Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 14th, '11

[JackSpratts]

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"We think that you and WikiLeaks have brought about what we think is a watershed in journalism and in freedom of information and potentially in politics." – Sydney Peace Foundation


"This weekend we found the complete source code for this crime kit being leaked to the masses on several underground forums as well as through other channels. We even compiled it in our lab and it works like a charm." – Peter Kruse


"This service is designed for extremely fast and absolutely easy file-sharing." – Dominic Holland



































May 14th, 2011




Biggest BitTorrent Downloading Case in U.S. History Targets 23,000 Defendants
David Kravets

At least 23,000 file sharers soon will likely get notified they are being sued for downloading the Expendables in what has become the single largest illegal-BitTorrent-downloading case in U.S. history.

A federal judge in the case has agreed to allow the U.S. Copyright Group to subpoena internet service providers to find out the identity of everybody who had illegally downloaded the 2010 Sylvester Stallone flick — meaning the number of defendants is likely to dramatically increase as new purloiners are discovered. Once an ISP gets the subpoena, it usually notifies the account holder that his or her subscriber information is being turned over to the Copyright Group, which last year pioneered the practice of suing BitTorrent downloaders in the United States.

Subpoenas are expected to go out this week.

All told, more than 140,000 BitTorrent downloaders are being targeted in dozens of lawsuits across the country, many of them for downloading B-rated movies and porn.

Many lawyers are mimicking the Copyright Group’s legal strategy, which includes offering online settlement payments, in hopes of making quick cash. The litigation can be so lucrative — with settlements around $3,000 per infringement — that two companies are both claiming ownership to a low-budget movie called Nude Nuns with Big Guns, and both firms are suing the same downloaders.

Not all federal judges, are agreeing to allow a massive number of subpoenas in a single case, but many are. The U.S. Copyright Act allows damages of up to $150,000 per infringement, and the cases all demand the maximum.

“It is well beyond time that the courts take control of these automated enterprises being run at great taxpayer expense with the active assistance of the federal court system,” said Lory Lybeck, a Washington state attorney defending about 100 BitTorrent defendants.

The IP addresses of the alleged copyright scofflaws are easily discoverable. Film companies pay snoops to troll BitTorrent sites, dip into active torrents and capture the IP addresses of the peers who are downloading and uploading pieces of the files.

The closest single lawsuit in size to the Expendables case targets 15,551 BitTorrent users for downloading a handful of porn flicks with titles such as Big Dick Glory Holes and Spin on My Cock. A judge has not decided whether to authorize subpoenas in that case.

Thomas Dunlap, who heads the Copyright Group in Washington, D.C., did not return phone messages. He informed the court Wednesday that, so far, he’s obtained 23,322 IP addresses that have allegedly infringed the Expendables, up from 6,500 when he initially filed the District of Columbia federal court case in February.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ttorrent-case/





Scottish Woman Convicted for File-Sharing

A 58 year old Scottish woman has been convicted for copyright crimes after she made 30,000 music files, over two thirds of them karaoke files, available online without a licence via a P2P file-sharing network.

Strathclyde Police investigated Anne Muir after receiving complaints from record label trade bodies BPI and IFPI. They raided her home in Ayr in 2008 and found over 30,000 files on her hard drive which were being made accessible to others via the DirectoConnect P2P file-sharing network.

She pleaded guilty to distributing content without a licence from copyright owners “to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright”. She won’t be sentenced until the end of the month, so it remains to be seen how severe the penalty for this file-sharing crime will turn out to be.

It is relatively rare for individual file-sharers to be pursued through the criminal courts, more commonly those who illegally share music online face civil action from the record companies. That said, the UK industry, which quickly discarded the sue-the-fans approach of its US counterpart, has looked for assistance from the authorities before, most notably in targeting those in the Oink file-sharing community, albeit with mixed success.

Aside from saving the music industry the expense of pursuing civil legal action, arguably you target individual file-sharers through the courts primarily to deter others from file-sharing, and the thought you could be prosecuted for file-sharing, rather than being sued for damages, is undeniably a stronger deterrent.

Muir’s legal rep told the court his client did not file-share for commercial gain, and became such a prolific file-sharer because she suffered from a severe obsessive personality disorder. Defence lawyer Lorenzo Alonzi said: “It has to be stressed that this offence was not committed from any desire to make money. Mrs Muir was not in any way trying to distribute on a large scale, she had a very big quantity of these files because she was hoarding – a symptom of the severe obsessive personality disorder that she suffers from”.

He continued: “She has, for many years, suffered from bouts of depression, which causes her to have extremely low self-esteem. Learning this new technology and picking up new skills gave her self-esteem a boost. But to be allowed into the [file-sharing] network she had to have a certain number of files already. She suffers from an obsessive behaviour disorder, which has been heightened recently because of problems within her family and the stress of this case. The obsessive behaviour is the explanation for Mrs Muir having so many of these files, it causes her to hoard things. She has expressed genuine remorse for this and is severely embarrassed about it”.

Commenting on the case, Mirian Watson, District Procurator Fiscal for Ayr, told reporters: “Illegally flouting copyright laws is tantamount to theft and not only deprives legitimate companies and artists of earnings, but also undermines the music industry as a whole. We will continue to work effectively with law enforcement in this area and to apply our robust prosecution policy”.

Meanwhile the BPI’s anti-piracy chief David Wood said: “The defendant illegally distributed music on a massive scale, causing significant harm to legitimate music companies. We will not comment further since the case awaits sentence. We would like to thank the Strathclyde Police and the Procurator Fiscal Service in Ayr for their diligent work on this investigation”.
http://www.thecmuwebsite.com/article...-file-sharing/





IP Address Leads Police To World’s Unluckiest File-Sharer
enigmax

As part of a file-sharing investigation, in 2010 authorities tracked an IP address to a house in Sweden. After a night playing video games a blurry-eyed house sitter answered the early morning call only to be welcomed by the police. They weren’t looking for him, but the owner who was abroad. Sometimes, however, you can be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

For years now, particularly in light of increased monitoring of file-sharing networks, subsequent lawsuits and pay-up-or-else schemes, one particular argument has persistently raised its head.

That argument is simple, although some like to make it more complex than it is. In a file-sharing context, an IP address does not identify a person, at best it merely identifies an Internet connection. Nevertheless, countless Internet subscribers have been accused of infringements they have not committed, merely because their name is on the bill.

However, a developing case in Sweden shows that while tracking down the subscriber behind an IP address, it’s also possible to arrest and prosecute someone completely different.

In December last year a guy identified only as ‘Martin’ answered a ringing doorbell. Having played video games all night he was half asleep, arriving at the door wrapped in a blanket. Three people were outside and one of them was showing his police badge.
“At first I thought something had happened, but pretty soon they explained that it was about file sharing,” Martin told Swedish news outlet NVP.

But the police weren’t there for Martin, they were looking for the bill payer. However, he was abroad and Martin was there just as a house sitter, watering plants and feeding fish.

With the police presence expanding to five officers, network cables were disconnected, hard drives and computers seized. Despite having no initial interest in Martin, one of the computers they decided to seize was his.

Then a few weeks ago Martin was summoned to a interview with the police. There he discovered that an inspection of his computer had revealed 200 downloaded movies and he was now being pursued for illegal file-sharing.

The prosecutor in the case, Frederick Ingblad, who is also deeply involved in most of Sweden’s other file-sharing cases, admitted that they were originally looking for someone else, but Martin just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“It is now suspected that he downloaded and uploaded particular films,” Ingblad explained.

Both individuals now stand accused of copyright infringement and their indictments are expected in the summer.

“My friends think that I had bad luck. I hardly know anyone who does not share files, since you have always been able to get what you want,” Martin said.

“Still,” he added, “I think the law is right.”
http://torrentfreak.com/ip-address-l...sharer-110510/





Lawsuit: Cops Ran Over Man in Arrest

Bridgewater man suffered broken leg
Joshua Burd

A man who was charged with illegally recording a movie in 2009 is suing the borough Police Department and the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office, alleging that an officer intentionally “mowed him down” with a police cruiser while trying to arrest him.

Timothy Epifan, 23, of Bridgewater has filed the civil rights suit in federal court in Trenton, charging that authorities used “deadly force” to apprehend him for a nonviolent crime.

Epifan, a resident of the Martinsville section, is seeking compensation for such injuries as severe leg fractures and thousands of dollars in medical bills.

“The community needs to know police will not needlessly maim citizens, and that if they do, they will be held accountable,” said Gerald H. Clark, a civil rights attorney representing Epifan. “Otherwise, police will feel free to do it again to others.”

The suit stems from a July 9, 2009, incident, which began when investigators, who were working with the Motion Picture Association of America, trailed Epifan from his parents’ home to Reading Cinemas in Manville, according to the suit. Epifan allegedly was found inside the theater, using a hand-held camera to record the movie “Brüno.”

When the movie ended, the borough and county investigators confronted him in the parking lot. When Epifan fled, police said, officers pursued him on foot and in their vehicles.

The suit claims that Epifan ran about 140 yards around the side of the theater and stopped. Suddenly, a police car driven by a county detective “slammed into his backside, dragging him under the vehicle,” according to the complaint and a news release issued by Epifan’s attorneys.

“It left a 10-foot trail of skid marks of bone, blood and skin,” the news release said. “Epifan sustained severe leg fractures, has undergone multiple surgeries, incurred hundreds of thousands in medical bills and now walks with a cane.”

Court papers filed around the time of the arrest said Epifan’s brother also was found illegally recording and pirating movies at the North Main Street theater. He was arrested without incident outside the building.

Timothy Epifan’s other attorney, John Bruno, said police were not justified in “mowing him down in the parking lot.” Epifan has no history of violence, Bruno said.

Manville Police Chief Mark Peltack declined to comment on the pending litigation.

Court documents filed by authorities said that Epifan, while fleeing, took a video-recording device from his waistband and attempted to delete the contents on it. The documents also said he was injured when he tried to run between two police vehicles and struck one of them on the right side.

Epifan pleaded guilty in April 2010 to a count of forgery in connection with the piracy case, according to records in state Superior Court in Somerville. He was sentenced to 364 days in the county jail and three years of probation.

Epifan’s lawsuit, filed Friday, also names as a defendant Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office Detective Sgt. Francisco Roman, who drove the car that allegedly struck Epifan. Also named are the Somerset County Board of Freeholders, the Prosecutor’s Office, several other police officers and the Motion Picture Association of America.
http://www.mycentraljersey.com/artic...ver-man-arrest





File-Sharing Lawyer Avoids Big ICO Fine Because He's "Too Poor"
Nicole Kobie

ACS Law's Andrew Crossley has been fined only £1,000 for a data breach - managing to dodge a £200,000 punishment by claiming not to have the means to pay.

Crossley's firm sent out letters demanding settlement payments of £500 or more to those accused via IP address evidence of illegally downloading copyrighted material. The few cases brought to court have since been dropped, and Crossley has shut down the firm.

The breach came after Crossley's letter campaign drew the attention of the Anonymous hacking group, which targeted the ACS Law website in retaliation. Following denial-of-service attacks, a flaw in the website leaked online emails containing the details of 6,000 accused illegal downloaders.

The ICO noted the leaked emails listed the credit-card details of accused file-sharers, as well as references to their sex life, financial status, and the material - some of it pornographic - they were accused of downloading.

“Sensitive personal details relating to thousands of people were made available for download to a worldwide audience and will have caused them embarrassment and considerable distress," said Commissioner Christopher Graham.

"The security measures ACS Law had in place were barely fit for purpose in a person’s home environment, let alone a business handling such sensitive details," said Graham.

Fine reduced

As punishment, the Information Commissioner was going to issue a £200,000 fine to ACS Law, but has dropped the fine to only £1,000 after Crossley "made a statement to lawyers that he was of limited means," an ICO spokesman told PC Pro. The £1,000 fine will be reduced to £800 if Crossley pays on time.

The ICO has been criticised for not making full use of its ability to fine up to £500,000 for serious data breaches, and the £200,000 punishment would have been its harshest punishment to date.

"Were it not for the fact that ACS Law has ceased trading so that Mr Crossley now has limited means, a monetary penalty of £200,000 would have been imposed, given the severity of the breach," Graham said. "Penalties are a tool for achieving compliance with the law and, as set out in our criteria, we take people’s circumstances and their ability to pay into account.”

When asked whether the ICO had taken any measures to verify Crossley's financial status, the spokesman was unable to comment at the time of publication.

Aside from spilling details of alleged file-sharers, the leaked emails also revealed Crossley was deciding whether to follow his recent purchase of a Bentley with a Ferrari. The Patent County Court heard ACS Law was pulling in £180,000 a month from the anti-piracy letters.

Crossley told the ICO that the attack cost his firm £20,000.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/367240/f...e-hes-too-poor





Lime Wire Founder on Copyright Law: 'I Was Wrong'
Greg Sandoval

Lawyers representing the four largest music labels tried to convey a message in court here today: Lime Wire founder Mark Gorton was so determined to help people pirate songs that he disregarded copyright law, artists' rights, and even the Supreme Court.

And eventually, Gorton conceded.

The best that he could offer for an excuse was that he misread the law. "I was wrong," Gorton told the court. "I didn't think our behavior was inducing [copyright infringement]. I understand that a court has found otherwise."

In numerous exchanges with Glenn Pomerantz, the labels' lead attorney, Gorton acknowledged knowing that LimeWire was being used to swap songs without paying for them by a "large percentage" of users. Despite being aware of the piracy, Gorton said he refused to shut down the service.

The copyright case brought in 2006 against Lime Wire and Gorton by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)--the record companies' trade group--is in the final stages. A year ago, U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood found Gorton liable for inducing mass copyright infringement. Last October, Wood ordered that Lime Wire's peer-to-peer service, LimeWire, which Gorton today acknowledged was used by millions of people to pirate perhaps billions of songs, be shut down.

It was the court that determined Gorton would pay but a jury is now tasked with deciding the amount, which can be anywhere between $7 million and $1.4 billion. Not only could a damages award mean a big payday for the labels, but it will also serve to make an example of Gorton.

With Gorton, 44, having already been found liable, the record labels are operating with a big advantage, sort of the courtroom equivalent of a penalty kick in soccer or free throws in basketball. There's no question of whether Gorton infringed the labels' copyrights. Lawyers for the record companies can now home in on just making it look like he acted with bad intentions. And in court today, Gorton's past comments and e-mails provided the labels with plenty of assistance.

Pomerantz showed a pie chart created by Lime Wire to show how Gorton and his managers classified users into four groups. "Hardcore pirates" made up 25 percent of the service's users. "Morally persuadable" users equaled another 25 percent. "Legally unaware" users were said to be 20 percent of LimeWire's users, and those that "sampled" music were 30 percent.

Lime Wire's managers reported to Gorton that of these groups, the company could expect to convince only 20 percent to pay for music, Pomerantz told the jury.

Pomerantz and the labels don't believe Gorton misread the law. They argued that he knew exactly what he was doing when he refused to cease operations. He told potential investors in 2001 that the service faced significant legal risks and could be sued by the RIAA. And then came the June 2005 Supreme Court ruling in the Grokster case. Grokster was one of the leading file-sharing services and the highest court in the land found in a unanimous decision that Grokster was "unmistakably unlawful."

That sent a message to most of Grokster's competitors. Gorton acknowledged most of his important file-sharing competitors closed down or tried to legalize their operations following the Supreme Court's decision. Gorton predicted prior to the ruling, in a New York Times interview that: "If the Supreme Court says it is illegal to produce this software, LimeWire will cease to exist."

A Supreme Court decision, which Gorton said he read, wasn't the only signal Gorton received that LimeWire was illegal.

Pomerantz showed a letter that was written to Gorton on behalf of the top labels--Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI Music--soon after the Grokster decision. The record companies spelled out the ways the Grokster decision applied to LimeWire and notified Gorton that they would sue him personally if he didn't "cease and desist."

Nonetheless, Gorton acknowledged, Lime Wire operated as before.

Gorton didn't take them at their word. He said he thought that the labels just wanted him to start trying to convert users to some kind of paying service.

Pomerantz told the jury there were filtering systems and other technologies available that could have helped Gorton and his managers stop some of the file sharing. "There were technologies that you didn't use that would have stopped some of the sharing, but you didn't use those?" Pomerantz asked Gorton.

"No," Gorton replied.

When it came to receiving questions from users about whether LimeWire was legal, Gorton acknowledged ordering employees not to respond such inquiries. He said he didn't want them giving legal advice.

Pomerantz showed the jury some of the e-mails from users.

• "I found my child downloading music and films from your site," wrote one parent on Christmas day in 2005. "Is this legal for my child to do so?"

• "Is LimeWire different from Napster?" wrote another user. "I'm a little afraid people will accuse me of copyright infringement."

Pomerantz summarized the situation this way: "People were trying to do the right thing and LimeWire didn't have an answer."

Notes: RIAA lawyers called Gorton to the stand to start the day and are scheduled to resume questioning of him tomorrow...In the court's gallery were executives for some of the major labels including Thomas Hesse, president of Sony Music Entertainment...Edgar Bronfman Jr., the chairman of Warner Music, is expected to testify on Wednesday...Gorton's lawyers indicated he will soon testify about the money he began putting away into family trusts following the Grokster decision. The RIAA has alleged that this was an attempt by Gorton to hide money in case he was sued. Gorton is expected to testify that he was only interested in managing his estate.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20061209-261.html





Lime Wire: Labels Hurt by Mismanagement, Not Piracy
Greg Sandoval

Edgar Bronfman Jr., CEO of Warner Music Group and heir to a huge beverage fortune, received more than $17 million in total compensation for the year 2008, even as he and his managers were laying off hundreds of employees and claiming that online piracy was to blame for much of the music industry's financial woes.

This was one of the facts that a jury was shown in federal court here today, as lawyers for Mark Gorton, the man behind the LimeWire file-sharing system, attempted to show that the file-sharing service he founded was not solely to blame for declining music sales and the industry's shrinking number of jobs. Baio tried to influence the jury by painting a picture of record labels led by fat cat executives who in some cases paid themselves huge sums and were too slow to react to major technological shifts in their industry. Some of the trouble, Baio suggested, was caused by the record companies' own poor stewardship.

As a result of a lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America in 2006, U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood found Gorton and Lime Wire, the company behind the popular file-sharing service of the same name, liable last year for willful copyright infringement. A jury is now deciding how much Gorton will pay in damages. The amount could be as high as $1.4 billion.

In an attempt to convince the jury that Gorton deserves to pay a huge financial penalty, RIAA lawyers have tried to prove that Gorton and his service--which was used to obtain songs without paying for them--cost the music industry billions in revenues as well as thousands of jobs.

Since last week, when Gorton's damages trial started, RIAA lawyers have tried to brand him as a man who knew he was breaking the law when he continued to operate a type of file-sharing service that the Supreme Court had outlawed in 2005.

But today in court, the major recording companies were represented in the person of Bronfman, a billionaire who after Baio got done questioning him, didn't appear to have suffered much from the downturn in music. He also didn't appear be all that friendly to music artists or his company's employees. These are some of the people who he told the court suffered greatly at the hands of Gorton and LimeWire.

Bronfman acknowledged to the court that after he obtained control of Warner Music in 2004, one of his first moves was to cut the label's artists roster by 40 percent. Bronfman said the label's economics forced his hand.

Earlier in the day, while responding to questions from RIAA lawyers, Bronfman said that people investing in music were also getting "hosed" because piracy was eroding their investments. Baio later illustrated for the jury that Bronfman wasn't among the "hosed" group. The jury learned that Bronfman and his investment group were able to recoup their original investment just months after the company was acquired for $2.6 billion. Last week, Bronfman agreed to sell Warner Music, a public company, for $3.3 billion in cash, or $8.25 a share, to Access Industries.

Bronfman may have scored points when he said that though he did profit from the sale, Warner Music's value had decreased substantially in the past five years. He said in 2006, he received an offer of $31 a share for the company. He did not disclose the bidder, but it has been reported that EMI Music, one of the other top four record companies, attempted to acquire Warner Music that year.

Baio didn't let up. He produced documents that Warner Music filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which reported Bronfman made $1 million in base salary during the past five years while earning $6 million in bonus money in most of those years, or six times his salary. In 2008, the year Bronfman banked $17 million in total compensation, the company saw layoffs.

Earlier in the hearing, Bronfman had bemoaned the layoffs but put much of the blame on illegal file-sharing.

But in discussions with analysts over several different years, Bronfman had listed numerous other factors that were combining to hurt the industry. They included greater competition for entertainment dollars from video games, changes in retailing (the demise of record stores), and a reduction in album releases. He suggested that the labels' main product had outlived its usefulness.

"We all have to recognize as an industry that the CD is a tired format," Bronfman said, according to documents Baio produced.

Another charge Baio made was that the labels are suffering now because they were too slow to react to the Internet, and to online file-sharing. To support his claim, he produced a transcript of a Bronfman speech.

