Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 16th, '11

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Let’s face it, we’re in the little girl business." – Charles Laufer


"To me, [WikiLeaks is] a clear and present danger to America, a foreign terrorist organization." – Representative Peter King (R-NY)


"It's total fucking bullshit. They can make you miss your flight and piss your pants, and treat you like a criminal." – Jacob Appelbaum


"Although [Righthaven’s] business model relies in large part upon reaching settlement agreements with a minimal investment of time and effort…the courts are not merely tools for encouraging and exacting settlements from Defendants cowed by the potential costs of litigation and liability. Whether or not this case settles is not my primary concern." – Judge John Kane


"With the current IP laws and the DMCA, end users and consumers are the losers and will continue to be the losers until we pass some effective reforms on these subjects. These lawsuits happen every day. People are dragged across the country every day. People are having to fight through interpretations of the DMCA every day." – Yasha Heidari


"This legislation will discourage illegal file sharing and provide more effective measures to help our creative industries enforce their copyright." – NZ Commerce Minister Simon Power


"No one will be able to see what they're downloading...the people on the internet who drive this sort of thing are a lot smarter than the people who make the rules, I think, or they're certainly a lot more IT savvy, anyway." – NZ ISP Managing Director Terry Coles



































April 16th, 2011





Berners-Lee: Web Access is a 'Human Right'

Speaks at MIT symposium marking the university's 150th anniversary
Jon Brodkin

Two decades after creating the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee says humans have become so reliant on it that access to the Web should now be considered a basic right.

In a speech at an MIT symposium, Berners-Lee compared access to the Web with access to water. While access to water is a more fundamental right, because people simply cannot survive without it, Web access should be seen as a right, too, because anyone who lacks Web access will fall behind their more connected peers.

"Access to the Web is now a human right," he said. "It's possible to live without the Web. It's not possible to live without water. But if you've got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger."

Berners-Lee appeared at the MIT symposium on "Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything," part of the school's 150th anniversary celebration. Other notable speakers included Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop Per Child, who also created the MIT Media Lab.

Berners-Lee has been outspoken on net neutrality, and at MIT warned against ISPs having too much control over how we use the Web. Berners-Lee also touched on smartphones, repeating his stance that it is better to develop Web apps that run on mobile devices than to create apps that circumvent the open Web.

He also said it's important for the Web not to simply become an instrument to spread unfounded rumors and conspiracy theories. One of his goals is to make the Web a system in which scientists can share data and information more effectively.

The Web has grown so large that the number of Web pages rivals the number of neurons in a human brain, Berners-Lee said. And the Web must be analyzed, just as we analyze the brain.

"To a certain extent, we have a duty about the Web which is greater than our duty about the brain, because with the brain we just analyze it," he said. "But with the Web, we actually get to engineer it. We can change it."

Negroponte used his time on stage to reflect on both the MIT Media Lab and the One Laptop Per Child project, which has supplied millions of cheap computers to children in some of the world's poorest countries. Negroponte's project could be seen as extending the idea that the Web is a basic human right with concrete action, putting laptops in the hands of children who otherwise would not get them.

Negroponte showed pictures of children around the world using the laptops, including one in Peru who was teaching his grandparents how to read and write. Each laptop, he noted, came loaded with 100 books. When 100 laptops were shipped to a village, that meant 10,000 books were coming with them.

The free market alone would not have been a great enough force to accomplish this, he said.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...rners-lee.html





Meet the Senator Blocking Big Content's Web Censorship Plan
Nate Anderson

Start talking about the Web censorship legislation currently being drafted in both chambers of Congress, and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) becomes an instant quote machine. This isn't just another of the many political issues Wyden has to juggle; the man cares about the Internet. And in his passion to defend it, he's not afraid to ruin his chances of becoming the next ex-senator to head the Motion Picture Association of America.

"You get a lot of folks expressing increasing concern that essentially one part of the American economy, the content industry, is trying to use government as a club to beat up on one of the most promising parts but the economy of the future—the Internet," Wyden told me last week when we talked about the issue. "These major content lobbyists shouldn't be provided the authority to cluster bomb on the 'Net."

The cluster bomb in question here is COICA, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, first introduced in the Senate late last year. It passed unanimously out of committee, though it did not get a full vote before the end of the Congressional term. This year, both chambers are drafting tweaked versions of COICA, due to be rolled out separately in the next few weeks, and the House recently held two hearings on the issue.

