Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 27th, '11

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August 27th, 2011




Federal Judge Finds Cloud Music Lockers Do Not Violate Copyrights
Jon Mitchell

A federal judge in New York ruled today in the defendant's favor on a copyright infringement case brought EMI and 14 record companies against cloud music locker service MP3tunes. Judge William H. Pauley III found that cloud-based music lockers are, for the most part, legally in the clear. The judge found that "MP3tunes did not promote infringement" by offering an open cloud storage service for music, meaning that it, as well as big-name services like Google Music and Amazon Cloud Drive, are on the right side of the law.

The record companies claimed that services like these duplicate files in ways that violate copyrights, that they don't do enough to stop repeat infringers, and that playing back songs from a locker constitute a "public performance," which would require a license for the material. The judge rejected all these claims, finding that MP3tunes is protected as a service provider under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The plaintiffs also argued that works recorded prior to 1972 were not protected by the DMCA, but the judge overturned this charge as well.

The record companies alleged that MP3tunes was responsible for 33,000 copyright violations, but Judge Pauley's ruling reduced that number by 99% to only 350 works. The violations are specific, involving MP3Tunes' technical failure to distinguish authorized copies of some songs, given away during "viral" marketing campaigns, and unauthorized copies that were still protected. The ruling found that these arrangements "contributed to the unauthorized use of EMI's copyrighted works," though MP3tunes founder/CEO and main defendant Michael Robertson says MP3tunes is "prepared to continue battling for the last 1%" of works cited in the case.

Overall, this is a resounding victory for cloud locker services and their users, though, as Robertson says, "it was not a complete victory[, and it was] not a final ruling," because some elements can still be appealed. EMI's case relied on several misconstructions of the nature of these services, and the judge turned those aside. EMI claimed that these cloud services host a "master copy" of a file within their service, so that users who upload the same song are just playing one digital copy hosted by the service. Playing that file would constitute a "public performance" that would require a license. But in reality, cloud locker services store individual copies of a user's own music, so they are merely service providers, and they can't be held accountable for copyright violations.

A victory for consumer choice

When it comes to Web-based music services, the alternative to cloud storage is a subscription-based streaming model, many of which have gained in popularity this year. These services are dependent on licenses for the material, though, so if they don't have the music a user is looking for, that user has to listen to it elsewhere. Alternatively, cloud lockers agnostically host whatever music a user wants to upload, and both Google and Amazon offer services like these, as does MP3tunes, the defendant in this case. Though record labels have accused these services of promoting piracy, today's ruling finds that they aren't responsible for the content uploaded by their users, and that's a victory for consumer choice.
https://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...do_not_vio.php





The Expendables Makers Dismiss Massive BitTorrent Lawsuit
Ernesto

The ever-growing avalanche of lawsuits against BitTorrent users in the United States may have reached a turning point. The makers of The Expendables have voluntarily dismissed their case against 23,322 alleged BitTorrent users who they accused of illegally downloading and sharing their film. This means that the once-largest BitTorrent lawsuit ever is finally over, and it could signal the beginning of the end for the entire scheme.

Since 2010 the United States Copyright Group (USCG) has sued tens of thousands of BitTorrent users who allegedly shared films without the consent of copyright holders.

Their example was soon followed by other law firms, representing dozens of copyright holders, who saw an opportunity to convert instances of piracy into a healthy revenue stream.

One of the movie studios that teamed up with USCG is Nu Image, the makers of The Expendables, an independent production that grossed more than $100 million in the United States alone.

A massive list of 23,322 U.S. Internet users were targeted by the film studio, and for a short while Nu Image had the questionable honor of having started the biggest file-sharing lawsuit the world has ever witnessed.

But, instead of raking in millions of dollars from the accused file-sharers as was the plan, Nu Image has now thrown in the towel by voluntarily dismissing the case.

Late last month the film studio received bad news as District Court Judge Robert Wilkins ruled that Nu Image can only go after those individuals who are reasonably likely to be living in the District of Columbia. This means that the movie studio could not send any subpoenas to ISPs when the IP-addresses are located in other districts.

This effectively meant that 99% of the initial defendants walked free. A devastating blow to the plans of USCG and Nu Image, and as a result they’ve now decided to drop the case in its entirety, including the defendants who were sued in the right district.

“Plaintiff hereby gives notice that it voluntarily dismisses the case in its entirety, without prejudice,” the attorneys write in a brief notice to the court.

Although it is not the first time that a judge has ruled that defendants have to be sued in the right court, the current case adds extra weight because of the sheer number of defendants and the fact that it received widespread coverage in the media previously.

If other judges side with Wilkins, future mass-lawsuits against BitTorrent users will become more costly. Although it is unlikely that these cases will disappear entirely, it seems plausible to assume that lawyers will now think twice before they sue thousands of defendants in the wrong district.

USCG in particular has to change their tactics if they want to continue suing alleged copyright infringers, not least because their actions are being watched more closely after doubt was cast over the reliability of their evidence.
https://torrentfreak.com/the-expenda...awsuit-110825/





RIAA Files Appeal in Jammie Thomas Case
Greg Sandoval

The large record companies have filed an appeal in their long-running copyright case against Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a Minnesota woman who was found liable for illegal file sharing.

In court documents filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) says it is appealing several decisions made during the case, going back to 2008.

Last month, a federal court once again lowered the amount a jury ordered Thomas-Rasset to pay to compensate the RIAA for damages. Last year, Rasset was ordered to pay $62,500 for each of the 24 songs she was accused of uploading illegally to the Web. But U.S. District Court Judge Michael Davis in Minnesota lowered the sum to $2,250 per song and with that, instead of owing the music labels $1.5 million, Thomas-Rasset currently owes them $54,000.

According to the documents filed with the appeals court by the RIAA, the trade group that represents all four of the largest trade companies wants the judges to determine:

Whether the district court erred by concluding that making a copyrighted work available for download on an online file-sharing network is insufficient to constitute a 'distribution' under 106(3) of the Copyright Act, and therefore refusing to enjoin defendant from making plaintiffs' copyrighted sound recordings available to the public.

Whether the district court erred by concluding that it had committed an error in instructing the jury that making a copyrighted work available for download on a online file-sharing network constitutes a "distribution" under 1063 of the Copyright Act and therefore vacating the jury's verdict and ordering a new trial.

Whether the district court erred by holding that the jury's award of statutory damages for defendant's willful copyright infringement violated the due process clause even though it was well within the range of damages awards authorized by 504(c) of the Copyright Act.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20...e-thomas-case/





Recording Labels Sue YouTube Downloader Website, Fail To Grasp The Insignificance Of Their Actions
Devin Coldewey

The recording industry doesn’t have the most respectable history when it comes to lawsuits. Between asking for millions for trivial acts of piracy, and asking potentially for trillions in more serious cases, they’ve shown that they’re not only completely disconnected from reality, but totally unheeding of the actual effects of their litigation. So it’s not surprising to see them tilting at yet another windmill.

Today’s target is TubeFire, a site that should be familiar to you, at least in principle. It allows you to download and convert YouTube videos to a format more easily watched offline (FLV files can be tricky). You give it the URL, it churns for a bit, and then you can download the video in MP4 or another format. Clearly this re-containering of free content is a grave threat to the recording industry, and must be stopped at all costs. So 25 of the world’s largest labels have gotten together and sued them.

TubeFire’s services are temporarily suspended pending examination of the complaint (in its place is a note apologizing and briefly describing the situation). And to be honest, the complaint is probably valid: technically, TubeFire was modifying and redistributing copyrighted material, at least so it appears on the face of it. The site is owned by Japanese media company MusicGate, and the suit was filed in Tokyo District Court. How international content protection laws will play out is beyond the purview of this article, but an international consortium of content providers is likely to make its effect felt regardless of jurisdiction.

The funny thing is that, as it so often is with these clowns, they’re not only barking up the wrong tree for a number of reasons, but they don’t seem to understand that they’re in a whole forest of wrong trees.

TubeFire is an ace away from being a perfectly legal service. To begin with, it’s plainly providing a useful service that’s only potentially a danger to copyright. Re-encoding videos to enhance portability isn’t criminal. YouTube is a fundamentally online service, and this is a natural extension of it, the way image servers and short URLs have acted for Twitter for so long. Users want to watch these videos, which for all intents and purposes are being given away for free, in places other than YouTube, for a number of perfectly legitimate reasons: bandwidth caps, coverage issues, traveling, and yes, sharing.

Next, local copies of the videos in question may already be present on the user’s computer. By simply viewing the video, it’s possible they have duplicated the whole thing in RAM or a temp folder. This writing, rewriting, renaming, and so on must count as modifying copyrighted data, mustn’t it? If not, then TubeFire isn’t much different. The video is already being encoded multiple times, transmitted as packet data, decoded and translated to display data. One more encode in there doesn’t materially affect the product.

Furthermore, is it really TubeFire doing this? Just as it is not Bittorrent Inc that pirates movies and music, TubeFire should not be held accountable for the actions of users. Terrorists used Google Maps to plan their strikes. Stalkers use Facebook to find victims. TubeFire is a simple in-out operation that corrects a minor problem with videos that users already have access to.

And let us not forget that TubeFire is one of perhaps hundreds of tools used for this purpose. They must not have looked very hard for them. Let me help, guys. I have one myself, built into my browser! I’ve buried it in the menu so it doesn’t clutter the screen, but look at how easy it is for me to grab one of many copies of a video:

Update: Mike reminds me that we in fact had our own tool for several years. YouTube sent us a cease and desist letter and eventually disabled the tool, but no one shook us down for millions in damages. It was a TOS thing, not a copyright thing.

Many of these are easily accessible just by changing the URL slightly or other simple methods. Some sites and tools strip the audio out, another extremely easy process — and one replicable, of course, by loading the YouTube video and closing your eyes.

These companies want to have their cake and allow no one to eat it at all. They don’t seem to understand that putting content on a service like YouTube comes at a price. They are making the content publicly available, free to all. They are literally giving away the content — and then they get mad when someone takes it!

The labels are seeking what appears to be statutory lost-income damages of $300 per video for an estimated 10,000 videos. That adds up to $3 million — the amount the labels would have earned if TubeFire had licensed each video. Now there are two objections here. Why is it a license and not royalties? If anything, TubeFire “rebroadcasted” the content, more like a relay station than anything, and a standard royalty fee of however many pennies or yen seems like it might be more applicable. I’m dubious on that point, however. It’s also unclear whether TubeFire knew they should have been licensing. The service does not require that information; it takes an identifier code, downloads the associated FLV file, and repackages it. Were the labels paying their artists when a file was watched, downloaded, or only when purchased? And how do they define “download”?

If the labels are in fact successful at bankrupting and shutting down TubeFire, I must warn them that the effect will be utterly nil. Any user who wants to download a video from YouTube will do so. There will be no reduction in this practice. The site is easily cloned, as the great number of similar sites shows (I can’t even remember which one is the original, if there is one). And like most of their legal actions, this one will bring down a rain of bad PR; if anything, piracy will increase. Here’s where I would put the hydra metaphor if this article weren’t already over a thousand words long.

Why, I wonder, did they not think harder about this and try something more effective and interesting? Maybe for music videos, the YouTube version is only half the song, and then there’s a link to the artist’s site, where there’s a more secure player and various buy and share links. Or release 10-second snippets on YouTube leading up the actual release elsewhere. Or just accept that when you let the cat out of the bag, you’re unlikely to get it back in. Piracy is when people steal things. Piracy is not people taking the content you gave them and watching it somewhere else. And TubeFire is nothing but a simple shortcut for actions users would be able to carry out anyway. Unfortunately, this distinction requires a judge capable of comprehending tech issues like this, and those judges are in short supply these days.

I know the music and movie associations are famously impervious to reason, but this is beyond stupid.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/26/one...t-a-time-dept/





Copyright Infringement Bill Protests to Take Place
Siobhan Keogh

Protests against the copyright infringement bill, which comes into action on 1 September, will take place in four New Zealand cities this Saturday.

The Infringing File Sharing Amendment Bill, dubbed the 'Skynet' law and the 'three strikes' law by commentators, allows copyright holders to issues infringement notices to internet users through their ISPs. Receiving three notices - or three 'strikes' - could mean a fine or a period of internet disconnection.

The bill was passed under urgency during the state of emergency that followed the February Christchurch earthquake.

Nearly 2,000 people have marked that they will be attending the Auckland protest on its Facebook page, with a further 350 having ticked the attending box in Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.

Protesters have been encouraged to wear black in reference to the 'blackout' campaign that took place when the government previously attempted to pass the bill.
http://pcworld.co.nz/pcworld/pcw.nsf...-to-take-place





Protest Against the Infringing File Sharing Amendment Bill
Friday, 26 August 2011, 11:33 am
Press Release: Green Party

Protest against the Infringing File Sharing Amendment Bill

What: Protest against the Infringing File Sharing Amendment
When: 12–3pm Saturday 27 August
Where: Aotea Square
Who: Green MP Gareth Hughes

Green Party technology spokesperson Gareth Hughes will be attending the protest against the Infringing File Sharing Amendment Bill in Auckland tomorrow.
Green MP Kevin Hague will also speak at the Christchurch protest.

The protest, organised primarily through Facebook and online discussion forums, is protesting the use of urgency to pass the law as well as the guilt-on-accusation nature of the law and the draconian three strikes clause which puts schools, universities and libraries at risk of fines or possible account disconnection.

The Green Party was the only party to vote against this controversial law and is encouraging greater availability of online content as a more effective means of reducing illegal online sharing.

“This law will have a chilling effect on public Wi-Fi internet and mean big costs for small businesses, schools and universities who will be responsible for all infringing on their account,” Mr Hughes said.

“The cost-recovery model adopted by the Government for ISPs to send the 3-strike notices could also see internet cost rises.

“The Government hasn’t done enough to prepare the public or schools for the introduction of this law who will face the penalties as account holders.”

Mr Hughes said that even the Speaker of Parliament would be liable for any infringing on the Parliamentary internet account.

“We support Kiwi creatives and think encouraging greater legal content available online would be more effective than this law which makes it cheaper and faster for large, very-profitable corporate media companies to enforce their old distribution models,” Mr Hughes said.

Wellington protest
Saturday 27 August
12:00pm - 3:00pm
Steps of Parliament

Christchurch protest
Saturday 27 August
12:00pm - 3:00pm
Ilam Fields to Hagley Park

Dunedin protest
Saturday 27 August
12:00pm - 3:00pm
The Octagon

Facebook events for the protest
Auckland: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=201024813275937
Wellington: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=146346358768364
Christchurch: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=211988468819910
Dunedin http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=237251236312943
ENDS
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA110...dment-bill.htm





New Zealanders Block Street, Rally Against New File-Sharing Law

Protestors demonstrating against new internet copyright laws blocked off Auckland's Queen St today.

Police said about 60 protestors turned up and sat in the intersection of Wellesley and Queen streets in the central city after midday.

The group was orderly and moved on quickly when police arrived.

No arrests were made.

The protestors were demonstrating against the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill, which comes into force on Thursday.

The bill makes downloading copyright-protected material punishable by fines of up to $15,000, with copyright holders able to alert internet service providers to any breaches.

The protestors are from a group called New Zealand Internet Freedom Collective (NZIFC).

The group's spokesman, James Roberts, says the law will be ineffective and infringes on the rights of New Zealanders.

"We do not want innocent New Zealanders criminalised by a law that will not stop the major illegal music and movie pirates actions who can easily avoid detection.

"We are also outraged that this law was rushed through Parliament under the urgency laws brought in to deal with the Christchurch earthquake."
http://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/5518...rum-up-support





Eagles Singer Don Henley: EFF, Google "Aid And Abet" Criminals
Nate Anderson

According to a USA Today op-ed from Eagles drummer and singer Don Henley, blocking foreign "rogue" websites, banning them from search engines, and cutting off their advertising and credit cards is "common sense." His arguments are neither new nor interesting, but what caught my eye was Henley's truly aggressive language toward those who lack his "common sense."

Henley supports the controversial PROTECT IP Act currently suffering a legislative hold in the Senate thanks to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). Those who have issues with the bill include the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Google—and Henley suggests that both are borderline complicit in criminal activity because of their resistance.

Critics of this pending legislation need to be honest about the company they keep and why they essentially aid and abet these criminal endeavors. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a civil liberties group, claims such a bill would "break the Internet," while Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt says it sets "a disastrous precedent" for freedom of speech. No one has the freedom to commit or abet crimes on the Internet. Stopping crime on the Internet is not, as EFF says, "censorship." There is no First Amendment right to infringe intellectual property rights.

That's a strong charge, though Google's recent agreement to pay $500 million to the US government for accepting money from foreign pharmacy websites certainly bolsters critics like Henley. I asked both Google and the EFF what they thought of this "aiding and abetting" language; Google did not respond by publication time.

The EFF sent me a copy of its own letter to USA Today, which has yet to run. It reads, in part:

EFF opposes this legislation not because we support intellectual property infringement (we don’t) but because the bill proposes troubling ways to try to address it. The legislation would establish vague and overbroad definitions, increase the risk of costly litigation (the bill’s right of action would not, as Mr. Henley suggests, be limited to law enforcement but encompass private actors and civil claims as well), and impose compliance burdens on search engines, payment processors, online advertisers, and potentially any service that provides links to third-party websites.

As a result, it poses a threat to online innovation, free speech, and creative efforts that our intellectual property system is supposed to promote... Apparently Mr. Henley does not object to compromising the Internet in the name of intellectual property rights enforcement. We do, and we think your readers should, too.

The response showed amazing restraint when it came to incorporating Eagles song titles; EFF board member Brad Templeton, who penned his own response to Henley, went in the other direction:

Take it Easy, Don. There’s a New Kid in Town, and it’s called the Internet. Get Over It. I Can’t Tell you Why, but in The Long Run, there isn’t going to be a Heartache Tonight. One of these Nights I hope you’ll you understand that for search engines to Take it To the Limit, they can’t be forced to police every search result.

Internet companies only grow when living Life in the Fast Lane, able to operate, innovate and design products without needing to check for permission from the music industry. If every time you wrote a song you had to worry about what every user who plays it and every store that sells it might do with it, you would lose your Peaceful, Easy Feeling quickly. Big companies might run filters, but if the small ones had needed to they would be Already Gone.

Henley closes without apparent irony, warning Congress not to be "taken in by special interest agendas disguised as First Amendment claims, or they themselves will be as culpable of abetting theft as the rogue sites and companies that support them."

So, Members of Congress, remember: doing the entertainment industry's bidding is common sense. Listening to the "special interests" who worry about freedom of speech and breaking the Internet? Well, that makes you just as much a criminal as they are.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-criminals.ars





Paul Vixie Explains How PROTECT IP Will Break The Internet
Mike Masnick

It's pretty difficult to question Paul Vixie's credibility when it comes to core internet infrastructure. Creator of a variety of key Unix and internet software, he's still most known for his work on BIND, "the most widely used DNS software on the internet." So you would think that when he and a few other core internet technologists spoke up about why PROTECT IP would break fundamental parts of the internet, people would pay attention. Tragically, PROTECT IP supporters, like the MPAA, appear to be totally clueless in arguing against Vixie. Their response is basically "it's fine to break the internet to evil rogue sites."

That, of course, is missing the point. It's not that anyone's worried about breaking the internet for those sites. It's that it will break fundamental parts of the internet for everyone else as well. And... it will do this in a way that won't make a dent in online infringement. Afterdawn sat down with Vixie who gave a clear and concise explanation of why PROTECT IP is a problem. The biggest issue is how it will impact DNSSEC, which adds encrypted signatures to DNS records to make sure that the IP address you're getting is authentic. You want that. Without that, there are significant security risks. But PROTECT IP ignores that.

Explained simply, for DNSSEC to work, it needs to be able to route around errors. But the way PROTECT IP is written, routing around errors will break the law:

Say your browser, when it's trying to decide whether some web site is or is not your bank's web site, sees the modifications or hears no response. It has to be able to try some other mechanism like a proxy or a VPN as a backup solution rather than just giving up (or just accepting the modification and saying "who cares?"). Using a proxy or VPN as a backup solution would, under PROTECT IP, break the law.

And, of course, none of these DNS efforts will actually stop infringement. As the Afterdawn article notes: "Bypassing DNS filtering is trivially easy. All you need to do is configure your computer to use DNS servers outside the US which won't be affected by the law."