"We used to fool ourselves," Bronfman said in 2007. "We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection, and file-sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find, and as a result, of course, consumers won."

Questioning of Bronfman was cut short when Wood adjourned the hearing early, but the CEO is expected to return to the witness stand possibly this week. Gorton is also expected to testify again in coming days.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20062020-261.html





Lime Wire to Pay Record Labels $105 Million, Ends Suit
Jonathan Stempel

The operators of LimeWire agreed to pay record companies $105 million, ending a federal trial over copyright infringement damages owed by the once popular but now defunct file-sharing service.

The settlement with 13 record companies, including labels owned by Sony Corp, Vivendi SA, Warner Music Group Corp and Citigroup Inc's EMI Group, followed mediation, and ends nearly five years of litigation.

U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood in Manhattan had ruled last May that LimeWire's parents, Lime Group and Lime Wire LLC, wrongfully assisted users in pirating digital recordings.

She shut down LimeWire in October, leaving open the question of damages that could have exceeded $1 billion on roughly 10,000 recordings released since 1972. A jury trial over that issue had begun last week.

"Lime Wire and its founder, Mark Gorton, are pleased that this case has concluded," according to their law firm Willkie, Farr & Gallagher, which announced the settlement.

The record labels include Arista, Atlantic, BMG Music, Capitol, Elektra, Interscope, Laface, Motown, Priority, Sony BMG, UMG, Virgin and Warner Brothers.

"We are pleased to have reached a large monetary settlement," RIAA Chief Executive Mitch Bainwol said in a statement. He called the accord a victory for music providers that "play by the rules."

Founded in 2000, LimeWire has been a thorn for record companies because millions of fans used it as an easy means to find and download music for free. Its owners have said the service once had more than 50 million monthly users.

LimeWire shut down five years after the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 2005 case involving file-sharing service Grokster Ltd, said companies could be sued for copyright infringement if they distributed services designed to be used for that purpose, even if the devices could also be used lawfully.

Warner Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman testified Wednesday at the trial that he was frustrated that LimeWire did not shut down or convert to a "legal service" after the Grokster ruling. "It's devastating, frankly."

In March, Lime Group settled a separate copyright lawsuit by more than 30 music publishers. Terms were not disclosed. [nN08178050] Record companies own copyrights to recordings while publishers can own copyrights to the songs themselves.

The case is Arista Records LLC et al v Lime Group et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 06-05936.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Gary Hill)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...74B78320110512





Google Infringes Copyright When its Services Link to Newspaper Sites, Belgian Court Rules

A Belgian appeals court has upheld an earlier ruling that Google infringes on newspapers' copyright when its services display and link to content from newspaper websites, according to press reports.

The search engine giant is responsible for infringing the copyrights of the papers when it links to the sites or copies sections of stories on its Google News service, the Belgian Court of Appeals said, according to a report in PC World.

Google must not link to material from Belgian newspapers in French the court said, according to the report. No translation of the ruling is yet available.

Google faces a fine of roughly €25,000 for every day it fails to comply with the court judgment, the report said. The ruling does not apply to Flemish newspapers.

Copiepresse, an agency acting for newspapers, sued Google on behalf of the newspapers in 2006 alleging that Google's services infringed the papers' copyright.. The newspapers argued that they were losing online subscriptions and advertising revenue because Google was posting free snippets of the stories and links to the full article on Google News.

Google's search engine offers links to the websites it indexes but also to 'cached' copies of those pages. The copies are stored on Google's own servers.

A Belgian judge ruled that Google had to remove all the content referring to Belgian newspaper stories from its services. That ruling was upheld at the Court of First Instance in Belgium in February 2007. Google had argued that its use came under a fair use exemption, but the court disagreed. Google appealed the decision, but the Belgian Court of Appeals has backed the earlier ruling.

"The Court rejects ... that such reproductions constituted quotes or accounts [of] news reports," a Copiepresse press release said according to an automated translation.

Copiepresse said the ruling rejected an argument that newspapers should have to 'opt out' of being indexed by Google. "Only prior authorisation of reproduction is legally valid," the press release said.

Copiepress had not been found responsible for breaching Google's rights, and that the company had simply defended its copyrights, Copiepresse said.

Google said how it linked to external content complied with copyright laws.

"We believe that Google News is fully consistent with applicable copyright laws," Google spokesman Mark Jones told computing website Webwereld according to an automated translation.

"Referral is the common practice of search engines, Google News and just about everyone on the Internet. We remain committed to work with publishers, and continue to seek new ways to generate revenue for the online distribution of news," Jones said.

Google removed all articles from the Belgian newspaper websites from Google News in 2007 but later restarted linking to the websites.

In 2008 Copiepresse said that Google's alleged infringements had cost its members up to €49m and asked the courts to force Google to pay that amount in damages.

"Google's business model, and that of some other search engines, relies on being allowed to exploit the 'fair use' exemptions within copyright laws. The exemptions allow people to reproduce some copyrightable content for the purpose of commentary. In the US the company have been successful in arguing 'fair use', but in Europe the terms of copyright law governing 'fair use' are much narrower," Kim Walker, media law expert at Pinsent Masons the law firm behind OUT-LAW, said.

"Copiepresse argues that Google has offered the public free access to paid-for content that would otherwise cost users money to look at. Google is going to have to find a technical solution to avoid storing information from the Belgian newspaper websites," Walker said.

"The complaints made by Copiepresse are rare because most online businesses deem the traffic they get from Google to be beneficial to the number of visitors they receive and the kind of revenues they can build from visitor numbers," Walker said.
http://www.out-law.com/default.aspx?page=11911





Music File Sharing on Your Phone: New Fears as Piracy Goes Mobile
Ben Sillis

Smartphones are the new PCs: they’re fast, they’re powerful, they’re always online and they’re always with you. But with the advent of 4G network speeds, sophisticated operating systems and apps looms the threat of piracy via file sharing: will BitTorrent data come to represent more than half of all mobile traffic, as it has done for ISPs the world over? We’ve scoured the murkiest corners of the web, crunched numbers and spoken to those involved – read on to find out where we’re headed.

How is it done?

On the face of it, mobile piracy should be a huge problem: unlimited data tariffs can still be had, American 4G LTE networks now offer faster real world speeds than most fixed connections and dual-core phones are fast enough to power even laptops today. As early as 2006, analysts were estimating that mobile piracy cost record labels and content providers more than £2bn ($3.4bn) in revenues – and that was before the age of the smartphone really dawned.

Currently, the leading method for sharing copyright material, be it songs, movies or even eBooks, is through a file sharing application that connects you to other users with the file. You’ll likely have heard of BitTorrent, the legal protocol that powers most of these applications, which according to a late 2010 report make up 53.3 percent of all upstream traffic in North America, with similar figures observed in other developed nations worldwide.

Until recently, this technology has naturally been limited to desktop PCs and laptops capable of running such programs around the clock. In recent years though, a series of BitTorrent clients for smartphone operating systems has emerged, first on Symbian S60 (LINK ), still supported on the company’s new phones today, and then on the currently exploding Google Android mobile OS.

Fire up the Android Market and you’ll find at least nine different native Android BitTorrent client apps available for download (as opposed to remote clients, which can be used to monitor downloads on your PC from your phone), with prices varying from free to $4.99 (£3) – there’s also another popular file sharing Android app, FrostWire, which does not use BitTorrent to connect users.

Install one of these, and with a quick web search you can be downloading anything from an unreleased Halo game to the latest movies and TV shows, in HD and stripped of adverts. These can then be played right on the handset, or even streamed to a TV.

The scale of the problem

While precise figures are unavailable, AndroLib’s download estimates (as of 9/5/2011) give us some insight into just how many people share media through BitTorrent, and they’re larger than you might expect. Peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing apps have been downloaded 1.21million times: FrostWire makes up the lion’s share of this number with an estimated 688,986 downloads – which equates to three downloads every single minute since launch in October – with tTorrent and aDownloader also grabbing six figure numbers. tTorrent too is pulling at least one download per minute worldwide.

However, based on our talks with the developers of these apps, it’s likely this figure is much higher. We understand that FrostWire has seen nearer 800,000 downloads, while Red Torrent has seen 60,000 installs and aBTC has had 10,000 – in the case of the last two, these figures are orders of magnitude higher than their AndroLib estimates. And then of course, these apps themselves are the victims of piracy – these estimates only include downloads from the Android Market itself.

Activity may be frighteningly high too: one client’s developer reports that active users make up a quarter of all their downloads. If that holds true across the board, there could be well over 300,000 people using P2P networks on their mobiles right now. Given Android’s phenomenal growth right now, (Google says 350,000 Android handsets are being activated every day), you can expect that to grow rapidly.

Our calculations have also not taken into account piracy on the iPhone. Apple doesn’t allow for P2P apps, or even remote clients, but a BitTorrent client app called Torrentula is available to jailbreak users on the Cydia app store (developer Albert Schulz could not be reached for comment) and the odd program does slip through the net. Last month, a free app called Any MP3 Downloader, which does just that, briefly appeared on the iTunes App Store, overtaking Angry Birds to become No. 1 download on the store. Apple does not remotely delete these apps from users’ phones once they have been pulled from the store.

Juniper Research analyst Daniel Ashdown certainly sees it becoming a growing problem. Last month he published a report in which he highlighted the threat of mobile P2P piracy, even hinting that it could require mobile networks to take action.

“File sharing is such a massive proportion of traffic on fixed lines networks, that if that migrates to the mobile networks it could put a lot of strain on the operators networks,” he tells us. “With operators launching 4G networks…as with 3G it’s going to gradually spread around the world, it’s going to become a much more viable alternative to file share via the mobile network.”

He points to the convenience of modern smartphones, as well as their huge storage capability today. “The mobile handset is the best suited for consuming music,” he says. “A lot of high end smartphones have around 32GB of memory and I think that’s enough for most people’s music collections.”

Red Torrent developer Michael Isaacson agrees, and sees a future where smartphones and tablets are the predominate source of all consumed media, legal or not.

“With the rise of 4G speeds, more powerful phones, and tablets they have the potential to become a large part of the piracy issue,” he says. “The family PC will be less and less prominent as everyone in the family will likely have a powerful phone or tablet of their own. Once a fairly common connection standard is in place for this sort of thing, I expect it to take off.”

Of course, it’s debatable just how large a proportion of file share data is under copyright. File sharing itself is not illegal, but one only has to take a look at the Recent Torrents section of The Pirate Bay’s website to see what is being seeded: everything from Lady Gaga’s latest single to a copy of Hollywood hit The Adjustment Bureau, not yet out on DVD and Blu-ray. Red Torrent developer Isaacson says he believes his app is used to download rips of TV shows above all else, while the aDownloader app provides a sophisticated search engine to browse through your choice of torrent sites, including the infamous Pirate Bay and another famous scourge of rights associations, isoHunt.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), British Phongraphic Industry (BPI) and the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment (UKIE) all either declined to comment, or were unable to provide estimates as to how much lost revenue these applications may have resulted in.

The legal app fightback

Although filesharing on mobiles is may prove to be a growing issue, it’s actually one where the content providers may have beaten the pirates already. Legitimate video and music apps are already providing a solid experience that’s preferable to BitTorrent on your blower, according to Stuart Dredge, a digital media journalist at Music Ally.

“I don’t think it’s the dreadful problem for music it could be seen as,” he says. “You can find music for free but they’re not really good music apps, compared with Spotify, iTunes, the legal stuff – they’re much better.”

Several developers we spoke to also agreed. “With a Netflix app coming soon [to Android], and hopefully Hulu support on the horizon, pirating video for mobile use should decline,” said Isaacson.

Another popular P2P Android app developer, who wished to remain anonymous, concurs. “I think the mobile culture is very different from that of the desktop culture. The majority of mobile users have been taught to install apps and acquire content through syndicated app stores,” he says.

“It’s more convenient than ever to access legal content and as 4G and faster wireless networks become ubiquitous the music consumption culture is moving towards streaming, which goes hand in hand with limited storage that you would rather use to store pictures and videos.”

Some networks too already throttle or block BitTorrent traffic on their networks, which can be accessed through laptops via mobile broadband dongles, making the process unappealing.

Even the smartphone OS developers seem to have cottoned on: Microsoft has already made clear that it won’t accept file sharing apps on its Windows Phone Marketplace. A Google spokesperson declined to comment when we asked to explain the company’s approval policy on P2P apps, but we’ve also discovered that Google has removed at least one file sharing app from the Android Market, Rapid Download!, which allowed users to download files from RapidShare, another haven for pirated materials.

Ultimately, Dredge says, mobile phone piracy will never go away, but it can be sidelined. “The key to fighting them is not to play Whack-A-Mole as they come out, but keep improving legal services. You can’t stop people developing ways to pirate music and you can’t stop people from using them…that’s where you’ll make money, not worrying how much money you’ll lose to piracy.”
http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2011/05...y-goes-mobile/





BMI Says A Single Person Listening To His Own Music Via The Cloud Is A Public Performance
Mike Masnick

There's no time like late on a Friday to send out disturbing missives. Companies who need to let staff go often find it easier to let the week "play out" before handing out the pink slips. Congressmen who need to shove through some questionable legislation often wait until the papers have gone to bed, or at least a majority of the voting citizens.

Martin Berenson, Senior Vice President and General Counsel for BMI has decided there's no time like Friday evening to kick out an editorial about streaming music via the "cloud."

Berenson chooses to couch his arguments in the relative safety of Capitol Records (and others) ongoing legal battle with MP3tunes.com, a "subscription Internet music 'locker' service," before launching a grazing attack on "cloud-computing" in general. While the legality of MP3tunes' actions is still under question, Berenson expresses his concern that its legal arguments could "create loopholes in the copyright law relating to the public performance right."

There's a lot to unpack in this editorial, but what it all boils down to is this: BMI wants a chunk of this "cloud" money.

MP3tunes logically points out (in its arguments against Capitol Records) that a user making a copy on a "dedicated, private, remote storage device" and playing it back to himself is a private performance and, therefore, needs no licensing. Google, the EFF and Public Knowledge have all entered amici briefs (or "broad attacks on the performing right," according to Berenson) stating that, "if a user initiates a stream, it should not be considered a public performance" by the service.

This seems to be a logical thought: one person listening to his or her own music is not a public performance. But, won't someone please think of the licensing? No worries, Berenson has that covered:

As previously noted, BMI argues that the public performing right has long applied to on-demand, interactive streaming. Additionally, it makes no difference if the audience for the transmission is only one person, who may receive the program at a unique time, and that MP3tunes’ attempt to make one to one transmissions into private performances is contrary to established law. We stress that it was only the existence of the unique copy made by each subscriber that was the critical factor that saved Cablevision from being an infringer. MP3tunes cannot evade that essential aspect of the court’s ruling on the grounds it would be more efficient to infringe with one copy in storage for all recipients.

Well, there you have it:

1. The right to collect licensing fees has "long applied" to streaming services, and since it's been there before, it logically follows that it should always be that way, no matter the differences of each situation.

2. It makes no difference if only one person is listening -- it's still a public performance. BMI and their fellow performance rights groups have always been willing to grant individuals the rights of a crowd.

3. Storage efficiency = infringement.

But Berenson's just warming up, and this is where it gets really interesting (and by "interesting," I mean "ludicrous"):

The strength of the public performing right would be threatened by a ruling that broadens the Cablevision court’s private-performance ruling to otherwise-unlicensed services. Cloud computing will no doubt grow tremendously in the future and if MP3tunes’ argument is adopted by the court, unlicensed entertainment services in “the cloud” will steal audiences from existing licensed streaming services (as well as from more traditional media entities), and copyright owners will be harmed by such a ruling.

From that point, Berenson takes a quick run at Amazon's Cloud Drive, mSpot and underdog neo-Luddites, Zediva (in particular, noting that Zediva's DVD player farm "competes unfairly with licensed services" -- which is a totally understandable statement, because the film industry has always been nothing but fair when dealing with competitors and customers).

While Berenson does not specifically attack or threaten Amazon's new service/player, one can only gather from this editorial that the rent-seekers (BMI, ASCAP, etc.) are beginning to formulate their plan to get a piece of this hot, new action, if not already forming an orderly line outside the virtual door. The sentence, "The issues are not confined to MP3tunes," seems to indicate that he considers these services to be next in line for the MP3tunes treatment.

After all, Berenson equates listening to unlicensed music streams to "theft" and there's really nothing more sincere than an "editorial" from a self-interest group. In closing, he offers this baffling line:

These efforts to diminish or circumvent the performing right point up the need for heightened vigilance on our part.

Godspeed, BMI. The more you can do to separate people from their music, the richer you should become. And with an entire nation of individual listeners billable as one (1) crowd, the sky's the limit. (Hence, the "pointing up," I assume.) Just watch out for those pesky "clouds".
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...formance.shtml





BSA 2010 Piracy Report: Big Numbers, Big Flaws
Glyn Moody

In the digital world, it seems, there are two certainties: that every year the Business Software Alliance will put out a report that claims huge amounts of software are being “stolen”; and that the methodology employed by that report is deeply flawed.

So, here we go again:

The commercial value of software piracy grew 14 percent globally last year to a record total of $58.8 billion, according to the 2010 BSA Global Software Piracy Study.

Just six years ago, the commercial value of the PC software that was being pirated in emerging economies accounted for less than a third of the world total. Last year, it accounted for more than half — $31.9 billion.

Notice that immediately we have the phrase “commercial value”; just in case you had any doubts what this might mean, it is explained in the methodology section:

The commercial value of pirated software is the value of unlicensed software installed in a given year, as if it had been sold in the market.

“As if it had been sold in the market”: this is, of course, a meaningless figure. The very reason that people pirate software in developing countries - the main focus of the BSA report - is that they cannot afford Western-level prices. So there is no way that pirated software could ever be converted to sales at those prices - it is economically impossible. Using it as a measure is pure fantasy.

A more sophisticated study would attempt to establish at what price people would actually choose to buy from dealers rather than other sources: then that could be used to calculate a realistic estimate of how much revenue is lost in developing countries. To do that, a good place to start would be the recently-published Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, whose results can be summarised thus:

Based on three years of work by some thirty-five researchers, Media Piracy in Emerging Economies tells two overarching stories: one tracing the explosive growth of piracy as digital technologies became cheap and ubiquitous around the world, and another following the growth of industry lobbies that have reshaped laws and law enforcement around copyright protection. The report argues that these efforts have largely failed, and that the problem of piracy is better conceived as a failure of affordable access to media in legal markets.

Exactly the same forces are at work in the world of software: this is a market failure, not a failure of enforcement.

But even if the BSA report had attempted this more realistic analysis, it would still draw the wrong conclusions from its results. Summarised in a section called rather risibly “Anti-piracy equity” - as if Western holders of intellectual monopolies really cared about “equity” when it came to exploiting developing countries:

Reductions in software piracy produce widespread economic benefits. For example, the BSA-IDC Piracy Impact Study found in 2010 that reducing the global piracy rate for PC software by 10 percentage points — 2.5 points per year for four years — would create $142 billion in new economic activity globally by 2013 while adding nearly 500,000 new high-tech jobs and generating $32 billion in new tax revenues for governments. On average, more than 80 percent of these benefits would accrue to local economies.

I debunked this erroneous argument last year:

One thing that is always omitted in these analyses is the fact that the money not paid for software licences does not disappear, but is almost certainly spent elsewhere in the economy (I doubt whether people are banking all these "savings" that they are not even aware of.) As a result, it too creates jobs, local revenues and taxes.

Put another way, if people had to pay for their unlicensed copies of software, they would need to find the money by reducing their expenditure in other sectors. So in looking at the possible benefit of moving people to licensed copies of software, it is also necessary to take into account the losses that would accrue by eliminating these other economic inputs.

Thus the BSA's hypocritical plea for “equity” - how equitable is it trying to extract a month's wages from someone for a copy of Windows whose marginal cost is close to zero, say? - simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Eradicating piracy won't generate “new economic activity globally”, nor will it generate new tax revenues for governments. Again, as I pointed out last year:

One important factor is that proprietary software is mainly produced by US companies. So moving to licensed software will tend to move profits and jobs out of local, non-US economies.

…

Another factor that would tend to exacerbate these problems is that software has generally had a higher profit margin than most other kinds of goods: this means any switching from buying non-software goods locally to buying licensed copies of software would reduce the amount represented by costs (because the price is fixed and profits are now higher). So even if these were mostly incurred locally, switching from unlicensed to licensed copies would still represent a net loss for the local economy.

Similarly, it is probably the case that those working in the IT industry earn more than those in other sectors of the economy, and so switching a given amount of money from industries with lower pay to IT, with its higher wages, would again reduce the overall number of jobs, not increase them, as the report claims.

So, as expected, this year's BSA report rehashes all its old errors, simply introducing even more unrealistic figures in an attempt to frighten governments into even more disproportionate and unjustified attempts to enforce intellectual monopolies.

But to be fair, the 2010 report does sport one novelty:

this year’s study also adds a new dimension: Deeper and richer surveys of PC users in 32 countries, conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs, one of the world’s leading public-opinion research firms.

