Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 3rd, '14

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"If you are actually paying and using [piracy sites] in desperation, I don't think it's unethical." – Irina Raicu


"I can't believe this is coming out now. Congress can’t pass a law to limit NSA surveillance, but they seem to be actively working to increase the amount of surveillance. They haven't been transparent in drafting this law." – Amie Stepanovich


"We see reaching the 4TB mark as really just the beginning and expect to continue doubling the [SSD] capacity every year or two, far outpacing the growth for traditional HDDs." – Manuel Martull


"The single best thing that has happened in my lifetime in music, after punk rock, is being able to share music, globally for free. That’s such an incredible development." – Steve Albini






































May 3rd, 2014




Could New Net Neutrality Rules Fuel Piracy?
Debbie Siegelbaum

Many consumers were outraged with the news that the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was possibly considering new rules allowing net providers to charge more for access to an online fast lane.

People decried the perceived death of open communication, the potential rising costs of access, and perhaps, most importantly, how they would access streaming episodes of favourite programmes like Breaking Bad and House of Cards.

The insatiable demand for streaming content has choked US networks, causing internet service providers (ISPs) to attempt to spread the cost of upgraded service to content providers like Netflix.

According to reports, the FCC will allow a fast lane for data-heavy services when new rules are published in May. Critics say this violates the so-called "net neutrality" principle that all internet traffic should be treated equally.

If such growing costs trickle down to consumers, experts believe a life of internet piracy may seem appealing for those accustomed to cheaper access.

There's "a real possibility that you will price some people out of the market for legitimate programming and into a market for ill-gotten programming because it will just cost too much or it will become clear they can pay a lot less for it," says Allen Hammond, director of the Broadband Institute of California.

Already more than 11% of all internet traffic is believed to be illegally shared, copyrighted content such as films and television episodes, according to a report commissioned by NBC Universal.

ISPs like Verizon have acknowledged that video streaming demand has grown exponentially in recent years, eating up to half of bandwidth. And upgrades to current networks can prove very costly.

"Other companies want us to spend our money to help supplement what they may be doing," Verizon spokeswoman Linda Laughlin says.

As ISPs negotiate with content providers like Netflix, service has sometimes slowed to a near unusable speed for certain customers.

In short, some people are paying for streaming services they are not always receiving.

For ethicist Irina Raicu, it presents an unusual dilemma in which turning to pirating of content may not be, technically, wrong.

"If you are actually paying and using [piracy sites] in desperation, I don't think it's unethical," she says, but adds that content creators may be hurt more than ISPs in the bargain.

Film studios concur, arguing internet piracy costs them millions of dollars in lost revenue every year.

"I think it just speaks to the way consumers are just pushed to the limit here," Ms Raicu says. "In a world where people feel like the big companies are allowed to act unethically and without any kind of regulations, I think it's more likely to prompt people to respond the same way."

Ms Raicu says the argument is part of the ongoing net neutrality debate in the US. Is the internet a human right, or a business to be controlled by market forces?

Many have argued the US government should treat the internet as a public utility rather than the oligopoly it is today.

A low number of ISPs control the bulk of the market, and in some areas of the nation there is only one ISP available.

And if you don't like their practices, well… tough.

Under such a system, customers don't have the ability to modify contracts or hold their ISP accountable, says Mr Hammond.

"Businesses are providing service based on a contract that is written from their point of view," he says. "We have [no room] to negotiate."

If no statutes are written to protect consumer rights, then customers are bound to the terms of the contract. It becomes a take-it-or-leave-it system.

And right now the US government appears less than eager to enter into the fray.

"If Congress wants to impose net neutrality, it can," says Aaron Schwabach, professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law.

But "I doubt that Congress could agree to adopt a national pancake right now", he says, referencing the recent paralysing political polarisation in the US House of Representatives and Senate.

Mr Schwabach also notes that those same politicians are beholden to the ISPs - often part of larger media conglomerates - for access to constituents come voting season.

"These corporations are pretty large and pretty well-versed and [also] have their people up on Capitol Hill" lobbying, echoes Mr Hammond. "And they have long memories and deep pockets."

When individual consumer Davids are up against corporate and government Goliaths, turning to piracy may some day become a form of social protest, experts argue.

"We have anti-monopoly laws, we have regulation because we don't want to have too much concentration of power in too few hands," says Stuart Green, a professor at Rutgers School of Law.

"I think people feel like at a certain point they have to correct what the government or the market won't correct," he adds. "When a government or oligopoly controls all of the wealth, then sometimes people have to break the law in order to change the status quo as an agent of social change."

Even if such internet piracy is a self-serving desire for free access to the Iron Man films and not pure altruism, if enough people do it, it may render the illegality of it moot.

"If people feel like this has gotten out of hand and power is controlled by too small a group of people [who think], 'My bills keep going up and up, I'm not going to tolerate that, I'm going to violate the law', the aggregate result is the law becomes unstable," Mr Green says.

"[If] most people believe that the law is not consistent with their intuitions and beliefs about what's right and wrong, the law isn't really going to be effective," he adds. "You can't have the FCC coming into people's homes and suing everybody. People just won't tolerate that."

But, if internet rules continue to change, ISPs may be able to block access to illegal content download sites for fear of being sued by content creators.

Basically, just as people may be turning more to piracy, pirate sites will be driven to extinction.

"That should reduce the incidents of illegal downloading because it won't be technologically possible," says Mr Green.

"Or people will find new ways to get around it."

Mr Schwabach notes that, when he was in college, other people would take turns purchasing a vinyl record each week and allowed their classmates to re-record and distribute the music on cassettes.

The same is likely to hold true for the internet.

"Some people always find a way," he concludes.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-27161270





The FCC Chairman’s Many Excuses

Tom Wheeler tries, and fails, to justify his execution of net neutrality.
Marvin Ammori

A few years ago, Internet users, democracy activists, and entrepreneurs got wind of a proposed law, SOPA, that would have changed the Web’s basic architecture to the benefit of a few media giants. So they organized protests for several months to oppose the law. Faced with this opposition, some senators and members of Congress who supported the Stop Online Piracy Act had a moment of sudden insight: They realized they were wrong. They had gone to Washington to help the very people who were now protesting them—the risk-takers, the job builders, the social changers. Instead of digging in or just brushing off the criticism, these policymakers learned from the protests and chose to stay on the right side of history.

Today, millions of Americans from every sector are up in arms over Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal to end network neutrality and authorize cable and phone companies to discriminate among websites and charge Web giants for “fast lanes” while keeping the rest of us in a “slow lane.”

Despite the outcry, Wheeler isn’t changing sides, he’s making excuses. In the past week, the chairman has published two blog posts and given one speech (at the cable lobbying association he used to head), while two law school professors, Kevin Werbach and Phil Weiser, have taken to the Huffington Post to defend him.

Wheeler’s posts attempt to placate critics, but let’s get one thing straight: He is not backing off his plan to hand the keys to the Internet over to the cable and phone industries. The chairman told the cable industry to “put away the party hats” because he’s not actually going to kill network neutrality. But his proposal is the same plan offered by the largest cable and phone companies, which have tried to kill network neutrality for almost a decade. Since 2006, the phone and cable industries have proposed a world where they won’t “block” any websites, but they will simply create a lane for all websites and then charge anyone who wants better service for a fast lane. They have fought a nondiscrimination rule for at least eight years, using tens of millions of dollars. The tolls for the fast lane may be tied to bandwidth or a company’s revenue. Finally, the cable and phone giants want this world to have no clear rules—just vague principles about what might be “commercially reasonable,” which is an invitation for small companies to sue the giants if they’re unhappy. Since the cable and telephone companies have more FCC lawyers than most companies have employees, they will scare off most potential companies suing and then beat the rest in “FCC court.”

The FCC chairman wants to move quickly—to authorize slow lanes on the Internet.

That’s basically what the chairman is backing—the often proposed AT&T/Verizon plan. It’s the plan that President Obama repeatedly opposed, beginning in 2006. It’s the plan that network neutrality advocates have fought against for eight years. He is emphasizing what AT&T always conceded: that carriers would be unable to “block,” that a provider will not “degrade” whatever is today’s existing service (and tomorrow’s “slow lane”), and therefore the Internet will remain an “open pathway.” But as Wheeler, Werbach, and Weiser concede, he will permit paid fast lanes. He will even permit cable and phone companies to offer fast lanes exclusively to one competitor and not to others. The only real restriction is that fast lanes can’t be offered exclusively to a company also owned by the cable or phone company. So Comcast wouldn’t be able to offer a fast lane only to NBC.com—which it owns—but could offer it only to Netflix or only to Apple, and nobody else, under the terms of his proposed rule.

So the chairman hasn’t changed his views in face of the backlash, but he is providing some excuses for his proposal. Here are the four main justifications:

1. It’s better than nothing. The chairman and the professors are saying that we should be happy that Wheeler is guaranteeing a slow lane because without that guarantee, the carriers could block sites and there’d be no rules against it. But “better than nothing” shouldn’t cut it. We should ask instead whether we are getting the right network neutrality rule—one that would preserve all the equality, innovation, and free expression we’ve seen on the Internet. Or whether Wheeler is fulfilling President Obama’s network neutrality promise (which is no fast lanes), rather than whether his order is better than a lump of coal in a stocking.

2. The other options aren’t that great, either. The chairman and the professors argue that the only alternative to allowing paid fast lanes and slow lanes is some rule against “unreasonable discrimination.” Wheeler suggests that the “unreasonable discrimination” rule would be flimsy and could lead to abuse. But the FCC can define some things in advance as reasonable or unreasonable. It did so in the 2010 order, saying that it doubted paid fast lanes could be reasonable and that the language was so “ominous” that the court effectively treated it as a ban.

3. My heart’s in the right place. The chairman emphasizes that his proposal is intended to allow “no unreasonable discrimination.” Werbach and Weiser claim that the chairman’s plan would stop the carriers from “arbitrarily favor[ing] certain applications” and require them to offer the “same terms” to all. But a court decision in January made it clear, under the FCC’s legal own conclusions, that the commission must allow cable and phone companies to charge “similarly-situated edge providers [the court’s term for websites] completely different prices,” and can charge websites for an exclusive fast lane “while limiting all other edge providers to a more standard service,” known as a slow lane. The FCC can’t generally require the “same terms” for all.

