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Old 05-03-14, 08:39 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 8th, '14

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March 8th, 2014




Looking for Oscars Torrents? This is Why You May End Up Empty-Handed

This year, less than half of the screeners Hollywood professionals receive to help them vote on the year’s best movies were illegally uploaded — but what’s the cause?
Liz Shannon Miller

If Ellen DeGeneres mentions the film The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty on Sunday night, it might be with a wince — this year’s host of the Academy Awards was publicly shamed last month when her watermarked copy of Walter Mitty was leaked online.

The Walter Mitty leak might make DeGeneres a cautionary tale about keeping track of your DVDs, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg that is Hollywood screener culture, which for years helped fuel movie piracy. That is, until recently.

In the context of awards season, a “screener” is a physical or digital copy of an awards-eligible film which is sent to members of a voting body “for [their] consideration.”

You don’t have to fill out an Oscar ballot to get free movies, though: While members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) vote on the Oscars, organizations like the Screen Actors Guild, the Writer’s Guild of America and others have their own award ceremonies.

While it might not be as prestigious to win Best Actor at the SAG Awards as it is to win an Oscar, these smaller ceremonies are still considered stepping-stones to the big prizes, and thus those voting bodies also receive screeners.

As you might predict from a situation where high-quality versions of high-profile films are suddenly available en masse, piracy is a major concern. But here’s the twist — over the past four years, screener piracy has actually decreased.

For the 12th year running, Andy Baio of Waxy.org has tracked the piracy of award-nominated films with a detailed Google spreadsheet. According to Baio’s numbers, in 2003, 25 screeners of the 28 films nominated that year were leaked online. But in 2014, only 15 screeners of the 33 films nominated have been leaked. That’s less than half.

To figure out why that might be, I spoke to several screener-receivers (under the condition of anonymity) about why that change has come about.

First, some felt that the studios and guilds have succeeded, to some extent, in putting fear into the hearts of the membership.

Screeners contain warnings, right at the very beginning of the DVD, that they are for guild-members-eyes-only, and that if they’re leaked, there will be consequences.

There’s also a demand that the DVDs should be destroyed once viewed — nobody I spoke with said they had ever destroyed a physical screener.

“I think it’s very important not to share them, because we shouldn’t be ruining our own industry,” one said. “And they’ll probably never get watched again. But we never end up destroying anything.”

That doesn’t mean, though, that those who receive screeners just hand them out casually once they’re done: “People are more careful about who they lend to,” one person said. “[The studios and guilds] have definitely cracked down on people sharing them.”

No one was certain as to what the exact punishment for leaking a screener would be, but their worries included being blacklisted by the leaked film’s studio and getting into serious trouble with their guilds.

“For a lot of [members], the only reason they’re still in these organizations is to get screeners, which is why they’re super-paranoid about lending them out,” one person said. “There’s a lot of cachet in receiving screeners, and I really believe mine could be traced back to me. I do not want to lose the privilege.”

There was mention of more than one Hollywood production company that has created a checkout system to track who borrows which screeners — not only bringing order to the lending process, but accountability as well, should a leak occur.

According to one guild member: “I only lend them out to people I trust, and I have a very comprehensive system in place where I keep track of where every screener is and will follow-up on them.”

Another member is more laid back about sharing screeners, but the idea of ripping them to the Internet made no sense: “I mean, [the studios] gave me this free thing. I won’t be a dick about it.”

In fact, none of the people I spoke to indicated that they’d ever have any interest in pirating their screeners — or that they thought their fellow guild members might do such a thing.

“No one’s pirating screeners,” one said. “They’re just being careless and then the pirates get to them.”

As Baio wrote, regarding the DeGeneres/Walter Mitty leak:

A postal worker, one of her employees, friend, family member, or countless others in the production and distribution chain could be responsible for ripping the DVD and putting it online.

How to combat that carelessness? Limit the opportunity for it to occur. Studios are now more selective about which guilds and organizations receive which screeners — and what format they receive them in.

The consensus among those I spoke with was that watermarking DVDs for the AMPAS membership of 6,000 would be manageable, but doing the same for the SAG voting body of 160,000 people would be more difficult — and expensive.

So, in 2011 some members of SAG — which currently has a membership of over 160,000 people — began receiving digital screeners in lieu of physical screeners.

Correlation isn’t causation, but 2011, according to Baio’s numbers, was the first year that leaked screeners for nominated films dropped below 50 percent. (32 percent, to be exact.)

This year, at least four films were available to SAG members through an encoded iTunes download that would expire after 30 days.

Some also received DVDs — some in fact received duplicates, because the system appears to have some randomness to it — but members were able to download movies including the Judi Dench-starring Philomena for their consideration.

“I think it’s a good system,” one person said of the iTunes system. “It’s more truthful.”

Piracy will always be an issue when it comes to digital distribution. But perhaps, in this case, it’s technology that will solve the problems technology has created.
http://gigaom.com/2014/03/02/looking...-empty-handed/





'The Pirate Bay' Ban Lifted Following New Deal
Aditya Bhat:

People can now access 'The Pirate Bay', a file-sharing website after the ban on it was lifted, following a deal between telecom company KPN and Dutch anti-piracy organisation BREIN.

This deal follows a court order in The Hague, where two Internet service providers (ISP) - Ziggo and XS4AII - were asked not to block users from accessing The Pirate Bay. Soon after, KPN reached a deal with BREIN, according to which they were able to lift the ban on users who want to access the torrent site, ZDNet reported.

The court in its verdict said that BREIN cannot force ISPs to block access to the site, as there was no dip in the content that were being downloaded by people illegally, and that the ban on them has not helped matters either.

The ban against the site was ruled in 2012, and KPN was not only ordered to block all access to the site but also that in case it does not, it had to shell out approximately €10,000 ($13,763) fine. That ruling has now been rendered useless.

Though BREIN has lost the case, it has said that the suspension of the ban on The Pirate Bay is only temporary. Further, it was also understood that now BREIN might also have to ask other ISPs to remove the ban on the site. BREIN stated that all ISPs, which they had ordered to ban the site, can lift the ban temporarily but only after consulting with the antipiracy organisation.

BREIN was not satisfied with the ruling. "The court believes that the purpose of the block is to cut the total number of infringements. Because the overall BitTorrent traffic at XS4ALL did not decrease, the court assumes that its subscribers are circumventing the blocking or visiting other torrent sites. The court considers that BREIN should have requested the blocking of other illegal websites at the same time. BREIN does not agree with the court's reasoning," the organisation stated.

The anti-piracy organisation will be taking the case to the Supreme Court but a date for a Supreme Court ruling has not been set, and it might take at least two more years to reach a verdict.

The Pirate Bay reportedly generates around $36 million or more in yearly advertising revenue from its torrent site.
http://www.ibtimes.co.in/articles/54...owing-deal.htm





Quarter of German Firms Use Unofficial File Sharing, Syncing

Nearly one quarter of businesses in Germany use file sharing and synchronisation without the IT department knowing about it, according to the IDC study Mobile Content Management in Germany 2014. Only 23 percent of businesses said they were currently deploying a company-wide product supported by the IT department, but this will rise to 42 percent in the next twelve months.

More than half of respondents already use file sharing and synchronisation. Most of the respondents said they were thinking more and more about an integrated mobility strategy, covering mobile device management, mobile applications managment, mobile security and mobile content management. The survey found three quarters of respondents share documents among colleagues using e-mail.

German businesses prefer to use data centres that are physically located in Germany, like to use certified technology and private cloud content, but remain open to other models of provision, IDC found. They particularly like TUV or ISO certified file sharing and synchronisation technology. The survey was carried out in December 2013 among 238 German business with at least 100 employees.
http://www.telecompaper.com/news/qua...yncing--999788





At Last Some Clarity About Who Is Winning The Cloud File Sharing War...
Ben Kepes

The file sharing and collaboration space is typified by two distinct perspectives on growth. The first says that user numbers are everything and that revenue shouldn’t be a key driver for vendors looking to take advantage of the land grab that currently exists. The second, more conservative approach perhaps has its genesis in the dotcom burst and says that while user numbers are good, deriving meaningful revenue from customers is the most important thing. Proponents of this approach are looking for growth in users, but not at the expense of growing revenue.