Here's the context to the first questions:

“The laws that give someone who invents a new product or technology the right to decide how it is sold are called intellectual property rights. Which comes closer to your view...”

Two options were then presented:

“Intellectual property rights benefit people like me by creating jobs and improving the economy.”

or

“Intellectual property rights hurt people like me by making products I need too expensive.”

Notice how this is framed in terms of “rights” - the word is used twice. This is a biased term, of course - it suggests that it is “right” to have that right. But really the question should have been:

“The laws that give someone who invents a new product or technology a monopoly on how it is sold are called intellectual monopoly rights. Which comes closer to your view...”

Similarly, the questions already bias the response by hammering home the idea that these are “rights”. Reframing the questions as

“Intellectual monopolies benefit people like me by creating jobs and improving the economy.”

or

“Intellectual monopnolies hurt people like me by making products I need too expensive.”

might well have produced results less favourable to the report's position. Nonetheless, it's interesting that only 61% thought intellectual monopolies benefitted ordinary people, while 37% thought they harmed them - hardly a resounding vote of confidence.

Another question gave these alternatives:

“Intellectual property rights allow companies to generate profits which in turn benefit local economies.”

or

“Intellectual property rights concentrate wealth in the hands of multinational companies that do not deliver significant local economic benefits.”

Here, there was even more scepticism about the benefits - only 59% agreed with the first, while 40% chose the second option. Imagine what the results would have been had they been phrased thus:

“Intellectual monopolies allow companies to generate profits which in turn benefit local economies.”

or

“Intellectual monopolies concentrate wealth in the hands of multinational companies that do not deliver significant local economic benefits.”

Here's a third set of alternatives:

“It is important for people who invent new products or technologies to be paid for them, because it creates an incentive for people to produce more innovations. That is good for society because it drives technological progress and economic growth.”

or

“No company or individual should be allowed to control a product or technology that could benefit the rest of society. Laws like that limit the free flow of ideas, stifle innovation, and give too much power to too few people.”

Of course, the first question is loaded: who doesn't think that it's important for people who create new products or technologies should be paid for them? No wonder 79% chose this option. But that's not the issue: the issue is whether Western companies can charge unrealistic prices for their products in developing countries - prices that are literally unaffordable by the majority of the population there - and expect them to be enforced by local governments against the interests of their citizens.

Despite the bias of these questions, it is, however, interesting that BSA is trying to bolster its case with this supposed support for monopoly-friendly policies from ordinary citizens. It suggests that it knows that the days of its old approach - claiming implausibly large damage to economies based on flawed methodologies - are numbered, and that it must find an alternative soon. Otherwise we may have to forgo the pleasure of reading those entertaining annual reports...
http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/ope...laws/index.htm





Cue the Music: Driven by Digital, Music Sales up in 2011
May 11, 2011

Music sales in the U.S. are up 1.6 percent in 2011, according to The Nielsen Company, as digital album and track sales saw dramatic growth through May 8. While physical albums saw a decline in year-over-year sales from the same period in 2010, digital album and track purchases went up 16.8 percent and 9.6 percent, respectively. Digital retailers received more than half of all music transactions, propelling a 12.4 percent growth in sales over last year.

Catalog album sales are up 5.4 percent in 2011, thanks in part to a long-awaited 2010 deal allowing digital distribution of The Beatles’ albums for the first time.

Other trends reported by Nielsen include:

• Vinyl sales increased 37 percent in the beginning of 2011 over the same period last year. Vinyl sales also rose 14.2 percent in 2010, although they only accounted for 1.2 percent of physical sales.
• 2011 saw the most successful Record Store Day in the event’s four-year history. Album sales at independent record stores increased over 39 percent the week of Record Store Day (April 16) from the prior week – an increase of 180,000 units – and 12.7 percent compared to 2010.
• Rock is the most popular genre of music, with 32 percent album share, while pop music represents 40 percent of all current digital tracks sold.
• Ninety-three of the 100 best selling vinyl albums in 2011 fall within the Rock or Alternative genres.

“Strong releases and aggressive promotions by the labels and retailers are among the many contributing factors to the strength we’re seeing in the music industry,” said Dave Bakula, SVP Analytics, Entertainment for The Nielsen Company. “Overall, the data reflects a continuing strong demand by music consumers.”
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/...es-up-in-2011/





File-Sharing Friendly Artist Sells Himself on eBay
enigmax

Readers will be familiar with musician Dan Bull, the pro-filesharing rap artist who has served up commentary on everything from Lily Allen’s abortive anti-filesharing campaign to the global threat of ACTA.

Following on from a Digital Economy Act protest track commissioned by ISP TalkTalk, Dan has a new idea for bringing music to the public.

“As I believe music should be freely copied by whoever wants it, I was trying to think of other ways artists could make a living and involve new fans,” Dan told TorrentFreak.

“I realised that music ought to go back to how it was before the industry took over – with artists providing a service, not a product.

“So, I have put myself on eBay. With a starting bid of one penny, people have a week to bid to win a fully customised and personalised song written and recorded by myself. On any topic they choose… no matter how obscure or weird.”

The eBay listing can be viewed here.
http://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing...n-ebay-110509/





Fyels: File-Sharing Can’t Get Any Easier
Ernesto

Day in and day out hundreds of millions of people share files on the Internet. While many use BitTorrent, one click hosting sites like RapidShare and Yousendit have become increasingly popular. A new startup in this area which launched today is Fyels.

Fyels.com is a drag and drop sharing site, meaning that all you have to do to share a file is drop it in your browser window. Although the concept of drag and drop sharing isn’t by any means new, the interface for Fyles is without a doubt the simplest we’ve ever encountered. To get to know more about the concept, we got in touch with the site’s founder Dominic Holland.

“The main reason I created this site, is that as a developer I am often needing to access local files through cloud servers and the fastest method is generally using file sharing sites,” Holland told TorrentFreak. “Although these sites make an extremely simple process extremely convoluted, and waiting times are just a pain in the ass.”

Fyels.com has virtually no restrictions and works out of the box.

After dropping a file onto the site users get a URL they can send to the people they want to share it with. There are no waiting times, no speed-limits and no restrictions other than a 2GB file-size limit. If the site becomes popular Holland could monetize it through ads to pay for expenses, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon we were told.

“This service is designed for extremely fast and absolutely easy file-sharing. Whether it becomes a much loved public product that needs monetization is to be seen, but I know that for my purposes this site is absolutely perfect, and if it pans out to be that way for others then great,” he said.

The core idea behind Fyels will always be to make sharing as easy and convenient as possible, without having to sign up for an account or buy credits. Aside from some minor tweaks there are no major changes planned, but depending on how the public reacts additional features such as image viewing, mp3 streaming, and video playback may be implemented.

Holland ensured us, however, that any changes and upgrades to Fyels will be made while keeping absolute ‘simplicity’ and ‘minimalism’ in mind.

Note: wile testing we ran into a few upload problems (files not completing), but we were told that everything’s working as it should now.
http://torrentfreak.com/fyels-file-s...easier-110510/





Dropdo Is A Fast, Minimalist File-Sharing Service
Matthew Rogers

Dropdo is a service that allows users to share and view files online. Users can share files up to 25MB in size by simply sending the Dropdo link to the recipient, and media files can be viewed or played directly in the browser.

Almost any common media or document file can be viewed or played in Dropdo. For documents, users can view plain text, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, RTF, PDF, CSV and more. URLs can also be entered in lieu of uploading a file directly.

There’s currently no limit to the life-span of hosted files, but there’s also no way to delete them without emailing Dropdo. The site’s FAQ mentions this and says that deleting files will likely be included once user accounts are added as a feature in the coming months.

There are also free extensions available for both Chrome and Firefox, which allow users to right click on items in web pages and send them straight to the service.
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/05...aring-service/





Min.us, File Sharing Simplified

Which web service or program are you using if you need to send a friend, business partner or your mom a file? The majority of you will likely answer that they use email or a file hosting service. I do prefer email myself, as it means that the files are send directly to the recipient, and not hosted on a server somewhere in the world wide web. Then again, email has its limitations like attachment size or type limits. If you need to send a 40 Megabyte file, you cannot do that by email (unless you split the attachment).

Some services, like Microsoft’s Hotmail allow multiple attachments with a size of up to 50 Megabytes each. They achieve this by hosting those files on their SkyDrive service.

The file size limit on file hosting sites is usually way larger than the 20-25 Megabytes per attachment that you get when you use email. While that is great if you need to send larger files, you should keep in mind that you transfer the files to a third party server. Use encryption or find a private server if you need to transfer important files.

Minus is a relatively new file hosting service that tries to fill the void that the popular file host Drop.io left behind (see Facebook buys Drop.io, shuts it down)

Minus offers file sharing for guests and registered members of the site. If you are a guest, you can simply drag and drop files on the minus web page to upload them to the file host. You can alternatively use the select link to launch a file browser to pick one or multiple files from the local system for uploading.

The file size limit has been set to 25 Megabytes for guests and 50 Megabytes for members, which should be enough in most cases. You need to split files if you want to share files larger than the file size limit.

You can add a caption to each file that you have uploaded to minus. Links are available to share, view or download individual files. A click on share displays the file url on the Min.us server farm, view is available for some file types like images, while download is available for file types that do not have an online viewer associated with them.

Guests need to know that their session expires once they upload new files which means that guests cannot access previously uploaded files anymore. Bad if you forgot to copy the file sharing urls.

Member accounts come with several benefits, from the increased file size limit of 50 Megabytes and access to the upload history to file galleries and the ability to modify the sharing url of your uploaded files. Probably the most important difference to public accounts is the ability to delete files that have been uploaded in the past.

Min.us creates galleries of uploaded files automatically. One interesting option here is the ability to download all files of a gallery as a zip file, handy if you want to download dozens of photos that have been posted to a gallery.

Tools for Windows, Linux and Mac, mobile devices and web browsers are available to make sure that users can upload files from virtually any device, even if they are not on the Min.us website.

What’s Missing?

It appears as if all files that you upload are automatically public. They are protected by the randomly generated url (which members can edit by the way), but that’s not the best of protections.

An option to set individual files to private, for instance by adding an option to password protect them, would be helpful.

Other than that, there is not much to criticize. If you are looking for an easy to use file hosting service, then you should take a closer look at Min.us.
http://www.ghacks.net/2011/05/12/min...ng-simplified/





Top Pirated eBooks at The Pirate Bay
Jason Boog

Today the file-sharers at The Pirate Bay attacked a European Union proposal that could set up a digital firewall blocking off file-sharing sites around Europe.

The Pirate Bay posted this message on the site: “the Battle of Internets is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of an Uncensored civilization! Upon it depends our own free life, and the long continuity of our sites and our trackers. The whole fury and might of the enemy will very soon be turned on us … if we fail, then the whole world, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

We continue to track the most popular single title eBooks (using the site’s “Top 100″ list for eBooks) on the file sharing site. As you can see by the list below (titles, but no links!), the most popular books aren’t the titles you might expect…

1. Men’s Fitness – 12 Minute Workout
2. All New Electronics Self-Teaching Guide 3 Ed
3. How a Genius: Your Brain and How to Train It
4. Photoshop CS5 All-in-One For Dummies
5. 1000 Photoshop Tips and Tricks
6. 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time
7. Excel 2010 Formulas
8. Hacking–Firewalls And Networks How To Hack Into Remote Computers
9. What Did We Use Before Toilet Paper?: 200 Curious Questions and Intriguing Answers
10. Advanced Sex: Explicit Positions for Explosive Lovemaking

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat...ternets_b29639





New York Times' Share of Newspaper Sites' Traffic Hits 12-Month Low

April was a quieter month for news than March, but other newspaper sites maintained traffic better
Nat Ives

The paywall introduced by The New York Times at the end of March is hurting traffic to its website, as expected, but perhaps within acceptable levels.

The New York Times' share of United States page views for all newspaper websites dropped from 13% in March to 10.6% in April, its lowest share in 12 months, according to new data from ComScore.

Page views from March to April declined 24.4% at The New York Times Online while slipping just 7.5% for newspaper sites as a group, according to the new ComScore numbers.

Year-over-year comparisons -- comparing April 2011 to April 2010, for example -- are inadvisable in the case of The New York Times because it adopted a different ComScore measurement methodology in May 2010.

The New York Times pointed out that some other news sites saw big declines after the big events of March, such as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, yielded to a quieter period in April. Yahoo News saw page views decline 23.9% and MSNBC.com saw page views slide 21.4%, according to a Times spokeswoman. Those sites are included in Comscore's general news category, not its newspapers category.

"When you look at these numbers at Yahoo News and MSNBC that suggests that there was a dip in news," the spokeswoman said. "Despite that, and given that this is the first month where you can see the traffic patterns post-digital subscription launch, these are actually better numbers than our internal projections."

"Despite the significance of the news, which can't be discounted, we retained our ranking in terms of unique users, page views and engagement, and that's important," she added. "So to us these are very strong and we're very pleased."

An analyst also said today that the paywall may be working. "Our framework suggests that even if The New York Times loses 20% of its web traffic, it will need to add about 107k subscribers to break even," Citi analyst Leo Kulp said in a note to investors.
Times Co. management said during its first-quarter conference call on April 21 that it had already added 100,000 subscribers, Mr. Kulp noted. That doesn't count home-delivery subscribers who get digital access free or the heavy users enjoying free access all year courtesy of a Lincoln promotion, but it does count people still enjoying a 99-cent introductory rate for their first four weeks.

"While we don't know how many of these are trial subscribers and won't convert, we think we can assume most of the subscribers are long-term," Mr. Kulp said.

"Based on our framework, we suspect the paywall is approaching breakeven on just the paying subscribers added in the first three weeks post-launch," he added in his note. "Furthermore, NYT will likely see a boost to revenue from Lincoln's sponsorship of 100k subscribers as well as the increase in print subscriptions post-launch, which is important because the print version is still very profitable."
http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/...th-low/227495/





For medicinal purposes only

Australian Tax Office Searches for Solution to RSI Epidemic

Seeks software to track the keystrokes and mouseclicks of computer users.
John Hilvert

The Australian Tax Office has put out a call for a software solution to reduce the number of employees that suffered from musculoskeletal disorders or repetitive strain injuries.

The tax office was seeking to reduce these injuries after being hit with higher workers' compensation insurance premiums.

Comcare, the Australian Government's workers compensation agency, told the ATO that its 2009/10 premium of $26.1 million was to rise to $30.8 million this year.

A tax office spokesman said of the incidents reported, 30 percent related to musculo-skeletal conditions that covered conditions such as repetitive strain conditions.

It released a request for quotation for commercial, off-the-shelf pause or exercise break software to help employees change their computing behaviour and manage their own safety “within their screen-based environment”.

"The proposed introduction of pause software is one of the prevention strategies to enable our employees to effectively manage their health and wellbeing in the IT environment," an ATO spokesman said.

Tracking keystrokes

The request for quotation asked for software to deliver safety messages to users and track users' key strokes and mouse clicks to determine more information about the nature of computing use in the workplace.

The ATO hopes this software might assist in identifying high-risk body stressing areas and individuals.

In particular, the software should report on:

• user progress (eg. keyboard activity and breaks) for user or administrator view;
• user group progress (eg. teams, business units, identified high risk user groups);
• break compliance;
• specific activity (eg. keyboard and mouse) by individual and/or user group;
• computer usage (eg. average daily computer use); and
• work activity patterns to identify high risk users or user groups

The spokesman said use of the proposed software would be voluntary and intended only to count keystrokes and mouse clicks rather than the content of the work being completed.

The software would need to to be compatible with ATO’s standard operating environment, including ROAM - a standard notebook operating environment used by mobile ATO staff. This included Microsoft Operating systems (currently Windows XP Professional).
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/256622...-epidemic.aspx





Think File-Hosting Sites Guard Your Private Data? Think Again
Dan Goodin

Academic researchers say they've uncovered weaknesses in dozens of the most popular file hosting sites that allow people to gain unauthorized access to data that's supposed to be available only to those selected by the user.

The services, which include sites such RapidShare, FileFactory, and Easyshare, allow users to upload large files and make them available to anyone who knows the unique URI (or Uniform Resource Identifier) that's bound to each one. Users may post the link on websites or forums available to the public or share it in a single email to prevent all but the recipient from downloading it. RapidShare, for instance, says it can be used to “share your data with your friends, colleagues or family.”

But according to academics in Belgium and France, a “significant percentage” of the 100 FHSs (or file hosting services) they studied made it trivial for outsiders to access the files simply by guessing the URLs that are bound to each uploaded file. What's more, they presented evidence that such attacks, far from being theoretical, are already happening in the wild.

“These services adopt a security-through-obscurity mechanism where a user can access the uploaded files only by knowing the correct download URIs,” the researchers wrote in a paper presented at the most recent USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats. “While these services claim that these URIs are secret and cannot be guessed, our study shows that this is far from being true.”

The researchers said they trained web crawlers on the file services and uncovered hundreds of thousands of private files in less than a month. They also used the sites to store private files that contained internet beacons, so they'd know if anyone opened them. Over a month's span, 80 unique IP addresses accessed the so-called honey files 275 times, indicating that the weakness is already being exploited in the wild to harvest data many users believe isn't available for general consumption.

The weakness that's easiest to exploit was found on sites that use sequential identifiers in the download URIs. By writing scripts that enumerate the the IDs character by character, their crawler was able to locate almost 311,000 unique files over a period of 30 days. The researchers then ran searches on Microsoft's Bing.com to arrive at an estimate that 168,320, or 54 percent of them, were private because they hadn't been shared online.

“Unfortunately, the problem is extremely serious since the list of insecure FHSs using sequential IDs also includes some of the most popular names, often highly ranked by Alexa in the list of the top internet websites,” the researchers wrote. To prevent their findings from being abused, their report didn't say which sites are vulnerable to specific types of attacks.

Another common weakness involved the use of pseudorandom URIs for each uploaded file. By using brute-force attacks that cycled through every possible combination, the researchers were able to successfully guess a file's unique ID 1.1 times for every thousand attempts. Part of the weakness is the result of websites that used IDs that consisted of only numeric strings with a maximum length of six numbers. But even when services used IDs with alphanumeric characters or numbers with a length of eight, the researchers achieved similar success rates.

In other cases, file services used ID systems with enough complexity that rendered brute-force techniques ineffective or used CAPTCHAs or other mitigations. But the researchers were often able to guess the names anyway, in some cases by exploiting a directory traversal vulnerability in a webhosting program used by multiple services.

In other cases, they defeated the mitigations by using a feature that allows people to report copyright violations and other abuse to the site admins and combining it with a separate feature for deleting files. Because the feature on one site exposed the first 10 characters of a file's 14-character ID, the number of combinations to brute force was a manageable 65,536.

The researchers said the most effective countermeasure against the attacks is the use of encryption on the user's computer. They developed a proof-of-concept Firefox add-on that automatically encrypts and decrypts files upon upload and download and uses steganographic techniques to hide the encrypted files.

The researchers included Nick Nikiforakis, Steven Van Acker, Wouter Joosen, of the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven in Belgium, and Marco Balduzzi and Davide Balzarotti of the Institute Eurecom in France.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05..._under_attack/





The Senators Who Say Merely Linking To Certain Sites Should Be A Felony
Mike Masnick

I wrote earlier about how the new PROTECT IP Act guts parts of the DMCA, but as you dig deeper, it's looking even worse. The original (and now updated) article focused on the use of the term "interactive computer service," which was in a draft copy of the bill. At the last minute, that was changed instead to be "information location tool." While, at first, this may seem to be a narrower definition, there are some serious concerns that this effectively makes it illegal to link to any website that is accused of being "dedicated to infringing purposes." That's because an "information location tool" is defined under current law to be: a "directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link."

Yes, you read that correctly: a link is an "information location tool" and such tools may be barred from pointing to sites deemed "dedicated to infringing" purposes. That seems like a massive breach of the First Amendment. If there is relevant information, as someone covering the news, why should I be prevented from linking?

Making matters even worse is a companion bill introduced by Senators Amy Klobuchar, John Cornyn and Christopher Coons, which would ratchet up charges for sites that stream infringing works to a felony. The specific text of the bill is not yet public, and it's likely that it just extends the "public performance" rights to section 506a of the Copyright Act (which only covers distribution and reproduction rights today). But, that leaves open a huge question of what is considered a "public performance" and how you define "streaming" in relation to a public performance. I can see it reasonably applying to a site hosting the content and streaming it... but what about an embed or a link, in which the content never touches the site in question at all? Tragically, we've already seen that the feds consider merely linking or embedding to be a form of a felony -- so it appears this bill is designed to make that even clearer, and that is really dangerous.

Put it all together, and our elected officials are now claiming that linking to something can be a felony. Yeah. Scary.