4. It’s just too hard to do net neutrality. Wheeler has said that he wants to get new rules on the books soon and not get tied up in court—“opening an entirely new [legal] approach” just “invites delay.” So basically, he wants to move quickly—to authorize slow lanes on the Internet. That is just giving up. Plus, he will be sued anyway, either once he adopts rules or anytime the FCC ever tries to enforce them, when a startup’s business may be on the line.

Wheeler promises to adopt better rules if this scheme fails—but he’ll be long gone by the time the market and the courts reject them, and by then the Internet will be lost.

What he should realize is that his proposal isn’t just unpopular. It will be a mistake of historic proportions. The proposal would drive a knife in the heart of American innovation because startups can’t afford to pay Verizon (and then AT&T, then Cox, etc.) for fast lanes to compete with existing Web giants. They certainly can’t rely on the FCC’s vague legal “commercial reasonableness” standards as a foundation to build their businesses and raise investment. There will be an innovation freeze; most sites will be stuck in “2014 Internet,” while some sites will be able to afford the benefits of 2015, then 2016, and eventually 2060 Internet. Second, it hurts consumer choice. Up until now, we could use whatever site we wanted without those sites needing to pay for priority. If I pay Verizon for “up to” 20 Mbps, I can use it on whatever site I want to, not whatever site paid Verizon. Third, it hurts the nonprofit and religious sector. They can’t afford to pay fees. There’s a reason why several religious organizations, from the Catholic Church to the Christian Coalition and United Church of Christ, have supported network neutrality for years. Thousands of nonprofits have spoken for network neutrality. Wikipedia, run by a nonprofit, will be running that donation banner every single day—and it’ll load slowly.

That’s the network we will face, and no rhetorical mind tricks change that.

Disclosure: The author is a lawyer who has advised startups and nonprofits on net neutrality issues.
http://www.slate.com/articles/techno..._proposal.html





AT&T Reportedly Considering $40 billion DirecTV Acquisition
Dieter Bohn

If the idea of Comcast buying out Time Warner Cable to become the largest cable company in America wasn't enough to make you worry about media consolidation, news tonight from the Wall Street Journal just might. Reportedly, AT&T has approached DirecTV to begin "possible acquisition" talks, a deal that the WSJ says could be worth over $40 billion. If it were to happen, it would give the combined company something on the order of 26 million TV subscribers, making it second only to the hypothetical Comcast/TWC combination of 30 million.

DirecTV could be looking to make a deal. The company was also recently rumored to be in talks with Dish about a merger as recently as last month. But working with AT&T might make more sense — the two companies already have an existing partnership in some areas.

It's entirely unclear how federal regulators would feel about a AT&T/DirecTV tie up, as we've yet to really see how Comcast's proposed merger will fare. In the event that both buyouts are approved, we'd have two massive companies with national footprints and dominant marketshare in the cable and satellite TV business, respectively. What the media landscape would look like in such a scenario is practically impossible to fathom, but we might hazard a few guesses.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/30/56...tv-acquisition





Sprint Said to Plan T-Mobile Bid as Banks Pushed to Fund
Alex Sherman

Sprint Corp. (S) plans to push forward with a bid for T-Mobile US Inc. (TMUS) after meeting with banks last month to make debt arrangements for that offer, people with knowledge of the situation said.

Sprint Chief Financial Officer Joe Euteneuer and Treasurer Greg Block met with six banks to ensure the lenders would be ready with financing structures when Sprint decides to pursue a takeover, said three of the people, asking not to named because the discussions are private. T-Mobile US has a market value of $23.5 billion.

Masayoshi Son, chief executive officer of SoftBank Corp. (9984), which owns about 80 percent of Sprint, is expected to make a formal bid in June or July, one of the people said. While regulators have consistently expressed concerns about a combination of the third- and fourth-largest wireless carriers in the U.S., Son and his advisers are building an argument they hope will convince the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice about the long-term health of the U.S. wireless industry.

“Son doesn’t give up,” said Tomoaki Kawasaki, an analyst at Iwai Cosmo Holdings Inc. in Tokyo. “An acquisition of T-Mobile would increase Sprint’s ability to compete in the U.S. by expanding scale and reducing costs.”

SoftBank rose 1.7 percent to 7,717 yen as the close in Tokyo trading. Shares of T-Mobile rose as much as 11 percent in after-hours trading yesterday. They closed at $29.29 in New York. Sprint rose 6 percent in late trading, after closing at $8.50.

FCC Review

The talks with banks centered around how much Sprint should borrow for the deal, a move that would have it also take on the $8.7 billion in net debt that T-Mobile has amassed, the people said. No financing commitments have been signed, and Son is still debating how to pay for a deal, the people said.

SoftBank and Deutsche Telekom AG (DTE), which owns about 67 percent of T-Mobile, are still speaking with each other to determine who would run the company, the people said. T-Mobile CEO John Legere is the leading candidate, one of the people said. Deutsche Telekom wants as much cash as possible in the deal, another person said.

Representatives for Overland Park, Kansas-based Sprint and Bellevue, Washington-based T-Mobile declined to comment. A spokesman for Deutsche Telekom didn’t respond to an e-mail seeking comment sent outside regular business hours.

Unprepared AT&T

Sprint wants to pursue a deal while the Justice Department and FCC are also reviewing Comcast Corp.’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable Inc., with the hope that regulators will see both deals as changing the telecommunications industry, three of the people said. The regulators blocked AT&T Inc.’s effort to acquire T-Mobile in 2011.

Son’s team believes AT&T was unprepared when it attempted to convince regulators a deal was in the public’s interest in 2011, three of the people said. Sprint is working to ensure it will have a detailed case to put in front of regulators, the people said.

Sprint also wants to avoid agreeing to a high termination fee because it could provide regulators with an incentive to reject the deal, one of the people said. AT&T had to pay T-Mobile $6 billion in cash and spectrum after its attempt was blocked, a move that Son views as a strategic mistake because T-Mobile became a stronger competitor as a result, the person said.

The Sprint executives met with bankers at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Mizuho Financial Group Inc., Bank of America Corp. and Deutsche Bank AG, according to the people familiar with the situation.

Representatives for Mizuho and the other banks declined to comment.

Any deal would need to be approved by the boards of SoftBank, Deutsche Telekom, Sprint and T-Mobile. This could be a lengthy process and may slow down the timeline on when a deal is announced, the people said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-0...r-funding.html





Pirate Bay Uploader Hit with $32M Lawsuit
Andy

A New York man has been landed with a huge lawsuit worth more than $32.2m after he was found to be uploading UFC content to The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents. Known online as Secludedly, the man uploaded at least 124 events. As a result UFC parent Zuffa is hitting him with everything from copyright infringement, to fraud, to breach of contract.

For quite some time a releaser known as Secludedly was one of the most reliable sources of UFC events on file-sharing sites around the world. But after a strong run, a release in January would prove to be his last.

After interviewing Secludedly in April 2013 and subsequently hearing he was in considerable trouble, earlier this year TorrentFreak tried to reach the ripper/uploader through previously-established channels. All attempts failed and now it’s clear why.

UFC parent company Zuffa have caught up with Secludedly in a very big way indeed. In a lawsuit filed at the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Secludedly is revealed as Steven A. Messina, a 27-year-old from Staten Island, New York.

The lawsuit, which includes two other doe defendants and an unknown company Zuffa refers to as XYZ Corp (“a business entity, the exact nature of which is unknown”), centers around the unlawful recording (“capping”), uploading and distribution of more than 120 UFC events via two of the world’s biggest torrent sites.

“Defendants have, on over 124 occasions, used the torrent websites known as http://kickass.to and http://thepiratebay.se to upload, distribute and publicly display the Broadcasts to the users of said websites,” the lawsuit reads.

Also receiving a prominent mention from Zuffa is the fact that Secludedly allowed people to donate via a PayPal in order to help with the financing of future ripping and uploading activities.

Secludedly, who TF understood to be just one person, is repeatedly referred to as a group in the lawsuit, such as when it’s claimed that “their” aim was to become “the most well-known pirates and infringers on the internet” who were “content to profit handsomely from user payments and donations to fund their rampant piracy and copyright infringement.”
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-u...awsuit-140501/





‘The Problem With Music’ has been Solved by the Internet
John McDuling

It’s now 20 years since Steve Albini, the legendary rock music producer best known for Nirvana’s last studio album In Utero, penned a seminal essay for the literary magazine, The Baffler.

It was titled “The Problem with Music,” and detailed how the entire food chain of the music business was set up to profit from the end product, except for the artists who actually conceived and made it.

He offered the example of a band, “pretty ordinary, but they’re also pretty good” that signed to a moderately sized independent label. They sold 250,000 copies of an album—considerable success by most standards—making the music industry more than $3 million, yet still ending up $14,000 in debt. “The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month,” he famously wrote.

Many aspiring musicians (and music journalists) of a certain vintage would have come across this inspirational piece of writing, thanks largely to the internet. So it’s quite fitting that since then, the same irrepressible force—the internet—has largely dismantled the profit centers the music industry has relied on for most of its existence.

Not everyone is cool with that. “The internet will suck the creative content out of the whole world until nothing is left,” wrote David Byrne, the former Talking Heads frontman, a sentiment that is shared by many in the music business who think the economics for artists have gotten even worse. Yet Albini, who we tracked down to discuss the state of the industry, is relatively upbeat, ebullient even.

“The single best thing that has happened in my lifetime in music, after punk rock, is being able to share music, globally for free,” he tells Quartz. “That’s such an incredible development.”

Over the past two decades the way recorded music is consumed has changed irrevocably. Napster and the various copycat file sharing services it spawned taught an entire generation of would-be CD buyers to expect to be able to listen to their favorite music for free. Not long after, Apple’s iTunes made it more attractive for those who are prepared to pay for music to buy individual songs rather than full albums.

The adjustment to this new reality has been painful, and not everyone has embraced it. (Remember when Jon Bon Jovi, hilariously, blamed Steve Jobs for the death of the music business?) But in Albini’s view, what exists now is far better than what existed before.