So it’s interesting to see some hard and fast statistics finally start to appear – especially since almost every press release I receive from one of these vendors includes the oft-quoted, but essentially meaningless remark about the product “being used by 95% of the Fortune 500″. Just because a cloud file sharing vendor CEO’s Aunt works within a F500 company and once looked at said product, it doesn’t mean their footprint within the Fortune company is in any way meaningful. So I was fascinated to get my hands on an IDC report published last year that details the user numbers and revenue for different vendors. While the data is only up until 2012, the trends it shows are what is really interesting here.

The report was a competitive analysis of the global file sharing marketplace and looked only at business revenue – Dropbox in particular but also Box has their origin in consumer product – Box pivoted to and enterprise focus after only a few years but for Dropbox the move to an enterprise model has been something of an afterthought. Dropbox in particular struggles to meet the needs of its enterprise customers while still retaining the elegant simplicity and ease of use that has seen it grow hugely over the past years.

The report attempts to segment off the non-business revenue that vendors make. Dropbox is a particularly good illustration of this. in it’s recent fundraising documentation, it was disclosed that Dropbox had total 2013 revenue of some $200M. The IDC report pegs their 2012 business revenue at $46M. Even allowing for decent growth, the split between business and consumer revenue is stark for the company. Anyway, getting onto the metrics, the report segmented off the top four vendors in terms of the number of registered users they have. It will come as little surprise to anyone that Dropbox not only has the highest numbers but is growing more steeply than its competitors. Interestingly Hightail (formerly called YouSendIt) is in second place – they have a significant legacy customer base from their previous product focus (FTP file transfer replacement) and hence we’re seeing historical userbase pull them through into their new product area

Where it gets interesting though is when it comes to revenue. And it’s here that we see a real justification for Box’s laser focus on the enterprise area. Box is far out in front in terms of revenue, and their numbers are accelerating faster than the other vendors. It’s interesting to also not Dropbox’s fairly linear growth and the impact of YouSendIt’s rebrand and shift of focus, since the name and product change, Hightail’s growth has steepened. It would appear the big loser, at least in relative terms is Citrix Sharefile who seems to have lsot ground to the other competitors. What is interesting here is that I’m aware of some of the growth numbers that Sharefile has been seeing which are particularly impressive. If those figures are true, and this IDC analysis is valid, it points to the huge growth the file sharing market as a whole is seeing. It would be interesting to compare total market annual growth rates for the cloud vendors versus the more traditional storage vendors.

Finally, and to further reinforce just how early we are in terms of market penetration of these products, IDC split revenue by region. The pie graph below shows that the Americas accounts for the lions’ share of the growth, leaving EMEA and APAC as largely untapped markets.

All of this points to a couple of things. Firstly that we are very early in what is a massive market opportunity but secondly, the astronomical valuations that both Box and Dropbox have been seeing of late have their genesis in both their outright growth in user numbers, their ability to convert those users into revenue, and the continuing rate of growth they’re seeing in the marketplace.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes...game-changers/





South Texas Judge in Videotaped Beating Loses Seat

A South Texas family law judge seen beating his then-16-year-old daughter in a video she posted online in 2011 has lost his re-election bid.

Unofficial returns show Aransas County voters on Tuesday rejected William Adams in the Republican primary.

The Corpus Christi Caller-Times reports County Attorney Richard Bianchi joins the bench in January. No Democrats challenged Adams, who sought a fourth full term.

The video shows Adams lashing his daughter. Hillary Adams has said she released the video, which she secretly taped in 2004, to compel her father to get help and show he's unfit as a judge. She said the beating happened after she illegally downloaded files from the Internet.

William Adams was suspended for a year. The Texas Supreme Court in November 2012 lifted his suspension.
http://www.khou.com/news/texas-news/...248540701.html





NBC Crows About Thwarting 45,000 'Illegal' Olympic Videos, Ignores The Fact That It Drove Users To Them
Karl Bode

Aside from a now-traditional lack of enough live coverage, pretty awful commentary, a ridiculous over-abundance of a strangely limited rotation of ads, making Bode Miller cry and Bob Costas' double eye infection, NBC did a pretty good job covering the Winter Olympics, right? NBC certainly believes so, even though it seems that many Americans found NBC coverage so immensely annoying, they went to great lengths to install VPNs so they could watch Canada's version of the games instead.

What has NBC achingly proud, however, is the fact that the company cleverly worked with Olympics officials to prevent viewers from trying to access the games via non-sanctioned NBC streams and online outlets. According to NBC, the company worked to kill off some 45,000 videos of Olympics competition, and an estimated 5,000 live streams (they avoid showing their math or any historical context for those numbers):

"Officials estimate that 20,000 videos of Olympic competition were kept off YouTube, either through filtering technology that prevents them from being posted in the first place or locates and takes them down shortly after they are added. Another 20,000 were stopped from distribution on similar video-sharing sites popular elsewhere in the world, like Dailymotion in Europe or VK.com in Russia, NBC said."

Right, well, good job I guess. The problem is that while NBC was busy waging their proud war on Olympic videos, they were simultaneously engaged in practices that were driving users to those same viewing options. While NBC did offer some live streams on their website, they were largely restricted to customers that only pay for cable, as part of the industry's lame "TV Everywhere" mindset (a mindset that increasingly doesn't seem to be doing much of anything for anybody, including cable). Worse, even some paying TV customers, like those paying for Comcast's new HBO, basic cable and broadband bundle, weren't allowed to watch the streams because they weren't buying expensive enough TV packages.

To hear NBC tell it, this kind of absurd inconsistency in policy is all a perfect example of how when NBC and sanctioned friends work together to be inconsistent, it results in online perfection:

"When all the players in the digital ecosystem cooperate and work together, it is possible to create an online environment in which legitimate commerce thrives, jobs are created and consumers receive content how, when and where they want it," said John McKay, NBC spokesman."

A real gold medal performance all around, NBC. You really stuck the landing.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...-to-them.shtml





The Top 1% of Artists Earn 77% of Recorded Music Income, Study Finds…
Paul Resnikoff

Whatever money is left in recordings, you’re probably not making it. That’s the harsh conclusion offered by Mark Mulligan of MIDiA Consulting, whose data shows a more extreme imbalance towards superstar artists than previously thought. ”The music industry is a ‘superstar economy,’ that is to say a very small share of the total artists and works account for a disproportionately large share of all revenues,” Mulligan noted.

“This is not a Pareto’s Law type 80/20 distribution but something much more dramatic: the top 1% account for 77% of all artist recorded music income.”

In other words, the exact opposite of the Long Tail, a theory that seemed exciting at the time but has now been thoroughly disproven (MIDiA’s report is titled The Death of the Long Tail: The Superstar Music Economy). Because instead of embracing choice, consumers have actually been completely overloaded by it. The result, according to Mulligan, is a ‘tyranny of choice‘ that makes consumers less likely to explore, and more likely to glom around mainstream artists.

There is good news, however: although recorded music earns far less in 2014, the percentage earned by artists has increased. Specifically, artists are now capturing 17 percent of recorded revenues, up from 13 percent in 2000. The only problem is that these gains are only being enjoyed by a tiny minority of artists.

Summary report here.
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/perm...nepercent?utm_





Tiny Digital Publisher to Put Newsweek Back in Print
Leslie Kaufman

The Graham family, longtime newspaper publishers, gave up and sold it for a dollar. The media mogul Barry Diller spent tens of millions trying to revive it, only to throw in the towel. Even Mr. Diller’s star editor, Tina Brown, could not stop it from going out of print.

But where giants failed, IBT Media, a small digital publishing company, sees a growth path for Newsweek, the struggling newsweekly magazine it bought for a pittance last summer.

Etienne Uzac, 30, and Johnathan Davis, 31, founders of IBT Media, believed they could recreate Newsweek as a vibrant and profitable web-only magazine. But now, having tripled Newsweek’s online traffic, they plan to punctuate the magazine’s comeback by turning on the printing presses again. Hard copies are expected to hit newsstands on Friday.

Break out the banner headline: Newsweek Is Back From the Dead!

“We had no real plans to bring it back into print,” Jim Impoco, Newsweek’s editor in chief, said during a recent interview at the company’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan. “We called it the p-word.”

But Mr. Uzac said readers urged them to return to print. “I had heard it would not be viable, but then I looked into it and decided we could sell some copies for significantly more than it cost to make,” he said.

Newsweek’s print ambitions are modest. It plans to print 70,000 copies — at its peak two decades ago, circulation was 3.3 million — and sell them for $7.99 each, with the magazine’s content also available online for a more affordable price.

