Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 18th, '10

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December 18th, 2010




Piracy Fight Shuts Down Music Blogs
Ben Sisario

Thanksgiving Day had barely begun when Kevin Hofman’s BlackBerry buzzed. It was one of the technical operators of OnSmash.com, Mr. Hofman’s popular hip-hop blog, telling him that the site had gone mysteriously blank just after midnight.

“At first I thought it was hackers,” Mr. Hofman said. But within hours a notice went up on the site saying that its domain name had been seized by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit of the Department of Homeland Security; it was one of dozens of sites shut down, accused of copyright infringement and selling counterfeit goods.

But Mr. Hofman, a brawny Long Islander in his early 30s who formerly worked for a major record label, does not think of himself as a pirate.

OnSmash.com and the handful of other music blogs shut down by the government post brand-new songs and videos without licenses, but much of that material is often leaked to them by managers, music labels and even the artists themselves.

As a result, these sites have a complex symbiosis with the music business. While the Recording Industry Association of America wants to shut them down, the rank and file of the record labels — particularly in hip-hop circles — uses them as marketing tools and publicity outlets.

“To Joe Q. Public, ‘leak’ sounds like a bad word,” Mr. Hofman said in an interview at a pizzeria on the Lower East Side, his lawyer by his side. “But if you’ve ever been in a marketing meeting at a record label, it’s ‘Hey, can you leak this to the blogs?’ Leak is now a marketing verb.”

In addition to OnSmash.com, the music sites shut down included Dajaz1.com, RapGodFathers.com and rmx4u.com; another, torrent-finder.com, is a search engine for users of BitTorrent, a file-sharing system that can be used for any kind of data.

The seizures over Thanksgiving weekend — most of the 82 sites involved were shut down for selling knockoff handbags, sunglasses and other goods — were made without warning. Internet advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have expressed alarm at the precedent the action might set.

Victoria A. Espinel, the White House’s intellectual property enforcement coordinator, said on Dec. 6 that more shutdowns could be expected soon as the government pursued “pirates and counterfeiters.”

Some of the people most surprised by the shutdowns are within the music business itself.

“The industry and my artists don’t have any issues with most of these sites,” said Corey Smyth, a manager of rappers and producers like Lil Jon and Talib Kweli. “When you’re trying to get something out, this is where the kids go.”

For artists, blogs that traffic in the latest leaks are not always beneficial, nor is it always clear where a leak is coming from. Fabolous, a Brooklyn rapper on the Def Jam label who has worked with OnSmash.com, said competition among blogs had resulted in a free-for-all in which e-mail accounts for artists and producers had been hacked in search of any snippets of new music that could attract readers.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” Fabolous said. “It’s a great, great promotional tool to get whatever you’re trying to get out to the masses. But on the other side it is a little bit of piracy, because sometimes it’s not always stuff that’s given — there’s certain things that are taken.”

More than a decade since the advent of the file-sharing service Napster, the big labels are still struggling to reconcile the promise and the threat of digital music.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not explained how it selected sites that deal in downloadable music, but a spokesman for the Recording Industry of Association of America, which represents the major music labels, said it had worked with ICE and other federal agencies in identifying infringing sites.

“The sites and services we identify are flagrantly violating federal copyright laws, illegally offering songs of well-known artists or pre-release content not commercially available online or in any store,” said the trade group spokesman, Jonathan Lamy.

Mr. Hofman, who began his career working in the new media and marketing departments of a major record label (he would not say which one), enjoys easy access to artists and labels. His site regularly hosted showcase concerts in New York clubs, and had been festooned with artist shout-outs. The Miami rapper Rick Ross, in the liner notes to his recent Top 10 album “Teflon Don,” thanked OnSmash.com before mentioning his own record company.

“I get nothing but open-arm receptions,” said Mr. Hofman, who is prominent enough in the music world that Kanye West links to him on Twitter. “I turn down more industry invites than I accept.”

Mr. Hofman said tracks and videos were leaked to his site regularly, adding that if he received a cease-and-desist letter about unauthorized material on his site, he took it down.

Sites like OnSmash.com and Dajaz1.com had advertising, but their operators said the income from it was minimal. The operator of Dajaz1.com, who calls himself Splash (he would not give his real name), described himself in an interview as a married father of two in Queens who once worked in the music industry.

“I have a regular, Joe Schmo job,” he said. But running an influential rap blog does have its privileges. “I’m on the phone with Busta Rhymes once every three to four days,” Splash said.

For now the seized domains are in legal limbo. David Snead, a lawyer specializing in Internet cases who is representing the owner of torrent-finder.com, speculated that it might be 30 to 60 days before he would be able to see a seizure order. “The government is providing zero information to help us determine what he is being charged with,” he said. “It’s a black hole.”

Some of the sites have resumed their postings by simply relocating to other domains: RapGodFathers.com is now operating on RapGodFathers.info, and torrent-finder.com is now torrent-finder.info.

Mr. Hofman said he was “extremely nervous” about his legal situation, but also puzzled.

“I see myself as a legitimate source of content online, and I have no reason to believe that I was ever perceived as otherwise. If what I’m doing is so wrong and is harming the artist, then why is he retweeting stuff to two million-plus people?” Mr. Hofman said, referring to Kanye West. “It just doesn’t make sense to me.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/bu...a/14music.html





Musician Releases Album And Explains Why File Sharing Isn't That Big A Deal
Mike Masnick

Brian points us to a video from Charlie McDonnell, a musician/internet personality, who has just released a new album. The video, rather than just talking up the new album, is a four minute reflection on file sharing that covers the sorts of things we talk about pretty frequently, basically saying (1) file sharing isn't stealing, because no one's missing something (using a comparison to stealing Mars Bars) and (2) if you like the content, it creates new fans who will help support the artist in other ways:

Again, nothing really new or different there but put forth simply and eloquently and interesting that it's done in conjunction with the release of his album, where he notes you can listen to the entire album for free and he's not going to be upset if folks get the songs from elsewhere, though he'd certainly like people to support him. You can hear the album below too, and it's internet geeky, so I figure folks around here might like it.

The one thing that surprises me, though, is that while he's using Bandcamp to handle sales of the CD, he's not offering downloads via Bandcamp, where he could do things like offer flexible pricing. Instead, you have to buy it from iTunes. Kind of strange.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...big-deal.shtml





How Much Does File-Sharing REALLY Cost Record Companies?
Eriq Gardner

In October, a federal judge ruled for record companies in their lawsuit against Lime Wire, issuing an injunction and delivering tough language on the file-sharing service's copyright infringement.

The case is about to move to a jury trial that will determine what damages are owed by Lime Wire to the labels, but before that happens, record companies are going to experience some pain, thanks to a decision on Tuesday by U.S. Magistrate Judge Debra Freeman.

In the lawsuit, the music companies are seeking more than $1 billion in statutory damages, so Lime Wire asked the judge to make the labels prove lost profits.

In response, the labels offered to show "gross revenue" on the infringing works.

That's not enough, said Lime Wire. The company insisted the plaintiffs should show actual damages, which to it means record companies should be ordered to produce information on costs such as royalty payments on the musical works alleged to have been infringed.

That request didn't go over too well with the plaintiffs, who argued in a letter to the judge last month that it would impose a "crushing burden" on them.

On Tuesday, Judge Freeman said tough noogies, with some interesting language written in the margins of a court-endorsed memo to the parties. She scribbled -- barely legible -- that Lime Wire should enjoy enough discovery to mount a defense on the damages issue. Both Lime Wire and the labels must pick 100 works -- 80 songs and 20 albums -- that each believes to be representative of the damage (real or not) that file-sharing has on the record companies. In addition, 100 more works -- another 80 songs and 20 albums -- will be selected at random.

Every year, studies come out that try to estimate the economic harm of piracy. And annually, these studies are subjected to a good share of skepticism in some quarters. The revealing exercise now underway in the Lime Wire case could turn out to be one that sets the standard for showing actual economic harm from piracy.

We suspected that the important phase of the Lime Wire case had come and gone as the company was inevitably headed for bankruptcy and questions about damages were merely academic. Looks like we were wrong. The case has gotten interesting again.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/blo...ompanies-60837





Last.fm Reveals £2.84m Loss – Bulk of Users Still in UK, Despite CBS Ownership
Mike Butcher

Last.fm, the UK-based music startup acquired by media giant CBS in 2007 for $280m (£140m), made a loss for 2009 of just under £2.84 million ($4.45 million), reveal new accounts for the company. The loss posted in 2008 was £17.11 million, reflecting the high costs of streaming music, which the company has now cut. It just goes to show how expensive streaming can be…

Financials published on the UK’s Companies House show the company ended last year with net liabilities of £22.24 million, but parent company CBS is still effectively subsidising the company and will “make available such funds as are needed”. We’re hoping that CBS is getting some value out of this relationship.

Over 54% of Last.fm’s revenues in 2009 were from the UK, 33.5% from the US, 9.4% from EU countries, and 2.3% from the rest of the world.

That’s a gain on US users but the question is, is it enough to sustain CBS as a sugar daddy?

Having said that, it pulled away from a gross loss of £3.81 million in 2008 to make a very slim £86,322 profit in 2009. Turnover was up from £4.19 million in 2008, reaching £7.28 million in 2009, while cost of sales was down £0.8m to £7.2 million in 2009. Some £5.37 million of turnover came from ad sales or 73.7%, £1.3 million was from subscriptions (17.9%) and £0.6 million was from affiliate sales (8.4%).

Last.fm was founded in 2002 but only really got going with the addition of Audioscrobbler in 2003. So that’s about 7 years to get to £7m in revenues, people.

Admin expenses were just under £3 million for 2009, but that’s from £13.35 million in 2008. Headcount fell from an average of 79 in 2008 to 55 in 2009, according to the report.

As music blog Musically points out, that would reflect Last.fm’s shift away from on-demand streaming music, which incurred high costs, and is really now being done by a number of providers now like MOG, Rdio and Spotify in Europe.

Musically has also unturfed the fact that the Company granted share warrants to third party labels in exchange for their licensing services. These were exercises at a price of £73.26 per share and vested on 30 May 2007. So it looks like rightsholders did not in fact entirely miss out on the proceeds from its acquisition, as some have suggested.

Meanwhile Last.Fm was the centre of a small spate of controversy recently when it turned off a few subscriber stations that, the company said, weren’t strictly DMCA compliant.
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/12/03/...cbs-ownership/





Study: In 2010, 1.2 Billion Songs Will Have Been Downloaded Illegally in Britain

1.2bn Songs Downloaded In The UK In 2010
Matt Brian

A report from British music lobbying group the BPI suggests that over 1.2 billion songs will have been downloaded illegally by 7.7 million file-sharers in Britain by the end of 2010, nearly four times the number of tracks bought legally this year.

Music industry executives, which note the study is “conservative”, say the figures highlight a problem where record labels and its investors are not as willing to spend when sourcing new talent with revenue being impeded by illegal file-sharing.

Geoff Taylor, Chief Executive of the BPI, believes that illegal filesharing is “a parasite that threatens to deprive a generation of talented young people of their chance to make a career in music, and is holding back investment in the fledgling digital entertainment sector.”

The BPI’s “Digital Music Nation 2010″ report estimates that UK digital singles sales could surpass 160 million in 2010, a rise of 10 million from last year, while digital album sales could top 21 million, up 5 million the year before.

Interestingly, figures show that in the 12 months leading up to September, digital downloads accounted for 24.5 percent of the UK record industry’s revenue, up more than 5% from a year previous.

BPI figures for the 12 months ending in September 2010 show digital services now account for 24.5 percent of UK record industry revenue, up from 19.2 percent a year earlier. The increase in digital music revenue hasn’t helped to offset declining CD sales though, something that the industry might need to asssess to see if the market has changed enough for a shift in how music is sold.

We don’t deny there is a high level of illegal music downloads but there are also a number of different initiatives trying to shift the way people consume music. Record companies still don’t see the advantages of “all-you-can-eat” music subscriptions like those offered by Spotify and other streaming services, leaving consumers with limited choices.
http://thenextweb.com/uk/2010/12/16/...ly-in-britain/





MPAA Shuts Down 29 BitTorrent and NZB Sites
enigmax

The MPAA and their colleagues in The Netherlands appear to have shut down more than two dozen BitTorrent, Usenet and other file-sharing sites today. Accused of linking to movies, music, TV shows and games, at least one domain appears to be redirecting to the website of Dutch anti-piracy outfit, BREIN.

mpaaIn an operation carried out by the MPAA and Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, 29 BitTorrent and Usenet indexing sites are believed to have been closed down.

The names of the sites, which appear to have been offering links to movies, music, TV shows, games and books, are currently unavailable but at least one appears to be identified as HD-UNiT3D.

As can be seen from its http://hd-united.com/ URL, it diverts straight to BREIN’s homepage.

Despite being hosted in the US the anti-piracy outfit cited Dutch law as the reason for the closures. “They are directed at the Dutch public” and “unlawful under Dutch law,” Kuik told TorrentFreak.

“This year we have made over 600 of these sites inaccessible. Some seek refuge in a foreign hosting provider. These 29 apparently thought that in America they could go undisturbed. That is incorrect,” Kuik said.

brein“Through cooperation with our foreign colleagues we can make sites in other countries inaccessible,” he added.

BREIN says it will also seek out the personal details of those who operate the sites in order to hold them personally liable.

As mentioned in our earlier articles, BREIN has indeed closed down many torrent and Usenet related sites. However, while some of them have been reasonably sized, most of them are particularly small and easy to close by pressuring their hosts.

The fact that none of the owners or users of the sites have alerted us about these alleged closures suggests that no sizable sites were included.

The MPAA are yet to make a statement on the action and as yet BREIN haven’t formally identified any of the sites targeted. If past actions are anything to go by, they will try to avoid naming them for fear of giving them even more publicity.

That HD-UNiT3D is redirecting to BREIN’s homepage is both worrying and suspicious. Previously, BREIN simply asked the hosting providers to take the sites down or face the legal consequences. This is the first time that they appear to have gained some level of control over a domain, an action that is usually only taken by the authorities and not a private anti-piracy group. Whether this is the result of old-fashioned pressure or something else will remain to be seen.

Update: TorrentFreak requested a list of the affected domains from BREIN and received this response from Tim Kuik.

“No that would amount to free PR for the sites that intend to continue their unlawful activities at another hosting provider. These are not large sites and we want to keep it that way.”

In response to a question about how the sites were taken offline:

“The sites were taken down by the hosting provider,” said Kuik.
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-shuts-d...-sites-101215/





MPAA, RIAA: Lawsuits Won't Protect Content
Greg Sandoval

Trade groups representing the music and film sectors say copyright law offers too many excuses for ISPs to do nothing about protecting copyright.

Lawyers representing independent filmmakers, including the studio that produced Oscar-winner "The Hurt Locker," might learn something from a document filed with the U.S. Department of Commerce today by music, television, and film industry trade groups.

The Commerce Department recently sent out a request for information, known as a "Notice of Information," on "copyright policy, creativity, and innovation in the Internet economy." What the Commerce Department intends to do with the information it obtains was unclear this afternoon, but it did receive a response from nine trade groups representing the entertainment sector. In that report were a few notable points.

"The role of lawsuits in solving the online theft problem is clearly limited," wrote the coalition that included the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). "For instance, bringing clear-cut claims against major commercial infringers is not by itself a solution in the long run," the coalition wrote. "These cases take years to litigate and are an enormous resource drain."

As an example, the coalition cited the litigation against the company behind the LimeWire file-sharing network, which concluded this year with a federal district court ordering the company to shut down the network. The coalition wrote that though the four largest recording companies prevailed in the case, "the LimeWire defendants were able to drag out the litigation for four years. Such massive civil cases do not provide a scalable solution to the full scope of the problem."

In the case of Lime Wire, the company that operated the LimeWire software, the RIAA's antipiracy approach meant bringing suit against a company. That's different from the strategy adopted by Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver (DGW), the law firm that has filed copyright complaints against thousands of individuals accused of illegally sharing movies made by indie studios. But what the two approaches appear to have in common is that they cost a lot.

DGW has seen considerable opposition from the accused and now many of the cases appear as if they will drag on in the courts for some time. That likely means higher costs for the plaintiffs. The top-four labels pursued a similar legal strategy against individuals for five years but ended the practice in 2008.

The plan now by the labels and big Hollywood studios is to seek more copyright protection from the government. Here is some of what the coalition wrote in its report to the Commerce Department about the state of online piracy:

• Peer-to-peer file sharing continues to account for at least 25 percent of all broadband traffic worldwide. A very high proportion of this traffic involves unauthorized copies of movies, TV programming, sound recordings, and other copyrighted works.
• A recent Princeton University study found that approximately 99 percent of 1,021 BitTorrent files reviewed violated copyright. It is true that P2P's percentage share of total traffic is down from previous years, but in large part this is attributable to increased use of streaming services and cyberlockers as means for making stolen copyrighted materials available.

• McAfee estimates that the number of "live, active sites delivering illegitimate content" has sextupled since 2007.

The coalition complained that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the law that offers Internet service providers a safe harbor from copyright liability, offers companies too many loopholes. They say that the way the law reads now, ISPs have too much of "an excuse to do nothing to combat pervasive and even blatant infringement."

Elsewhere in the report, the coalition used Google as an example of a company that once resisted requests for greater antipiracy efforts but is now moving in the right direction. Last week, Google announced it would stop doing business with members of AdSense, the advertising vehicle that pays sites for posting ads on its pages, if they were found to be trafficking in pirated content. Google also said it would be quicker to remove pirated links from its search results once notified by copyright owners.

The coalition noted, however, not every search engine is cooperating.

"Even though highly effective automated systems for matching online content to copyright reference databases are readily available and are currently in use by some service providers," the coalition wrote, "other providers feel no obligation to implement them."

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20...#ixzz17uHbv8gJ

http://www.scribd.com/doc/45163806/F...ission-3331524
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20025357-261.html





Supreme Court Rebuffs Costco In Copyright Challenge
Daniel Fisher

The Supreme Court, in a 4:4 decision, refused to overturn a Ninth Circuit decision limiting the first-sale doctrine to U.S.-produced goods. The decision upholds the right of manufacturers — in this case, Swiss watchmaker Omega — to use copyright laws to prevent U.S. retailers from selling goods they obtained overseas.

More analysis on the decision from the indispensable Scotusblog here. Omega sued Costco for selling its watches for prices below suggested retail, citing a tiny Omega logo on the goods that it said gave it the copyright holders power to control how creative works are distributed. Costco cited the first sale doctrine, which says copyright holders are only entitled to such protection on the first sale of a work. Without such protection, libraries and book resellers couldn’t function.

The decision — or non-decision, really, since Justice Elena Kagan was forced to recuse herself, leaving a tie vote — has serious implications for U.S. retailers that obtain their goods on the gray market. Manufacturers that like to engage in price discrimination by selling goods overseas for prices below what they charge in more affluent markets now have a powerful tool to prevent retailers from importing those goods and selling them in the U.S. It could apply to “foreign made” copies of movies and other electronic entertainment. Critics of the Ninth Circuit decision say it also gives U.S. companies an incentive to move production overseas to avoid the reach of the first sale doctrine.
http://blogs.forbes.com/danielfisher...ght-challenge/





Time Warner Views Netflix as a Fading Star
Tim Arango

For the past year, executives at big media companies have watched Netflix with growing resentment — for its success in delivering movies and television shows via the Internet, for its stock price nearly quadrupling, for its chief executive being named businessperson of the year by Fortune magazine.

Now many of the companies that make the shows and movies that Netflix delivers to mailboxes, computer screens and televisions — companies whose stocks have not enjoyed the same frothy rise, and whose chief executives have not won the same accolades — are pushing back, arguing that the company is overhyped, and vowing to charge much more to license their content.

“It’s a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world?” said Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, in an interview last week. “I don’t think so.”

Netflix has been a business partner to the movie and television studios through licensing deals, but increasingly it is seen as a partner with its hands far deeper in the pockets of the media companies than anyone thought. Through its success, the company has positioned itself at the center of the media universe — at the nexus of technology and content — and is now finding it a place increasingly under attack.

The relationship between Netflix and the media companies will most likely change drastically, beginning next year when a deal between the company and Starz, the pay-TV channel, to stream movies from Sony and Disney expires.

The original deal from 2008, in which Netflix paid an estimated $25 million annually — a paltry sum, executives say, compared with the hundreds of millions of dollars cable and satellite companies pay Starz for the same movies — is now seen as a major coup for Netflix, and a major mistake by Starz.

Michael Nathanson, a media analyst at Nomura, called it “probably one of the dumbest deals ever. Starz gave up valuable content for tens of millions of dollars.”

Mr. Bewkes said that deal, which gave Netflix significant momentum into the new world of online video, potentially undermined the business model of cable television, based on the subscription fees that have steadily flowed even as other media businesses have suffered in the digital age. “Why should anyone subscribe to Starz when they can basically get the whole thing for about nothing?” he said. “That doesn’t make much sense.”

Mr. Bewkes explained that in the late 1990s the media industry embraced Netflix as a new distribution outlet for renting DVDs — without foreseeing that the company would eventually accelerate the decline in the sales of DVDs, which for years had been the lifeblood of the film industry. Now, with its success online, Netflix has raised fears that consumers may stop paying for cable television — the much-debated phenomenon of cord-cutting.

Mr. Nathanson agreed, saying, “The first engagement the industry had with Netflix was innocent. DVDs were selling, and it didn’t seem like much of a problem.”

Now, however, Netflix is increasingly seen as potentially a very big problem.

“In the past six months, and because of concerns of Wall Street and concerns of cord-cutting, it’s influencing the investor conversations about the future of media,” Mr. Nathanson said. “Now, the industry is very focused on Netflix, and what they can do.”
A media conference last week in New York held by the investment bank UBS became a platform for executives to express their grievances and emphasize that they will now aggressively try to tilt the economic balance between Netflix and content creators back toward the media conglomerates.

“When Netflix first came around, the dog was the discs and the baggie,” said Robert S. Wiesenthal, executive vice president and chief financial officer at the Sony Corporation of America, referring to the envelopes the discs are mailed in, “and the streaming was the tail.” But very quickly, he added, that situation was reversed. “And now the economics for the content companies are going to reflect that.”

Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer for Netflix who negotiates all the deals with Hollywood, attributed the comments to the media industry’s efforts to understand the future of television and movie-watching.

“I don’t think they feel threatened,” he said. “They are not very sure of the outcome of what appears to be a very major shift in consumer behavior.” He described the shift as toward “on-demand, instant gratification video.”

“Netflix is the leader in that space,” he said. “So we become the center of the rhetoric.”

If Netflix is to renew the Starz pact — and thus keep a steady flow of Hollywood movies — it will probably pay many times the current $25 million a year. Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG research, estimated a new deal could cost Netflix more than $250 million a year. Mr. Bewkes suggested a new deal may not be reached, because Netflix’s subscription streaming service, which costs about $8 a month, isn’t high enough for the company to pay top dollar for movies.

“At $8 to $10, it doesn’t have the economics to support high-value programming,” he said.

As evidence of Netflix’s growing importance, Mr. Bewkes said decisions about deals that might have been made two years ago by a junior employee in a studio’s digital division are now reaching his desk. For example, Mr. Bewkes himself approved a deal to allow Netflix to stream “Nip/Tuck,” a drama produced by Warner Brothers’ TV studio.