COICA allows the government to block sites at the domain name (DNS) level, and it would require online ad networks and credit card companies to stop working with blocked sites. The goal is to target foreign piracy and counterfeiting sites that can't be easily reached through US courts. The blocks would require judicial sign-off, but most hearings would feature only the government's point of view, and rightsholders would largely supply the target list to government investigators.

In Wyden's view, the whole idea is little more than "creeping corporate control of the Internet."

Wyden has credibility on Internet issues. When the Communications Decency Act passed in the mid-1990s, Wyden managed to write and insert Section 230 into the bill, which freed companies and bloggers alike from liability for material written or submitted by others. It was a landmark provision, one that keeps ISPs, sites like Ars Technica, and companies like Google safe from lawsuits over comments and videos produced by users. (Much of the rest of the law was thrown out as an unconstitutional restriction on speech.)

Wyden recently reflected on that moment in a speech about Section 230. "I don’t want to embarrass any of my colleagues," he said, "but in the mid-90’s much of the debate was defined by folks who were afraid of the new technology—they wanted to protect children from the scary Internet—Chris and I hit on an idea that we felt would enable these new networks to protect their users without making them magnets for lawsuits… It was our intention to protect the network effect from the smothering hand of government and litigation."

In the debate over COICA, Wyden sees a similar dynamic at play, and he intends to take a leading role in the debate. "If the new version of COICA is like last year's version of COICA," he told me, "I will do everything in my power to block it."

Here's our full conversation.

Due process

Ars: Let's start with the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) domain name seizures. I recently spoke to Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who is strongly opposed to the seizures. They lack due process, in her view, because the seizure hearings aren't adversarial. You said last year that "the law is best applied when the government's assertions can be challenged before its actions are approved.” Do the recent domain name seizures violate that principle?

Wyden: I am very troubled for the domain name seizures, for the reasons that Congresswoman Lofgren has mentioned. Also, as you know, I have written to the agency trying to get some specific answers to questions; they haven't responded. This very much relates to the debate that's about to be held on Capitol Hill with the prospect of COICA legislation or "COICA Plus," as some in the House seem to be talking about.

The question is, why should the Congress give increased authority to law enforcement to seize domain names when we are not even clear how the authority that they have under current law is being used?

I think it's a very troubling practice that the government is engaged in now, and if someone is talking about going even further, in a way that I think could do damage to the Internet, I'm pretty skeptical.

Ars: What are the key things you want to hear from ICE about their current practice before you would consider extending the government's authority over Internet domains?

Wyden: It is unclear how they make their judgments today about due process, and yet Congress is being asked to go out and expand the law on the books. There are significant questions today with respect to the distribution of infringing content, questions about links—these are areas that have got to be answered first.

Ars: I've talked to several people who are in favor of the domain name seizures and COICA. They point out repeatedly that the US already has seizure law for a wide variety of things, including narcotics and counterfeit products—and they say this is exactly the same thing.

Wyden: I think it's important to make a distinction between counterfeit goods and copyright infringement. This is right at the heart of the debate. With respect to counterfeits, the bad guys are warehousing, advertising, they're directly selling illicit merchandise, often to unsuspecting consumers. With respect to copyrights, what constitutes willful distribution or even infringement is still unsettled law.

In addition, with respect to the illegal production or distribution of tangible goods, the government has made it clear what's legal and what's not. So this is an area where you've got a pretty bright line; when you're talking about counterfeits, you've got efforts that are reasonably targeted, people understand what the ground rules are, there's a sense that you understand what law enforcement is doing with respect to key issues like due process. That is not the case today for copyright infringement.

Nate, that's right at the heart of this debate. I mean, when you're seizing tangible goods, you're not undermining the pillars of the Internet as well.

Ars: You specifically mentioned “linking sites" that host no infringing content themselves. We've seen several of these being seized by ICE. It sounds like you want more judicial clarity around issues like that before you think "seizure" is an appropriate response.

Wyden: Most reasonable Internet experts are telling us that linking itself cannot be illegal—but we've still got ICE out there saying, "Let's prosecute folks for linking." That's another issue that needs to be resolved.

I'd like to step back and give a broad overview of the issue here. Since we don't have a new COICA bill, we're speaking in the context of COICA as it was written last time [in late 2010].