“You would pay only if you don’t want to read anything on a backlit screen,” Mr. Uzac said. “It is a luxury product.”

Steven Cohn, editor in chief of Media Industry Newsletter, said Newsweek’s decision to print the magazine made good business sense.

“The print magazine is kind of a prop to give the web better exposure,” Mr. Cohn said. “For Newsweek, having a cover can have its advantages. You can appear on ‘Meet the Press.’ Celebrities and politicians like being on actual covers on the newsstand. They have stripped the costs way down. So really, what do they have to lose?”

Yet Newsweek’s reappearance in print comes at a fraught moment for the industry. Time Inc. — the parent of Newsweek’s longtime archrival, Time magazine, as well as Sports Illustrated and Fortune — recently laid off roughly 500 people to cut costs.

Across the industry, newsstand sales of consumer magazines fell 11 percent in the second half of 2013 from the period a year earlier. Paid subscriptions dropped 1.2 percent, according to the Alliance for Audited Media’s most recent data.

“They have got a really tough road to revive a ghost brand,” said Ken Doctor, a media analyst with Newsonomics. “They are looking for really high prices and in a market where they have a lot general competitors.”

Today’s Newsweek bears little resemblance to the magazine in its heyday. It was founded in 1933 and backed by members of the Astor and Mellon families. The Washington Post Company, controlled by the Graham family, acquired Newsweek in 1961. It thrived for decades under The Post’s ownership, but during the Internet era it began to struggle with shrinking readership and advertising sales.

In 2010, the businessman Sidney Harman bought Newsweek for $1 and the assumption of $40 million in liabilities. He teamed with Mr. Diller and invested heavily in the magazine in a failed attempt to revitalize the brand, putting Ms. Brown in charge. She spent freely, hiring well-known writers and sending them traveling around the globe.

Newsweek’s current owners are the youthful Mr. Uzac and Mr. Davis, who met after college through campus Christian fellowships. They started the website International Business Times in 2006, scraping together money from family and friends. Mr. Uzac sold ads; Mr. Davis was the programmer and wrote the articles. They eschewed outside investors, ran a lean ship and expanded the company slowly. By 2010, IBT had 10 employees and revenue of roughly $2 million, they said.

It was then that IBT began using metrics to help tailor coverage to what readers wanted.

“We began to shift the culture to serve a different type of demand, so we were getting cues back from our audience,” Mr. Davis said.

Dry corporate-earnings articles larded with financial data, for example, were poorly read. But Mr. Davis discovered that readers landed on earnings pieces by searching for a company’s products. So IBT began to de-emphasize numbers in earnings stories while highlighting a company’s product pipeline.

That sort of analysis helped traffic increase 1,200 percent in 2010, Mr. Davis said. Today, IBT has 240 employees and 40 million unique monthly visitors across 10 brands, with titles like Latin Times and Medical Daily. Mr. Davis said the privately held company posted revenue of about $21 million last year, largely from digital banner ads, and generated a profit of about $500,000.

Newsweek’s current editor in chief, Mr. Impoco, has held senior editing positions at The New York Times, Portfolio and Reuters. The magazine also has a few prominent writers, including Kurt Eichenwald, a former Times business reporter, and contributors like Matthew Cooper, a former reporter at Time. But only five staff members from Ms. Brown’s Newsweek were offered jobs by IBT, and most of the current staff members are relatively young and not yet established.

When IBT bought Newsweek, Mr. Davis and Mr. Uzac came under scrutiny for their religious ties. An article published on Christianity Today’s website tied the two to a Korean pastor named David Jang, and it described Mr. Jang as a controversial, messianic figure.

Mr. Davis and Mr. Uzac say they are dismayed that their religion has become an issue. They admire Mr. Jang, they said, and acknowledge that Mr. Davis’s wife works at a university Mr. Jang started. They said Mr. Jang had no financial stake in IBT or influence on the business, and the idea that they considered him the messiah was preposterous.

“My faith is my faith, the work is the work,” Mr. Uzac said. “The editorial is 100 percent independent.”

Mr. Impoco, the magazine’s editor, said he had not seen any religious or conservative agenda.

“Since I’ve been here I’ve had less interference than any other place I’ve worked,” he said. “We’ve written more stories on atheism than anything religious.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/03/bu...-in-print.html





US Drops Web Link Sharing Charges Against Journalist

Could still get decades in prison.
Juha Saarinen

United States prosecutors today said they have dropped eleven charges against journalist Barrett Brown - including for publishing a hyperlink in an online chat forum - in one of the closest watched digital liberties trials yet.

The US government had accused Brown of publishing a link to a file in an Internet Relay Chat room, which allegedly contained credit card validation information for 60,000 clients of security contractor Stratfor, which was hacked in 2011.

Brown's lawyers had argued for a dismissal of the hyperlinking charges, saying it did not amount to an actual transfer of the file and therefore, could not be construed as a crime.

Hyperlinking was also protected speech, Brown's lawyers said, and covered by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution which permits freedom of expression.

Soon after the motion to dismiss the hyperlinking charges was filed by Brown's lawyers, US prosecutors responded and dropped the allegations along with ten others linked to it.

The dropped charges represent a substantial victory for Brown, reducing a possible century-long prison sentence by decades should he be found guilty.

Brown faces further charges on alleged threats against police and obstruction of justice. He was arrested in September 2012 and has been in custody since then.

In November last year, hacktivist Jeremy Hammond was handed a ten-year prison sentence for his role in the Stratfor hack.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/374220...ournalist.aspx





Getty Images Makes 35 Million Images Free in Fight Against Copyright Infringement

Getty Images has single-handedly redefined the entire photography market with the launch of a new embedding feature that will make more than 35 million images freely available to anyone for non-commercial usage. BJP's Olivier Laurent finds out more
Olivier Laurent

The controversial move is set to draw professional photographers’ ire at a time when the stock photography market is marred by low prices and under attack from new mobile photography players. Yet, Getty Images defends the move, arguing that it’s not strong enough to control how the Internet has developed and, with it, users’ online behaviours.

“We’re really starting to see the extent of online infringement,” says Craig Peters, senior vice president of business development, content and marketing at Getty Images. “In essence, everybody today is a publisher thanks to social media and self-publishing platforms. And it’s incredibly easy to find content online and simply right-click to utilise it.”

In the past few years, Getty Images found that its content was “incredibly used” in this manner online, says Peters. “And it’s not used with a watermark; instead it’s typically found on one of our valid licensing customers’ websites or through an image search. What we’re finding is that the vast majority of infringement in this space happen with self publishers who typically don’t know anything about copyright and licensing, and who simply don’t have any budget to support their content needs.”

To solve this problem, Getty Images has chosen an unconventional strategy. “We’re launching the ability to embed our images freely for non-commercial use online,” Peters explains. In essence, anyone will be able to visit Getty Images’ library of content, select an image and copy an embed HTML code to use that image on their own websites. Getty Images will serve the image in a embedded player – very much like YouTube currently does with its videos – which will include the full copyright information and a link back to the image’s dedicated licensing page on the Getty Images website.

More than 35 million images from Getty Images’ news, sports, entertainment and stock collections, as well as its archives, will be available for embedding from 06 March.

“Images are the communication medium of today and imagery has become the world’s most spoken language. Whether via a blog, website or social media, everyone is a publisher and increasingly visually literate,” says Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Getty Images, in a prepared statement. “Innovation and disruption are the foundation of Getty Images, and we are excited to open up our vast and growing image collection for easy, legal sharing in a new way that benefits our content contributors and partners, and advances our core mission to enable a more visually-rich world.”

Online power

“What we’ve decided to do is to provide through the embed player the capability to use this imagery, but there’s a value for Getty Images and the content owners,” says Peters. “And that value is in three parts. First, there will be attribution around that image, and since we’re serving the image, we’re actually going to make sure there’s proper attribution. Second, all of the images will link back to our site and directly to the image’s details page. So anybody that has a valid commercial need for that image will be able to license that imagery from our website. Third, since all the images are served by Getty Images, we’ll have access to the information on who and how that image is being used and viewed, and we’ll reserve the right to utilise that data to the benefit of our business.”

While more than 35 millions images will be available from today, Getty Images tells BJP that the Reportage and Contour collections will not be included. News images sourced from Agence France-Presse and distributed by Getty Images, however, will be available to all for non-commercial use in the next few weeks.