It seems that we really should highlight the list of Senators who have sponsored these bills, and who are telling you that linking to content should be considered a felony. The first bill is sponsored by:

Patrick Leahy
Orrin Hatch
Chuck Grassley
Charles Schumer
Dianne Feinstein
Sheldon Whitehouse
Lindsey Graham
Herb Kohl
Chris Coons
Richard Blumenthal
Al Franken <-- Updated to include, missed him on the first pass

The latter bill is

Amy Klobuchar
John Cornyn
Chris Coons, who has the distinction of sponsoring both dreadful bills

So, there you go. The Senators who think it's okay for the government to put people in jail for linking.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...e-felony.shtml





It’s Back

Jack,

We knew it was coming: Members of Congress and their business allies were gearing up to pass a revised Internet Blacklist Bill -- which more than 325,000 Demand Progress members helped block last winter -- but we never expected it to be this atrocious. Last year's bill has been renamed the "PROTECT IP" Act and it is far worse than its predecessor.

Senators Leahy and Hatch pretended to weigh free speech concerns as they revised the bill. Instead, the new legislation would institute a China-like censorship regime in the United States, whereby the Department of Justice could force search engines, browsers, and service providers to block users' access to websites, and scrub the American Internet clean of any trace of their existence.

Will you urge Congress to oppose the PROTECT IP Act? Just click here -- it'll only take a second.

Furthermore, it wouldn't just be the Attorney General who could add sites to the blacklist, but the new bill would allow any copyright holder to get sites blacklisted -- sure to result in an explosion of dubious and confused orders.

Please help us push Congress to reject the PROTECT IP Act: Just click here.

Thanks for continuing the fight for a free and open Internet.
http://act.demandprogress.org/act/pr...&source=auto-e





Revised 'Net Censorship Bill Requires Search Engines to Block Sites, Too
Nate Anderson

Surprise! After months in the oven, the soon-to-be-released new version of a major US Internet censorship bill didn't shrink in scope—it got much broader. Under the new proposal, search engines, Internet providers, credit card companies, and ad networks would all have cut off access to foreign "rogue sites"—and such court orders would not be limited to the government. Private rightsholders could go to court and target foreign domains, too.

As for sites which simply change their domain name slightly after being targeted, the new bill will let the government and private parties bring quick action against each new variation.

A source in Washington provided Ars with a detailed summary of the PROTECT IP Act, which takes its acronym from "Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property." This beats the old acronym, COICA; who can be against protection? The actual legislation should be introduced shortly.

The bill is an attempt to deal with foreign sites which can be difficult for US enforcement to reach, even when those sites explicitly target US citizens.

The PROTECT IP Act makes a few major changes to last year's COICA legislation. First, it does provide a more limited definition of sites “dedicated to infringing activities.” The previous definition was criticized as being unworkably vague, and it could have put many legitimate sites at risk.

But what the PROTECT IP Act gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. While the definition of targeted sites is tighter, the remedies against such sites get broader. COICA would have forced credit card companies like MasterCard and Visa to stop doing business with targeted sites, and it would have prevented ad networks from working with such sites. It also suggested a system of DNS blocking to make site nominally more difficult to access.

The PROTECT IP Act adds one more entity to this list: search engines. Last week, when the Department of Homeland Security leaned on Mozilla to remove a Firefox add-on making it simple to bypass domain name seizures, we wondered at the request. After all, the add-on only made it easier to do a simple Google search, and we wondered "what the next logical step in this progression will be: requiring search engines to stop returning results for seized domain names?"

Turns out that's exactly what's being contemplated. According to the detailed summary of the PROTECT IP Act, this addition "responds to concerns raised that search engines are part of the ecosystem that directs Internet user traffic and therefore should be part of the solution."

Rightsholders also score a major victory with the new legislation, which grants them a private right of action—something Google publicly trashed as a terrible idea earlier this year. Copyright and trademark holders don't have to badger the government into targeting sites under the new bill; they are allowed to seek court orders directly, though these orders would only apply to payment processors and advertising networks (not to ISPs or search engines).
Help us out, please

The emphasis here is on forcing intermediaries to get involved in policing such sites. Rightsholders have had difficulty suing the millions of end users engaged in infringement, and they have had difficulty suing the sites themselves when they are based abroad. But MasterCard and Google? Those are easy, US-based targets who will comply will any law Congress passes.

The PROTECT IP Act goes even further than forcing these intermediaries to take action after a court order; it actively encourages them to take unilateral action without any sort of court order at all. The bill summary makes clear that ad networks and payment processors will be protected if they “voluntarily cease doing business with infringing websites, outside of any court ordered action.” If a search engine decides that the next YouTube is a copyright infringer—and rightsholders have often sued sites like Veoh and YouTube in the past—it can simply cut off advertising for that reason and be immunized under the law. So can Visa.

The bill also encourages everyone—domain name registries, search engines, payment processors, and ad networks—to cut off access to infringing sites that "endanger the public health." That is, online pharmacies (which are often hotbeds of counterfeiting).

Given the strong opinions elicited by the earlier COICA, the expansion of powers here is a bit surprising, but the continued presence of the legislation is not. That's because, no matter how much power and money Congress devotes to intellectual property, rightsholders are back every couple of years for more—as the NET Act, DMCA, Sonny Bono Term Extension Act, PRO-IP Act, and Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) remind us. Each is "essential"—but somehow never quite enough.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-sites-too.ars





NSA Gathers 4x the Amount of Info than the Library of Congress, Daily
Curt Hopkins

The National Security Agency is the geekiest of the spy shops. The NSA is responsible for gathering and parsing information from around the world, usually electronic data. At ReadWriteWeb, we're no strangers to big data, in fact we're fans. But sometimes you come face to face with facts and figures that bring home how big "big" is.

According to an article from the Baltimore Sun, in six hours, the NSA intercepts and stores as much information as you find in the whole of the Library of Congress.

Speaking of John Parachini, Director of the Intelligence Policy Center at The RAND Corporation the Sun wrote, "(He) said the rule of thumb has been that every six hours, NSA collects an amount of information equivalent to the store of knowledge housed at the Library of Congress."

That's in six hours. Every day they wind up with four times that amount. The information that is collected includes video from drone overflights, emails, conversations captured by electronic means, texts and intercepted mobile phone conversations, like the one that led to the location of Osama bin Laden.

Whether the NSA should do what it does, whether or not we gather too much and contextualize too little, how sharp the organization's code-breaking skills are or are not, whether their 30,000 employees and billion-dollar budget are worth it: all these are interesting and important issues.

But I just wanted to share an example of how much data we wrestle with as a society, an example that you can - just barely - get your head around. Every six hours one of our spy agencies gathers as much information as our most complete repository of literature contains. It is a mind-boggling amount of information, even in an age of big data.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...of_info_in.php





Battle Brews Over FBI’s Warrantless GPS Tracking
Kim Zetter

Kathy Thomas knew she was under surveillance. The animal rights and environmental activist had been trailed daily by cops over several months, and had even been stopped on occasion by police and FBI agents.

But when the surveillance seemed to halt suddenly in mid-2005 after she confronted one of the agents, she thought it was all over. Months went by without a peep from the FBI surveillance teams that had been tracking her in undercover vehicles and helicopters. That’s when it occurred to her to check her car.

Rumors had been swirling among activists that the FBI might be using GPS to track them — two activists in Colorado discovered mysterious devices attached to their car bumpers in 2003 — so Thomas (a pseudonym) went out to the vehicle in a frenzy and ran her hands beneath the rear bumper. She was only half-surprised to find a small electronic device and foot-long battery wand secured to her metal fender with industrial-strength magnets.

“I think I must have found it right after they put it on, because there was no grime on it at all,” she told Wired.com recently.
How Vehicle Tracking Works

Law enforcement secretly installs the tracking device on a target's car. Some models are hidden in the engine compartment and wired to the car battery. Others are slapped to the undercarriage with industrial-strength magnets.

As the target drives around, the tracking device triangulates its position from three or four GPS satellites, and digitally transmits its coordinates continuously by radio.

The law enforcement agency receives the coordinates and displays the target's location in real time on a computerized map, keeping a record of the target's movement. Illustration: Mitsu Overstreet/Wired.com

The use of GPS tracking devices is poised to become one of the most contentious privacy issues before the Supreme Court, if it agrees to hear an appeal filed by the Obama administration last month. The administration is seeking to overturn a ruling by a lower court that law enforcement officials must obtain a warrant before using a tracker.

The constitutional matter until now has been left to district courts around the country to decide, resulting in a patchwork of conflicting rulings. Meanwhile, a federal lawsuit filed in March by an Arab-American college student named Yasir Afifi alleges that the FBI violated his privacy rights by placing a GPS device on his car without a warrant, and that the bureau targeted him simply because of his ethnic background.

In the midst of this legal controversy, Threat Level decided to take a look inside one of the devices — which are generally custom-made for law enforcement. Working with the teardown artists at iFixit, we examined the device Thomas found on her car nearly six years ago, which you can see in the photos and video accompanying this story.

When Thomas found the device on her vehicle back in 2005, she ripped it from the underside of her fender, but quickly grew fearful the FBI would raid her house if agents suspected she’d removed it. So she carried it in a duffel bag in her trunk for a week, while she and her boyfriend considered what to do.

When her lawyer called a local U.S. attorney to inquire about the device, the prosecutor acknowledged it belonged to the feds and said they wanted it back. But Thomas refused to hand it over, and the FBI seemed to drop the matter. Her attorney told Threat Level the government “basically abandoned it.”

She provided it to Wired.com recently, after reading a story about Afifi discovering a tracker on his car. She said she wanted to raise more awareness about how the technology is being used for stealth surveillance.

GPS vehicle trackers, based on technology first used by the military for navigation, have become a popular law-enforcement tool for tracking people. Cruder than other forms of surveillance — they report only where a suspect’s car goes, not who is in the car or what occupants do when they arrive at a location — they’re nonetheless frequently used for supplementary surveillance. That’s because in most jurisdictions, investigators don’t need court approval to slap a tracking device on a driver’s car, and because the devices provide a stealthier and more cost-effective approach to surveillance than a team of cops trailing a suspect around the clock.

The devices, however, have become one of the most divisive Fourth Amendment issues facing courts around the country. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled last year that using a GPS tracker was no different than physically trailing a suspect in public, and that such surveillance was not protected by the Fourth Amendment, even if agents placed the device on a suspect’s car while it was parked in his driveway.

But Judge Alex Kosinski, in the dissenting opinion, called the use of GPS trackers without a court order “straight out of George Orwell’s novel 1984” and said they give government “the power to track the movements of every one of us, every day of our lives.”

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., agreed with him when it ruled in a different case last year that collecting data from a GPS device planted on the Jeep of drug suspect Antoine Jones amounted to a search, and therefore required a warrant. Prosecutors argued that the device only collected the same information anyone on a public street could glean from following the suspect. But Judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote in his ruling that the persistent, nonstop surveillance afforded by a GPS tracker was much different from physically tracking a suspect on a single trip.

“Unlike one’s movements during a single journey, the whole of one’s movement over the course of a month is not actually exposed to the public because the likelihood anyone will observe all those movements is effectively nil,” he wrote. What’s more, the bulk of data gleaned by such a device over time could help deduce a lot about a person, such as whether he associated with political groups, was a heavy drinker or weekly churchgoer, was an unfaithful husband or an outpatient receiving regular medical treatment.

The Obama administration called the ruling “vague and unworkable,” and filed a writ in April asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case. A decision on whether the high court will hear the case is pending.

It’s not known how many people are tracked with GPS devices every year, but the devices don’t always go undetected. An elderly Arab-American in the San Francisco Bay Area reportedly discovered a vehicle tracker on his car in 2009, while he attended a free auto-repair workshop and let the instructor demonstrate an oil change on his vehicle.

Then last year, Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old Arab-American college student in California discovered a device attached to his car when he took the vehicle into an auto shop for an oil change. After a friend posted photos of it on Reddit.com, and readers identified it as a GPS tracker, the FBI showed up at Afifi’s apartment demanding he return the device. He’s since filed a lawsuit over the tracking.

Although the Justice Department has said the devices are used by investigators “with great frequency,” neither the department nor local law enforcement agencies are required to compile or disclose statistics about their use in the way the Justice Department is required to report annually to Congress on the use of national security letters issued to ISPs and other businesses for customer records.

Kathy Thomas doesn’t know if the FBI obtained a warrant to place the tracker on her car. But she said authorities never charged her with any crime. Threat Level could find no federal case filed against her.

Her FBI file, which she obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request, makes it clear the surveillance was part of a nationwide investigation of activists connected to Earth First, the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front — groups the FBI considered “left-wing anarchists” whose members sometimes advocated criminal activity to further their aims.

Thomas, who provided Threat Level with only a handful of the 800 redacted pages she received in her request, says she organized activities with Earth First and participated in animal rights activities, but never belonged to the two other groups. Instead, she was a member of Food Not Bombs.

The FBI reports indicate agents likely turned to the GPS tracking device after it became increasingly difficult to tail her physically.

Thomas had begun engaging in countersurveillance maneuvers, FBI agents claimed in the documents, including speeding, running red lights, making unsafe lane changes and weaving through congested traffic to evade them. A July 2004 report describes how she drove one day into the cul-de-sac where she lived and sped around to confront and photograph cars she believed were tailing her. The report says Thomas was becoming “extremely surveillance-conscious,” and that agents “were made [recognized as agents] on two separate occasions.”

Thomas says the surveillance was a daily occurrence for months. Then in April 2005 she confronted an agent who was following her on the freeway. She took an exit ramp and stopped, and when he pulled up behind her, she got out of her car to yell at him, shaking a glass Perrier bottle in her hand. She says the agent laughed at her, and after that the surveillance stopped. Or so she thought.

She found the GPS tracker on her car a few months later.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/05/gps/





FBI: If We Told You, You Might Sue

Often when the government tries to suppress information about its surveillance programs, it cites national-security concerns. But not always.

In 2008, a few years after the Bush administration's warrantless-wiretapping program was revealed for the first time by the New York Times, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act. That act authorizes the government to engage in dragnet surveillance of Americans' international communications without meaningful oversight. As we've explained before (including in our lawsuit challenging the statute), the FISA Amendments Act is unconstitutional.

In 2009, we also filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about the government's interpretation and implementation of the FISA Amendments Act. Last November, the government released a few hundred pages of heavily redacted documents. Though redacted, the documents confirmed that the government had interpreted the statute as broadly as we had feared and even that the government had repeatedly violated the few limitations that the statute actually imposed.

Two weeks ago, as part of our FOIA lawsuit over those documents, the government gave us several declarations attempting to justify the redaction of the documents. We've been combing through the documents and recently came across this unexpectedly honest explanation from the FBI of why the government doesn't want us to know which "electronic communication service providers" participate in its dragnet surveillance program. On page 32:



There you have it. The government doesn't want you to know whether your internet or phone company is cooperating with its dragnet surveillance program because you might get upset and file lawsuits asserting your constitutional rights. Would it be such a bad thing if a court were to consider the constitutionality of the most sweeping surveillance program ever enacted by Congress?
http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-se...ou-might-sue-1





DOJ Wants Wireless Providers to Store User Info
Declan McCullagh

The U.S. Department of Justice today called for new laws requiring mobile providers to collect and store information about their customers, a proposal that pits it against privacy advocates and even other federal agencies.

Jason Weinstein, the deputy assistant attorney general for the criminal division, picked an odd place to describe the department's proposal: a U.S. Senate hearing that arose out of revelations about iPhones recording information about owners' locations, and, in some cases, transmitting those data to Apple without consent.

Nevertheless, Weinstein said, "when this information is not stored, it may be impossible for law enforcement to collect essential evidence." In January, CNET was the first to report that the Justice Department had started a new legislative push for what is generally known as mandatory data retention.

"Many wireless providers do not retain records that would enable law enforcement to identify a suspect's smartphone based on the IP addresses collected by Web sites that the suspect visited," he added.

In an exchange with Sen. Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the subcommittee that convened today's hearing, Weinstein did not elaborate on the proposal, including whether it would require wireless providers to record location information as well.

The Justice Department's suggestion conflicts with what the Federal Trade Commission--which also sent a representative to today's hearing--has recommended. A company should adopt a policy of "not collecting or retaining more data than they need to provide a requested service or transaction," said Jessica Rich, deputy director of the FTC's bureau of consumer protection.

Also testifying are Bud Tribble, Apple's vice president for software technology and Google's U.S. director of public policy, Alan Davidson. Microsoft is not making an appearance, even though it collects location information from Windows Mobile 7 devices with a unique ID.

"I believe that consumers have a fundamental right to know what data is being collected about them," Franken said. That can be, he said, "really sensitive information that I don't think we're doing enough to protect."

While no specific location privacy bill has appeared as a result of last month's privacy flap, there have been calls for a Federal Trade Commission investigation, and unrelated "do not track" legislation was introduced yesterday. And Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has drafted legislation that would curb warrantless access to location histories by police (see CNET Q&A with Wyden).

What began as a hearing devoted to location privacy soon spiraled into entirely unrelated issues about computer security, the recent Sony security breach, mandatory notification for similar breaches, restrictions on mobile applications, and Google Street View.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called on Apple and Google to remove applications that alert users to the presence of police and other law enforcement checkpoints that have been set up to combat drunk driving, a controversy that became public in March. The apps are presumptively legal under the First Amendment, but Schumer said they should nevertheless be removed on public safety grounds.

"How you can justify (selling) apps that put the public at serious risk?" he asked. "Why hasn't Google removed this type of application?"

Davidson replied that while this is an "important issue," Google has "a fairly open policy in what we allow."

"In some cases the police department publishes when and where there's going to be a checkpoint," Tribble said, suggesting that if the information is public, an app that reproduces it should not necessarily be a problem.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) suggested that a January 2010 Google patent indicates that the company was planning to intercept the payloads of Wi-Fi communications as part of its Street View service to track locations--an allegation that, if done intentionally, could be a federal crime.

"Are you aware that this process may have been used?" Blumenthal said.

It turned out that Blumenthal appeared to have been confused: the patent application dealt with detecting "data rates," not intercepting the contents of Wi-Fi signals. (Ashkan Soltani, a technologist also testifying today, added that intercepting payloads wouldn't even help to identify locations.)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20061472-281.html





Microsoft Skype Deal May Strain Relations With AT&T, Verizon
Amy Thomson

Microsoft Corp. may have a tougher time convincing wireless operators to support mobile phones with Windows software after its $8.5 billion purchase of Skype Technologies SA, analysts said.

Skype’s Internet-calling service will be on Windows phones, as well as Microsoft’s Xbox and Kinect game consoles, the Redmond, Washington-based company said today. Skype lets members make free voice and video calls to each other, and calls to most outsiders for 2.3 cents a minute.

Microsoft’s backing of Skype may be seen as a threat by wireless carriers such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless because it could cut into voice revenue, said Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York.

“It is kind of a head scratcher to me how Microsoft is going to navigate the complicated relationships that it has to have with carriers at the same time as it is repositioning itself as a potentially major threat to their wireless voice business,” Moffett said.

Microsoft is trying to expand in mobile devices as it faces slower growth in personal computers, the traditional market for its Windows and Office software. The company, which has lost ground in the smartphone market to Apple Inc.’s iPhone and Google Inc.’s Android devices, introduced the Windows Phone 7 operating system last year and struck a partnership this year to have Nokia Oyj use Windows as its primary handset software.

Nokia, the world’s largest mobile-phone maker by unit sales, said last month it plans to introduce devices running Windows Phone in volume next year.

Microsoft fell 16 cents to $25.67 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading at 4 p.m. New York time. It has lost 8 percent this year. Luxembourg-based Skype is privately held.

‘Bandwidth Arbitrage’

Software such as Skype’s may cut into revenue for wireless operators because it allows users to make calls with data services, just like they do when surfing the Internet, rather than using traditional voice minutes. Carriers typically charge customers for voice plans and data plans separately.

Using a data plan for voice or video calls can make them much cheaper for customers, Moffett said. Google and Apple offer similar products.

“It’s certainly a threat,” said Moffett, who has an “outperform” rating on AT&T and an “underperform” on Verizon Communications Inc., majority owner of Verizon Wireless. “We’ve broadly characterized it under the title of bandwidth arbitrage. Wireless operators make the vast majority of their profits from low-bandwidth services like voice and text, but those services are easily arbitraged by doing them over the data network, where the price per megabyte is a tiny fraction.”

‘Good Relationships’

Investors may see the Microsoft-Skype combination as a threat to carriers’ revenue, said Jonathan Chaplin, an analyst with Credit Suisse Group AG. Still, Microsoft is unlikely to push Skype services so aggressively that it threatens carrier relationships, he said.

The company “needs good relationships with carriers to drive the adoption of Windows Mobile,” New York-based Chaplin said in a note to investors. “This will discourage Microsoft from pushing a disruptive business model with Skype.”

Melissa Havel, a spokeswoman for Microsoft, declined to comment. Brenda Raney, a Verizon Wireless spokeswoman, and Fletcher Cook, an AT&T spokesman, also declined to comment.