“Record labels, which used to have complete control, are essentially irrelevant ,” he says. “The process of a band exposing itself to the world is extremely democratic and there are no barriers. Music is no longer a commodity, it’s an environment, or atmospheric element. Consumers have much more choice and you see people indulging in the specificity of their tastes dramatically more. They only bother with music they like.”

In the physical music era, company executives and the music press were the arbiters of taste— a band needed to convince a label to sign it, fund it, and often get critics to like it, to have a realistic shot at success. These days, it’s a much more meritocratic process: people can make music in their garage and reach their audiences through YouTube, BandCamp and any number of internet avenues. “You can literally have a worldwide audience for your music….with no corporate participation, which is tremendous,” Albini says.

Swimming upstream

Another seismic internet-driven shift in music consumption is currently underway, with streaming services like Pandora (a publicly listed company with a market value of around $5 billion) and Spotify (valued at $4 billion in the private markets ahead of a possible IPO) becoming increasingly popular, and arguably responsible for further declines in recorded music sales.

Albini these days runs his own recording studio in Chicago and is lukewarm on the value of such services for true music enthusiasts. He’s skeptical about the chances of them becoming a viable earnings stream for artists, but refreshingly comfortable with their business models.

“I think they are extremely convenient for people who aren’t genuine music fans, who don’t want to do any legwork in finding bands,” Albini says. “[But] I think there is incorrect calculus being done by the people who are upset about them.” When a song is played one million times on Spotify, it can still have an audience of one person who plays it a lot. When it is played one million times on terrestrial radio, the audience is orders of magnitude bigger, he explains. “I actually think the compensation is not as preposterous as anyone else,” he says. “It’s like complaining that cars are going faster than horses.”

Spotify, which is reportedly part-owned by record labels, has been subject to fierce and colorful criticism from artists about remuneration. But Pandora, a much bigger service, has had its biggest problems with music publishing companies who control licensing rights and collect royalties for songs used commercially (for example by radio stations, digital music services, film studios and advertisers.)

Albini describes the music publishing business as “extortionate.” “Publishing was a racket. It was not a legitimate part of the music business,” he says. We recently took a deep dive into a court case between Pandora and the century-old American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) that uncovered some questionable behavior by the music establishment against the internet company. The Future of Music Coalition also has an explainer on how the incredibly complex world of music royalties works here. “It never operated for the benefit of songwriters,” says Albini. “Of all of the things that have collapsed in the music paradigm, the one I am most pleased to see collapse is the publishing racket.”

The future of music

It’s not just record company profits and shady A&R executives that have lost out from the internet-driven disruption of the music industry. The entire ecosystem that once supported musicians—neighborhood record stores, small recording studios like Albini’s Electrical Audio complex in Chicago, and indie record labels—is struggling. Albini likens these players, himself included, to blacksmiths that are surviving on a “thrifty entrepreneurial spirit” and settling into a niche role for really high-quality work.

Yet, amid the collapse of the old music business model, the underlying economics for artists have quietly undergone a significant transformation. Ticket prices for live music have increased significantly. Arguably, this reflects the fact in that our internet-connected, device obsessed society, people are increasingly seeking out tangible experiences. It ultimately means that live performances are likely to be the main way successful artists starting out today will earn their living. “I think that’s a totally much more direct and genuine way for an audience to pay for a band, and a much more efficient means of compensation” Albini says.

“On balance, the things that have happened because of the internet have been tremendously good for bands and audiences, but really bad for businesses that are not part of that network, the people who are siphoning money out. I don’t give a fuck about those people.”
http://qz.com/202194/steve-albini-th...-the-internet/





SanDisk Announces 4TB SSD, Hopes for 8TB Next Year

SanDisk's new drive family has up to 4TB capacity for data center use
Lucas Mearian

SanDisk this week announced the industry's first 4TB enterprise-class SAS solid-state drive (SSD) in its Optimus MAX product based on 19-nanometer process technology.

The company also unveiled three new Lightning II 12 Gbps performance SAS SSDs with capacities of up to 1.6TB.

In all, SanDisk announced four new data center-class SSDs. As the drives are enterprise-class, which are typically sold through third parties, SanDisk did not announce pricing with the new drives.

Along with the new drives, SanDisk confirmed that the company hopes to release 6TB and 8TB Optimus MAX SSDs in a 2.5-in. size next year -- surpassing anything previously offered by manufacturers.

"We see reaching the 4TB mark as really just the beginning and expect to continue doubling the capacity every year or two, far outpacing the growth for traditional HDDs," Manuel Martull, SanDisk's product & solutions marketing director, stated in an email reply to Computerworld.

SanDisk's new 4TB Optimus MAX SAS SSD is the highest capacity 2.5-in. SSD drive to date. The SSDs come with a 6Gbps SAS interface. The drive is aimed at read-intensive applications, such as data warehousing, media streaming and web servers. The typical workload envisioned for the 4TB drive is 90% read and 10% write, SanDisk stated.

The Optimus MAX SAS SSD is capable of up to 400 MBps sequential reads and writes and up to 75,000 random I/Os per second (IOPS) for both reads and writes, the company said.

"The Optimus MAX SSD achieves a capacity point that far outpaces today's highest-capacity 2.5-in. 10,000 and 15,000 rpm SAS hard-disk drives, making it the first true replacement for legacy mission-critical data center SAS HDDs," SanDisk stated in its announcement.

The Optmimus MAX can sustain between one and three full drive writes per day. The upgraded Optimus family of drives will be available to storage and server equipment manufacturers in the third quarter of this year.

John Scaramuzzo, general manager of SanDisk's Enterprise Storage Solutions Group, said the high capacity and small footprint of the drives will offer users a path for transitioning from hard disk drives to SSDs because they'll no longer be "forced to decide between cost and performance, or give up important functionality."

SanDisk also announced an upgrade to its Lightning Gen. II SSD. That drive family comes with a 12Gbps SAS interface marking the company's highest-performance flash-based hardware.

The Lightning Gen. II SSD lineup comes in three flavors: The high-endurance Lightning Ultra, the mixed-use Lightning Ascend and the entry-level Lightning Eco. All come with a five-year warranty and have a 2.5 million-hour mean time between failure rating from SanDisk.

The Lightning Gen. II 12Gbps SAS SSD product family will be available for sampling with storage and server equipment manufacturers in the third quarter.

The Lightning Ultra Gen. II SSD offers up to 25 full capacity drive writes per day. It delivers up to 190,000 and 100,000 IOPS of random read/write performance and sequential read/write speeds of up to 1,000 MBps and 600 MBps, respectively. The drive comes in capacities ranging from 200GB to 800GB.

The Lightning Ascend Gen. II SSD has lower endurance and can provide up to 10 full capacity drive writes per day. The drive is aimed at applications with respectable write performance, but is tuned for heavier read workloads such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), Exchange and file server use, and online transaction processing (OLTP).

The Lightning Ascend SSD delivers up to 190,000 random read and 80,000 write IOPS and sequential read/write speeds of up to 1,000 MBps and 600 MBps, respectively. The SSD is available in capacities ranging from 200GB to 1.6TB.

The Lightning Eco Gen. II SSD is considered SanDisk's entry-level enterprise SSD and is designed for read-intensive application workloads such as data warehousing, media streaming, video on demand and cloud computing. It can sustain up to three full capacity drive writes per day. The Eco SSD is available in capacities of 1TB and 1.6TB and delivers up to 180,000 random read and 35,000 write IOPS and sequential read/write speeds of 1,000 MBps and 500 MBps.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic..._8TB_next_year





Sony Develops Tape Tech That Could Lead to 185 TB Cartridges

Sony has created a magnetic tape material that can store up to 74 times more data per unit area than materials in use today
Tim Hornyak

Sony has developed a magnetic tape material that can store data at 148 gigabits per square inch, roughly 74 times the density of standard tapes.

The technology represents the world's highest recording density for the medium, the electronics giant said, and could allow the creation of tape cartridges with a capacity of 185 TB.

By comparison, LTO-6 (Linear Tape-Open), the latest generation of magnetic tape storage, has a density of 2 gigabits per square inch, or 2.5 TB per cartridge uncompressed.

Used for storage since the first digital computers, magnetic tape has been eclipsed by hard disk drives and flash drives as a medium in recent years but is still in use to preserve critical information over the long term in data centers, corporate archives and other facilities.

To make the new recording material, Sony used a kind of vacuum thin film-forming technology called sputter deposition. The process involves shooting argon ions at a polymer film substrate, which produces layers of magnetic crystal particles.

By tweaking the sputter conditions and developing a soft magnetic underlayer on the film, the manufacturer was able to create a layer of fine magnetic particles with an average size of 7.7 nanometers.

At the Intermag Europe 2014 international magnetics conference starting in Germany on May 4, Sony will describe the new technology in a presentation with IBM, which helped measure the new density.

Sony said it wants to advance the thin-layer deposition technologies and commercialize the new tape, but it did not say when such a product could appear on the market.

According to the Tape Storage Council industry group, tape capacity shipments grew by 13 percent in 2012 and were projected to grow by 26 percent last year.
http://www.itworld.com/storage/41678...-tb-cartridges





Senate Intelligence Panel Leaders Draft Cyber Legislation
Ellen Nakashima

Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are drafting cyber legislation that would enable companies to share threat data with federal agencies without fear of getting sued, officials said Monday.

Efforts to move comprehensive legislation in this area have failed in recent years, with a bill to establish security standards and ease data sharing going down to defeat in 2012. Recent disclosures about ties between the National Security Agency and telecommunications firms have made it even more difficult to advance legislation that would call for the sharing of data between the government and the private sector.

The House has twice passed information-sharing-only bills — most recently last year — but the Senate has not been able to reach a consensus on the issue.

Still, senior intelligence and military officials recently have renewed calls for legislative action, citing the threat of cyberattacks.

The new, 39-page draft bill, written by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the intelligence committee, and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), the ranking Republican, states that no lawsuit may be brought against a company for sharing threat data with “any other entity or the federal government” to prevent, investigate or mitigate a cyberattack.

Protection from lawsuits has been a key demand from industry officials and a point of contention for privacy advocates, who have argued that such an exemption could expose consumers’ data to potential government abuse or even encourage firms that have been hacked to go on the offensive.

In 2012, the advocates persuaded the committee to specify that the threat data could be shared only with a civilian agency. But the new draft leaves open the possibility that data could be sent directly to military or intelligence agencies.