The most contentious clash between Netflix and the media industry will probably center on Netflix’s ambition of expanding its television offerings.

Netflix announced last week a new deal to stream ABC shows, like old episodes of “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives.” But cable subscriptions in the United States are down this year — a trend some attribute to Netflix — so studios will be reluctant to make any deals, like offering current episodes of shows that would upset cable TV economics.

“Once you put it on Netflix, you really can’t sell it anywhere else,” said Mr. Bewkes.

The media industry is also vowing to offer its own alternatives to Netflix as a way to watch shows online. Time Warner’s HBO is in the process of introducing a new online service, HBO GO, which will be available to authenticated HBO subscribers. Mr. Bewkes has also led an industry initiative he has called TV Everywhere, whose idea is to offer cable network programming online for anyone who is a verified cable subscriber.

Of the many deals the industry has made with Netflix — at lower prices than companies charge other distributors, like cable companies — Mr. Bewkes said, “this has been an era of experimentation, and I think it’s coming to a close.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/bu.../13bewkes.html





After Touting 28-Day Advantage Over Netflix, Blockbuster Agrees to Same Delay
Austin Carr

Blockbuster dropped millions on its comeback ad campaign, centering the TV spots on its 28-day advantage over competitors Netflix and Redbox for the latest films. "Why wait 28 days for new releases?" the commercials asked. "Blockbuster has hot new releases ... 28 days before Netflix and Redbox."

Well, not quite. Today, NCR, which operates Blockbuster's thousands of kiosks nationwide, agreed to a deal with Warner Bros to get new movies 28 days after their initial DVD release. The agreement follows similar deals with 20th Century Fox and Universal Studios, which combined make up close to half of studio market share.

So much for that advantage on Redbox. Now, both Blockbuster and its fast-growing kiosk rival will offer many of the same titles at the same time.

According to NCR, delaying new releases lowers acquisition costs. This is exactly why Netflix and Redbox agreed to the 28-day window, even as Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes touted the deals as a huge get for the struggling rental giant. In a recent interview with Fast Company Netflix's VP of communications made it very clear that the 28-day window was in no way Blockbuster's advantage.

"We actually went proactively to the studios several years ago because the 28-day model is really good for us--we recommended it," said Steve Swasey, VP of corporate communications for Netflix, who explained that the agreement helped shave off significant costs. "We're even talking to other studios about it."

That was a far cry from Keyes's description of the 28-day advantage, which, according to one film industry source, was an arrangement that Blockbuster actually had very little control over.

"Blockbuster didn't stay with new releases by choice," explained the source at the time, who is very familiar with the studio agreements with Netflix and Blockbuster. "Movie studios have Blockbuster where they want them--they know Blockbuster is not in any position to negotiate because of their financial position. The studios are getting huge payments for new releases from Blockbuster because they know the company needs them."

Blockbuster will still offer new titles through its other channels, but will it continue to sustain those costs if the 28-day head-start's traction remains "choppy"? Perhaps it's time Blockbuster update its ads: Blockbuster has hot new releases, 28 days before Netflix, Redbox, and Blockbuster Express.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1710430/a...-to-same-delay





Netflix Touts Open Source, Ignores Linux

If Netflix loves open source, where's the Linux client?
Joe Brockmeier

Last week's post from Netflix on its use of open source has gotten a lot of coverage from the tech press. Too bad nobody's called the video giant out on its hypocrisy: They benefit greatly from open source, but really don't care to let their customers do the same.

What I'm referring to here, of course, is Netflix's famous lack of support for playback on the Linux desktop. You can watch Netflix movies on Windows, Mac OS X, iOS (iPad & iPhone), and Linux-based machines like the Roku — but if you're an Ubuntu (or Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, etc.) user? Better have a second machine handy to actually utilize Netflix streaming. As a Linux user, it grates on me a bit to see Netflix's Kevin McEntee singing the praises of using and contributing to open source — but doing nothing to promote the same benefits for desktop users of open source.

Don't get me wrong — I'm a big fan of Netflix, and a heavy user of Netflix's service since long before Big Red was streaming video. I understand all too well the realities of supporting the Linux desktop. It may not make business sense for Netflix to invest in a player for Linux, given the relatively small audience on the Linux desktop.

Still, it grates a bit to see Netflix talking about its use and contribution to open source, when the company clearly doesn't care to help users who really embrace open source. In particular, much of the open source that Netflix is crowing about is developed by users who make Linux their choice of desktop OS. Netflix has gotten a lot of mileage out of Linux — the company's servers are Linux-based, and many of the dedicated players that let people use Netflix with their home entertainment centers are also Linux-based.

But there's no love for users with Linux desktops, laptops, and so on. Maybe there's not an immediate, direct return on investment if Netflix provides a Linux client, but it would be nice if Netflix was willing to contribute to the "alternative choice" of millions of users who see the same benefits in using Linux on the desktop that Netflix sees on the server. I'm not even asking that Netflix provide a fully open source client — though that would be great if they did — merely saying that the company could be a real champion of open source by treating all of its users as first-class citizens rather than ignoring Linux users.

McEntee's post also misses the point of many FOSS projects. According to McEntee FOSS projects "often originate as a labor of love by software developers who are tired of seeing a shared problem solved over and over again in one off solutions, or perhaps they realize that they can offer a more simple and elegant alternative to a commercial product."

McEntee is overlooking the motives that drive Netflix to use open source in the first place. It's not just a labor of love, or pursuit of a more elegant solution — it's the drive to avoid being locked into a proprietary vendor. It's the desire to have flexibility, and to benefit from the "virtuous cycle" that makes Netflix successful as a user and contributor to FOSS. Maybe the open source solutions are labors of love, and maybe they're more elegant — but they absolutely afford the companies better flexibility and freedom over choosing proprietary solutions. Wouldn't it be nice if Netflix supported this by giving its customers the ability to enjoy the same freedoms on their desktops?
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/69722





5 Lessons We’ve Learned Using AWS
John Ciancutti

In my last post I talked about some of the reasons we chose AWS as our computing platform. We’re about one year into our transition to AWS from our own data centers. We’ve learned a lot so far, and I thought it might be helpful to share with you some of the mistakes we’ve made and some of the lessons we’ve learned.

1. Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore.

If you’re used to designing and deploying applications in your own data centers, you need to be prepared to unlearn a lot of what you know. Seek to understand and embrace the differences operating in a cloud environment.

Many examples come to mind, such as hardware reliability. In our own data centers, session-based memory management was a fine approach, because any single hardware instance failure was rare. Managing state in volatile memory was reasonable, because it was rare that we would have to migrate from one instance to another. I knew to expect higher rates of individual instance failure in AWS, but I hadn’t thought through some of these sorts of implications.

Another example: in the Netflix data centers, we have a high capacity, super fast, highly reliable network. This has afforded us the luxury of designing around chatty APIs to remote systems. AWS networking has more variable latency. We’ve had to be much more structured about “over the wire” interactions, even as we’ve transitioned to a more highly distributed architecture.

2. Co-tenancy is hard.

When designing customer-facing software for a cloud environment, it is all about managing down expected overall latency of response. AWS is built around a model of sharing resources; hardware, network, storage, etc. Co-tenancy can introduce variance in throughput at any level of the stack. You’ve got to either be willing to abandon any specific subtask, or manage your resources within AWS to avoid co-tenancy where you must.

Your best bet is to build your systems to expect and accommodate failure at any level, which introduces the next lesson.

3. The best way to avoid failure is to fail constantly.

We’ve sometimes referred to the Netflix software architecture in AWS as our Rambo Architecture. Each system has to be able to succeed, no matter what, even all on its own. We’re designing each distributed system to expect and tolerate failure from other systems on which it depends.

If our recommendations system is down, we degrade the quality of our responses to our customers, but we still respond. We’ll show popular titles instead of personalized picks. If our search system is intolerably slow, streaming should still work perfectly fine.

One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our ability to succeed despite failure, then it isn’t likely to work when it matters most – in the event of an unexpected outage.

4. Learn with real scale, not toy models.

Before we committed ourselves to AWS, we spent time researching the platform and building test systems within it. We tried hard to simulate realistic traffic patterns against these research projects.

This was critical in helping us select AWS, but not as helpful as we expected in thinking through our architecture. Early in our production build out, we built a simple repeater and started copying full customer request traffic to our AWS systems. That is what really taught us where our bottlenecks were, and some design choices that had seemed wise on the white board turned out foolish at big scale.

We continue to research new technologies within AWS, but today we’re doing it at full scale with real data. If we’re thinking about new NoSQL options, for example, we’ll pick a real data store and port it full scale to the options we want to learn about.

5. Commit yourself.

When I look back at what the team has accomplished this year in our AWS migration, I’m truly amazed. But it didn’t always feel this good. AWS is only a few years old, and building at a high scale within it is a pioneering enterprise today. There were some dark days as we struggled with the sheer size of the task we’d taken on, and some of the differences between how AWS operates vs. our own data centers.

As you run into the hurdles, have the grit and the conviction to fight through them. Our CEO, Reed Hastings, has not only been fully on board with this migration, he is the person who motivated it! His commitment, the commitment of the technology leaders across the company, helped us push through to success when we could have chosen to retreat instead.

AWS is a tremendous suite of services, getting better all the time, and some big technology companies are running successfully there today. You can too! We hope some of our mistakes and the lessons we’ve learned can help you do it well.
http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/...using-aws.html





Amazon’s WikiLeaks Response Threatens Cloud Computing
Ben Rooney

Amazon’s removal of WikiLeaks from its servers threatens the future of cloud computing and jeopardizes the huge potential growth of its adoption, according to a leading industry figure.

Dr. Joseph Reger, Chief Technology Officer for Fujitsu Technology Solutions, said that Amazon’s reaction shows the need for an industry-wide approach to service level agreements and codes of practice:

“The provider simply cut off cloud services for WikiLeaks—that is, its server capacity, which made WikiLeaks inaccessible on the internet.

Amazon’s reason: WikiLeaks violated its terms and conditions. This is bad news for the new IT paradigm of cloud computing. If a provider can terminate its service that easily, then it is doing exactly what skeptics expect, putting the security and availability of cloud services into question.

Amazon may be able to prove its accusation—but it still leaves a bad taste. Where will this lead? Should providers of cloud services constantly review whether any of their customers are pursuing an unpopular or immoral activity and continually make value judgments as to whether they are willing to continue the service?

Many potential customers for cloud computing services will, I fear, have been paying attention and will now be forced to reconsider whether they can afford to make their IT that dependent on a third party. Cloud-computing’s reputation has been damaged. For IT, this is the real tragedy.”

Industry-level standards needed

It is all a matter of trust, said Dr. Reger. Clients have been worried about the security of their data by attacks on their provider. Now they have to worry about their data by attacks by their provider.

Dr. Reger said the whole episode highlighted the need for the nascent cloud industry to work together and produce industry-wide codes of practice. He cautioned people considering moving to the cloud to look very closely at the Service Level Agreement (SLA) they were signing.

The last thing cloud providers want to be, said Dr. Reger, is in the business of deciding if content is legal or not: “That is not the job of providers. It has to be judged by a court of law.”

He called for the European Union to look at the issue, saying it needed to be resolved at the European level as the legal position across the union was so fragmented: “We should try and turn this fragmentation to our advantage. There should be a European concentration on this problem so that in the EC there is clarity.”

Important for companies to have a fall back

In reply to the comments a spokesman for Amazon Web Services (AWS) said, in an emailed statement: “AWS does not pre-screen its customers but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them.”

The company has already issued a statement on its site in which they said, “when companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn’t rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won’t injure others, it’s a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere.”

Mr. Pierre Liautaud, who ran the recent European Tech Tour about Cloud Computing, said the Amazon issue showed the importance for companies to have a fall back option:

“What this story tells us is that no matter how good the SLA with your cloud-service provider, there will be unexpected circumstances where the IT service you depend on is not delivered nor restored properly. Therefore every business needs to ensure they have appropriate business continuity plans, one of which being the option to switch cloud providers.

Like in other industries (financial services, aerospace & defense, energy), there is a need for world-class cloud computing leaders in Europe, in order for the region to compete globally and stay immune from decisions made elsewhere. The recent European Tech Tour about cloud computing shows that there are tons of innovation coming from our region. We need to get our acts together quickly as the pace of this industry is much faster than other sectors.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/201...ing/tab/print/





WikiLeaks Supporters' Group Abandons Cyber Attacks
Georgina Prodhan

A loose grouping of cyber activists supporting WikiLeaks has abandoned its strategy of online attacks on organizations seen as hostile to the site in favor of spreading the leaked documents far and wide online.

Internet activists operating under the name "Anonymous" temporarily brought down this week the websites of credit card giants MasterCard and Visa -- both of which had stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks.

The United States, enraged and embarrassed by WikiLeaks' publication of thousands of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables, has leant on organizations from Amazon to online payments service PayPal -- which have now withdrawn services to WikiLeaks.

In an overnight blog post, Anonymous announced a change of strategy, saying it now aimed to publish parts of the confidential U.S. diplomatic cables as widely as possible and in ways that made them as hard as possible to trace.

The cyber activists briefly brought down PayPal's official blog by bombarding it with requests this week but failed to harm retail and Web-hosting giant Amazon, which withdrew its services to WikiLeaks more than a week ago.

"We have, at best, given them a black eye. The game has changed. When the game changes, so too must our strategies," said the blog post announcing "Operation: Leakspin."

The activists are now encouraging supporters to search through leaked cables on the WikiLeaks site and publish summaries of ones that have been least exposed, labeling them so they are hard to find by any authority seeking to quash them.

"Use misleading tags, everything from "Tea Party" to "Bieber." Post snippets of the leaks everywhere," the blog said, referring to the U.S. grassroots conservative movement and the 16-year-old Canadian pop phenomenon Justin Bieber.

Similar strategies have been used in the past on YouTube and the now defunct Napster by users seeking to share video and music while dodging copyright crackdowns.

The activists had previously been using denial of service attacks, in which they bombarded the Web servers of the perceived enemies of WikiLeaks with requests that crashed the sites, in an operation named "Operation Payback."

(editing by David Stamp)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6BA1AH20101211





Keeping Secrets WikiSafe
Scott Shane

Can the government still keep a secret? In an age of WikiLeaks, flash drives and instant Web postings, leaks have begun to seem unstoppable.

That may be just a first impression. Sobered government officials are scrambling to stop the hemorrhage of documents, even as antisecrecy radicals are discovering that some secrets may be worth protecting after all.

Still, there’s been a change. Traditional watchdog journalism, which has long accepted leaked information in dribs and drabs, has been joined by a new counterculture of information vigilantism that now promises disclosures by the terabyte. A bureaucrat can hide a library’s worth of documents on a key fob, and scatter them over the Internet to a dozen countries during a cigarette break.

That accounts for how, in the three big WikiLeaks document dumps since July, the usual trickle of leaks became a torrent. All of it, disguised as a Lady Gaga CD, was smuggled out of a military intelligence office, according to government prosecutors, by Pfc. Bradley Manning, a soldier now imprisoned and charged with the leak.

Even two decades ago, in the days of kilobytes and floppy discs, such an ocean of data would have been far more difficult to capture and carry away. Four decades ago, using a photocopier, a leaker might have needed a great many reams of paper and a tractor-trailer.

“I do think it’s true that the large contours of national and international policy are much harder to keep secret today,” said Steven Aftergood, who runs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “It would not be possible to conduct a secret war in Cambodia, as took place in the Nixon administration.”

Indeed, within hours of American missile strikes in Yemen against suspected Al Qaeda camps last December, amateur video of the destruction was on YouTube. The videos labeled the strikes “American.” The strikes have never been publicly acknowledged by the Defense Department.

Or consider the speed at which news travels. During the Iran-contra affair, American arms sales to Iran were first reported by a Beirut weekly, Al Shiraa, in November 1986; it was a few days before the American press picked up the story. “Now it would take a few minutes,” said Mr. Aftergood.

Long before WikiLeaks, of course, reporters often met bureaucrats with troubled consciences or agendas, and produced sensational disclosures. The Pentagon Papers is the iconic case. More recently, the classic muckraking model unveiled closely guarded programs that the Bush administration put into place after Sept. 11, 2001: the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret prisons; waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods; the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping without court warrants on American soil.

All those disclosures led to public debate and to action: the prisons were closed; coercive interrogations were banned; the N.S.A. program was brought under court supervision. But the disclosures also fed a bipartisan sense in Congress and across the intelligence agencies that secrets were too casually whispered to reporters. One unexpected result in the first two years of the Obama administration has been four prosecutions of government employees on charges of disclosing classified information, more such prosecutions than under any previous president.

That is a reason to suspect that the openness of this new era will have limits. Would-be leakers can, presumably, be dissuaded; they can be outmaneuvered in the technological cat-and-mouse game; they can learn self-restraint. And there are signs that all of that may be happening in the WikiLeaks case.

WikiLeaks set out with “a ‘Field of Dreams’ philosophy for inviting leaks — ‘If we build it, they will come,’ ” said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which obtains and publishes declassified government documents. “They tried to create a safe place for disclosures. But with Bradley Manning behind bars, who’s going to rush to follow his example?”

Now, with the third WikiLeaks collection linked to Private Manning in the news, members of Congress have called with new ferocity for punishing the group and its provocateur-in-chief, Julian Assange. Representative Peter King, a New York Republican, has asked the State Department to consider designating WikiLeaks a terrorist group; Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, has called for espionage charges against Mr. Assange, an idea that legal experts say is problematic. Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut has called for an investigation of The New York Times because it has published some of the material obtained by WikiLeaks.

Whether or not the Obama administration tries to prosecute those who disseminated the information, it is determined to use technology to preserve its secrets. The Defense Department is scaling back information sharing, which its leaders believe went too far after information hoarding was blamed for the failure to detect the Sept. 11 plot.

The department has also stripped CD and DVD recorders from its computers; it is redesigning security systems to require two people, not one, to move large amounts of information from a classified computer to an unclassified one; and it is installing software to detect downloads of unusual size.

Yet even as the government seeks to rein in WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks is reining in itself. The confidential diplomatic cables it disclosed have unquestionably turned the discreet world of diplomacy upside down. But the disclosures have been far more modest than WikiLeaks’ self-proclaimed dedication to total transparency might suggest.

Had it chosen to do so, WikiLeaks could have posted on the Web all 251,287 confidential diplomatic cables about six months ago, when the group obtained them. Instead, it shared the cables with traditional news organizations and has coordinated the cables’ release with them. As of Friday, fewer than 1 percent of the cables had been released on the Web by the antisecrecy group, The Times and four European publications combined.

“They’ve actually embraced” the mainstream media, “which they used to treat as a cuss word,” Mr. Blanton said. “I’m watching WikiLeaks grow up. What they’re doing with these diplomatic documents so far is very responsible.”

When the newspapers have redacted cables to protect diplomats’ sources, WikiLeaks has generally been careful to follow suit. Its volunteers now accept that not all government secrets are illegitimate; for example, revealing the identities of Chinese dissidents, Russian journalists or Iranian activists who had talked to American diplomats might subject them to prison or worse.

In an op-ed essay for The Australian last week, Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian citizen who is currently being held in Britain on sex charges from Sweden, declared his devotion to some core Western press values. “Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media,” he wrote. “The media helps keep government honest.”

But WikiLeaks has not quite joined the ranks of traditional publishing, and it may yet cast all restraint aside. Reaching back to his hacker roots, Mr. Assange has created what he calls an “insurance” plan for his own future and that of WikiLeaks. The group has put on the Web, for download, encrypted files containing a huge trove of documents that have not yet been released. Thousands of people have downloaded the files.

If the United States moves to prosecute, Mr. Assange has said, the group will release the encryption key, in effect making public tens of thousands of unredacted cables — and who knows what other dangerous secrets.

It is a 21st-century threat, and one the Obama administration is taking very seriously.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/we...w/12shane.html





Relatives of Spanish Cameraman Killed in Baghdad Use WikiLeaks to Press for Justice
Andrés Cala

In what could be the first legal case to use filtered WikiLeaks documents as evidence, the family of a Spanish cameraman killed in 2003 by a US tank shell during the battle for Baghdad filed a complaint Monday. They seek to open an investigation into whether high-ranking officials here colluded with the US Embassy to stop charges being filed against three American soldiers, including a colonel.

José Couso of Telecinco, the Spanish cameraman, and Taras Protsyuk, a Ukranian cameraman working for Reuters, died April 8, 2003, when a shell fired by an M1 Abraham tank hit the 15th floor of the Palestine Hotel, which scores of foreign journalist were using as a base and Pentagon-approved safe haven. Two other media locations were hit that day, also killing Al Jazeera correspondent Tareq Ayyoub. Four others were injured, leading to broad condemnation and demands to protect reporters.

Couso’s family has been fighting an uphill battle as it presses for criminal charges against the US soldiers. The US and Spain are, after all, close allies, and the US has taken the position that its soldiers are not liable to foreign jurisdictions, particularly when carrying out their duties in war zones.

The case has been dismissed twice at the request of Spanish prosecutors, only to be reopened by the Spanish Supreme Court. Currently, the country’s National Court is awaiting Iraqi entry visas to investigate the involvement of a sergeant, a captain, and a colonel in the incident seven years ago.

What the WikiLeaks documents show

According to the WikiLeaks documents posted by El País newspaper, former US ambassador in Madrid Eduardo Aguirre wrote in May 2007 that “while we are careful to show our respect for the tragic death of Couso and for the independence of the Spanish judicial system, behind the scenes we have fought tooth and nail to make the charges disappear.”

A month later, according to the documents, Mr. Aguirre told former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the Spanish government “has been helpful behind the scenes in getting the case appealed.”

Then in July 2007 another confidential embassy report summarized a lunch meeting between Aguirre and Attorney General Conde-Pumpido in which the Spanish official “said that he continues to do what he can to get the case dismissed, despite public pressure from the family, leftist group, and the press,” according to Aguirre.

The latest complaint from the family, filed at the Attorney General's office, asks that US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks be used as evidence that Spanish officials conspired to unduly influence prosecutors to dismiss the case. The accused include former Foreign Affairs Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos, former Justice Minister Juan Fernando López Aguilar, Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido, and National Court Chief Prosecutor Javier Zaragoza.

“The fundamental goal is to stop government meddling,” says Enrique Santiago, the Couso family's lawyer. “The family could have filed this with the courts directly, but it wanted to make sure that the rule of law still exists.” The Attorney General’s Office did not return calls for comment.

US meddling?

“It’s certainly going to increase the pressure on the government to play it straight,” says Reed Brody, a Brussels-based lawyer for Human Rights Watch. “The implication that top Spanish officials did bidding for the US is very damaging and I think even without the lawsuit it may cause them to try to rectify [the situation].”

“Those of us who are pushing the Obama administration to undertake serious investigations were always hoping that Spanish cases would cause the US to act,” Mr. Brody says. “Nobody expects [former Defense Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld in a court in Madrid, but it would be beneficial if these processes led to... answered questions at home.”

The Pentagon has publicly apologized for the deaths but found US troops acted within rules of engagement in the Palestine Hotel attack. US forces trying to capture Baghdad came under heavy sniper and rocket propelled grenade fire that day and intelligence suggested that a “spotter” was directing fire against US troops from the hotel, the US investigation said.