Microsoft is likely to integrate Skype into software for tablet computers as well as mobile phones, said Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Partners LP in New York. Skype, with 170 million active users, will help boost the popularity of Windows- powered devices, he said.

Big Knock

“What’s the big knock on Microsoft right now? PCs are going to be displaced, tablets are going to take over the world,” Gillis said in an interview. “Throw Skype into this, that’s going to give them a unique edge.”

If Internet-calling technologies gain in popularity on mobile devices, wireless operators may respond by changing prices. Carriers may raise the price of using their networks by boosting the cost of data plans, Moffett said.

“The simplest thing will be new pricing plans where they will shift more of the price burden onto data plans to insulate them,” Moffett said. “There’s a clear vision in the technology community that voice and text aren’t businesses, they’re applications.”
--With reporting by Olga Kharif in Portland, Oregon. Editors: Peter Elstrom, Ville Heiskanen
http://www.businessweek.com/news/201...t-verizon.html





A Brief History of Skype
Doug Aamoth

Microsoft just bought Skype for $8.5 billion. Not to get too personal, but that's many, many billions more than I make in a year. But unlike buying a human writing machine like yours truly at an affordable price, Microsoft is paying $8.5 billion for something called Skype. Here's what it's getting.

Remember Kazaa?

Kazaa, in case you don't remember or have never heard of it, was a peer-to-peer file sharing program used by millions of people in the early 2000's just as Napster was getting shut down for enabling the illegal sharing of music files. Kazaa enabled people to share music files but it also let people share videos and programs as well, which made it very, very popular.

The basic structure of a peer-to-peer file sharing network is that whoever's on the network is connected to everyone else on the network, with no official, central server or group of servers sitting in the middle holding all the files. The more people who are on the network, the faster the network can send files back and forth. And the more people who have the same file on their computer, the faster it could be sent to someone trying to download it.

So the magic of Napster and later, Kazaa, was that when a popular file—say, a music file labeled HumptyDance.mp3—was made available on the network, everyone could download it really fast. And better yet, no one person could really be held accountable for facilitating piracy since the file wasn't stored on a central server anywhere—though as we'd see later, the people that actually owned Napster and Kazaa eventually got sued anyway.

Kazaa was initially built by some programmers in Estonia and then purchased by two guys: Niklas Zennstrom of Sweden and Janus Friis of Denmark. Zennstrom and Friis developed Kazaa a bit more and by around 2003, it became the most downloaded piece of software ever. They sold the company to Sharman Networks shortly thereafter and set out to build Skype.

Skype's Peer-to-Peer Roots

Skype leveraged the same type of peer-to-peer networking idea that Kazaa was built upon, but applied it to voice transmission instead. The idea was that the more people that used Skype, the more reliable the connection would be for each of them. Oh, and it was free. That helped a lot. Skype's big selling point was that users could make free voice calls (using their computers and a headset) to each other from anywhere in the world. After all, since it was a peer-to-peer network it was to Skype's advantage to have as many people using the network as possible so that it'd be stable and fast.

And since it used peer-to-peer technology, calls from people in the middle of nowhere would sound fine as long as other people in the middle of nowhere used Skype, too—they didn't have to be routed through some server in a more populated area—so a lot of people in the middle of nowhere started using Skype. People in populated areas did too because, hey, people like free calls. You could call someone in another country for zero dollars.

Skype very quickly became a verb, as in, "Skype me!" or "Yo Dawg, you Skypin'?" And when you become a verb, you know you've made it.

Skype also handled instant messaging, which is relatively easy compared to voice data and eventually added live videoconferencing—all of which was free between Skype users. Then it started making money by charging people for using Skype to call out to regular telephone numbers, and to accept incoming calls to Skype from outside phone numbers at rates that were pennies on the dollar compared what people were paying for standard phone service and long distance calls.

So Skype's been one of those "disruptive" technologies we've all heard about. It took a business model like expensive phone service, applied a heaping helping of technology to it, and made it so affordable that people were willing to put up with having to make phone calls while sitting at their computers. And now as mobile phone technology gets faster and better, it's starting to creep into the mobile phone space and shake things up there.

Why Microsoft?

A few years down the line, Microsoft's $8.5 billion purchase of Skype will either seem outrageous or it'll look like a good idea. You may recall that eBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion in 2006 and, up until this morning, that figure seemed outrageous. Now eBay's actually looking pretty smart, which is something that hasn't been uttered for quite some time.

But unlike eBay, Microsoft could end up putting its billions to good use, seeing that it can integrate Skype into almost any of its products. It'll be able to handle live video chat on Windows computers and Xbox 360 consoles, help groups of people quickly collaborate on Office documents, and facilitate call-back and instant messaging features in Outlook, just to name a few of its potential uses. And don't forget about Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 mobile platform. That'll put just about every one of Skype's features to work.

Skype also has around 700 million users, too, with whom Microsoft now has a pretty direct line of communication. Run the numbers and, all told, Microsoft paid about $12 per person for that sort of access.
http://techland.time.com/2011/05/10/...tory-of-skype/





Movie Streamers Line Up Heavyweight Lawyers To Fight MPAA
enigmax

The bizarre-yet-brilliant streaming movie service Zediva recently punched a hole straight through the MPAA’s restrictive licensing roadblocks. Now the fledgling outfit is facing the legal might of Hollywood who want to bomb it back to the Stone Age. Perhaps surprisingly, Zedivca aren’t rolling over and have instead compiled a dream team of lawyers to fight back.

Earlier this year a brand new streaming movie service appeared which repackaged and augmented something old in order to fill a gap in the market. The both brilliant and bizarre Zediva service allowed subscribers to watch movies online that are not available on services such as Netflix because they are still in the DVD sales window.

A product of the movie industry’s licensing rules put in place to avoid the cannibalization of DVD sales, Zediva allowed its subscribers to rent and view physical DVDs remotely using the Internet. Needless to say the MPAA weren’t amused and in early April they filed a lawsuit at the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

“Zediva illegally streams movies to its customers without obtaining required licenses from the movie studios,” said the MPAA, adding that Zediva is little more than a “sham”.

But rather than roll over and die, perhaps surprisingly Zediva are fighting back. According to Paid Content, Zediva have hired a team of lawyers from “elite” San Francisco law firm, Durie Tangri.

The team includes Joe Gratz, the lead attorney in the recent case of EFF/Augusto v Universal Music Group. Troy Augusto was sued by UMG for selling promo CDs on eBay and was represented by the EFF. He won the case, affirming an eBay seller’s right to resell promotional CDs bought from secondhand stores.

Also on the team is file-sharing expert Michael Page. He was lead counsel for Grokster in their epic battle against the record labels and studios, representing them at district, Ninth Circuit, and Supreme Court levels. For this he received the California Lawyer Attorney of the Year award for 2005.

Also on the team is Mark Lemley who commands a place in countless lists of “most-admired” Intellectual Property lawyers. An author of six books, Lemley is a founding partner of Durie Tangri, a veteran of cases involving Comcast, Google, Grokster and NetFlix, and has taught intellectual property law to both federal and state judges.

As detailed by Paid Content, the MPAA aren’t taking any chances either. They’ve hired a team from Munger, Tolles & Olson which includes Glenn Pomerantz and Kelly Klaus – lawyers currently engaged in beating up LimeWire.
http://torrentfreak.com/movie-stream...t-mpaa-110512/





Netflix CEO: We Don't Want World War III With Cable
Julianne Pepitone

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is pleased with his company's massive growth, but he fears that getting too large will start "an Armageddon" with cable networks.

Hastings talked about Netflix's "niche" philosophy -- a Goldilocks-esque business plan of staying "not too big, not too small" -- in a panel discussion Tuesday at the Wired Business Conference in New York City.

Panel moderator Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired magazine, asked Hastings who is "most threatened" by Netflix as it expands its streaming video content.

"We've consistently said getting into current season [TV] or newer movies would not be profitable for us," Hastings said. "It would be an Armageddon. It would be World War III, and we likely wouldn't survive that battle."

Anderson then read a quote from a Comcast exec who said that Netflix doesn't compete with TV, it competes with reruns.

Hastings acknowledged that his company doesn't expect to compete on sports and breaking news, which are suited to live broadcast. "[Netflix is] not every single thing all of you folks want to watch, but it's $8 a month," he said. "It's choosier content."

Still, it's clear that one of Netflix's top priorities is upgrading the quality and depth of the content it has available for instant streaming. On top of licensing its first original series -- "House of Cards," starring Kevin Spacey and due out in late 2012 -- Netflix has recently snapped up some choice reruns, including "Mad Men" and the first season of "Glee."

"You have to make a deal with the content owner," Hastings said. "Luckily we're bigger now, so we can write the check and get the content flowing."

That's a costly and time-consuming process, but it's been in the game plan all along. Netflix (NFLX) attracted most of its giant subscriber base -- which now tops 22 million in the U.S. -- through its DVDs-by-mail rental service. But streaming has been the real goal ever since the company's inception in 1997, according to Hastings.

"We had set up the whole business essentially for streaming, but the network wasn't big enough years ago," he said. "But in 2005 we clicked on YouTube and watched cats on skateboards -- and we thought, it's here! Since then, we've had so much fun finally delivering on our name: Net. Flix."
http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/03/tech...owth/index.htm





Comcast Users Blocked From The Pirate Bay
Ernesto

During the last few hours reports have been trickling in from Comcast subscribers who are unable to access The Pirate Bay website. Although there is no sign that Comcast is actively blocking user access to the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, something is clearly not in order. The Pirate Bay team have confirmed that they are not the ones who are blocking, and they’re investigating the issue.

Starting few hours ago, Comcast subscribers began reporting issues with accessing The Pirate Bay.

Although downtime is nothing new for users of the popular BitTorrent site, this time around the connectivity issues appear to be affecting only a select group.

Several tests and numerous user reports reveal that Comcast subscribers from all across the United States are unable to connect to The Pirate Bay. The traceroute from Comcast connections stops at thepiratebay.piratpartiet.se, as it’s supposed to, but The Pirate Bay website does not appear.

Further tests show that the blockade is not DNS related. What is actually causing the issue is uncertain at this point.

Although there’s been a lot of talk about censorship lately, it seems doubtful that this is an intentional blockade on Comcast’s part. That said, there is clearly a mismatch between the Comcast network and The Pirate Bay site which leaves access to the rest of the Internet unaffected.

TorrentFreak spoke to The Pirate Bay team who confirmed that there’s a significant drop in visitors from the U.S. They are currently investigating the issue to see if there’s anything they can do on their end.

When it comes to BitTorrent blocking, Comcast already has quite a reputation. In 2007 TorrentFreak broke the news that Comcast was actively blocking BitTorrent traffic. Comcast initially denied, but later admitted its wrongdoings.

Comcast’s BitTorrent blocking fueled the Net Neutrality debates and eventually resulted in an FCC investigation and various lawsuits. A class action lawsuit was settled by the ISP who reserved a $16 million fund for affected subscribers.

In the light of all the previous legal issues it therefore seems unlikely that Comcast has ventured out on its own to block The Pirate Bay website.

When there’s more information available on the current issues we’ll update this article. In the meantime Comcast users can access the site through Anonymouse and other proxies.

Update: It appears that many Rogers users in Canada have problems accessing the site as well.
http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-bloc...te-bay-110512/





Comcast Offers Help to The Pirate Bay, Problems Fixed
Ernesto

Starting 24 hours ago, nearly all Comcast subscribers were unable to access The Pirate Bay. Although Comcast is not the only ISP affected by the connectivity issue, the problems appear to be most widespread in their network. In an effort to resolve the problems, Comcast has offered The Pirate Bay assistance from their engineers, to get to the bottom of the issue.

Yesterday TorrentFreak received several emails from worried Comcast subscribers who could no longer load their favorite BitTorrent site, The Pirate Bay.

A quick look at our web-analytics further revealed a bump in people searching Google for “thepiratebay down”.

The majority of these people showed up as Comcast subscribers, which led us to conclude that something is up with the connection between The Pirate Bay and the Comcast network.

This morning we wrote an article on the issue, mentioning that The Pirate Bay was trying to find the origin of the problem.

The report didn’t go unnoticed by Comcast either. In a response to the issue Jason Livingood, Executive Director Internet Systems Engineering at Comcast, told TorrentFreak: “Please note that we do not block websites and we are NOT blocking The Pirate Bay.”

As stated in the original article, we never suspected an intentional blockade, but something was clearly wrong. Luckily, Comcast is there to help The Pirate Bay get back on track.

Comcast has reached out to The Pirate Bay and set aside resources in case the BitTorrent site needs it. “I can have our engineers work directly with them to assist,” Jason Livingood told TorrentFreak.

Initially The Pirate Bay team suspected that Comcast might be filtering PMTU responses, but Comcast looked into this and ruled it out. At the moment The Pirate Bay team is looking at other possibilities, but Comcast is confident that they’re not causing the problem.

The Pirate Bay team prefers to keep the exact location of their core hardware somewhat of a mystery, and some of this network magic may conflict with Comcast at the moment. It’s expected that, with or without help from Comcast, the issues will be resolved soon.

Update: Right before we finished this article, Comcast users were able to connect to The Pirate Bay again. The issue was reverse path filtering in a Tier1 network Comcast traffic went through.

Comcast reached out to Serious Tubes Networks, who deliver transit to The Pirate Bay, and they were able to correct the issue.

“Comcast emailed our NOC about their users complaining about not reaching The Pirate Bay. We resolved the issue and TPB can now be reached from ComCast,” the CEO of Serious Tubes Networks told TorrentFreak.

Indeed, Comcast Cares.
http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-offe...te-bay-110512/





F.C.C. Commissioner Leaving To Join Comcast
Edward Wyatt

Four months after the Federal Communications Commission approved the merger of Comcast and NBC Universal, one of the commissioners who approved the deal said she would join Comcast to oversee its government affairs office.

Meredith Attwell Baker, a former Commerce Department official in the George W. Bush administration, announced on Thursday that she will leave the F.C.C. when her term expires at the end of June. At Comcast, she will serve as senior vice president of government affairs for NBC Universal.

Ms. Baker, one of two Republicans on the five-member commission, was nominated to F.C.C. by President Obama and started there in July 2009. As part of an ethics pledge she signed upon taking office at the F.C.C., she will not be able to contact F.C.C. officials for the length of the Obama administration, a Comcast spokeswoman said.

In addition, Ms. Baker will not be allowed to lobby any executive branch or agency official on matters related to the Comcast-NBC merger for the remainder of the administration. The F.C.C. voted 4 to 1 in January to approve the merger, subject to several conditions.

The departure drew immediate criticism from group that opposed the Comcast-NBC merger. Craig Aaron, the president and chief executive of Free Press, a media interest group, called the move “just the latest, though perhaps most blatant, example of a so-called public servant cashing in at a company she is supposed to be regulating.”
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.co...-join-comcast/





Senators Grill AT&T and T-Mobile CEOs Over Their Proposed Merger
Jim Puzzanghera

Skeptical lawmakers on Wednesday interrogated the chief executives of AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile USA about their proposed merger, raising concerns that the $39-billion deal would increase prices for wireless consumers by creating a market dominated by two huge players.

“The more providers of cellphone service, the lower the price, the better the quality of service and the more innovation that results,” said Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), chairman of the Senate's antitrust subcommittee.

“So the burden will squarely be on AT&T and T-Mobile to convince us why this merger is desirable, how it will benefit consumers, and to put aside our concerns that it may very well harm competition.”

The deal, announced in March, would combine AT&T, the nation’s second-largest wireless provider, with No. 4 T-Mobile. The new behemoth would vault ahead of Verizon Wireless to become the nation's largest carrier. AT&T and Verizon would control nearly 80% of the market, with Sprint in a distant third.

The Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission are reviewing the deal to determine if it will harm wireless competition and is in the public interest.

Analysts have said the deal faces tough hurdles to approval from the Obama administration, which has vowed to be tougher on antitrust issues.

AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson and T-Mobile CEO Philipp Humm told the subcommittee that the deal would benefit consumers by merging two companies with complementary technology, allowing it to deliver next-generation wireless service to more customers than it could separately as available airwaves become scarce.

They said the improved and expanded service made possible by the merger would continue the wireless innovation that has driven prices down and would help expand high-speed wireless Internet access, a major goal of the Obama administration.

“It’s a very basic concept that in any industry, greater capacity is a fundamental driver of competition,” Stephenson said. “Over the last decade, U.S. wireless prices have steadily come down and this transaction will allow that to continue.”

Congress has no vote on the deal, but opposition from lawmakers can influence regulators. Kohl has vowed to look closely at the deal. And the title of the hearing raised the question of a potential emerging wireless monopoly similar to the one AT&T had decades ago in the traditional land-line world -- “The AT&T/T-Mobile Merger: Is Humpty Dumpty Being Put Back Together Again?"

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse warned that the deal would lead to a duopoly that would increase prices.
“AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile will turn back the clock on wireless competition,” he told the subcommittee. “It will … put Ma Bell back together again.”

In that environment, Sprint would be a likely takeover target. That would leave the nation with only two nationwide carriers, which would have huge clout to sign more exclusive deals on innovative devices as AT&T has had with the iPhone, and hobbling small, regional wireless companies as well, Hesse said.

Kohl said that having fewer national wireless providers would be alarming.

“If we go from four to three and then from three to two, that’s pretty serious,” he said.
Kohl’s concerns have been echoed by public interest groups.

“Sprint will have just 16% and will instantly become a takeover target,” Gigi Sohn, president of digital rights group Public Knowledge, told the subcommittee. “We should not go back to the future … back to duopoly.”

Victor H. "Hu" Meena, chief executive of Cellular South Inc., a wireless provider in Mississippi, said the deal would cause small carriers like his to either “be acquired or bled dry” by AT&T and Verizon because the smaller providers would be unable to compete with the giants' market clout.

“We can find nothing good about it,” he said of the deal. “It’s bad for consumers. It’s bad for jobs. It’s bad for competition.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said he was skeptical about AT&T’s promises that the deal would lead to more service in rural states such as his. The Judiciary Committee will push regulators to perform an “exhaustive and careful analysis.”

“I expect the Justice Department is leery of creating a market where other companies have to merge in order to survive,” Leahy said.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/tech...antitrust.html





KPN Under Fire Over Internet Privacy

Criticism is mounting of telecoms company KPN for using software known as Deep Packet Inspection to monitor what extra services mobile internet users are accessing.

KPN said on Thursday it used DPI to monitor use of the WhatsApp application for smart phones but denied it analyses actual messaging and content. Vodafone has also admitted using DPI to monitor mobile internet use.

T-Mobile has not admitted using DPI but does say it keeps an eye on what bandwidth mobile internet users are taking up, to make sure there is enough capacity, news agency ANP reports.

Extra charges

KPN is planning to introduce extra fees for some mobile internet services, such as internet-based phone calls and DPI allows it to analyse what services customers are using.

Digital rights group Bits of Freedom believes KPN is violating the law and is calling on KPN subscribers to lodge legal complaints, website Wireless Federation said.

The consumers association Consumentenbond has called on the privacy watchdog to look into the use of DPI.

Alternatives

Telecoms watchdog Opta has already said KPN should not use the technology to analyse what its customers are doing online because there is enough other technology to achieve the same result. Opta too called on the privacy watchdog CBP to intervene.

The CBP has not yet responded.

DPI can also be used to offer targeted advertising and copyright protection.
http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archive...internet_p.php





The Class That Built Apps, and Fortunes
Miguel Helft

ALL right, class, here’s your homework assignment: Devise an app. Get people to use it. Repeat.

That was the task for some Stanford students in the fall of 2007, in what became known here as the “Facebook Class.”

No one expected what happened next.

The students ended up getting millions of users for free apps that they designed to run on Facebook. And, as advertising rolled in, some of those students started making far more money than their professors.

Almost overnight, the Facebook Class fired up the careers and fortunes of more than two dozen students and teachers here. It also helped to pioneer a new model of entrepreneurship that has upturned the tech establishment: the lean start-up.

“Everything was happening so fast,” recalls Joachim De Lombaert, now 23. His team’s app netted $3,000 a day and morphed into a company that later sold for a six-figure sum.

“I almost didn’t realize what it all meant,” he says.

Neither did many of his classmates. Back then, Facebook apps were a novelty. The iPhone had just arrived, and the first Android phone was a year off.

But by teaching students to build no-frills apps, distribute them quickly and worry about perfecting them later, the Facebook Class stumbled upon what has become standard operating procedure for a new generation of entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley and beyond. For many, the long trek from idea to product to company has turned into a sprint.

Start-ups once required a lot of money, time and people. But over the past decade, free, open-source software and “cloud” services have brought costs down, while ad networks help bring in revenue quickly.

The app phenomenon has accentuated the trend and helped unleash what some call a new wave of technology innovation — and what others call a bubble.