The bill is prompting objections from civil liberties advocates, who say the legislation in its current form is too sweeping.

“This is definitely a step back,” said Gabe Rottman, legislative counsel and policy adviser for the American Civil Liberties Union, who was shown a copy of the draft. “The problem is the definitions of what can be shared and who it can be shared with are too broad. In this draft, companies can share data with the military and the NSA. Given the past revelations, I think it’s important to keep this information in civilian hands.”

A committee aide said staff members were seeking comment so that senators can consider revisions before any formal consideration of the legislation. The bill also would enable the government to share cyberthreat data with industry.

The draft states that information may be shared that “indicates, describes or is necessary” to identify a software vulnerability, computer intrusion or attack. Although it says that personal information should be stripped out before the data are passed on to the government, if the personal information is not “directly related” to the attack, the looseness of the language and the real-time nature of data sharing leave room for error, privacy advocates said.

They also expressed concern that the data could be used not just for cybersecurity but also for foreign intelligence, counterintelligence or law enforcement aims.

Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the NSA and head of the U.S. Cyber Command, said at his confirmation hearing in March that liability protection was “a critical element” of any cyber bill. Rogers, who was confirmed March 31, said such legislation “is a key for our future.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...5a6_story.html





CISPA 3.0: The Senate's New Bill As Bad As Ever
Jason Koebler

CISPA is back for a third time—it has lost the 'P,' but it's just as bad for civil liberties as ever.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is considering a new cybersecurity bill that contains many of the provisions that civil liberties groups hated about the Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). Most notably, under the proposed bill companies could not be sued for incorrectly sharing too much customer information with the federal government, and broad law enforcement sharing could allow for the creation of backdoor wiretaps.

The bill, called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2014 (embedded below), was written by Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and is currently circulating around the committee right now but has not yet been introduced. Right now, the bill is only a “discussion draft,” and the committee is still looking to make revisions to the bill before it is officially introduced.

In any case, the bill will look familiar to anyone who has followed the trials and tribulations of CISPA: The general premise of the bill is to allow the federal government to share classified “cyber threat” information with companies (which is good), but also allows companies to share “cyber threat” information about their customers with the federal government—which could be bad, depending on how it’s implemented. Any programs created by the bill would be under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security, which is important, because it's a civilian, not military group such as the National Security Administration.

If you'll remember, the Senate is where the last CISPA went to die, and other Senate cybersecurity bills have limited the circumstances under which data can be shared with law enforcement. Not so in Feinstein's new bill. The language of the draft would give companies a wide latitude to share information, in real time, with state, local, and federal law enforcement, a move that's concerning to civil liberties experts.

"I think the Senate bill was much much better placed when this issue came up before—it limited law enforcement use to very specific circumstances, such as when there was the threat of imminent death or bodily injury," Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told me. "This very broad criminal purpose creates the possibility that cybersecurity information sharing becomes a backdoor wiretap, because law enforcement would be receiving information it otherwise would not get unless it showed probable cause. You don’t want a world where very robust cybersecurity information sharing turns into a law enforcement tool that’s used to prosecute people for completely unrelated crime."

It’s clear in the draft language that Feinstein is trying to assuage the concerns of civil liberties groups, but they’re still not going to be terribly happy with many of the provisions. The bill generally requires that companies strip identifying information from any information shared with the government that could pertain to a person not directly involved with a “cyber threat” and also calls for the attorney general to meet with civil liberties groups to devise the final policies and procedures for how the whole thing would work within 30 days of the bill’s passage.

But even those provisions don't go far enough or have loopholes, according to Amie Stepanovich of the civil liberties group Access. While any information that goes from the government to private companies would have identifying information in it stripped, Stepanovich says there's a "loophole large enough to drive a semi-truck through" that would allow companies to leave identifying information if someone tangentially relates to a cyber threat.

"A 'cyber threat' could mean you're just on a spam email list," and are therefore subject to having your information shared with the government, she said.

The bill also calls for the government to create some sort of “notification system” to let companies know when they’ve shared data that doesn’t pertain to a specific cyber threat.

But that’s all it’d be—a notification. Like CISPA, the bill gives companies nearly complete liability protection—they can’t be sued for the information they share with the federal government as long as they act with “good faith.” According to the bill, companies that act with “gross negligence” or “willful misconduct” would still be subject to legal sanctions. That clause is still problematic, Stepanovich said.

"It fails to encourage good information practices, it’s a crutch instead of encouraging proper cybersecurity. They're saying that some information shouldn’t be transferred, but even if it is transferred, it cannot result in a lawsuit even if it’s intentionally shared," she told me. "It takes away the ability for the public to have any say in how their information is shared."

In any case, this is the major hangup that civil liberties groups and CISPA’s author, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), couldn’t reconcile. Rogers has said that, without liability protection, any information sharing is “a hard problem to work.”

“You have liability issues with sharing information, and you have, my fear would be, this unwieldy cooperation of competition between companies, and so, yes, we put liability protection in the bill, and again we did that because it has to be in my mind a voluntary process,” Rogers said at an event discussing CISPA last year. “We don’t want any mandates telling people, ‘you must give us information, or you must cooperate.’”

To get around that, then, you remove any sort of responsibility from companies who overshare; you “notify” them that they’ve overshared instead of holding them responsible, and whoever’s privacy gets violated along the way just has to deal with it.

Rogers often takes most of the heat for CISPA and other cybersecurity bills, but this isn’t the first time that Feinstein has introduced something like this. In 2012, she introduced similar legislation that ended up dying in committee.

Again, this is just an early draft—it’s possible that the civil liberties provisions get toughened up before the bill is introduced, but as it now stands, the bill is certainly problematic.

Meanwhile, progress has stalled on any bills that would overhaul how groups like the NSA collect information.

"I can't believe this is coming out now. Congress can’t pass a law to limit NSA surveillance, but they seem to be actively working to increase the amount of surveillance," Stepanovich said. "They haven't been transparent in drafting this law."
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the...kdoor-wiretaps





White House Wades Cautiously into Effort to Protect Online Privacy
Roberta Rampton and Alexei Oreskovic

The White House will lay out ideas this week for protecting U.S. consumers' privacy in an era in which the ubiquitous use of computers and mobile phones provides a constant data feed on individuals.

But after a 90-day review of "big data," the White House is expected to suggest ways to encourage companies to protect privacy and identify areas for further study, rather than calling for a legislative overhaul.

The Obama administration is treading carefully to avoid further antagonizing major technology companies and international allies angered by the government's data surveillance programs.

The review was led by John Podesta, senior counselor to President Barack Obama, who previously worked on tech privacy issues as a Capitol Hill staffer and as an aide to President Bill Clinton.

Podesta already has made clear that he is concerned technology could be used to discriminate against people for housing, credit, jobs, health and education.

But he has explicitly called his review a "scoping exercise" to look broadly at issues, not to develop detailed policies.

"The tech sector is probably the crown jewel of growing the economy in America right now. And it was clear he did not want the government to do anything to damage that needlessly," said Dick O'Brien, head of government relations for the American Association of Advertising Agencies and who was part of a meeting Podesta held with the advertising industry at the White House in March.

"We walked out with the feeling that he was there to learn," O'Brien said. "He has no ax to grind, as far as we could see."

Still, Podesta must offer concrete ideas, or he will face heat for just producing a "book report," said Max Everett, a consultant on cybersecurity and risk management issues who was chief information officer for Republican President George W. Bush.

"They don't need to have conclusions right now -- they just need to know which way to go," Everett said.

The review on big data was sparked by the revelations of ex-spy contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked information about the National Security Agency's data collection programs.

The backlash created a major political headache for Obama at home and abroad. Obama has taken steps to rein in the NSA, but he also sought to broaden the conversation about big data by ordering the review, pointing out that private companies and academics use the same kinds of information and techniques.

With electronic devices increasingly connected to the internet, consumers are leaving more and more digital footprints that can be collected and analyzed, as they share location data through their phones and post personal information on social media.

For instance, smart thermostats, such as the Nest devices, recently acquired by Google, keep track of when a person is home, and fitness bracelets monitor biometric data such as heart rates.

With the Podesta report, the White House will seek to reframe concerns about data and privacy while showing that it takes the issue seriously and wants to do something about it.

Eric Schultz, a spokesman for the White House, said the report will "capture the key technological changes of relevance to our government and the future of privacy in America," and look for ways to minimize risks to privacy.

COMPLAINTS FROM TECH

After Snowden's leaks, technology companies like Facebook, Google and Yahoo criticized the government for raising privacy fears at home and abroad, which they said hurt their businesses.

European leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose cell phone had been monitored by the NSA, vowed to push for tougher data rules in Europe. Merkel will visit Obama at the White House on Friday.

"Part of having privacy be a policy agenda led by the White House is a way to show Europe that privacy is important to the administration," said a privacy officer from a technology company, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

While U.S. internet companies have pushed Obama to reform government surveillance, they argue that no wholesale change is needed for rules on the collection and use of commercial data.

If the White House were to call for an overhaul of commercial rules, that would imply U.S. rules are too weak and could fuel arguments abroad for data trade restrictions.

Even if the White House wanted to pursue legislation, such as codifying the "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights" it drafted in 2012, it would need cooperation from Congress. That is unlikely to happen ahead of the November midterm elections.

Podesta has said he thinks updates are needed for the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a statute governing internet communications which he helped draft in 1984.

Both privacy groups and tech companies have called for that legislation to require government agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission to be required to get warrants before accessing the email of people under investigation. A bipartisan bill to do that has stalled on Capitol Hill.

(Reporting by Roberta Rampton and Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Caren Bohan and Leslie Adler)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A3S0WC20140429





Obama Panel Supports Warrant Requirement for E-Mail, Cloud Content

Congress has punted on issue for years. E-mail, cloud data to remain exposed.
David Kravets

On Thursday, a panel commissioned by President Barack Obama to examine the implications of "big data" concluded that cloud and e-mail content should be constitutionally protected—a recommendation that Congress is seemingly unwilling to adopt.

The panel—which included White House counselor John Podesta, Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, the President's Science Advisor John Holdren, the President's Economic Advisor Jeff Zients, and other senior officials—recommended that an aging law be changed to require that authorities obtain warrants to seize cloud-based content and e-mail. Such data, when it is stored on third-party servers and older than 180 days, is not constitutionally protected.

