeks: Fox News Network and the TV show X-Factor are reported as prior targets. As the name implies, LulzSec would appear to be in it for the proverbial lulz, rather than, say, financial gain.

A statement from LulzSec:

Greetings, Internets. We just finished watching WikiSecrets and were less than impressed. We decided to sail our Lulz Boat over to the PBS servers for further... perusing. As you should know by now, not even that fancy-ass fortress from the third shitty Pirates of the Caribbean movie (first one was better!) can withhold our barrage of chaos and lulz. Anyway, unnecessary sequels aside... wait, actually: second and third Matrix movies sucked too! Anyway, say hello to the insides of the PBS servers, folks. They best watch where they're sailing next time.

The PBS program Frontline (and specifically the producers of the "Wikisecrets" episode), may have been the stated target, but the scope of intrusion was significantly more broad. And the Frontline site and its "Wikisecrets" subsite don't show any signs of a hack at all.

LulzSec posted an overview of the data and defacements here.

Xb.png Here's a cache of the fake "Tupac still alive in New Zealand" story the intruders posted. Unfortunately, Tupac remains dead, and PBS NewsHour social media and online engagement point person Teresa Gorman spent Sunday night on Twitter repeating this fact to dozens of incredulous individuals and news organizations [partial screengrab of @gteresa's Twitter feed here].

Here's a copy of the "Free Bradley Manning" defacement page LulzSec posted, featuring the "nyan cat" meme.
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/05/29...in-retrib.html





Who is LulzSec, Hacker of PBS? Are They Hacking Sony Again?

PBS was just hacked by a group of Internet vigilantes who put up a bogus story of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls being alive and well in New Zealand. The hackers claimed it was revenge for what they thought was an unfair portrayal of Wikileaks in a PBS documentary.

If you think Anonymous did it, you’d be wrong. Instead, a new group called LulzSec (Lulz Security) did it.

LulzSec isn’t really new – it was just thrust into the spotlight for the first time while Anonymous previously perpetrated all the high-profile stunts.

An earlier attack by LulzSec targeted Fox.com. They hacked the website, posted the passwords of Fox employees, altered several LinkedIn accounts of these employees, and hijacked the Fox15 twitter account. It also previously targeted Sony's music website in Japan.

LulzSec claims to be a separate entity from Anonymous. In an interview with Forbes, LulzSec member Whirlpool said the group hacks for “lulz and justice.”

After its PBS exploit, LulzSec claims to be planning bigger things. On its Twitter account, it stated it was hacking Sony right now.

“Hey @Sony, you know we're making off with a bunch of your internal stuff right now and you haven't even noticed? Slow and steady, guys,” boasted one Tweet early in the morning on Tuesday.

“#Sownage (Sony + Ownage) Phase 1 will begin within the next day. We may have a pre-game show for you folks though. Stay tuned,” warned a Tweet from May 29.

“We're working on another Sony operation. We've condensed all our excited tweets into this one: this is the beginning of the end for Sony,” stated another Tweet from May 27.

A Sony spokesperson did not immediately respond to IBTimes' request for comments.

AT&T may be another target of LulzSec.

One Tweet from May 17 read “AT&T aren't going to enjoy what The Lulz Boat is cooking.” Another read “We've got some curious items from the AT&T ship, and our FBI-related plunder is still on course. Smooth sailing! “
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/1551...-lulz-sony.htm





Web Hackings Rattle Media Companies
Brian Stelter

It might just be the most worrisome letter to the editor any news organization can receive.

PBS fought on Monday and Tuesday to restore the Web sites for two news programs on public television, “Frontline” and “PBS NewsHour,” which were crippled by hackers who said they were angered by coverage of WikiLeaks.

The incidents were the latest examples of what security experts call “reputational attacks” on media companies that publish material that the hackers disagree with. Such companies are particularly vulnerable to such attacks because many of them depend on online advertising and subscription revenue from Web sites that can be upended by the clicks of a hacker’s keyboard — and because unlike other targets, like government entities and defense contractors, they are less likely to have state-of-the-art security to thwart attacks.

The PBS attack was said to be motivated by a “Frontline” film about WikiLeaks that was broadcast and published online on May 24. Some supporters of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, and Bradley Manning, a soldier who is suspected of having shared hundreds of thousands of government files with WikiLeaks, criticized the film and claimed that it portrayed the two men in a negative light.

When the anonymous hackers posted a fake news article on a PBS blog and published passwords apparently obtained from PBS servers late Sunday night, they attached complaints about the film, which was titled “WikiSecrets.”

Staff member at PBS said they were appalled by the hackings — which were perceived to be attempts to chill independent journalism — and, to a lesser extent, by the long delay in having the sites restored. In a telephone interview on Tuesday, David Fanning, the executive producer of “Frontline,” called the incidents a “real intrusion into the press” and said they should not be characterized as mere pranks.

“This is what repressive governments do,” he said. “This is what people who don’t want information out in the world do — they try to shut the presses.”

Mr. Fanning said “Frontline” included multiple points of view in “WikiSecrets” and provided forums for criticism of the film. Other staffers, speaking anonymously because they had not been authorized by PBS to speak on the record, did not point the finger for the hack directly at WikiLeaks, but some did suggest that it would be hypocritical for any supporters of such a group to try to tamp down on freedom of information.

From time to time, other news organizations have wound up in the bull’s-eye of hacker groups, sometimes after they have published unflattering information about those very groups.

Last December, Web sites belonging to Gawker Media were forced to stop publishing when hackers gained access and stole the names and passwords of some users. Gawker had been critical of hacker groups like the one called Anonymous that had attacked security firms and Web sites of the Egyptian government.