If you start with the proposition that you should protect intellectual property at any and all costs, including compromising individual freedom, then you're for last year's COICA. If you believe as I do that the Internet is playing an increasingly important role in our economy, then you are skeptical of that kind of thinking and you want to make sure that you're not advancing proposals that are going to make the Internet weaker.

The reason I got into this goes back to the first hearing that I held on this in the Senate, where I'm chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Competitiveness and International Trade. I pointed out that I think the Internet is the shipping lane of the 21st century. So if somebody comes along and is advancing proposals that I think are going to undermine our prospects there, I'm going to blow the whistle and do everything I can to try to change them.

Precision-guided missiles

Ars:I believe that was the hearing at which you said that COICA was like "using a bunker-busting cluster bomb when what you need is a precision-guided missile.”

Wyden: That's correct! Look, we don't dispute that there is a serious problem with respect to counterfeiting, IP issues, piracy, and the like. We are not disputing that. But until there is a bright line about what constitutes the distribution of infringing content and some of these other issues, the government ought to stop seizing websites that allegedly distribute infringing goods.

And these major content lobbyists shouldn't be provided the authority to cluster bomb on the 'Net.

Ars: So what's your preferred “precision-guided missile” approach to infringing sites?

Wyden: I think we would like some bright lines. Obviously, this has got to be an approach that involves international cooperation as well, but we want to see somebody clearly lay out what a "rogue website" is. I'm not convinced that a blogger or search engine that provides a link to where infringed content could be is distribution, so there needs to be some tighter definitions about what a rogue website is.

Only law enforcement ought to be authorized to take action against websites. Congress currently serves as a check on law enforcement's actions. We provide the financing and, if Congress thinks law enforcement is going too far, then we can go out and do something about that. The government's accountable to taxpayers; now we're talking about giving this kind of authority to movies and to Universal Studios and people like that. I don't think the Congress can risk giving the content industry power that cannot be easily checked.

The third thing is, it's important to not increase liability for intermediaries. Just as you don't hold a toll road accountable for a driver's bad behavior, you shouldn't hold the ISPs or other platforms liable for online user behavior. That was the point of Section 230 that I wrote. It's not the private sector's responsibility to conduct law enforcement on the 'Net.

The fourth area is using domain name systems to redirect consumers away from the [infringing] websites. It's basically like taking down or putting up misleading street signs; it threatens the integrity and the architecture of the 'Net. I'm not going to support a bill like that.

To me—and this is a key point—if the United States starts getting involved in approaches that confuse the architecture of the Internet, people are going to say, "Well, let's put governance into the hands of some international body." I don't think there's going to be any benefit to putting Internet governance authority into the hands of the United Nations.

Finally, I've already mentioned the due process issue, making sure operators of websites are provided with the opportunity to present a defense before their personal property is taken by the big hand of the federal government.

Safe harbors

Ars: I was speaking recently with Dan Castro of Washington think tank ITIF, who testified at a House hearing on "rogue sites" a few weeks ago. He was very clear about wanting more intermediary liability; he would like ISPs to be doing deep packet inspection, looking for copyright infringement on traffic passing through their wires—

Wyden: Oh, I read the story. I think sticking it to ISPs like that is a big mistake.

Ars: I wanted to ask you about it because you were so involved with drafting Section 230. Do you see the broader enforcement move by ICE and now with COICA as a way to strip back some of the safe harbor provisions we have in place now, or not?

Wyden: It certainly could end up that way. I think unraveling the safe harbor provisions would be a step back in terms of the ramifications for technology.

I read the interview. Look, people have differences of opinion; I would just have a very sharp difference of opinion on that point. I'm of the view that, had we not been able to get that provision I authored in, I don't think the 'Net would have been able to develop in a number of key areas.

This is not Ron Wyden taking credit for inventing the Internet, but I think in a lot of respects, the Internet without Section 230 would not have developed as it has. It's been a force for commerce and freedom because of the provisions in 230 that advance some of those values.

Ars: One of the key ideas in the old COICA was holding US-based payment processors like MasterCard and Visa, along with US-based ad networks like those from Google, responsible for not funding websites on the blacklist. This sets up a situation where websites can be legal overseas—in fact, we've already seen this with the domain name seizures—but US-based multinational companies are forbidden from doing business with them. As a matter of policy, is this a helpful approach?

Wyden: It sure strikes me as a bad precedent. I would want to see details on how someone would go about doing it. The first thing that comes to mind, as the chairman of the trade subcommittee, is: "Aren't you setting a precedent where foreign countries can do that to you?"