However, multiple journalists' accounts disagreed. Reporters on the scene said there was no fire coming from the hotel and that the location was a known refuge for foreign media. An investigation into the attack led by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists concluded that while the attack “was not deliberate, it could have been avoided and may have been caused by a breakdown in communication within the US Army chain of command.”

“The most disturbing thing of the revelations," says Brody, "is that the US was bullying other countries, not just Spain, to try to get officials to interfere with the judiciary. The US has built a wall of immunity and impunity for acts related to Iraq and Afghanistan and now it’s trying to get impunity extended abroad."

“It’s the first use of Wikileaks information in a court," he adds, "but I’m pretty sure it won’t be the last. It’s going to change the playing field.”

And even if the collusion complaint doesn’t prosper, few doubt Spanish public opinion will be a lot more vigilant now over the broader Couso case. “Spanish people get upset with interferences on their courts,” Brody said. “Part of this case is to hammer away at that point, that Spain should not be a lackey and should let the courts do its work.”
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europ...ss-for-justice





Companies Try to Avoid Data Privacy Regs with Voluntary Effort
Paul Shread

Attempting to stave off mandatory U.S. data privacy regulations, data collection companies have banded together to launch a project that will let consumers edit data about themselves or opt out of online data collection entirely.

The Better Advertising Project's Open Data Partnership, to launch next month, will let consumers "edit their information or opt out completely from any participating company's cookie," the group said. Consumers will be able to gain access to and edit their information directly from an ad impression or publisher site that uses Better Advertising's Assurance Platform without the need to visit each company site individually. An advertising icon of a lowercase "i" in a triangle will direct users to more information about online data collection.

"Better Advertising's Open Data Partnership is exactly the kind of initiative that will enable us to remain self-regulated as an industry," Mike Zaneis, senior vice president and general counsel for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), said in a statement.

Initial participants in the partnership include 33Across, Bizo, BlueKai, Demdex, eXelate, Lotame, SafeCount and Turn. The companies say they don't traffic in personally identifiable information (PII), and no PII will be accessible as part of the program.

The Open Data Partnership companies will give Better Advertising access to the information they collect and maintain about how each unique consumer browser is identified within their systems. This will include whether or not an active targeting or opt-out cookie is present on that particular web browser and what information, if any, has been collected. Better Advertising, which powers the Digital Advertising Alliance's advertising self-regulatory program, will make the data available to consumers through its Assurance Platform, but will not collect or use any of the data.

The partnership announcement came just days after a U.S. Federal Trade Commission report appealed to industry to develop a "do-not-track" registry for consumers who want to opt out of online behavioral tracking and Congress began debating whether national online privacy legislation is necessary.

While the Open Data Partnership is a start, there are scores of online tracking and major internet companies that have yet to sign on to the effort.

A partnership spokesperson said Google and Yahoo "have been in touch" with the group, but referred eCRM Guide to the companies for further comment.

A Yahoo spokesperson outlined the company's own efforts at data privacy and added, "we have worked with many players in the ad ecosystem through our mutual self-regulatory groups, including Better Advertising, and are hopeful many compliant solutions will emerge to give publishers, advertisers, agencies, and ad networks choices to select those that work the best for them, keep competition alive, and result in offering consumers the absolute best possible transparency and choice tools available."

Google likewise cited its online privacy efforts.

The issue of data privacy also came up on an International Institute for Analytics conference call last week that outlined business analytics predictions for the year ahead. Among the predictions was the seemingly obvious one that data privacy concerns won't be going away in the next year, but what was interesting about the discussion was that the participants favored voluntary measures in order to avoid stricter mandatory ones — which they said would give consumers the confidence to share more personal data with companies of their choosing.

"I think the absence of privacy legislation in the U.S. is actively constraining the availability of data for people to use in analytics because no one will tell anyone anything if they can avoid it precisely because they don't expect it to stay private with the person they gave it to," said IIA faculty member James Taylor. "If they were more confident that they could tell company X things about themselves so that company X could serve them better and that only company X would ever use that data and it was protected for that one purpose, I think they would be more willing to share data with the companies that they want to get better interaction with."

Bill Franks, chief analytics officer of Teradata's SAS program, agreed. "At the end of the day, whether it was a law or a simple agreement, if the customers trusted you'd use their data appropriately, you'd make more progress, and if companies continue not to, they'll continue to push for more rules, and the rules, as always, will be worse than what you could have implemented on yourself and made people happy," he said.

Lotame CEO Andy Monfried said the Open Data Partnership could also ease consumer fears by letting them see the information that is compiled about them. "What we at Lotame and other companies in our space do with regard to data collection is so misunderstood, and is far more benign than some reports would have consumers think," he said.
http://www.ecrmguide.com/article.php...ary-effort.htm





Some Truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks Style

Ever wonder what Comcast's connections to the Internet look like? In the tradition of WikiLeaks, someone stumbled upon these graphs of their TATA links. For reference, TATA is the only other IP transit provider to Comcast after Level (3). Comcast is a customer of TATA and pays them to provide them with access to the Internet.

1 day graphs:

Image #1: http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/78/ntoday.gif
Image #1 (Alternate Site): http://www.glowfoto.com/viewimage.ph...=2010&srv=img4

Image #2: http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/749/sqnday.gif
Image #2 (Alternate Site): http://www.glowfoto.com/static_image.../img6/glowfoto

Notice how those graphs flat-line at the top? That's because they're completely full for most of the day. If you were a Comcast customer attempting to stream Netflix via this connection, the movie would be completely unwatchable. This is how Comcast operates: They intentionally run their IP transit links so full that Content Providers have no other choice but to pay them (Comcast) for access. If you don't pay Comcast, your bits wont make it to their destination. Though they wont openly say that to anyone, the content providers who attempt to push bits towards their customers know it. Comcast customers however have no idea that they're being held hostage in order to extort money from content.

Another thing to notice is the ratio of inbound versus outbound. Since Comcast is primarily a broadband access network provider, they're going to have millions of eyeballs (users) downloading content. Comcast claims that a good network maintains a 1:1 with them, but that's simply not possible unless you had Comcast and another broadband access network talking to each other. In the attached graphs you can see the ratio is more along the lines of 5:1, which Comcast was complaining about with Level (3). The reality is that the ratio argument is bogus. Broadband access networks are naturally pull-heavy and it's being used as an excuse to call foul of Level (3) and other content heavy networks. But this shoulnd't surprise anyone, the ratio argument has been used for over a decade by many of the large telephone companies as an excuse to deny peering requests. Guess where most of Comcasts senior network executive people came from? Sprint and AT&T. Welcome to the new monopoly of the 21st century.

If you think the above graph is just a bad day or maybe a one off? Let us look at a 30 day graph...

Image #3: http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/8917/ntomonth.gif
Image #3 (Alternate Site): http://www.glowfoto.com/static_image.../img6/glowfoto

Comcast needs to be truthful with its customers, regulators and the public in general. The Level (3) incident only highlights the fact that Comcast is pinching content and backbone providers to force them to pay for uncongested access to Comcast customers. Otherwise, there's no way to send traffic to Comcast customers via the other paths on the Internet without hitting congested links.

Remember that this is not TATA's fault, Comcast is a CUSTOMER of TATA. TATA cannot force Comcast to upgrade its links, Comcast elects to simply not purchase enough capacity and lets them run full. When Comcast demanded that Level (3) pay them, the only choice Level (3) had was to give in or have its traffic (such as Netflix) routed via the congested TATA links. If Level (3) didn't agree to pay, that means Netflix and large portions of the Internet to browse would be simply unusable for the majority of the day for Comcast subscribers.


Love,

Backdoor Santa

http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg15911.html





Group Finds 5 Main Flaws with Proposed Net Neutrality Rules
Tim Conneally

A group of more than 80 advocacy groups including The Media Access Project, Reporters without Borders, Daily Kos, Common Cause, and Nonprofit Technology filed a letter with the Federal Communications Commission on Friday citing five main areas that need improvement in the Net Neutrality legislation coming up for vote on December 21.

Unlike former FCC Commissioner Michael Powell, whose main concern is keeping the Internet lean and loosely governed to empower investors, entrepreneurs, and businesses, these groups are focused on the rights of the user.

"In announcing the circulation of his draft Order, Chairman Genachowski rightly noted that protecting the free market online means that users, not broadband service providers, must choose what content and applications succeed," the letter said. "If the current draft Order is adopted without substantial changes, Internet Service Providers will be free to engage in a number of practices that harm consumers, stifle innovation and threaten to carve up the Internet in irreversible ways."

The principle concern these groups have is the Order's omission of "Paid Prioritization," or the ability for service providers to set payment tiers for different types of services and allocate bandwidth accordingly.

"Paid prioritization is the antithesis of openness. Any framework that does not prohibit such economic discrimination arrangements is not real Net Neutrality," the letter said. "Without a clear ban on such practices, ISPs will move forward with their oft-stated plans to exploit their dominant position and favor their own content and services and those of a few select paying partners through faster delivery, relegating everyone else to the proverbial dirt road."

AT&T's Hank Hultquist openly mocked these groups' knowledge of such issues in August, calling them the "Church of Extreme Net Neutrality," who preach the "old time religion of the dumb network" without taking all facts into consideration.

The Group's subsequent gripes all follow along the same lines, asking for more adequate consideration of "full Net Neutrality" to wireless and mobile traffic, which includes the banishment of all economically-motivated traffic prioritization or blocking of applications, sites, and services; and for more comprehensive coverage that lacks loopholes.

The group cites the fiasco over "managed services" earlier this year, and points out that there is no specific language protecting against this either.

"While some highly sensitive and truly specialized services might not be best provided over the open Internet, there is no reason for the FCC to create a specialized services loophole that would undermine Net Neutrality. Unfortunately, the draft Order apparently opens the door to specialized services without any safeguards," the group said.

Finally, the group calls Genachowski's rejection of Title II, and gravitation toward the Title I provisions that failed to hold up in the circuit court against Comcast an "unnecessary risk."
http://www.betanews.com/article/Grou...les/1292014505





Comcast Testing Combo TV-Internet Service
Lance Whitney

Comcast is trying out a new service that would provide both TV and Web content through a single set-top box.

The service, codenamed Xcalibur, would outfit subscribers with a set-box that lets them watch certain Web videos and search for live, on-demand, and recorded shows, according to The Wall Street Journal. Currently being tested by Comcast customers in Augusta, Ga., the service is seen as Comcast's response to competitors such as Google TV and Apple TV as well as subscribers cutting the cord on their cable TV subscriptions in favor of online content.

But from the Journal's description, Xcalibur so far seems limited in scope. It doesn't let subscribers freely surf the Web but rather offers access to limited Web programming and basic connections to social networks. Of course, this is just a first, trial step, and Comcast could beef up the service should it catch on. At this point, the cable company hasn't even decided yet whether to launch the service or how it would be priced.

"We are testing many technological approaches to understand how best to meet consumer interests, and this small trial is one of those experiments," a Comcast spokeswoman said in a statement e-mailed to the Journal.

Comcast has been working on the project for more than a year, said the Journal, citing people familiar with the matter. The boxes receive TV programming through traditional cable but get their Web content via IP technology. That same IP technology could also help Comcast deploy new interfaces and other changes to the system more quickly, added the Journal.

The cable giant has seen an ongoing dip in the number of cable TV customers over the past year, though growth in Internet and voice subscribers has more than compensated.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20025572-93.html





FCC: 68% of US Broadband Connections Aren't Broadband
Emil Protalinski

The FCC has published a new 87-page report titled "Internet Access Services: Status as of December 31, 2009." The report explains that 68 percent of connections in the US advertised as "broadband" can't really be considered as such because they fall below the agency's most recent minimum requirements: 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream.

In other words, more than two-thirds of broadband Internet connections in the US aren't really broadband; over 90 million people in the country are using a substandard broadband service. To make matters worse, 58 percent of connections don't even reach downstream speeds above 3Mbps. The definition of broadband is constantly changing, and it's becoming clear that the US is having a hard time keeping up.

The report also notes that wireless service subscribers with mobile devices and data plans for full Internet access grew 48 percent to 52 million in the second half of 2009. Furthermore, for all connections over 200 kbps, mobile wireless is the leading technology at 39.4 percent, ahead of cable modems and ADSL, at 32.4 percent and 23.3 percent, respectively. For connections over 3Mbps, however, cable modems account for 70 percent share.

While it's important to remember that the report focuses on what broadband speeds consumers are actually choosing to purchase, as opposed to availability, it's still worth noting that the overall picture is a poor one. Consumers may have higher speeds available to them but if they are opting to subscribe to significantly lower speed tiers, competition isn't fierce enough and thus the overall situation isn't changing very much.
http://www.techspot.com/news/41535-f...broadband.html





Approval of Internet Traffic Rules Likely: Analysts
Jasmin Melvin

Contentious Internet traffic rules facing a vote next week are likely to be adopted without radically veering from a proposal unveiled earlier in the month, telecommunications policy analysts said on Wednesday.

The Federal Communications Commission will vote on December 21 on whether to adopt regulations that ban the blocking of lawful traffic but allow Internet service providers to ration Web traffic on their networks.

The proposal laid out two weeks ago by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski was met with concern from the other members of the FCC, putting in question the likelihood of winning over a majority of the five-member FCC.

The two Republican commissioners have objected to FCC action on Internet rules, saying the Internet is best able to thrive in the absence of regulation. And Genachowski's two fellow Democrats on the panel could withhold support from any measure they view as too weak.

But analysts said commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Michael Copps, the Democrats on the panel, are more likely to consider it in the majority's interest to move ahead with so-called net neutrality rules.

"There aren't really any better options for Copps and Clyburn than to support the chairman, despite their preference for tougher rules," said Paul Gallant, an analyst with MF Global.

"After the November elections, the chairman's room to maneuver on net neutrality got a lot narrower," he added.

Net neutrality rules would determine whether high-speed Internet providers should be allowed to block or slow information or charge websites for a "fast lane" to reach users more quickly.

Genachowski's proposal is more flexible for wireless broadband, acknowledging that wireless is at an earlier stage of development than terrestrial Internet service.

High-speed and mobile Internet providers like Comcast Corp, Verizon Communications and AT&T Inc are likely to oppose any regulations that seek to go beyond Genachowski's initial proposal.

"Our sense is an order likely will be approved, with some modifications, but not radical changes, to the draft, given the tightrope the FCC leadership appears to be walking," Stifel Nicolaus analysts said in a research note.

Stifel Nicolaus is particularly plugged in to FCC developments, with analyst Rebecca Arbogast having previously been a division chief at the agency.

A possible tweak of Genachowski's initial proposal could include clearer language against paid prioritization, Stifel Nicolaus analysts said, but strengthening the rules much further could prompt legal challenges from companies.

"Party loyalty will trump some of the policy differences," Medley Global Advisors analyst Jeffrey Silva said of Copps and Clyburn's potential reasons not to defect from the chairman.

Strengthening rules for wireless carriers beyond anti-blocking and transparency provisions, which Clyburn has supported, would probably be a deal-breaker for industry support of the regulations, Silva said.

"There's not a lot of room to tinker with the compromise that's been struck without threatening the compromise," Silva said.

Even if the rules are adopted, lawmakers are likely to challenge the rules, as Republicans have been vocal that they oppose any FCC action geared at governing the Internet.

(Reporting by Jasmin Melvin, editing by Dave Zimmerman and Matthew Lewis)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20101215/..._netneutrality





Mobile Carriers Dream of Charging Per Page
Ryan Singel

Just a week before the FCC holds a vote on whether to apply fairness rules to some of the nation’s internet service providers, two companies that sell their services to the country’s largest cellular companies showed off a different vision of the future: one where you’ll have to pay extra to watch YouTube or use Facebook.

The companies, Allot Communications and Openet — suppliers to large wireless companies including AT&T and Verizon — showed off a new product in a web seminar Tuesday, which included a PowerPoint presentation (1.5-MB .pdf) that was sent to Wired by a trusted source.

The idea? Make it possible for your wireless provider to monitor everything you do online and charge you extra for using Facebook, Skype or Netflix. For instance, in the seventh slide of the above PowerPoint, a Vodafone user would be charged two cents per MB for using Facebook, three euros a month to use Skype and $0.50 monthly for a speed-limited version of YouTube. But traffic to Vodafone’s services would be free, allowing the mobile carrier to create video services that could undercut NetFlix on price.

In short, you’d have a hard time creating a better graphic of the future that net neutrality advocates warn will be imminent if the federal government does not apply fairness rules to the mobile internet. A court struck down an earlier set of fairness rules in the spring, but it was never clear if those rules applied to wireless carriers.

“It certainly is exactly the thing we have been warning the companies will do if they have the opportunity and explains why AT&T and Verizon are so insistent that the wireless rules be solely about blocking and not anything else,” said Public Knowledge legal director Harold Feld. “If you want the slide deck to show why we need the same rules for wireless and wireline, this is it.”

The FCC is set to adopt some net neutrality provisions Tuesday, but they will not apply to mobile devices.

Feld says the slide shows that the wireless companies’ seemingly successful fight to not have net neutrality rules apply to them is not about a desire to make sure that critical services get priority.

“It’s not about wirelessly monitoring people’s pacemaker data,” Feld said. “Its about charging you extra to access Facebook.”

In fact, it looks suspiciously similar to a graphic created by a net neutrality advocate to satirize the dreams of ISPs.

The ideas don’t look too different from the way cable companies price their video offerings, with different packages of programming at different levels.

But the model is a radical departure from the current internet model in the United States where the company you pay to connect your computer or mobile device to the internet acts like a utility. You pay for a certain guaranteed throughput and sometimes a maximum amount of monthly data, and the company’s job is just to deliver that content to you, regardless of whether you are using Netflix, Hulu, Yahoo, Google or some small startup few people have ever heard of.

That’s the concept behind net neutrality.

When shown the presentation, Stanford University professor Barbara van Schewick seemed not surprised at all.

“I have been saying that this is where they want to go for a while,” van Schewick wrote to Wired. “The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), a technology that is being deployed in many wireline and wireless networks throughout the country, explicitly envisages this sort of pricing as one of the pricing schemes supported by IMS.”

Van Schewick, who heads the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, argues in her recent book, Internet Architecture and Innovation, that such network models undermine the net’s openness, which has allowed anyone with a computer, a vision and the right skills to create a business, without having to pay anyone extra for the privilege.

And as van Schewick points out, this model is already showing up in European mobile networks, where some networks charge users an extra fee to use internet telephony or to use an e-mail client on their phone.

These models are bad from a public policy perspective. By imposing a higher price on the bandwidth needed for certain applications, the network providers effectively tax these applications, which may lead people to use them less than they normally would. This is bad for users because they cannot use the Internet in the way that is most valuable for them. This is bad for affected application providers because their market shrinks: They lose all those customers who would have used the application at the normal price of Internet transport, but who are not willing to pay the additional tax. But from the network provider’s perspective this pricing scheme increases their profits.

Pro-net neutrality groups have argued that the carriers will try to make more money by breaking that model, creating fast lanes and slow lanes, and discriminating against content they compete with.

For instance, Comcast runs an online video service called FanCast that competes with NetFlix and YouTube, and is trying to buy NBC, which owns more than 30 percent of Hulu.com. And every cable and satellite company offers pay-movie services for an extra monthly fee and a la carte video on demand that compete with third-party streaming video services, like Blockbuster and Amazon.

Allot and Openet also have an idea for how the carriers can make more money off of movies, what they called “split billing” — a way of allowing internet service providers to get a slice of the money that online movies companies are being paid by customers.

In this case, a customer can watch a 15-minute preview of a movie for free. If she doesn’t order the film, the company that served up the film would pay the carrier for the bandwidth used. But if the customer pays to watch the movie, then the ISP gets a cut of the money paid to the online movie service.

Compare that to the current de facto state of affairs for broadband connections, where a customer pays the cable company or wireless provider to connect them to the internet, the online movie service pays to connect to the internet, and the network’s only role is to connect the two.

The FCC’s proposed rules for net neutrality, which come up for a vote by the five-member commission on Tuesday December 21, haven’t been publicly released. But according to the summary provided by the FCC, cable and DSL companies would be prohibited from unfair discrimination, but could create fast and slow lanes.

Wireless carriers would be exempt from the discrimination and blocking rules, but would have to make public how they handle congestion on their networks.

The carriers say that they need the freedom to discriminate because wireless networks can get clogged, but net neutrality advocates say the proper response is simply to dole out equal bandwidth to each user, and not try to pick which applications to put in the fast lane.

The FCC decided against the politically charged route of regulating ISPs as if they were a utility by re-classifying them as “telecom services.” That category applies to the phone company, and if the FCC had taken that step, the same rule that requires phone companies to connect all calls, no matter who you call or who calls you, would have applied to the internet, as well.

Instead, the FCC has seemingly formed a coalition with the nation’s ISPs, getting them to agree not to sue to overturn the rickety legal framework, in exchange for giving the companies wide latitude on how to price the communications infrastructure of the future.

And from the looks of it, the carriers and their vendors have a very good idea of what the future will cost you.

Additional reporting by Sam Gustin.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/...trality-tiers/




Governments Shouldn’t Have a Monopoly on Internet Governance
Vint Cerf

The beauty of the Internet is that it’s not controlled by any one group. Its governance is bottoms-up—with academics, non-profits, companies and governments all working to improve this technological wonder of the modern world. This model has not only made the Internet very open—a testbed for innovation by anyone, anywhere—it's also prevented vested interests from taking control.

But last week the UN Committee on Science and Technology announced that only governments would be able to sit on a working group set up to examine improvements to the IGF—one of the Internet’s most important discussion forums. This move has been condemned by the Internet Governance Caucus, the Internet Society (ISOC), the International Chamber of Commerce and numerous other organizations—who have published a joint letter (PDF) and launched an online petition to mobilize opposition. Today, I have signed that petition on Google’s behalf because we don’t believe governments should be allowed to grant themselves a monopoly on Internet governance. The current bottoms-up, open approach works—protecting users from vested interests and enabling rapid innovation. Let’s fight to keep it that way.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/...nopoly-on.html





Incompetent BitTorrent Researchers Strike Again
Ernesto

Over the past years we’ve seen dozens of BitTorrent and piracy studies that were not the most robust or accurate, but the reports from the University of Ballarat’s Internet Commerce Security Laboratory top them all. Among other painful mistakes, the researchers conclude that older films such as Gladiator, Juno and Hancock were among the 10 most downloaded films this summer, years after they came out.

I almost cried this morning.

Last summer we debunked a study by the University of Ballarat’s Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL). Carefully we spelled out the many obvious mistakes that were made, both in data collection and the research design in general. In addition, we contacted the lead researcher, offering our help.

Several news outlets who published the story were kind enough to acknowledge our critique, but the researchers themselves went silent and didn’t respond directly to the errors we pointed out. Today, the same researchers are again making headlines, and it seems that they haven’t learned a thing.

In a replication of the study they conducted earlier this year, the researchers have studied what’s being downloaded on BitTorrent. Among other things they want to find out which files are popular on BitTorrent at the moment, and how many of these are infringing.

But there’s a problem. Again.

In common with those behind last year’s study, the researchers have no clue what they are doing. Mistake after mistake has been made, as we will point out below. The worst part is that some media outlets appear to be taking this research seriously, while it’s in fact a disgrace for anyone who works in academia.