And while supporters of PROTECT IP insist that there's nothing to worry about because it only impacts those "foreign websites," that's misleading in the extreme. PROTECT IP will impact a ton of US-based technology companies. First, if we have a less secure internet, that's going to be a problem for obvious reasons. Additionally, the way the law works is that it puts a direct burden on US companies to figure out ways to block sites declared rogue (you know, like the Internet Archive and 50 Cent's personal website), or face liability. This will increase both compliance and legal costs.

In the last few months we've been hearing from more folks in the startup world who are really concerned about the excessive burdens PROTECT IP is going to put on them. If you're an entrepreneur who's worried about this, we'd like to hear about it. Please contact us.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...internet.shtml





Washington Post Editorial Claims Piracy 'Costs' Companies Millions; Believes PROTECT IP Won't Be 'More Sweeping Than Necessary'
Tim Cushing

Another editorial has appeared supporting PROTECT IP, this time at the Washington Post. The writer, sporting the unlikely nom de plume "Editorial," makes the usual statements rehashing the usual arguments. In true pro-PROTECT IP fashion, it begins by pretending this act has something to do with counterfeited goods:

CITY SIDEWALKS ONCE were lined with merchants peddling counterfeit designer handbags or second-rate copies of popular movies. Such vendors are less commonplace today, but counterfeit goods have proliferated more than ever, thanks to the Internet.

Fake goods - from sneakers to pharmaceuticals - are produced half a world away but can be marketed to U.S. consumers through foreign Web sites.

So far, so what. If anyone is still clinging to the notion that PROTECT IP is being cobbled together to stop trafficking of counterfeit goods, then these few lines of lead-in should allow them to remain comfortably misinformed. Editorial (or "Ed," for short) gets to the real driving force behind the act in the very next sentence:

Some sites stream pirated U.S.-produced or -owned movies and television shows. Such theft costs the copyright- or trademark-holders billions of dollars each year and thwarts the ability of writers, producers, songwriters and others in the creative arts to earn the royalties they are due.

Costs? Really? Piracy COSTS the rightsholders billions of dollars?

Now, you can make the argument that piracy results in lost sales or that a decline in revenues can possibly be attributed to piracy (no really, go ahead... the comment threads are open), but I don't think that you can say that piracy of goods costs these companies anything. Just because the content providers of the US may be routinely filling out large numbers under the heading "PIRATES" in their collective Accounts Payable columns, they are incurring no costs as a result of piracy.

Now, those in the industry may be confused and point to the dollar amount expended to fight piracy as a "cost," but if that's the case, it's very much an optional cost. More to the point, pretty much every dollar spent on this fight is a wasted dollar. For all the good it does them, they may as well just contact major pirates (whoever they are) and offer them X amount of dollars to stop running their piratey websites. Sure, these pirates might take the money and some might even cease their piratical operations, but someone else would take their place and no one would be better off but a limited number of pirates.

In short, discussing piracy as a "cost' when it comes to digital goods is completely misrepresenting what's actually going on here. If we were discussing physical goods, then yes, theft (a word that is perfectly logical when referring to physical goods) could be considered a cost. But when it's just a matter of bandwidth usage paid for by the uploaders and downloaders, then there's no real "cost."

However, the inanity/insanity doesn't stop there. Read on:

Consumers often find themselves saddled with shoddy goods and little or no recourse to get their money back. Unlike domestic sites, these foreign-registered businesses are often out of reach of U.S. laws.

Maybe those consumers who are purchasing counterfeit products are finding themselves with shoddy goods, but I can guarantee you that consumers who are availing themselves of pirated digital goods (movies, music, games) are finding themselves "saddled" with clearly superior goods, free of region locking, DRM, ridiculous street dates, a million anti-piracy intersitials and the like.

It goes on from there, sounding more and more like an MPAA press release than an actual editorial. There's some stuff about how PROTECT IP won't break the internet or violate anyone's free speech. There's talk about how "reasonable" and "fair" it is and how it will only be used to deal with consistent violators (the ever-popular "rogue sites") before wrapping it all up with this paragraph:

The Protect IP Act takes pains to protect Internet service providers, search engines and others that may have done business with a rogue site. They are not required to scour the Internet for offenders nor are they held liable if they happen to host or provide services to a site that is eventually deemed unlawful. They are only required to take "reasonable" and "technically feasible" measures to obey a court order. There may still be room to tweak these provisions to ensure that they are not more sweeping than necessary. But there is a need for a legal tool that stops those who persistently leech off of the innovations of others.

While I would like to believe that efforts enforced by the DHS (in association with the MPAA and RIAA) would result only in tempered responses to the "worst" sites, there is nothing in the collective past of all the entities involved that indicates this would happen. And as has been proven already, what the MPAA/RIAA/DHS feels is reasonable is far removed from what ISPs and search engines feel is reasonable. So the definition of "reasonable" will obviously be left in the hands of those tasked with enforcing the legislation and, as other nations instituting various anti-piracy programs have shown, the public is already persona non grata during the debate of these bills. It can't be too much longer before everyone else on the "outside" of this bill (ISPs, search engines, etc.) finds themselves completely shut out of the input process.

And what exactly is this supposed to mean? "Not more sweeping than necessary?" Everything implemented in a top-down fashion by government entities is "sweeping." The government only knows how to do "macro." That's what government does best. The government should not be in the micromanagement business, but thanks to the fiduciary arm twisting of various lobbyists, it's finding itself in exactly that position. Even worse, "Ed" here is relying on the fact that the government (again, in conjunction with the RIAA and the MPAA) has any idea what "necessary" is and can be counted on to not "sweep" past it.

None of this is truly necessary and as such, it can pretty much be guaranteed that the implementation of PROTECT IP will bring about tons of enthusiastic sweeping with a large number of overreaching brooms. And not only will the taxpayers be handed a broken internet (while being scolded about "why we can't have nice things"), we'll also be expected to pay for the privilege, including any internet repair work down the road.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...ecessary.shtml





RealNetworks Crushes Dutch Webmaster for Hyperlink

Vendor lawsuit is over link to competing freeware package
Brenno de Winter

RealNetworks has sued the owner of a website in The Netherlands for displaying a hyperlink to a competing freeware package. As the company seeks compensation for its claimed losses, the 26-year-old man is borrowing money from family to survive.

The case started in 2010 when RealNetworks demanded that the computers belonging to Hilbrand Edskes and his family be confiscated. A Dutch judge granted this in an ex-parte ruling, based on an alleged violation of copyright law and trademark law. The company claims that Edskes was hosting the infringing software. The move to secretly obtain the order was meant to ensure that evidence wasn’t deleted.

Edskes has a website, Codecpack.nl, that links to a wide variety of freeware programs. One of these is Real Alternative, a competitor of the mediaplayer RealPlayer from RealNetworks. RealNetworks alleges that the software violates their trademarks and copyright, and it wants to be compensated for all downloads via Codecpack.nl.

However, Edskes wasn’t hosting the software, but just redirected to other sites for the actual download. The complaint turned out to be based on a hyperlink to the software. To date there have been two court sessions, and in December Edskes will have to testify under oath.

There is a heavy pricetag attached to the case. So far Edskes has incurred more than €66,000 in legal fees. He says the costs cut his savings, hindering him from buying his own house. If he loses the case Dutch law requires him to cover all legal fees of RealNetworks. According to documents Webwereld.nl has studied these costs are nearly €75,000.

RealNetworks claims Edskes failed to remove the link to the software, and the reference in the DNS directories existed after February 12, 2010. However, the hosting provider checked backups and confirmed the removal of the link. The company that confiscated the computers has confirmed the immediate removal of the link. Unclear is the exact date the DNS reference disappeared, since backup cycles take longer. RealNetworks alleges the infringement was ongoing for 43 days and thus Edskes ought to pay €210,000 in fines. Edskes claims DNS caching is to blame for the delay.

It is remarkable that RealNetworks is going after Edskes. The software is available at many locations. The documents seen by Webwereld also show that the company is unaware of who the real creator of Real Alternative is. When asked a series of questions on the matter the company, through their Dutch legal firm, refused to comment. Questions will be answered only when the court has ruled, "no matter what the outcome is."
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/tech...for-hyperlink/





Why IP Addresses Alone Don't Identify Criminals
Marcia Hofmann

This spring, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed a search warrant at the home of Nolan King and seized six computer hard drives in connection with a criminal investigation. The warrant was issued on the basis of an Internet Protocol (IP) address that traced back to an account connected to Mr. King's home, where he was operating a Tor exit relay.

An exit relay is the last computer that Tor traffic goes through before it reaches its destination. Because Tor traffic exits through these computers, their IP addresses may be misinterpreted as the source of the traffic, even though the exit node operator is neither the true origin of that traffic nor able to identify the user who is. While law enforcement officers have seized exit relays in other countries, we weren't aware of any seizures in the United States until ICE showed up at Mr. King's home.

After the computers were seized, EFF spoke with ICE and explained that Mr. King was running a Tor exit relay in his home. We pointed out that ICE could confirm on the Tor Project's web site that a computer associated with the IP address listed in the warrant was highly likely to have been running an exit relay at the date and time listed in the warrant. ICE later returned the hard drives, warning Mr. King that "this could happen again." After EFF sent a letter, however, ICE confirmed that it hadn't retained any data from the computer and that Mr. King is no longer a person of interest in the investigation.

While we think it's important to let the public know about this unfortunate event, it doesn't change our belief that running a Tor exit relay is legal. And it's worth highlighting the fact that these unnecessary incidents are avoidable, and law enforcement agents and relay operators alike can take measures to avoid them in the future.

First, an IP address doesn't automatically identify a criminal suspect. It's just a unique address for a device connected to the Internet, much like a street address identifies a building. In most cases, an IP address will identify a router that one or more computers use to connect to the Internet. Sometimes a router's IP address might correspond fairly well to a specific user—for example, a person who lives alone and has a password-protected wireless network. And tracking the IP addresses associated with a person over time can create a detailed portrait of her movements and activities in private spaces, as we've pointed out in a case in which the government is seeking IP addresses of several Twitter users in connection with the criminal investigation of Wikileaks.

But in many situations, an IP address isn't personally identifying at all. When it traces back to a router that connects to many computers at a library, cafe, university, or to an open wireless network, VPN or Tor exit relay used by any number of people, an IP address alone doesn't identify the sender of a specific message. And because of pervasive problems like botnets and malware, suspect IP addresses increasingly turn out to be mere stepping stones for the person actually "using" the computer—a person who is nowhere nearby.

This means an IP address is nothing more than a piece of information, a clue. An IP address alone is not probable cause that a person has committed a crime. Furthermore, search warrants executed solely on the basis of IP addresses have a significant likelihood of wasting officers' time and resources rather than producing helpful leads.

In the case of Tor, the police can avoid mistakenly pursuing exit relay operators by checking the IP addresses that emerge in their investigations against publicly available lists of exit relays published on the Tor Project's web site. The ExoneraTor is another tool that allows anyone to quickly and easily see whether a Tor exit relay was likely to have been running at a particular IP address during a given date and time. The Tor Project can also help law enforcement agencies set up their own systems to query IP addresses easily. These simple checks will help officers concentrate their investigative resources on tracking down those actually committing crimes and ensure that they don't execute search warrants at innocent people's homes.

If you run an exit relay, consider operating it in a Tor-friendly commercial facility instead of your home to make it less likely that law enforcement agents will show up at your door. Also follow the Tor Project's advice for running an exit relay, which includes setting up a reverse DNS name for your IP address that makes it clear your computer is running an exit relay.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/0...tify-criminals





SIGGRAPH Keynote Review: Cory Doctorow Discusses Copyright Laws
Ryan Wilsey (Bandrik)

The annual SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference has always had a knack for attracting some of the brightest minds in the computer graphics industry, and 2011 is no exception. Nestled away in the waterfront Canadian city of Vancouver this year, Cory Doctorow was invited to give the keynote address at SIGGRAPH 2011.

Cory Doctorow is an esteemed writer, contributing to The Guardian, the New York Times, and Wired, as well as a science fiction author of books such as Little Brother and For the Win. He is currently the co-editor of the popular blog, Boing Boing.

During his talk, Cory focused on the role of copyright laws. These laws have, unfortunately, struck a sour chord with people everywhere. From RIAA crackdowns to tyrannical DRM in games, copyrights have gone from protecting content creators to becoming a jailhouse for digital freedoms. Cory firmly believes that this isn’t how it has to be, and begins by inviting us to record and upload his talk, which can be viewed at the end of this article.

“In the digital age, everything we do involves making copies,” he begins. “In the U.S., we copy like we breathe.” Copyright is here to help govern how these copies are made, and to protect the rights of content creators. While copyright has received a bad rap lately, “a good copyright system results in more people making more creations—one of copyrights’ most important goals is to serve creators.”

When copyright goes wrong

Almost two decades ago, governments realized that they needed to address the growing amount of digitally transferred copying. Copyright law had to be modernized to cope with the digital age, starting with the passing of law to protect technologies used to prevent unauthorized copying. In 1996, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaty pressed nations to adopt special protections for “technical protection measures”, today known as

Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Two years later, one of the most notorious pieces of American legislation came into being: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1998, the DMCA went beyond WIPO’s suggestions by not just protecting copy-preventing digital locks, but also making the act of circumventing these locks illegal—even for using the copyrighted content for otherwise legal means. This means while it is legal to back up, format-shift, time-shift, or quote for the purposes of criticism or discussion copyrighted material, all of this is barred once DRM is applied.

DRM-free since 2003. The DMCA didn't work.

This removal of previously available rights became the DMCA’s exploitable flaw. Because of the almost unfair protections the law has given, “DRM companies have more say over our works than we do.” Cory uses Apple and the iTunes audiobook store as an example. Content makers must agree to have Apple’s DRM applied to their wares, which prevents end users from taking audiobooks purchased from iTunes onto different platforms, should they decide to later switch. Meanwhile, Apple gets to enjoy the lion’s share of copyright protection, rather than the authors—maintaining almost full control over the content.

The slightly ironic thing about DRM is how painfully ineffective it is at preventing copying. I can almost guarantee that most of you reading this have at one time used software to copy a protected DVD or use a cracked version of software. All it takes is for one bright person to shatter a products’ DRM and share the results online. Sadder yet, often the only way to obtain a pristine, fully-functional version of a digital product is to pirate a cracked version of it.

Doctorow’s Laws

At this point, Cory goes to talk about what he calls “Doctorow’s Laws” in regards to copyright, of which there are three. Doctorow’s Law #1 is that “anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and won’t give you the key, they did not put the lock there for your benefit”. While this may seem obvious, it goes back to the idea of selling a crippled product to end-users, especially when some vendors go as far as touting the DRM as a “feature”.

Doctorow’s Law #2: “Fame won’t guarantee fortune, but nobody has ever gotten rich by being obscure”. While this may be a slightly odd statement with regards to copyright, the point of this is twofold. First, it is indeed quite true that just being well-known doesn’t automatically give you a pool of money to swim through like Scrooge McDuck. However, people can’t buy something that they don’t know even exists. Thus, fame and notoriety are useful for garnering commercial success.

Stewart got it half right.

Now here’s how copyright comes into play with Law #2: getting people interested in your content can be difficult, but copying solves the “getting stuff to your audience” problem. Content can be hosted on and shared via intermediaries such as YouTube and Blogger. Fortunately, these intermediaries are not required to police every single submission, which is impossible due to the sheer volume that users push. However, entertainment companies such as Viacom are lobbying to apply these liabilities or remove privacy options, which would crush content hosting and thus diminishing the ability for creators to share their works.

Doctorow’s Law #3: “Information doesn’t want to be free, people do”. Way back at The Hackers Conference in 1984, Stewart Brand once said to Steve Jobs, “information wants to be free.” However, Cory argues that it isn’t the information that needs to be free and pirated, but for people to be “free to own devices that don’t let remote authorities set policy against our will and against our interests, free to use networks that don’t spy on us in case we’re infringing the copyright, and free to communicate in private without having to worry that our personal lives will be made public in the name of protecting copyrights.”

The future of copyright

Looking to the future, Cory made two distinct predictions. First, copying will become increasingly easier due to larger and cheaper storage solutions, faster and easier networks, and peoples’ knowledge and desire to copy and share. Second, everything done in the physical world will increasingly require some online-connected component, causing internet policies to affect every single aspect of our lives.

To this end, it is very important that copyright laws return to protect and create a proper marketplace for creative works, while restoring freedom to consumers that wish to use their legitimately-purchased content in ways that suit them. In the meantime, entities such as the DMCA and the DRM it supports continues to hinder and stagnate both creators and consumers. Cory ends with a dramatic call to action: “Let’s keep the creative industries where they belong: on the side of free speech, free assembly, and freedom of conscience.”
http://tech.icrontic.com/articles/si...opyright-laws/





Samsung Cites Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' Movie As Prior Art Against iPad Design Patent

Late last night, Samsung filed its opposition brief to Apple's motion for a preliminary injunction in the United States. The main part of Samsung's opposition brief has not yet entered the public record because they filed it under seal. I hope to see a redacted version later today. Samsung has also filed extensive declarations with numerous exhibits, and those documents already give an idea of what Samsung's defense strategy against Apple's motion is.

One element of Samsung's defense strategy is interesting enough that I wanted to report on it beforehand. Ever since Apple started to assert the design of the iPad against other manufacturers, many people have been wondering whether there's actually prior art for the general design of the iPad in some futuristic devices shown in sci-fi movies and TV series. And indeed, Samsung's lawyers make this claim now in their defense against Apple's motion for a preliminary injunction.

This is how the related declaration explains why this movie picture is valid prior art for a certain iPad-related design patent:

Attached hereto as Exhibit D is a true and correct copy of a still image taken from Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey." In a clip from that film lasting about one minute, two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers. The clip can be downloaded online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ8pQVDyaLo. As with the design claimed by the D’889 Patent, the tablet disclosed in the clip has an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table's surface), and a thin form factor.

I also watched that movie years ago. I wouldn't call myself a fan, but I think it's a good film. Admittedly, I had forgotten about those tablet computers shown in it.

It would be amazing if the court agreed with Samsung that this constitutes prior art for that particular iPad-related design patent. Whether or not Samsung will succeed, the mere fact that they proffer this kind of evidence is remarkable and will be exciting for many fans of movies in general -- and of that movie in particular -- to find out about.
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011...icks-2001.html




15-Year-Old Schoolboy On Trial After Head Teacher Tells Police About File-Sharing
enigmax

A 15 year-old schoolboy with a taste for BitTorrent went to trial yesterday after downloading and sharing 24 Hollywood movies. The case, however, has a worrying twist. Rather than being hunted down online by an anti-piracy company, the teenager was turned over to the police by the head teacher at his school. The prosecutor says he had no choice but to take action.

In March 2011 the IT department of a Gothenburg school investigated the issue of a virus which apparently came from a student’s computer.

During a closer examination IT staff found that the student had 24 Hollywood movies stored on his hard drive. The 15-year-old boy in question had obtained them from two Swedish torrent sites – tankafetast.se and tankaner.se.

Ultimately the school’s head teacher learned of the IT technicians’ discovery but rather than deal with the issue in-house, she chose to drastically escalate the matter – by calling in the police. Now, five months after the alleged offenses, the boy is on trial in Sweden.

“Our policy is to always notify the police if we have suspicion of a crime,” the head teacher told GP.se. “It is not our job to investigate, it’s a matter for the police.”

The investigation was led by the International Public Prosecution Office in Stockholm and the trial began in the Gothenburg District Court yesterday. Prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad, a veteran of such cases, says this trial is a record-breaker – no-one this young has ever been prosecuted for file-sharing violations.

“If I find that I can prove a crime, I have to prosecute. I do not consider the person’s age or whether file sharing has occurred on a small or large scale,” Ingblad says. “By contrast, his young age, of course, is important in terms of what punishment he will be sentenced to.”

Although Ingblad says he will press for the teenager to be sentenced as a juvenile, the punishment for copyright infringements still run from fines to two years in jail.

“Politicians and copyright monopolists alike have been promising solemnly to never send the police after the entire younger generation,” Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge told TorrentFreak. “Here, we can see for ourselves how much those promises were worth. The politicians who let this happen need to be kicked out of office.”

During the hearing the boy admitted downloading movies such as The Fighter, The Mechanic, The Social Network and Scary Movie 4, but said that he had no idea he was uploading them to others at the same time.

“It’s paradoxical,” says Inglblad. “The thousands of small users who are online to download a single movie is a prerequisite for the entire system to work.”

“To prosecute one of them is of course just scratching the surface. But if you want the legal download services to work there must be at least a small chance you will get caught if you download illegally, even if you are young,” he says.

Rick Falkvinge sees the situation somewhat differently, in that sharers should not be subjected to criminal trials but rewarded, and that hopefully attitudes in the future will change.