In opposition

Ars: Senator Al Franken (D-MN) told me a few weeks ago that he supports COICA so long as certain tweaks are made and certain safeguards are put in place. Could you ever come to that position, or is COICA fundamentally flawed?

Wyden: Those concerns I laid out, those are major concerns. Again, they go to this question of the role of the Internet in our society. I think the Internet is increasingly the place where societies organize, where commerce is conducted. I don't want to see approaches that weaken the Internet.

My sense is that, based on last year's COICA, I don't know how you go forward with this legislation without answers to the questions that I posed to the agencies. There's a reason those agencies aren't getting back to us with those answers. I think they have not yet thought through the responses.

My door is open. It's no fun being the one person in the United States Senate who has said, "I'm going to do everything I can to block a bill that passed unanimously [out of committee last year]." But the fact that the agencies didn't respond to my questions, have addressed these concerns, means that if the new version of COICA is like last year's version of COICA, I will do everything in my power to block it.

Ars: This seems like an issue in which you might be able to forge alliances with some conservatives who are suspicious about increased government power. Have you been able to do that?

Wyden: We have definitely been pursuing exactly that kind of coalition. I think there are a lot of folks with libertarian leanings, a lot of folks all across the political spectrum who are waking up to what the ramifications are here for the Internet. At some point, we begin to see that when government seizes private property without due process, you get a lot of folks across the political spectrum coming together.

You get a lot of folks expressing increasing concern that essentially one part of the American economy, the content industry, is trying to use government as a club to beat up on one of the most promising parts but the economy of the future—the Internet. That transcends folks' positions on the political spectrum. Certainly, when you're talking about creeping corporate control of the Internet, you've got something that unifies people across the political spectrum, and we're reaching out.

I'd be the first to recognize how powerful the special interests are who have lined up to advance this legislation. I'm one United States senator. I'm going to do everything I can to change it.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...rship-plan.ars





Copyright Reform’s Controversial Start
Frances Robinson

Summer came early to Brussels last week – the sun shone, Place Lux was full of chino-wearing lobbyists, and two EU parliamentarians kicked off a row about copyright that will last all through the season of good weather* and barbecues.

Dutch liberal MEP Marietje Schaake, who raised the question along with Swedish Pirate Party MEP Christian Engstrom, filed an official question regarding the commission’s appointment of Maria Martin-Prat, a former head of legal affairs for the record industry’s trade body, as new head of copyright with EU Commissioner Michel Barnier’s directorate general.

Engstrom was as outspoken as you would expect a pirate, or Viking, to be about appointment on his blog:

Welcome to the European Union, where the big business lobby organizations are calling most of the shots at the Commission, and where citizens are just seen as a nuisance to be ignored. I guess the only real news is that they don’t even bother to try to hide it any more.

But the row over Ms. Martin-Prat’s appointment is just part of a much wider debate in the EU — how to fix copyright and fight piracy.

It’s an emotive issue that has caused tremendous controversy since Napster, Limewire and other peer-to-peer filesharing services emerged: an era when which pitted students in slogan T-shirts against Metallica. Rules that have their origins in the days of vaudeville and gramophone recordings (hence the term “mechanical rights”) are showing their age in an era of instant downloads, music on demand, and easy-peasy sharing of pretty much everything online.

The debate is shaping up nicely. Schaake, one of the MEPs questioning the appointment, told Real Time Brussels:

European consumers are not able to conveniently access and enjoy music and films with their connected digital devices, but are forced into downloading from unauthorized sources. Piracy can be considered as unmet demand.

In contrast, Frances Moore, CEO of record industry body IFPI, told this blog there are an “unprecedented number of ways” for Europeans to download legitimately, and that:

This is a problem affecting not just the music industry but most other creative industries as well. That is why piracy needs to be tackled for the legitimate market to realise its full potential.”

What happens next? The commission is set to present its intellectual property right strategy in early May — get ready for a long, hot summer of copyright wrangling.

*Good weather in Brussels = maybe slightly less rain than usual.
http://blogs.wsj.com/brussels/2011/0...ogle_news_blog





Belgian ISP Does Not Have to Filter Out Copyright-Infringing Traffic

Belgian ISP Scarlet should not have to filter copyright-infringing traffic from its service because to do so would invade users' privacy, an advisor to the EU's top court has said.