In large parts the methodology is the same as last time, so we won’t report all the painful mistakes that were pointed out before. Instead, will will just sum up some of the new findings, and point out why these are clearly wrong.

1. Most downloaded files

The data collected for the new study was gathered in July 2010, and the researchers used the number of active seeders at the time to determine what files are ‘most downloaded’. One would assume that such a list would be dominated by new titles, but according to the Australian researchers this is not the case.

In their top 10 most downloaded (read ‘seeded’) movies, we find the following titles that have been available for years:

# Wanted (2008)
# Hancock (2008)
# Juno (2007)
# Step Brothers (2008)
# Gladiator (2000)
# Toy Story (1995)

At TorrentFreak we have years of experience at tracking BitTorrent downloads, and we’ve never seen any old titles in our weekly lists. Older titles do show up as popular in tracker scrapes sometimes, but they are always from fake torrent files or manipulated trackers. Common sense should have alerted the researchers that something might have been wrong with their data collection methods or sample.

The report also claims that the aXXo release of the film Wanted had a massive 50,582 seeders two years after it was released. Aside from the fact that we haven’t seen such a high seeder count in weeks, it is absolutely impossible that a download would have these impressive figures two years after it first became available.

The inaccuracy of the most downloaded film list is nicely illustrated by the researchers themselves. Aside from gathering data from BitTorrent trackers, they also looked at the 100 most searched for terms on the BitTorrent search engine isoHunt at the time. Interestingly, none of the older movies listed in their top 10 most downloaded list was present in the list of popular searches.

2. Popular Categories

As we suggested, to determine the popularity of various categories the researchers used a random sample of torrents this time, instead of the sample of popular torrents they previously selected. Despite this change the gathered data differs significantly from what most torrent sites report.

Based on a sample of 127,600 torrent files they conclude that nearly 70% of the torrents are video content and less than 2% is software.

If we look at the >10 million torrent files (unique hashes) that are available on a quality torrent site such as BitSnoop, we see a different picture. On BitSnoop 9% of all torrents are categorised as software, while video adds up to ‘just’ 52%. This leads us to believe that the sample the researchers used is heavily biased towards video content, or that their categorization algorithms are flawed.

3. Multiplying Trackers

The last point that we want to address is again an illustration of the incompetence of the researchers. What we missed last time is that they simply added up the reports of the different BitTorrent trackers they scraped. If “torrent A” is tracked by 5 individual trackers, then the researchers add up the seeder counts of them all, while in fact they are often used by the same downloaders.

Or put differently, most torrent clients allow people to use multiple trackers. That means that they can be listed as a seeder at several trackers at the same time. The researchers didn’t calculate this in, and are therefore overestimating the download counts, which were already suspicious to begin with.

Sadly enough we have to conclude that this new study is just as bad as the previous one, and totally unusable to describe the BitTorrent landscape. We’re not exaggerating if we say that the researchers are incompetent, lack common sense, and are too stubborn to take advice when we offered it.

When I contacted researcher Dr. Paul Watters last time he sent the following reply: “I would be happy to send you a complimentary of my O’Reilly ‘Statistics in a Nutshell’ book that might give further insight into statistical methodology.” I chuckled, since I’ve worked as an academic myself for years, publishing in high impact peer-reviewed journals.

Perhaps the State Government of Victoria, IBM, Westpac Banking Corporation, the Australian Federal Police and Village Roadshow should ask for a refund, as they all supported the research financially.
http://torrentfreak.com/incompetent-...-again-101211/





Jennifer Stoddart: Making Your Privacy Her Business
Jacquie McNish

Canada’s fearless privacy cop is having an awkward public moment.

It’s not because I’ve asked Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart about government secrets gushing from the leaky pipe that is Wikileaks. Or creepy Internet stalkers who collect personal information from giant Web utilities such as Facebook or Google. Or even because I stuck my nose into her private life.

No, Ms. Stoddart is agitated because I’m fumbling through the flotsam of my purse in search of a misplaced credit card to pay for lunch at Play, the latest irreverent eatery from award-winning Ottawa restaurateur, Steve Beckta.

Noooooo,” she protests. “I cannot allow this.”

Slapping a purple wallet the size of a small cabbage on the table, she yanks out a series of green and blue bills to pay for lunch, ignoring the receipt. The lady who rescued the Privacy Commission from a previous administration’s near-fatal expense account scandal is paying for a lunch out of her own pocket. It absolutely won’t do to have a journalist pay for her meal.

“I must be like Caesar’s wife,” she says, glancing quickly behind herself at the fortress-like U.S. embassy that faces the restaurant, “above suspicion!”

That such a formidable regulator would be so agitated about a modest lunch bill won’t surprise anyone in the nation’s capital, a buttoned-down town where bureaucrats post expense accounts on government websites and cabinet ministers issue puritanical edicts about what civil servants can and cannot consume. But to a frequenter of Bay Street watering holes, where deal dogs don’t blink at lunch bills that can cost more than some Canadians’ monthly mortgage, her momentary panic is a revelation.

It’s one of one of many surprises that the elegant 61-year-old, whose athletic frame is wrapped in a flowing black wool sweater, serves up over a lunch of “sweet mama squash soup,” seared Digby scallops and catfish tacos.

The biggest stunner is that Canada’s privacy cop, who is quietly dismissed in some Silicon Valley circles as an old-fashioned scold, is something of an Internet rebel. The same regulator who famously stared down Facebook and forced it to tighten privacy standards for 500 million global users, is in fact, she shares, an early advocate for access to information on the Internet.

Her technology epiphany occurred in the early 2000s when Ms. Stoddart travelled to Britain as the president of Quebec’s Commission on Access to Information to get a close look at the country’s innovative access-to-information laws.

“It blew my mind,” she says of her meetings with regulatory, academic and archival leaders who were leading the global charge to put Britain’s government documents, regulations, archival data and service information on the World Wide Web.

“I came back and told my staff, ‘this is it, the Brits have figured it out.’ ”

What they figured out, and what continues to shape her thinking as a regulator, is that the Internet is a powerful tool that can ensure greater transparency and accountability in governments and other organizations.

“Governments shouldn’t hoard information. The information is there and it belongs to the people,” she says. “Information and the manipulation of information is the key to power. Those who can control the information can influence society enormously. The more accurate the flow of information the … more productive we can be.”

How can this philosophy be reconciled with the woman who publicly frets about people who share too much personal information on the Web and the companies who harvest their data?

Part of the answer is that Jennifer Stoddart has always been something of a maverick. After an early career as an academic specializing in Quebec social history, she shifted her pragmatic mind to a law degree so that she could help modernize regulations standing in the way of gender, cultural and employment equity. By the time she was tapped as Canada’s Privacy Commissioner in 2003, she had devoted more than 20 years to promoting the rights of women, human rights, and access to information.

The other thing you need to know is that Ms. Stoddart is not in the least bit dewy-eyed about the innovative marvels of the Internet. Although she recognized in the early 2000s that the Web represented a “tectonic shift” in human society and communications, she was always skeptical that an open digital world was a gateway to the better life that its early inventors promised.

“I never believed the purists when they talked about the Internet being about everything good. I have studied too much history. Most Utopian experiments … never survive in their original shape because negative forces, some would say evil forces, are always present.”

Ms. Stoddart’s public-policy sensibilities probably would have gone largely unnoticed had it not been for the restless innovative mind of a Harvard University dropout named Mark Zuckerberg. When a group of Ottawa University students filed a complaint that Mr. Zuckerberg’s wildly popular social network Facebook was sharing users’ personal information with outsiders without permission, she found herself confronting a challenge for which she had been preparing her entire career.

“I had to find the correct line for interpreting laws and reflecting modern societal values,” she says. “It was the whole philosophical challenge of being a privacy purist or realizing that this was a radical new form of communication that clearly had many benefits.”

The Privacy Commission took on the difficult job of finding the right line for two reasons. Unlike the United States, Canada has privacy laws that prohibit companies from sharing personal data without customers’ consent. The other factor was Ms. Stoddart. Despite a few sleepless nights, she wasn’t going to shy away from enforcing the law, even if the target was the world’s fastest growing enterprise.

“We went out on a limb. We had to interpret how you could continue [Facebook’s] business within the confines of Canadian law,” she says. At the heart of the regulator’s concerns were the many “opacities” at the social network which made it hard for users to understand how to protect their data from unwanted prying eyes, particularly application makers.

“The principle of consent was important. You can’t really consent if you don’t know what is going on,” she says. Without consent, she says, it was open season for “all those organizations behind the scenes scarfing your personal information.”

The commission grabbed international headlines in 2008 and put privacy fears on the public radar when it announced the world’s first privacy investigation into Facebook. Ms. Stoddart says it took a while for the California-based company to “wake up and smell the coffee,” but after months it agreed to a number of changes to give Facebook users more powers to shield their data and opt out of applications that gave outside organizations access to that data.

The hardest part about the Facebook investigation was not the difficult negotiations with the upstart company, but rather the company’s privacy flip-flops. After the initial discussions, the company had agreed to allow users to block application developers from grabbing their photos, videos and personal information. That change was to take effect in August, 2010. But then, last spring, Facebook suddenly shifted course and said it would allow the developers to grab data after all.

“It was a very difficult moment,” Ms. Stoddart recalls, because it appeared that Facebook was gearing up to test the small regulator’s limited enforcement powers. Under current legislation, the Privacy Commission has no power to fine or restrict privacy offenders. Instead it can only refer cases to a Federal court.

“Thank goodness,” Ms. Stoddart says, Facebook blinked and rolled out a series of clear and potent privacy protections that are starting to be emulated by other technology companies. Indeed this week Microsoft announced that it is reviving a powerful privacy tool in the next version of its Internet browser that will allow users to stop websites and tracking companies from gathering information about them.

Ms. Stoddart says the Internet privacy battle “is not over yet, because it is such a fast-changing world.” After the federal government extended her mandate this week by another three years, she hints she will be seeking more enforcement powers for the commission, but she declines to divulge specifics.

More clout would definitely make her job easier, but if the social philosopher had one wish, it would be to create a button to make things disappear on the Internet. “What if after five years you could press a ‘delete’ button” she says, that could wipe out embarrassing photos or posts that never die on the Web. “People have the right to be forgotten.”

______

CURRICULUM VITAE

Beginnings

Born in Toronto, 1949. Daughter of an Ontario government transport lawyer and a kindergarten teacher. Fluent in five languages, she says her early exposure to French in preschool gave her a life-long interest in culture and social issues.

Education

Devoted seven years in Ontario, Quebec and Paris to studying Quebec social history. She completed course work for her doctoral degree at the Université de Paris VII, but did not write her thesis. In 1980, she added a law degree to her collection when she graduated from law school at McGill University. She was called to the Bar in 1981.

Career

Has been Canada’s Privacy Commissioner since 2003 and her term was extended this week for another three years. Before that she headed the Quebec Commission on Access to Information and had senior positions at the Quebec Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission, the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women.

Personal

Lives in Ottawa during the week, but returns home to Montreal on the weekend, where she lives with her husband, an architect and professor of urban planning. They have two adult sons.

Passions

Keeps an Arabian endurance horse outside of Montreal where she trains to compete in long-distance rides. Earlier this year she rode for four hours on a 25-mile endurance competition in Vermont and is now training for a longer course. “Before I get too old I want to do a 50-mile endurance competition.”

______

IN HER OWN WORDS

On arriving at the embattled Privacy Commission in 2003 after her predecessor George Radwanski departed under the cloud of an expense account scandal:

“The office was in such bad shape that anyone who came to work for us thought they would be committing career suicide.”

On the eruption of government secrets from WikiLeaks:

“This isn’t about open government. These are leaks of information that would otherwise be inaccessible. It seems folly to say there are things in government that should not be confidential, particularly in a volatile world where national security issues in a heavily armed world are crucial.”

On regulating privacy in a rapidly evolving digital world:

“I think we have to keep talking … privacy is an inherently subjective concept. To apply rules rigidly is not helpful. It stifles the economic benefit it creates.”

On her biggest privacy fears:

“I worry about the kids. The teens, the 20-year-olds who are experimenting, sharing things, taking risks and acting out like we all did. But on the Internet this behaviour is documented forever.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repor...rticle1833688/





Major Ad Networks Found Serving Malicious Ads
Dennis Fisher

Two major online ad networks--DoubleClick and MSN--were serving malware via drive-by download exploits over the last week, experts say, after a group of attackers was able to trick the networks into displaying their ads by impersonating an online advertising provider.

The scheme involved a group of attackers who registered a domain that was one letter away from that of ADShuffle.com, an online advertising technology firm. The attackers then used the fake domain--ADShufffle.com--to dupe the advertising networks into serving their malicious banner ads. The ads used various exploits to install malware on victims' PCs through drive-by downloads, according to information compiled by security vendor Armorize.

The ad networks only served the malicious content for a short period of time, but the episode shows just how difficult the drive-by download problem can be to address.

"Users visit websites that incorporate banner ads from DoubleClick or rad.msn.com, the malicious javascript is served from ADShufffle.com (notice the three f's), starts a drive-by download process and if successful, HDD Plus and other malware are installed into the victim's machine, without having the need to trick the victim into doing anything or clicking on anything. Simply visiting the page infects the visitors," Armorize CTO Wayne Huang said in a blog post describing the scheme.

"Known sites affected: Sites that incorporate DoubleClick or rad.msn.com banners, including for example Scout.com (using DoubleClick), realestate.msn.com, msnbc.com (using both), and mail.live.com. We'd like to note here it's very possible that multiple exchanges, besides those listed here, have been serving the fake ADShufffle's ads."

In some instances, the attackers used the notorious Eleonore exploit pack and the Neosploit package to accomplish the drive-by downloads. The attacks exploited a wide variety of vulnerabilities in browsers and Adobe Reader.

When a victim visited a site that was displaying one of the malicious banner ads, the user's browser tries to render the malicious ad and contacts the back-end ad server. The server pulls in the malicious ad content from ADShufffle, which uses some malicious JavaScript to exploit one of a number of vulnerabilities. The JavaScript generated an iFrame that used the Eleonore exploit pack to finish the compromise and drop some malicious files on the PC.

It's a classic drive-by download scenario, but in this case it's made all the more troublesome by the broad reach of the legitimate ad networks that were victimized by the attack. Armorize researchers contacted officials at DoubleClick after discovering the scheme.

"We reached out to DoubleClick and in less than a few hours time they arranged a meeting with a group of their experts on anti-malvertising and incidence response. We were very surprised and impressed with the speed that DoubleClick acted. We provided details, and DoubleClick said they were already on top of the issue," Huang said.

"At the same time, our CEO Caleb Sima received a private email indicating that mail.live.msn, together with other big websites, were serving drive-by downloads via malvertising. We started to investigate other ad exchanges, because it was apparent that ADShufffle.com was able to trick multiple ad exchanges into serving their malicious javascript."

A spokesman for Google, which owns DoubleClick, told the IDG News Service that the malicious ads were only being served for a short amount of time, and that the company's own malware filters detected the ads, as well.
https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/m...ous-ads-121210





Gawker Media Confirms That Their Commenter Database Was Hacked
Colby Hall

Yesterday Gawker Media denied reports that their database of 1.5 Million usernames, emails and passwords had been hacked. Comments broadcast via the apparently compromised Twitter feed of Gawker Media’s tech and gadget site Gizmodo strongly suggested a security compromise. Gawker Editorial Director Scott Kidder claimed through his own Twitter feed that “No evidence to suggest any Gawker Media’s user accounts were compromised, and passwords encrypted anyway.” Mediaite can now confirm that the Gawker’s database has been compromised at least to some degree. Evidence delivered from an anonymous source claiming responsibility for the security breach, also claims that a complete sharing of the private user data will be shared later today at 9PM GMT (4pm EST.) Update #2 – Data has been shared and Gawker’s CMS as been hacked as well.

Originally reported by Joe Coscarelli at The Village Voice, an apparently hacked Gizmodo Twitter account announced support for WikiLeaks, but also announced the following message “Gawker.com Gizmodo.com Lifehacker.com hacked, 1.5 Million usernames/emails/passwords taken:

This morning, Matt Brian reported on the alleged security breach for TheNextWeb:

From the information we have been provided, it appears that some of the base infrastructure of the Gawker Media organization has landed in the hands of people completely unrelated to the site or business itself. Though we were initially under the impression that it was the 4chan-founded group of Anonymous we have since been told, via email, that the responsible party has no affiliation with Anonymous or others. In fact, here’s what we’ve seen, in whole:

It has come to our attention that you are reporting about gawker.com being hacked by Anonymous and Operation payback in the war against the wikileaks drama that is currently taking place. While we feel for Wikileaks plight, and encourage everyone to donate and mirror the site, we are not related to Operation Payback or engaged in their activities. We have compromised all their email accounts and databases, and a significant portion of the passwords have been unhashed into plaintext.

To prove the validity of our claims, here is a sample of the database: [redacted]

While we were, of course, skeptical of the information the claims were potentially huge. That said, we did ask for proof and proof was provided via screenshots of information that would typically only be available to a site administrator or owner.

Mediaite was also contacted by an individual who has remained anonymous and cannot be verified. The source, however, did share examples of what appear to be working pairings of usernames and passwords for users to comment on Gawker Media sites. If this is a real hack, and again, there is no concrete evidence that the entire database has been compromised, it would be a particularly embarrassing security breach for Gawker Media. In fact, it was Gawker’s alleged arrogance that seems to be the motivation for the hack. The anonymous source claims:

We went after Gawker because of their outright arrogance. It took us a few hours to find a way to dump all their source code and a bit longer to find a way into their database.

We found an interesting quote in their Campfire logs:

Hamilton N.: Nick Denton Says Bring It On 4Chan, Right to My Home Address (After
The Jump)

Ryan T.: We Are Not Scared of 4chan Here at 210 Elizabeth St NY NY 10012

I mean if you say things like that, and attack sites like 4chan (Which we are not affiliated to) you must at least have the means to back yourself up. We considered what action we would take, and decided that the Gawkmedia “empire” needs to be brought down a peg or two. Our groups mission? We don’t have one.

We will be releasing the full source code dump along with the database at 9PM GMT today. You are the only outlet we have told the release time.

When contacted by Mediaite, Mr. Kidder reiterated that there was no evidence of any security breach, but that they were still investigating the claims.

Earlier this year, Gawker attracted national media attention and launched an FBI investigation with a report on an iPad security breach which exposed the identities and personal information of 114,000 iPad 3G owners, including Mike Bloomberg, Harvey Weinstein, and Diane Sawyer.

Now, Gawker has been hit with what appears to be a security breach of ten times the magnitude. Given Gawker’s public flaunting of the hacker community that populates 4Chan — with which our source emphasizes the group involved in this particular database hack has no affiliation — combined with Gawker’s at-times schadenfreude-filled celebration of other major media outlets’ failings, this is sure to be a story that gets lots of attention in the coming days and weeks.

Update – Scott Kidder shares with Mediaite the following note to all staff that confirms that their database has in fact been hacked:

Our user databases do indeed appear to have been compromised. The passwords were encrypted. But simple ones may be vulnerable to a brute-force attack. You should change the password on Gawker (GED/commenting system) and on any other sites on which you’ve used the same passwords. Out of an abundance of caution, you should also change your company email password and any passwords that may have appeared in your email messages.

We’re deeply embarrassed by this breach. We should not be in the position of relying on the goodwill of the hackers who identified the weakness in our systems. And, yes, the irony is not lost on us. Lifehacker has tips on how to create strong passwords: http://lifehac.kr/h7jgzQ

http://www.mediaite.com/online/gawke...e-been-hacked/





The Case for Lousy Passwords
Peter Smith

In the aftermath of the big Gawker security breach, a lot of ink is being spilled about passwords. Some of what you've been reading, like Dan Tynan's Seven lessons learned from the Gawker and McDonalds hack attacks here at ITworld, is solid, useful info for anyone who uses the web.

But I've also been seeing a lot of jeering posts about how people invariably pick bad passwords. When it gets to the point where even The Wall Street Journal is gleefully pointing out how pathetic some passwords are, I decided the time had come to step up and speak out for the other side.

I'm a Gawker reader and I use lousy passwords. My Gawker password wasn't quite as easy as "password" but it was a short word that the hackers have almost certainly cracked by now. Did I use this password because I'm ignorant? No. My bank password (for example) is much longer and uses a mix of upper and lower case, numbers and punctuation. I still imagine it could be cracked if my bank experienced a data breach, but it at least would take a little bit of time.

So why is my Gawker password so weak? Because I don't care! I read a few Gawker sites and every once in a blue moon I feel the urge to comment, and when I need to comment I need to log in. In a perfect world I wouldn't need to log in or have an account at all. I'd just write a comment and hit submit, but of course the comment spammers have ruined that experience for us. If someone hacked into my Gawker account it wouldn't matter to me. They'd get my 'casual' e-mail address, sure, but that's not connected to anything important. I don't use my real, permanent email on sites like Gawker. There's no data in my Gawker account that I care about. I do sometimes reuse that bad password, but only on other sites where I'm equally not concerned with security.

To put all this in context I urge you to read Coding Horror's excellent Rainbow Hash Cracking piece. In it, Jeff Atwood points out that the password "Fgpyyih804423" was cracked in 160 seconds by the Ophcrack cracker. That was back in 2007 when the piece was written. By now I'm sure it'd take even less time. Your "good" password probably isn't all that much better than these "bad" passwords that the pundits are lecturing us about.
http://www.itworld.com/personal-tech...ousy-passwords





U.S. Code-Cracking Agency Works as if Compromised
Jim Wolf

The U.S. government's main code-making and code-cracking agency now works on the assumption that foes may have pierced even the most sensitive national security computer networks under its guard.

"There's no such thing as 'secure' any more," Debora Plunkett of the National Security Agency said on Thursday amid U.S. anger and embarrassment over disclosure of sensitive diplomatic cables by the web site WikiLeaks.

"The most sophisticated adversaries are going to go unnoticed on our networks," she said.

Plunkett heads the NSA's Information Assurance Directorate, which is responsible for protecting national security information and networks from the foxhole to the White House.

"We have to build our systems on the assumption that adversaries will get in," she told a cyber security forum sponsored by the Atlantic and Government Executive media organizations.

The United States can't put its trust "in different components of the system that might have already been violated," Plunkett added in a rare public airing of NSA's view on the issue. "We have to, again, assume that all the components of our system are not safe, and make sure we're adjusting accordingly."

The NSA must constantly fine tune its approach, she said, adding that there was no such thing as a "static state of security."

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

Plunkett declined to comment on WikiLeaks, which has started releasing a cache of 250,000 diplomatic cables, including details of overseas installations that officials regard as vital to U.S. security.

Official have focused publicly on Army Private Bradley Manning, who is being detained at a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, as the source of the leak.

NSA, a secretive Defense Department arm that also intercepts foreign communications, conceives of the problem as maintaining the availability and assuring the integrity of the systems it guards, rather than their "security," she said.

NSA -- which insiders jokingly used to say referred to "No Such Agency" -- also focuses on standardization and auditing to hunt for any intrusions, Plunkett said. She referred to the development of sensors for eventual deployment "in appropriate places within our infrastructure" to detect threats and take action against them.

Mike McConnell, a retired Navy vice admiral who headed the NSA from 1992 to 1996, told the forum he believed no U.S. government network was safe from penetration.