Blogs that draw revenues from Google Ads will still be able to use the Getty Images embed player at no cost. “We would not consider this commercial use,” says Peters. “The fact today that a website is generating revenue would not limit the use of the embed. What would limit that use is if they used our imagery to promote a service, a product or their business. They would need to get a license.” A spokeswoman for Getty Images confirms to BJP that editorial websites, from The New York Times to Buzzfeed, will also be able to use the embed feature as long as images are used in an editorial context.

Peters, aware of the controversial nature of this decision, claims that Getty Images had no choice but to open up its collections of images. “What we’ve seen is a significant amount of infringement online in an area, unfortunately, that we can’t control because this is how the Internet has developed,” he tells BJP. “What we’re trying to do here is to put a legal method in place for that to happen and that actually benefits our content owners.”

Advertising avenue

He adds that Getty Images’ existing licensing business will not be affected and that the stock library will continue to “pursue online infringing use as we’ve done traditionally.”

Getty Images will also look to draw additional revenues from its player through advertising. “We reserve the right to monetise that footprint,” Peters explains. “YouTube implemented a very similar capability, which allows people to embed videos on a website, with the company generating revenue by serving advertising on that video.” And while Getty Images has yet to determine how these ads will appear, Peters is confident that this capability will be introduced in the near future.

The stock agency will also use the data it will draw from the player to perfect its collections. “We’ll be working with the creative and editorial teams at Getty Images to better understand how our imagery is being used and how they can better create imagery.

Getty Images’ move is expected to have drastic repercussions across the entire stock photography market, which has been forced, in recent years, to compete against the number one stock library by slashing its prices. Peters believes some agencies might want to follow Getty Images’ example – Magnum Photos, in recent months, for example, toyed with the idea of allowing non-commercial use of its collections of images, as reported by BJP – and he says Getty Images is open to conversations to share its player with others. “We think this is a bigger decision and a bigger issue than Getty Images. We’ve always been opened to using our platform to benefit other content creators.”

As for Getty Images’ own photographers, the new embed program won’t have an opt-out clause. “If you’re a Getty Images contributor, you’ll be participating in this.”

BJP will analyse the full impact of today’s news in a series of articles to be published later today and this week. Stay tuned.
http://www.bjp-online.com/2014/03/ge...-infringement/





Cameron Aide Arrested Over Allegations Relating to Child Abuse Images

Patrick Rock resigned as deputy head of Downing Street's policy last month on day before arrest
Nicholas Watt

A senior aide to David Cameron resigned from Downing Street last month the day before being arrested on allegations relating to child abuse images.

Patrick Rock, who was involved in drawing up the government's policy for the large internet firms on online pornography filters, resigned after No 10 was alerted to the allegations.

Rock was arrested at his west London flat the next morning. Officers from the National Crime Agency subsequently examined computers and offices used in Downing Street by Rock, the deputy director of No 10's policy unit, according to the Daily Mail, which disclosed news of his arrest.

No 10 confirmed on Monday evening that Rock had been arrested. A spokesman: "On the evening of 12 February, Downing Street was first made aware of a potential offence relating to child abuse imagery. It was immediately referred to the National Crime Agency (CEOP).

"The prime minister was immediately informed and kept updated throughout. Patrick Rock was arrested at his home in the early hours of 13 February, a few hours after Downing Street had reported the matter. Subsequently, we arranged for officers to come into No 10 and have access to all IT systems and offices they considered relevant.

"This is an ongoing investigation so it would not be appropriate to comment further, but the prime minister believes that child abuse imagery is abhorrent and that anyone involved with it should be properly dealt with under the law."

The arrest of Rock, 62, who had been tipped for a Tory peerage, will have come as a severe shock to the PM and the Tory establishment.

Cameron and Rock worked together as special advisers to Michael Howard in his time as home secretary in the mid 1990s. Rock later worked for Lord Patten alongside Cameron's chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, during his time as a European commissioner in Brussels.

Rock was never a member of Cameron's innermost circle, whose members are closer to the prime minister's age. But he was a respected and trusted figure who shared Cameron's sense of humour.

The Daily Telegraph columnist Benedict Brogan recalled in 2011, when Rock started working in No 10, that he and Cameron repaired to the Two Chairmen pub on the day John Smith died in 1994.

"We both agreed that Blair coming meant that we would be fucked," he was quoted as saying. Brogan also wrote that Rock coined the phrase: "Cows moo, dogs bark, Labour put up taxes."

Rock helped to draw up government policy which led to the deal with the internet giants on online filters. Under the deal, all households connected to the internet will be contacted to be asked if they would like the filters installed.

Rock faced embarrassment last year when he was photographed walking up Downing Street clutching a document outlining progress on hundreds of pledges made by the coalition. Ed Miliband said the document, which admitted that some of the 399 pledges had not been met, was an "audit of coalition broken promises".
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2...or-pm-arrested





Elite Security Posse Fostered Founders of WhatsApp, Napster
Joseph Menn

A few days after selling WhatsApp to Facebook for $19 billion, Jan Koum stepped into a suite at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco to celebrate with old friends, including CEOs, reformed hackers and a few people who fell into both those camps.

Conducted over snacks and beer, the late-night festivity was a spontaneous reunion of a security super-group that had come to Koum's aid in 2000 as he grappled with a denial-of-service attack that knocked Yahoo offline when Koum was responsible for security there.

The now defunct collective known as w00w00 (pronounced whoo whoo) had thrived on Internet Relay Chat channels in the late 1990s and early 2000s, between get-togethers at hacking conventions such as Def Con in Las Vegas, where a member said Koum "came across like a big, friendly kid."

Although the elite group was not well known outside hacking circles, its members have spawned more than a dozen companies, mainly in security. The two most famous exceptions are WhatsApp, the messaging service that Koum co-founded, and Napster, the pioneering file-sharing company that was shut down by the music industry in 2001.

The key to w00w00's success, according to interviews with a dozen members, was that it brought together people with widely varying expertise and backgrounds in a meritocratic way that would be tough to replicate in today's more complex and competitive world of security.

Koum was already a senior Yahoo Inc executive in his early 20s when he joined w00w00. Napster Co-founder Shawn Fanning was one of several members still in high school. Both came from poor backgrounds and benefited from the group's welcoming culture, which prized collaboration in the era before computer security became a big business, let alone a major factor in national defense and offense.

"Communication was democratized, and curiosity was rewarded," Koum told Reuters last week. "I had so much fun in early days learning about networking, security, scalability and other geeky stuff."

The w00w00 party at the St. Regis on February 26 came during the peak of the week-long RSA Conference across the street, the largest gathering of tech security professionals in the world. Some w00w00 veterans were attending the show to hawk software or services from their companies, while others were taking pains to avoid the marketing hype powered by a flood of new investment.

At the reunion, most of the crew ignored the cheese and dried fruit to catch up on old times and toast the man they regard as the first real w00w00 billionaire. The Ukraine-born Koum, who wore a gray T-shirt and black sweatshirt over his large frame, made $6.8 billion from the sale of WhatsApp to Facebook Inc, according to Forbes.

(Napster co-founder Sean Parker is also a billionaire, having gotten rich through owning early stock in Facebook, but he was too business-minded to spend much time in w00ww00.)

The gathering was also an occasion to reflect on why the security issues that the w00w00ers worked on 15 years ago were such excellent preparation for broader technology innovation, and why that might be less true now.

"You don't get cats and mice playing well together anymore, because the stakes have gotten so high and the net has become politicized," said Dug Song, who was a core w00w00 member. "W00w00 was the Switzerland of computer security."

TAKEN FOR GRANTED

In the 1990s, deep tech knowledge was needed to make things work. Now that infrastructure has been built out and cloud-computing resources can be rented cheaply from the likes of Amazon.com Inc, much more is taken for granted.

"Young kids have less interest in security these days," said Ejovi Nuwere, an orphan from Brooklyn who joined w00w00 before he signed on as a security engineer at Lehman Brothers and then went on to found multiple companies. "There's a lot more interest in starting the next Facebook than in reverse-engineering software."

Founded by Utah teenager Matt Conover, who chose the silly, exclamation-like name, w00w00 claimed about 30 core contributors at its peak, each of them invited by an existing member.

Several participants had wandered to the wrong side of the law in the past. At 15, Nuwere hacked into his local Internet service provider. When he called the company and explained how he did it, he was hired at minimum wage.