Scarlet had been ordered by a Belgian court to filter traffic that infringed copyrights belonging to members of artists' rights agency Sabam (Société belge des auteurs compositeurs et éditeurs).

Pedro Cruz Villalón, an advocate general of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), said that such a system would violate rights guaranteed under EU law in an opinion published today.

"The installation of the filtering and blocking system is a restriction on the right to respect for the privacy of communications and the right to protection of personal data, both of which are rights protected under the Charter of Fundamental Rights," Cruz Villalón said in an opinion, according to an ECJ press release. The opinion has not yet been published in English.

Villalón said that those rights listed under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, can be restricted, but only in line with national law, and only if that law meets certain standards.

"A restriction on the rights and freedoms of internet users ... would be permissible only if it were adopted on a national legal basis which was accessible, clear and predictable," Villalón said. "

Sabam, a Belgian artists' and authors' rights group, won a court order in 2007 forcing ISP Scarlet Extended to create a system to block users from illegally downloading copyrighted material.

Scarlet appealed the original decision, which had given it six months to devise a system to block illegal downloads. The ISP said at the time that the ruling would force ISPs to carry out "invisible and illegal" checks on an internet users' activity.

Cruz Villalón said that any system that met the Belgian Court's demands would be extensive and would block files that no court had said definitely infringed any copyright.

"The court order would apply 'in abstracto' and as a preventive measure, which means that a finding would not first have been made that there had been an actual infringement of an intellectual property right or even that an imminent infringement was likely," he said, according to the ECJ statement.

He also said that the measure would apply to too many people because Scarlet customers would be in communication with non-Scarlet customers.

"The system must be capable of blocking any file sent by an internet user who is one of Scarlet's customers to another internet user – who may or may not be one of Scarlet's customers and who may or may not live in Belgium – where that file is thought to infringe a copyright managed, collected or protected by Sabam," said the statement. "It must also be capable of blocking receipt by an internet user who is one of Scarlet's customers of any file infringing copyright which has been sent by any other internet user."

"Neither the filtering system, which is intended to be applied on a systematic, universal, permanent and perpetual basis, nor the blocking mechanism, which can be activated without any provision being made for the persons affected to challenge it or object to it, are coupled with adequate safeguards," the Advocate General said, according to the statement.

Scarlet had opposed integrating software called Audible Magic that would identify illegal content on file sharing networks, and appealed the decision to Brussels Court of Appeal.

In 2010 the Brussels Court of Appeal said it could not rule on the matter without first referring two questions to the European Court of Justice.

Brussels has asked the ECJ to determine if delivering an injunction against ISPs forcing it to filter content suspected of copyright infringement contradicts a person's right to privacy and protection of personal data. It also asked the ECJ if a national court should balance the extent with which it orders screening to take place with the impact it would have on those fundamental rights.

The EU's Copyright Directive says copyright owners can obtain a court order against intermediaries whose services are used for piracy. But the E-Commerce Directive says that ISPs are generally not responsible for the activity of customers and that member states must not put ISPs under any obligation to police illegal activity on its service.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04...ing _traffic/





New Zealand Outlaws Internet File-Sharing

New Zealand passed a law against online piracy on Thursday which outlaws file-sharing and threatens repeat offenders with having their Internet access cut off.

The new law allows for penalties of up to NZ$15,000 ($12,000) to be paid to the copyright owner and if this is ineffective offenders can have their Internet account suspended for up to six months.

"Online copyright infringement has been damaging for the creative industry, which has experienced significant declines in revenue as file sharing has become more prevalent," Commerce Minister Simon Power said.

"This legislation will discourage illegal file sharing and provide more effective measures to help our creative industries enforce their copyright."

The new law gives copyright owners the power to send evidence of alleged infringements to Internet service providers, who will then send up to three infringement notices to the account holder.

If the warnings are ignored then a claim can be made to the Copyright Tribunal which can make awards of up to NZ$15,000 against the account holder.

The new law will take effect on September 1 but will not apply to mobile networks until October 2013.

Only the Green Party and two independent MPs voted against the bill although there were strong objections by user groups over the past year as it went through the select committee process.