A third-party inspection of major computer systems found there was none of consequence "that is not penetrated by some adversary that allows the adversary, the outsider, to bleed all the information at will," said McConnell, director of national intelligence from 2007 to 2009 and now leader of the intelligence business for the Booz Allen Hamilton consultancy.

(Reporting by Jim Wolf; editing by Todd Eastham)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6BF6BZ20101217





The Clock is Ticking on Encryption

Today's secure cipher-text may be tomorrow's open book
Lamont Wood

In the indictment that led to the expulsion of ten Russian spies from the U.S. in the summer of 2010, the FBI said that it gained access to their communications after surreptitiously entering one of the spies' homes, during which agents found a piece of paper with a 27-character password.

In other words, the FBI found it more productive to burglarize a house than to crack a 216-bit code, despite having the computational resources of the U.S. government behind it.

That's because modern cryptography, when used correctly, is rock solid. Cracking an encrypted message can require time frames that dwarf the age of the universe.

That's the case today. But within the foreseeable future, cracking those same codes could become trivial, thanks to quantum computing.
The encryption landscape

"The entire commercial world runs off the assumption that encryption is rock solid and is not breakable" says Joe Moorcones, vice president at SafeNet Inc., an information security firm in Belcamp, Md.

There are two kinds of encryption algorithms used in enterprise-level communications security -- symmetric and asymmetric (also called public-key encryption), he explains. Symmetric algorithms are typically used to send the actual information, where asymmetric algorithms are used to send both the information and the keys.

Symmetric encryption requires that the sender and receiver both employ the same algorithm and the same encryption key. Decryption is simply the reverse of the encryption process -- hence the "symmetric" name.

The scale of the problem

Today's encryption algorithms can be broken. Their security derives from the wildly impractical lengths of time it can take to do so.

Let's say you're using a 128-bit AES cipher. The number of possible keys with 128 bits is 2 raised to the power of 128, or 3.4x10^38, or 340 undecillion. Assuming no information on the nature of the key (such as that the owner likes to use his or her children's birthdays) a code-breaking attempt would require the testing of each possible key until one is found that works.

Assuming that enough computing power was amassed to test 1 trillion keys per second, testing all possible keys would take 10.79 quintillion years. This is about 785 million times the age of the visible universe (13.75 billion years.) On the other hand, you might get lucky in the first 10 minutes.

Using quantum technology with the same throughput, exhausting the possibilities of a 128-bit AES key would take about six months. However, moving to 256 bits would give the system a level of security equivalent to 128 bits with a conventional computer.

Cracking an RSA or EC cipher with a quantum machine would be essentially immediate.

There are numerous symmetric algorithms available, but Moorcones says that, at the enterprise level, nearly everyone uses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), published in 2001 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology after five years of testing. It replaced the Data Encryption Standard (DES), which debuted in 1976 and uses a 56-bit key.

Typically using keys that are either 128 or 256 bits long, AES has never been broken, while DES can now be broken in a matter of hours, Moorcones says. AES is approved for sensitive U.S. government information that is not classified, he adds.

As for classified information, the algorithms used to protect it are, of course, themselves classified. "They're more of the same -- they put in more bells and whistles to make them harder to crack," says Charles Kolodgy, analyst at IDC, a market research firm in Framingham, Mass. And they use multiple algorithms, he says.

Though rumors have long swirled around the idea, well-respected sources universally reject the idea that AES has a "back door" that allows the government to read messages encrypted with it. "It's been too heavily scrutinized," says Paul Kocher, head of Cryptography Research Inc., in San Francisco. "They would have to put in a back door that no one else could see, and to be able to do that they would have to be years ahead of everyone else, and that is unlikely."

The beauty of public-key cryptography

The genuine weakness of AES -- and any symmetric system -- is that the sender has to get the key to the receiver. If that key is intercepted, transmissions become an open book. That's where asymmetric algorithms come in, as a method for disseminating symmetric keys.

Moorcones explains that asymmetric systems are also called public key cryptography because they use a public key for encryption and a different, private key for decryption. "You can post your public key in a directory with your name next to it, and I can use it to encrypt a message to you, but you are the only person with your private key so you are the only person who can decrypt it."

The most common asymmetric algorithm is RSA (for inventors Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman). It is based on the difficulty of factoring large numbers, from which the two keys are derived.

But RSA messages with keys as long as 768 bits have been broken, notes Kocher. "I would guess that in five years even 1,024 bits will be broken."

Moorcones adds: "You often see 2,048-bit RSA keys used to protect 256-bit AES keys."

Other kinds of algorithms

Besides responding with longer RSA keys, users are also turning to elliptic curve (EC) algorithms, based on the math used to describe curves, with security again increasing with the size of the key. EC can offer the same security with one-fourth the computational complexity of RSA, Moocones says. However, EC encryption up to 109 bits has been broken, Kocher explains.

RSA remains popular with developers because implementation requires only multiplication routines, leading to simpler programming and higher throughput, Kocher says. Also, all the applicable patents have expired. For its part, EC is better when there are bandwidth or memory constraints, he adds.

As for private individuals, IDC's Kolodgy says that many turn to freeware implementations of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), published in 1991 by Phil Zimmermann. PGP traffic can be readily identified, inviting attempts to intercept key transfers.

For those who want to hide the fact that they are receiving messages, there's steganography, which involves hiding text, encrypted or not, typically within the pixels of photos posted on the Web. Anyone can download the picture and extract the message, assuming he has the right software. In fact, the previously cited 27-character code used by the Russian spies was for the password protection of a steganography software disk.

"The problem with steganography is that is not encryption, it's hiding, like putting drugs in a secret compartment of your suitcase," says Zimmermann, now a security consultant in Santa Cruz, Calif. "If your opponent knows about it they can intercept the message."

The quantum danger

This mostly tidy world of cryptography may be seriously disrupted by the expected arrival of quantum computers. "There has been tremendous progress in quantum computer technology during the last few years," says Michele Mosca, deputy director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Mosca notes that in the past 15 years we have moved from playing with quantum bits to building quantum logic gates. At that rate he thinks it is likely we will have a quantum computer within 20 years.

"It's a game changer," Mosca says, explaining that the change comes not from a speed-up in the computer's clock speed, but from an astronomical reduction in the number of steps needed to perform certain computations.

Basically, Mosca explains, a quantum computer should be able to use the properties of quantum mechanics to probe for patterns within a huge number without having to examine every digit in that number. Cracking both RSA and EC ciphers depends on this very issue -- finding patterns in huge numbers.

Mosca explains that, with a conventional computer, finding a pattern for an EC cipher with N number of bits in the key would take a number of steps equal to 2 raised to one-half N. As an example, for 100 bits (a modest number), it would take 2^50 (1.125 quadrillion) steps.

With a quantum computer it should take about 50 steps, he says, and code-breaking would then be no more computationally demanding than the original encryption process.

With RSA, determining the number of steps needed for a solution through conventional computation is more complicated than with EC encryption, but the scale of the reduction with quantum computation should be similar, Mosca says.

The situation is less dire with symmetric encryption, Mosca explains. Breaking a symmetric code like AES is a matter of searching all possible key combinations for the one that works. With a 128-bit key there are 2^128 possible combinations. But thanks to a quantum computer's ability to probe large numbers, only the square root of the number of combinations needs to be examined -- in this case 2^64. This is still a huge number, and AES should remain secure with increased key sizes, he says.

Timing issues

When will all this happen?

"We don't know," says Mosca. To mere mortals, 20 years is a long way off, but in the world of cyber-security, it's right around the corner. "Is that an acceptable risk? I don't think so. So we need to start figuring out what alternatives to deploy since it takes many years to change the infrastructure."

Moorcones at SafeNet disagrees. "DES lasted for 30 years, and AES is good for another 20 or 30 years," he says. Increases in computing power can be countered by changing keys more often -- one per message if necessary -- he adds, as many enterprises currently change their key only once every 90 days. Every key, of course, requires a fresh cracking effort, as any success with one key is inapplicable with the next.

The rule of thumb, when it comes to encryption, is that "you want your messages to provide 20 years or more of security, so you want any encryption that you use to remain strong 20 years from now," says Kolodgy.

The other quantum technology

If quantum technology calls into question the methods used to disseminate encryption keys, it also offers technology -- called quantum key distribution, or QKD -- by which such keys can be simultaneously generated and transmitted securely. This works in at least in some situations.

QKD has actually been on the market since 2004, with the fiber-based Cerberis system from ID Quantique SA in Geneva, Switzerland. Grégoire Ribordy, the firm's founder and CEO, explains that the system is based on the fact that measuring quantum properties changes them.

At one end of an optical fiber, an emitter sends individual photons to the other end. The phase of some the photons are measured as they are transmitted and thereby acquire a value, and the receiver is informed of the value through a separate channel. Normally the photons will arrive with the expected values and will be used to generate a new encryption key.

But if there is an eavesdropper on the line, that third party will have reassigned values to the photons through the act of measuring them. In that case, the receiver will see an error rate in the photon values and no key will be generated. In the absence of that error rate, the security of the channel is assured, Ribordy says.

Cryptography

"It's like a fountain of random bits," he says of the system. "You can store the bits in a buffer and use them different ways, and with standard applications we use them to make 256-bit AES keys, and then replace the key every minute."

However, since security can only be assured after the fact -- when the error rate is measured, which happens immediately -- the channel should be used to send only the keys, and not actual messages, he notes.

The other limitation of the system is range, which currently doesn't exceed 100 kilometers (62 miles), although they have achieved 250 kilometers in the lab. However, due to the rate that photons get lost in the fiber, the theoretical maximum is 400 kilometers, Ribordy says. Going beyond that must await the development of a quantum repeater -- which would presumably use the same technology as a quantum computer, he adds.

QKD security, like all security, is not cheap, with an emitter-receiver pair costing about 100,000 Swiss francs (about $97,000), he says.

Safe, at least for now

For the time being, "code-breaking today is an end-run game -- it's all about snatching the user's machine," says Kolodgy at IDC."These days, if you pull something out of the air, you can't decrypt it."

But the biggest problem with encryption, typically, is the lack of any. "All business-critical data should be encrypted at rest, especially credit card data," says Richard Stiennon at IT-Harvest, a security analyst firm in Birmingham, Mich. "The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council requires that merchants encrypt it -- or better yet not store it at all. And data breach notification laws don't require you to disclose your lost data if it was encrypted."

And of course, leaving your encryption keys lying around on slips of paper also turns out to be a bad idea.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic..._on_encryption





WikiLeaks Chief Says He Fears US Ready to Indict
AP

The founder of WikiLeaks says he fears the U.S. is getting ready to indict him.

Julian Assange told reporters Friday outside a supporter's country mansion where he is confined that he was being subjected to "what appears to be a secret grand jury investigation against me or our organization."

But Assange says his organization was resilient and designed to withstand "decapitation attacks."

He adds that the allegations against him of sex crimes are part of a smear campaign, but Sweden says they stem from serious allegations made by two women.

A High Court judge freed Assange on bail Thursday on condition he reside at a supporter's 600-acre estate in eastern England, wear an electronic tag and report to police daily.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010...s-Assange.html





US Steps Up Efforts to Charge Assange with Conspiracy

Accused soldier offered plea bargain if he names WikiLeaks founder
Kim Sengupta and David Usborne

US authorities have stepped up their efforts to prosecute Julian Assange by offering Bradley Manning, the American soldier allegedly responsible for leaking hundreds of thousands of government documents, the possibility of a plea bargain if he names the Wiki-Leaks founder as a fellow conspirator.

The development follows claims by Mr Assange's supporters that a grand jury has been secretly empanelled in northern Virginia to consider indicting the WikiLeaks chief. But the US Justice Department has refused to comment on any grand jury activity.

As Mr Assange arrived last night at the East Anglia mansion after his release from a London prison on bail, he said he considered the threat of US legal action to be "extremely serious" even though "they have yet to be confirmed". He told Sky News: "We have heard today from one of my US lawyers that there may be a US indictment for espionage for me coming from a secret grand jury investigation. "There are obviously serious attempts to take down the content by taking us down as an organisation and taking me down as an individual."

American officials view persuading Pte Manning to give evidence that Mr Assange encouraged him to disseminate classified Pentagon and State Department files as crucial to any prospect of extraditing him for a successful prosecution. To facilitate that, Pte Manning may be moved from military to civilian custody, they say. Since being charged in July with disseminating a US military video showing a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters that killed 17 people in Iraq including two Reuters employees, the soldier has been held at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia. But members of his support network insist that he has not co-operated with the authorities since his arrest in May.

The Justice Department views the chances of a prosecution as far slimmer if Mr Assange was merely the passive recipient of information. But Adrian Lamo, a former hacker who had been in contact with Pte Manning and eventually turned him in to the government, is said to have told the FBI that Mr Assange had given the young soldier an encrypted internet conferencing service as he was downloading government files and a dedicated server for uploading them to WikiLeaks. The US Attorney General, Eric Holder, said this week that he had "authorised significant steps" in the investigation into the leaks without going into details. However, US diplomats say that while the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 can be used against Pte Manning, extending it to Mr Assange would come up against the formidable defence of free speech and media freedom enshrined in the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

If Mr Assange is indicted under the Espionage or Computer Fraud acts when there is no evidence that he instigated Pte Manning's activities, it could follow that the New York Times, which disseminated the information in the US, could also face prosecution – something officials say the Justice Department simply would not countenance.

WikiLeaks appears to be aware of the danger if it is proved to be involved in a conspiracy to leak material. It has deleted from its website the claim that "Submitting confidential material to Wiki-Leaks is safe, easy and protected by law". The site now says: "Submitting documents to our journalists is protected by law in better democracies." It also now says: "WikiLeaks accepts a range of material, but we do not solicit it." Furthermore, it no longer says it welcomes "classified" material.

At a first hearing on the WikiLeaks affair by the House Judiciary Committee in Washington, John Conyers, a leading Democrat, cautioned against a rush towards prosecuting Mr Assange. He said: "Many feel that the WikiLeaks publication was offensive. But being unpopular is not a crime and publishing offensive information is not, either. And the repeated calls from politicians, journalists and other so-called experts crying out for criminal prosecutions or other extreme measures make me very uncomfortable."

Others, notably Joe Lieberman in the Senate and Peter King in the House of Representatives have pushed for new legislation to facilitate the prosecution of Mr Assange in the event that existing law proves insufficient. "Assange and his associates... have not only damaged US national security... but also placed at risk countless lives, including those of our intelligence sources," said Mr King.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...y-2162639.html





WikiLeaks Taps Power of the Press
David Carr

Has WikiLeaks changed journalism forever?

Perhaps. Or maybe it was the other way around.

Think back to 2008, when WikiLeaks simply released documents that suggested the government of Kenya had looted its country. The follow-up in the mainstream media was decidedly muted.

Then last spring, WikiLeaks adopted a more journalistic approach — editing and annotating a 2007 video from Baghdad in which an Apache helicopter fired on men who appeared to be unarmed, including two employees of Reuters. The reviews were mixed, with some suggesting that the video had been edited to political ends, but the disclosure received much more attention in the press.

In July, WikiLeaks began what amounted to a partnership with mainstream media organizations, including The New York Times, by giving them an early look at the so-called Afghan War Diary, a strategy that resulted in extensive reporting on the implications of the secret documents.

Then in October, the heretofore classified mother lode of 250,000 United States diplomatic cables that describe tensions across the globe was shared by WikiLeaks with Le Monde, El Pais, The Guardian and Der Spiegel. (The Guardian shared documents with The New York Times.) The result was huge: many articles have come out since, many of them deep dives into the implications of the trove of documents.

Notice that with each successive release, WikiLeaks has become more strategic and has been rewarded with deeper, more extensive coverage of its revelations. It’s a long walk from WikiLeaks’s origins as a user-edited site held in common to something more akin to a traditional model of publishing, but seems to be in keeping with its manifesto to deliver documents with “maximum possible impact.”

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s founder and guiding spirit, apparently began to understand that scarcity, not ubiquity, drives coverage of events. Instead of just pulling back the blankets for all to see, he began to limit the disclosures to those who would add value through presentation, editing and additional reporting. In a sense, Mr. Assange, a former programmer, leveraged the processing power of the news media to build a story and present it in comprehensible ways. (Of course, as someone who draws a paycheck from a mainstream journalism outfit, it may be no surprise that I continue to see durable value in what we do even amid the journalistic jujitsu WikiLeaks introduces.)

And by publishing only a portion of the documents, rather than spilling information willy-nilly and recklessly endangering lives, WikiLeaks could also strike a posture of responsibility, an approach that seems to run counter to Mr. Assange’s own core anarchism.

Although Mr. Assange is now arguing that the site is engaged in what he called a new kind of “scientific journalism,” his earlier writings suggest he believes the mission of WikiLeaks is to throw sand in the works of what he considers corrupt, secretive and inherently evil states. He initiated a conspiracy in order to take down what he saw as an even greater conspiracy.

“WikiLeaks is not a news organization, it is a cell of activists that is releasing information designed to embarrass people in power,” said George Packer, a writer on international affairs at The New Yorker. “They simply believe that the State Department is an illegitimate organization that needs to be exposed, which is not really journalism.”

By shading his radicalism and collaborating with mainstream outlets, Mr. Assange created a comfort zone for his partners in journalism. They could do their jobs and he could do his.

“The notion that this experience has somehow profoundly changed journalism, the way that information gets out or changed the way that diplomacy happens, seems rather exaggerated,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, which used information from the leaks to report a series of large articles.

“It was a big deal, but not an unfamiliar one. Consumers of information became privy to a lot of stuff that had been secret before,” Mr. Keller said. “The scale of it was unusual, but was it different in kind from the Pentagon Papers or revelation of Abu Ghraib or government eavesdropping? I think probably not.”

In this case, the media companies could also take some comfort in knowing that the current trove did not contain, with a few notable exceptions, any earth-shaking revelations. No thinking citizen was surprised to learn that diplomats don’t trust each other and say so behind closed doors. But as it has became increasingly apparent that WikiLeaks was changing the way information is released and consumed, questions were raised about the value of traditional journalistic approaches.

“People from the digital world are always saying we don’t need journalists at all because information is everywhere and there in no barrier to entry,” said Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia Journalism School. “But these documents provide a good answer to that question. Even though journalists didn’t dig them out, there is a great deal of value in their efforts to explain and examine them. Who else would have had the energy or resources to do what these news organization have done?”

WikiLeaks certainly isn’t being afforded the same protections we give other media outlets in free countries. It has come under significant attack as PayPal, Amazon and Visa have all tried to bar WikiLeaks from their services, a move that would seem unthinkable had it been made against mainstream newspapers. (Can you imagine the outcry if a credit card company decided to cut off The Washington Post because it didn’t like what was on the front page?)

Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, has called for Mr. Assange’s execution and Sen. Joseph Lieberman has said that he should be charged with treason while Sarah Palin has called him “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.” (Indeed, Senator Lieberman has suggested that the Justice Department should examine the role of The New York Times in the leaks.)

Mr. Packer is very much against the prosecution of WikiLeaks on grounds of treason because, he said, “discerning the legal difference between what WikiLeaks did and what news organizations do is difficult and would set a terrible precedent.”

But Mr. Assange, who is currently being held in prison in Britain on sex charges brought in Sweden, is a complicated partner. So far, WikiLeaks has been involved in a fruitful collaboration, a new form of hybrid journalism emerging in the space between so-called hacktivists and mainstream media outlets, but the relationship is an unstable one.

WikiLeaks may be willing to play ball with newspapers for now, but the organization does not share the same values or objectives. Mr. Assange and the site’s supporters see transparency as the ultimate objective, believing that sunshine and openness will deprive bad actors of the secrecy they require to be successful. Mainstream media may spend a lot of time trying to ferret information out of official hands, but they largely operate in the belief that the state is legitimate and entitled to at least some of its secrets.

And Mr. Assange has placed a doomsday card on the table: he has said that if WikiLeaks’s existence is threatened, the organization would be willing to spill all the documents in its possession out into the public domain, ignoring the potentially mortal consequences. (His lawyers told ABC News that they expect he will be indicted on espionage charges in the United States.) Mr. Packer said such an act “is something no journalistic organization would ever do, or threaten to do.”

And what if WikiLeaks was unhappy with how one of its ad hoc media partners had handled the information it provided or became displeased with the coverage of WikiLeaks? The same guns in the info-war that have been aimed at its political and Web opponents could be trained on media outlets.

Steve Coll, president of the New America Foundation and an author and a contributor to The New Yorker who has written extensively about Afghanistan, said that the durability of the WikiLeaks model remained an open question.

“I’m skeptical about whether a release of this size is ever going to take place again,” he said, “in part because established interests and the rule of law tend to come down pretty hard on incipient movements. Think of the initial impact of Napster and what subsequently happened to them.”

Of course, Napster is no longer around but the insurgency it represented all but tipped the music industry.

“Right now, media outlets are treating this as a transaction with a legitimate journalistic organization,” he said. “But at some point, they are going to have to evolve into an organization that has an address and identity or the clock will run out on that level of collaboration.”

Emily Bell, the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, said that WikiLeaks had already changed the rules by creating a situation where competitive news organizations were now cooperating to share a scoop.

“WikiLeaks represents a new kind of advocacy, one that brings to mind the activism of the ’60s, one in which people want to get their own hands on information and do their own digging,” she said. “What you are seeing is just a crack in the door right now. No one can tell where this is really going.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/bu...ia/13carr.html





Iceland Considers Revoking Visa/MasterCard Licenses For Wikileaks Ban
Mike Masnick

With Visa and MasterCard cutting off payments for Wikileaks, it appears that some Icelandic politicians are threatening to remove both companies' operating licenses in that country. Apparently, the Icelandic Parliamentary General Committee has asked both companies to explain what legal grounds they used for cutting off Wikileaks and, without evidence of legitimate reasons, both companies could lose their operating licenses. We had already noted that Icelandic firm DataCell, which was handling the payments for Wikileaks, was planning to sue both companies but it appears that the Icelandic government may help out. Of course, I would imagine that Visa and Mastercard both care about keeping the US government more happy than the Icelandic government...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...eaks-ban.shtml





Air Force Blocks Media Sites
Spencer E. Ante and Julian E. Barnes

The U.S. Air Force is blocking its personnel from using work computers to view the websites of the New York Times and other major publications that have posted classified diplomatic cables, people familiar with the matter said.

Air Force users who try to view the websites of the New York Times, Britain's Guardian, Spain's El Pais, France's Le Monde or German magazine Der Spiegel instead get a page that says, "ACCESS DENIED. Internet Usage is Logged & Monitored," according to a screen shot reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The notice warns that anyone who accesses unauthorized sites from military computers could be punished.

The Air Force said it had blocked more than 25 websites that contained the documents, originally obtained by the website WikiLeaks and published starting late last month, in order to keep classified material off unclassified computer systems.

Major Toni Tones, a spokeswoman for Air Force Space Command, wouldn't name the websites but said they might include media sites. Removing such material after it ends up on a computer could require "unnecessary time and resources," Major Tones said.

"It is unfortunate that the U.S. Air Force has chosen not to allow its personnel access to the most important news, analysis and commentary," a New York Times spokeswoman said.