Another w00w00er, Anthony Zboralski, received a suspended sentence in 1997 for posing as a Paris FBI official and using the agency's network services - provided by AT&T - for free for four months.

Nuwere said the group adopted a "don't ask, don't tell" policy, though anyone who was obviously hacking for malicious reasons was shunned.

Most members of w00w00 were conducting research on their own, at small companies or ensconced in big ones like Koum.

"We had some really rich and interesting discussions about security topics," Conover recalled. "If someone had a good tool they wrote, they'd likely share it."

One of those tools was the Nmap Security Scanner, created by w00w00 member Gordon Lyon. Used by defenders and attackers alike, the program scans networks for open ports, available services and deployed software. Another tool was the member-developed password cracker, John the Ripper.

W00w00 members regularly spoke at the top security conventions. One of them, Jeff Forristal, under the handle "Rain Forest Puppy," published guidelines for responsibly disclosing flaws to software vendors before the general public.

Fanning used the w00w00 crowd as beta-testers for Napster. Another w00w00 contributor, Jordan Ritter, ended up heading the development of Napster's server software before he started anti-spam service Cloudmark and other companies.

Koum was already working long hours to build up Yahoo's infrastructure and automate its defenses. His big test came when a Canadian teenager launched massive denial-of-service attacks on Yahoo and others, briefly rendering most of them unreachable. Known as MafiaBoy, the teen said after his arrest that he had directed hundreds of compromised university computer networks to connect to Yahoo simultaneously, overwhelming its resources.

Having never met most of the w00w00 members in person, Koum nevertheless turned to them for help in a way that would be unthinkable for a top security executive today. One of those brainstorming with him was Song, who later became the founding architect of a major denial-of-service mitigation firm, Arbor Networks Inc.

ENTER THE SPIES

As most of the w00w00 membership took serious jobs, often at each other's companies, the security industry as a whole was splintering.

Conover and others ended up at big companies such as Symantec Corp. Some old-school hackers picked fights with several w00w00 members, arguing that information about security flaws should not be published.

Increasingly during the last decade, geopolitics entered into the picture. Spy agencies and military commanders realized the immense value of specialized software for breaking into and potentially disrupting enemy networks. Some hackers who were caught breaking the law said they were offered a choice between jail and government service.

The apolitical Conover said he did not like it when U.S. authorities questioned him about his associations after he returned from a conference in China.

Another w00w00 mainstay, Ralph Logan, became a consultant with both corporate and U.S. government security contracts, doling out work as a "hostel for homeless hackers."

Others sold research on how to exploit various software to brokers, who sold it to military contractors. This way of earning a living bothered some w00w00ers on a philosophical level because the information was not shared widely to help shore up cyber defenses.

"The people who understand vulnerabilities and how to exploit them are being co-opted into building offensive tools for national interests," Nuwere said. "These are issues that hackers have faced in other countries for a long time."

Koum is among many w00w00ers who have left the security business. Logan has a big-data startup, Kiku Software. Conover's latest project is a virtualization company called CloudVolumes. Ritter hired Nuwere for a non-security stealth startup called Ivy Softworks.

Though security was once a major breeding ground for important new companies, such departures suggest this might not be the case for long.

"The barriers for entry to learning about hacking in the old sense are such that it doesn't allow for as much free expression and open research," Logan said. "It's an unfortunate sign of maturity in the industry."

(Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Tiffany Wu)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A260KF20140307





Italian Spyware Firm Relies on U.S. Internet Servers
Ellen Nakashima and Ashkan Soltani

An Italian computer spyware firm, whose tools foreign governments allegedly have used to snoop on dissidents and journalists, relies heavily on the servers of U.S. Internet companies, according to a new report.

At least 20 percent of the servers used by clients of Hacking Team, based in Milan, are located in the United States, effectively making the companies that own those servers key nodes in a hidden global network of spyware servers, according to a report to be released Tuesday by Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

The discovery raises ethical questions for the cloud companies whose servers Hacking Team clients use to surreptitiously take control of targets’ computers and phones, turn on Web cameras and intercept encrypted communications. And it comes amid a growing cry for export controls on such software.

The United States was home to the single largest concentration of Hacking Team servers detected since May 2012, according to the researchers. Of the 555 machines identified worldwide, the researchers found that 80 belonged to Linode, a New Jersey firm, and that 40 of those were in the United States.

With Citizen Lab’s help, a human rights activist in Dubai recently discovered that his computer had been hacked using the Italian firm’s software. His e-mail was still being read even after he changed the password. In Morocco, computers belonging to a group of journalists critical of the government were hacked using the same spyware. And in December, an Ethiopian journalist in the United States was targeted, again apparently using Hacking Team software, according to Citizen Lab.

A Linode server in Atlanta and one in London were linked to the Dubai and Morocco cases, respectively, according to the report’s lead author, Bill Marczak, a Citizen Lab research fellow.

“What we’ve tried to do here is unravel Hacking Team’s labyrinthine hidden collection structure that they use to hide government spying globally,” said Morgan Marquis-Boire, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab.

The researchers found that the U.S. servers linked to Hacking Team in some cases attempted to camouflage themselves as U.S. companies and Web sites such as Apple and ABC News.

A spokesman for Hacking Team, which has a sales office in Annapolis, Md., did not dispute the findings on its U.S. servers. “Much of the world’s Internet traffic transits the United States, so it is no surprise that Citizen Lab would find servers in this country carrying all manner of Internet traffic including that of various criminals and terrorists,” Eric Rabe, the firm’s chief communications executive, said in an e-mail.

He added: “Our clients do not use our tools to attack U.S. systems, but rather to perform surveillance on subjects of criminal investigations. The tools are used to intercept communications from [a] particular subject’s devices, not to perform some sort of general scanning of an entire population or the traffic of a particular server.”

Rabe said the 11-year-old firm, which does not identify its clients, sells “exclusively to government agencies such as police departments or intelligence services.” He said it does not sell to governments if there are “credible concerns that Hacking Team technology will be used to facilitate human rights violations.”

Several countries with checkered human rights records have used Hacking Team spy tools that rely on U.S. Web hosting providers, according to Citizen Lab.

Although none of these countries are under U.S. sanctions for rights abuses, activists have nonetheless raised concerns that some authoritarian governments are exploiting the largely unregulated spyware trade.

Hacking Team touts its Remote Control System as stealthy and “untraceable.” In the wrong hands, RCS can become a highly invasive tool that puts dissidents’ or activists’ lives at risk, the researchers say.

Technology experts say that holding cloud computing companies accountable for their users’ activity can be a difficult issue because selective policing of server use may be legally problematic. But when notified that an account appears to be linked to abusive or illegal activity, firms should investigate and take action, said Andrea Matwyshyn, assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Linode, along with Texas firm Rackspace, were the cloud-hosting companies most frequently linked to Hacking Team.

A Linode spokesman said the company takes abuse complaints seriously and investigates suspicious activity immediately.

Rackspace spokesman Brandon Brunson said the alleged misconduct involving Hacking Team’s spyware “would definitely violate our policies.”

But he said that when the company investigated the systems identified as belonging to Hacking Team by Citizen Lab, it found only two active customers from the date range associated with those machines. Rackspace was unable to trace the account owners, an individual and a small business, back to Hacking Team, he said.

As of Monday, the two Rackspace servers linked to Hacking Team were still active, according to Citizen Lab and verified by The Washington Post.

“These are spyware servers running the same type of spyware which has been widely documented as targeting activists in repressive countries,” Marczak said. “I would hope that Rackspace would treat this issue with the seriousness it deserves.”

Industry officials familiar with Hacking Team have told The Post that the firm advocates using five proxy servers to make it difficult for a sleuth to track a spy campaign back to its origins.

Rabe declined to address how the server contracts are set up, saying only, “Hacking Team works with the clients to establish their service. Each system is designed and configured for the particular requirements of an individual client.”

Hacking Team installs its spyware tools on clients’ equipment, but clients manage the operations.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...b28_story.html





Ukraine Is In Turmoil, But It’s Still Online. Here’s Why.
Andrea Peterson

After months of domestic unrest, Ukraine now has Russian troops and a potential international crisis brewing in Crimea. On Friday, reports surfaced that Ukrtelecom, the country's largest telecom provider, had suffered a major outage in Crimea -- with UPI reporting the company alleged phone and Internet services were almost entirely down in the region after unidentified people sabotaged their infrastructure by seizing telecommunications nodes and destroying cables.