“If the government should interfere at all with people sharing culture, it should be in the form of medals to those who share the most,” he told us.

“It is of poor comfort for a 15-year-old in a criminal court that the laws will have changed to prove him right and dignified several years later. In the meantime, he has the full moral support of pirates all over the world, from San Francisco to Sydney,” he concludes.
https://torrentfreak.com/15-year-old...haring-110824/





Illegal Downloads of Fox Shows on the Rise
Nick Bilton

It looks like the television studios did not learn anything from the missteps of the music industry.

Last month Fox said it would wait eight days after its shows air before making them available on Hulu, the video-streaming Web site. Consumers who want to watch these shows online will now have three choices: Watch the shows live; wait eight days until the videos are posted online by Fox; or, as many have decided to do, watch them illegally.

Fox shows are now being rapidly downloaded on video-sharing sites, according to the blog TorrentFreak, which monitors BitTorrent and file sharing online.

TorrentFreak tracked the number of downloads of two Fox television shows before and after the company’s new eight-day policy took effect. During the first five days of the delay, downloads of the show Hell’s Kitchen increased by 114 percent. Downloads of the show MasterChef also rose by 189 percent, TorrentFreak said.

According to recent studies, illegal music downloads began slowing rapidly with the introduction of online streaming services like Spotify and Rdio. A study in the United Kingdom found that teens do not feel the need to steal music if it is available through online streaming services.

TorrentFreak recently noted that online piracy of television shows fell dramatically when networks began offering video content through streaming networks online. Now, it seems the decision to delay video distribution may bring another rise in online bootlegging.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/0...s-on-the-rise/





Time Warner to Subsidize Subscribers’ TV Device
Brian Stelter

Time Warner Cable, one of the nation’s top cable and Internet providers, said on Tuesday that it would subsidize some purchases of a set-top box called Slingbox that allows users to watch their home television programming from anywhere, like a vacation home or a mobile phone.

Time Warner Cable said it would give subscribers to its $99-a-month Wideband Internet service, which is faster and costlier than traditional broadband, a rebate for the total cost of the $300 device.

As a sales promotion, the rebate offer reflects the fact that Internet connectivity, not television, is becoming the core part of the business for companies like Time Warner Cable. But it doubles as something else: as a shot across the bow to cable programmers who say that distributors should pay them more for the right to such place-shifting.

Time Warner Cable has been wrestling with programmers for months over this issue. In March, the company released an app that allowed its paying subscribers to watch dozens of cable channels on the iPad at home. The app was challenged by some programmers, led by Viacom, which owns channels like MTV and Nickelodeon and which accused Time Warner Cable in a lawsuit of “unlicensed distribution” of its content.

Time Warner Cable, in its own lawsuit, argued that its existing carriage contracts with companies like Viacom cover all the screens in a subscriber’s home.

The dueling lawsuits demonstrate just how contentious the topic is for the television industry. “Both sides see their own future as being up for grabs,” said Dan Cryan, the senior principal analyst for broadband at IHS Screen Digest. Distributors are trying to make sure they keep pace with consumers who want to watch TV in new places and on new devices. Programmers are trying to make sure that they don’t miss a major revenue opportunity.

“As with everything, it’s about money at the end of the day — money and customer relationships,” Mr. Cryan said.

Earlier this year, Viacom battled with another distributor, Cablevision, over an even more technologically advanced iPad app that replicated the entire channel lineup, but two weeks ago the two companies resolved their lawsuits. They refused to reveal the terms of the agreement, leaving it unknown whether Cablevision conceded that it should pay more for the right to stream to tablet screens.

Meanwhile, Viacom and Time Warner Cable are at a stalemate. For now, Viacom’s channels are not being streamed via the app.

With the Slingbox rebate, Time Warner Cable is essentially reminding programmers that there are other ways to port channels to different screens and places, though it wouldn’t admit to such a tactic on the record.

The rebate will be available sometime in September. Jeffrey A. Hirsch, the executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Time Warner Cable, said the rebate was a promotion for Wideband, which only an undisclosed fraction of its subscribers have. “Over time we’re really trying to emphasize Wideband as a mainstream product,” he said.

With a Slingbox, Mr. Hirsch added, “you can take your entire video lineup out of the home with you.” He declined to address questions about Viacom, and Viacom declined to comment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/b...tv-device.html





Free Games Boost Gaming Industry Revenue
Michelle Martin

An increase in the number of people playing free games is providing the gaming industry with an additional source of revenue as gamers shell out millions for virtual goods and add-ons.

Free games, once the bane of the gaming industry, are now proving lucrative for game developers who entice people to pay for virtual costumes or tools which enhance game experience.

According to a survey published by German tech industry association Bitkom earlier this month, 45 percent of German gamers opt for free-to-play versions only.

Matthias Hellmund, head of mobile development at German game developer Exozet said the target group for $70 console games was gradually shrinking as gamers get used to games on Apple's iPad which are free or cost 99 cents.

"But people don't necessarily spend less, because fans might be willing to invest even hundreds of pounds for a game experience they really like - so some spend more money than they would on a premium-priced game," he told Reuters at Gamescom, Europe's largest video games trade fair.

Bitkom found that 43 percent of German gamers splash out on games which require them to pay before they play, spending an average of 15 euros a month.

But some gamers who use free-to-play games spend much more than that on a single micro transaction -- up to 1,500 euros ($2,113) for a rare sword or special armor in some cases -- Christian Funk, a virus analyst at Russian computer security company Kapersky Lab, told Reuters.

Funk monitored Ebay -- one of the most important sales channels for virtual goods -- in June found more than 3,641 virtual items for use in Activision Blizzard's "World of Warcraft" game were sold at an average price of 132.33 euros ($186.4) during a 14-day period.

Based on these figures, Funk estimates that gamers spend around 11.5 million euros on virtual goods for that one game per year, giving a glimpse of what kind of sums the micro transaction industry was handling, he said.

"The value is in the rarity - gamers are prepared to pay real money for virtual goods," he said, adding some virtual items were status symbols for players.

"Just as in the real world people are willing to spend lots of money on nice glasses, watches or sports cars, this is just a hobby," he said.

Growing Audience

The audience for free-to-play games is growing rapidly. Wooga, Europe's largest social game developer, has seen the number of people who play its free games on Facebook rise from 3.15 million active users in January 2010 to 32.83 million in June 2011, data from media research firm Screen Digest shows.

Around 3 percent of people who play Wooga's games pay for virtual goods such as magic wands or for the ability to complete a mission instantly.

"It's more attractive to pay if I like a game and if I want to progress faster and not pay 60 euros but not know what I get," Wooga spokeswoman Sina Kaufmann told Reuters.

The company claims to be the world's biggest supplier of "magic equipment" after selling more than 28 million magic wands to gamers who play its "Monster World" since the game's launch in May 2010.

But while these sales figures are good for the industry, the micro transactions business has brought challenges with it.

Game developer Richard Garriott said free downloadable games are "here to stay" and that the industry was becoming more creative about monetizing seemingly free-to-play games such as by charging players to move on to the next level or by converting people to paying a subscription.

(Reporting by Ludwig Burger; editing by James Jukwey)





Top 10 Largest File-Sharing Sites
Ernesto

BitTorrent is no longer the dominant player when it comes to file-sharing on the Internet. The five largest English language websites dedicated to swapping files are all related to centralized file-hosting services, also known as cyberlockers. The Pirate Bay and Torrentz are the only BitTorrent sites that managed to secure a spot in the top 10.

The Internet is the largest copying machine ever invented, and if we take a look at the massive amounts of traffic file-sharing sites get, millions of people are using it to its full extent.

4shared, the largest English language file-sharing site, is serving 2.5 billion pageviews alone every month, and this number is increasing rapidly.

Below we have compiled a list of the top 10 largest (general purpose) file-sharing sites on the Internet, based on measurements by Google. What stands out immediately is that 8 of the 10 sites are related to cyberlockers, and only 2 are BitTorrent sites.

This picture is quite different from the landscape 5 years ago when BitTorrent sites dominated the file-sharing space. Early 2007 Mininova was the first BitTorrent site to earn a place among the top 100 most-visited sites on the Internet, and soon thereafter they were joined by The Pirate Bay.

In the years that followed BitTorrent sites continued to dominate, but in the background cyberlockers were catching up, and catching up fast. Where most BitTorrent sites were seeing moderate growth, several new cyberlockers saw their traffic surge. In the last year many cyberlocker sites have outgrown The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, isoHunt and other popular torrent sites.

Below is the full list of sites based on Google’s ranking [July 2011]. We have to note though that several site owners in this list told TorrentFreak that the monthly pageviews and unique visitors are hugely underestimated. The Pirate Bay for example claims 1,500,000,000 pageviews, which is more than double the Google estimate. Other sites report similar ‘downgrades,’ so overall the ranking would still hold.

Ranking Website Category Unique monthly visitors Monthly pageviews

1 4shared Cyberlocker 55,000,000 2,500,000,000
2 Megaupload Cyberlocker 37,000,000 400,000,000
3 Mediafire Cyberlocker 34,000,000 330,000,000
4 Filestube Meta-search 34,000,000 280,000,000
5 Rapidshare Cyberlocker 23,000,000 280,000,000
6 The Pirate Bay Torrent index 23,000,000 650,000,000
7 Fileserve Cyberlocker 19,000,000 190,000,000
8 Hotfile Cyberlocker 16,000,000 110,000,000
9 Torrentz.eu Meta-search 15,000,000 340,000,000
10 Depositfiles Cyberlocker 14,000,000 110,000,000

https://torrentfreak.com/top-10-larg...-sites-110828/





Missouri Teachers Sue to Block Social Media Law
Kevin Murphy

In the face of a lawsuit, a Missouri state senator defended on Saturday a new state law that will prohibit teachers from communicating privately with students over the Internet.

A teachers group filed a lawsuit Friday afternoon contending the new lawsuit violates free speech and other rights, but the senator who sponsored it says it does nothing of the kind.

"It doesn't stop any avenue of communication whatsoever, it only prohibits hidden communication between educators and minors who have not graduated," said state Senator Jane Cunningham, a St. Louis Republican and key sponsor of the law.

School districts statewide are being required to adopt new policies to comply with the law beginning January 1, but the Missouri State Teachers Association said in its lawsuit that banning social media contact is unconstitutional.

"The act is so vague and over-broad that (teachers) cannot know with confidence what conduct is permitted and what is prohibited and thereby 'chills' the exercise of first amendment rights of speech, association, religion, collective bargaining and other constitutional rights," says the lawsuit, filed in Cole County Circuit Court in the state capital of Jefferson City.

The lawsuit names the state, the governor and attorney general as defendant and seeks a court injunction and hearing.

Representatives of the teachers' association and other groups said they are unaware of any state with a law as restrictive as the one in Missouri.

The law permits teacher-student contact if the Internet site can be viewed by parents, administrators or the public. Teachers and students can still e-mail and text each other as long as someone is copied, Cunningham said.

Cunningham said the teachers' association supported the law and helped draft some of the language last spring.

"It seems like they are suing their own work," she said.

But Todd Fuller, spokesman for the teachers' association, said Saturday the group did not review the final language on social media usage. That language on social media contact is just one part of a larger bill intended to discourage private relationships between teachers and students that have sometimes led to sexual abuse.

Teachers have said the vast majority of their private contacts with students over the Internet are education-related and can be helpful, especially for shy students. The lawsuit made a similar point.

"Plaintiffs have used and are using non-work-related social networking sites as an important avenue for contact with students, both during emergencies and for everyday educational issues, such as when a student has difficulty with a classroom assignment or identifying bullying," the lawsuit states.

(Writing and reporting by Kevin Murphy; Editing by Mary Wisniewski and Jerry Norton)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...77J1QW20110820





Download.com Wraps Downloads in Bloatware, Lies About Motivations
Lee Mathews

There was a time long, long ago when Download.com was the place I went for software. It’s been years, however, as the site repeatedly showed signs of devolving into a site every bit as bothersome as the many third-tier software repositories that hide genuine links below clever-placed advertisements and bundle toolbars with their “certified” local downloads.

At Download.com, page designs have been repeatedly tweaked over the years to push its updater software (now called TechTracker), TrialPay offers, and the site’s mailing list. Bothersome, perhaps, but certainly not inexcusable. They’ve got to make money off the site somehow, after all, and banner ads don’t always do the job. Now, things have taken a turn for the worse: Cnet has begun wrapping downloads in a proprietary installer.

Wrapping installers is a terrible practice. For one thing, it can be a violation of a program’s distribution terms — but Download.com has no doubt ensured that its TOS states that if you let them mirror your files you’re giving them free reign. It’s also a serious slap in the face to users, who wind up not with a clean, genuine version of the installer they tried to download but a modified beast that shoves toolbars, home page, and default search engines changes down their throats.

But it gets worse. Cnet knows that there’s something wrong with what they’re doing, and they’re trying to deceive developers and users. On the Upload.com FAQ, there’s a note posted to let developers know why the bundling is taking place: “for the users.” Yes, Cnet thinks we’re clueless enough to believe that their motivation is really to provide users with a less painful download and installation process. Because opt-out toolbars and homepage changes make software setup less annoying.

If the installer was designed so that users could opt-in to the toolbar install or browser setting changes, things might be a little different. The way it stands now what Download.com is doing is totally unacceptable. Here’s hoping they come to their senses — or that Microsoft at least steps in to temporarily put a halt to the practice. Cnet’s bundling Bing, after all, and having your brand pushed as bloatware is never a good thing.

Update: Not every program is currently being wrapped — but they will be wrapped once a new version of a program is uploaded and distributed via Download.com. If the downloaded filename begins with “cnet_” then look elsewhere for the download. As you can see from the image above, even the GPL’d free-as-in-speech-and-beer VLC is wrapped by Cnet.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing...ut-motivations





Smartphone Crapware: Worse Than Laptops?
Mike Jennings

A couple of years ago I holed myself up in the PC Pro Labs with some new laptops to see what impact their pre-installed software — known as crapware, bloatware and shovelware — had on performance.

The results proved shocking but, when it comes down to it, that software is pretty easy to deal with – it’s just a matter of uninstalling everything and, if you’re really particular, running an app like CCleaner to get your Registry back to its fighting weight.

Not so with smartphones. On Friday, I eased the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro from its box, turned it on, and was greeted with a message urging me to set up McAfee WaveSecure before I’d even set up the phone with my Google account.

Delving into the app drawer revealed more unwanted software, with a host of apps neatly summarising Android’s perennial fragmentation issues: alongside the official Market, the Xperia Mini Pro comes loaded with four different app stores. There’s also other McAfee apps installed as well as a Popcap Games trial and a selection of media management tools.

It’s not restricted to Sony Ericsson handsets, either. HTC’s often held up as the paragon of Android quality — alongside Samsung — but my own Desire HD is riddled with stuff that I simply don’t want: 3Mobile-TV, 3Musik and Planet3 were all installed alongside third-party apps such as Amazon MP3, Bebo, Bejeweled Deluxe and a demo of EA’s Sims 3.

Who’s responsible? Networks, largely, which receive clean handsets and then load them up with rubbish after signing deals with numerous partners. And it’s not like you can just get rid of this software, either — most of it’s there to stay, with hard-coded blocks in place to ensure you don’t uninstall any of the tat you don’t want.

There are ways around it, with rooting a possibility if you’d like an untarnished Android experience. Personally, I use a superb app called LauncherPro to kill two birds with one stone: it replaces HTC Sense with its own customisable home screen, and it also allows you to hide apps in your app drawer — the next-best option if I can’t uninstall.

Vodafone’s actions prove that smartphone bloatware can go very wrong, but other companies don’t seem to be learning lessons. Instead, this greed continues, and comes at the expense of Android’s reputation and, more importantly, the tarnished experience that users will have with their new phones — after all, this sort of thing doesn’t happen on iOS.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/08...-than-laptops/





Judge Says Warrant Required for Cell Phone Location Data
Timothy B. Lee

In recent years, the courts have struggled to decide whether the government needs a warrant to access historical records about a cell phone user's location. Some courts have found that when users turn on their cell phones, they "voluntarily" transmit their location to their cell phone providers and thereby waive any expectation of privacy.

On Monday, Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York soundly rejected this line of reasoning. The federal government had asked the courts to order Verizon Wireless to turn over 113 days of location data about a suspect's cell phone. It did so under a provision of the Stored Communications Act that only requires law enforcement to show that the records are "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation."

Does the government violate the Constitution when it obtains location data without meeting the Fourth Amendment's "probable cause" standard? Some courts have found that it does not. But in a 22-page opinion, Judge Garaufis analyzed and rejected these other courts' arguments, holding that law enforcement needs a warrant to obtain months of location data.

"The fiction that the vast majority of the American population consents to warrantless government access to the records of a significant share of their movements by 'choosing' to carry a cell phone must be rejected," he wrote. "In light of drastic developments in technology, the Fourth Amendment doctrine must evolve to preserve cell-phone user's reasonable expectation of privacy in cumulative cell-site-location records."

In recent decades, questions about how to apply the Fourth Amendment to electronic communications has focused on two key concepts. The third-party doctrine is the idea that Americans waive their Fourth Amendment rights when they disclose information to a business like a phone company or bank. For communications entrusted to third parties, the courts have traditionally extended Fourth Amendment protection only to the contents of communications—the audio of a phone call or the text of a letter—and not to non-content metadata about the call, such as the number dialed or the address on the envelope.

Some judges have tried to shoehorn cell phone location data into this analytical framework. But Judge Garaufis refused to do so, ruling that the distinction between content and non-content information didn't make sense in this context. "There is no meaningful Fourth Amendment distinction between content and other forms of information, the disclosure of which to the Government would be equally intrusive and reveal information society values as private," he wrote.

Instead, he offered two reasons to think the Fourth Amendment protects cell phone location data. First, the third-party doctrine should not apply to "widely used communication technologies in which service-provider intermediaries receive and store private user information incident to the service."

And second, "established normative privacy considerations support the conclusion that the reasonable expectation of privacy is preserved here." In other words, when a user signs up for a cell phone, he's not consenting to his cell phone provider disclosing a complete record of his movements to the government.

The decision is a refreshing change from the long line of cases that have tried to apply decades-old Fourth Amendment principles to 21st Century communications technologies. The extent of tracking enabled by cell phones was unthinkable when those earlier cases were decided. Judge Garaufis recognized that the legal standards need to evolve along with changing technologies. We hope other judges will follow his lead.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...ation-data.ars





Dangerous Cybercrime Treaty Pushes Surveillance and Secrecy Worldwide
Katitza Rodriguez

As part of an emerging international trend to try to 'civilize the Internet', one of the world's worst Internet law treaties--the highly controversial Council of Europe (CoE) Convention on Cybercrime--is back on the agenda. Canada and Australia are using the Treaty to introduce new invasive, online surveillance laws, many of which go far beyond the Convention's intended levels of intrusiveness. Negotiated over a decade ago, only 31 of its 47 signatories have ratified it. Many considered the Treaty to be dormant but in recent years a number of countries have been modeling national laws based on the flawed Treaty. Moreover, Azerbaijan, Montenegro, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom are amongst those who have ratified within the last year. However, among non-European countries, only the U.S. has ratified the Treaty to date, making Canada and Australia's efforts unique. The Treaty has not been harmless, and both Australia and Canada are fast-tracking legislation (Australia's lower house approved a cybercrime bill last night) that will enable them to ratify the Treaty, at great cost to the civil liberties of their citizens.

Leaving out constitutional safeguards

Australia's invasive bill highlights one of the fundamental flaws of the Convention on Cybercrime: the Treaty's failure to specify proper level of privacy protection necessary to limit the over-broad surveillance powers it grants law enforcement agencies. This creates problems in countries like Australia since, as the Australia Privacy Foundation points out, Australia lacks the legal constitutional safeguards afforded to many other democratic countries:

The CoE Convention has to be read within the context that applies in CoE countries - where there are substantial and actionable constitutional protections for human rights. The absence of any such countervailing protection for human rights in Australia makes it completely untenable for the Convention to be implemented in Australia without very substantial additional provisions that achieve a comparable balance.

Bills proposed in Canada (read here and here) are also affected by the Convention's flaws as they adopt the lowest possible standard of protection against many of the invasive powers they grant. The bills provide law enforcement access to sensitive data on the mere suspicion it might be useful to an investigation. Indeed, at times they leave out the safeguards altogether, as noted in a letter from Canadian privacy scholars and civil society organizations:

[the legislation] will give state agents the power to access ...highly sensitive personal information, even where there is no reason to suspect it will assist in the investigation of any offense...What [this] facilitates, simply put, are unjustified and seemingly limitless fishing expeditions for private information of innocent and non‐suspicious Canadians.