The other publications couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

The move was ordered by the 24th Air Force, which is responsible for maintaining Air Force computer networks. The Army, Navy and Marines aren't blocking the sites, and the Defense Department hasn't told the services to do so, according to spokespeople for the services and the Pentagon.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense has issued guidance against visiting WikiLeaks or downloading documents posted there, according to defense officials. The Air Force told its own personnel in August to avoid those actions. Service commanders have authority to go beyond Pentagon guidance and issue orders to protect classified information.

One senior defense official questioned the wisdom of blocking the newspaper sites or even prohibiting service members from visiting them on military computers, arguing that the information has spread on the Internet and that sites like the New York Times contain other, useful information. The defense official said blocking the New York Times was a misinterpretation of military guidance to avoid visiting websites that post classified material.

The new order doesn't prevent Air Force personnel from viewing the media websites on nonmilitary computers, one Air Force official said. The block can also be lifted if accessing one of the news sites is essential to a person's job, according to the screen shot.

—Russell Adams contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...121568506.html





Facebook Wrestles With Free Speech and Civility
Miguel Helft

Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, likes to say that his Web site brings people together, helping to make the world a better place. But Facebook isn’t a utopia, and when it comes up short, Dave Willner tries to clean up.

Dressed in Facebook’s quasi-official uniform of jeans, a T-shirt and flip-flops, the 26-year-old Mr. Willner hardly looks like a cop on the beat. Yet he and his colleagues on Facebook’s “hate and harassment team” are part of a virtual police squad charged with taking down content that is illegal or violates Facebook’s terms of service. That puts them on the front line of the debate over free speech on the Internet.

That role came into sharp focus last week as the controversy about WikiLeaks boiled over on the Web, with coordinated attacks on major corporate and government sites perceived to be hostile to that group.

Facebook took down a page used by WikiLeaks supporters to organize hacking attacks on the sites of such companies, including PayPal and MasterCard; it said the page violated the terms of service, which prohibit material that is hateful, threatening, pornographic or incites violence or illegal acts. But it did not remove WikiLeaks’s own Facebook pages.

Facebook’s decision in the WikiLeaks matter illustrates the complexities that the company grapples with, on issues as diverse as that controversy, verbal bullying among teenagers, gay-baiting and religious intolerance.

With Facebook’s prominence on the Web — its more than 500 million members upload more than one billion pieces of content a day — the site’s role as an arbiter of free speech is likely to become even more pronounced.

“Facebook has more power in determining who can speak and who can be heard around the globe than any Supreme Court justice, any king or any president,” said Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University who has written about free speech on the Internet. “It is important that Facebook is exercising its power carefully and protecting more speech rather than less.”

But Facebook rarely pleases everyone. Any piece of content — a photograph, video, page or even a message between two individuals — could offend somebody. Decisions by the company not to remove material related to Holocaust denial or pages critical of Islam and other religions, for example, have annoyed advocacy groups and prompted some foreign governments to temporarily block the site.

Some critics say Facebook does not do enough to prevent certain abuses, like bullying, and may put users at risk with lax privacy policies. They also say the company is often too slow to respond to problems.

For example, a page lampooning and, in some instances, threatening violence against an 11-year-old girl from Orlando, Fla., who had appeared in a music video, was still up last week, months after users reported the page to Facebook. The girl’s mother, Christa Etheridge, said she had been in touch with law enforcement authorities and was hoping the offenders would be prosecuted.

“I’m highly upset that Facebook has allowed this to go on repeatedly and to let it get this far,” she said.

A Facebook spokesman said the company had left the page up because it did not violate its terms of service, which allow criticism of a public figure. The spokesman said that by appearing in a band’s video, the girl had become a public figure, and that the threatening comments had not been posted until a few days ago. Those comments, and the account of the user who had posted them, were removed after The New York Times inquired about them.

Facebook says it is constantly working to improve its tools to report abuse and trying to educate users about bullying. And it says it responds as fast as it can to the roughly two million reports of potentially abusive content that its users flag every week.

“Our intent is to triage to make sure we get to the high-priority, high-risk and high-visibility items most quickly,” said Joe Sullivan, Facebook’s chief security officer.

In early October, Mr. Willner and his colleagues spent more than a week dealing with one high-risk, highly visible case; rogue citizens of Facebook’s world had posted antigay messages and threats of violence on a page inviting people to remember Tyler Clementi and other gay teenagers who have committed suicide, on so-called Spirit Day, Oct. 20.

Working with colleagues here and in Dublin, they tracked down the accounts of the offenders and shut them down. Then, using an automated technology to tap Facebook’s graph of connections between members, they tracked down more profiles for people, who, as it turned out, had also been posting violent messages.

“Most of the hateful content was coming from fake profiles,” said James Mitchell, who is Mr. Willner’s supervisor and leads the team. He said that because most of these profiles, created by people he called “trolls,” were connected to those of other trolls, Facebook could track down and block an entire network relatively quickly.

Using the system, Mr. Willner and his colleagues silenced dozens of troll accounts, and the page became usable again. But trolls are repeat offenders, and it took Mr. Willner and his colleagues nearly 10 days of monitoring the page around the clock to take down over 7,000 profiles that kept surfacing to attack the Spirit Day event page.

Most abuse incidents are not nearly as prominent or public as the defacing of the Spirit Day page, which had nearly 1.5 million members. As with schoolyard taunts, they often happen among a small group of people, hidden from casual view.

On a morning in November, Nick Sullivan, a member of the hate and harassment team, watched as reports of bullying incidents scrolled across his screen, full of mind-numbing meanness. “Emily looks like a brother.” (Deleted) “Grady is with Dave.” (Deleted) “Ronald is the biggest loser.” (Deleted) Although the insults are relatively mild, as attacks on specific people who are not public figures, these all violated the terms of service.

“There’s definitely some crazy stuff out there,” Mr. Sullivan said. “But you can do thousands of these in a day.”

Nancy Willard, director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, which advises parents and teachers on Internet safety, said her organization frequently received complaints that Facebook does not quickly remove threats against individuals. Jim Steyer, executive director of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco, also said that many instances of abuse seemed to fall through the cracks.

“Self-policing can take some time, and by then a lot of the damage may already be done,” he said.

Facebook maintains it is doing its best.

“In the same way that efforts to combat bullying offline are not 100 percent successful, the efforts to stop people from saying something offensive about another person online are not complete either,” Joe Sullivan said.

Facebook faces even thornier challenges when policing activity that is considered political by some, and illegal by others, like the controversy over WikiLeaks and the secret diplomatic cables it published.

Last spring, for example, the company declined to take down pages related to “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day,” an Internetwide protest to defend free speech that surfaced in repudiation of death threats received by two cartoonists who had drawn pictures of Muhammad. A lot of the discussion on Facebook involved people in Islamic countries debating with people in the West about why the images offended.

Facebook’s team worked to separate the political discussion from the attacks on specific people or Muslims. “There were people on the page that were crossing the line, but the page itself was not crossing the line,” Mr. Mitchell said.

Facebook’s refusal to shut down the debate caused its entire site to be blocked in Pakistan and Bangladesh for several days.

Facebook has also sought to walk a delicate line on Holocaust denial. The company has generally refused to block Holocaust denial material, but has worked with human rights groups to take down some content linked to organizations or groups, like the government of Iran, for which Holocaust denial is part of a larger campaign against Jews.

“Obviously we disagree with them on Holocaust denial,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. But Rabbi Cooper said Facebook had done a better job than many other major Web sites in developing a thoughtful policy on hate and harassment.

The soft-spoken Mr. Willner, who on his own Facebook page describes his political views as “turning swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks,” makes for an unlikely enforcer. An archaeology and anthropology major in college, he said that while he loved his job, he did not love watching so much of the underbelly of Facebook.

“I handle it by focusing on the fact that what we do matters,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/te...3facebook.html





Amazon in the Book Banning Business
Selena Kitt

I was contacted by CreateSpace (Amazon’s Print on Demand service) who publishes my print books. They informed me that my title, Back to the Garden, had been removed for violating their “content guidelines.” When I consulted their guidelines I found them so vague as to be useless—were they saying my content was illegal? Public domain? Stolen? Offensive? (All of these were on the list). When I inquired as to the specifics of the violation, they were not forthcoming, and sent a form letter response stating that Amazon “may, in its sole discretion, at any time, refuse to list or distribute any content that it deems inappropriate.”

On Sunday, December 12, the print title that had been removed had now disappeared from the Kindle store, as well as two of my other titles, Naughty Bits and Under Mr. Nolan’s Bed. I have over fifty titles selling on Amazon, all of them in erotic fiction categories. The only thing these three singled-out titles had in common, besides being written by me—they were all erotic incest fantasy fiction.

About this time, I heard that two other authors, Jess C. Scott and Esmerelda Green, both had erotic incest-related titles removed from Amazon's site. After some research, I discovered one of Frances Gaines Bennett’s incest-related books had also been removed. As the night wore on, and public outcry about censorship and banned books began on Twitter at #amazonfail and #amazoncensors and on their own Kindle Boards, more and more incest-related erotica titles began to disappear from the Amazon site, so that the “Kindle Incest” search page began to look like swiss cheese. Teleread covered the story soon after.

When some of my readers began checking their Kindle archives for books of mine they’d purchased on Amazon, they found them missing from their archives. When one reader called to get a refund for the book she no longer had access to, she was chastised by the Amazon customer service representative about the “severity” of the book she’d chosen to purchase.

As of this writing, Amazon has refused to respond to my emails or phone calls in regards to this matter and has refused to further clarify what, if any, content guidelines the books in question violate. If Amazon had clear guidelines that were applied to all publishers across every platform and enforced them consistently, this would be a moot issue. By not clearly stating their position and choosing books either arbitrarily or based on searches of top-rated titles which are the most visible titles in the genre, they seem to be deliberately hiding a clear case of discrimination and what amounts to censorship (albeit ipso facto) because of their lack of transparency.

I want to be clear that while the subject of incest may not appeal to some, there is no underage contact in any of my work, and I make that either explicitly clear in all my stories or I state it up front in the book's disclaimer. I don't condone or support actual incest, just as someone who writes mysteries about serial killers wouldn't condone killing. What I write is fiction. It's fantasy, not reality. And I'm not saying what I write isn't controversial, but it's not illegal (at least in some states) or a threat to national security, and seems as undeserving of censorship as... well...

As fellow author, Will Belegon, noted, if Amazon is going to start pulling books with incest in them: "I just re-read Genesis 19: 30-38 and realized that Lot's daughters got him drunk, had sex with him and bore sons. I demand you follow your clear precedent and remove The Bible from Kindle."

Or perhaps Amazon should create a new television ad after they follow their clear precedent and ban the book the woman is reading in the advertisement on her Kindle ("Sleepwalking" by Amy Bloom) which tells the story of a 19-year-old boy who has a sexual encounter with his stepmother, which, in some states, is legally incest.

While it can be said that, for an author or celebrity, any press (including bad press) is good press, for a bookseller and publisher, that does not necessarily hold true. Can Amazon afford the bad press about book removal which may spark outcries from many corners, including self-publishing authors, the fastest-growing segment of their Kindle ebook distribution?

In speculating on the motivations of Amazon’s actions, as they have not been forthcoming with any statement or explanation, I am concerned that they may be acting out of reactionary fear. This may be based on pressure from a small number of vocal and complaining conservative and/or religious right extremists who object to and are afraid of sexual fantasies and erotic printed material (including incest fantasies). It may also be based on threatening governmental pressure related to the recently removed WikiLeaks. More speculation may point to overzealous lawyering as Amazon moves from just-distributor and bookseller to publisher.

While I am not a lawyer, constitutional scholar or legal expert on free speech and intellectual freedom, I am an author and publisher and know that, regardless of the technical legalities of Amazon's actions, buckling to this pressure and the removal of books will hurt their bottom line. It will damage relationships with readers, authors, publishers and organizations such as the American Library Association and the ACLU, among others, who are interested in supporting free speech. I should also note that I am a professional psychologist and, while no longer licensed or working in the field, it’s clear that when individuals and organizations fail to recognize the difference between fantasy and reality, problems such as this result.
http://theselfpublishingrevolution.b...-business.html





Why Attackers Can't Take Down Amazon.com

The organizers of an attempted Amazon takedown called off the attack less than an hour later.
Julianne Pepitone

The website-attacking group "Anonymous" tried and failed to take down Amazon.com on Thursday. The group's vengeance horde quickly found out something techies have known for years: Amazon, which has built one of the world's most invincible websites, is almost impossible to crash.

Amazon has famously massive server capacity in order to handle the December e-commerce rush. That short holiday shopping window is so critical, and so intense, that even a few minutes of downtime could cost Amazon millions.

So Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) has spent years creating and refining an "elastic" infrastructure, called EC2, designed to automatically scale to handle giant traffic spikes. The company has so much spare server capacity, in fact, that it runs a sideline business hosting other websites. Its customers include the New York Times, Second Life, Etsy, Playfish, the Indianapolis 500 and the Washington Post.

Until last week, WikiLeaks was one of Amazon's website-hosting customers. Amazon gave WikiLeaks the boot in the wake of the site's controversial release of a trove secret U.S. State Department documents.

That put Amazon in the crosshairs of Anonymous, a group that originated on image-board site 4chan.org, which organizes swarms to try to crash the websites of those it deems enemies. In the past, Anonymous has taken down several high-profile sites, including those of the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America.

This week, Anonymous launched takedown campaigns against organizations that have shunned the site WikiLeaks. Under the banner "Operation Payback," the Anonymous group successfully crashed Mastercard.com and strained the websites of Visa and PayPal. (Mastercard and Visa's transaction networks -- which run completely independently of their websites -- were unaffected.)

Anonymous makes its attacks not through hacking, but merely by directing a giant traffic surge to the targeted website. That's called a DDoS attack, short for distributed denial-of-service -- and it's hard for most websites to defend against. The attack itself isn't sophisticated. It's the equivalent of simply hitting the "refresh" button on a website thousands of times, which attackers use automated programs to do.

But Amazon's entire business model is built around handling intense traffic spikes. The holiday shopping season essentially is a month-long DDoS attack on Amazon's servers -- so the company has spent lavishly to fortify itself.

Anonymous quickly figured that out. Less than an hour after setting its sights on Amazon, the group's organizers called off the attempt. "We don't have enough forces," they tweeted.

Instead, they decided to go hammer PayPal's API, which seems to be holding up fine under the attack. "These attacks have at times slowed the website itself down, but have not significantly impacted payments," a PayPal representative said.

So click away, holiday shoppers. Amazon's got your back.
http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/09/tech...ileaks_attack/





List: openbsd-tech
Subject: Allegations regarding OpenBSD IPSEC
From: Theo de Raadt <deraadt () cvs ! openbsd ! org>
Date: 2010-12-14 22:24:39
Message-ID: 201012142224.oBEMOdWM031222 () cvs ! openbsd ! org
[Download message RAW]

I have received a mail regarding the early development of the OpenBSD
IPSEC stack. It is alleged that some ex-developers (and the company
they worked for) accepted US government money to put backdoors into
our network stack, in particular the IPSEC stack. Around 2000-2001.

Since we had the first IPSEC stack available for free, large parts of
the code are now found in many other projects/products. Over 10
years, the IPSEC code has gone through many changes and fixes, so it
is unclear what the true impact of these allegations are.

The mail came in privately from a person I have not talked to for
nearly 10 years. I refuse to become part of such a conspiracy, and
will not be talking to Gregory Perry about this. Therefore I am
making it public so that
(a) those who use the code can audit it for these problems,
(b) those that are angry at the story can take other actions,
(c) if it is not true, those who are being accused can defend themselves.

Of course I don't like it when my private mail is forwarded. However
the "little ethic" of a private mail being forwarded is much smaller
than the "big ethic" of government paying companies to pay open source
developers (a member of a community-of-friends) to insert
privacy-invading holes in software.

----

From: Gregory Perry <Gregory.Perry@GoVirtual.tv>
To: "deraadt@openbsd.org" <deraadt@openbsd.org>
Subject: OpenBSD Crypto Framework
Thread-Topic: OpenBSD Crypto Framework
Thread-Index: AcuZjuF6cT4gcSmqQv+Fo3/+2m80eg==
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2010 23:55:25 +0000
Message-ID: <8D3222F9EB68474DA381831A120B1023019AC034@mbx021-e2-nj-5.exch021.domain.local>
Accept-Language: en-US
Content-Language: en-US
X-MS-Has-Attach:
X-MS-TNEF-Correlator:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
MIME-Version: 1.0
Status: RO

Hello Theo,

Long time no talk. If you will recall, a while back I was the CTO at
NETSEC and arranged funding and donations for the OpenBSD Crypto
Framework. At that same time I also did some consulting for the FBI,
for their GSA Technical Support Center, which was a cryptologic
reverse engineering project aimed at backdooring and implementing key
escrow mechanisms for smart card and other hardware-based computing
technologies.

My NDA with the FBI has recently expired, and I wanted to make you
aware of the fact that the FBI implemented a number of backdoors and
side channel key leaking mechanisms into the OCF, for the express
purpose of monitoring the site to site VPN encryption system
implemented by EOUSA, the parent organization to the FBI. Jason
Wright and several other developers were responsible for those
backdoors, and you would be well advised to review any and all code
commits by Wright as well as the other developers he worked with
originating from NETSEC.

This is also probably the reason why you lost your DARPA funding, they
more than likely caught wind of the fact that those backdoors were
present and didn't want to create any derivative products based upon
the same.

This is also why several inside FBI folks have been recently
advocating the use of OpenBSD for VPN and firewalling implementations
in virtualized environments, for example Scott Lowe is a well
respected author in virtualization circles who also happens top be on
the FBI payroll, and who has also recently published several tutorials
for the use of OpenBSD VMs in enterprise VMware vSphere deployments.

Merry Christmas...

Gregory Perry
Chief Executive Officer
GoVirtual Education

"VMware Training Products & Services"

540-645-6955 x111 (local)
866-354-7369 x111 (toll free)
540-931-9099 (mobile)
877-648-0555 (fax)

http://www.facebook.com/GregoryVPerry
http://www.facebook.com/GoVirtual

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129236621626462&w=2





List: openbsd-tech
Subject: Re: Allegations regarding OpenBSD IPSEC
From: "Jason L. Wright" <jason () thought ! net>
Date: 2010-12-15 18:27:31
Message-ID: 20101215182710.GA6897 () jason-wright ! cust ! arpnetworks ! com
[Download message RAW]

Subject: Allegations regarding OpenBSD IPSEC

Every urban lengend is made more real by the inclusion of real names,
dates, and times. Gregory Perry's email falls into this category. I
cannot fathom his motivation for writing such falsehood (delusions
of grandeur or a self-promotion attempt perhaps?)

I will state clearly that I did not add backdoors to the OpenBSD
operating system or the OpenBSD crypto framework (OCF). The code I
touched during that work relates mostly to device drivers to support
the framework. I don't believe I ever touched isakmpd or photurisd
(userland key management programs), and I rarely touched the ipsec
internals (cryptodev and cryptosoft, yes). However, I welcome an
audit of everything I committed to OpenBSD's tree.

I demand an apology from Greg Perry (cc'd) for this accusation. Do
not use my name to add credibility to your cloak and dagger fairy
tales.

I will point out that Greg did not even work at NETSEC while the OCF
development was going on. Before January of 2000 Greg had left NETSEC.
The timeline for my involvement with IPSec can be clearly demonstrated
by looking at the revision history of:
src/sys/dev/pci/hifn7751.c (Dec 15, 1999)
src/sys/crypto/cryptosoft.c (March 2000)
The real work on OCF did not begin in earnest until February 2000.

Theo, a bit of warning would have been nice (an hour even... especially
since you had the allegations on Dec 11, 2010 and did not post them
until Dec 14, 2010). The first notice I got was an email from a
friend at 6pm (MST) on Dec 14, 2010 with a link to the already posted
message.

So, keep my name out of the rumor mill. It is a baseless accusation
the reason for which I cannot understand.

--Jason L. Wright

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129244045916861&w=2





Skype's Biggest Secret Revealed
Sean O’Neil

For eight years, Skype enjoyed selling the world security by obscurity. We must admit, really good obscurity. I mean, really really good obscurity. So good that almost no one has been able to reverse engineer it out of the numerous Skype binaries. Those who could, didn’t dare to publish their code, as it most certainly looked scarier than Frankenstein.

The time has come to reveal this secret. http://cryptolib.com/ciphers/skype contains the greatest secret of Skype communication protocol, the obfuscated Skype RC4 key expansion algorithm in plain portable C. Enjoy!

Why publish it now? - It so happened that some of our code got leaked a couple of months ago. We contacted Skype reporting the leak. Only weeks later, our code is already being used by hackers and spammers and we are abused by Skype administration. I do not want to go into any finger-pointing details here, but naturally, we do not wish to be held responsible for our code being abused. So we decided that the time has come for all the IT security experts to have it. Why let the hackers have the advantage? As professional cryptologists and reverse engineers, we are not on their side. Skype is a popular and important product. We believe that this publication will help the IT security community help secure Skype better.

However, for the time being, we are not giving away a licence to use our code for free in commercial products. Please contact us if you need a commercial licence.

It is not all security by obscurity of course. There is plenty of good cryptography in Skype. Most of it is implemented properly too. There are seven types of communication encryption in Skype: its servers use AES-256, the supernodes and clients use three types of RC4 encryption - the old TCP RC4, the old UDP RC4 and the new DH-384 based TCP RC4, while the clients also use AES-256 on top of RC4. It all is quite complicated, but we’ve mastered it all. If you want to know more, come to Berlin for 27C3 to hear all the juicy details on how to use this function to decrypt Skype traffic.

With best regards,
Skype Reverse Engineering Team

http://www.enrupt.com/index.php/2010...ecret-revealed





EFF Victory: Appeals Court Holds that Email Privacy Protected by Fourth Amendment
Kevin Bankston

In a landmark decision issued today in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. Closely tracking arguments made by EFF in its amicus brief, the court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their phone calls and postal mail.

EFF filed a similar amicus brief with the 6th Circuit in 2006 in a civil suit brought by criminal defendant Warshak against the government for its warrantless seizure of his emails. There, the 6th Circuit agreed with EFF that email users have a Fourth Amendment-protected expectation of privacy in the email they store with their email providers, though that decision was later vacated on procedural grounds. Warshak's appeal of his criminal conviction has brought the issue back to the Sixth Circuit, and once again the court has agreed with EFF and held that email users have a Fourth Amendment-protected reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of their email accounts.

As the Court held today,

Given the fundamental similarities between email and traditional forms of communication [like postal mail and telephone calls], it would defy common sense to afford emails lesser Fourth Amendment protection.... It follows that email requires strong protection under the Fourth Amendment; otherwise the Fourth Amendment would prove an ineffective guardian of private communication, an essential purpose it has long been recognized to serve.... [T]he police may not storm the post office and intercept a letter, and they are likewise forbidden from using the phone system to make a clandestine recording of a telephone call--unless they get a warrant, that is. It only stands to reason that, if government agents compel an ISP to surrender the contents of a subscriber's emails, those agents have thereby conducted a Fourth Amendment search, which necessitates compliance with the warrant requirement....