MPs were accused of not understanding file sharing and Internet basics.
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news...414-1dg65.html





New Zealand Politican Tweets How She's Violating Copyright Law Night Before Supporting Three Strikes Copyright Law
Mike Masnick

This is just bizarre. Andrew Dubber points us to the latest on the debate in New Zealand's Parliament over the draconian new three strikes law, in which people will get kicked off the internet after accusations (not convictions) of file sharing. Dubber points us to the speech from Parliament Member Melissa Lee discussing her support of the new law. You can see it here.

All well and good... except the night before this debate, she posted the following to her own Twitter account:

Ok. Shower... Reading ... And then bed! listening to a compilation a friend did for me of K Pop. Fab. Thanks Jay.

Now, to be fair, in her speech, she does say she gets that sharing a DVD or a CD can be sensible. She even references the "Korean Wave" of k-pop and says that it happened because of file sharing (directly contradicting US VP Joe Biden's lies from yesterday).

In the end, then, she seems to have no logical consistency at all. She's happy to infringe on copyright when she gets to listen to good music. And she knows that infringement helped get artists attention and built up things like the Korean Wave of successful musicians... and yet New Zealand still needs to pass draconian copyright law to outlaw these things that she admits aren't so bad. Say what now?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...ight-law.shtml





Apra Endorses Strong Copyright Message.

APRA, the organisation that represents the New Zealand's music writing community, is encouraged by the government's recent strong copyright message.

The much debated Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill was yesterday passed with broad support from all the major political parties across the political spectrum. It enacts a graduated response process where repeat infringers will receive warning notices from their ISP in response to evidence gathered by rights owners.

"We acknowledge all sides of this debate but there are basic principles that should not be ignored. The future is a digital one and whilst technology might change the way content is delivered it shouldn't be used as an excuse to ignore the rights of those who make the content in the first place", says APRA's Director of NZ Operations, Anthony Healey.

Despite what has been reported widely in the media, APRA note that the possible penalties imposed include fines, not suspension of internet accounts. Only at some time in the future, if it is shown that the current process has not been effective and that the problem is widespread, will the range of remedies available to the Copyright Tribunal be extended to include account suspension.

"In today's world connectivity is crucial, but this current attitude of entitlement in relation to illegal file sharing must change. We need this law to encourage the development of more legal digital services, to encourage ISPs to play a responsible role and to set the example that the creator's rights are worthy of our respect. This is an important step in the right direction" says Healey.
http://www.voxy.co.nz/national/apra-...essage/5/88015





ISP Says New Copyright Law Effectively Useless
Alex Walls

New Zealand Internet Service Provider EOL said today that the new copyright bill was ineffective and did not take into account hotspots, shared IP addresses and legal file sharing.

The Tauranga-based independent ISP has grown from a small family business in 1995 and last year was named one of New Zealand’s top Internet ServiceProviders (ISPs) by Consumer Magazine for the second year running. Managing director Terry Coles has called the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment bill that was passed yesterday effectively useless.

Mr Coles told NBR the bill would be difficult to for EOL to enforce since copyright owners catch alleged offenders by identifying their IP address. But all medium to small EOL customers shared IP addresses which was more secure, he told NBR. This meant that there was a large number of customers that EOL would not be able to tell whether they were infringing copyright or not.

"The bulk of our users use one IP number externally anyway so from the outside world, from the internet side, all our users appear as one user."

The bill also did not take into account hotspots, such as Tauranga Hospital, where it was impossible to tell who was logging in, since names and addresses were not required when purchasing credit, and cash could be used, Mr Coles said.

He said he regularly received emails from Hollywood studios and international corporations looking to track down offenders' IP addresses, but EOL was unable to help them, despite being firmly against illegal downloading, due to IP address sharing and hotspot anonymity.

Mr Coles also said that not all peer-to-peer and torrent traffic was illegal, since a lot of it was used for downloading and sharing open source software.

"So you know the fact that we can, if we were to look at a customer, see them doing some file sharing, that doesn't mean to say that it's illegal, they may be transferring some quite legitimate files." He said this was not taken into account in the bill.
"I haven't seen that mentioned in the bill at all, it seems to be trying to block all peer-to-peer traffic."

Mr Coles said the ISPs should have been spoken to before the bill was passed, he said, since they were the ones who would be approached by copyright owners and would have to divulge the identity of the accused customer.

"Most ISPs, especially the small and medium ones, in order to do that, there's a huge amount of resources and time they'd have to put in in order to track that person down. They'd have to go through millions of lines of logs to try and find out who was transferring that particular data at that particular date and time."