Gag orders in place of oversight: Cultivating a culture of secrecy

The Convention's most systemic flaw is that it seeks to impose invasive surveillance powers without legal protections. Aside from failing to specify adequate safeguards, it also leaves out the types of oversight mechanisms necessary to ensure its broad powers are not abused. Worse, the Convention takes active steps to reduce oversight and transparency by calling for limitations on when individuals can and cannot be notified that they are being spied upon.

The Australian bill even criminalizes any attempt to disclose the fact that the powers it grants to law enforcement have been used to spy on an individual. These gag orders will prevent anyone from disclosing the existence and content of interception warrants, all but ensuring innocent individuals will never know their civil liberties have been violated:

...it should be possible for individuals to find out that their communications have been subject to a preservation order or disclosed to law enforcement agencies once there is no longer any prejudice to an ongoing investigation.

Nigel Waters, Australia Privacy Foundation, Parliamentarian hearing on the Cybercrime Bill.

Proposed Canadian legislation also paves the way to blanket and perpetual gag orders that will apply by default to the most invasive of the seizure powers it authorizes. These gag orders can insulate abuses of power --when innocent people are surveilled for no good reason--and they will never find out nor will be able to challenge the abuse of their rights, even in situations where there is no longer any risk to an ongoing investigation.

The far-reaching powers this legislation puts in place, if adopted at all, should be accompanied by equally far-reaching oversight regimes, not gag orders. Instead of preventing abuses from ever seeing the light of day, individuals should be notified when they have been surveilled, and the extent, nature and frequency of such surveillance must be subject to rigorous external oversight.

Tamir Israel, staff attorney, Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic.

Blanket gag orders are strongly disfavored under U.S. law, and at least one U.S. court of appeals has found a similar gag order provision partially unconstitutional. A provision of the PATRIOT Act permitted the government to obtain electronic communication transaction records from an Internet Service Providers without a court order. The law imposed a gag order on 'National Security Letter' recipients, with extremely limited judicial review that required courts to accept the FBI's assertions as true and placed the burden on the ISP to challenge the gag order after it had been issued. As EFF argued, such gag orders stifle free expression, and without any judicial oversight, the government was free to do what it wanted. The court agreed that the gag order provision was unconstitutional as written, but it construed the gag rules narrowly so as to pass First Amendment muster and found that the Justice Department could adopt additional procedures to cure the remaining defects-a result that EFF disagrees with because it is Congress's job to write laws.

Forcing service providers to retain your data

Countries are also using the Convention to put in place powers aimed at forcing service providers to store customer information for extended periods of time. While the Convention itself foresees targeted preservation orders in scenarios where there is a reason to believe the information would otherwise be vulnerable to loss or modification, Australian and Canadian bills ignore this important limitation. Also, while the Convention envisions a distinction between orders forcing service providers to preserve data they have already collected and orders aimed at forcing service providers to intercept and record data in real time, the misuse of proactive or 'ongoing' preservation orders aims to undermine this distinction.

In the U.S. and in Canada, for example, there have been cases where preservation powers have been misused to proactively compel service providers to retain data such as email or text messages that are not yet in their possession or control. Proactive preservation force service providers to record data they would never have otherwise retained, effectively bypassing legal protections in place for real-time electronic interceptions. As the U.S. DOJ notes in its manual on seizing electronic communications:

...should not be used prospectively to order providers to preserve records not yet created. If agents want providers to record information about future electronic communications, they should comply with the electronic surveillance statutes discussed in Chapter 4.

Instead of attempting to avoid such problems, the Australian bill embraces this confusion, and expressly grants law enforcement the right to order 'ongoing preservation'. This, combined with the complete lack of any obligation to ensure preservation orders are narrowly targeted to capture relevant data at risk of deletion, opens the door to blanket retention orders aimed at real-time interception of communications services on a mass scale:

The Australian law, for example, is phrased in such broad terms that it could be applied indiscriminately, without any assurance that it will only be used to preserve data that is at risk of being destroyed:

The Bill could require an Internet Service Provider to preserve all stored communications (e.g. traffic and content data) for a telecommunications service (e.g. email, text messaging, mobile phone) for a specified period of time. Unless our concerns about the meaning of a 'service' are addressed, then under an ongoing domestic preservation notice, a Commonwealth agency could arguably request that a major carrier such as Telstra or Optus, preserve all emails used on its service for a 30 day period.

Australia Privacy Foundation Submission to the Parliament.

The proposed Canadian legislation also fails to ensure preservation demands will be used in a targeted manner and is likely to lead to voluntary retention of personal information that would not otherwise have been kept by telecommunications service providers.

Convention Premised on Outdated concepts of online data

The flaws inherent in the Convention itself are exacerbated by the fact that it was drafted over ten years ago and much has changed since then. The Convention was premised on the notion that 'traffic data' (data generated by computers as a by-product of online interactions) is 'less sensitive', and so should be more readily accessible to law enforcement. That was then, and this is now: Today's 'traffic data' can include such sensitive information as your otherwise anonymous online identity or your social network of contacts. Mobile companies and our Internet services providers are now recording our whereabouts at every moment, and we are leaving far more detailed footprints that reveal sensitive information of our daily lives. Sensitive data of this nature warrants stronger protection, not an all-access pass.

Other things have changed in the online environment as well. The ongoing move towards cloud computing means that more and more of our information will be stored online. Nowadays, countless millions are trusting web-based email services such as Google Gmail to store years worth of private correspondence, and cloud services such as Dropbox or Google Docs store your most private documents. The Treaty could not envision this reality when it was drafted in 2001. Governments must now think carefully about what the Treaty's increased law enforcement powers will mean for citizen rights in this new digital context.
http://activepolitic.com:82/blog/201...Worldwide.html





IBM builds 120 Petabyte Cluster Out of 200,000 Hard Drives
Sebastian Anthony

Smashing all known records by a multiple of 10, IBM Research Almaden, California, has developed hardware and software technologies that will allow it to strap together 200,000 hard drives to create a single storage cluster of 120 petabytes — or 120 million gigabytes. The drive collective, when it is complete, is expected to store one trillion files — or to put it in Apple terms, two billion hours of MP3 music.

The data repository, which currently has no name, is being developed for an unnamed customer — but with a capacity of 120PB, its most likely use will be the storage device for a supercomputer or other high-performance computing (HPC) application; 120PB is the kind of capacity that you need to store global weather models or infinitely detailed weapon system simulations, both of which are usually carried out by government agencies or federally-funded research institutions. Alternatively, it could be used to store a large portion of the internet (or data about its users) for Google or Facebook, or another client with very deep pockets. The largest systems currently in existence are generally around 15 petabytes — though, as of 2010, Facebook had a 21PB Hadoop cluster, and by now it’s probably significantly larger.

Exact details about the software and hardware isn’t given by IBM, but we do know that it features a new-and-updated version of IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS). GPFS is a volume-spanning file system which stores individual files across multiple disks — in other words, instead of reading a multi-terabyte high-resolution model at 100MB/sec from a single drive, the same file can be read in a massively parallel fashion from multiple disks. The end result is read/write speeds in the region of several terabytes per second — and, as a corollary, the ability to create more than 30,000 files per second. GPFS also supports redundancy and fault tolerance: when a drive dies, its contents are rebuilt on a replacement drive automatically by the governing computer.

On the hard drive side of things, if we divide 120PB by 200,000 you get 630GB — and once you factor in redundancy, it’s fairly safe to assume that the drives are all 1TB in size. We also know that every single one of the 200,000 drives will be watercooled with presumably the largest and most complicated bit of plumbing ever attempted — but considering IBM’s penchant for watercooling its top-end servers, that’s hardly surprising (though we still hope to post a photo of the system once it’s complete).

As it stands, supercomputers — and large-scale science experiments like the LHC — can produce (and compute) far more data than can be feasibly stored. IBM’s system, it is hoped, will be a data repository that goes some way to bridge the gulf between silicon, Moore’s law-governed technology — and electro-mechanical storage. Of course, on the other hand, perhaps it’s time to stop playing around with hard drives and start building mass storage arrays out of flash memory…
http://www.extremetech.com/computing...00-hard-drives





Alex Winter Shooting Napster Doc

VH1 will share his files
Owen Williams

He originally envisaged and scripted it as a fictionalised drama, but Alex Winter has now decided to take the documentary route on his film about the rise and fall of peer-to-peer file sharing service Napster. The Social Network rather stole his narrative thunder, but backed by the VH1 division that made the awesome Anvil! The Story Of Anvil, Winter is confident that his story is still worth the telling.

"Napster and the birth of file sharing technology made possible everything from Wikileaks to the iPod to Facebook," Winter tells Deadline. "It became an expression of youth revolt, and contributed to a complete shift in how information, media and governments work. And it is a fascinating human story, where this 18-year-old kid invents a peer-to-peer file-sharing system, and brings it to the world six months later."

Napster was, of course, the company that first felt the full weight of the record companies' legal machines, after it allowed the free downloading of MP3s, resurrecting the old "home taping is killing music" debate, and famously much annoying Metallica's Lars Ulrich, among many others. It was thoroughly busted for facilitating mass copyright infringement in 2002, and now exists as a paid subscription service. Winter says that it was always intended to be a legal paid service like iTunes, working in tandem with the record companies, and only went rogue when short-sighted labels wouldn't give founder Shawn Fanning the time of day.

Fanning is involved with Winter's documentary, as is Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake in The Social Network), who was either a co-founder of Napster or just an early employee, depending on what you read. Label heads and musicians will also fill the roster of on-screen interviewees, and Winter promises a balanced film allowing both sides to "vent".

“It’s a grey area," says Winter. "I can understand Fanning’s side, but I can also empathise with the horror that Metallica felt when a single that wasn’t even finished ended up on the radio.”
http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=31863





Gualtiero Jacopetti, Maker of ‘Mondo Cane,’ Dies at 91
Douglas Martin

Gualtiero Jacopetti, a filmmaker who titillated and disgusted moviegoers by roaming the globe to document bizarre, not to say creepy, phenomena — a chicken that smokes cigarettes, for instance — in the movie “Mondo Cane” and its sequels, died on Wednesday at his home in Rome. He was 91.

His death was widely reported in the Italian press.

Mr. Jacopetti liked to say he had invented the “antidocumentary” or the “shockumentary” with “Mondo Cane,” which was unveiled, and well received, at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. He showed Italian villagers slicing themselves with glass in observance of Good Friday; the French painter Yves Klein using naked women as paintbrushes; and New Yorkers dining on insects in a fancy restaurant.

The narration was droll and the images were ironic: A bereaved mother in New Guinea nurses a suckling pig, immediately followed by the wholesale slaughter of pigs for an orgy of feasting in the same region. Mr. Jacopetti called such transitions “shock cuts.” Another scene shows people mourning in a pet cemetery in Pasadena, Calif. Cut to shots of customers savoring roast dog at a Taiwanese restaurant.

Mr. Jacopetti made “Mondo Cane,” which translates as “a dog’s world,” with Franco Prosperi and Paolo Cavara, who also collaborated with him on other films. It was distinguished by a jazzy score by Nino Oliviero and Riz Ortolani, whose theme song, “More,” was nominated for an Academy Award and recorded by Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Judy Garland and many others.

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it an “extraordinarily candid” film. Judith Crist of The New York Herald Tribune called it pretty much everything: “bizarre and barbaric, macabre and gruesome, ironic, hilarious, bloodstained, unconventional, provocative and controversial.”

Pauline Kael of The New Yorker was dismissive. Anyone who liked “Mondo Cane,” she wrote, was “too restless and apathetic to pay attention to motivations and complications, cause and effect.”

“Mondo Cane” was nonetheless named best production by the Academy of Italian Cinema, and was a big financial success worldwide. Mr. Jacopetti went on to make a sequel, “Mondo Cane 2” (1963), and, in between, “Women of the World” (1963), which looked at women with the same lurid scrutiny found in the “Mondo” films.

A newspaper advertisement assured viewers they had seen nothing quite like “Women of the World,” then described the movie: “Women in blind love and blistering hate, women carnal and capricious, women at their most primitive and their most sophisticated, women as they are in every part of the world.”

Some reviewers suggested that the moviemakers visited 39 countries on five continents mainly to discover that women everywhere seem to have lots of skin when photographed with few or no clothes. But they also showed Bedouin women braving gunfire in Algeria to gather shell casings for a living; an aging Scotsman who has 84 wives on the tiny island of Iwa; and Elizabeth Rudel Smith, former treasurer of the United States — all clothed.

Fundamentally, Mr. Jacopetti considered himself a journalist, which he had formerly been. He said his goal was to make “a film that would play on the big screen whose subject was reality.” But his audiences wanted to be entertained as much as informed, and a huge wave of imitation “Mondo” movies arose to satisfy them.

Russ Meyer, a director known for his films featuring large-breasted women, made “Mondo Topless” in 1966. Three years later, the idiosyncratic director John Waters made the cult hit “Mondo Trasho.”

Americans even took the Italian word for world and made it an all-purpose adjective. Tony Thorne in his “Bloomsbury Dictionary of Modern Slang” said this was usually done by adding a “mock-Latin ‘o’ ending, as in ‘mondo-sleazo’ or ‘mondo-cheapo.’ ” A book of pop-culture essays published in Canada in 1996 was called “Mondo-Canuck.”

Gualtiero Jacopetti was born in Barga, Italy, on Sept. 4, 1919. According to obituaries published in Italy, he helped Allied troops when they invaded the country in World War II. He was a magazine editor and helped start the Italian magazine L’Espresso, and made newsreels before turning to feature films.

Mr. Jacopetti was sometimes accused of staging some of the strange things he filmed. He admitted to only one re-enactment: a scene in “Mondo Cane 2” based on the self-immolation of a Vietnamese monk, seen everywhere in an Associated Press photo.

Among the memorable scenes in “Mondo Cane 2” was that of a group of Italian villagers smashing in a garage door with their heads in an annual ritual. Some bleed from their ears and mouths, go into convulsions and have to be carried off. Once inside, the men and the rest of the villagers eat until they’re sick.

In 1966 Mr. Jacopetti made “Africa Addio” (“Goodbye, Africa”), which depicted violent convulsions in postcolonial Africa. Accused of colluding with mercenary killers to arrange executions for the benefit of his cameras, he went back to Africa to collect testimony to clear his name.

In 1971 he and Mr. Prosperi made “Goodbye, Uncle Tom,” in which the two portray filmmakers who journey back in time to chronicle slavery in America before the Civil War.

One goal of the quasi-documentary approach of the “Mondo” movies and their imitators was to elude censors. As the need for that passed, the genre fell out of favor, along with beach-party films and giant-insect movies. Today, cable television and the Internet furnish a never-ending supply of amusingly weird phenomena.

Information on Mr. Jacopetti’s survivors was unavailable. Articles in Italy said he wanted to be buried next to the English actress Belinda Lee, a former girlfriend. She died in a car accident in 1961 when they were traveling together from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Mr. Jacopetti was injured in the crash.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/m...ies-at-91.html





Porn Movie Pirates, Beware: You May Be Sued
Howard Mintz

In mid-July, Yolanda P. opened her mailbox in Visalia to find a letter that has been landing in tens of thousands of mailboxes across the country -- she was being sued by an adult film company for illegally downloading porn on her computer.

These allegations of porn piracy are now part of a torrent of legal battles unfolding coast-to-coast in an explosion of copyright lawsuits filed over the past year. From Silicon Valley to Washington, D.C., adult filmmakers are unleashing their lawyers in federal courts to sue John and Jane Does for stealing porn and sharing it on an increasingly porn-happy Internet.

Duplicating in many ways the music industry's ill-fated campaign a few years ago to stem music file sharing, the adult film world has now sued more than 200,000 initially anonymous defendants nationwide in an attempt to track down and punish those who illegally download porn movies with titles such as "A Punk Rock Orgy in the Woods" and "Dexxxter." The lawsuits name "Doe" defendants until they can unearth the identities of those accused of downloading porn through their Internet providers.

'Stealing their movies'

The legal campaign has hit federal courts particularly hard in the Bay Area, where the porn industry has lawyers and favors tech-savvy local federal judges, as well as Texas, West Virginia and Chicago, where the primary architect of the strategy, lawyer John Steele, is based. The adult entertainment
industry has dubbed Steele the "Pirate Slayer."

Steele calls the lawsuits a simple defense against copyright theft.

"Our clients," Steele said, "are losing millions of dollars from people stealing their movies. They should get their money back from thieves."

But critics, led by the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, say the industry is abusing the court system by casting a wide net that ends with menacing letters to embarrassed targets who'd rather cut a check than fight back and be identified in court as someone who may have downloaded porn.

"The intent of these lawsuits is to get peoples' identifying information and attempt to extort settlements out of them," said Corynne McSherry, EFF's intellectual property director.

The so-called "mass copyright" cases all follow the same format: an adult film company sues scores of anonymous defendants, alleging a particular movie was pirated using the popular file-sharing technology BitTorrent. The number of defendants can be staggering, dwarfing the scope of the music industry's lawsuits; there were 2,100 Does named in one recent San Jose case, and 23,000 in the largest thus far in Washington, D.C.

The end game for the porn industry's lawyers is to identify Does and send them letters, such as the one sent to Yolanda P., who was tracked down through her Comcast account, according to court papers. These letters notify people they can settle for anywhere from $1,500 to $2,500, or fight it out in court and have their names linked to downloading porn.

Most of these people do not want to pay lawyers to fight. But in some instances, judges have invited groups such as EFF to jump in and raise arguments against allowing the cases to proceed on such a mass scale and to prevent the industry's lawyers from securing email account information. Just last week, EFF, at the invitation of a San Francisco judge, argued in a legal brief that the "dragnet" approach to suing violates due process rights in a case against more than 5,000 anonymous defendants accused of pirating the movie "Danielle Staub Raw."

Thus far, both sides can claim some legal victories. Earlier this month, a Chicago federal judge refused to dismiss one of the cases, rejecting arguments the Does have a right to keep their identities confidential when there "appear to be meritorious copyright infringement claims."

'Think twice'

But other judges have tossed out lawsuits, including the case in Washington involving the 23,000 defendants. San Jose U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal recently expressed concern in an order about lumping so many defendants in one case, and another federal judge in Oakland, Claudia Wilken, on Aug. 11 refused to allow a case to proceed against more than 1,700 separate Does.

"I don't think anyone is saying copyright owners lack the ability to go into court with lawsuits," said Eric Goldman, a Santa Clara University law professor and tech law expert. "The question is whether they can do it in (this) manner."

The porn industry's attorneys say they are on solid legal ground in suing en masse, arguing it is the only practical way to tackle widespread piracy. Steele also acknowledges that he hopes there is a deterrent effect to the legal campaign, and legal experts say that proved to be the case with the music industry, even though it suffered bad publicity when some targets turned out to be misfires, such as people who didn't own a computer or were dead.

"That may have fizzled, but it made people at the margins nervous about file sharing," said Mark Lemley, director of Stanford University's Law, Science and Technology program. With the porn industry's lawsuits, he added, "People are going to think twice about doing this."
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_18728995





‘Life 2.0’: a Big Step Beyond Pornography and Phone Sex
Joe Meyers

The Oprah Winfrey Network will unveil a new documentary Thursday at 9 p.m. — “Life 2.0” — that explores the world of people who start substituting life online for “real world” encounters.

Director Jason Spingarn-Koff zeroes in on customers of the Second Life virtual reality website, but the sensitive and engrossing 90-minutes could apply to any of the intense fantasy relationships that are possible on the Internet.

Spingarn-Koff clearly has remarkable gifts as an interviewer — all of the subjects in the film reveal very intimate aspects of their lives and in a few cases they allowed the director to track their behavior for months (or years?).

Second Life provides customers with the ability to create an alternate personality that can then interact with other anonymous “avatars” on the site. Some of the people we meet live on Second Life use avatars that are only slight variations of their actual personalities. Others role play to an extraordinary degree.

A lively and funny African-American woman in Detriot lives as a slimmer and slightly sexier fashion and lifestyle merchant on Second Life where she has actually created a business for herself selling upscale clothing and home furnishings to the avatars.

The small purchases people make to liven up their virtual lives adds up to a six-figure income for the Detroit woman who spends about 12 hours a day in the basement of her family home desiging and selling.

The business runs into trouble when someone steals her ideas and starts giving away the goods. A lawsuit is filed which might have lasting implications on Internet sites.