Communication outages are a mainstay of modern conflict -- especially in the case of popular revolts or demonstrations in which protesters often rely on the Internet to organize. In recent years, some countries have faced regional or national blackouts during periods of unrest, including Syria and Sudan. But outside observers say the outage in Crimea appears not be as significant as some reported.

Renesys, an Internet monitoring firm, was initially unable to confirm that there was any outage whatsoever.

But a later chart tweeted by Renesys shows a five-hour disruption affecting Ukrtelecom Friday night. However, it also showed that that other Internet service providers serving Crimea were unaffected.

"We're not seeing outages there," said Renesys researcher Doug Madory, "but who knows what might happen next. Whatever changes are happening are subtle ones."

However, Madory thinks Ukraine's infrastructure is more robust than that of other countries that have faced total Internet blackouts in the past. "Ukraine is not Syria or Sudan," he explains. "It is served by many ISPs with many independent terrestrial connections to neighboring countries. Due to this, it would be difficult to have a national blackout in a place like Ukraine."

UkrTelecom posted a message from Rinat Akhmetov, the president of its parent company SCM, about the turmoil facing Ukraine on its Web site Sunday. "The future of our country has been put under threat," wrote Akhemetov in Ukrainian, who is reportedly the richest man in Ukraine and a longtime ally of President Viktor Yanukovych, saying the internal political tensions threatened to escalate into a conflict that could destroy the "integrity of Ukraine."

"We will work 24/7 to sustain the operability of Ukraine’s infrastructure," he wrote. "This is our biggest contribution to the integrity of the country."

Speaking at the opening of RightsCon, an online freedom conference currently being held in San Francisco, Ukrainian free speech advocate and Mass Information Institute director Oksana Romaniuk praised the role of the Internet in helping citizens organize and share information during recent demonstrations. But meanwhile in Russia, some Web sites linked to Ukrainian protests have been censored.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...ine-heres-why/





DDoS Cyber Attacks Get Bigger, Smarter, More Damaging
Peter Apps

Crashing websites and overwhelming data centers, a new generation of cyber attacks is costing millions and straining the structure of the Internet.

While some attackers are diehard activists, criminal gangs or nation states looking for a covert way to hit enemies, others are just teenage hackers looking for kicks.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have always been among the most common on the Internet, using hijacked and virus-infected computers to target websites until they can no longer cope with the scale of data requested, but recent weeks have seen a string of particularly serious attacks.

On February 10, internet security firm Cloudflare says it protected one of its customers from what might be the largest DDoS documented so far.

At its height, the near 400 gigabyte per second (gbps) assault was about 30 percent larger than the largest attack documented in 2013, an attempt to knock down antispam website Spamhaus, which is also protected by Cloudflare.

The following day, a DDoS attack on virtual currency Bitcoin briefly took down its ability to process payments. [ID:nL2N0LG1Y8]

On February 20, Internet registration firm Namecheap said it was temporarily overwhelmed by a simultaneous attack on 300 of the websites it registers, and bit.ly, which creates shortened addresses for websites like Twitter, says it was also knocked out briefly in February.

In a dramatic case of extortion, social networking site Meetup.com said on Monday it was fighting a sustained battle against hackers who brought down the site for several days and were demanding $300 to stop. It would not pay, Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman told Reuters.

DDoS attacks were at the heart of attacks blamed on Russian hackers against Estonia in 2007 and Georgia during its brief war with Russia in 2008. It is unclear if they played a role in the current stand-off between Moscow and Ukraine in which communications were disrupted and at least one major government website knocked out for up to 72 hours.

A report this month by security firm Prolexic said attacks were up 32 percent in 2013, and a December study by the cyber-security-focused Ponemon Institute showed them now responsible for 18 percent of outages at U.S.-based data centers from just 2 percent in 2010.

The average cost of a single outage was $630,000, it said.

"It's really a game of cat and mouse," said Jag Bains, chief technology officer of Seattle-based DOSarrest, a firm that helps government and private-sector clients protect their sites.

"I'd like to say we are ahead, but I just don't think it's true."

As well as growing in volume, he said attacks were becoming much more sophisticated in targeting the most vulnerable parts of websites, making even a small attack much more effective.

The aims of attackers include extortion, political activism, providing distraction from data theft and, for "hobbyist" hackers, just testing and showcasing their skills, security experts say.

Other victims in recent months have included the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Royal Bank of Scotland and several major U.S. banks, which analysts believe were targeted by Iran in response to sanctions. Iran denies the charge.

HIJACKING PRINTERS, SMARTPHONES

Many attacks, however, appear to be homegrown. The most popular point of origin for DDoS attacks in the last three months of 2013, Prolexic said, appeared to be the United States, followed by China, Thailand, Britain and South Korea.

As well as hijacking computers, Prolexic said attackers are increasingly targeting smartphones, particularly those using Google's Android operating system, which by the third quarter of 2013 accounted for more than 80 percent of new phones.

Even wireless printers, experts say, have sometimes been co-opted into attacks, packed together in botnet groups. That, they warn, can put previously unprecedented cyber firepower in the hands of relatively unskilled hackers, who increasingly include teenagers.

Last year, British police arrested a 16-year-old as part of their investigations into the attack on Spamhaus, while German police arrested an 18-year-old after a DDoS attack paralyzed the Saxony government website.

DDoSarrest says some of the most recent attacks it has dealt with were on U.S. universities and largely blamed on students showing off or protesting against high tuition fees.

The sheer volume of attacks means many perpetrators are never traced, and some computer security experts complain law-enforcement authorities remain reluctant to prosecute the youngest offenders.

Until recently, DDoS attacks were seen less of a threat than attempts to steal customer data or intellectual property. That, however, is changing fast.

SLOWING THE INTERNET

Last year's Spamhaus attack was described by some as slowing the entire global Internet, and most experts agree the largest attacks can slow access across entire regions. Cloudflare says there were anecdotal reports of slowness in Europe during the latest attack.

Crashing data centers can wreak havoc with other services based there, including phone systems and vital industrial facilities.

The Ponemon report showed DDoS attacks are now the third largest cause of outages after power system failure and human error, outstripping traditional causes such as weather events.

Even if attacks do not succeed, the cost of mitigating them is rising fast, providing many millions of dollars of business for firms such as Cloudflare and Prolexic, taken over last month by Akamai Technologies for about $370 million.

Namecheap, which aims to offer cut-price hosting for websites, said it had already spread its data centers across five countries and three continents to better handle constant attacks but was still overwhelmed by the roughly 100 Gbps incident.

Attacks on that scale, Prolexic says, now occur several times a month and are now frequently so complex and fast moving that automated systems can no longer tackle them.

Prolexic itself runs a permanently manned operation centre at its headquarters in Florida, allowing it to keep one step ahead and instantly move material between data centers.

"It's very hard to know what to do," said Alexander Klimburg, a cyber security expert at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs currently on exchange at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. "The tools to do this can be purchased online incredibly cheaply, while the damage they can do and the cost of mitigating it is exponentially higher."

(Editing by Will Waterman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A240XZ20140305





A Vast Hidden Surveillance Network Runs Across America, Powered by the Repo Industry
Shawn Musgrave

Few notice the “spotter car” from Manny Sousa’s repo company as it scours Massachusetts parking lots, looking for vehicles whose owners have defaulted on their loans. Sousa’s unmarked car is part of a technological revolution that goes well beyond the repossession business, transforming any industry that wants to check on the whereabouts of ordinary people.

An automated reader attached to the spotter car takes a picture of every #license plate it passes and sends it to a company in Texas that already has more than 1.8 billion plate scans from vehicles across the country.

These scans mean big money for Sousa — typically $200 to $400 every time the spotter finds a vehicle that’s stolen or in default — so he runs his spotter around the clock, typically adding 8,000 plate scans to the database in Texas each day.

“Honestly, we’ve found random apartment complexes and shopping #plazas that are sweet spots” where the company can impound multiple vehicles, explains Sousa, the president of New England Associates Inc. in Bridgewater.

But the most significant impact of Sousa’s business is far bigger than locating cars whose owners have defaulted on loans: It is the growing database of snapshots showing where Americans were at specific times, information that everyone from private detectives to insurers are willing to pay for.