Today's decision is the only federal appellate decision currently on the books that squarely rules on this critically important privacy issue, an issue made all the more important by the fact that current federal law--in particular, the Stored Communications Act--allows the government to secretly obtain emails without a warrant in many situations. We hope that this ruling will spur Congress to update that law as EFF and its partners in the Digital Due Process coalition have urged, so that when the government secretly demands someone's email without probable cause, the email provider can confidently say: "Come back with a warrant."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/1...ls-court-holds





U.S. Consumer Say They Now Spend As Much Time on the Internet As They Do Watching TV
Klint Finley

Videodrome For the first time ever, U.S. consumers report spending an equal amount of time using the Internet as they do watching TV. According to a report released by Forrester today, Gen Xers now claim to spend more time online than watching TV and Boomers now report spending an equal amount of time on both activities. Senior Boomers still report watching more television, and Generation Y has long reported spending more time online.

Forrester's Jackie Rousseau-Anderson notes that the metrics are self-reported and differ from Nielsen and Comscore's. What's important here is that more people perceive themselves to be spending equal amounts of time online and watching TV. Also noteworthy is that consumers don't report spending much less time watching TV, just more time online.

Rousseau-Anderson also notes that for the most part people aren't reporting watching less TV, so all that extra Internet time must be coming from somewhere else. Consumers are spending less time with print media, so that might be where some of the time is coming from. But it's likely that quite a bit online time is actually spent multitasking.

U.S. consumers are also reporting spending more time using the mobile Internet. Forrester has classified mobile Internet users into three categories: social, information, and media users.

Forrester's research follows debate about whether "cord cutting" is or is not a myth. The Forrester report supports the notion that consumers aren't cutting the cord yet, and are merely supplementing their TV watching with the Internet.

However, TV and the Internet are converging. Netflix recently signed a deal with Disney to to provide hundreds of movies and TV shows through its streaming service.

It wasn't clear to me whether Forrester counts streaming media over the Internet as TV or Internet time.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...he_interne.php





Phone-Wielding Shoppers Strike Fear Into Retailers
Miguel Bustillo and Ann Zimmerman

Tri Tang, a 25-year-old marketer, walked into a Best Buy Co. store in Sunnyvale, Calif., this past weekend and spotted the perfect gift for his girlfriend.

Last year, he might have just dropped the $184.85 Garmin global positioning system into his cart. This time, he took out his Android phone and typed the model number into an app that instantly compared the Best Buy price to those of other retailers. He found that he could get the same item on Amazon.com Inc.'s website for only $106.75, no shipping, no tax.

Mr. Tang bought the Garmin from Amazon right on the spot.

"It's so useful," Mr. Tang says of his new shopping companion, a price comparison app called TheFind. He says he relies on it "to make sure I am getting the best price."

Mr. Tang's smartphone reckoning represents a revolution in retailing—what Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Chief Executive Mike Duke has dubbed a "new era of price transparency"—and its arrival is threatening to upend the business models of the biggest store chains in America.

Until recently, retailers could reasonably assume that if they just lured shoppers to stores with enticing specials, the customers could be coaxed into buying more profitable stuff, too.

Now, marketers must contend with shoppers who can use their smartphones inside stores to check whether the specials are really so special, and if the rest of the merchandise is reasonably priced.

While many holiday consumers refuse to pay full price, retailers are trying to outdo one another by encouraging shoppers to spend more, but without giving away the store. Elizabeth Holmes discusses some of retailers' most popular discount tactics.

"The retailer's advantage has been eroded," says Greg Girard of consultancy IDC Retail Insights, which recently found that roughly 45% of customers with smartphones had used them to perform due diligence on a store's prices. "The four walls of the store have become porous."

Some of the most vulnerable merchants: sellers of branded, big-ticket items like electronics and appliances, which often prompt buyers to comparison shop. Best Buy, the nation's largest electronics chain, said Tuesday that it may lose market share this year, a downward trend that some analysts are attributing in part to pressure from price comparison apps.

Smartphone fans such as Mr. Tang are still a small subset of shoppers. It remains unclear whether large numbers of Americans will be willing to take the extra time to compare offers with mobile programs. Some consumers may want to deploy the technology only when buying expensive or unusual items.

Still, store chains are increasingly concerned about the ability of mobile-equipped shoppers to tilt the balance of power in retailing toward consumers—in part because their numbers are quickly rising.

On the Friday after Thanksgiving a year ago, consumers using mobile devices accounted for just 0.1% of visits to retail websites, according to Coremetrics, a division of International Business Machines Corp. that estimates e-commerce activity. This Black Friday, they accounted for 5.6%, for a 50-fold increase.

E-commerce experts expect use of shopping apps to mushroom as more Americans purchase smartphones.

Dozens of mobile shopping apps are already available through Apple Inc.'s iTunes, and programmers are busy developing many more to transform smartphones into shopping weapons. Many of them use phone cameras to photograph bar codes and QR codes, or simply let users speak a product's name into their devices.

TheFind app has been out for four weeks and has been downloaded 400,000 times, according to the company. RedLaser, an app that allows shoppers to use mobile-phone cameras to scan bar codes to compare products and prices, has now been downloaded six million times since it was introduced in May 2009, says parent eBay Inc.

Although store executives publicly welcome a price-transparent world, retail experts don't expect all chains to measure up to the harsh judgment of mobile price comparisons. Some will need to find new ways to survive.

"Only a couple of retailers can play the lowest-price game," says Noam Paransky, senior manager at consultancy Kurt Salmon Associates. "This is going to accelerate the demise of retailers who do not have either competitive pricing" or a standout store experience.

Because consumers made more frugal by the economic downturn are flocking to the cheapest offers they can find, comparison shopping via smartphones is making it harder for many retailers to charge higher prices in stores than on their websites.

"Those days are over," says Laura Conrad, president of comparison site PriceGrabber.com. Despite the higher costs associated with a bricks-and-mortar store, "The line between offline and online has been blurred."

This week, Best Buy settled a lawsuit by the Connecticut attorney general alleging that it showed web prices at in-store kiosks that were higher than those customers saw on home computers.

The shift in consumer behavior also imperils some of the most lucrative aspects of selling in stores, such as the ability to use salespeople to lure customers into making impulse buys, or entice them to buy one thing after they came in for another. A 10-country study by management consultant Accenture this year found that 73% of mobile-powered shoppers preferred peering into their phones for basic assistance over talking to a retail clerk.

For diehard deal-hunters such as Mary Saunders, a Virginia mother of two, the phone is fast becoming the weapon of choice in the battle for the best bargain. Hunting for Christmas gifts on a recent afternoon, Ms. Saunders used her iPhone at several stores to scan bar codes on every item on her children's Christmas wish lists, saving $2 here and $3 there.

Ms. Saunders still gathers newspaper circulars and visits all the big stores near her home in Stephens City, Va., to scrutinize specials. But her phone gives her a new sense of empowerment.

"I am slightly obsessed with getting the best deal," says Ms. Saunders, a substitute teacher. "So to me, the bar code scanner is the coolest thing in the world."

While e-commerce experts say many U.S. retailers have been slow to react to the mobile trend, some are starting to see that there is upside as well as disruption: Now retailers can virtually target customers inside competitors' stores.

Through a partnership with TheFind, Best Buy now targets personalized advertisements to shoppers when the program detects that they are in stores such as Wal-Mart.

If shoppers use TheFind's free app to compare prices on TVs at Wal-Mart, for example, the phone gleans the particulars from their recent search and shows them ads of similar electronics for sale at Best Buy. The items aren't always identical, and the prices aren't always better, but it is an attempt by Best Buy to enter the competition, similar to the way that marketers now target special offers to consumers based on what they are searching for on home computers.

The offers are only sent to customers who opt to allow the program to use their phone's global positioning system to track their location. Still, some consumers have complained about the technology; one review on iTunes is titled, "Spying on Me 24/7."

"That is an opportunity to steal a sale right when someone is in the throes of making a decision. That is what makes mobile so powerful," says Best Buy Chief Marketing Officer Barry Judge, who believes retailers must "dive in headlong" into the new environment.

The hard sell doesn't stop there. If a customer inside a Best Buy compares prices through TheFind and discovers a better deal elsewhere, the retailer also makes one last pitch for the sale with ads showing them deals on other products at the store, such as a similar Blu-ray player that comes with a free movie disc.

"Instead of letting that person walk out, you are telling the customer, 'Look, we know you're already here, let's make a deal,'" says TheFind's Chief Executive, Siva Kumar. "It is not a consumer-only game. Retailers can use it to their advantage."

While Best Buy is aggressively entering the stores of rivals, it still refuses to match competitors' prices shown on comparison programs. Best Buy's guarantee applies only to deals in print advertisements by neighboring competitors, a policy Mr. Judge admits Best Buy may have to change.

Wal-Mart plans its own countermeasures to capture mobile sales, says Gibu Thomas, the company's senior vice president of mobile and digital strategy.

But the company, which doesn't see mobile-phone apps as a threat to its discount model, says it is wary of moving too rapidly and frets about being seen as Big Brother by following customers' movements as they shop.

"We continue to believe that we are the best-positioned global retailer for now and the years ahead," a Wal-Mart spokesman says.

Pure online sellers are also venturing into stores—virtually, that is—with mobile programs meant to steal away sales from bricks-and-mortar rivals.

Amazon.com released a new comparison app last month that allows iPhone users to scan bar codes, take pictures of items on shelves or describe products by speaking into their devices, to see whether the online giant can beat the store's prices.

"We want customers to feel confident in their purchases, and by allowing them access to Amazon's information wherever they are, they will be," says Sam Hall, director of Amazon Mobile.

The hassle of multiple store visits still outweighs the allure of small savings for smartphone warriors such as Matt Binder, a 24-year-old employee of a startup web company in New York City. But when presented with an option to click a button to save a few dollars, he gladly complied.

Armed with an iPhone loaded with Amazon's Price Check app, he was searching for holiday gifts on a recent Sunday in a Westbury, N.Y., Best Buy when he spotted a stocking stuffer, a two-gigabyte USB drive, for $11.99. He snapped a picture of it, and learned from the app that Amazon had it with more memory for $9.99.

"I wouldn't drive somewhere else to save $2," he says, but he made a mental note to buy it from Amazon later when he got home, to save precious battery power on his shopping tool.

At Wal-Mart, he saw the same flash drive, beside a big display boasting "Every Day Low Prices." But thanks to his smartphone, Mr. Binder knew better. The advertised price was $6 higher than Amazon's.

Indeed, the mobile phone threatens to undercut Wal-Mart's once novel strategy: promising to save consumers money on their overall shopping baskets instead of promoting individual items.

"The whole notion of going to one place to buy everything in one fell swoop because you are sure of a total market-basket savings may go away," says Leon Nicholas of consultancy Kantar Retail.

Toys "R" Us nearly went under six years ago when Wal-Mart brutally slashed prices on popular toys in a successful bid for market share. So the toy merchant is trying to insulate itself from direct price comparisons with a strategy that focuses in part on exclusive items.

"The most successful retailers have great product," says Toys "R" Us Chief Executive Gerald Storch. "That always wins over everything else. Unless you're selling coal."

In practice, such a strategy has limitations, however. Many shoppers, especially children, want the same thing their friends got, not something else.

A day of shopping with Ms. Saunders in Virginia shows what retailers are up against.

She was approached repeatedly by shop clerks who offered to help, but rebuffed them in case they tried to talk her into buying more. Her smartphone told her a DSi game on her list goes for $10 less at Best Buy and that Target has Barbie's Fashionista dolls for the cheapest price around—by $3.

One way stores attempt to beat this price-comparison game is by stocking products that manufacturers have slightly modified exclusively for them, signaling the phone that no other store has the product.

Ms. Saunders used her iPhone to scan the bar code on a case for the Nintendo DSi handheld gaming system at Wal-Mart, but it didn't show up at other stores. A worker informed her that it is a special Wal-Mart bundle: the case plus earphones and a plug for $19.99.

But Ms. Saunders was undeterred. She typed the item's description on TheFind and discovered that Walmart.com, the retailer's website, offers a better bundle including a car adapter—for $5 less.

"It's like, 'gotcha,'" she said. "I feel so good when that happens."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...69574496.html#





Best Buy Feels the Pressure of Rivals on the Web
Christine Hauser

At barely 10 a.m., holiday shopping was in full swing at a Best Buy on the Upper West Side. A harried father searched for a new Xbox for his children. A personal assistant picked up video game accessories for her boss’s twins. One young woman fiddled with a coffeemaker, while another paid for a DVD player.

Outside, parked along the curb, a Best Buy van displayed the slogan “to serve, install and repair.” Inside, one of Best Buy’s frontline salesmen, known as blue shirts for their uniforms, shouted to no one in particular across the vast showroom: “Anybody have any questions?” And moments later, to a couple trying out some laptops, he said: “You guys O.K.?”

At a time when the nation’s brick-and-mortar electronics retailers are increasingly feeling the squeeze from online sellers and discounters, the scene at the Best Buy store exemplified what the company hoped would keep customers pushing through its glass doors: the service support, the personal touch of its sales staff and the products on display that allow shoppers to see, touch and try.

Its strategy, however, has not worked as well as envisioned in a recovering economy. The challenges faced by electronics stores were highlighted this week when Best Buy, the world’s largest consumer electronics retailer in revenue, reported that third-quarter net income fell 4.4 percent, to $217 million, and sales fell 1.1 percent, to $11.9 billion. Sales at stores open for more than a year declined 5 percent.

The third-quarter results were below analysts’ forecasts and affected other stocks. Shares of Best Buy fell 18 percent during the day Tuesday, after the results were announced. That was the biggest decline since August 2002, and other retailers like Hhgregg and RadioShack followed suit.

For the week, Best Buy shares lost 18 percent, Hhgregg fell 14 percent, and RadioShack 5 percent.

“The market, which is already weak, is dramatically shifting away from stores and toward online,” said Colin A. McGranahan, a senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “The online share of the market is now a critical mass, and the discount stores are also fierce competitors and willing to sell the product at very low prices to get that customer through the door.”

“You are also seeing another factor where people are going into Best Buy, getting advice on the product and then using smartphones to scan the Web for better deals,” he said.

With the shift toward online destinations, electronics retailers need to adapt to the changing landscape, analysts say, even as they continue to open storefronts. Online sales in the United States are forecast to account for 20 percent of total consumer electronics sales of $250 billion by the end of this year.

“Online has now gotten big enough to encroach on Best Buy,” Mr. McGranahan said.

Best Buy reported for the first time this year that it had started to lose market share. Sales of televisions, computers and video game software were weaker than expected, Brian J. Dunn, Best Buy’s chief executive, said this week.

Separately, in a e-mail he added that the company offered customers “a place where they can talk to knowledgeable, unbiased and engaged salespeople who demonstrate the art of what’s possible” and help them make choices.

Even so, new technology, like 3-D televisions that often need specialists to answer the questions of consumers, was not moving as briskly as hoped. Analysts said the company did not promote lower-tier products as aggressively as it should have. In general, sales were going to Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, Costco and Sears.

“The results certainly signify how much competition consumer electronic retailers are facing from mass merchants and larger online retailers,” said R. J. Hottovy, director of consumer research at Morningstar. “It is tough to see what the company is going to do,” he said. “I think that a lot of the worries lingering out there were exacerbated by the results.”

Morningstar said it was reducing its fair value estimate for the stock, raising questions about Best Buy’s ability to defend market share from mass merchants, especially while major suppliers like Apple expanded their own outlets. “These factors support the viewpoint that Best Buy lacks an economic moat, in our view,” said the research note.

Analysts downgraded their expectations for the fiscal year.

“We whacked a billion in revenue out of our forecast,” down to $50.2 billion in global sales, Mr. McGranahan said, adding: “It was a pretty bad quarter. Sales declined more than we thought, and the outlook for the fourth is not great.”

And Best Buy said in its third-quarter earnings news release that it was lowering its per-share outlook for the year.

Even so, electronics and appliances retailers are still pressing ahead with new storefronts. Best Buy plans to open 50 to 55 stores by the end of February.

Hhgregg expects to open a store early next year in Pensacola, Fla., and up to 45 more in fiscal 2012. Company officials declined to be interviewed before the end of the current quarter on Dec. 31.

Analysts still question how the surviving electronics retailers can adapt in an industry that has already seen its share of bankruptcies, like Circuit City’s. While Best Buy is testing new products, like fitness equipment and electronic scooters, it might have to shift to smaller stores, Mr. Hottovy said.

“They have got to change their business model,” he said. “They are throwing anything against the wall to see if it will work.”

A spokeswoman for Best Buy, Susan Busch, said the company planned to accelerate the use of its “robust” online offerings. “Best Buy’s online channel had more than 40 million site visits from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday,” she said in an e-mail.

Analysts note that the company and other stand-alone retailers are banking on what they see as the competitive advantage of in-store expertise. But some fear customers will go to a store to get advice about a product, only to buy it online or at a better price with discounters.

Mr. McGranahan said he suspected there was still a market for the personal touch. “I don’t think 100 percent of consumer electronics are going to be sold online,” he said. “There are still a lot of people who want to see it, touch it, feel it, take it home today.”

On a recent morning, Gregory D. Shufro went to a RadioShack on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to inspect a coaxial cable before buying it. “That is something you can’t do online,” he said.

At Best Buy, Dinah Sternbach, 19, weighed down with school textbooks in her backpack, said it was still worth it to pick up a bulky new Keurig coffeemaker instead of ordering it online. “There is something psychological about getting what I want now,” she said.

And Jordan Miraglia, 24, a hospital intern, bought a DVD player for a local child. She said she would have ordered gifts online only for her family in Maryland, to avoid carrying them through Penn Station. Otherwise, she said she loved holiday shopping in stores.

“It reminds me people have people they care about,” she said. “Everyone looks at each other in the eyes.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/bu...18bestbuy.html





Santa via Cellphone: Shopping Online Without a Computer
Claire Cain Miller and Verne G. Kopytoff

This holiday season, consumers are beginning to shop and make purchases on their mobile phones. The shift from buying presents in front of the computer at home or work to doing it during bus commutes or while standing in line at cafes is small, but, for the first time, noticeable and even significant.

Shopping on cellphones and portable tablet computers like iPads accounted for about 5 percent of online sales in November, while last year mobile shopping sales were too insignificant to measure, according to Coremetrics, an e-commerce measurement service owned by I.B.M. Many more shoppers are using their phones to research items and compare prices before making purchases offline or on computers.

“There were early adopters last year, but it’s absolutely real this year,” said Kelly O’Neill, director of industry marketing for ATG, which provides online and mobile commerce technology to retailers like Best Buy and J. C. Penney. And mobile shoppers are buying high-ticket items like diamond rings and cars, not just virtual goods and ring tones.

On Dec. 12, eBay’s busiest mobile shopping day of the year, worldwide mobile sales nearly tripled from last year to $13 million, according to the company, which expects $1.5 billion in mobile sales this year.

Virtually every product that people buy on computers sells in similar proportion on mobile devices, said Steve Yankovich, eBay’s vice president for mobile. He said shoppers bought an average of four Ferraris a month from their cellphones.

Tiffany English, 30, of Hoboken, N.J., bought her mother’s Christmas gift, a painting of a child, when the eBay mobile app alerted her that the auction was about to end while she was out in Greenwich Village. She used eBay’s RedLaser app to compare prices on a set of barbecue tools for her brother, and bought the set on her cellphone from Amazon.com while standing in Bed Bath & Beyond, where the same item cost more.

“It’s saving me time and saving me money,” Ms. English said. “I feel like my grandma: ‘You can do that with your phone?’ ”

EBay is so convinced of the future of mobile phone shopping that on Wednesday it acquired Critical Path Software, a mobile phone app developer, to speed its move into this new arena.

At Blue Nile, the diamond and jewelry e-commerce site, mobile revenue is up sixfold this month from the period a year ago. The company says a mobile shopper recently bought a ring for more than $250,000 via a cellphone.

“A year ago, we really didn’t know whether mobile would be very impactful for our business, because this is a very considered purchase, a high-ticket luxury item,” said Diane Irvine, chief executive of Blue Nile. Now, she said, “we can envision a time when sales from a mobile device will eclipse sales over the desktop Web site.”

Most shoppers still use their phones for finding nearby stores or looking up reviews and comparing prices, rather than for buying goods, retailers and analysts say. Still, that type of research increasingly leads to mobile sales, particularly for online retailers that compete heavily on price, like consumer electronics stores, said Sucharita Mulpuru, principal analyst for e-commerce at Forrester Research.

Perhaps the biggest reason for the spike in mobile shopping is simply that more Web retailers have created mobile Web sites or apps that make it easier to search inventory on a small screen without a mouse, by forgoing fancy Flash graphics and selling a limited number of products on phones.

Mobile apps often have features that Web sites don’t. For example, Amazon’s app lets people scan bar codes, speak into the phone or take a photo of an item to search for products. Bluefly’s sends a cellphone alert when an item that was out of stock becomes available again.

Just as e-commerce made it possible for people to shop in the office and late at night, mobile phones let them shop anywhere. And because shoppers on cellphones often have a purchase in mind, they can be more valuable to retailers. “Mobile shoppers are the hunters, and people sitting at their computer are gathering,” said Jill Dvorak, senior consultant for the e-commerce advisory company FitForCommerce.

Tom Keithley, 49, of Monkton, Md., is one of those hunters. He travels often for his job in financial services, and this year he did half his holiday shopping while on the road. From his cellphone he bought a Blue Nile ring for his wife and a eucalyptus wreath from Gump’s, the home décor shop.

“I’m usually in airports and airplanes, so it’s more convenient for me to use the time to do things I might normally do if I were sitting at my desk,” he said.

Mobile shopping is particularly appropriate for customers of flash sale sites like Gilt. Its limited-time sales start at noon each day and sell out quickly, so people miss out if they are away from their computers. Since Gilt introduced its mobile apps, shoppers have more consistently made purchases at noon, and mobile sales generally account for 10 percent of revenue and close to 20 percent on holidays and weekends, said Carl Sparks, president of the Gilt Groupe.

The iPad has also helped mobile commerce, but in a different way. While cellphone apps are made to complete transactions as quickly as possible, iPad apps tend to be for shopping as sport. For instance, Amazon’s iPad app, called Windowshop, shows many images and lets people browse and view close-up shots of items.

“It makes it much more visual and fluid and entertaining,” said Sam Hall, director of mobile at Amazon, “something that never could have been done on a smaller-screen device.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/te.../18mobile.html





Word Lens Translates Words Inside of Images. Yes Really.
Alexia Tsotsis

Ever been confused at a restaurant in a foreign country and wish you could just scan your menu with your iPhone and get an instant translation? Well as of today you are one step closer thanks to Word Lens from QuestVisual.

The iPhone app, which hit iTunes last night, is the culmination of 2 1/2 years of work from founders Otavio Good and John DeWeese. The paid app, which currently offers only English to Spanish and Spanish to English translation for $4.99, uses Optical Character Recognition technology to execute something which might as well be magic. This is what the future, literally, looks like.

Founder Good explains the app’s process simply, “It tries to find out what the letters are and then looks in the dictionary. Then it draws the words back on the screen in translation.” Right now the app is mostly word for word translation, useful if you’re looking to get the gist of something like a dish on a menu or what a road sign says.

At the moment the only existing services even remotely like this are Pleco, a Chinese learning app and a feature on Google Goggles where you can snap a stillshot and send that in for translation. Word Lens is currently self-funded.