The most time in “Life 2.0” is devoted a Westchester, N.Y. woman and a Canadian man whose avatars meet and fall in love in Second Life (below). They eventually divorce their spouses and try for a “First Life” romance that demonstrates the huge gulf between fantasy and reality.

Spingarn-Koff is refreshingly even-handed in his treatment of sensitive material. He never mocks his subjects even when their behavior is at its most bizarre. The filmmaker seems to understand that while most of us might not spend 12 hours a day on Second Life, we are all sorting through the pluses and minuses of the time we spend online.

Set your DVR for OWN this Thursday at 9 p.m. I don’t think you’ll be sorry you did.
http://blog.ctnews.com/meyers/2011/0...and-phone-sex/





Pirates Punked as KOOBFACE Targets Torrent P2P File Sharing
John Kennedy

The notorious KOOBFACE botnet, known for maliciously targeting popular social networking sites, is now propagating via a torrent peer-to-peer network through Trojanised shared application files.

Trend Micro has found a “loader” being used by KOOBFACE, which is a component responsible for downloading other components.

Unwitting users looking for pirated copies of popular software such as games, PC utilities or productivity software are in for a surprise, as these Trojanised software torrents are found on popular torrent sites. The following is a partial list of the observed torrent file names that have been Trojanised by KOOBFACE:

• 65_Silent_Scream_The_Dancer.torrent

• 67_Dark_Ritual.torrent

• 68_Celtic_Lore_Sidhe_Hills.torrent

• 69_Lightroom.torrent

• 71_SystemCare.torrent

• WinrRAR_4_Beta_7.torrent

• 72_Voodoo_Whisperer.torrent

• 73_Allore_And_The_Broken_Portal.torrent

• 74_Secret_of_Hildegards.torrent

• 75_Mystery_Chronicles.torrent

• 76_Magical_Mysteries.torrent

Software pirates get punked

According to Trend Micro, the loader arrives on the victim’s computer either by downloading Trojanised torrent files, or through a new component of KOOBFACE named “tor2.exe”, which is detected as WORM_KOOBFACE.AV.

WORM_KOOBFACE.AV, upon execution, connects to the C&C domain to request a torrent file. Once received, it executes a torrent client, which is found in the resource section of the binary, onto the affected system. This torrent client, a 2.2.1 version of uTorrent, is executed such that it is not visible to the user and runs as a background process.

The torrent client is used to download the files referenced by the previously downloaded torrent file from the C&C. A sample of the downloaded torrent file references four files, which is supposedly an Adobe Lightroom installer package:

These files serve different functions:

setup.exe decrypts and executes setup3.cab then executes setup2.cab.
setup1.cab acts as the downloader of the other component binaries.
setup2.cab is the actual Adobe Lightroom installer.
setup3.cab decrypts and executes setup1.cab.

The files setup.exe, setup1.cab, and setup3.cab are all also detected as WORM_KOOBFACE.AV.

Infected systems running WORM_KOOBFACE.AV are running a hidden torrent client process, making the system a “peer” that seeds or hosts the malicious binaries.

The more seeders there are for a specific torrent file, the more likely it is for other users to download them since they promise faster download speeds.

“The shift from concentrating on propagating through social networks to torrent P2P networks may be a result of the efforts by the targeted social networks to prevent the KOOBFACE botnet from abusing their framework,” Jonell Baltazar, a senior threat researcher at Trend Micro, wrote in the company’s blog.

“Despite this change, users should be aware that the KOOBFACE gang has not stopped in coming up with schemes to infect users’ systems. They are simply looking for other means to do so,” Baltazar said.
http://www.siliconrepublic.com/strat...p-file-sharing





3 Teenagers Arrested After CD Warehouse Burns in London Riots
James C. McKinley Jr.

Three teenagers have been arrested in connection with a fire that gutted a warehouse full of recordings during the London riots, destroying millions of compact discs and crippling distribution for about 150 independent labels, the BBC reported.

Two of the suspects, aged 17 and 18, remained in custody, while a second 17-year-old was released on bail. They were among more than 922 people arrested during the riots.

The blaze left Sony Corporations’s 215,000-square-foot warehouse in the Enfield district of London a smoldering heap on Monday morning. The fire destroyed about 25 million discs, including CDs, DVDS and video games, a Sony official told Billboard. The warehouse was also the hub for PIAS Entertainment, a major distributor of independent labels in Britain and Ireland.

More than 150 of the labels lost massive amounts stock, among them XL, Domino, Warp, Sub Pop, Ninja Tune and Soul Jazz. Beggars Group alone lost 750,000 CDs. Recent releases by major artists like Adele, Artic Monkeys and Anna Calvi were affected.

The fire also hurt a host of small and independent film distributors, among them BFI, Artificial Eye, Metrodome and Dogwoof. Some companies said their stock was insured and could be replaced, but the disruption was costly. “It’s a huge dent in our business,” said Tom Abell, director of Pecadillo Pictures, which lost about 50,000 units, in an interview with The Guardian. “The stock can be replaced but there is nothing there to sell right now. It’s basically a cash-flow problem.”

Officials at Sony and at PIAS are struggling to replace the lost stock. Sony put out a statement saying it hoped to have a temporary distribution center up and running within a week. Nick Hartley, the chief operating officer of PIAS, told Billboard he was urging labels to begin manufacturing again and trying to shift stock from Europe to Britain to keep orders flowing.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...-london-riots/





Confirmed: Twitter Will Meet With the UK Government for Riot Talks

Twitter has confirmed that it will meet with the UK Home Secretary on Thursday, after being called in for discussions over the role it played in the recent riots that blighted many parts of the country.

We reported last Friday that the UK government had finally set a date for the meeting with the major social networks, after promising to do so at an emergency meeting earlier this month.

With the date set for Thursday, 25th of August, only Facebook had initially confirmed that it was attending. But BlackBerry makers RIM later confirmed that it would attend, following the role its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) services reportedly played in helping to organize the riots.

And now a Twitter spokesperson has confirmed to The Next Web that it too will have a representative at the meeting this Thursday, though no official statement was released other than that.

It will be interesting to learn what comes out of the meeting, though as I’ve written previously, I don’t expect there to be too many changes to the status quo.
http://thenextweb.com/uk/2011/08/22/...or-riot-talks/





Internet Restored in Tripoli as Rebels Take Control

The country will also soon integrate the rebel mobile networks with the network in Tripoli
John Ribeiro

Internet connectivity was restored in Tripoli late Sunday local time, as rebel forces took control of many parts of the capital city of Libya.

A new mobile network set up by the rebels in the east of Libya in April, called Libyana Al Hurra, and a similar network in Misrata, will soon also be linked to the Libyana Mobile Phone network in Tripoli, said Ousama Abushagur, a Libyan telecommunications engineer in the U.A.E, who led the team that set up Libyana Al Hurra.

The rebels set up the networks after they were cut off from the centralized Libyana network in Tripoli, which required all international calls to be routed through an international gateway in Tripoli. "Everything will be reconnected and go back to normal," Abushagur said on Monday.

In Tripoli, "Internet went off & is back now", said a resident @flyingbirdies in a message on Twitter. Internet is back in Tripoli after months of no connection, said another Twitter user, @libya_win: "My cousins are speaking to me !"

Local DSL (digital subscriber line) access in Tripoli had been cut off for most people, except some officials in government offices, from February, Ahmed Shreef , a resident of Tripoli, said in an e-mail interview on Sunday.

Shreef and some others used their Internet access to update their followers on Twitter on developments in Tripoli, and to inform rebel fighters of the precise locations of troops loyal to the Muammar Gaddafi regime. Shreef did not disclose how he had got the Internet connectivity.

The upswing in the fortunes of the rebels was reflected early Monday in a congratulatory SMS (short message service) said to have been sent to users by the government-controlled Libyana Mobile Phone. "Free calls for all mobile phones, and the reception is good too," said Shreef in a Twitter message.

The website of Libyan Telecom and Technology, which controls the country's national connection to the Internet, went offline on Sunday, but reappeared Monday carrying a message for the Libyan people on its Arabic website. Renesys, a firm that studies Internet traffic flows, translated the message as congratulating Libya "on emancipation from the rule of the tyrant", in an apparent reference to Gaddafi. The English version of LTT's site does not carry the message.

Local Internet access in Tripoli was temporarily restored late Saturday local time after months of disruption, according to reports on Twitter, as the rebels were closing in on Tripoli. But it was once again blocked on Sunday, Shreef said.

A majority of the country's international routes were also down for a while early morning on Sunday, Renesys reported,

Renesys speculated in a blog post that the brief restoration of the Internet was the sign of a conflict within the local telephone company, with someone struggling to reactivate service at the neighborhood level, only to have it switched off again at the national level.
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/..._take_control/





Dirty Rotten Thieves Stealing Your Wifi? Find Out What They’re Looking At With These 3 Apps
James Bruce

If your Wifi is being hijacked by some dirty rotten thieves – I showed you how to check this before – what can you do to get your own back, or find out a little more about who is responsible? Or rather, if a hacker has gained access to your wifi network, what kind of nasty things could they do to you?

In this tutorial today, I’ll be demonstrating some low-level but terrifying utilities you can run on your compromised network. If you weren’t paranoid enough after I showed you how to crack a WEP network in 5 minutes last week, you will be after today.

Prerequisites

• These apps will only work on a wifi network that is either open or has compromised WEP security for which you have the passphrase.
• Backtrack5 Security Linux Live-CD: if you’re unfamiliar with the boot process and how to get into a GUI, read last week’s tutorial on how to hack your WEP network.
• A wireless card that supports monitor mode (where it captures all the packets on the network).

Note: This isn’t the only way to sniff out packets on the wifi, but as far as I’m concerned it’s the easiest for beginners and consists of really only a few shell commands to see results. It certainly isn’t the most comprehensive or effective way to do things, and there are certain drawbacks and limitations I’ll discuss beside each utility.

Today we’ll be covering 3 different basic-level utilities for figuring out what’s going on: urlsnarf, webspy, and driftnet.

Setting Up

Boot into Backtrack5 as described last week. Before continuing, make sure you have the following information noted down somewhere:

• The BSSID (Mac address) of your target network.
• The NAME of your target network.
• The CHANNEL number that the network operates on (1-12).
• The WEP key (if needed).

Start by placing your wifi card into monitor mode on the specified channel, using:

airmon-ng start wlan0 [channel]

Replace wlan0 with the name of your wireless device - iwconfig will tell you this if you don’t know it already – and with the relevant [channel] in there too (don’t include the brackets). You should now have a mon0 interface for monitoring network traffic.

Since the packets need to be decrypted on the fly, we need to run them through the airtun-ng utility, which will give us a live stream of the decrypted packets as it sees them on the network, in a suitable format for some of the other apps we will use today. Type in the following command, replacing your details:

airtun-ng -a [bssid] -w [password] -t 1 mon0

Leave out the -wbit if you’re doing this on an open wifi network. You should see something similar to this if it’s successful.

The utility created a new network device stream called at0, which we need to activate using another command (open a new terminal for this, and don’t close the one running airtun-ng):

ifconfig at0 up

Okay, setup is complete, onto stage 2.

URLSnarf

This is going to list out all the websites visited by users on the network, so you can see in real time what sites they are browsing too.

urlsnarf -i at0

It’s also going to give a lot of noise though, as each website visited results in a number of requests being made to various places. Here’s a snapshot of me browsing the iTunes store. A quick look over the list will tell me:

• The user is on an IP address of 192.168.0.5 (useful for finding out more later)
• The request is coming from a 32GB model iPad.
• Exactly which URLs are being loaded.
• The user has gone through a number of mobile applications, like Mobile Safari, Reeder (a Google Reader app), and the iTunes store.

With multiple users it could become difficult to tell which requests are made by who, but there are additional filters I won’t get into. For now, this is scary enough.

DriftNET

This one is used to capture images that are being downloaded from websites and such, and it’s pretty much as voyeuristic as you can get.

driftnet -v -i at0

Note: -v isn’t needed, but it shows a textual output in the console window which I prefer to know it’s working or found something. It isn’t perfect by far – during tests I found it only tended to pick up smaller images, presumably because it wasn’t able to fully grab the packets for larger JPGs and such, but it is effective none the less. Here I’ve browsed to a famous Chinese movie streaming website.

It certainly doesn’t pick up everything, but I can assure you that if they’re browsing to a certain pR0n site thats begins with Red and ends with Tube, you’re going to know about it.

WebSpy

While I prefer the log file format of URLSnarf, this utility will actually attempt to mirror what the user is browsing on your computer. In practice it doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped, but it’s intriguing none the less. You need to target a specific user IP on the network though – which you should have through URLSnarf, then type in the following:

webspy -i at0 [target ip address]

Now, in theory, whatever they visit will be mirrored onto your local Firefox browser. In reality, I found it would open a new browser window for every request the website site made – so a site like MakeUseOf might open new tabs for the various advertisers, and Disqus commenting – added to which some sites would only open by IP address. Certainly good fun and some sites work as expected, but of limited real world use.

Conclusion:

Running these utilities on your own network to see who’s stealing your wifi and what they’re doing with it is probably acceptable, but once you start running these in public spaces (as someone did with this wifi picture frame that grabs traffic from open wifi spots), you enter a whole new realm of illegalities. Or do you? It’s actually quite easy to secure your traffic even on an open wifi by tunnel everything through a VPN or such, so I hope this just goes to show you exactly how dangerous WEP networks and open wifi can actually be. Think twice before jumping on that local “free internet” someone seems to be broadcasting for fun. I plan to explore some more wifi trickery over the coming weeks, so stay tuned and play safe people.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/dirty-r...i-find-3-apps/





Web Site Ranks Hacks and Bestows Bragging Rights
Riva Richmond

So you think you can hack?

Some 700 hackers looking to show off their talents have piled into an upstart Web site called RankMyHack.com in the last month. Emerging from the shadowy underground, they have submitted evidence of more than 1,200 Web site hacks, eager to have their feats measured against those of their peers.

The site was created by a hacker nicknamed Solar to bring a little accountability to the online forums and chat rooms where hackers gather to learn tricks of the trade, buy and sell contraband and form alliances. There, eBay-style ratings systems meant to establish reputations are routinely abused, morality tends to be fluid and anonymous young people often talk big while carrying a small stick.

RankMyHack offers a way to separate the skilled from the so-called script kiddies by verifying hacks using codes that participants must plant somewhere on sites they have compromised. As in a video game, RankMyHack awards points, which are based on the popularity of the hacked site and the technical difficulty of the hack. Total scores determine hackers’ ranks on the “leader board of legends.” Players can even challenge one another to duels.

“So have you got what it takes to be the best?” Solar taunts on the site’s home page, which has a distinctively retro design.

Participants can also win “bounties” for hacking racist sites as well as university, military and government sites, an element intended “to focus the abilities of talented hackers against political and government forces.”

In an e-mail interview, Solar, who declined to disclose his name or age, said he was a computer-science student in Britain and aspired to a career in computer security. He acknowledged hacking illegally “in the past” to develop his skills, but said he had never engaged in criminal acts like fraud.

As of Sunday, the top break-in on the site was said to be a hack of The Huffington Post, worth nearly 1.7 million points and claimed by Mudkip, who is also the site’s top-ranked hacker. The second-biggest hack, worth 1.5 million points, was said to be on Google, by Blackfan.

The Huffington Post did not respond to requests for comment. Google said Blackfan had told it about a minor bug in the mobile version of Google.com as part of its program to reward security researchers for finding and disclosing vulnerabilities. The flaw poses no risk to users, Google said.

Hackers like Mudkip and Blackfan can use a RankMyHack banner to display their stats on other Web sites, including hacker forums.

But the banners can also help crime groups find talented and willing recruits, warned Rob Rachwald, director of security strategy at Imperva, a security company. “If you like blood on your hands, this shows you’re willing to do the dirty work.”

And RankMyHack could be useful to the authorities. “The ability to verify that a person compromised a system is a law enforcement person’s dream,” said Holt Sorenson, a security specialist who helps run the Capture the Flag competition at the annual Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas.

RankMyHack seems to take a page from competitions like Capture the Flag that attract some of the world’s most skilled hackers. In that game, competing teams defend their computers from attack while trying to steal a piece of data from or plant data on another team’s computer. Organizers verify hacks and declare winners.

At Def Con, no real damage is done and a strong performance can cement a reputation — and attract job offers. But RankMyHack, which celebrates and some say incites illegal hacking, could hurt Solar’s prospects for a career path that requires trust.

Solar argued that the hacks would occur regardless, and that the site was positive because hackers did not need to do damage to prove they had infiltrated a site.

He said security companies should be impressed that, “secured to the teeth” and attacked a hundred times a day, RankMyHack itself was still standing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/t...ng-rights.html





In Silicon Valley, the Night Is Still Young
Claire Cain Miller

LET the rest of the country worry about a double-dip recession. Tech land, stretching from San Jose to San Francisco, is in a time warp, and times here are still flush.

Even now, technology types in their 20s and 30s are dropping a million-plus each on modest ranch houses in Palo Alto in Silicon Valley and Victorian duplexes in San Francisco, and home prices in some parts have jumped nearly 50 percent in the last six months.

Jobs — good, six-figure jobs, with perks like free haircuts and lessons on how to create the next start-up company — are here for the taking, at least for software engineers.

And for anyone with a decent idea and the drive to start a company, $100,000 to get it off the ground is easy to come by.

Yet, for all the outward optimism, even before the recent gyrations on Wall Street, old fears have been creeping in, nagging memories of the dot-com bust. You can sense it at cocktail parties in Menlo Park, at business conferences in Redwood City, inside the hipper-than-thou offices of young Web companies in San Francisco. Maybe, just maybe, these good times won’t last, and it will all come crashing down again.

“There’s this ’90s hangover people still have,” says Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder and tech investor.

Now the worry is that all the turmoil on Wall Street will spread West. Can Silicon Valley really prosper if the general economy tips back into a recession? Can you make a fortune on your I.P.O. if the market is falling? Probably not. But then, no one should work here unless she is prepared to be lucky. Even in worrisome moments, like now, the essential optimism of this place endures.

“There’s a ‘greater-fool theory,’ ” says Lise Buyer, who was a tech stock analyst during the dot-com bubble and is back with a consulting firm, the Class V Group, that advises on initial public offerings. “In Silicon Valley, we are as a species wildly optimistic. But if we weren’t, we wouldn’t have so many entrepreneurs because no one who’s being rational would ever found a company.”

And so start-ups are multiplying. Engineers are deciding that this is the right time to create would-be Groupons or Facebooks — “me-too companies,” valley speak for start-ups that are basically copycats of a winning formula — or yet another local, social mobile app.

Even more than buying a new Prius or jetting off to Cabo for the weekend, the new money set here wants to keep investing — and believing. Backing another start-up is a status symbol, the No. 1 splurge, and it captures both the tech industry’s belief in the future and its fear of missing the next big thing.

“These are nouveau tech millionaires,” says Adeo Ressi, a coach for entrepreneurs. “It’s not that they don’t see the warning signs. It’s like roulette.”

Even before the fragility of the stock market became apparent, people here had been asking this question: Are we in a new tech bubble?

The optimists — or, some would say, the self-interested who stand to profit from the hype — note that the amounts being invested are nowhere near what they were in 2000, and that the companies this time are generally profitable and mature. The pessimists say yes, a bubble has been inflating, yet even they aren’t fleeing. They just hope to be the smart ones who get lucky and get out before it pops.

A bubble looks just like a boom, says Marc Andreessen, who touched off the first boom when his company, Netscape, went public in 1995. Frank Quattrone, the investment banker who took Netscape and dozens more companies public back then, says that today feels less like the height of the bubble and more like 1995, when tech companies were starting to go public but investors weren’t yet speculative.

Just four short years ago, social media and the iPhone were the hot new things, and money was sloshing around. But when the recession hit in 2008, Silicon Valley froze. Of course, that didn’t last long: by 2010, start-up investing was booming again with money from angel investors playing with their own cash, and this year the I.P.O. markets opened wide to tech companies for the first time since 2007.

Twenty-two tech companies went public in the second quarter alone this year worth $5.5 billion, the highest dollar amount since 2000, according to the National Venture Capital Association. Only six went public in all of 2008.

The valuations of young start-ups, meanwhile, have been defying gravity. Almost 1,000 raised $7.5 billion from venture capitalists in the second quarter, up 19 percent from the first quarter and 61 percent from the same period in 2009.