"The laws that govern protections afforded to our communications were written before e-mail, the Internet, and cloud computing came into wide use. Congress should amend ECPA [the Electronic Communications Privacy Act] to ensure the standard of protection for online, digital content is consistent with that afforded in the physical," the panel concluded.

But it's uncertain whether Congress would actually amend ECPA, the privacy law in question that was adopted during the Reagan era.

Here's why: the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a reform measure last year requiring the authorities to obtain a probable-cause warrant to acquire cloud-based data—the same Fourth Amendment standard necessary to search the same material if it was on a hard drive in your house. However, an anonymous lawmaker or lawmakers has blocked the measure from going before the full Senate for a yes or no vote.

And that's despite the unheard of support from the Justice Department saying it backs the Senate package to enhance the public's privacy protections.

What's more, at least 200 lawmakers on the House side have co-sponsored a similar bill, yet it remains idled, too, amid concerns from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which opposes the plan. That's an unprecedented number of lawmakers to ever sponsor a piece of legislation. And similar packages have been floating about for years.

On Monday dozens of groups, from those representing civil rights to business interests, urged the government to reform ECPA. Even the US Chamber of Commerce was on board. That says a lot because the chamber represents companies the SEC likely would be examining for stock irregularities.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others are invoking a recent federal appeals court ruling and are demanding warrants despite ECPA, but the entire tech sector is not.

The White House panel on Thursday also urged Congress to pass a host of other pieces of legislation relating to student privacy and data-breach notifications
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...cloud-content/





Help EFF Test Privacy Badger, Our New Tool to Stop Creepy Online Tracking

EFF is launching a new extension for Firefox and Chrome called Privacy Badger. Privacy Badger automatically detects and blocks spying ads around the Web, and the invisible trackers that feed information to them. You can try it out today:

Privacy Badger is EFF's answer to intrusive and objectionable practices in the online advertising industry, and many advertisers' outright refusal to meaningfully honor Do Not Track requests. This week, Mozilla published research showing that privacy is the single most important thing that users want from their web browsers. Privacy Badger is part of EFF’s growing campaign to deliver that privacy by giving you the technical means to disallow trackers within the pages you read on the Web.

This is an alpha release; we've been using it internally and don't think it's too buggy. But we're looking for intrepid users to try it out and let us know before we encourage millions of people to install it. If you find bugs, you can file them on github against either the Firefox or Chrome repos as appropriate.

How does Privacy Badger work?

Privacy Badger is a browser-add on tool that analyzes sites to detect and disallow content that tracks you in an objectionable, non-consensual manner. When you visit websites, your copy of Privacy Badger keeps note of the "third-party" domains that embed images, scripts and advertising in the pages you visit.

If a third-party server appears to be tracking you without permission, by using uniquely identifying cookies to collect a record of the pages you visit across multiple sites, Privacy Badger will automatically disallow content from that third-party tracker. In some cases a third-party domain provides some important aspect of a page's functionality, such as embedded maps, images, or fonts. In those cases, Privacy Badger will allow connections to the third party but will screen out its tracking cookies.

Advertisers and other third-party domains can unblock themselves in Privacy Badger by making a strong commitment to respect Do Not Track requests. By including this mechanism, Privacy Badger not only protects users who install it, but actually provides incentives for better privacy practices across the entire Web.

So users who install Privacy Badger not only get more privacy and a better browsing experience for themselves, but actually contribute to making the Web as a whole better for everyone.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/privacy-badger





British Spy Chiefs Secretly Begged to Play in NSA’s Data Pools
Ryan Gallagher

Britain’s electronic surveillance agency, Government Communications Headquarters, has long presented its collaboration with the National Security Agency’s massive electronic spying efforts as proportionate, carefully monitored, and well within the bounds of privacy laws. But according to a top-secret document in the archive of material provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, GCHQ secretly coveted the NSA’s vast troves of private communications and sought “unsupervised access” to its data as recently as last year – essentially begging to feast at the NSA’s table while insisting that it only nibbles on the occasional crumb.

The document, dated April 2013, reveals that GCHQ requested broad new authority to tap into data collected under a law that authorizes a variety of controversial NSA surveillance initiatives, including the PRISM program.

PRISM is a system used by the NSA and the FBI to obtain the content of personal emails, chats, photos, videos, and other data processed by nine of the world’s largest internet companies, including Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Skype. The arrangement GCHQ proposed would also have provided the British agency with greater access to millions of international phone calls and emails that the NSA siphons directly from phone networks and the internet.

The Snowden files do not indicate whether NSA granted GCHQ’s request, but they do show that the NSA was “supportive” of the idea, and that GCHQ was permitted extensive access to PRISM during the London Olympics in 2012. The request for the broad access was communicated at “leadership” level, according to the documents. Neither agency would comment on the proposed arrangement or whether it was approved.

Last June, in the wake of the Guardian‘s PRISM disclosures, British Foreign Secretary William Hague issued a lengthy statement declaring that “the arrangements for oversight and the general framework for exchanging information with the United States are the same as under previous governments.” Warrants to intercept the communications of any individual in the United Kingdom, the statement read, must be personally signed by a cabinet secretary.

Likewise, the British Intelligence and Security Committee reported in July that, after reviewing “GCHQ’s access to the content of communications, the legal framework which governs that access, and the arrangements GCHQ has with its overseas counterparts for sharing such information,” the spy agency’s collaboration with the NSA was within the bounds of British law.

But the broader access secretly sought by GCHQ only months earlier appears to have been unprecedented – and would have placed fewer restrictions on how the NSA’s surveillance data is obtained and handled by British spies.

In response to the revelation, British member of Parliament Julian Huppert has accused government officials of issuing statements intended to “deliberately mislead” about GCHQ’s surveillance programs and called for an overhaul of the current system of oversight.

Eric King, head of research at London-based human rights group Privacy International, said that the latest disclosure raised “serious concerns” about whether GCHQ has pushed for the ability to sift through data collected by the NSA in a bid to circumvent British laws restricting the scope of its surveillance.

“GCHQ’s continued insistence that it is following the law becomes less credible with every revelation,” King told The Intercept, adding that he believed the agency was “stretching its legal authorities with help from international partners.”

GCHQ’s request is outlined in an NSA memo marked “top secret” and “noforn” – agency jargon for “no foreigners.”

It was prepared last year for Gen. Keith Alexander, then director of the NSA, in advance of a visit by Sir Iain Lobban, chief of GCHQ. Lobban was scheduled to attend a dinner at Alexander’s home on April 30, 2013. The following day, the two spy chiefs were to have a “one-on-one discussion,” and Lobban was to be given a tour of NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, complete with demonstrations of the agency’s operations.

The memo includes talking points for Alexander on issues related to Syria and Iran, and also warns that GCHQ is being “challenged with their activities and operations being subject to increased scrutiny and oversight from their government (and public).” Alexander was told that Lobban might ask about the safeguards in place to prevent any data that GCHQ shared with the NSA from being handed to others, such as Israel, who might use it in “lethal operations.”

Under the heading “key topic areas,” the document notes that gaining “unsupervised access” to data collected by the NSA under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “remains on GCHQ’s wish list and is something its leadership still desires.”

Section 702 of FISA grants the NSA wide latitude to collect the email and phone communications of “persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.” It authorizes PRISM and several other programs – with codenames such as BLARNEY and STORMBREW – that covertly mine communications directly from phone lines and internet cables.

The memo adds: “NSA and SID [Signals Intelligence Directorate] leadership are well aware of GCHQ’s request for this data, and the steps necessary for approval. NSA leadership could be asked whether we’re still supportive of this initiative.”

GCHQ was previously reported to have had some level of access to PRISM since at least June 2010, generating 197 intelligence reports from the data in 2012. However, the British agency appears to have been unsatisfied with limits placed on its use of the system.

While GCHQ’s ultimate aim was to gain “unsupervised” access to the NSA’s FISA databases, as of April 2013 it had already successfully lobbied for increased access to the trove “supervised” by the NSA. The newly disclosed Snowden document indicates that GCHQ was close to concluding a deal to gain the supervised access to communications collected under FISA as part of a program called “Triage 2.0.” This deal, under unspecified conditions imposed by the NSA, was “awaiting signature” from the British agency in April 2013, according to the document.

In addition, the top-secret memo notes that the NSA had separately agreed with GCHQ to share data on a broader “unsupervised” basis as part of a program called Olympic Option.

Olympic Option was a surveillance program operated during the London Olympics in 2012, under which at least 100 GCHQ operatives were given access to the PRISM system “throughout the Olympic timeframe,” ostensibly to identify potential terror threats. In a single six-day period in May 2012, according to a top-secret PowerPoint slide, GCHQ received 11,431 “cuts of traffic” from communications intercepted using PRISM. (“Cuts” is a term used by the NSA to describe extracts of conversations that it collects.) The memo prepared for Alexander describes the British request for unsupervised access to FISA 702 data as “in a manner similar to Olympics Option [sic].”

The data sharing between the agencies during the Olympics, though, was not isolated to PRISM. It also encompassed large volumes of metadata – such as the “to” and “from” details from an email but not the content of the message itself – as part of a more expansive Olympics surveillance effort. The NSA was funneling troves of intercepted data to GCHQ from a system called GHOSTMACHINE, a massive cloud database used by the NSA to analyze metadata and store, according to one document in the Snowden archive, “100s of billions of entries.”

The NSA declined to answer a series of questions from The Intercept about its surveillance cooperation with GCHQ or comment on whether the arrangement has involved sharing information on Americans’ communications.

In a statement, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said that the agency is legally barred from sharing intelligence collected under PRISM and similar programs “unless the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has first approved minimization procedures, which must comply with the Fourth Amendment and limit the collection, retention and dissemination of information about U.S. persons.” Vines added that, in response to a “genuine threat of terrorist attack” surrounding the 2012 Olympics, the U.S.intelligence community “took steps authorized by law and consistent with the Constitution to protect Americans and citizens of other countries.”

Similarly, GCHQ refused to answer any questions on the record about the documents. The agency issued its boilerplate response to inquiries, insisting that its work “is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight.”