He said these kinds of laws were being implemented all over the world and would force copyright infringement offenders to move to encrypted software to download files, which meant "that no one can see them anyway".

"They're not going to be able to be seen and no one will be able to see what they're downloading...the people on the internet who drive this sort of thing are a lot smarter than the people who make the rules, I think, or they're certainly a lot more IT savvy, anyway."
http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/isp-say...eless-aw-90936





Dutch Government To Outlaw File-Sharing and Block The Pirate Bay
Ernesto

Traditionally, The Netherlands has been one of the most lenient countries when it comes to the sharing of copyrighted material on the Internet, but this will change if the Government gets to implement their new plans. Under new legislation downloading of copyrighted movies and music will become outlawed. The lawmakers claim that this change is needed to crack down on ‘pirate sites’.

Through the actions of anti-piracy outfit BREIN, The Netherlands has been in the news regularly in connection with file-sharing and copyright related cases.

The group was responsible for the demise of the once largest torrent site Mininova, achieved a conviction against the Pirate Bay founders, and more recently expanded its track record with a victory against one of the largest Usenet communities on the Internet.

All the above was accomplished even though the actual downloading of copyrighted movies and music for personal use is completely legal in BREIN’s home country. In the Netherlands only the uploading part of file-sharing is punishable by law, but if new plans from the Government are adopted this may soon change.

Today, State Secretary of Security and Justice Fred Teeven announced that the Government wants to modernize current copyright law. One of the most drastic changes put forward in the new plans is that in addition to uploading, downloading of all copyrighted material will also be outlawed.

In addition to a complete ban on the sharing of copyrighted material, the new copyright plans will also get rid of the “copy-levy” on blank CDs and DVDs. This levy, ranging from $0.20 to $0.87 per piece, was put in place to compensate rights holders for the films and music that were copied for personal use.

The State Secretary notes that the changes related to file-sharing will not mean that the Government will actively prosecute individual downloaders, but stresses that they are needed to get “pirate websites” blocked by Internet service providers. At the moment this is impossible. Last year BREIN sued two of the largest Dutch ISPs, requesting that they should block their customers’ access to The Pirate Bay, but the attempt failed.

State Secretary Teeven emphasizes that The Pirate Bay is one of the main targets, although he misspells the website url in his official letter, pointing to piratebay.org instead. According to the State Secretary, The Pirate Bay is “a major resource of illegal material” which should be blocked by ISPs.

Although applicable to all citizens, the new law is specifically aimed at the blocking of illegal websites. There will be no three-strikes rules as proposed in other countries, and the Government will not chase individual file-sharers.

In a response to the news, BREIN confirmed that it will not go after individual file-sharers in the future either. Their prime targets are the websites that facilitate copyright infringement, not their users.

Aside from toughening the law, the new plans also include ‘protections’ for the privacy of file-sharers. One of the key points is that the rights holders can only claim the personal details of an alleged infringer if that person shared copyrighted material on a massive scale. This would prevent the pay-up-or-else settlement schemes that are currently ongoing in the United States.
http://torrentfreak.com/dutch-govern...te-bay-110411/





Survey: Dutch Artists Say P2P Doesn’t Hurt Them Financially
Nicholas Deleon

You may have heard that the Dutch Government now plans to outlaw music and movie (and whatever else) downloading. That seems pretty prosaic: since when was it legal to infringe on someone’s copyright? Isn’t that the whole point of copyright? No matter, for in the lead up to the Dutch announcement’s announcement a survey was taken. “What about the survey?” you may ask. Well, said survey reveals that a good number of artists believe that they’re not hurt financially by piracy, and that it’s about time to re-think the artist-fan relationship with respect to DRM.

The survey asked 4,000 artists (musicians, authors, photographers, etc.) for their views on all sorts of piracy-related subjects.

For example, only 12 percent of respondents said they believed file-sharing hurts them financially. Artists with more schooling’ under their belt tend to be among those who don’t believe file-sharing hurts them financially. So much for the claims by certain organizations that artists are being put in the poor house because of BitTorrent.

What else? Oh, that file-sharing helps spread the word about their work. So says just north of 50 percent of respondents, though this number may change as more and more streaming options break into the mainstream. A sort of, “Online music services help spread the word about my work.”