At first the bubble debate fixated on LinkedIn, which went public in May. Its stock price spiked on the first day of trading, reminding people of the bubble days — but then again, LinkedIn is a 10-year-old, profitable company. (Its shares have since fallen 16 percent.) Then more companies joined the I.P.O. rush, like the money-losing Groupon, just two years old. By promoting a gauge it called “acsoi” (for adjusted consolidated segment operating income) to measure its business performance, it called to mind the initial Internet wave, which offered interesting metrics like “eyeballs” and “mindshare.”

Now, amid the stock market’s overall upheaval, people are wondering whether highflying Web companies can still make it on Wall Street.

“Investors don’t want stocks with valuations that rival the national debt,” said Scott Sweet, senior managing partner of I.P.O. Boutique, an advisory firm. “They’re going to have to be pristine, not only on revenue growth but also showing decreasing losses or increasing profits.”

No matter what you call it — a bubble, a boom or business as usual in a land of optimism — something has been in the air. It may be harebrained or hopelessly out of touch, but if you don’t have a rosy outlook, you don’t belong here.

ON a rare sunny June day in southern San Francisco, hundreds of entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs flocked to the Founder Showcase, a kind of “American Idol” for start-ups that is held every three months and run by Mr. Ressi. Ten lucky founders, chosen in advance, pitched their companies to a panel of five venture capitalist judges, while the rest watched and voted for their favorites on their cellphones.

The audience members were hoping for money — or even just a business card or some advice on pitching their own companies — from the investors among them. The investors were easy to spot: they were the older ones with button-down shirts and slacks.

It was the seventh Founder Showcase. But signaling the appetite for money-making ideas, it had sold 600 tickets, double the number of the previous event.

First to make a presentation was Bundled, a service for merchants that sell coupons on daily deal sites, just one of many start-ups chasing Groupon. But Dave Parker, Bundled’s founder, said it was different — “the post-daily-deal company for businesses.”

Not different enough, apparently, for some people. “I’ve probably seen four of these in the last two weeks,” said Rebecca Lynn, a judge from Morgenthaler Ventures. The judges held up their scorecards. The average score was 3 out of 5.

Soon came VidCaster, a service for Web sites to add video; it was started by Kieran Farr, a taxi driver turned chief executive. He said his service had absolute stickiness — meaning that it lures Internet users to stick around for a long time.

“What’s the gross margin of the business look like?” asked George Zachary of Charles River Ventures.

“What does that mean?” Mr. Farr said.

“That’s a problem.”

Average score: 2.8.

Downstairs, free wine and tables of salami and crudités beckoned, but many people lingered to swarm the V.C.’s with their own ideas.

Rory O’Driscoll, a venture capitalist, complained that all the new deals were incredibly overpriced, but he still dismissed bubble talk. “It’s a little bit party-poopy,” he said, “to go from the world is ending because no one is investing to the world is ending because everything is so overpriced, without going through the middle part where we all make money.”

HANGING out near University Avenue in Palo Alto or in the SoMa district of San Francisco, you might wonder where all the wealth is. You can’t spot many designer suits, diamond tennis bracelets or mansions with columns. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Instead, waiting in line at the Off the Grid food trucks in SoMa or at Fraiche frozen yogurt in Palo Alto, you see people in fleeces emblazoned with the names of their start-ups and hear them chatting about their new app or what to do with $30 million.

“You never change the way you dress,” says an executive at one hot start-up who made a small fortune at a previous one. He wore an orange T-shirt. “You don’t want to flaunt it,” he adds, “especially in front of your employees.”

So you might buy a car that’s nice but not too fancy — maybe a Prius or a BMW, but definitely not a Bentley — and take up a hobby like kite surfing. You occasionally charter a plane to fly privately, especially if it gives you more time to work on your start-up. Efficiency makes sense to engineers; splurging for splurging’s sake does not.

At open houses, engineers in their 20s and 30s have offered cash to pay for $1.5 million homes, and are even bidding up the prices of $3,500-a-month rental apartments by a few hundred dollars. In Palo Alto, according to the real estate Web site Trulia, the median home sale price has risen 49 percent in six months, to about $1.2 million.

“You’re seeing the new tech money and also the anticipation of new tech money,” says Alex Lehr of Lehr Real Estate in San Carlos, Calif., as builders buy land and fixer-uppers in preparation for Facebook to go public.

Still, the young tech millionaires are not buying all they can afford. They avoid towns like Atherton and Woodside, where senior executives and rich venture capitalists live, because they don’t want to seem showy.

For some, it’s a different story. Yuri Milner, the Russian investor who stormed the valley with hundreds of millions of dollars, which he plowed into Facebook, Zynga and Twitter, recently spent $100 million on a French-style chateau with a ballroom, home theater and indoor and outdoor pools.

But it hasn’t sat well with some people here.

“Being that ostentatious is O.K. in Russia, but not here,” says an executive who attended a party at Mr. Milner’s house but didn’t want to be named, wishing to preserve business relationships.

The new home of Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, is more typical. Mr. Zuckerberg, who Forbes says is worth $13.5 billion, finally stopped renting and splurged on a house. He spent $7 million to buy one that is a century old — with just one pool (though it is saltwater).

Instead, the biggest splurge for the valley’s nouveau riche is angel investing, putting $25,000 or $100,000 into a friend’s start-up to keep the cycle going.

“That’s where all the money goes,” says Alex Rampell, a co-founder of TrialPay, an online advertising start-up in Mountain View. “It’s not about making it back. It’s about feeling good — and doing what’s accepted.”

At a rooftop party in the hills south of downtown San Francisco, M. C. Hammer was shouting into the microphone as attendees raised their cellphones high to take his picture. “Today and yesterday — different tempos, different styles,” he intoned.

The scene was an office-warming party for Airbnb, a service for people who want to rent rooms in their homes. It had just joined the club of start-ups, including Spotify, Square and Gilt, that were valued at $1 billion or more by their investors; its new office was befitting of a company with $112 million in fresh capital.

The conference rooms had been lavishly transformed into models of some of Airbnb’s most enviable properties, like an art-filled apartment in SoHo in Manhattan and a mushroom dome cabin near Santa Cruz. The women’s restrooms were painted hot pink and stocked with dry shampoo, Chloé perfume and affirmational notes — like “life is lovely” — scrawled on the wall. The shelves held multiple copies of books like “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind” by T. Harv Eker.

The guests, sipping cocktails and playing Skee-Ball, looked out of place in tech land. They were dressed in short black cocktail dresses and slacks. But once they put on the gray hoodies — bearing Airbnb’s logo — that were distributed at the event, they were a casting director’s dream.

A private security guard and a fire marshal watched with amusement from the sidelines. Many tech companies had been hiring them for parties, they said. The fire marshal said he had worked at one at AT&T Park, the baseball stadium that Genentech had rented out for a concert with “the guy from ‘American Idol’ who didn’t win but has a rock band now.”

Another night, another office-warming party in San Francisco — this time for Foursquare, the Web service that alerts your friends to your location. The event was in an airy loft around the corner from the offices of hot start-ups like Twitter.

“Hiring is the main reason for the party, to make some noise that we have space in San Francisco,” said Dennis Crowley, a Foursquare co-founder who had flown in from New York, where the company is based, on Virgin America, the pink-lit, WiFi-equipped airline that serves as a commuter train for tech types shuttling between the two cities.

A disco ball started flashing, and someone brought Mr. Crowley a gold paper crown. Engineers and venture capitalists cozied up to the bar to order “the Start-Up” (gin, tonic and blackberry soda) and “the Frat House” (rum and Mountain Dew Throwback). But the guests seemed mostly concerned with checking in to the party on Foursquare and posting about it on Twitter; their messages were broadcast on a giant screen.

Mr. Crowley may have a haircut like Justin Bieber’s former shaggy look, but at 35 is old by Silicon Valley standards. During the first boom, he was a tech analyst at JupiterResearch. In 2004, he started Dodgeball, another check-in service, which Google bought for a few million dollars and later shut down.

He scoffed at comparisons to 1999. Today, he said, “companies get a lot more done with a lot less capital.”

“There are so many more people on the Internet,” he added. “My grandmother knows how to shop on Amazon.”

“There is real money to be made.”

THE Twitter message flickered on the screen of Aye Moah’s iPhone, just as she was waking up in a Silicon Valley motel. She turned to her boyfriend and business partner, Alexander Moore, and said, “Get in the car and go.”

The investor Dave McClure had just posted that he needed a ride because his car was in the shop. The payment: he would listen to a start-up pitch from his driver.

Ms. Moah and Mr. Moore had come to the valley to raise money for their e-mail start-up, Baydin, but their meetings hadn’t gone well. So they leapt at Mr. McClure’s offer.

Mr. Moore jumped into his Chevy Cobalt and picked up Mr. McClure. And by the time they reached his destination 20 minutes later, Mr. McClure had agreed to give Baydin $100,000.

Mr. Moore and Ms. Moah have since moved into an office with cement floors and sweeping views. Almost nightly, they attend networking events with other engineers, or parties like one in San Francisco featuring belly dancers playing with fire. The couple dream of turning their start-up into a big company.

But if the dream is contagious, so is the fear.

The other day, Mr. Moore went to a start-up event to learn about “quick exits” — valley talk for cashing out of your company while you still can — where executives from large tech companies coached young entrepreneurs on how to sell their nascent start-ups.

Just in case.

Miguel Helft contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/t...-new-bust.html





Steve Jobs Resigns as Apple CEO
Michael S. Rosenwald

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, who almost single-handedly changed the way people around the world consume music, the Internet and even TV, announced late Wednesday that he has resigned as leader of the company he co-founded in his parents’ garage.

Jobs, who has suffered from pancreatic cancer and had a liver transplant in 2009, has looked increasingly frail in his cultlike appearances in front of Apple fans to introduce new products, but he did not explicitly indicate in a letter to the company’s board and its customers whether his health was failing.

“I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know,” wrote Jobs, who has been on a health leave of absence since January. “Unfortunately, that day has come.”

Although not entirely unexpected given the grave nature of his previous illnesses — he had surgery for a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2004 — Jobs’s resignation ends one of the most extraordinary runs in business history. This month, Apple briefly became the most valuable company in the world, surpassing oil giant Exxon Mobil.

Jobs has been replaced by Tim Cook, his longtime No. 2 and the company’s chief operating officer. Cook has run Apple’s day-to-day operations during Jobs’s health-related absences. Jobs will be chairman of the board.

A volatile visionary, a detail-obsessed taskmaster, a lover of simple, understated design in hardware and in software, Jobs over the past three decades has had an outsize, iconoclastic influence on personal computing — first with the Apple II and then the Macintosh computers, then iPods, and now with post-PC devices such as the iPhone and iPad. No other electronics company in the world introduces products that spur massive lines of fans that snake around malls, sometimes for days.

“He’s had a massive impact on personal computing — more important than Bill Gates or anybody else, I think,” said Leander Kahney, editor of the blog Cult of Mac and a longtime computer industry observer. “He has made this company in his image. It functions almost as an extension of his unique personality. There’s really nothing else like it.”

In recent years, as Apple stores have popped up in malls around the country and in iconic locations on several continents — it has a mammoth store in London’s Covent Garden — the company’s reach has stretched beyond its fanboy customers, who disliked Microsoft’s more geeky offerings, and into the lives of everyday consumers. They use the company’s products in their offices, their cars, on their couches and in bed.

Even the stodgy federal government has recently embraced Apple products, deploying iPads, iPhones and Mac laptops to bureaucrats, criminal investigators and doctors. Company executives have said that interest in the iPad by government agencies, schools and colleges has taken them by surprise. Several other companies have tried to match Apple’s recent success with the iPad, but most competing products have not caught on.

Bill Gross, the founder of more than 100 technology companies, wrote on Twitter: “Business superhero Steve Jobs has changed people’s lives around the world more than almost any businessperson alive.”

Jobs is capping his second stint at Apple. He left in 1985 after a brutal battle for control with other executives. He founded another computer company and bought the film company Pixar from George Lucas. Facing near collapse in 1997, Apple brought Jobs back.

Apple’s succession plan has been one of the most closely held secrets in corporate America, but observers said it was not surprising that the company turned to Cook, who is widely credited with running Apple’s intricate teams of designers, engineers and programmers.

“The board has complete confidence that Tim is the right person to be our next CEO,” said Apple board member Art Levinson. “Tim’s 13 years of service to Apple have been marked by outstanding performance, and he has demonstrated remarkable talent and sound judgment in everything he does.”

Still, the prospect of Apple without its visionary-in-chief will spook Apple investors and customers. The company’s stock dropped about 5 percent in after-hours trading Wednesday.

His departure comes at a crucial moment in the battle for the future of computing as companies such as Facebook, Google and Netflix tussle over the flow of information and entertainment. Jobs apparently feels so strongly about the importance of the moment that he emerged from his leave this summer to introduce iCloud, Apple’s way of letting people store their digital lives in the cloud. After the event, he was photographed in a tender embrace with his wife.

Kahney, the Cult of Mac editor, said Apple will probably be in good shape in the short- and medium term. The company is known for mapping out products several years in advance, and Jobs has certainly played a role in those plans.

“While this marks the end of an era for Apple, I think it’s important to remember that there’s more to Apple than any one person, even Steve Jobs,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner.

Apple and Jobs are “inextricably linked,” said Steven Levy, a senior writer at Wired magazine who has written two books about Apple and chronicled Jobs for more than two decades. But he added that it doesn’t mean the company can’t push on without its founder.

“Every CEO leaves at some point. There’s no such thing as a CEO that goes on forever. People get sick, or they leave,” Levy said, but Jobs has “done a pretty good job” of making sure that the company “doesn’t miss a step.”

Staff writer Brady Dennis contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...PcJ_story.html





$103M to Expand Broadband Internet in Rural US
Michael Felberbaum

Telecommunications companies in 16 states will share more than $103 million in federal funding to help expand broadband Internet access to those areas of rural America that haven't been reached by the high-speed service or are underserved, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Monday.

Policymakers, public interest groups and telecom companies are seeking to bridge the digital divide by reaching even the most remote pockets of the U.S. with broadband internet, hoping to improve economic and educational opportunities there.

"There's a big gap that remains between rural and urban areas because it's just hard to make a business case in rural areas," said Jonathan Adelstein, the agriculture department's rural utilities service administrator, in a conference call with reporters. "Rural areas' future depends upon access to broadband and we're not where we need to be today."

The states that will benefit from the funding are: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

As many as one in 10 Americans can't get Internet connections fast enough to engage in such common online activities as watching video or teleconferencing, and two thirds of schools have broadband connections that are too slow to meet their needs, the Commerce Department reported earlier this year.

Last year, the Federal Communications Commission released a national broadband plan that set a goal of hooking up 100 million U.S. households to broadband connections of 100 megabits per second by 2020. That's at least 20 times faster than many existing home connections.

About 28 percent of rural America, or nearly 19 million people, lack access to Internet with speeds of three megabits per second or faster, compared with only 3 percent, or 7.2 million people, in non-rural areas, according to an FCC report titled "Bringing Broadband to Rural America."

Adelstein said rural areas lag behind the urban areas of the country when it comes to broadband Internet access because the more remote areas don't have enough people, have rugged terrain, or it's too costly for companies to serve them.

One of the grants announced Monday will help provide Internet services to about 570 members of the Karuk Native American Tribe in a mountainous region of Orleans, in northern California.

"It is a remarkably remote place. It's one of the darkest places from space in the lower 48" states, said Craig Tucker, a spokesman for the tribe.

Tucker said lack of reliable Internet services is a "limiting factor for economic development" for the tribe and the non-Native community that lives in the area as well.

"There's not really good cell phone service, or Internet service. Even electricity is a struggle/ A lot of people are off the grid entirely," he said.

Another grant will help rebuild the broadband infrastructure in Tushka, Okla., which was hit by a tornado in April that killed two people and destroyed or damaged numerous buildings in the community.

Adlestein said there's still a "long way to go" in terms of bringing rural America in line with the rest of the country, and he added that one of the challenges is that young people won't stay in communities without broadband Internet access.

"There's not a future there for them," he said. "Not only do they expect it, but they need it ... if young people want to stay rural areas where they grew up."

The majority of the funding comes in the form of infrastructure loans of totaling about $90 million for five broadband projects. These projects join others across the countries that are sharing $192 million in loans announced by the Agriculture Department in late July.

About $13 million of the funding is through the USDA's Community Connect program, which provides grants to rural, economically challenged communities. The funds can be used to build, buy or lease facilities to bring broadband access to community facilities such as schools and government offices, as well as residents and businesses.

The USDA funding is just one of several federal, state and local programs working to expand Internet access to rural parts of the country.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...US-2135673.php





Google Fiber Shows its Potential with 151Mbps Download Speeds
Matthew Humphries

Early last year Google set out on a mission to bring 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home networks in selected areas across the U.S. It was a big challenge, and one that states, counties, and cities fought hard to get in their areas.

18 months on, and those Google networks are being installed. As they come online individuals with access to the super-fast lines are posting their Speedtest.net results, and boy are these connections fast.

Reddit user TheTeam posted an image on the site with the tag line “I just got Google Fiber.” The image shows his Speedtest.net result and both the download and upload speeds are pretty incredible, maxing out at 151.68Mb/s and 92.79Mb/s respectively. That’s more than enough for a lag free game of CounterStrike or streaming a movie.

The test area is thought to be covering an area just off campus at Stanford as Google set out as a first location in October last year. To make this an even better deal, because it is just in the testing phase, this access isn’t costing anything. So it’s super-fast free broadband anyone would be privileged to have.

The obvious question now is, if Google can do this, why aren’t network operators banging down the company’s door to get involved and roll this out everywhere. Yes, there’s big investment involved, but these companies are kidding themselves if they think waiting and dealing with a lack of bandwidth in the future is going to work for them. Whoever jumps first and starts investing in these fiber-to-the-home initiatives is going to be rewarded with a lot of new customers in years to come.
http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-ce...eeds-20110823/





Did AT&T Lie to Your Representative?
Tim Karr

Earlier this summer 76 House Democrats were misled by AT&T.

They signed on to a letter circulated by Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) that was so packed with AT&T talking points and spin that it’s worth wondering who really drafted the letter.

In it the 76 Democrats repeated AT&T’s argument that merging with T-Mobile is the only way that it can extend its mobile network to 97 percent of the population. They also signed on to the AT&T notion that this merger will "create thousands of jobs … which will greatly contribute to our continuing economic recovery."

But here’s the rub. Neither of these claims is true.

An AT&T lawyer recently leaked a document that revealed AT&T can accomplish its network buildout for one-tenth the cost of acquiring T-Mobile. And despite AT&T’s insistence that the deal will spur job growth, the merger will cost an estimated 20,000 Americans their jobs.

Being wrong on the facts has never stopped AT&T’s relentless drive to get Washington to bless this disastrous deal. AT&T is hitting other members of Congress with the same misinformation, and the same AT&T lobbyists who misled the “Butterfield 76” are trying to drum up additional support for the merger.

AT&T’s believes that the truth doesn't matter in a Washington where fact checking takes a distant second to check writing.

The phone giant writes more of those checks in Washington than any other company. It has spent $200 million on lobbyists and campaign contributions over the years and gives more than $60 million a year to not-for-profit groups, many of which have lent their name to form letters supporting the merger.

(Not coincidentally, Rep. Butterfield received more than $32,000 in campaign contributions from AT&T.)

Today Free Press launched a national call-in campaign to convince the 76 House Democrats to remove their names from this letter. We’re also asking other members of Congress to stand up for the truth and oppose this merger.

AT&T and its allies are heralding everyone on Rep. Butterfield’s letter as a merger supporter. But if they're rightfully having second thoughts now that the facts have come to light, these members of Congress need to get their names off the letter.

It’s time AT&T paid a political price for its lies.
http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/...representative





AT&T Now Charging You For Not Using Enough Long Distance

Company's nickel and diming continues despite T-Mobile desires
Karl Bode

AT&T has been engaging in a lot of nickel-and-diming behavior of late that's normal for an anti-competitive giant, but a little odd for a company trying to sell regulators on their $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile. After imposing some of the lowest caps and highest rates in the wireless industry, AT&T imposed new usage caps on broadband users without making sure the meters work. They followed that up by cracking down on unofficial tetherers (imposing a fee for doing nothing while crippling smartphones) and then substantially jacking up the price of SMS service by killing off one of their most popular SMS plans. Now according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, AT&T has added a new $2-a-month "minimum use" fee to traditional landline users (all six of you left) who don't use enough long distance for AT&T's liking:

AT&T has added a new $2-a-month "minimum use" fee to the phone bills of landline customers who don't have long-distance calling plans. In other words, customers who rarely, if ever, make long-distance calls are the ones most likely to pay the fee. Those customers can avoid the fee, a company spokeswoman said, as long as they make at least $2 worth of long-distance calls a month.