While public debate about the license reading technology has centered on how police should use it, business has eagerly adopted the $10,000 to $17,000 scanners with remarkably few limits.

At least 10 repossession companies in Massachusetts say they mount the scanners on spotter cars or tow trucks, and Digital Recognition Network of Fort Worth, Texas, claims to collect plate scans of 40 percent of all US vehicles annually.

Today, a legislative committee in Boston is scheduled to hold a hearing on a bill that would ban most uses of license plate readers, including the vehicle repossession business, making exceptions only for law enforcement, toll collection, and parking regulation.

“We have technology rapidly moving ahead in terms of its ability to gather information about people,” said state Representative Jonathan Hecht, a Watertown Democrat who filed the bill, “We need to have a conversation about how to balance legitimate uses of this technology with protecting people’s legitimate expectation of privacy.”

But Digital Recognition and other so-called “data brokers” who collect plate scans are fighting Hecht’s bill, arguing that repo agents are not invading privacy when they scan a license plate, which is available for all to see. The data brokers do not disclose the owner of the plates, they point out, though customers such as banks, insurers, and private investigators have ready access to that information.

Brian Shockley — vice president of marketing at Vigilant, corporate parent of Digital Recognition — plans to warn legislators that Massachusetts risks getting left behind in the use of a new tool that helps fight crime.

“I fear that the proposed legislation would essentially create a safe haven in the Commonwealth for certain types of criminals, it would reduce the safety of our officers, and it could ultimately result in lives lost,” Shockley is scheduled to say in testimony prepared for the hearing before the Joint Transportation Committee.

License plate scanning technology has been around for decades — the British police originally adopted it in the 1970s to track the Irish Republican Army members — but it only came into wide use in the last decade as cheaper but highly effective models became available. These scanners use high-speed cameras and optical character recognition technology to capture up to 1,800 plates per minute, even at high rates of speed and in difficult driving conditions. The scanner also records the date, time, and GPS location of each scan.

Since 2008, more than 60 Massachusetts police departments have started using scanners to track down drivers with unpaid tickets, no insurance, or driving stolen vehicles, but the trend has raised concern about potential privacy invasions. In December, Boston police suspended their use of plate scanners altogether after a Globe investigation reported questionable data management, including the accidental public release of more than 69,000 license plate numbers that had been scanned over six months.

Meanwhile, private companies were quietly and rapidly finding ways to profit from much larger databases with little public discussion. Digital Recognition Network, with the help of about 400 repossession companies across the United States, has increased the number of license scans in its database tenfold since September 2010, and the firm continues to add another 70 million scans per month, according to company disclosures. Digital Recognition’s top rival, Illinois-based MVTRAC, has not disclosed the size of its database, but claimed in a 2012 Wall Street Journal interview to have scans of “a large majority” of vehicles registered in the United States.

Unlike law enforcement agencies, which often have policies to purge their computers of license records after a certain period of time, the data brokers are under no such obligation, meaning their databases grow and gain value over time as a way to track individuals’ movements and whereabouts.

Massachusetts private investigator Jay Groob said he uses the license plate database kept by a third data broker, TLOxp, paying $25 for a comprehensive report from the Florida-based company’s “very impressive” database of a billion-plus scans.

“It helps generate other leads,” said Groob, president of American Investigative Services in Brookline. “If a vehicle has been missing, or you need to locate a person, this gives us another locus to investigate.”

Groob said he would use the database to track a missing person or conduct background investigations for child custody or marital infidelity litigation. Groob said he “absolutely” foresees vehicle location data becom#ing part of private investigators’ standard toolkit.

Chris Metaxas, chief executive of Digital Recognition, has promoted his database as a useful tool for anyone else who has to confirm a person’s real address “because most of the time people are near where their cars are.” He told the Globe that his database is already helping the auto insurance industry cut down on fraud in which where applicants falsely claim to live in a place where insurance rates are lower.

“Some people have a condo in Florida but actually live in New York ten months out of year,” said Metaxas. “Insurers need help to keep this kind of fraud under control.”

But the main commercial use of license plate scanners remains the auto finance and auto repossession industries, two professions that work closely together to track down people who default on their loans. Digital Recognition lists Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., HSBC Holdings, and Citibank among its clients, while MVTRAC boasts that it serves 70 percent of the auto finance industry.

Liran Cohen — owner of Massachusetts Recovery Bureau, a repossession company in Lynn — said most banks he works with now require repossession contractors to use license plate readers because it is so much easier to find vehicles eligible for repossession.
“The banks want it,” said Cohen, who mounted his license scanner on an unmarked tow truck. “All of them make a big deal out of it, since it gives them so much value.”

But the use of scanners has grown so fast that there has been little discussion of what limits, if any, to place on repossession agents as they trawl for vehicles to impound. A number of such companies contacted by the Globe confirmed that they often send their spotter cars to commercial lots, such as shopping mall parking lots, because those tend to be hotspots for vehicles to repossess.

In fact, on its website Digital Recognition described what it calls good “target environments” for repossession agents, including “malls, movie #theaters, sporting events, and numerous other locations.” In marketing materials, the firm has indicated that it suggests routes for repossession companies that focus on workplaces and commercial lots during the day and apartment complexes and residential areas at night.

However, several commercial property owners contacted by the Globe said they had no idea repossession agents could be in their parking lots, scanning license plates and feeding them into a national database. Some said they would consider the practice trespassing.

“We’re unaware that this is happening, and we’re reaching out to our security teams and law enforcement contacts to get a better handle on it,” said Les Morris, spokesman for Simon Property Group, which owns Copley Place mall in Boston and South Shore Plaza in Braintree.

“If we saw scanning like this being done, we would throw them out,” said Issie Shait, senior vice president of property management at New England Development, which owns the CambridgeSide Galleria and Bunker Hill Mall District.

Two repossession companies also told BetaBoston that they focus on low-income housing developments, since a significant number of residents are delinquent on their car payments.

“This is just another example of stereotyping,” responded Cambridge Housing Authority deputy executive director Michael Johnston, who had never heard of plate scanners before. “But our lots are open, and we don’t have any gated communities in our system, so I don’t know how to prevent it.”

But the national database companies claim they have no say in where their affiliates scan plates, whether on private property or along public streets. They said repossession agents and tow truck companies are all private contractors who make their own decisions.

“We have nothing to do with the actual data collection process,” Digital Recognition’s Metaxas said in an interview. “We provide technology to #repossession professionals.”

The burgeoning private databases of license plates may ultimately be a boon to law, as well, giving them access to a trove of license plates that many are not allowed to keep themselves, because of data-purging requirements. Hecht’s bill would require law enforcement statewide to purge its license plate data after 48 hours.

Digital Recognition already provides its entire data pool to more than 3,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide, free of charge for most searches. The Massachusetts State Police is a registered subscriber, as are the Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, and Quincy police departments. Even Boston College and Brandeis police have access to the firm’s entire scan database.

License plate reader companies have defeated proposals similar to the one before the Legislature’s Joint Transportation Committee, and they sued the state of Utah after it enacted a ban on commercial use of license plate scanning. In its filing, Digital Recognitionasserts that its field agents have a First Amendment right to collect pictures of license plates in public places.

But privacy advocates say the databases are far more intrusive than the data brokers admit, arguing that private businesses can easily translate anonymous-sounding license plate numbers into owners’ names just by obtaining information from states’ motor vehicle registries. In Massachusetts, for example, private investigators can get access to the Registry of Motor Vehicles directly, and insurance companies and banks may already know the plate number for a given individual.

“Right now, it’s the wild West in terms of how companies can collect, process, and sell this kind of data,” says Kade Crockford of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. “The best legal minds, best public policy thinkers, and ordinary people whose lives are affected need to sit down and think of meaningful ways we can regulate it.”
http://betaboston.com/news/2014/03/0...repo-industry/





Microsoft's Attempt To Convert Users From Windows XP Backfires Thanks To Low Loyalty, Limited Benefits
Joel Hruska

For the past few months, Microsoft has been loudly and insistently banging a drum. All support and service for Windows XP and Office 2003 shuts down on April 8 -- no more security updates, no more fixes. In early February, faced with a slight uptick in users on the decrepit operating system the month before, Microsoft hit on an idea: Why not recruit tech-savvy friends and family to tell old holdouts to get off XP?