Good says that the obvious steps for Word Lens’ future is to get more languages in. He’s planning on incorporating major European languages and is also thinking about other potential uses including a reader for the blind, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we did French next, Italian and since my mom is Brazilian, Portuguese.”

Says Good, modestly, “The translation isn’t perfect, but it gets the point across.” You can try it out for yourself here.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/wor...es-yes-really/





Sincerest Form of Flattery: Some Joke!
Dave Itzkoff

Days before Thanksgiving the CBS late-night host Craig Ferguson was informed by a fan on Twitter that he had a particularly ardent French admirer. Some might say a copycat. Others might say a plagiarist.

In YouTube clips and other online videos Mr. Ferguson and his team at “The Late Late Show” discovered that a Parisian imitation called “Ce Soir Avec Arthur” (“Tonight With Arthur”) was essentially performing their program. Like Mr. Ferguson the host of “Arthur” opened his show with a monologue delivered inches from the camera, and he used hand puppets in his routine. Most tellingly — or damningly — when the opening credits of “The Late Late Show” and “Ce Soir Avec Arthur” were played side by side they were virtually identical.

For Mr. Ferguson and his staff the experience awoke them to a reality with which many comedians are all too familiar. In comedy, a field where paranoia about having one’s work stolen already runs rampant, the Internet has heightened this anxiety of influence among its practitioners.

The Web has given comedians an unparalleled real-time resource to determine if their material is being copied, but it has also provided would-be thieves with an almost infinite library to steal from. And it has made it easy to make public accusations of plagiarism that may or may not have merit without providing a forum to resolve these fights.

“The only way to battle a thief is to out-write and out-create them,” said Patton Oswalt, a stand-up comedian and actor who has used the Internet as a bully pulpit to confront his imitators. “The good thing about the Internet is, it’s showing how much dumb thievery there is out there.”

In October the creators of “South Park,” the Comedy Central series, apologized for a parody of the summer blockbuster “Inception” that lifted dialogue from a CollegeHumor.com skit on the same topic after its creators had pointed out the similarities on the Web. Last month NBC’s “Tonight Show With Jay Leno” belatedly credited two bloggers with creating a humorous montage of Taylor Swift video clips after the bloggers complained that “Tonight” had broadcast their material without attribution.

These were cases where the Web helped show a chain of authorship and establish due credit, but grayer areas exist. In September a “Saturday Night Live” sketch about women who wear comically small hats unleashed a barrage of angry Twitter messages from viewers who said it ripped off the Adult Swim comedy “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!,” which had ran a skit called — what else? — “Tiny Hats.”

And in November the producers of an online music video sued the “South Park” creators for parodying their video so closely that, these producers said, it constituted copyright infringement.

The Web has abetted both plagiarists and plagiarism fighters in many familiar ways, from term-paper writing to news reporting and beyond. But its effect on comedy has had its own special resonance.

For as long as there have been nubile farmers’ daughters and bars that serve priests and rabbis, plagiarism has been part of the humorists’ landscape, enabled by the distance between markets where traveling stand-ups performed and by an unspoken rule that if you could lift someone else’s punch line and get away with it, it was yours.

“There isn’t a comic who wasn’t worried or had heard that so-and-so stole his act,” said Peter Lassally, the executive producer of “Late Late Show,” and a veteran producer for late-night hosts like Johnny Carson and David Letterman. “They were all angry, all the time, about people stealing part of their act or their whole act. But it was hearsay mostly.”

Now some Web-based comedy groups expend considerable energy to avoid duplicating the work of others, whether deliberately or accidentally.

At CollegeHumor, a site owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp that produces 12 original videos a week, no sketch gets posted without thorough Google searching, internal debate and second-guessing.

Some months ago, said Sam Reich, College Humor’s president for original content, the group contemplated a parody of the Lady Gaga video “Poker Face” to be called “Butter Face” only to discover that such a video had been created by someone else, but it had not been widely seen at the time.

“We’re in this conundrum of, while we did have the idea, there’s this other version that exists,” Mr. Reich said. “It’s not very popular. Do we do ours anyway? We ended up deciding not to.”

More recently, Mr. Reich said, College Humor scrapped a nearly finished video after friends from another sketch group, the Whitest Kids U’Know, advised that they were about to show a similar skit on their IFC television series.

But television comedies do not always pull their sketches when CollegeHumor gets to a premise first, Mr. Reich said, perhaps because television is not expected to move as rapidly as the Internet.

“There’s a comedy trough that we all feed from,” Mr. Reich said, adding that the Internet’s never-ending stream of humorous videos, pictures, blog posts and Twitter messages from professional and amateur comedians alike make a truly unique joke increasingly impossible.

“It’s a race these days,” he said. “A joke could be up the next day after something happens, and then where’s our recourse?”

Rich Juzwiak, who maintains the Web site Four Four and was one of the bloggers “The Tonight Show” credited for its video montage of Ms. Swift, also recently wrestled a correction out of NPR, which acknowledged that it had used one of Mr. Juzwiak’s Web videos as a basis for a “Morning Edition” report about cellphones in horror movies. And this month the entertainment news show “The Insider” broadcast a montage of Mariah Carey clips highly similar to one Mr. Juzwiak had posted a day earlier on his blog.

In an interview Mr. Juzwiak said that these incidents reflected a “media bias,” that broadcast media organizations did not treat Web competitors as legitimate peers and treated their content as if it was theirs for the taking.

“If I were to say, ‘There’s this magazine article that would make a great blog post, let me retype it,’ that’s not fair,” Mr. Juzwiak said. “But just because something hasn’t been verbalized, they think it’s O.K. to do so.”

Mark Stencel, NPR’s managing editor for digital news, said in an interview, “We made a mistake, but I don’t think there’s a pattern in it.”

He added: “I think having most of the content on the planet out there and highly Google-able shines a brighter light on that when it happens. And I think that’s a good thing.”

A press representative for “The Tonight Show” said in a statement that its initial failure to attribute Mr. Juzwiak’s work was “an administrative error, and when brought to the attention of the show it was immediately corrected.” “The Insider” did not acknowledge any wrongdoing but linked to Mr. Juzwiak’s blog on its Web site.

The only thing Mr. Juzwiak said he can do in these situations is to write angry blog posts taking his imitators to task, an outcome that did not seem to bother him entirely.

“I live in constant fear of not having ideas,” he said. “When something like this happens to me, and it gives me something to write about, I appreciate it for that.”

So far perhaps only the “Late Late Show” has figured out how to address its more exhaustive imitators without resorting to online name calling or threats of legal retribution. On his first show after Thanksgiving Mr. Ferguson invited the copycat host of “Ce Soir Avec Arthur,” a French comedian named Jacques Essebag, to appear on “Late Late Show” and perform an opening routine with him.

“What’s the point of making a case?” said Michael Naidus, a “Late Late Show” producer. “Maybe someone will pay us some money at the end of a long and pretty unhappy discussion. Instead we do what we always do here. Let’s make a show that’s fun.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/ar.../13comics.html





The Numbing Ubiquity of Computer Graphics
Ryan Lambie

Once so dazzling in films such as Jurassic Park and The Matrix, computer graphics are now a common sight on the small screen and in cinema. And Ryan's not happy...

Andrex adverts now feature creepy CG puppies. In a slightly eerie usage of computer technology, digital dogs use laptops, bake cakes and drive taxis in an effort to sell us toilet paper.

The Andrex ad, with its sinister dogs from the Uncanny Valley, is evidence, if any were needed, of the ubiquity of computer graphics. Once a novelty, the use of CG has become so cheap and commonplace that you're as likely to see a fully computer animated mammal in a commercial for toilet roll as you are in a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster.

Back in the late-70s and 80s, big screen visual effects went through a remarkable period of transition. The use of scale miniatures, matte painting and backscreen projection had remained almost unchanged since the dawn of cinema, a comparison of the visual effects in, say, Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) reveals that little had changed in terms of technique, even if the end results were more lifelike 55 years later.

Gradually, however, computer graphics began to creep into visual effects, and as processing power improved exponentially in the 80s, their appearance became ever more prominent.

Twenty or 30 years ago, even the tiniest glimpse of a computer-generated effect had an almost magical air of futuristic novelty about it. As a child, I remember seeing the wireframe trench run in Star Wars, a sequence that surely inspired Atari's joyous videogame tie-in a few years later, and being enthralled by it. (Though, in fairness, I was at an age where I would have been equally enthralled by the glow of a lava lamp.)

Nevertheless, the 70s and 80s were an era where the appearance of computer graphics in film was still quite startling. The Light Cycle race in Tron looked breathtakingly exotic. The minute-long 'Genesis' sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, created by the arm of Industrial Light and Magic that would later become known as Pixar, was an utterly bewitching one. The walnut-shaped, mirror-like ship from 1986's Flight Of The Navigator was similarly jaw-dropping.

And yet, since the advent of a holy trinity of groundbreaking movies in the 90s, namely, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park and The Matrix, it has become increasingly difficult to get particularly worked up about special effects of any kind. Audiences may have cooed and gasped over the imagery of Avatar and Inception, but we've now become so numbed by such visual flights of fancy, whether they're in films or adverts, that they appear to be set to a side almost as quickly as we've seen them.

As Tron: Legacy vehicle designer Daniel Simon put it in a recent interview on this very site, "We're living in a very fast-moving world. Even for me - I'm 34 now, and it's shocking to me how... I mean, when I saw Avatar, I was so blown away, but I was also blown away by how fast people forgot about it. Like, a few weeks after it came out, if you were still talking about Avatar, you were so from yesterday!"

Think about how frequently the effects work of The Matrix was borrowed and lampooned in other films and commercials. A version of it even turned up in an advert for the middle-class forest retreat, Centre Parcs, with a 360-degree shot of an unsuspecting swan.

By contrast, the distinctive moments of Avatar and Inception have scarcely caused a ripple in popular culture, despite these films' huge grosses. We haven't seen an Inception-style folding city being employed to sell perfume, or a blatantly obvious rip-off of Cameron's blue Na'vi tribe used to advertise a car cleaning product, which would surely have happened had those films appeared in the 80s.

The way products are advertised has, of course, changed considerably in the last 20 years or so, but so too has the way we consume popular culture. Now readily available on mobile phones, computers, iPods and iPads, the sheer amount of dazzling imagery we see every day has reached saturation point. Ahead of release, big-budget movies will now have a dozen different types of poster to advertise them, and numerous trailers, commercials and sneak peak clips.

It's hardly surprising, then, that filmmakers struggle to create a sense of awe through special effects alone. By the time we've sat down in the cinema to watch the latest Hollywood masterpiece, we've already learned so much about the film's mood, tone, and overarching plot that, when the expensive effects are splashed across the big screen, they're greeted with a nod of recognition rather than a cheer of excitement.

The comedian Billy Crystal, in an interview back in the 80s, remarked that professional comedians seldom laugh at each other's jokes. Immersed as they are in the mechanical process of writing and telling amusing stories, they merely deconstruct them in their minds, and perhaps murmur their acknowledgement that, yes, that particular quip worked well.

In this respect, we've perhaps become similarly critical as moviegoers. Where we once sat through Terminator 2 and gasped when Robert Patrick turned into a slippery blob of mercury, we now watch, say, Inception and simply acknowledge that, yes, the folding city looks quite realistic.

In an attempt to break through our jaded defences, Hollywood has taken to employing things like 3D glasses to add a new sense of exoticism to the activity of going to the cinema. But if it hasn't already, 3D is surely something that, like Panavision before it, will soon cease to be a novelty, and will instead become yet another weapon in the Hollywood filmmaker's arsenal.

There is an upside, of course, to the prevalence of dazzling computer graphics. For one thing, it will perhaps force filmmakers to come up with compelling stories to tell, rather than attempting to cover up a flimsy or regurgitated narrative with flashy effects. It's a slim hope, but it's at least a possibility.

Better yet, the fact that it's now comparatively cheap to create CG effects means that new filmmakers can let their imaginations run riot on a tiny budget. For evidence, look no further than Gareth Edwards' Monsters, a film created with little more than two professional actors, one Sony camera and a copy of 3DSMax. As Edwards put it in a recent interview, "You can go into a shop now and buy a laptop that's faster than the computers they used to make Jurassic Park."

So, while the days where computer graphics can shock or dazzle us, as they once did in The Matrix or Terminator 2, appear to be long gone, the continued integration of technology into films has, for those with imagination and a flair for storytelling, greatly extended the creative possibilities of cinema. And given ad men the ability to conjure up really, really creepy digital puppies to sell rolls of loo paper.
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/6944..._graphics.html





Berkman Plans Digital Public Library of America
Curt Hopkins

Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet and Society has announced a "research and planning initiative" to construct and open a so-called digital public library.

With the backing of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant, Berkman will bring together a large group to help "define the scope, architecture, costs and administration" of an online library of unusual scope.

Doron Weber, Vice President of the Sloan Foundation sketched the scope of the project.

"We're grateful to Berkman for coordinating this historic effort to create a Digital Public Library of America and to fulfill the vision of an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that draws on the nation's living heritage to educate, inform and empower everyone in this and future generations."

The Berkman Center is well known for its research into online topics, including filtering and aspects of online tyranny.

The project's Steering Committee is made up of library and foundation leaders. They plan to announced the schedule early next year, which promises to announce a full slate of activities in early 2011. Among their tasks will be to gather a group of partners that will include public and research library reps, cultural organizations, members of government and industry and authors and publishers.

The first meeting will be led by the official United States Archivist, David Ferriero. It will be followed by a host of meetings and workshops over the next year.

The steering committee includes Berkman co-director John Palfrey; Charles Henry, President of the Council on Library and Information Resources; Stanford University's Ida M. Green University Librarian and Director of Academic Information Resources Michael Keller; and Deanna Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress.

With the Internet and e-readers, the question might arise "Why do we even need a digital public library?" David Rothman, founder of TeleRead and long-time proponent of such a project, makes the case ably in a November essay in The Atlantic.

"(T)here is one thing I currently cannot do with my Kindle despite all the sizzle in the commercials--read public library books. Local libraries do not use the Kindle format for their electronic collections, relying instead on rival standards used by Sony Readers and certain other devices."

In short, those who own one type of reader or another can only buy a miniscule number of the books libraries contain. And anyone who isn't rolling in money can't even buy many of those. A DPL would solve both those problems, extending the joy of reading into a host of devices at no cost to the users.

A professor of mine once complained about his latest crop of students. "There has never been a generation more capable of finding data nor less capable of understanding it." Whether that's true or not this is: Books provide the context for making sense of data. A digital public library would extend the reading of books to most people in all places in the U.S.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...of_america.php





Myna – A Free & Powerful Digital Music Recording Studio In The Cloud
Jeffry Thurana

One of my dreams is having my own recording studio. It doesn’t have to be too fancy, just enough to jam with my friends and record a few simple songs for my own collection. But even the simplest arrangement (small mixer, keyboard, guitars, drum set, tape recorder, sound isolated room) would cost me a fortune.

Then came along Garageband – the free digital online recording studio where amateur musicians can do almost everything that they can imagine. Still, there are limitations. Garageband and other music creation tools require powerful machines to run them well.

I never thought that there would be the day when people could access a free and powerful recording studio from any computer and do recording on the go. But it’s already available today – in the cloud.

Patching The Pieces Together

The one that we are going to talk about is a Flash-based online audio editor called Myna. This tool comes from Aviary, the same people who bring us Roc and other cool online tools.

Myna is a fully featured digital recording studio. Maybe it’s the closest thing that we’ve got to Garageband, both in ease of use and price. Even the interface reminds us of Garageband. Myna is also accessible by anybody under any operating system, as long as he/she has an Internet connection and a Flash-capable browser.

I was blown away when I listened to the demo song created using Myna. It’s as if the tool was a standalone desktop application. So I quickly hit the “Start a new Myna creation” link to try creating my own.

You start with ten blank tracks that you can fill with loops from the library or with your own recording. The first thing that you want to do is check the “Snap To Grid” option. Then you can rename the tracks by double clicking on the name fields. To navigate to any part of the song, use the map field.

Similar to Garageband, Myna gives users the option to build the song using loops. You can find the loop on the library at the lower part of the interface. The loops are provided by Quantum Tracks.

But before you can access them, you have to agree to the terms by clicking on the button.

The loops are arranged in the Explorer-like columns. Choosing one item on the left part will reveal the content next to it.

You can find the loops at the very right of the hierarchy. Click on the small “play” button to listen to the loop or drag the item to fill one of the tracks above.

To view the loop, you might need to play with the zoom tool inside the “View” menu.

Aside from loops, you can also fill the tracks with items from Aviary’s public library, beats created using Roc, or sounds from the SoundCloud service.

To record your own voice or live instrument and insert the recording to your project, click the “Record” button next to the volume slider.

Before you begin, the Flash player will ask you to allow it to access your microphone as the input device. Then you can start the recording by clicking the “Start Recording” button. The microphone settings can be found on the left side.

After the recording process has finished, click the “Import to Project” button. The result is available on the right sidebar. Click on the “Imported” button next to the “Library” button. Drag your recording to the track that you want.

Repeat the import and record process for other tracks until your song is done.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/myna-fr...-studio-cloud/





A Snapshot of the Public BitTorrent Landscape
Ernesto

In a few months BitTorrent will celebrate its tenth anniversary, and in these years it has become the preferred technology to share files online. Today we document a piece of BitTorrent history with one of the most elaborate overviews of the files currently available on public trackers.

When we first started reporting on BitTorrent late 2005, the BitTorrent landscape was totally different from what it is today. There were just a few hundred thousands files being shared, compared to the millions of files that are out there today.

To document the ongoing evolution of BitTorrent and the files people share, today we present a snapshot of the BitTorrent landscape at the end of 2010. We believe that this is the most elaborate and detailed classification of the files currently available on BitTorrent.

The data is gathered with help from BitSnoop and comes from thousands of BitTorrent trackers. It includes (nearly) all torrents that can be downloaded from public torrent sites today, including those that were not active at the time our snapshot was taken.

We start off with an overview of the number of torrents and the associated file-sizes, separated into five broad categories. Later, we will take a close look at some of the sub categories such as TV, movies, books and different types of gaming platforms.

Torrent Files Available Publicly on BitTorrent, December 2010 category torrents % data %

Audio 2,215,469 21.3% 845.0 TB 7.0%
Video 5,507,266 52.9% 9,151.5 TB 76.0%
Software 975,192 9.4% 334.4 TB 9.8%
Games 340,416 3.3% 657.8 TB 5.5%
Other 1,377,560 13.2% 1,049.3 TBp 8.7%
Total 10,415,903 100% 12,037.9 TB 100%

Below are the same categories again, but now with the number of peers who have downloaded the complete file and continue to share it (seeders), and the peers who are currently downloading the files (leechers).

Seeders / Leechers on BitTorrent, December 2010 category seeders % leechers %

Audio 3,759,006 18.6% 1,119,027 11.2%
Video 12,857,328 63.6% 7,337,257 73.5%
Software 1,396,979 6.9% 401,404 4.0%
Games 737,688 3.6% 412,812 4.1%
Other 1,460,175 7.2% 709,466 7.1%
Total 20,211,176 100% 9,979,966 100%

The data above shows us that the number of public torrents exceeds at least 10 million and that close to 30 million peers were sharing a torrent at the time this snapshot was taken.

We also find that video content is by far the most popular category on BitTorrent. The ‘video’ category contains more than half of all torrents available, and two thirds of all active BitTorrent users are downloading or sharing video content.

In terms of available files, ‘games’ is the smallest category with just 340,416 torrents, but in terms of active BitTorrent users ‘software’ is at the bottom with 4 percent. In total, all available files on BitTorrent add up to a massive 12,037.9 TB.

Let’s drill down a bit more, and take a look at the different subcategories. It has to be noted that not all torrents are categorized into a subcategory, and these files will be ignored below.

Movies vs. TV

Movies are by far the largest ‘video’ subcategory with 2,012,432 torrents, followed by TV which lists 1,011,607 torrent files. In terms of downloaders this difference is even more pronounced. Movies have 7,173,330 seeders and 2,851,119 leechers, while TV has 2,626,238 seeders and 1,230,625 leechers. The other video subcategories such as anime, adult and music videos are far behind.

Gaming platforms

PC games are shared the most on BitTorrent, with a total of 113,624 available torrent files. PSP games are in second place with 31,742 torrents, followed by Wii (25,770), Playstation (24,240), XBox (24,108), NDS (18,714), Mobile (2,495) and Mac games (1,936).

Books

One of the categories that has been growing quickly in the last year is ‘books’. We currently count 399,267 available ebook torrents (including magazines), with 662,228 seeders and 172,811 leechers. Ebooks are followed by audio books, with 81,841 torrent files and comics with 15,774 available torrents.

It will be interesting to see how these trends develop over time. We will update this overview in a few months to see what trends are emerging and to find out more about what’s happening in other subcategories.
http://torrentfreak.com/a-snapshot-o...dscape-101214/





UN Mulls Internet Regulation Options

WikiLeaks sparks push for tighter controls.
John Hilvert

The United Nations is considering whether to set up an inter-governmental working group to harmonise global efforts by policy makers to regulate the internet.

Establishment of such a group has the backing of several countries, spearheaded by Brazil.

At a meeting in New York on Wednesday, representatives from Brazil called for an international body made up of Government representatives that would to attempt to create global standards for policing the internet - specifically in reaction to challenges such as WikiLeaks.

The Brazilian delegate stressed, however, that this should not be seen as a call for an "takeover" of the internet.

India, South Africa, China and Saudi Arabia appeared to favour a new possible over-arching inter-government body.

However, Australia, US, UK, Belgium and Canada and attending business and community representatives argued there were risks in forming yet another working group that might isolate itself from the industry, community users and the general public.

"My concern is that if we were to make a move to form a governmental-only body then that would send a very strong signal to civil society that their valuable contribution was not required or was not being looked for," an un-named Australian representative told the meeting.

Debate on the creation of a new inter-governmental body stemmed from a UN Economic and Social Council resolution 2010/2 of 19 July.

The resolution invited the UN Secretary-General "to convene open and inclusive consultations involving all Member States and all other stakeholders with a view to assisting the process towards enhanced cooperation in order to enable Governments on an equal footing to carry out their roles and responsibilities in respect of international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet but not of the day-to-day technical and operational matters that do not impact upon those issues."

Much debate concerned the meaning of "enhanced cooperation" and whether a new inter-governmental body was required. Participants also debated the roles of existing organisations - such as the Internet Governance Forum, ICANN and the ITU.

The IGF - an organisation that informs the UN but makes no decisions - is running close to the end of a five-year mandate, due to expire at ?the end of the year.

The likes of ISOC, ICANN and more recently the World Information Technology and Services Alliance (WITSA) have recently expressed concerns that a working panel to decide on the future of the IGF has been limited to representatives from member-states.

"Australia is a very strong supporter of the Internet Governance Forum," the unidentified Australian UN representative said at the New York meeting this week. "That is very much due to the multi-stake-holder approach of the IGF. It is an inclusive process."

Australia's Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy said that Australian Government welcomed the resolution of the Second Committee of the United Nation General Assembly (UNGA) to extend the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) for a further five years.

The DBCDE said it would like to see the organisation retain an open and participatory membership.

"Australia has always supported the participation of civil society and the private sector in the IGF and regards their participation as being integral to the IGF's success," a spokesman told iTnews.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/242051...n-options.aspx

















Until next week,

- js.



















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