Imposing obnoxious fees at every opportunity certainly isn't new (check out the real obnoxious fee experts in the banking industry). Neither is this particular effort, since Verizon started imposing a fee like this back in 2007. Still, you'd expect AT&T to tone this stuff down slightly while trying to convince regulators on how fantastic the T-Mobile deal would be for the public. AT&T's total unwillingness to rein this behavior down in any of their business sectors suggests that the company knows full well that they'll get T-Mobile deal approval. Given AT&T has contributed more to political campaigns than any corporation since 1989 suggests they're probably right.

The T-Mobile deal aside, nickel and diming a declining userbase doesn't do AT&T any favors. Landline service is inexpensive to provide, and pissing off a contingent that's already fleeing to cable VoIP alternatives in droves is the kind of logic only found in phone company board rooms. You can only imagine the kind of new and "innovative" fees Verizon and AT&T will concoct with an 80% wireless industry market share.
https://secure.dslreports.com/showne...istance-115869





Nick Ashford, Part of Motown Songwriting Duo, Dies
AP

Nick Ashford, one-half of the legendary Motown songwriting duo Ashford & Simpson, has died at age 70. His longtime friend and former publicist Liz Rosenberg told The Associated Press that Ashford — who along with wife Valerie Simpson wrote some of Motown's biggest hits — died Monday in a New York City hospital. He had been suffering from throat cancer and had undergone radiation treatment.

Among the songs Ashford & Simpson penned are "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," ''You're All I Need To Get By" and "Reach Out And Touch Somebody's Hand."

He is survived by his wife and two daughters.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/201...t-Ashford.html





Jerry Leiber, Rock ’n’ Roll Songwriter, Dies at 78
AP

Jerry Leiber, who with longtime partner Mike Stoller wrote "Hound Dog," ''Jailhouse Rock," ''Yakety Yak" and other hit songs that came to define early rock 'n' roll, died Monday. He was 78.

He was surrounded by family when he died unexpectedly of cardiopulmonary failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said his longtime publicist, Bobbi Marcus.

With Leiber as lyricist and Stoller as composer, the team channeled their blues and jazz backgrounds into pop songs performed by such artists as Elvis Presley, Dion and the Belmonts, the Coasters, the Drifters and Ben E. King in a way that would help create a joyous new musical style.

From their breakout hit, blues great Big Mama Thornton's 1953 rendition of "Hound Dog," until their songwriting took a more serious turn in 1969 with Peggy Lee's recording of "Is That All There Is?" the pair remained one of the most successful teams in pop music history.

"He was my friend, my buddy, my writing partner for 61 years," Stoller said. "We met when we were 17 years old. He had a way with words. There was nobody better. I am going to miss him."

The two chronicled their lifelong partnership, which Leiber called "the longest running argument in show business," in their 2009 memoir, "Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography." The pair's writing prowess and influence over the recording industry as pioneering independent producers earned them induction into the non-performer category of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

"The music world lost today one of its greatest poet laureates," said Terry Stewart, president of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. "Jerry not only wrote the words that everyone was singing, he led the way in how we verbalized our feelings about the societal changes we were living with in post-World War II life. Appropriately, his vehicles of choice were the emerging populist musical genres of rhythm and blues and then rock and roll."

Recording Academy President Neil Portnow said Leiber and Stoller helped shape the music of the 1950s and '60s.

"Together, they were an extraordinary team that generated a rich and diverse musical catalog that leaves an indelible imprint on our cultural history," he said.

Leiber, who like Stoller was white, said his musical inspiration came from the close identification he had with black American culture during his boyhood and teen years in Baltimore and Los Angeles.

Thus he was the perfect lyricist for bluesy, jazz-inflected compositions like "Kansas City," ''Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots," ''Charlie Brown," ''Drip Drop," ''Stand By Me" and "On Broadway."

The lyrics could be poignant, as in "On Broadway," or full of humor, as in the antics of high school goofball Charlie Brown, who "calls the English teacher Daddy-O" and laments: "Why's everybody always pickin' on me?"

The result was a serious departure from the classically inflected music that had been produced by a previous generation of pop songwriters that included George Gershwin and Irving Berlin.

"Irving Berlin was the greatest songwriter of all time," Leiber told The Los Angeles Times' "West" magazine in 2006. "I was in awe of him. But his music wasn't my music. My music was the blues."

Over their career, they had 15 No. 1 hits in a variety of genres by 10 different artists. Among the performers who sang their songs were Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Willie Nelson, Frank Sinatra, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and Otis Redding.

Leiber and Stoller were instrumental in helping launch Presley's career with such songs as "Hound Dog" and "Jailhouse Rock." The two far preferred Thornton's version of "Hound Dog" to Presley's, in part because the latter version changed some of the lyrics.

"Lick for lick, there's no comparison between the Presley version and the Big Mama original," Leiber said in the pair's dual autobiography, "Hound Dog," published in 2009. Stoller said he was annoyed by the Presley version, but still praised the "edge of danger and mystery" that Presley brought to his covers of R&B records.

In the 1990s, their songs became the centerpiece of a long-running Broadway revue, "Smokey Joe's Cafe," which won a Grammy for best musical show album in 1996.

"The songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller remains one of the greatest and most prolific partnerships of all time," said Martin N. Bandier, chairman and chief executive of Sony/ATV Music Publishing. "Like the lyrics in his iconic songs, Jerry was humorous, insightful and always memorable. He will be missed by everyone who knew him, but lucky for all of us his songs will live on for generations."

Their last song to reach wide acclaim was the 1969 ballad, "Is That All There Is?" Lee's moody rendition of the song, whose lyrics are based on an 1896 short story by German author Thomas Mann, reached the top 20.

Leiber and Stoller continued to collaborate on earnest, eclectic projects, including 1975's "Mirrors."

Leiber was born in Baltimore in 1933 to Jewish immigrants from Poland. He met Stoller after moving to Los Angeles with his mother in 1950.

The two immediately began collaborating and formed their own record label, Spark, in 1953.

The pair had grown tired of writing pop hits by the late 1960s, Leiber once said, and decided to concentrate on more serious music. Those later efforts never found the wide audience that their earlier work did, but Leiber said that was fine with him and his partner.

"The earlier market of swing and Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee and Duke Ellington was pretty much gone, but we liked that kind of sound and wanted to imitate it," he told The New York Times in 1995. "In a way, we had helped kill it with what we had done. We had helped bring down the cathedral, and now we didn't know where to pray."

Leiber was survived by three children, Jed, Oliver, and Jake; and two grandchildren, Chloe and Daphne.

___

Entertainment writer Sandy Cohen in Los Angeles and music writer Nekesa Moody in New York contributed to this report.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/201...ry-Leiber.html





Atari Continues Efforts to Alienate and Persecute Retro Fanbase

Further to earlier reports of Atari targeting parts of the retro Atari community, Atari have now turned their attention to atari2600.org, a website that has been registered by Andrew Davie, since 2000.

The site has been used by Davie over the years to showcase his non-commercial programming efforts for the ancient Atari 2600 console. The receipt of a letter from Atari's SVP & General Counsel, Kristen Keller, came as a surprise for the Atari enthusiast, who told Atari User he is "disappointed" at Atari's approach and is considering his position.

Atari are demanding Davie begin arrangements to handover atari2600.org to them as the domain name contains the Atari brand ("Atari"), in its entirety, in the domain name.

Atari have also recently gone after Starsoft Berlin, a hobbyist site dedicated to producing various demos for the Atari 8-bit computer platform - again a completely non commercial fan site.
http://atariuser.blogspot.com/2011/0...enate-and.html





Motorola Value Found in 18 Patents Used Against Apple: Tech
Brian Womack and Susan Decker

Among Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc.’s more than 17,000 patents, a group of 18 may prove most useful in Google Inc. (GOOG)’s effort to fend off litigation targeting the Android mobile platform.

The inventions date back to 1994 and form the heart of three Motorola lawsuits against Apple Inc. (AAPL), making them among the stars of the portfolio, said David Mixon, a patent lawyer at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings in Huntsville, Alabama. They cover technology essential to the mobile-device industry, including location services, antenna designs, e-mail transmission, touch- screen motions, software-application management and third- generation wireless.

“Any patent owner, before they consider litigation is going to carefully evaluate their patents to withstand an attack,” Mixon said in a telephone interview. “You don’t want to hold any back. You want to pick your strongest patents.”

Google is counting on its $12.5 billion acquisition of Libertyville, Illinois-based Motorola Mobility to strengthen its patent lineup as Apple and Microsoft Corp. challenge Android, the best-selling smartphone operating system in the second quarter. Google had been issued fewer than 1,000 patents as of the start of this year. Motorola Mobility would add another 17,000, as well as about 7,500 pending applications.

“There are a lot of sweet patents in that portfolio,” said Dean Becker, chief executive officer of Palm Beach, Florida-based ICAP Patent Brokerage, the world’s largest. He said Google only needs a few to bolster its legal position.

On the Sidelines

Android was introduced on handsets three years ago to further Google’s advertising business and is provided free to device makers including Motorola Mobility, Samsung Electronics Co. and HTC Corp. (2498) The platform accounted for 43.3 percent of the smartphone market last quarter, according to Stamford, Connecticut-based research firm Gartner Inc. Cupertino, California-based Apple had an 18.2 percent share.

The U.S. International Trade Commission, which arbitrates patent-related disputes, has fielded more than a dozen cases in the past year related to smartphones and tablets. Because Google doesn’t profit directly from Android, it has been able to sit mostly on the sidelines while its partners were sued.

Google has been sued twice by competitors over Android -- Oracle Corp. (ORCL) and Skyhook Wireless Inc. -- and has never led a patent-infringement case against another company. It declined to comment for this story, as did Motorola Mobility and Apple.

An ITC judge last month found HTC’s Android phones infringed two Apple patents, which may spur a U.S. import ban.

‘Under Threat’

“We’ve been saying for some time that we intend to protect the Android ecosystem,” David Drummond, chief legal officer at Mountain View, California-based Google, said during a conference call with analysts last week. “It’s under threat.”

Motorola Mobility, which created the consumer market for mobile phones with the DynaTAC 8000X “brick” in 1983, and Apple, which reinvented the industry with the “smart” iPhone in 2007, are among the larger companies that have been battling over ownership of mobile technology. Motorola Mobility, spun off from Motorola Inc. in January, picked a fight with Apple in October when it filed three lawsuits and an ITC complaint.

The cases target Apple products including the iPhone 4, iPad, AppleTV and MacBook Air. Motorola Mobility used four of the 18 patents from the Apple cases to help push BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. (RIMM) into a cross-licensing settlement last year. That deal required Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM to make an undisclosed upfront payment and pay royalties.

Balance of Power

The balance of power is shifting toward Google with this acquisition of Motorola Mobility, so the option for settlements and cross-licensing will become “inevitable,” said Ron Epstein, CEO of Epicenter IP Group LLC, a Redwood City, California-based patent brokerage.

“We’re in a market battle here and people are using innovation as a tool for who will win,” he said. “The only way to protect your innovation from copying is patents.”

One patent from 2001 disables a “touch sensitive” sensor when a smartphone is near a user’s head to prevent inadvertent hang-ups or dialing. Another from 1994 aims to increase data storage, while a third enables users to control when a global positioning system sends their location data over a network.

In a patent-infringement case that started today at the International Trade Commission, Microsoft accused Motorola Mobility of infringing seven of its patents and requested a halt to imports of certain Motorola phones. The trial is the first smartphone dispute to be heard since Google announced it would buy Motorola Mobility.

Motorola Mobility also has a “leading position” in fourth-generation wireless networks, CEO Sanjay Jha said on a conference call last month.

‘Back Off’

In addition to the Apple fight, Motorola Mobility has claimed Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft infringes some of its patents over video technology and is seeking to block imports of the Xbox video-game console.

Even with a stronger patent portfolio for Google, Apple is likely to continue to pursue its patent battles against HTC and Samsung, said Peter Misek, an analyst with Jefferies & Co. in New York.

“This is a war,” Misek said.

Apple filed its own patent-infringement complaints against Motorola in October at the ITC and in federal court in Madison, Wisconsin. Apple also filed a civil suit in March accusing Motorola Mobility of “a pattern of unfair, deceptive and anticompetitive conduct” and said the company demanded higher licensing rates than for other competitors over three years of talks. Microsoft has made the same allegations over Motorola’s licensing demands, which Motorola has denied in both cases.

Epstein said the strength of the 18 patents from the Motorola Mobility portfolio is likely the tip of the iceberg.

“I would be shocked if they brought all of the patents they thought were of value in this first round of litigation,” Epstein said. “They brought a set of patents that they thought would do a job they set out for, which is telling Apple to back off.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Brian Womack in San Francisco at bwomack1@bloomberg.net; Susan Decker in Washington at sdecker1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net; Allan Holmes at aholmes25@bloomberg.net
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-0...pple-tech.html





TouchDroid Will Turn TouchPads Into Android Tablets
Nancy Gohring

The lucky people who managed to buy a US$99 TouchPad before they sold out just got luckier: A group of developers is working on a way to load Android onto the tablets.

Hewlett-Packard said last week it would stop making the TouchPad and that it was exploring options for the webOS software that runs on the device. It has also dropped the price of the 16GB TouchPad to $99, making it one of the best tablet deals around.

Still, people who bought it took a risk, since it's not clear if HP will continue to develop the operating system. That risk may now pay off since the TouchPad could become the best-value Android tablet.

Three developers and other supporters have launched the TouchDroid project and plan to soon begin porting an older version of Android, known as Gingerbread, to the tablets.

"So you've plunked down your $99/$149, and you're staring at that WebOS screen... Welcome to a grand effort to port Android to the HP Touchpad," they wrote on a wiki page about the project.

The group is having to start its work with Gingerbread because Google has not released the source code for Honeycomb, the version of Android for tablets that first became available on the Motorola Xoom in February. Once Ice Cream Sandwich, the next version of Android, becomes available, they'll focus on that version of the OS, according to the wiki site.

The developers said there's no way to know how long it will be before they can release a working version of Android for the tablet. "Figure this will take a good long while. Keep your expectations very low and for now enjoy WebOS," the site says.

Further complicating the initiative, some of the developers don't yet have TouchPads.

"Until all of the #touchdroid developers receive their devices, project development will be very slow or at a standstill this week," according to the HPTouchDroid Twitter feed.

Companies including Best Buy, CompUSA, Staples, CDW and Circuit City say they have sold out of Touchpads online, and in some cases in stores too.

Best Buy wrote in a forum Sunday that it had completely sold out of TouchPads and that it would not be receiving any more. Amazon lists some TouchPads for sale, at higher prices than $99 and from little-known retailers.

On Monday, HP said interest in the TouchPad was so high that it was having trouble keeping a website about the product online. "The amount of traffic to the TouchPad availability page is causing issues," HP said via its main Twitter page.

The website currently says: "Due to the significant price reduction, we experienced overwhelming demand for the product and are temporarily out of inventory."

More units are on the way, however. HP Social Media Manager Bryna Corcoran said via Twitter that the company was restocking. "No more being made, but have inventory coming from ones already manufactured," she wrote.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2386...d_tablets.html





Slip-Up in Chinese Military TV Show Reveals More Than Intended

Piece shows cyber warfare against US entities
Matthew Robertson & Helena Zhu

A standard, even boring, piece of Chinese military propaganda screened in mid-July included what must have been an unintended but nevertheless damaging revelation: shots from a computer screen showing a Chinese military university is engaged in cyberwarfare against entities in the United States.

The documentary itself was otherwise meant as praise to the wisdom and judgment of Chinese military strategists, and a typical condemnation of the United States as an implacable aggressor in the cyber-realm. But the fleeting shots of an apparent China-based cyber-attack somehow made their way into the final cut.

The screenshots appear as B-roll footage in the documentary for six seconds—between 11:04 and 11:10 minutes—showing custom-built Chinese software apparently launching a cyber-attack against the main website of the Falun Gong spiritual practice, by using a compromised IP address belonging to a United States university. As of Aug. 22 at 1:30pm EDT, in addition to Youtube, the whole documentary is available on the CCTV website.

The screenshots show the name of the software and the Chinese university that built it, the Electrical Engineering University of China's People's Liberation Army—direct evidence that the PLA is involved in coding cyber-attack software directed against a Chinese dissident group.

The software window says "Choose Attack Target." The computer operator selects an IP address from a list—it happens to be 138.26.72.17—and then selects a target. Encoded in the software are the words "Falun Gong website list," showing that attacking Falun Gong websites was built into the software.

A drop-down list of dozens of Falun Gong websites appears. The computer operator chooses Minghui.org, the main website of the Falun Gong spiritual practice.

The IP address 138.26.72.17 belongs to the University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB), according to an online trace.

The shots then show a big "Attack" button on the bottom left being pushed, before the camera cuts away.

"The CCP has leaked its top secret here," says Jason Ma, a commentator for New Tang Dynasty Television. "This is the first time we see clearly that one of the top Chinese military universities is doing this research and developing software for cyber-attacks. There's solid proof of it in this video," he said.

The Chinese Communist Party has consistently denied that it is involved in cyber-attacks, but experts have long suspected that the Chinese military engages in them.

"Now we've got proof," Ma says. "They're also extending their persecution of Falun Gong overseas, attacking a civil website in the U.S. These are the clear messages revealed in these six seconds of video."

Network administrators at UAB contacted on Friday took a look at the IP address on their network and said it had not been used since 2010.

One of the technicians also recalled that there had been a Falun Gong practitioner at the university some years ago who held informal Falun Gong meetings on campus. They could not confirm whether that individual used that IP address.

A UAB network administrator assured The Epoch Times that they have safeguards against both network intrusions, and that their network is not compromised.

After the short interlude, the documentary continued with the themes it had started with for another nine minutes.

Last month McAfee, a network security company, said that an unprecedented campaign of cyber-espionage—affecting over 70 organizations or governments around the world and implicating billions of dollars in intellectual property—was being carried out by a "state actor."

Later evidence traced IP addresses involved in the attack to China, and a growing mountain of other circumstantial evidence also suggests that the attacks originated from China.

The military documentary on July 17, on the other hand, was meant to show that the United States is the real aggressor in cyberspace, and that China is highly vulnerable to cyber-attacks. “America is the first country to propose the concept of a cyberwar, and the first country to implement it in a real war,” the narrator said at one point.

It might have worked, except for those screenshots.
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/chin...ded-60619.html





'Zombie Cookies' Won't Die: Microsoft Admits Use, HTML5 Looms as New Vector

One year ago this week, I wrote about zombie cookies [1], describing how Disney, MySpace, and NBC Universal had just been sued for using zombie cookies to track people even if they have gone to great lengths to disable, block, or delete cookies. Seven months ago, I mentioned that Adobe had taken up the pitchfork [2] and vowed to make Flash zombie cookies a thing of the past.

So it's pretty shocking that Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford researcher, caught Microsoft [3] using both a cache-based zombie cookie and a more advanced type of persistent "supercookie" to track folks even if they blocked or deleted browser cookies. Microsoft surreptitiously tracked users who had the temerity to visit MSN.com (in the United States, Canada, and Spain), the U.S. English home page of www.microsoft.com [4], or the Microsoft Store.

Perhaps even scarier, as HTML5 gains traction: Its local storage [5] is a great feature, but one wide open for abuse for such items as zombie cookies. And Internet Explorer's InPrivate Browsing, Firefox's Private Browsing, and Chrome's Incognito browsing modes won't protect you from the ETag form of zombie cookies or from HTML5-based zombies.

The controversy over zombie cookies continues to play out in the courts as well. Hulu and Web-tracking company Kissmetrics were sued last month [6] for using the ETags technique in a zombie redux uncovered by University of California at Berkely researchers, according to Jennifer Granick at ZwillGen [7]. That case came despite the legal warning issued last year when Clearspring and Quantcast, the primary defendants in the first zombie cookie class-action lawsuit, settled last December [8], paid $2.4 million for their transgressions.

As for Microsoft getting caught with its hand in the zombie cookie jar, the company was quick to disavow the behavior, as Computerworld reported [9]. Mike Hintz, Microsoft's associate general counsel, said, "We determined that the cookie behavior he observed was occurring under certain circumstances as a result of older code that was used only on our own sites, and was already scheduled to be discontinued."

Indeed.

Mayer found two zombielike mechanisms, both implemented by a script called wlHelper.js. By design, wlHelper.js is supposed to make it possible for Microsoft to track a user across several different Microsoft domains. There's nothing particularly fattening, illegal, or immoral about that -- but making the cookies persistent put Microsoft's behavior in a decidedly gray area.