Early on, the Facebook Class became a microcosm of Silicon Valley. Working in teams of three, the 75 students created apps that collectively had 16 million users in just 10 weeks. Many of those apps were sort of silly: Mr. De Lombaert’s, for example, allowed users to send “hotness” points to Facebook friends. Yet during the term, the apps, free for users, generated roughly $1 million in advertising revenue.

Such successes helped inspire entrepreneurs to ditch business plans and work on apps. Not all succeeded, but those that did helped to fuel the expansion of Facebook, which now has nearly 700 million users.

Venture capitalists also began rethinking their approach. Some created investment funds tailored to the new, bare-bones start-ups.

“A lot of the concepts and ideas that came out of the class influenced the structure of the fund that I am working on now,” says Dave McClure, one of the class instructors and founder of 500 Startups, which invests in lean start-ups. “The class was the realization that this stuff really works.”

Nearly four years later, many of the students have learned that building a business is a lot harder than creating an app — even an app worthy of an A+.

“Starting a company is definitely more work,” says Edward Baker, who was Mr. De Lombaert’s partner in the class and later in business. The two have founded Friend.ly, a social networking start-up.

Still, many students were richly rewarded. Some turned their homework into companies. A few have since sold those businesses to the likes of Zynga. Others joined hot start-ups like RockYou, a gaming site that at the time was among the most successful Facebook apps.

The Facebook Class changed Mr. De Lombaert’s life. His team’s app, Send Hotness, brought in more users and more money faster than any other in the class. And its success attracted the attention of venture capitalists.

“The class, more than anything, set the tone for us to try to start something big,” says Mr. Baker, 32, Friend.ly’s C.E.O.

When the Send Hotness app began to take off, Mr. Baker encouraged Mr. De Lombaert to treat himself to a new car. Mr. De Lombaert settled for a laptop. (He also put some money aside to help to pay his Stanford tuition.) They eventually sold the app to a dating Web site.

Facebook did not actively participate in the Stanford class. But some of its engineers attended sessions, and it benefited from the success of the students’ apps. “It really felt like an incubator,” says David Fetterman, a Facebook engineer who helped develop the applications platform.

The startling success of some of the class’s projects got Silicon Valley buzzing. The final session, held in an auditorium in December 2007, was attended by more than 500 people, including many investors.

“The Facebook platform was taking off, and there was this feeling of a gold rush,” said Mike Maples Jr., an investor who attended some of the classes and ended up backing one of the start-ups.

THE Facebook Class was the brainchild of B. J. Fogg, who runs the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford. An energetic academic and an innovation guru, he focuses on how to harness technology and human psychology to influence people’s behavior.

Mr. Fogg thought that the Facebook platform would be a good way to test some of his theories. Creating a new model of entrepreneurship was far from his mind.

At first, university administrators pushed back. “Facebook was not taken so seriously in academic circles back then,” Mr. Fogg recalls.

But there was no hesitation among students — from undergraduates in computer science to M.B.A. candidates — who were spending much of their lives immersed in Facebook.

From the start, many approached the class from a business angle. Mr. Baker, for instance, was a graduate business student but lacked technical skills, so he spent his first week interviewing engineers. “I wanted a technical co-founder,” he says.

He settled on Mr. De Lombaert, and the two, along with a third student, Alex Onsager, created Send Hotness. It let users send points to friends they considered “hot” and to compare “hotness” rankings.

Soon they found themselves in a proverbial “the dog ate my homework” situation. Three days before a presentation was due, Mr. De Lombaert accidentally deleted the computer code he was tinkering with. “We kind of freaked out,” he recalls.

Rebuilding the app would take too long. So, working around the clock over a weekend, they built another version, with a more rudimentary algorithm.

The stripped-down app took off. In five weeks, five million people signed up. When the team began placing ads on the app, the money poured in.

They had stumbled upon one of the themes of the class: make things simple, and perfect them later.

“The students did an amazing job of getting stuff into the market very quickly,” says Michael Dearing, a consulting associate professor at the Institute of Design at Stanford, who now teaches a class based on similar, rapid prototyping ideas. “It was a huge success.”

DAN GREENBERG was sitting at the kitchen table one night when he and another teaching assistant decided to get into the app game. Mr. Greenberg, a graduate student who had done research for Mr. Fogg, hadn’t planned to get app-happy. But the students’ success whetted his appetite.

Four weeks into the quarter, he and his colleague, Rob Fan, set out to create an app that would let Facebook users send “hugs” to one another.

It took them all of five hours.

The app took off. So they moved on to apps for “kisses,” “pillow fights” and other digital interactions — 70 in all.

Their apps caught on with millions of people and were soon bringing in nearly $100,000 a month in ads. After the class ended, the two started a company, 750 Industries, named after the 750 Pub at Stanford where Mr. Greenberg and Mr. Fan where drinking when they decided to become business partners.

But juggling the business and schoolwork was too much for Mr. Greenberg, then 22. So he called his father.

“I said, ‘Dad, it is 10 p.m., and I’ve got so much stuff to do,’ ” Mr. Greenberg recalls. “ ‘We’re running this business, and I’ve got customers, and we are earning money, and we got financing and we have people to hire. But I have to write a paper tonight, and I just don’t have time for it.’ ”

His father advised him to pull a Mark Zuckerberg and drop out. The next day, Mr. Greenberg did just that.

Now 25, he works out of a glass-walled corner office in San Francisco. He is C.E.O. of his company, now called Sharethrough, which uses social media to distribute videos across the Web for companies. It employs 30 people and has raised about $6 million in venture capital. “It feels like a fairy tale when you look back on it,” he says of the class.

He has upgraded his lifestyle somewhat, but still doesn’t own a car. “I have a Vespa and skateboard,” he says.

“LOVE CHILD.” It sounds like an unlikely name for an app. But Johnny Hwin and his Stanford class team set out to build an app of that name, one that would let two users create and raise a virtual child. It never took off.

“We were overly ambitious,” Mr. Hwin says.

Seeing his classmates strike gold with simpler ideas proved to be a valuable lesson. In 2009, he began working on Damntheradio.com, a Facebook marketing tool that helped bands and musicians connect with fans online.

It opened last June and was acquired in January by FanBridge, where Mr. Hwin is now a vice president, for a few million dollars, he says.

Mr. Hwin, who is 26 and also a musician, now lives in a loft space in the Mission neighborhood in San Francisco. He uses his place as a kind of salon for late-night art shows and concerts.

“With Love Child, we wanted it to be perfect,” he says. With Damntheradio, he found his first clients by showing mockups of the product. “We were able to launch within weeks,” he says.

Another class member, Robert Cezar Matei, says he had only modest success with his projects. One, he said, allowed users to send “cheesy pickup lines” to friends; another encouraged people to reveal something about themselves. After graduating from Stanford, he wanted to earn some money to go traveling, but instead of getting a job, he decided to write Facebook apps. “I’d seen my peers being so successful with apps,” he says. “If they could do it, I could do it.”

After a few false starts, he created an app that let people send points and “kisses” to friends. It struggled until Mr. Matei, who speaks several languages, translated the app. The next day, traffic jumped fivefold. He added games, and employees, and the app became one of the most popular Facebook programs in Europe. In late 2009, he sold to Zynga for an undisclosed sum.

Also in the class was Joshua Reeves, who built an app that created animations that Facebook members would send to one another as birthday greetings or other messages. It made enough money for him to quit his job in 2008 to start Buzzeo, a content management system for Facebook. A year ago, Buzzeo was acquired by Context Optional, where Mr. Reeves, 28, is now a vice president. Last week, Efficient Frontier, a digital marketing company, acquired Context Optional for an undisclosed sum.

ONE recent afternoon at the headquarters of Friend.ly in Mountain View, Calif., 10 engineers worked away as two employees turned their attention to a companywide project: a 24,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.

For much of the past year, Friend.ly has worked on developing its service, a social network for meeting new people, without much success. A few weeks ago, the work appeared to pay off: traffic took off, growing to nearly five million monthly users.

Mr. Baker says the Facebook platform is a magnet for young developers, even though the kind of simple apps that were the focus of his Stanford class now face bigger hurdles. Facebook has made it harder to develop big-hit apps by controlling how apps spread virally.

But Mr. Fogg, says that for those who were at the right place at the right time — in late 2007 — things were different. “There was a period of time when you could walk in and collect gold,” he says. “It was landscape that was ready to be harvested.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/t...y/08class.html





3-D Plastic Art for the Masses: Ready to Print
Melena Ryzik

As it turns out, there really is a great future in plastics.

“There’s nothing like working with plastic!” Marius Watz announced to an appreciative crowd at the start of a talk in Brooklyn recently. Mr. Watz, a Norwegian-born artist, was describing his work with MakerBot, a new consumer-grade, desktop-size 3-D printer. With some assembly and do-it-yourself tinkering, the MakerBot makes, or “prints,” three-dimensional objects from molten plastic, creating a piggy bank, say, or a Darth Vader head from a computer design at the touch of a button.

“I’d heard about 3-D printing in the ’90s, but at that time it sounded like some sci-fi technology, like laser guns,” Mr. Watz said. “Basically, it sounded totally awesome.”

“Awesome” was sort of the buzzword at MakerBot’s inaugural open house, held at its warehouselike offices in Gowanus, Brooklyn, where Mr. Watz, its first artist in residence, showed off his sculptural forms (“We just started doing some blobby objects — vaguely disturbing but also awesome”) to a few dozen admirers and MakerBot owners, mostly guys in various stages of nerdy bliss. (“Aaawwwe-some.”)

After a burst of invention by three friends, the company was formed two years ago— “built on caffeine,” said a founder, Bre Pettis — and has since expanded to 32 employees and thousands of MakerBot kits sold. Three-D printing has existed for years, but the machines were cumbersome and expensive, relegated to art and engineering schools, often monopolized by specialists. The MakerBot, which tops out at about $1,300, gives anybody with a computer and an idea the same creative horsepower, and artists are beginning to take notice.

On Saturday 3rd Ward, the Brooklyn arts and design collective, will host a Make-a-Thon, where those interested can play with the Bots and receive miniature 3-D busts of themselves printed by Kyle McDonald, MakerBot’s current artist in residence and an expert in digital scanning.

“It’s definitely baked into the DNA of MakerBot that this is a tool for creative people,” said Mr. Pettis, who worked as a middle school art teacher in Seattle before starting the company with Zach Hoeken Smith and Adam Mayer, hardware and Web developers. (They met at a Brooklyn hacker space.) As part of their mission, MakerBot’s founders also embrace sharing: users are encouraged to post their designs for the machine on a company blog, Thingiverse, where anyone can have access to them, to print or modify.
“We’re obsessively open-source,” said Mr. Pettis, who, like many people in the MakerBot universe, speaks with the zeal of the technologically converted. “In this age of the Internet, the sharers are the people who will come out ahead — the people who make progress and then share it so that other people can stand on their shoulders.”

He knows his audience. John Abella, a MakerBot hobbyist from Huntington, N.Y., came to the open house with a bin full of objects for the show-and-tell.

“Almost all these things are things we got off Thingiverse,” he said, clutching a brightly colored plastic doodad. “We have a rabbit that someone put a dragon head on.”

Mr. Abella, 35, who works in network security, said the appeal of MakerBot was that “everybody sees it with their own slant.”

“My wife’s friends look at it, and they ask me for cookie cutters in shapes that don’t exist,” he continued. “At work people see it and say, ‘Can that replace the missing part in the company Ping-Pong table?’ ” (Probably, though the MakerBot has its limits — it can print objects that are at most five inches on a side, at relatively low resolution.)

Another hobbyist, Ed Hebel, made a carrying case for a single cigarette. “I go out and I don’t want to take a whole pack of cigarettes,” Mr. Hebel, an engineer from upstate New York, said, demonstrating his little holder, which he invented for the show-and-tell. “This is called a Lucy. I thought of this like two days ago. I thought for like 20 minutes, and I thought of this. And an hour later, I printed it.”

And shortly after that, it went up on Thingiverse, where, despite Mr. Hebel’s disclaimer that smoking is bad, another user quickly suggested a modification.

As part of its open-source ethos, in its offices MakerBot has a “botfarm” — 18 machines capable of operating almost continuously — that it will give over to worthwhile projects. Michael Felix, a Brooklyn designer, used it to make the hinges for a giant geodesic dome he built for a music video shoot. Noting that nearly 4,500 MakerBots have been sold so far, Mr. Pettis said, “For artists, it’s kind of like, imagine, you create something that’s a 3-D model, there’s 4,500 different locations in the world where it can seep out of the Internet into the real world and blow people’s minds.”

But the ease of replication does present some questions for art professionals.

“Art is not traditionally an open-source practice,” Mr. Watz, who is represented by the DAM gallery in Berlin, noted dryly at the open house. Nonetheless, he posted some of his technical specs on Thingiverse, explaining that he didn’t want to take advantage of the generous community spirit there without giving back.

And as a digitally oriented artist, Mr. Watz said, he had long questioned the art market’s economy of scarcity, even if he participated in it with limited-edition designs. For prospective buyers, he does offer to sign his MakerBot work, which brings up another question.

“What is the real value of my signature on the object?” he mused, adding: “When I’m trying to model with the MakerBot, I don’t consider that printed model the final product. It’s the process that is the significant part.”

Some Bot artists are just excited about the machine’s practical applications. David Bell and Joe Scarpulla have been laboring for years on a stop-motion animated film and photo series with an elaborate, labor-intensive miniature set. On a whim, Mr. Bell and Mr. Scarpulla bought a MakerBot — a “CupCake” model, which costs about $700 — and found it to be a good fit as a custom manufacturer.

“Our first successful prop was a miniature toilet bowl,” Mr. Bell said. “We’re outfitting an entire apartment in 1/8 scale. So far we’ve done sinks and light sockets, a bathtub and pots and pans.” Including the painstaking design process and troubleshooting, using the Bot takes the same amount of time as hand carving, Mr. Scarpulla added, “but the results are definitely better.”

Now they are imagining other things they can use their machine for, on a much bigger scale. “It opens up a lot of opportunities,” Mr. Bell said.

That sentiment was echoed by Mr. Watz and Mr. McDonald and visible on a tour of MakerBot headquarters, known as the Botcave. In the front, by the whirring Botfarm, is a vending machine of Bot-extruded plastic bangles. Employees sit behind stacks of products with high-tech Seussian names, like Thingomatic Gen. 4 Subkit for Stepper Drivers V 3.3.

Little plastic doohickeys and thingamabobs cover many surfaces. (A new employee recalled being told to print out his own coat hook.) Mr. McDonald, 25, comes nearly every day to work on his MakerBot project, which turns the Kinect, an inexpensive 3-D scanner and Xbox accessory, into a miniature replicator. Though his previous work was theoretical — his background is in computer science and philosophy, which translated to an interest in “democratizing technology,” he said — playing with plastics and engaging with other Bot fiends has changed his focus.

“Now I think about physical things,” he said. “I spend a lot of time thinking, how can these systems be used in an interactive way? It’s basically my full-time job to inspire myself and others. It doesn’t pay very well, but I’m happy.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/a...d-printer.html





Solar Fire Breakthrough
Marcin

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a breakthrough on the Solar Turbine project. We are adopting the Solar Fire concentrator technology as our official solar energy platform. OSE and Solar Fire are entering into partnership – with a single purpose of creating a state-of-art, replicable, open source platform for solar concentrator power applied to electricity, space heating, and process heat.

Prototyping done already by Solar Fire indicates that electrical production can be attained by such a system at a $0.5-$1 system materials cost per peak watt – if combined with a modern steam engine as the heat engine. This is about a factor of 10 lower than photovoltaics. See Eerik Wissenz, Solar Fire project leader, introduce the latest successful prototype of 32 square meter solar capture area:

Solar Fire is now officially adopted as the OSE pathway to the Solar Concentrator – one of the 50 technologies of the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS). Eerik is now the Project Leader for the OSE Solar Concentrator development. Solar Fire is bringing 3 key developments:

1. Simple focusing mechanism for the individual mirrors (as seen in video)
2. Computational program (open source) to calculate mirror alignment
3. Low cost collector and reflector structure

OSE is bringing 3 key contributions to the table:

1. Development of the modern steam engine as the heat engine for the solar concentrator, which is one of the 50 GVCS technologies
2. Development of a solar tracking and mirror cleaning system for full automation of the device, as well as development of measures to protect against hail and heavy winds
3. Media exposure to promote this idea worth spreading

We will be adding the solar concentrator to our Kickstarter offering on the Open Source Microfactory, which we are planning to deploy on June 1, 2011. Thus, it will be the Solar Microfactory. Now if we put the Distributive Enterprise concept into the core of our Kickstarter offering – then we might have to extend our offering to the Mobile Solar Microfactory- with an early release of the Civilization Starter Kit DVD v0.1 as one of the rewards. We are planning to build the Solar Fire P32 (as in the above video) with a modern steam engine in September, 2011 – during the first, major, one-month long Factor e Farm Convergence of 2011.

If you have been following our work on the solar concentrator system – such as the initial prototyping work at Factor e Farm, you will note that Solar Fire is a departure from our former strategy of the Linear Solar Concentrator. The big point of the Linear Fresnel Type Concentrator, as discussed in Factor e Live Distillations – Part 8 – Solar Power Generator – is that the linear concentrator is inherently scalable. One can scale a linear array infinitely by lengthening it – thereby meeting the scalability criterion of OSE Specifications for Distributive Enterprise. The problem with dish concentrator systems is that they are not scalable. Structural costs become prohibitive for increasing dish size. It turns out that the Solar Fire system addresses the scalability question very well for 2 reasons. First – the Solar Fire system is a low-to-the-ground, flat array of mirrors – with inherently low structural costs (wind-loading is addressed by the low-to-the-ground profile). Second, the solar receiver is an extremely simple, low cost design: essentially an empty drum with a rounded front face – at a cost of about $100 in materials for the P32 system.

To scale power, individual arrays with individual solar receivers can be replicated. For higher power applications, the receivers are simply linked via insulated interconnections. Because of the low cost of the receiver, the system cost scales linearly with added usable power – so the system is infinitely scalable. This means that a given community can build up its power-generating infrastructure on-demand, as it grows. So Eerik is a smart guy, and he has me totally convinced on the scalability issue – by his cost structure data for the system. We are expecting to put the entire P32 – with receiver for $2k in materials, and $2.5k in materials including a 5 hp uniflow, bump-valve steam engine. This is a psychological relief for me – as I admittedly had no practical clue as far as how to produce an effective, low-cost receiver if we went with the linear concentrator system. Industry standards show that this is possible, but that would have been an arduous up-hill battle if we were to succeed. At the same time – I can’t see any way to come up with a linear collector anywhere as low in cost as the Solar Fire point-receiver. We are building on the work of the Whitecliffs Solar Power Station – which has demonstrated exactly the simple bump-valve uniflow steam engine that we are pursuing in our prototype. They have run the steam engine successfully for thousands of hours, and attained 21% solar conversion efficiency to electricity. The parameters for the Solar Fire P32 indicate that we should attain a 15% efficiency with our system if we use the bump-valve uniflow steam engine design. This means 3kW peak of electrical power!

We are enlisting the peer review of the Steam Automobile Club of America – a goldmine of talent. Ladies and gentleman – to sum up – solar power is coming to Factor e Farm this September – a welcome breakthrough, ahead of schedule. It looks like we’ll be testing our first steam engines in real life with the solar concentrator – which has the advantage of a ‘clean burn’ that does not require cleaning of the steam generator. This means no maintenance requirements, as opposed to the case when chemical fuels are burned. We have retired our 1-cylinder Lister diesel engine years ago when we received a donation of 2kW peak solar cells from Ersol. I’ve been anticipating the moment of going from solar panels (photovoltaic power) to solar concentrators (solar concentrator electric power) for years now. The former is still an eco-elite privilege, while the latter has the capacity to provide Power to the People.

If you look at this issue from general principles – semiconductors will never be as cheap as mirrors. I stand in awe as the countdown to September continues, as we may break through the smoke and mirrors surrounding energy access for humanity. Share this far and wide and tweet this. This could be major news. It’s open source, so it may be coming to your rooftop or backyard next.
http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/2011/05/solar-fire/





Facebook Busted in Clumsy Smear on Google
Dan Lyons

The social network secretly hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about the search giant, The Daily Beast's Dan Lyons reveals—a caper that is blowing up in their face, and escalating their war.

For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.

The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. It got worse when USA Today broke a story accusing Burson of spreading a “whisper campaign” about Google “on behalf of an unnamed client.”

Article - Lyons Facebook Google Facebook hired a private PR company to plant negative Google stories in the press. Credit: AP Photo

But who was the mysterious unnamed client? While fingers pointed at Apple and Microsoft, The Daily Beast discovered that it's a company nobody suspected—Facebook.

Confronted with evidence, a Facebook spokesman last night confirmed that Facebook hired Burson, citing two reasons: First, because it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, because Facebook resents Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service.

Like a Cold War spy case made public, the PR fiasco reveals—and ratchets up—the growing rivalry between Google and Facebook. Google, the search giant, views Facebook as a threat, and has been determined to fight back by launching a social-networking system of its own. So far, however, Google has not had much luck, but Facebook nonetheless felt it necessary to return fire—clandestinely.