Earlier this month, a report by the U.K. government’s communications interception commissioner deemed GCHQ’s arrangements with the NSA to have been within the law and said that the agency was not engaged in “indiscriminate random mass intrusion.”

But the newly revealed documents raise questions about the full extent of the clandestine cooperation – key details about which appear to have been withheld from lawmakers.

Huppert, the member of Parliament, served on a committee that reviewed – and recommended against – a push from the British government for more powers to access private data before the Snowden materials became public last year.

At no point during that process, Huppert says, did GCHQ disclose the extent of its access to PRISM and other then-secret NSA programs. Nor did it indicate that it was seeking wider access to NSA data – even during closed sessions held to allow security officials to discuss sensitive information. Huppert says these facts were relevant to the review and could have had a bearing on its outcome.

“It is now obvious that they were trying to deliberately mislead the committee,” Huppert told The Intercept. “They very clearly did not give us all the information that we needed.”

Decrying the process as a “good example of how governments should not behave,” the Liberal Democrat parliamentarian is calling for significant reform of the U.K.’s current surveillance regime.

“I want to see much greater clarity on how we have oversight, because it is currently not fit for purpose,” he says. “We need much more transparency about what is happening. And we need to revise our laws, because our laws clearly have too many loopholes in them.”
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/a...ccess-snowden/





Apple, Facebook, Others Defy Authorities, Notify Users of Secret Data Demands
Craig Timberg

Major U.S. technology companies have largely ended the practice of quietly complying with investigators’ demands for e-mail records and other online data, saying that users have a right to know in advance when their information is targeted for government seizure.

This increasingly defiant industry stand is giving some of the tens of thousands of Americans whose Internet data gets swept into criminal investigations each year the opportunity to fight in court to prevent disclosures. Prosecutors, however, warn that tech companies may undermine cases by tipping off criminals, giving them time to destroy vital electronic evidence before it can be gathered.

Fueling the shift is the industry’s eagerness to distance itself from the government after last year’s disclosures about National Security Agency surveillance of online services. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google all are updating their policies to expand routine notification of users about government data seizures, unless specifically gagged by a judge or other legal authority, officials at all four companies said. Yahoo announced similar changes in July.

As this position becomes uniform across the industry, U.S. tech companies will ignore the instructions stamped on the fronts of subpoenas urging them not to alert subjects about data requests, industry lawyers say. Companies that already routinely notify users have found that investigators often drop data demands to avoid having suspects learn of inquiries.

“It serves to chill the unbridled, cost-free collection of data,” said Albert Gidari Jr., a partner at Perkins Coie who represents several technology companies. “And I think that’s a good thing.”

The Justice Department disagrees, saying in a statement that new industry policies threaten investigations and put potential crime victims in greater peril.

“These risks of endangering life, risking destruction of evidence, or allowing suspects to flee or intimidate witnesses are not merely hypothetical, but unfortunately routine,” department spokesman Peter Carr said, citing a case in which early disclosure put at risk a cooperative witness in a case. He declined to offer details because the case was under seal.

The changing tech company policies do not affect data requests approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which are automatically kept secret by law. National security letters, which are administrative subpoenas issued by the FBI for national security investigations, also carry binding gag orders.

The government traditionally has notified people directly affected by searches and seizures — though often not immediately — when investigators entered a home or tapped a phone line. But that practice has not survived the transition into the digital world. Cellular carriers such as AT&T and Verizon typically do not tell customers when investigators collect their call data.

Many tech companies once followed a similar model of quietly cooperating with law enforcement. Courts, meanwhile, ruled that it was sufficient for the government to notify the providers of Internet services of data requests, rather than the affected customers.

Twitter, founded in 2006, became perhaps the first major tech company to routinely notify users when investigators collected data, yet few others followed at first. When the Electronic Frontier Foundation began issuing its influential “Who Has Your Back?” report in 2011 — rating companies on their privacy and transparency policies — Twitter was the only company to get a star under the category “Tell users about data demands.” Google, the next mostly highly rated, got half a star from the civil liberties group.

The following year, four other companies got full stars. The preparation of this year’s report, due in mid-May, has prompted a new flurry of activity in the legal offices of tech companies eager to gain a coveted star.

Google already routinely notified users of government data requests but adopted an updated policy this week detailing the few situations in which notification is withheld, such as when there is imminent risk of physical harm to a potential crime victim. “We notify users about legal demands when appropriate, unless prohibited by law or court order,” the company said in a statement.

Lawyers at Apple, Facebook and Microsoft are working on their own revisions, company officials said, although the details have not been released. All are moving toward more routinely notifying users, said the companies, which had not previously disclosed these changes.

“Later this month, Apple will update its policies so that in most cases when law enforcement requests personal information about a customer, the customer will receive a notification from Apple,” company spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said.

The trend toward greater user notification gained new urgency amid the government surveillance revelations made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Although the bulk data collection he disclosed was for national security purposes, not routine criminal investigations, companies grew determined to show that they prized their relationships with customers more than those with authorities — a particularly sensitive issue overseas, where the American tech industry has been lambasted as too cozy with the U.S. government.

“Post-Snowden, there is a greater desire to compete on privacy,” said Marc Zwillinger, founder of ZwillGen, a Washington-based law firm that has major tech companies as clients. “Companies have had notice policies and cared about these issues for years. It’s only now that it’s being discussed at the CEO level.”

The changing legal standards of technology companies most directly affect federal, state and local criminal investigators, who have found that companies increasingly balk at data requests once considered routine. Most now refuse to disclose the contents of e-mails or social media posts when presented with subpoenas, insisting that the government instead seek search warrants, which are issued only by judges and require the stricter legal standard of probable cause.

Subpoenas, by contrast, can be issued by a broader range of authorities and require only that the information sought be deemed “relevant” to an investigation. A 2010 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit backed the industry’s contention that search warrants should be required for digital content, a standard now widely accepted.

For data other than content — such as records showing the senders and recipients of e-mails, the phone numbers registered with accounts or identifying information about the computers used to access services — companies have continued accepting subpoenas but warn investigators that users will be notified before disclosure occurs.

“That was one of the purposeful burdens that was supposed to limit government surveillance,” said Marc Rotenberg, a Georgetown University law professor and executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “As a historic matter, the intent always was that a person would be notified.”

The shifting industry practices force investigators to make difficult choices: withdraw data requests, allow notification to happen or go to magistrate judges to seek either gag orders or search warrants, which typically are issued under seal for a fixed period of time, delaying notification. Such choices were made even more difficult by the rising skepticism of magistrate judges, many of whom in recent years have scrutinized such requests more carefully or rejected them altogether, legal experts say.

“It’s sort of a double whammy that makes law enforcement’s job harder,” said Jason M. Weinstein, former deputy assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s criminal division, now a partner at Steptoe & Johnson. “It has the potential to significantly impair investigations.”

Ronald T. Hosko, a former FBI special agent who until his recent retirement oversaw the criminal division at the Washington field office, said the development of cases has been hurt by the threat of user notification, especially during early phases when investigators try to work discreetly, before a suspect potentially can destroy evidence. He said the shift among tech companies has been driven mainly by concern about their public images, at the expense of public safety — an issue he said was particularly acute when it came to cases involving child predators or terrorists.

“My fear is that we will be less secure in our country, in our houses, because of political decisions, because of the politics of the day, rather than what will keep us safe,” Hosko said. “I’m concerned that that gets people killed, that that gets people hurt.”

Companies that have policies to notify users of government data collection say they make exceptions for cases of imminent danger to potential victims, especially if the safety of a child is at risk. In the vast majority of situations, however, users deserve to know who is collecting their data and why, the companies say. The exceptions, they say, should be decided by a judge — not by a company lawyer, and not by an investigator.

“The intent is to make sure it’s not a rubber stamp,” said Dane Jasper, chief executive of Sonic.net, an Internet and phone provider in California whose notification policy has won a star from EFF. “That way we’re not releasing customer information without due process.”

Ann E. Marimow contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...y.html?hpid=z1





Anonymous Chatting, Through a Simple Service
Jenna Wortham

Secret, the popular mobile application, lets people share their deepest, darkest — and occasionally funniest — confessions anonymously, with their friends.

The application lets people see other people’s ‘secrets’ and comment on them, but it doesn’t yet include a way for them to message each other through the service.

So Philip Kaplan, a serial entrepreneur and a Secret user, cobbled together a simple and free service called Anonyfish that allows people to send private, anonymous messages to each other.

“I noticed that people were creating one-off Gmail accounts to talk to people from Secret, and I thought that was a waste,” he said in a recent phone interview.

His service, called Anonyfish, lets people create a user name that they can share with those they want to communicate with and then gives them access to a simple inbox for exchanging messages. The service is appealing to someone who might want to talk about something that was posted on Secret — like acquisitions rumors or accusations of workplace harassment — in private, but not reveal their full identity yet.

“Everything is encrypted,” he said. “I can’t even see the user names. It all looks like random characters and garbage.”

Anonyfish is still new and relatively small. It was introduced in February and hosts around 600 messages each day. More than 20,000 usernames have been registered through the site. Mr. Kaplan says that doesn’t necessarily reflect the number of users, since one person theoretically could create multiple accounts.

The service is largely intended for people who use Secret, Mr. Kaplan said, since Secret’s main competitor, Whisper, already offers private, anonymous messaging.

But Mr. Kaplan says he hopes that Anonyfish eventually extends to other services or is used for any interactions where both parties may be reluctant to reveal their names or personal information.

“There are a lot of services where people could use this,” he said, including Vine, Reddit, or anything where people might not use their real-world identity on the service.

Mr. Kaplan was also involved with an early version of a company called Blippy, a start-up that let people publish their credit card purchases online. Not long after its launch, however, Blippy accidentally exposed some sensitive information and the company eventually pivoted into another service for real-time mobile auctions, although Mr. Kaplan is no longer involved with the company.

More than a decade ago, he also ran an Internet messaging board.

At some point, Mr. Kaplan said, he would like to introduce a feature that would give people the ability to reveal their identities to each other, if both parties agreed.

But for now, said Mr. Kaplan, who has also helped create ventures like AdBrite and worked on services like TinyLetter, the service is still a pet project.