The first approach creates a cookie, then sticks a copy of the cookie along with wlHelper.js in the browser's cache. If the user deletes the cookie but doesn't clear the browser cache, wlHelper.js jumps back and re-creates the cookie.

The second approach, called ETags, uses a clever trick to store the cookie in the browser cache by having the cache store a bogus version number, which can be subsequently retrieved. Once again, if the user deletes the cookie but doesn't clear the browser cache, wlHelper.js is smart enough to retrieve the old cookie from the bogus version number. According to Mayer, this technique was first observed in the wild just two weeks ago.

Mayer found copies of wlHelper.js in these sites:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx [10]
http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/...isplayHomePage [11]
http://www.msn.com [12]
http://ca.msn.com [13]
http://es.msn.com [14]

If you visited one of those sites, wiped out your cookies, and then visited another, your cookies came back.
https://www.infoworld.com/t/internet...-vector-170511





White House Pledges New Net Privacy Approach
Declan McCullagh

A White House aide today previewed the administration's forthcoming approach to Internet consumer protection, saying it will provide "privacy law without regulation."

"Businesses that are engaged in responsible privacy practices today ought not to face any additional burdens," said Danny Weitzner, associate administrator at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) who's on assignment to the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Weitzner suggested during a discussion at a Technology Policy Institute conference here that: "You can have stronger privacy law, clearer rules, clearer principles established in law, without the costs and downsides of a traditional regulatory structure."
In December, the U.S. Commerce Department outlined proposals for how federal laws regulating companies' data collection practices could be updated, but stopped short of specific recommendations for legislation. An administration-wide white paper is expected this fall.

Lawrence Strickling, the NTIA's administrator (the agency is part of the Commerce Department) suggested to Congress in March that it should enact a "consumer privacy bill of rights" that would mandate broad privacy protections. Some possibilities--Strickling, too, avoided specifics--include requiring companies to describe the purpose for which they're collecting data, and keeping it secure once collected.

That's similar to what Weitzner outlined today. "I think the government has a key role in articulating what consumer rights ought to be," he said.

"The strength of our system is that we iterate quite a bit in trying to answer those questions--(instead of having) a fixed set of regulations, and then scratch our heads for 10 years and worry whether they're the right ones," he said.

While the United States does not have a data collection law as specific as Europe's controversial approach, federal agencies including the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission have existing authority to police privacy violations. So do state attorneys general--who have used state laws to extract concessions from Facebook and Amazon.com. Class action lawsuits, such as one filed against Apple, tend to have a strong deterrent effect.

Victor Nichols, the chief executive of data broker firm Experian North America, who spoke earlier in the day, warned of overzealous federal regulation of companies' data collection and use practices. That can interfere with economic growth, he said.

"We all understand that laws and regulations cannot move as fast as businesses can in response to consumer need," Nichols said. "Industry self-regulation therefore provides the flexible approach...providing consumers with the transparency and choice that they need."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20...vacy-approach/





Former WikiLeaks Spokesman Disputes Claims About Destroyed Files
Kim Zetter

A former WikiLeaks spokesman under fire for recently destroying thousands of unpublished documents submitted to the secret-spilling site last year says WikiLeaks is publicly exaggerating the contents of the deleted files, in an increasingly ugly dispute playing out over Twitter and in the press.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “was aware of the submissions and had taken out all the stuff he deemed worthy enough,” wrote former spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg in an e-mail to Wired.com. “It is not like we did not talk to one another, so he was aware of the submissions. He just claims all kinds of stuff now that is not true.”

Domscheit-Berg shocked WikiLeaks supporters this week when he told the German newsweekly Der Spiegel that he’d deleted more than 3,500 unpublished documents that he and an associate took with them when they left the organization last year. He said he destroyed the documents because Julian Assange could not guarantee safe handling of the files or their sources.

Since then, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed has spewed out a steadily-growing list of important documents and files it claims are lost to history because of Domscheit-Berg’s actions. On Tuesday, WikiLeaks tweeted that the documents included “videos of a major US atrocity in Afghanistan.” WikiLeaks previously claimed that 5 gigabytes of data from Bank of America, and a copy of the U.S. No-Fly List were also causalities of the purge. The latter is a list of names of terrorist suspects who are not allowed to fly on planes taking off from the U.S. or flying to or over the country.

“I can confirm that there was a No-Fly list in the batch, but it had not been published back then because it already was public,” Domscheit-Berg said in e-mail. “It was one of those lists floating around on the internet.”

WikiLeaks’ other claims about what the destroyed documents contain are “false and misleading,” Domscheit-Berg said, such as in the case of the Bank of America documents. Domscheit-Berg cast doubt on the latter claim, based on the fact that Assange had already announced plans to publish the bank documents back in 2009, a time period that is outside the scope of when the documents that Domscheit-Berg destroyed supposedly arrived to WikiLeaks.

Last year, Domscheit-Berg told Threat Level that he only possessed documents that had been submitted to WikiLeaks between July 2010, when its newly re-architected submission system went back online, and the end of that summer, when Domscheit-Berg left WikiLeaks with another colleague. WikiLeaks says the documents span a much longer submission period, between January and July 2010, when the organization’s submission system was offline for a chunk of time.

Domscheit-Berg did not speak to the discrepancy in his e-mail to Wired.com, but seemed to accept the longer time frame.

“The objects we are talking about are submissions from January 2010 to September 2010,” he wrote.

But Domscheit-Berg noted that the Bank of America materials could not have been among the destroyed documents because the “BoA material was already announced in October 2009 for example, much earlier. ”

Assange, he said, had claimed “repeatedly in the past that he was going to publish [the bank data], and then he claimed BoA was blackmailing him over it. Now he claims I destroyed it. So which of it is it?,” Domscheit-Berg wrote.

The latest assertion about the video also does not jibe with the timing of WikiLeaks’ past statements about when it received the video and was working on decrypting it.

The video in question is likely one that WikiLeaks previously claimed it possessed, which showed a May 2009 U.S. air strike near Garani village in Afghanistan. The local government insisted the air strike killed nearly 100 civilians, most of them children. The Pentagon released a report about the incident in 2009, but backed down from a plan to show video of the attack to reporters.

The Garani video was among the first files that former Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning allegedly leaked to WikiLeaks. According to the government’s charging documents, Manning leaked the video to WikiLeaks some time between November 1, 2009 and January 8, 2010, when WikiLeaks announced on its Twitter feed that it had obtained “encrypted videos of US bomb strikes on civilians.” The tweet included a link to a Wired.com article about the Garani air strike.

WikiLeaks later hinted that year that it planned to release the video, but instead released another video in April 2010 under the title “Collateral Murder.” This video showed a U.S. Apache air strike on civilians in Iraq.

Assange told reporters after the “Collateral Murder” release that his organization still planned to release the Garani video. But the video was apparently contained in an encrypted AES-256 ZIP file, according to statements Manning made to a former hacker, and the organization appeared to be having trouble cracking the military-grade encryption.

Now WikiLeaks is claiming the video was destroyed by Domscheit-Berg.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...berg-disputes/





Anonymous Leaks Nude Pics of BART Spokesman

Anonymous has declared war on San Francisco's commuter subway system, BART. They've staged protests and hacked website, but a leak of nude pics of a BART spokesman has taken things to another, more personal level.

SF Weekly reports that a member of Anonymous has set up a blog (NSFW) exposing BART spokesman Linton Johnson's, uh, Johnson. The blog shows a couple shots of Johnson cavorting at an outdoor party, pulling down his pants and revealing his dong. Also the message: "If you are going to be a dick to the public, then I'm sure you dont mind showing your dick to the public…"

Linton became an Anonymous target after he revealed that he was the one who came up with the idea to shut down cell service at BART stations to prevent protests earlier this month over the shooting death of a homeless man at the hands of BART Police. In their ongoing "Operation Bart," Anonymous has hacked BART passenger and police databases, and shut down a number of stations with real-life protests for two weeks in a row now.

The intensely personal attack on Linton mirrors what Anonymous did to former defense contractor Aaron Barr last year: They broke into his and his colleagues' email and posted their in-boxes for anyone on the internet to search through. If you're going to take on Anonymous, be sure you've changed all your passwords and stored your nude pics in a footlocker buried underneath your floorboards. They're basically an amoral Wikileaks for normal people.
http://gawker.com/5834101





In Britain, a Meeting on Limiting Social Media
Ravi Somaiya

British officials and representatives of Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry met Thursday to discuss voluntary ways to limit or restrict the use of social media to combat crime and periods of civil unrest, while trying to dodge charges of hypocrisy and censorship that trailed Prime Minister David Cameron’s call to restrict use of the networks after this month’s riots.

The government’s home minister, Theresa May, according to one account of the meeting, said that the aim was not to “discuss restricting Internet services,” but to instead “crack down on the networks being used for criminal behavior.” A spokeswoman for Ms. May said the government “would not be seeking any additional powers.”

But the discussion, according to those present, was still aimed at reeling in social media and strengthening the hand of law enforcement in gathering information from those networks. In the wake of revolutions that have seen widespread calls for freedom and democracy, free-speech advocates have said, the British government is considering similar policies to those it has criticized in totalitarian and one-party states.

“You do not want to be on a list with the countries that have cracked down on social media during the Arab Spring,” said Jo Glanville, the editor of Index on Censorship, a magazine that campaigns for freedom of expression, noting that such actions could “undermine democracy.”

Indeed, Iran, criticized by the West for restricting the Internet and curbing free speech, seemed to savor the moment and offered in the immediate aftermath of the riots to “send a human rights delegation to Britain to study human rights violations in the country,” according to the semiofficial Fars News Agency.

Mr. Cameron had called for stronger controls on social media after nimble, smartphone-armed rioters and looters used the networks to outmaneuver the police. But while his call drew an outcry in some quarters, it also received heartfelt applause in others, where restoring order was seen as a higher priority than the rights of social networkers.

“I can understand why some people would feel uneasy,” said Gordon Scobbie, a senior police officer who leads efforts to sharpen the force’s social media presence and who was present at the meeting of Facebook, Twitter and the company that owns BlackBerry, Research in Motion. “But if they’re allowing criminal activity — and this was high-end criminality, people lost their lives in these riots — I struggle to see how that can just go on.”

“We have a duty to protect people,” he added, “and that’s always balanced with human rights, online or offline. It’s no different now.”

The officials and the executives met in private in government offices. The companies declined, beyond carefully written statements, to say what specific new measures they would be taking in cooperation with the British police and government.

But Mr. Scobbie said the group had discussed how far the networks might be willing to bend privacy rules to assist the police in pursuing online criminal activity. Twitter, he said, giving an example, might consider compelling people to use their real names instead of anonymous handles. Research In Motion has already agreed to provide the British police information from the BlackBerry Messenger network — used by many rioters to organize and strategize — under certain circumstances, he said. They might consider allowing “protocols” for easier access in future. RIM has previously negotiated with Saudi Arabia and India to allow some monitoring of users’ messages.

Mr. Scobbie and others present at the meeting said that the police were also considering using social media analysis software tools to parse enormous quantities of data available online for signs of future unrest.

“When people use a telephone, under certain circumstances, law enforcement has a means of intercepting that,” he said. “Just because it’s different media, we shouldn’t stand back and say, ‘We don’t play in that space.’ ” The police, he said, must have authority online and in real life.

But Heather Brooke, a freedom-of-information advocate who has written extensively about privacy online, cautioned that such secret negotiations came “with no judicial review or accountability,” adding, “Who’s checking to see whether the police are just going around fishing for information on the whole population, or going for people or groups they don’t like?”

Ms. Glanville, the free-speech advocate, described “a panic, a knee-jerk response to criminality and immorality” behind such measures, citing the cases of two men sentenced to four years in jail each for posting Facebook messages encouraging rioting, though no riots occurred. Politicians and the British judiciary were “out of touch,” she said.

The police, she said, have found social media a useful tool, helping to catch hapless looters who posted pictures of stolen goods online, and communities have used the same networks to gather together to repair their neighborhoods. “It’s not about social media, it’s about the state of the nation. Instead of taking about our great difficulties, we’re talking about the medium.”

It is not the first time Britain has wrestled with such dilemmas. Last year, Paul Chambers, 26, frustrated by an airport’s closing, threatened in a jokey Twitter message to blow the airport “sky high.” When he was arrested and fined, losing his job in the process, he became a cause célèbre, with the comedian Stephen Fry among those offering support for his case. This year, tens of thousands of Twitter users flouted a court order imposed on more traditional media and named a soccer player, Ryan Giggs, who was said to have had an affair with a reality TV star.

Some of the nations that have been criticized by the West for their own draconian crackdowns on inconvenient freedoms of speech have watched Britain’s recent struggles with barely disguised glee. In China, The Global Times, a government-controlled newspaper, praised Mr. Cameron’s comments, writing that “the open discussion of containment of the Internet in Britain has given rise to a new opportunity for the whole world.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/w.../26social.html





Musicians Mourn Ashford at His Own Bar
James C. McKinley Jr.

It was blues night at Sugar Bar on Tuesday, and the musicians were working through their grief over the loss of Nick Ashford, the singer and songwriter who with his wife, Valerie Simpson, penned some of the greatest songs of the Motown era.

Halfway through the first blues, a wailing tune in a minor key, Jermaine Paul, a young soul singer, started to talk over the vamp about what Mr. Ashford, whose chair was empty, meant to him, voicing what many in the room were feeling.

“Put one hand in the air for Nick, y’all,” Mr. Paul said. “We feel him here tonight. There was something special about that man. There was something about it when he looked you in the eyes. It’s like he saw your soul, like he saw who you are, and when a good friend looks in your eyes, he accepts you, and that’s the kind of man he was. Or is. He’s here tonight, ain’t he.”

But Mr. Ashford’s absence in the New York City club he had founded with his wife was palpable, and it hurt to the bone many of those pressed into the bar. There was a wreath in front of his club on West 72d Street, a table piled high with flowers and a sign saying: “R.I.P. Soul Legend. Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”

Mr. Ashford died of throat cancer on Monday at a hospital in New York at the age of 70, leaving behind his wife and writing partner and a catalogue of hit songs that expressed the couple’s expansive and hopeful view of love, his biggest hits being “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing.”

He also left many friends who came to the club they owned, where they held open mike nights every Tuesday and Thursday, fostering dozens of young musicians and providing a hangout for established R. & B. singers and players whose lives had been entwined with the couple’s.

After the first set, Nat Adderley Jr., the jazz artist and the former musical director for Luther Vandross, took the mike to tell the crowd how Mr. Ashford and Ms. Simpson had given him a job in a backup band while he was still in high school in Manhattan. Mr. Ashford had mentored dozens of musicians who went on to have celebrated careers in pop music. “So many of us credit Nat and Valerie for starting us in pop music and bring us up from nowhere,” he said.

By 11:30, the club was crowded with session musicians and vocalists, most of whom had a story to tell about the help Mr. Ashford had given them at various times in their careers.

As the night wore on, a jam session started to mark Mr. Ashford’s death. It reached a peak when Alyson Williams, a soul singer who enjoyed some success in the early 1990s, led the group in a rousing singalong rendition of “Solid,” the biggest hit Mr. Ashford and Ms. Simpson had as performers. A half-dozen other professional singers crowded the microphones, among them Lisa Fischer, who has sung behind acts like the Rolling Stones, and Alfa Anderson, a former lead singer for the band Chic.

Freddie Jackson, the rhythm and blues singer, said he had known Mr. Ashford for 30 years and that their friendship could be traced back to the White Rock Baptist Church in Harlem, where Mr. Ashford met Ms. Simpson and they began their long partnership. “I miss his heart and I miss his cooking swordfish on Sunday evening,” Mr. Jackson said.

Mr. Jackson recalled auditioning to be one of the backup singers for Ashford and Simpson after they left Motown’s stable of writers and began a career as a duo. He didn’t make the cut. He added that Mr. Ashford had an unforgettable knack for simple lyrics that drilled down into the heart of the subject. “Those songs stuck like glue,” he said. “He was magical for me.” When the music started, Mr. Jackson got up to trade scat lines with Mr. Paul during an uptempo number, and the room filled with a gospel feeling.

Some musicians had trouble holding back their tears as they entered the club. “I don’t like this part of life,” said Bobbi Humphrey, a flute player who has also known Mr. Ashford since the early 1970s. She surveyed the club with wet eyes. “It’s not just a music room. You actually become family here.”

Younger musicians said that the club was an incubator for talent and that Mr. Ashford had provided a platform for performing, as well advice and steady constructive criticism over the years. Mr. Paul recalled Mr. Ashford telling him to carry a tape recorder to capture musical thoughts before they disappeared.

“He said, ‘Press record,’ ” Mr. Paul recalled. “Always press record if you walk in and you are humming something. That’s coming from somewhere. Those are the things that are given to you.”

Mr. Paul said he felt blessed that Mr. Ashford had given him a steady gig and a place to develop his voice and style. “To me, he encompasses R .& B., that R. & B. pop sound, songs that people want to hear 30 years later,” Mr. Paul said quietly. “Those songs aren’t going anywhere.”
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...t-his-own-bar/





Yes, He Sold Fakes. They Are Supposed to Be Fake.
Jeffrey E. Singer and Corey Kilgannon

The items, mostly copies of luxury objects, inside the little shop in downtown Manhattan are made of thin cardboard and might not even pass muster deep in the background of a movie set.

But that did not deter the police from arresting a shop worker on counterfeiting charges for selling several items, including Louis Vuitton and Burberry handbags.

There is just one problem: the items are supposed to be fake.

The store, Fook On Sing Funeral Supplies, on Mulberry Street along what is known in Chinatown as Funeral Row, sells traditional objects of mourning, mostly copies of luxury objects. The items are made of cardboard, paper and plastic, to be used at funerals as symbolic gifts for the deceased. The cardboard models are burned as part of traditional Chinese funeral practices.

The store sells a cardboard mansion for $400 and a cardboard flat-screen television for $40. There are stacks of money ($10,000 bills) for sale, as well as miniature sports cars, cellphones, double-breasted suits and even smiling dolls to act as servants in the hereafter.

“When people die, they feel they are going to need things in the next world,” explained one of the store’s owners, Amy Mak-Chan, who is the arrested man’s aunt. “They might want a car and a house and other nice things. People buy these things here, to give them as gifts at the funeral.”

A police spokesman on Wednesday would only offer information from the arrest report, including that the worker who was arrested on Tuesday, Wing Sun Mak, was observed offering to sell three handbags “that bore a counterfeit trademark Burberry” and one handbag that bore a fake Louis Vuitton insignia. He was also observed offering for sale four pairs of shoes and two outfits.

Mr. Mak said that a man in street clothes entered the store and seemed particularly interested in the handbags and loafers, obviously cardboard, that have print designs that vaguely resemble Louis Vuitton’s and Gucci’s.

“He asked me, ‘How much is this?’ ” recalled Mr. Mak, pointing to a handbag on display. “I said $20, and he pulled out his badge and said, ‘Are you selling this to me?’ And then he arrested me.”

He was held overnight in a local precinct house and then arraigned Wednesday afternoon in Criminal Court at 100 Centre Street, several blocks from the store, before being released.

He was charged with two counts of copyright infringement in the third degree. Jonathan L. Stonbely, a lawyer from Legal Aid assigned to Mr. Mak, said that he was prepared to defend his client against the charges and that he had rejected an offer from prosecutors to allow Mr. Mak to plead guilty to disorderly conduct and pay a $100 fine.

Ms. Mak-Chan said that the items offered to the dead change with the times.

“We never thought that updating things would go against America’s laws,” she said.

After he was handcuffed and escorted into a police van, Mr. Mak said, the police went on to arrest other people in Chinatown who seemed to be hawking items that more closely resembled designer products.

In the wake of their fellow worker’s arrest, store employees on Wednesday said they were outraged and a bit jittery. On a four-foot-long cardboard sports car, they used Post-It notes to cover a blue and white design that resembled the BMW insignia.

Councilwoman Margaret Chin, who represents the neighborhood and was contacted by the store’s owners for help, said she had requested a meeting with police officials.

“You expect the police to be culturally sensitive,” Ms. Chin said. “This has been going on for hundreds of years, the Chinese burning offerings to the dead, and that’s what these kind of stores are for. It’s hard to understand how someone could mistake this for criminal activity.”

Suki Lin, the wife of the arrested man, picked up her own Coach handbag. “It’s real,” she said, a gift from her husband. She motioned toward a cardboard bag and said, “If he gave me that bag, I’d beat him to death.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/n...nt-arrest.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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