The group that claimed responsibility for the PBS attack this week, called Lulzsec, also hacked Fox.com, the Web site of the Fox broadcast network, earlier this spring and divulged personal information about some of the potential contestants on a reality show. “We don’t like you very much,” the group wrote in a letter touting the successful break-in.

Individual subjects of media coverage have also been known to retaliate using hacking tactics: in a well-publicized case that led to a conviction last year, a New Jersey man spread a computer virus that searched for mentions of his name in online articles and tried to shut down the hosts of those articles.

The PBS attack appeared to start with Sunday’s publication of a fake news article about the rapper Tupac Shakur being spotted alive in New Zealand. (He died in 1996.) Then, on Monday afternoon, the “Frontline” site was infiltrated, Mr. Fanning said.

Comparing it to a rock being chucked through a storefront window, he said, “I don’t believe it will in any way hinder our continuing reporting on these sorts of subjects, but it is a cautionary note.”

Among the news sources affected was Tehran Bureau, a well-regarded source of news about Iran that is operated under the “Frontline” umbrella. The Web sites appeared to be back online on Tuesday afternoon.

Robert Corn-Revere, a partner at the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine who specializes in First Amendment law, compared the hacking incident to the vandalism of a newspaper box or the theft of the papers from the box. “Something like that is not a protected First Amendment act, even though you’re expressing frustration with a newspaper,” he said.

When the Web site for “PBS NewsHour” was disrupted, staffers turned to sites like YouTube, where they posted Monday’s newscast, and Tumblr, where they published transcripts and the news organization’s features.

PBS said that visitors to the sites did not have their personal information compromised, as has occurred in other hacking cases.

“As this breach shows, there’s more than just personally identifiable information at risk,” said Phil Blank, a security analyst with Javelin Strategy & Research. Many Web sites, he said, fail to take appropriate steps to combat “Web site defacing” and “reputational risk.”

In the event of a hacker attack, news organizations, he said, “lose both ways — they lose from the ‘Gee, don’t they take care of their Web site?’ perspective, and they lose from the ‘How do I know the information they’re putting out is accurate?’ perspective.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/b...ia/01hack.html





Hacker Attacks Threaten to Dampen Cloud Computing's Prospects
Clare Jim and Lee Chyen Yee

The recent high-profile hacking of Google's Gmail service and Sony's Playstation gaming network is threatening to slow the take-off of the next big thing in the computing space - the cloud.

Computer companies will need to collaborate to work on addressing security issues to boost confidence in cloud computing, where data and software is stored on servers and accessed via the Internet, especially in the corporate space where the potential market size is much larger than the retail space.

"Many enterprises have reservations about the security of cloud computing because of the multi-tenant architecture and the fact that cloud providers are 'big targets'," said Steve Hodgkinson, IT research director at UK-based research firm Ovum.

"The reality, however, is that the leading cloud providers have a very strong incentive to invest in the latest security technologies and processes -- and will arguably be more secure than most enterprises themselves."

Security is a hot issue in the computing world. Hackers broke into Sony's networks and accessed the information of more than 1 million customers, the latest of several security breaches.

The breaches were the latest attacks on high-profile firms, including defense contractor Lockheed Martin and Google, which pointed the blame at China.

Concerns over security could slow the growth of the market for cloud computing, which is expected to reach $3.2 billion this year in Asia alone from $1.87 billion last year, while the global market could reach $55 billion in 2014, according to estimates by technology research firm IDC.

Fragmented Market

Analysts and industry experts believe hardware-based security provides a higher level of protection than software with encryption added to data in the servers. Chipmakers are working to build more authentication into the silicon.

"We have to do a combination of mitigating things like building more and more security in the infrastructure," said Boyd Davis, a vice president at chipmaker Intel Corp, speaking at the Computex computer show in Taipei this week.

Intel has been working since the end of last year with software and computer vendors including Fujitsu, Huawei, Cisco, Dell, IBM and Hewlett Packard on a cross-industry initiative aimed at making cloud infrastructure more simplified, secure and efficient.

But one of the problems cloud faces is that it is a fragmented market where many vendors provide different security solutions based on their own standards.

Intel's rival ARM and Advanced Micro Devices are also in the process of embedding higher security in their chips and processors, but working with different partners.

If there was an open standard to follow, it would help the industry to build a much secure cloud system, according to AMD.

"Because if you don't have an open standard, you might do security in a certain way and I might do something that's not compatible, and the applications can't talk to each other," said Manju Hegde, AMD's corporate vice president.

He noted that Apple, set to unveil next week a cloud-based service called iCloud, has its own security because it is a vertical company, but the rest the industry should have an open standard.

Intel's Davis agreed that the lack of an open standard and interoperability are limits to the cloud, but added that the industry would have to strike a balance in an open standard with security or else it would make hackers' work easier.

"Because the definition of secure is tightly held. That's one of the dilemmas we'll face. We'd like to provide more capability to control the workload running on our processors, but the more we do that the more we invite malicious codes in."

(Editing by Jonathan Standing and Muralikumar Anantharaman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7521WQ20110603





Hacker Group LulzSec Challenges FBI
Tiek00n

Hacker Group "LulzSec" has gained some attention recently for their hacks of PBS and Sony. Their most recent target: FBI affiliate Infragard.

The group claims, "It has come to our unfortunate attention that NATO and our good friend Barrack Osama-Llama 24th-century Obama have recently upped the stakes with regard to hacking. They now treat hacking as an act of war. So, we just hacked an FBI affiliated website (Infragard, specifically the Atlanta chapter) and leaked its user base. We also took complete control over the site and defaced it..."
http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/06/0...Challenges-FBI

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

May 28th, May 21st, May 14th, May 7th

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


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