“This is just a side thing for now,” he said. “But who knows what will happen in the future?”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0...imple-service/





Inside the ‘DarkMarket’ Prototype, a Silk Road the FBI Can Never Seize
Andy Greenberg

The Silk Road, for all its clever uses of security protections like Tor and Bitcoin to protect the site’s lucrative drug trade, still offered its enemies a single point of failure. When the FBI seized the server that hosted the market in October and arrested its alleged owner Ross Ulbricht, the billion-dollar drug bazaar came crashing down.

If one group of Bitcoin black market enthusiasts has their way, the next online free-trade zone could be a much more elusive target.

At a Toronto Bitcoin hackathon earlier this month, the group took home the $20,000 first prize with a proof-of-concept for a new online marketplace known as DarkMarket, a fully peer-to-peer system with no central authority for the feds to attack. If DarkMarket’s distributed architecture works, law enforcement would be forced to go after every contraband buyer and seller one by one, a notion that could signal a new round in the cat-and-mouse game of illicit online sales.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” said Amir Taaki, one of DarkMarket’s creators and the founder of the anarchist group Unsystem, in a short speech at the Toronto Bitcoin Expo unveiling the project. He compared DarkMarket’s improvements on the now-defunct Silk Road to the advent of Bittorrent, a decentralized technology that revamped Napster’s more vulnerable model of filesharing and flummoxed copyright enforcers. “Like a hydra, those of us in the community that push for individual empowerment are in an arms race to equip the people with the tools needed for the next generation of digital black markets.”

DarkMarket, Taaki and its other developers admit, is still just an experimental demonstration. They have yet to integrate anonymity protections like Tor into the software; currently every user’s IP address is listed for every other user to see. And black market enthusiasts shouldn’t expect DarkMarket’s creators to finish the open source project themselves any time soon–Taaki says he’s focused on polishing his anonymous Bitcoin software project Dark Wallet, and his co-creators Damian Cutillo and William Swanson say they’re tied up with their own Bitcoin startup known as Airbitz.

“This is just a simple prototype, but we wanted to show people that it’s possible,” Taaki says. “But this is going to happen. If not us, someone else will do it.”

Taaki argues that DarkMarket’s code, posted to GitHub, already has all the basic ingredients that made Silk Road a giant underground success: the ability for buyers and sellers to communicate privately and make payments to each other, pages where sellers can show their wares, a reputation system for sellers with ratings and reviews, and an escrow system that protects payment until goods are received by the buyer. “And it’s all totally decentralized,” says Taaki.

Achieving those functions, while also preventing scams and fraud, is no simple task. Two of DarkMarket’s creators, Swanson and Cutillo, gave WIRED a demo of the software along with a step-by-step explanation of how a typical deal would go down. What they revealed is a Rube Goldberg machine of checks and balances designed to prevent users from cheating each other, without ever requiring oversight from an administrator or other authority figure.

Here’s how it works:

• A user downloads the DarkMarket software, which runs as a daemon in the background of the user’s operating system, allowing them to connect to the DarkMarket network through any browser. The DarkMarket daemon incorporates a library of commands for peer-to-peer networking known as ZeroMQ, which allows the user’s PC to become a node in a distributed network where every user can communicate directly with every other user.

• Any DarkMarket user can become a seller on the market simply by editing an HTML file that DarkMarket designates as his or her seller page, adding pictures and descriptions of items for sale just as he or she would on the Silk Road or eBay. (For users with nothing to sell, the page remains blank.) Buyers can browse the market by clicking on other users’ DarkMarket nodes or search for a seller’s nickname to view their seller pages. At the moment, DarkMarket displays only a bare IP address for every user, but the system’s creators say it will eventually show a pseudonym for each one and also allow product searches.

• When a user wants to buy something, he or she sends an order message (“I’ll take ten of your finest MDMA doses”) to the seller. If the seller agrees, the buyer and seller together choose what DarkMarket calls an “arbiter.” Since the market doesn’t have any central authority, the arbiter’s job is to settle any disputes–to serve as a tie breaker in any stalemate that might arise if the deal goes sour. Both the buyer and seller can keep a list of approved arbiters, and one will be chosen at random from the overlapping names on their lists. “The arbiter is just another peer on the network,” says Swanson. “Just as anyone can be a buyer or seller, anyone can be an arbiter.”

• Once the buyer, seller and arbiter for a transaction are chosen, DarkMarket creates a new Bitcoin address that will serve as the escrow, holding the buyer’s money until the transaction is complete. But this isn’t any run-of-the-mill Bitcoin address; It combines the three users’ public encryption keys, created based on a private encryption key generated when they installed DarkMarket, to offer what’s known as a “multisignature” address. That address is designed so that once the buyer’s bitcoins go into it, they can only be moved again if two out of three of the parties agrees and signs that transaction with the private key that controls their Bitcoins.

• The buyer moves his or her money to the escrow address. If the product is shipped and arrives, the buyer and seller both sign a transaction to move the escrowed bitcoins to the seller. If the product doesn’t arrive–or if it’s defective, or some other dispute arises–the buyer and the seller may both try to move the bitcoins into their own account. In that case the arbiter can choose which transaction to sign, which determines where the coins end up. The arbiter can also demand a payment for his or her services, which would be split off from the bitcoins.

• After a transaction, every participant can leave ratings and reviews for every other participant. Those reputation measurements are cryptographically signed with the writer’s private key so that they can’t be forged, and copied to other nodes on the network. When a user visits a seller page, the ratings and reviews for that seller are pulled from other nodes to display the seller’s track record, preventing fraud and rewarding good customer service.

• To create consistent identities and prevent untrustworthy users from impersonating trusted ones, DarkMarket nodes keep a list of all the public keys and nicknames of every user on the network. This ledger of names and keys is periodically put through a cryptographic function known as a hash and added to the Bitcoin blockchain by including it in a small transaction. That trick prevents anyone from altering the ledger to steal someone’s identity; When a user searches for a nickname on DarkMarket, the software looks at the blockchain to check the user’s key against the ledger before displaying that user’s seller page. (So far, Taaki has added DarkMarket’s identities to the Bitcoin blockchain manually, but he says he plans to automatic the process.)

If DarkMarket improves and catches on among contraband traders, it’s not exactly clear what legal risks Taaki and his fellow coders might be taking. Taaki argues that he’s merely distributing a program–not running a criminal conspiracy. “I’m just a humble coder,” he says. “Code is a form of expression. You can’t imprison someone for speaking an idea.”

And if the creators of a fully peer-to-peer black market were to be locked up? If all goes according to plan, their leaderless community would go about business as usual.

Here’s a video made by an audience member at Taaki and Swanson’s presentation of DarkMarket at the Toronto Bitcoin Expo.
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/darkmarket/





From Balloons to Shrimp-Filled Shallows, the Future is Wireless
Jeremy Wagstaff

The Internet may feel like it's everywhere, but large pockets of sky, swathes of land and most of the oceans are still beyond a signal's reach.

Three decades after the first cellphone went on sale - the $4,000 Motorola DynaTAC 8000X "Brick" - half the world remains unconnected. For some it costs too much, but up to a fifth of the population, or some 1.4 billion people, live where "the basic network infrastructure has yet to be built," according to a Facebook white paper last month.

Even these figures, says Kurtis Heimerl, whose Berkeley-based start-up Endaga has helped build one of the world's smallest telecoms networks in an eastern Indonesian village, ignore the many people who have a cellphone but have to travel hours to make a call or send a message. "Everyone in our community has a phone and a SIM card," he says. "But they're not covered."

Heimerl reckons up to 2 billion people live most of their lives without easy access to cellular coverage. "It's not getting better at the dramatic rate you think."

The challenge is to find a way to connect those people, at an attractive cost.

And then there's the frontier beyond that: the oceans.

Improving the range and speed of communications beneath the seas that cover more than two-thirds of the planet is a must for environmental monitoring - climate recording, pollution control, predicting natural disasters like tsunami, monitoring oil and gas fields, and protecting harbors.

There is also interest from oceanographers looking to map the sea bed, marine biologists, deep-sea archaeologists and those hunting for natural resources, or even searching for lost vessels or aircraft. Canadian miner Nautilus Minerals Inc said last week it came to an agreement with Papua New Guinea, allowing it to start work on the world's first undersea metal mining project, digging for copper, gold and silver 1,500 meters (4,921 feet) beneath the Bismark Sea.

And there's politics: China recently joined other major powers in deep-sea exploration, partly driven by a need to exploit oil, gas and mineral reserves. This year, Beijing plans to sink a 6-person 'workstation' to the sea bed, a potential precursor to a deep-sea 'space station' which, researchers say, could be inhabited.

"Our ability to communicate in water is limited," says Jay Nagarajan, whose Singapore start-up Subnero builds underwater modems. "It's a blue ocean space - if you'll forgive the expression."

BALLOONS, DRONES, SATELLITES

Back on land, the challenge is being taken up by a range of players - from high-minded academics wanting to help lift rural populations out of poverty to internet giants keen to add them to their social networks.

Google, for example, is buying Titan Aerospace, a maker of drones that can stay airborne for years, while Facebook has bought UK-based drone maker Ascenta. CEO Mark Zuckerburg has said Facebook is working on drones and satellites to help bring the Internet to the nearly two thirds of the world that doesn't yet have it. As part of its Project Loon, Google last year launched a balloon 20 km (12.4 miles) into the skies above New Zealand, providing wireless speeds of up to 3G quality to an area twice the size of New York City.

But these are experimental technologies, unlikely to be commercially viable for a decade, says Christian Patouraux, CEO of another Singapore start-up, Kacific. Its solution is a satellite network that aims to bring affordable internet to 40 million people in the so-called 'Blue Continent' - from eastern Indonesia to the Pacific islands.

A mix of technologies will prevail, says Patouraux - from fiber optic cables, 3G and LTE mobile technologies to satellites like his HTS Ku-band, which he hopes to launch by end-2016. "No single technology will ever solve everything," he said.

Indeed, satellite technology - the main method of connectivity until submarine cables became faster and cheaper - is enjoying a comeback. While Kacific, O3b and others aim at hard-to-reach markets, satellite internet is having success even in some developed markets. Last year, ViaSat topped a benchmarking study of broadband speeds by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

And today's airline passengers increasingly expect to be able to go online while flying, with around 40 percent of U.S. jetliners now offering some Wi-Fi. The number of commercial planes worldwide with wireless internet or cellphone service, or both, will triple in the next decade, says research firm IHS.