The response to this earnest effort was a torrent of abuse from Windows 8 users who aren't exactly thrilled with the operating system. Microsoft has come under serious fire for some significant missteps in this process, including a total lack of actual upgrade options. What Microsoft calls an upgrade involves completely wiping the PC and reinstalling a fresh OS copy on it -- or ideally, buying a new device.

According to Gene Grabowski, an executive vice president with PR management firm Levick, this disaster was predictable. Microsoft has misjudged how strong its relationship is with consumers and failed to acknowledge its own shortcomings. Not providing an upgrade utility is one example -- but so is the general lack of attractive upgrade prices or even the most basic understanding of why users haven't upgraded.

If you're not familiar with modern operating systems, this is not a feature

Microsoft's blog post listing reasons why consumers should upgrade include the following "advantages." We've thoughtfully included our evaluations.

Windows 8 is "Highly Personal."

True. Since I started using Windows 8, I've begun referring to my computer with very particular names and specific phrases, most of which I didn't learn in Sunday School. When your ad copy includes the phrase "more background designs and colors" as a feature, it's possible that you're marketing to the wrong crowd.

"The Best Windows yet... scaling from 8-inch tablets, two-in-ones, and large-screen all-in-ones."

Remember, this is a blog post aimed at selling people running Windows XP. Forget tablets -- what does it do for ancient eight-pound Inspirons with wheezing fans and a mole rat living in the ducting? How's it work on a VGA-based LCD with a maximum resolution of 1024x768? Please, tell me how your touch-based tablet experience will boost the performance of my roller-based mouse.

"A beautifully redesigned store."

Full of software no one wants with hardware requirements your computer couldn't meet if someone kicked it off a cliff. If you're still on Windows XP, it's entirely possible that you're stuck with graphics hardware that's barely DX9-capable.

"Deep cloud integration with OneDrive."

If I tell my grandmother her new OS has "deep cloud integration," she'll look concerned and ask me if it makes the computer hard to see. She might even hook up a dehumidifier nearby to keep the water vapor down.

Underneath the snark, a real problem

Ok, so, making fun of Microsoft is easy -- but underneath the tone-deaf messaging, there is a genuine problem. Windows XP is 13 years old and Microsoft has no obligation to continue supporting it -- but failing to support it means that many of the most vulnerable or cash-strapped customers could end up playing host to an avalanche of malware or security exploits.

Microsoft's right to kill XP is unquestioned, but the company appears to have no insight into why its customers continue to use the OS. The fact that it only recently made a file migration tool available is evidence that Redmond hasn't actually investigated the problem. Do consumers need a low-cost upgrade version? Upgrade tools? New hardware? Are the 29% of users still stuck on XP pirates, consumers, small businesses, or enterprise users? Are we talking about broke kids in their 20s with old netbooks, elderly people stretching out the lifespan of a computer, or foreign users who can't afford an upgrade?

The fact that Microsoft apparently can't be arsed to find out means the upcoming transition will be ugly.
http://hothardware.com/News/Microsof...#ixzz2v6C9mS58





Windows XP Shows a Slight Growth before it Outdates
Suhail

Windows XP has been serving the computer users around the world for almost 13 years now. Microsoft’s announcement about ending the support for Windows XP seems to have a very low effect on its users. This is inferred from the latest statistics, which indicated a petty rise of share from 29.3 percent to 29.5 percent. Microsoft officially announced on 8th April 2014 to restrict support for XP initiating from March 8.

These statistics were affirmed in the Desktop Top Operating System Share Trend this month. Considering the overall statistics, it appears that XP has cut the share of Windows 7 and Windows 8, as both the versions have experienced a fall in the past three months, while the share of XP rose since the start of this year.

Businesses still holding on to XP would be highly concerned with this scenario, as the transition process for both small and large enterprises is not an easy task. In fact, it is quite challenging for the companies lacking a dedicated IT staff, as performing the upgrade on thousands of systems could lead to downtime for customers, which may never be acceptable for a running business. As the countdown continues, Microsoft urges its XP users to upgrade to the latest version ASAP. The users in this concern are now frequently be notified with pop-ups regarding the ending support and are requested to upgrade.

Microsoft has made an exception for the Chinese market, as Windows XP will continue receiving security support in China. On the other hand, a share growth of XP indicates that loyal users are not much prepared to let it go. Keeping this in view, I expect a time extension or postponement of the end support date.
http://www.productusp.com/windows-xp...-outdates.html





Frustrated Cities Take High-Speed Internet Into Their Own Hands
Joel Rose

College Station is right in the middle of Texas — a few hours by car from Austin, Dallas and Houston and home to Texas A&M, a major research university. But if you're in the market for high-speed Internet access, College Station can feel like the middle of nowhere.

"It's been pretty bleak. You get too far from the university, and it's nothing," says Andrew Duggleby, co-founder of Exosent Engineering, a company that designs and builds tanker trucks for the oil industry.

"We're doing three-dimensional computer-aided design, big 3-D models," he says. "So here we are, this super-advanced engineering company, with all these technologies — but then it can't get past the walls."

There is no high-speed Internet access in Exosent's part of College Station, Duggleby says. If he wants to show one of his 3-D models to a client for review, he has to copy the files onto a portable hard drive and put it in the mail.

James Benham, a city councilman in College Station, is worried that high-tech jobs are fleeing to Austin and other cities with faster and cheaper broadband. "We have lost countless companies to other towns because we cannot provide the level and cost of connectivity," Benham says.

Even in central Texas — not exactly a hotbed of activist government — cities are thinking seriously about how to upgrade their broadband infrastructure.

"We have to deliver consistent electricity and water. I think we have to lump [connectivity] in with the critical infrastructure that we at least have an obligation to think about and plan for," Benham says. "The worst thing, I think, a city could do is sit back and do nothing and wait."

The Private Approach

Right now, only a handful of American cities have superfast fiber-optic networks. Many others are looking on with "visceral jealousy," says Susan Crawford, a visiting professor of intellectual property at Harvard Law School. "And it's disrupting what has otherwise been a very smooth, unbroken, complacent approach to communications in America."

Crawford says cities need to take the lead on building fiber-optic networks because most private broadband providers don't think it's economically worthwhile.

But cable and telecom companies dispute that. Comcast recently said it would offer faster speeds — but only when consumers demand it.

So far, the demand simply doesn't justify the massive investment, says Fred Campbell, director of the nonprofit Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology.

"The rush to fiber may be foolhardy," Campbell says. "There's a notion that we should adopt a 'build it and they will come' strategy. But it can be more efficient in the long run to meet demand as it occurs."

There is one private company that's making a very big bet on very high speeds: Google. The company is offering to pay for the construction of fiber networks that can deliver speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second.

Google Fiber started in Kansas City and is expanding to Austin, Texas, and Provo, Utah, this year. Kevin Lo, manager of Google Fiber, says those cities were picked carefully, based partly on their willingness to streamline their regulations and make it easier for Google to build.

"Building these fiber networks is really hard. It requires hundreds, if not thousands of miles of brand new construction," Lo says. "It has the potential to be really disruptive to local communities who aren't ready for it."

Google Fiber recently said it may expand to nine more metropolitan areas, including Atlanta, Nashville, Tenn., Phoenix and Portland, Ore.

Cities Take The Helm

But even if Google Fiber built out to all of them, professor Susan Crawford says it would still only reach 3 percent of American homes.

"When it comes to the national picture for high-speed Internet access, Google is barely a ripple on the surface," she says. "They're choosing places where they know they'll do well. And they're hoping that other companies and other cities will take up this mantle."

Indeed, cities that have been left out of Google Fiber are thinking about how to do something similar on their own.

Ted Smith, chief of economic growth and innovation for Louisville, Ky., says when the new Google cities were announced, he got hundreds of emails asking why the city wasn't chosen. Louisville, he says, is actively looking for a broadband provider to build a fiber network.

"We've certainly sent the bat signal up to the sky to let people know that we will be easy to do business with," Smith says.

One thing Louisville will not do, Smith says, is pay for the network itself. But Chattanooga, Tenn., did: The city's publicly owned electric company recently spent upward of $300 million on a new fiber-optic network. Chattanooga's mayor, Andy Berke, says the high speeds are helping attract new businesses to his city.

"If, as a country, we're going to participate in this next round of innovation, we have to make sure the infrastructure exists," Berke says. "Someone's going to have to do this. And it makes sense that cities are going to lead the way."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechcons...heir-own-hands

















Until next week,

- js.



















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