Here were two guys from one of the biggest PR agencies in the world, blustering around Silicon Valley like a pair of Keystone Kops.

At issue in this latest skirmish is a Google tool called Social Circle, which lets people with Gmail accounts see information not only about their friends but also about the friends of their friends, which Google calls “secondary connections.” Burson, in its pitch to journalists, claimed Social Circle was “designed to scrape private data and build deeply personal dossiers on millions of users—in a direct and flagrant violation of [Google's] agreement with the FTC.”

Also from Burson: “The American people must be made aware of the now immediate intrusions into their deeply personal lives Google is cataloging and broadcasting every minute of every day—without their permission.”

Chris Soghoian, a blogger Burson offered to help write an op-ed, says Burson was “making a mountain out of molehill,” and that Social Circle isn’t dangerous.

Soghoian asked Burson directly what company was paying the agency to spread this stuff around. Burson wouldn’t say. Miffed, Soghoian published their email exchange online. You can see it here.

The story gained wider attention when USA Today reported that two PR flacks from Burson—former CNBC tech reporter Jim Goldman, and John Mercurio, a former politcal reporter—had been pushing reporters at USA Today and other outlets to write stories and editorials claiming Google was violating people’s privacy with Social Circle.

USA Today looked into it, but decided the claims were exaggerated—at which point, Goldman ran for cover. “After Goldman’s pitch proved largely untrue, he subsequently declined USA Today’s requests for comments,” the paper reported.

The mess, seemingly worthy of a Nixon reelection campaign, is embarrassing for Facebook, which has struggled at times to brand itself as trustworthy. But even more so for Burson-Marsteller, a huge PR firm that has represented lots of blue-chip corporate clients in its 58-year history. Mark Penn, Burson’s CEO, has been a political consultant for Bill Clinton, and is best known as the chief strategist in HIllary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Yet here were two guys from one of the biggest and best-known PR agencies in the world, blustering around Silicon Valley like a pair of Keystone Kops. Even yesterday, when I asked flat out whether Facebook had been the client behind the campaign, a Burson spokesman refused to confirm it. Then, later, learning that Facebook had come clean, the Burson spokesman wrote back and confirmed it.

As for Facebook, its pious handwringing about user privacy might be a bit of a smokescreen. What really seems to be angering Facebook is that some of the stuff that pops up under “secondary connections” in Google’s Social Circle is content pulled from Facebook.

In other words, just as Google built Google News by taking content created by hundreds of newspapers and repackaging it, so now Google aims to build a social-networking business by using that rich user data that Facebook has gathered.

Facebook claims that Google is violating Facebook’s terms of service when it uses Facebook member data in that way. “We are concerned that Google may be improperly using data they have scraped about Facebook users,” the spokesman says. A Google spokeswoman reached last night said Facebook’s allegation about Google improperly using data was a new one and the company needed time to consider a response.

The clash between Google and Facebook represents one of the biggest battles of the Internet Age. Basically, the companies are vying to see who will grab the lion’s share of online advertising.

Facebook has 600 million members and gathers information on who those people are, who their friends are, and what they like. That data let Facebook sell targeted advertising. It also makes Facebook a huge rival to Google.

Last month, Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page sent out a memo telling everyone at Google that social networking was a top priority for Google—so much so that 25 percent of every Googler’s bonus this year will be based on how well Google does in social.
It’s hard to say whether Google will ever be able to crack Facebook’s grip on social networking. But after this sorry, clumsy episode, Facebook no longer seems so invincible. In fact, they almost seem a little bit afraid.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-a...mpt-on-google/





Facebook Caught Exposing Millions of User Credentials

App bug overrides user privacy settings
Dan Goodin

Facebook has leaked access to millions of users' photographs, profiles and other personal information because of a years-old bug that overrides individual privacy settings, researchers from Symantec said.

The flaw, which the researchers estimate has affected hundreds of thousands of applications, exposed user access tokens to advertisers and others. The tokens serve as a spare set of keys that Facebook apps use to perform certain actions on behalf of the user, such as posting messages to a Facebook wall or sending RSVP replies to invitations. For years, many apps that rely on an older form of user authentication turned over these keys to third parties, giving them the ability to access information users specifically designated as off limits.

The Symantec researchers said Facebook has fixed the underlying bug, but they warned that tokens already exposed may still be widely accessible.

“There is no good way to estimate how many access tokens have already been leaked since the release [of] Facebook applications back in 2007,” Symantec's Nishant Doshi wrote in a blog post published on Tuesday. “We fear a lot of these tokens might still be available in log files of third-party servers or still being actively used by advertisers.”

While many access tokens expire shortly after they're issued, Facebook also supplies offline access tokens that remain valid indefinitely. Facebook users can close this potential security hole by changing their passwords, which immediately revokes all previously issued keys.

The flaw resides in an authentication scheme that predates the roll out of a newer standard known as OAUTH. Facebook apps that rely on the legacy system and use certain commonly used code variables will leak access tokens in URLs that are automatically opened by the application host. The credentials can then be leaked to advertisers or other third parties that embed iframe tags on the host's page.

“The Facebook application is now in a position to inadvertently leak the access tokens to third parties potentially on purpose and unfortunately very commonly by accident,” Doshi wrote. “In particular, this URL, including the access token, is passed to third-party advertisers as part of the referrer field of the HTTP requests.”

A Facebook spokeswoman said there is no evidence the weakness has been exploited in ways that would violate the social network's privacy policy, which steadfastly promises: “We never share your personal information with our advertisers.” Facebook on Tuesday also announced it was permanently retiring the old authentication routine.

Doshi, who was assisted by fellow researcher Candid Wueest, said there's no way to know precisely how many apps or Facebook users were affected by the glitch. They estimate that as of last month, almost 100,000 applications were enabling the leakage and that over the years “hundreds of thousands of applications may have inadvertently leaked millions of access tokens to third parties.”

Facebook over the years has regularly been criticized for compromising the security of its users, which now number more than 500 million. The company has rolled out improvements, such as always-on web encryption, although users still must be savvy enough to turn it on themselves, since the SSL feature isn't enabled by default.

As indicated above, all previously issued access tokens can be cleared by changing your Facebook password. Readers who aren't sure if they're affected might want to err on the side of security and update their password now.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05...ntials_leaked/





KPN Deep Packet Inspection to Fit on Mobile Internet
Dimitri Reijerman

KPN has a session with investors admitted that for months the controversial deep packet inspection technology used in its mobile network. This may violate the telecommunications law.

In a question and answer session with investors confirms Marco Visser, director of KPN Mobile Netherlands, the issue that the telecommunications interception deep packet inspection method applied to mobile data customers mapping. "We have known this for the first world," according to the CEO. According to Visser dpi among others, for measuring the penetration WhatsApp to a subscriber of his flock.

Tuesday presented KPN CEO Eelco Blok figures that even the rapid growth of 'texting killer WhatsApp at Hi-subscribers had to illustrate. But according to Fisher's words that the data for a minimum period of nine months were collected through deep packet inspection.

Visser let the investors know that the controversial eavesdropping technology company's commitment to VoIP traffic on its mobile network to recognize, so that such applications now can charge separately. KPN earlier this year indicated that the new mobile subscription will come, and that prices for mobile Internet subscriptions will rise, but the company never made clear what technique was used for applications such as VoIP to identify the mobile data streams.

It is unclear whether KPN dpi technique is still applied to its mobile network and the telecommunications company that also betting on its fixed network, the company has not yet responded to questions about it. KPN is also not known whether only the header of a data packet or look it also examines the payload. Nevertheless, it seems KPN deep packet inspection to enter a gray area, and the application of this technology possible interception in violation of the law.
http://translate.google.com/translat...r.html&act=url





Zeus Source Code Leaked
Dennis Fisher

The source code to the infamous Zeus crimeware kit, which has been sold on underground forums for years, has been leaked and is now available for anyone to see if they know where to look.

Security researchers over the weekend noticed that files that appeared to contain the source code for the Zeus crimeware kit were starting to pop up on various forums frequented by attackers and cybercriminals. The Zeus exploit kit is perhaps the most well-known kit of its kind right now, and has been used by a variety of attackers for numerous malware campaigns and targeted attacks.



Danish security firm CSIS saw copies of the Zeus source code appear on underground forums in the last few days and took the time to download and compile the code.

"This weekend we found the complete source code for this crime kit being leaked to the masses on several underground forums as well as through other channels. We already collected several addresses from where it is being distributed in a compressed zip archive. We even compiled it in our lab and it works like a charm," Kruse wrote in a blog post.

Zeus has been sold in the criminal underground for several years now and versions of its have been found to be part of a number of targeted attacks. The kit itself can be quite expensive to buy, and researchers say that it can sell for roughly $5,000. But the availability of the Zeus source code not only will likely wipe out the market for Zeus licenses, but will make the kit available to a different class of attacker.

"We believe this will be used as both inspiration for new and complex banking Trojan variants as well as abused in future attacks. The code can easily be modified and even improved in functionality," Kruse said in an email interview.

"With the source code in the wild it's likely we'll see an increase in attacks since lots of potential criminals might have been lacking both financials and trustworthiness to obtain their own license of this kit. Now being available as source code we'll likely see a rebranding and slight modifications distributed from various sources."

Several months ago, the code bases for the Zeus kit and the SpyEye kit were joined and speculation among researchers was that development on Zeus had stopped. However, as Kaspersky Lab researcher Dmitry Tarakanov noted in March, that isn't necessarily the case.

"A few days ago I found a ZeuS sample that also checks if it is being analyzed, for example, by antivirus companies. The functionality is basically the same but with minor modifications – another criterion for detecting a new test platform had been added. In this variant of ZeuS there are also modifications to the structure in pieces of code, which had remained unchanged for over 6 months and been used in thousands of samples of the Trojan," Tarakanov said in a blog post on new developments in Zeus variants.

Aviv Raff, CTO of security firm Seculert, said he'd seen a recent copy of the Zeus source code, as well, and found some interesting bits in there. The source code includes both a FAQ section and a full user manual, which lists the kit's support for various operating systems, including Windows 7, Vista and some older versions, as well as on Windows x64. The FAQ section spells out how the Zeus malware generates the unique bot ID for each infected machine and what the iterative version numbers mean.

Like Kruse, Raff expects the release of the Zeus code to lead to further changes and modifications to the attack tool.

"Unfortunately, this [leak] means that we will probably see more hybrid malware in the future, and not only the 'SpyZeus' (as in latest SpyEye versions). There are rumors of a new Mac OS X banker Trojan which includes a ZeuS like web injections. The author of this kit might have taken the code of the web injection parsing from this public release," Raff said.
https://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/z...-leaked-051011





Anonymous: Peering Behind the Mask

Are members of the 'hacktivist group' Anonymous defenders of truth and seekers of knowledge, or simply a bunch of cyber terrorists? Jana Herwig investigates
Jana Herwig

When Anonymous first made big headlines in early 2008 with its protests against the Church of Scientology, dubbed Project Chanology, it was not yet apparent that Anonymous would be here to stay.

Three years later, Anonymous has not only gained a sizeable collection of adversaries and critics – including government agencies, IT security companies and digital rights advocacies who criticise its methods – it has also won scores of secret and not so secret admirers, especially among the highly social media literate, digital creative class.

The reputation of its members as defenders of truth and seekers of knowledge, digital avengers who cannot be lied to because they will hijack the emails of those who try, seems to strike a chord with many.

What has remained unclear is just who or what Anonymous is. Popular descriptions used in the media are those as a protest movement, a hacker community, or – merging the two – as a hacktivist group. Apart from an interest in the actual individuals behind the handle, a focus has been on whether or not Anonymous has a leader or central command structure which oversees and steers it actions.

While Anonymous claims the contrary – and some reports from "inside Anonymous" characterise it as a "stamping herd" of wary individuals – this suspicion does not subside. In mid-March, Gawker announced to have received chat logs from Anonymous' "secret war room", and evidence of "certain members doling out tasks, selecting targets, and even dressing down members who get out of line".

What has received less attention in the media is where Anonymous came from and what it is outside of ongoing activities such as last year's Operation Payback, which targeted companies that had cancelled their service to Wikileaks, or the current Operation Sony, which began as a consumer rights protest until Sony suggested Anonymous might have been behind the PlayStation Network hack (Anonymous denies this).

But these operations, and the fluctating number of individuals that engage in them at a time, are not identical with the collective identity of Anonymous, an identity that has been crafted in a collaborative effort and whose origins I am going to outline here.
Anonymous is anyone who knows the rules

This collective identity belongs to no one in particular, but is at the disposal of anyone who knows its rules and knows how to apply them. Anonymous, the collective identity, is older than Anonymous, the hacktvist group – more to the point, I propose that the hacktivist group can be understood as an application of Anonymous, the collective identity.

This identity originated on imageboard 4chan.org, as a byproduct of a user interface policy called forced anonymity, also known for short as "forced anon".

Forced anon made it impossible for users to type in their name when they published a forum post. Instead, "Anonymous" would invariably appear as the default author name for any post. As a result, and in particular for the uninitiated, discussions on 4chan would seem like an absurd soliloquy, with "Anonymous" posting a message and "Anonymous" and "Anonymous" responding.

What this interface policy prevented was the creation of a hierarchy among users, which is known to quickly establish itself in online forums, with older forum members dominating and "newbies" having little weight in the discussion. Anonymous's (the group's) present dismissal of hierarchies and leadership has its roots in this practice. The uncertainty about who is talking (or probably just talking to him or herself, feigning conversation) is characteristic of the "forced anon" experience.
Fertile ground for collaboration

While users could not inscribe their individual identities, 4chan provided a fertile ground for a collaborative play with this collective identity, generating the rules for its rhetoric and its visual appearance. During Project Chanology, these rules and generated cultural meanings could first be witnessed in action by larger media audiences – eg, in the video Message to Scientology, which popularised Anonymous's biblical claim: "We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us."

Protesters in physical space wore Guy Fawkes masks in the style introduced by V for Vendetta, which is now widely recognised as Anonymous's iconic look.

Anonymous's appearance with masks is not coincidental. The collective identity itself serves as a mask, allowing the bearer to do and say things that would otherwise be out of bounds.

Guests at a fancy-dress party are familiar with the phenomenon: the one who dresses up as Casanova develops a talent in charming the attendees that is otherwise unknown in him. In its excess and exaggeration, the carnivalesque is also rarely free from a critique of society. On 4chan, this critique manifests itself rather crudely as a relentless and often obscene mockery of virtually everything (as the purported 'Rules of the Internet', No. 18, would have it: "Everything that can be labeled can be hated.").
With Anonymous, the hacktivist group, the critique is more politically refined, tackling in particular internet censorship and the suppression of information – although its backlog of activities also features interventions such as the hacking and manipulating of epilepsy support forums with flashing animations, potentially triggering a seizure in people with photosensitive epilepsy.

For those who have only become aware of Anonymous over the past half year, such an intervention might seem out of character. These days, Anonymous, the hacktivist group, seeks to emphasise its advocacy of digital rights and even its trustworthiness – eg, claiming in its defence against Sony that "Anonymous has never been known to have engaged in credit card theft".

But taking sides with the most noble cause has so far not been known as a priority of Anonymous, the collective identity. While noble causes are not per se excluded, its motto – "We did it for the lulz" (read: for our enjoyment) – potentially overrides all other causes. A frequently circulated motivational poster by Anonymous warns us: "Anonymous. Because none of us are as cruel as all of us."

Anonymous, the collective identity, not only has a carnivalesque edge; it also echoes traditional African mask societies whose many functions, as Elizabeth Allo Isechei puts it, include the "exercise of male power and various forms of social control, whether over the youthful initiates or those the maskers perceive as deviant".

It must be noted that it is the mask and the temporary position outside of the social order which bestows this power on the maskers, a power which does not extend to the regular life of the individuals and their unmasked identities.
Understanding the collective

If one understands Anonymous, the group, as a contemporary, post-adolescent mask society and Anonymous, the collective identity, as its mask, activities such as Operation Payback appear in a new light: they, too, can be read as an attempt to exert social control, in this case over the companies that dropped Wikileaks as a client, through punishing them with DDoS attacks.

To understand Anonymous as a collective identity, the crucial question to be asked is not who the individuals are that use the mask, but what it is that this mask allows them to do.

Unlike traditional mask societies, however, gaining access to Anonymous does not require initiation through "elders" or senior members of the group. Instead, a user's computer, web and programming skills are the decisive factor which he or she must bring or develop to be initiated.

To first accumulate knowledge about Anonymous's rules, a user must spend a considerable amount of time online – eg, on websites such as 4chan or Encyclopedia Dramatica – to become familiar with its language and understand its culture.

While this might be technically relatively easy for someone who works in the media or IT industries, spending a lot of time online will be comparably more difficult for, say, a teacher or sales clerk.

The details of an ongoing operation, however, are not discussed on these websites. To become an active member of the hacktivist group, users need to be able to enter IRC channels and, again, spend much time online to be able to follow the crowd if it moves elsewhere.

Depending on their skills and allocatable time, some users will merely observe (including journalists – which also raises the question whether these have already become part of Anonymous or not). Others will take up more active roles within the operation.
Press releases will be written, posters designed, communication infrastructure set up. While it does not seem likely that all participants in an operation are "hackers", some activities will necessarily require the involvement of programmers and administrators.

This could indeed be one of the weak spots where Anonymous, the hacktivist group, risks betraying the promise of Anonymous, the collective identity. Certain skills might translate into a more important role within an operation, and as soon as infrastructure such as a website or IRC channel is set up more permanently, it might amount to actual control. The "civil war" said to have "broken out in the ranks of headless 'hacktivist' collective Anonymous" on 9 May 2011 was sparked off by this very issue: "There is a hierarchy. All the power, all the DDoS - it's in that [IRC] channel," an Anonymous splinter group declared after having stolen the IP addresses and passwords from two AnonOps network sites – not to destroy Anonymous, but to fight back the ongoing centralisation and reform it according to its promise.

The other weak spot is in Anonymous's dealings with the media: Anonymous's original notion of a leaderless, heterarchical organisation is antithetical to journalists' relentless demands for quotable references from spokespersons (nor does it help that seeing one name in the news might be appealing to some participants in an operation).

The media, on the other hand, have so far barely been able to reflect the distinction between members of an ongoing operation and the notion of Anonymous as a collective identity – which, awkwardly, makes everyone engaging with Anonymous a hacker in the public perception.

Anonymous, the collective identity, has not only by now become a part of internet lore, it is also already being used by people to nurture a resilient self who would stand up for his or her rights if necessary.

We can assume that hardly anyone of those toying with the idea of putting on Anonymous's mask is a hacker on the verge of committing a DDoS attack – the mask may be empowering, lending them for instance an apodictic rhetoric in the defense of their information rights which not everyone might be able to muster on his or her own. As a collective idenitity, Anonymous is also about the right of wearing a mask, to make use of a speaking position that would otherweise not be available, both online and in physical space.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ehind-the-mask





Two Swedes Jailed for Life for Philippine Internet Porn

Two Swedes have been jailed for life in the Philippines for violating human trafficking laws by running a live internet porn operation in a southern city that catered to foreigners.

The convictions were the first legal victory in the battle against foreign-operated porn operations in the Philippines, said Lalae Garcia of the Tubaga movement, a women and children rights group on the southern island of Mindanao.

"This is definitely a major victory for abused and exploited women," she told reporters after a court in Cagayan de Oro sentenced the Swedes and three Filipino accomplices.

Law enforcement agencies say cybersex, or providing sexually explicit material over the internet, is a growing industry in many parts of the world, including in the Philippines, where there is perceived to be a low risk of arrest and high returns.

The court, in a May 6 judgment that was released on Tuesday, also fined the Swedes, Emil Andreas Solemo and Bo Stefan Sederholm, 2 million pesos ($46,500) each. The three Filipinos were jailed for 20 years and fined 1 million pesos each.

"Disrespect for Filipino women and violations of our laws deserve the strongest condemnation from this court," read part of the 25-page court decision.

Justo Yap, National Bureau of Investigation regional director, said 18 women, aged 19 to 24, some of whom were naked and sending live feeds to clients abroad, were rescued after a raid on a premises in April 2009.

(Reporting by Manuel Mogato; Editing by John Mair and Nick Macfie)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...74A1RG20110511





Cybersex Swedes Claim They Did 'Nothing Wrong'

The two Swedish IT-experts jailed for life in the Philippines for running a cybersex den say they are living a nightmare among hardened criminals and maintain that they have done nothing wrong.

Emil Andreas Solemo, 35,and Bo Stefan Sederholm, 31, were convicted of human trafficking this week after being found running an operation in which 17 naked women in an office building performed in front of cameras for overseas internet clients.

The government hailed the verdict as a landmark victory in the battle against human trafficking because the Swedes were the first to be handed life sentences for what has in recent years become a booming cybersex industry.