WHITE SPACE

Densely populated Singapore is experimenting with so-called 'white space', using those parts of the wireless spectrum previously set aside for television signals. This year, it has quietly started offering what it calls SuperWifi to deliver wireless signals over 5 km or more to beaches and tourist spots.

This is not just a first-world solution. Endaga"s Heimerl is working with co-founder Shaddi Hasan to use parts of the GSM spectrum to build his village-level telco in the hills of Papua.

That means an ordinary GSM cellphone can connect without any tweaks or hardware. Users can phone anyone on the same network and send SMS messages to the outside world through a deal with a Swedish operator.

Such communities, says Heimerl, will have to come up with such solutions because major telecoms firms just aren't interested. "The problem is that these communities are small," says Heimerl, "and even with the price of hardware falling the carriers would rather install 4G in cities than equipment in these communities."

The notion of breaking free of telecoms companies isn't just a pipe dream.

MESH

Part of the answer lies in mesh networks, where devices themselves serve as nodes connecting users - not unlike a trucker's CB radio, says Paul Gardner-Stephen, Rural, Remote & Humanitarian Telecommunications Fellow at Flinders University in South Australia.

Gardner-Stephen has developed a mesh technology called Serval that has been used by activists lobbying against the demolition of slums in Nigeria, and is being tested by the New Zealand Red Cross.

Mesh networks aren't necessarily small, rural and poor: Athens, Berlin and Vienna have them, too. And Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has called them "the most essential form of digital communication and the cheapest to deploy."

Even without a balloon and Google's heft, mesh networks offer a bright future, says Gardner-Stephen. If handset makers were to open up their chips to tweaks so their radios could communicate over long distances, it would be possible to relay messages more than a kilometer.

In any case, he says, the Internet is no longer about instantaneous communication. As long as we know our data will arrive at some point, the possibilities open up to thinking of our devices more as data couriers, storing messages on behalf of one community until they are carried by a villager to another node they can connect to, passing those messages on several times a day.

It's not our present vision of a network where messages are transmitted in an instant, but more like a digital postal service, which might well be enough for some.

"Is the Internet going to be what it looks like today? The answer is no," said Gardner-Stephen.

PISTOL SHRIMPS

As the Internet changes, so will its boundaries.

As more devices communicate with other devices - Cisco Systems Inc estimates there will be 2 billion such connections by 2018 - so is interest increasing in connecting those harder-to-reach devices, including those underwater, that are beyond the reach of satellites, balloons and base stations.

Using the same overground wireless methods for underwater communications isn't possible, because light travels badly in water. Although technologies have improved greatly in recent years, underwater modems still rely on acoustic technologies that limit speeds to a fraction of what we're now used to.

That's partly because there are no agreed standards, says Subnero's Nagarajan, who likens it to the early days of the Internet. Subnero offers underwater modems that look like small torpedoes which, he says, can incorporate competing standards and allow users to configure them.

This is a significant plus, says Mandar Chitre, an academic from the National University of Singapore, who said that off-the-shelf modems don't work in the region's shallow waters.

The problem: a crackling noise that sailors have variously attributed to rolling pebbles, surf, volcanoes, and, according to a U.S. submarine commander off Indonesia in 1942, the Japanese navy dropping some "newfangled gadget" into the water.

The actual culprit has since been identified - the so-called pistol shrimp, whose oversized claw snaps a bubble of hot air at its prey. Only recently has Chitre been able to filter out the shrimp's noise from the sonic pulses an underwater modem sends. His technology is now licensed to Subnero.

There are still problems speeding up transmission and filtering out noise, he says. But the world is opening up to the idea that to understand the ocean means deploying permanent sensors and modems to communicate their data to shore.

And laying submarine cables would cost too much.

"The only way to do this is if you have communications technology. You can't be wiring the whole ocean," he told Reuters. "It's got to be wireless."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A3Q0OH20140427





Urgent - Saravá Group is About to Lose its Main Server!

Submitted by sarava on Sat, 2014-04-26 15:41

FIRST DATA THEFT AFTER MARCO CIVIL INTERNET BILL HAS PASSED:
POLICE ATTACK ON PRIVACY MAY OCCUR AFTER NETMUNDIAL'S EVENT

Due to a secret lawsuit by the judiciary against Radio Muda, the oldest independent radio station working in Brazil, Saravá's main server is due to be confiscated this on Monday, April 28th, at 1:00 PM (Local time, GTM-3h).

Radio Muda has had its equipment confiscated once before in Februrary 24th of this year[1]. As litigation has prgressed, Prosecuting Attorney Edilson Vitorelli Diniz Lima from the Public Prosecutor's Office , signed a request for the server aiming for the radio's site data that might identify it's members.

Sarava's server is located at the State University of Campinas, Unicamp, and hosts the radiolivre.org platform, including Radio Muda's website. The server also hosts many different research projects related to Unicamp and other public Brazilian universities.

Sarava is a research group that for the past 10 years have offered gratis technological infrastructure, political thinking and autonomous and secure communication resources to research groups and social movements [2]. In 2008, one of its servers was confiscated; it still hasn't been returned [3].

Now, as the Marco Civil Internet Bill has just passed[4], Brazil is hosting a World International Internet Meeting, and while Brazil is implementing state-of-the-art legislation towards Internet privacy, freedom and security, we face once more an attempt to steal data, undermining the privacy of research projects and free acess to information, with the closure of discussion lists, sites and other tools.

We say the decision of breaking the confidentiality of our communications following the Public Prosecutor's Office lawsuit is disproportionate . After all, the server has no record that could identify its users as part of its Privacy Policy[5].

We ask for solidarity from all groups, individuals and institutions that fight for a free society and Internet. Next Monday, April 28th at 1:00PM (local time, GMT-3h), there will be a demonstration in front of the Data Processing Center of the Philosophy and Humanities Institute building at Unicamp; support is welcomed.
Our hatred towards this act will be shown throughout social media and messages to Public Prosecutor's Office posted all over the internet. Hashtags:
#SaravaLivre, #netmundial1984, #sarava, #privacidade, #OurNetMundial,
#marcocivildainternet

We demand that the police attacks against the server of Saravá Group and its users' data be brought to an immediate halt.
https://www.sarava.org/en/node/104





To Save the Internet We Need To Own The Means Of Distribution
David Morris

With the announcement by the FCC that cable and telephone companies will be allowed to prioritize access to their customers only one option remains that can guarantee an open internet: owning the means of distribution.

Thankfully an agency exists for this. Local government. Owning the means of distribution is a traditional function of local government. We call our roads and bridges and water and sewer pipe networks public infrastructure for a reason.

In the 19th century local and state governments concluded that the transportation of people and goods was so essential to a modern economy that the key distribution system must be publicly owned. In the 21st century the transportation of information is equally essential.

When communities own their roads they can and have established the rules of the road. The most fundamental and ubiquitous is what might be called road neutrality. Everyone has equal access regardless whether they drive a Ford or a Chevy, a jeep or a moped.

About 20 years ago, exasperated by high prices, poor service and a callous disregard by cable and phone companies for the future communications needs of their host communities, American cities began building their own networks. Initially these were based on cable and later on fiber.

Today almost 90 communities have citywide fiber networks. Another 74 have citywide cable networks. Scores more have partial fiber networks that serve public institutions—local government, libraries, schools, networks—and could easily be extended. See here for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s comprehensive map of muni networks in the United States.

More than 3 million people currently live in communities with a publicly owned communications network.

Unlike the FCC, cities that own their telecommunications networks can, and undoubtedly will respond to the will of their citizens by embracing the principle of net neutrality.

Many of today’s muni networks are in cities that a century ago built their own electricity networks after private companies proved unwilling to provide universal, affordable, reliable power. Today over 2000 cities still own the electric means of distribution. Their price and reliability is comparable or better than those of investor owned utilities and they are, unsurprisingly, far superior in responding to the needs of their communities.

Publicly owned telecommunications networks offer lower prices and higher speeds than Comcast and AT&T and Time Warner. It is instructive that the first gigabit network was built not by a private company but by Chattanooga, a muni network. Today 40 cities in 13 states have locally owned gigabit networks.

Cities that have built their own networks have found them a singularly successful economic development investment, especially for retaining and attracting the growing numbers of businesses that require high speed, high capacity networks.

Sometimes incumbents have reacted to the prospect of a new competitor by upgrading their networks or lowering their prices. More often they aggressively lobby legislatures to pass laws prohibiting such competition. To date 19 states impose significant obstacles to communities owning their broadband networks. Nebraska, Nevada, Texas, Missouri have enacted outright bans. Virginia prohibits a city from offering tv unless it can cash flow the first year. Utah prohibits public broadband networks from selling any retail services.

To persuade legislators to inhibit or prohibit muni networks telecom lobbyists offer two arguments. First they contend that government cannot effectively run a telecom network. When it becomes impossible to ignore the growing empirical evidence to the contrary, they shift gears and pitch without shame an entirely contradictory argument: Cities have an unfair advantage.

That was the argument Time Warner used in North Carolina after the cities of Wilson and Salisbury successfully demonstrated their telecom competences. It was a bizarre thesis. Time Warner had 15 million subscribers and revenues of $18 billion at the time. Salisbury had 1000 subscribers and a total municipal budget of $34 million. Nevertheless, North Carolina legislators dutifully voted to effectively prohibit other cities from replicating Salisbury and Wilson’s successful ventures.

The FCC has done nothing to stop states from stripping their citizens of the right to get out from under an increasingly monopolistic broadband delivery system, although they have the authority to do so.

Nor has the FCC acted when giant telecom companies unfairly try to squash their public competitors. After Monticello, Minnesota built its telecom network the incumbent cable company Charter used its profits from cities where it had an effective monopoly to offer Monticello households a triple play package for $60 a month even while it charged $145 a month for the identical package in the nearby city of Buffalo. It was a clear case of predatory pricing but the FCC refused to step in.

The FCC decision on net neutrality, the increased concentration of power in the cable industry and the increasingly commonplace successes of muni networks should convince voters to demand that their own cities seize control of their information futures.
http://www.ilsr.org/save-internet-means-distribution-2/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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