But both men claim most of the evidence against them was fabricated or obtained illegally, and appear bewildered why they should be jailed for Internet pornography when prostitution is rampant across the Philippines.

"We don't see ourselves as human traffickers at all," Solemo, 35, said in an exclusive interview with AFP on Thursday from a crowded jail in the southern city of Cagayan de Oro where they have been since their arrest in April 2009.

Sederholm, 31, bristled at their portrayal by the Philippine press as modern-day slave traders.

"The women were not forced to do it. It was nothing like that at all," said Sederholm, who like his business partner was wearing a prison-issue yellow T-shirt, long shorts and a sandals.

Solemo, a tall man with gold-rimmed glasses and a goatee, said he and Sederholm were IT consultants who had been hired to set up the computer systems at the cybersex shop where the women worked in Cagayan de Oro.

Although they refused to say who hired them, they denied police charges that they owned the business and recruited the women, saying they only arrived in the country a month before being arrested.

The Swedes also pointed out that the women working in the cybersex operation were all adults - prosecutors never alleged that minors were involved - and said the case against them smacked of hypocrisy.

"Some say it's (cybersex) demeaning and horrible, but you can go to any city in the Philippines and see girls who are dancing on poles in skimpy clothes. It's absurd...there are places there that openly sell girls," Solemo said.

"What we have undertaken here would not have been considered as trafficking anywhere in the West. In the United States or elsewhere it is not illegal to undress before computer cameras if you are of legal age."

Sederholm said they believed they had become scapegoats to make authorities look good to the United States, which put the Philippines on a blacklist of countries deemed as not doing enough to combat human trafficking.

"They wanted to make a trophy case of us to show to the United States that something is being done about human trafficking," Sederholm said.

But the judge who delivered the verdict against the Swedes, Jeoffre Acebido, said anyone who sexually exploited impoverished Philippine women should be punished.

"Disrespect for Filipino women and violations of our laws deserve the strongest condemnations from this court," Acebido wrote in his ruling.

"It will not shirk from its duty to impose the most severe of penalties against anybody, be he a foreign national or a citizen of this country, who tramples upon the dignity of a woman by taking advantage of her vulnerability."

Beverly Musli, the head of a local women's rights group that helped prosecutors gather evidence in the case, also said the Swedes deserved to be in jail.

"It's still trafficking because the victims were recruited from all over the Philippines and transported to the south," said Musli, who is a lawyer.

She said focusing on cybersex when prostitution was a widespread and open problem across the country was not hypocrisy.

"We are doing our best in stopping all forms of violence against women," she said.

Both Swedes said they had not given up hope that they would win an acquittal on appeal.

"You just can't bury yourself and say you'll not move, not eat. We have to keep going and hoping. Of course we will appeal. We're not going to lie down," Solemo said.

But they indicated they were struggling physically and mentally in the crowded jail, sharing a small cell with five other people accused of crimes including murder and drug trafficking.

"In some ways it's worse than a nightmare in that you can not wake up. It's the nightmare of not knowing whether we would be spending the next 20-25 years of our life in jail," Solemo said.

Sederholm refused to discuss his personal life. But Solemo spoke emotionally about his own plight, saying his father died a month ago, his girlfriend had left him and he had lost 17 kilogrammes while in jail.
http://www.thelocal.se/33746/20110513/





WikiLeaks' Assange Gets Australian Peace Prize
Avril Ormsby

WikiLeaks' Australian founder Julian Assange, who enraged Washington by publishing thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, was given a peace award on Tuesday for "exceptional courage in pursuit of human rights."

Assange was awarded the Sydney Peace Foundation's gold medal in London, only the fourth to be handed out in its 14-year history. The not-for-profit organization associated with the University of Sydney, is supported by the City of Sydney.

Currently fighting extradition from Britain to Sweden over alleged sex crimes, the computer expert was praised for "challenging centuries old practices of government secrecy and by championing people's right to know."

"We think the struggle for peace with justice inevitably involves conflict, inevitably involves controversy," the foundation's director Professor Stuart Rees said.

"We think that you and WikiLeaks have brought about what we think is a watershed in journalism and in freedom of information and potentially in politics."

He also criticized the Australian government, saying it must stop shoring up Washington's efforts to "behave like a totalitarian state," and said it was "appalled by the violent behavior by major politicians in the United States."

WikiLeaks caused a media and diplomatic uproar late last year when it began to publish its cache of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, revealing secrets such as that Saudi leaders had urged U.S. military action against Iran.

Some American politicians said WikiLeaks should be defined as an international terrorist organization.

Assange himself claimed publication of the cables helped shape uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East and said WikiLeaks was on the side of justice.

Other winners include Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7495FP20110510





Africa's Cascade of Internet Censorship

As governments fear popular protest movements, filtering has been initiated in Ethiopia, Uganda, Ivory Coast and beyond.
Jillian C. York

Despite much attention paid to Egypt and Libya's Internet shutdowns, Tunisia's pervasive Internet filtering, and Morocco's arrests of bloggers, little attention has been given to Internet censorship issues throughout the rest of the African continent. Events in recent weeks, however, have brought the region's online troubles into sharp focus.

In Ethiopia, government filtering of websites has long been common practice. Despite an Internet penetration rate of only 0.5 per cent, the Ethiopian government blocks a range of political opposition websites, as well as independent news sites reporting on the country and the sites of a few human rights organizations. Ethiopia's Internet infrastructure is state-owned, leaving control of it entirely at the hands of the government.

Recently, on World Press Freedom Day, Ethiopian officials hijacked an event sponsored by UNESCO, removing independent journalists from the lineup and installing government-approved reporters in their place, as the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported. At the same time, the government lifted the ban on a variety of sites normally blocked under the country's filtering regime. Ostensibly, the lift occured in the face of the UNESCO event's theme: new media and the Internet.

Despite the unblocking - likely temporary, if history is any indicator - Ethiopia continues to be one of Sub-Saharan Africa's worst offenders when it comes to Internet freedom.

Just-in-time blocking in Uganda

As protests have spread like wildfire across the Middle East and North Africa, "just-in-time" blocking of websites (a phenomenon wherein sites are blocked temporarily around a protest or other event) has become increasingly common. On April 14, Uganda's Communications Commission (UCC) quietly ordered ISPs to block Facebook and Twitter for 24 hours in light of a Walk to Work protest against spiralling food and fuel prices in the country.

According to Uganda's Daily Monitor, a letter from the UCC ordered social networking sites Facebook and Twitter to be shut down for security reasons, stating:

We have received complaints from security that there is [a] need to minimise the use of the media that may escalate violence to the public in respect of the ongoing situation relating to walk-to-work mainly by the opposition in the country … You are therefore required to block the use of Facebook and Twitter for 24 hours as of now; that is, April 14, at 3:30pm to eliminate the connection and sharing of information that incites the public.

When pressed, the office stated that the letter was unnecessary and that no ban would take place. However, some Ugandans reported the sites temporarily inaccessible on Uganda Telecom.

Though the sites remain accessible, Ugandan Commissioner of Police Andrew Kaweesi has called cyberactivism a Western phenomenon, stating that "governments need to come up with an enabling law that guards against misuse of communication networks to protect social values and national identity," and called for regulation of online publications.

More access, more control

Though most of the continent has been free from Internet filtering, with increased access comes increased control. Burundi, which is not known to block websites, arrested the editor of an online news site in 2010, and in April 2011 the prosecutor in the case sought a life sentence. Such methods aren't uncommon: Egypt's internet is largely free as well, yet dozens of bloggers have been arrested over the years.

Practices vary by country. For example, some nations, such as Ivory Coast, have moved to enact filtering. A March 24, directive from the Ivory Coast Telecommunications Agency called for the ban of anti-Gbagbo websites (no word on whether that initiative has since fallen through).

Sudan has left the Internet largely unfettered, preferring instead to use social networking sites to track down protesters. According to a blog post by researcher Patrick Meier, the Sudanese government reportedly set up a group calling for protest, drawing thousands of activists to join. Many of those who attended the street protests were met by police and arrested for their participation.

Despite strides in recent years, the African continent continues to struggle with Internet access, lagging behind the rest of the world with only 5.6 per cent of the total global online population. Nevertheless, recent initiatives, including one from Google, promise to develop greater access to the Internet.

But as access to the Internet increases across the African continent, there will undoubtedly be a cost, as there has been in so many other parts of the world: online freedom.
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth...039497302.html





US Billionaire Wins High Court Order Over Wikipedia 'Defamation'

Louis Bacon claims comments on Wikipedia and two other sites defamed him – but forcing them to reveal names may be difficult
Josh Halliday

A billionaire US hedge fund manager has been given the green light by the high court in London to force three websites – including Wikipedia – to disclose the identities of online commenters alleged to have defamed him.

Louis Bacon, the founder and chief executive officer of Moore Capital Management, was given permission on Monday to use a UK court order to obtain the information from the US publishers behind Wikipedia, the Denver Post newspaper, and the popular blogging platform WordPress.

Bacon wants to launch defamation proceedings against a number of online commenters – all of whom use sobriquets like "gotbacon" and "TCasey82" – alleged to have posted libellous material about him on these websites.

In the high court on Monday, Mr Justice Tugendhat granted Bacon's application to serve a court order – known as a Norwich Pharmacal Order (NPO) – by email against these websites. However, legal experts have told the Guardian that the US-based companies could legally ignore or refuse to comply with the orders.

US-born Bacon, who owns a property in London, was this weekend named the UK's wealthiest hedge fund manager by the Sunday Times Rich List. According to the paper, Bacon is now worth £1.1bn after a 69% rise in his personal fortune in the past 12 months.

Tugendhat said that the Wikimedia Foundation had told Bacon's solicitors, Schillings, that it would hand over details of the commenters if it was served with a court order – but later said that it would have to be a US subpoena, as opposed to a NPO brought in a UK court.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, said Bacon would need a court order and that any defamatory material would be removed from its websites. The Denver Post had not responded to requests for comment by the time of publication.

Tugendhat said civil procedure rules allowed him to grant Bacon's application against the US defendants, but added: "In future claimants should put before the court evidence as to whether that method is permitted by the law of the country in which the claim form is to be served (or a good reason for not doing so), since if it is, service by an alternative method will be unnecessary."

A spokeswoman for London law firm Schillings said the case was brought in the UK high court – as opposed to a US court – because Bacon had made a similar case against the UK-based website host, justhost.com, last year. Justhost complied with that order.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011...dia-defamation





Twitter Outings Undermine "Super Injunctions"
Georgina Prodhan

Twitter revelations of alleged attempts by British celebrities to cover up sexual indiscretions show that "super injunctions" to gag the press are unsustainable, lawyers said Monday.

A Twitter user posted details Sunday of six instances of what the blogger said were injunctions obtained by television and sports stars to cover up affairs or prevent the publication of revealing photographs.

One of the celebrities named, socialite Jemima Khan, used her own Twitter feed to deny an allegation that she had obtained a super injunction to prevent intimate pictures of her and TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson from being published.

"OMG - Rumour that I have a super injunction preventing publication of "intimate" photos of me and Jeremy Clarkson. NOT TRUE!" she tweeted.

Super injunctions prevent the media from reporting not only details of a story but even the existence of the injunction.

They have their legal basis in the UK's 1998 Human Rights Act but have given rise to concerns of a creeping privacy law made by the courts and favoring the famous and wealthy.

"It's rich man's justice," said media lawyer Mark Stephens, a partner at London-based law firm Finers Stephens Innocent, noting that not a single woman was known to have obtained such an injunction.

Stephens estimated that about 200 super injunctions had been issued in the past three to four years. Their cost of more than 100,000 pounds ($164,000) each puts them out of most people's reach.

Public debate over super injunctions was rekindled last month when prominent BBC journalist Andrew Marr confessed that he had obtained one in 2008 to prevent reporting of an extra-marital affair he had had.

Stephens, an outspoken pro-media lawyer who has represented celebrities including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, said incidents like the weekend Twitter leak showed the super injunction was outdated.

"The superinjunction is becoming unsustainable because people are just breaking it," he said.

His sentiments were echoed by intellectual property and media lawyer Keith Arrowsmith, a partner at Manchester-based law firm Ralli Solicitors.

"The fact that anyone can set up these feeds without anyone checking the identity of the author undermines the credibility of super injunctions. People on Twitter feel as though they can publish anything and it doesn't matter," he said.

Twitter had no immediate comment on the matter. The tweets were still on the site Monday afternoon, almost 24 hours after they were first published.

Echoes Of Spycatcher

Both lawyers compared the current situation with the notorious 1980s Spycatcher case, in which the British government tried to ban ex-intelligence officer Peter Wright from publishing his autobiography.

The book was published in Australia and in many other foreign countries and was smuggled into Britain. The UK government eventually gave up its attempt to ban it.

One of the best-publicized uses of a super injunction was the case of shipping company Trafigura in 2009, which forbade discussion of allegations the company had dumped toxic waste in Ivory Coast.

"The underlying problem with the current law is that the courts are being used to conceal the truth," Liberal Democrat member of parliament John Hemming wrote in an email to Reuters. Hemming is compiling a report on super injunctions.

"I know of a number of cases where the truth that is being concealed involves serious misbehavior by the authorities rather than the peccadilloes of celebrities. That is where there is a real danger in the current position," he added.

Stephens said the author of the weekend tweets could expect "a knock on the door from the lawyers" in the next 48 hours for contempt of court.

But Arrowsmith stressed that this would not help the people who had been outed.

"In the past, for example, if someone had got wind that the News of the World was planning to break a story Sunday, we could try to agree a way forward, and, if that failed, approach the court for a ruling."

"With international instant messaging it's too late, the cat is out of the bag," he said.

Arrowsmith said Twitter itself, as a U.S.-based organization, would be hard for UK courts to pursue.

"If you're going to have a super injunction, you've got to have a international super court to enforce it," he said.

(Additional reporting by Olesya Dmitracova; Editing by Steve Addison)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7481X820110509





Utah Court Strikes Blow for Free Speech, Dismisses Trademark and CFAA Claims Against Political Activists
Corynne McSherry

As we've noted before, many trademark owners are none too happy when political activists use their marks as part of a larger statement about the owners' business or political practices. Sometimes, that unhappiness takes the form of improper legal threats and even lawsuits designed to silence critical speech. In a ruling issued today, a federal judge called a halt to one such lawsuit, affirming the essential balance between trademark rights and free speech.

The case has its origin in a brief action carried out by members of Youth For Climate Truth (YFCT), a group concerned about climate change. The action targeted Koch Industries, a billion dollar company that has publicly challenged the science behind climate change theories. Borrowing "identity correction" techniques pioneered by groups such as the Yes Men, YFCT issued a press release, purportedly from Koch, in which the company promised to stop funding organizations that deny climate change. The release was posted for a few hours on a website (www.koch-inc.com) that partially imitated Koch Industries' own website. The action received some media coverage, but no press organization thought the release was real. If Koch were sensible, that should have been the end of it.

But Koch was not sensible. It sued YFCT for trademark infringement, cybersquatting, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (for allegedly not complying with the terms of service on the real Koch website) and assorted state claims, then issued subpoenas seeking the identities of the YFCT members. With help from lawyers at Public Citizen, YFCT moved to quash the subpoenas and dismiss the case.

Judge Dale Kimball granted the motion and threw the whole thing out. On the trademark claims, the judge noted that YFCT's activities were clearly noncommercial and, therefore, governed by the First Amendment, not state or federal trademark law.

“The Lanham Act regulates only economic, not ideological or political, competition . . . “Competition in the marketplace of ideas” is precisely what the First Amendment is designed to protect.”

On the cybersquatting claims, the judge found that Koch could not plausibly claim that YFCT intended to profit from the spoof website, given that it was operated anonymously, for a just a few hours, and had no commercial purpose.

As for the CFAA claims, which were based on YFCT's alleged violation of real Koch website's terms of use, the judge rightfully found that using information that Koch made publicly available on its site, with no attempt to prevent access, could not possibly amount to "exceeding authorized access" to a website. Indeed, Koch did not even require visitors to agree to its terms of use.

“Koch’s complaint is not that Defendants obtained the information but rather that they ultimately used the information in an unwanted manner. The CFAA addresses only the act of trespassing or breaking into a protected computer system; it does not purport to regulate the various uses to which information may be put.”

All in all, a good day for free speech. Hopefully other trademark owners will take heed and learn that the best response to critical speech (including speech that involves "identity correction") is more speech -- not a lawsuit.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/0...eech-dismisses





Breaking: New Media-Parody Site Hits Internet
Angela Watercutter

Big fan of media mockery, but getting burnt out on Gawker and The Onion? Well, we have news for you. Please welcome to the internet: The Final Edition.

The news-parody site launched Tuesday with a spoof of The New York Times website, which should come as no surprise. The Final Edition was founded by Tony Hendra, the National Lampoon alumnus and This Is Spinal Tap actor who helped create parody newspaper Not the New York Times more than three decades ago.

“We thank The New York Times from the bottom of our hearts for being so ridiculously easy to parody,” Hendra said in an e-mail to Wired.com. Following Tuesday’s Times send-up, The Final Edition’s mission is “to save humanity from the deadly worldwide scourge of funny cat videos,” he added.
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/...final-edition/





Will BitTorrent be the New Facebook?
Damon Poeter

BitTorrent has brand spanking new offices in San Francisco's multimedia corridor and the company is undergoing a massive makeover with a new user-friendly interface, simplified controls and a renewed sense of purpose.

BitTorrent, founded by BitTorrent protocol inventor Bram Cohen and venture capitalist Ashwin Nevin in 2004, on Thursday launched Chrysalis, a beta version of new personal content channels that leverage the company's huge, if unheralded in the mainstream, share of the global file-sharing industry.

The platform lets users create social channels where they can share videos, photos and other content via the BitTorrent and uTorrent clients that have an 80 percent share of the torrent market, according to the company.

The BitTorrent protocol moves up to 40 percent of all Internet traffic, Shahi Ghanem, BitTorrent's chief strategist, told PCMag this week. But the company needs to shed its reputation as just a download manager (albeit a really powerful download manager) that's mainly used by technically savvy users.

Enter Chrysalis, which replaces the maze of folders and codecs that current torrent users must navigate with a UI that's got big, simple buttons and the clean lines of a Facebook page. The beta project lets users find content on the Internet via the torrent network, view or play it without having to search around for software, and pass it along to friends and fans, Ghanem said.

That's not exactly revolutionary but BitTorrent's value proposition is that it's uniquely positioned to let users move really huge files like videos without sacrificing quality or taking a really long time to do it. Plus there are no downloading limits.

"It's the only network in the world that actually gets faster as more people use it," Ghanem said.

Another "800-pound gorilla" that BitTorrent constantly has to address is the torrent network's association with the sharing of illegal content, Ghanem said. The U.S. Copyright Group and other plaintiff organizations have in recent months stepped up their legal efforts to seek damages from torrent users who commit copyright infringements in sharing files.

As the curator of the BitTorrent protocol and the developer of the BitTorrent and uTorrent clients, BitTorrent the company isn't responsible for what users do on the torrent network, just as Google isn't held accountable for content users can access through its Chrome browser.

Still, the stigma remains. But Ghanem said the way people use the torrents is evolving away from the piracy and pornography that helped fuel their growth. Independent artists are eager to reach the massive audiences the torrent network can supply, he said, while ordinary consumers are now able to produce things like HD video that they want to share with friends and family.

One potential sticking point for Chrysalis is that it doesn't let users wall off their channels. That means that anything you put on your media channel would be publicly available to all users of the platform, even though it would be tough to find if you didn't promote it.

Ghanem said BitTorrent had the ability to create closed channels and might do so in future releases.

"Right now we just want to see what users want to do with this and we'll go from there," he said.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385289,00.asp





Find Out if You’re a Target in the Biggest U.S. BitTorrent Lawsuit Ever
David Kravets

More than 23,000 people will soon be notified by their internet service providers that their subscriber information is being turned over to lawyers suing over the 2010 Sylvester Stallone flick The Expendables.

As we first reported Monday, the case is the largest BitTorrent file-sharing lawsuit in U.S. history.

We just updated our IP Detective tool with the 23,322 IP addresses targeted between Feb. 5 and April 22 in the mass lawsuit filed by the Washington-based U.S. Copyright Group on behalf of Nu Image.

All told, more than 140,000 BitTorrent downloaders are being targeted in dozens of lawsuits across the country, many of them for downloading B-grade movies and porn. Film companies pay snoops to troll BitTorrent sites, dip into active torrents and capture the IP addresses of the peers who are downloading and uploading pieces of the files.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great resource on what to do if you’re a target.

As before, our widget also will attempt to check if you’re one of the nearly 6,000 targets in the controversial Nude Nuns with Big Guns case, or the OpenMind Solutions lawsuit going after nearly 3,000 alleged porn downloaders.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...awsuit-checker
















Until next week,

- js.



















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Recent WiRs -

May 7th, April 30th, April 23rd, April 16th

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


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