All of this being said, the Dutch artists aren’t a bunch of hippies who think everything should be free forever. Nope, with a majority saying that the penalties from illegal file-sharing should be more serious that the current penalties on the books.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/04/12...m-financially/





London School of Economics Say File Sharing is Not the Main Cause for the Current Slump in Sales

The London School of Economics have released a report supporting the argument that file sharing is not the root cause for the current slump in music sales and also suggests industry chiefs are lying when they say it is.

Since the digital download explosion of the mid 00's both music and movie industry fat cats have blamed pirate activity for all negative financial results and have chosen to ignore the fact that there has been an overall decline in leisure spending across the world since the global financial crisis started to bite.

The report also points out that people who don't own computers, and therefore can't share files, have stopped buying music at the exact same rate as those who do.

"The LSE's paper argues that everything the content industry says about file sharing is wrong. It suggests file sharing is the future, and that revenue downturns can be explained by other forces."

A different study does indicate that file sharing could be responsible for 20% of lost income - but also finds the other 80% is a result of the music industry's own sales techniques in offering music in a massive range of formats from digital singles to video game add-ons.

Legal file sharing is on the increase across the world - the LSE says income from digital streams has increased by over 1000% between 2004 and 2010 to $4.6bn.

Take a look at the report here.
http://www.licklibrary.com/news/2011...slump_in_sales





Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters

How did a drummer who never intended to make money from music end up as one of the biggest and wealthiest rock stars?
Carl Wilkinson

A group of record company executives, sitting down to sketch the perfect rock star, may well come up with someone a little like Dave Grohl. He has the look—long, thick black hair; he has the talent—he plays the drums, guitar and piano, he sings and he writes his own songs; and, above all, he has both pedigree and credibility.

In the early 1990s, as drummer with seminal grunge band Nirvana, Grohl helped change the face of popular music. Today, as lead singer with stadium-filling rock giants Foo Fighters, he is a multi-millionaire who has sold more than 15 million albums worldwide, won six Grammy awards and is president of his own record label. Alongside Foo Fighters he has a number of side projects (including supergroup Them Crooked Vultures, with Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones); a documentary about his band shot by Oscar-winning director James Moll was released last month and his seventh album, Wasting Light, is out on Monday. Now 42, Grohl—and his brand of rock 'n' roll—has grown up, had kids and settled down.

How did a man who was just a drummer and who never intended to make money from music end up as one of the biggest and wealthiest rock stars of the decade, succeeding in the face of a record industry in crisis?

We meet at Studio 606, the 8,000 sq ft recording space he built in 2005 in the Northridge area of Los Angeles. Outside, the Californian spring sunshine throws stark shadows across a neighbourhood that estate agents would describe euphemistically as "mixed"; from inside this large utilitarian building, with its tinted windows, the blue sky looks almost overcast.

Grohl, who is tall, lean and has grown into his slightly goofy looks, sets down the keys to his decidedly un-rock 'n' roll grey BMW estate, tucks his shoulder-length hair behind his ear and flips the lid on his laptop. "Sorry," he beams. "I've just got to check my e-mail. I want to see if my daughter got into private school." Grohl married Jordyn Blum in 2003, and they have two daughters, Violet Maye, aged four, and Harper Willow, one.

The upstairs lounge looks like a bachelor pad: there's a fridge, jukebox and widescreen TV with an eclectic selection of boxsets: The Office, ACDC and Bon Jovi gigs, and a tape of the Make-up and Effects trade show 1997. Scattered across the purple sofa are cushions covered with old band T-shirts (Slayer, The Police, Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Led Zeppelin) made by Grohl's mother. "She called up and said 'David, what do you want me to do with those T-shirts in the attic?'," says Grohl in a falsetto.

Downstairs, a vast recording studio complete with Persian rugs and a grand piano in the corner leads on to a warehouse filled with carefully labelled guitar cases, drums and assorted equipment. Among the platinum records, framed posters and photographs hanging in the corridor outside the soundproofed control room where we adjourn to talk is the iconic cover of Nirvana's 1991 album Nevermind, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in September.

Nevermind (and Nirvana) is both a gift and a curse to Grohl now. "For 16 years I've had to balance these two things: my love and respect of Nirvana and my love and respect of the Foo Fighters." He lifts first his right hand then his left and balances the two, the large feathers tattooed on both forearms gently rising and falling. "I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Nirvana, there's no question. But I don't know if I'd be alive if it wasn't for the Foo Fighters. I try to keep them at a balance that is very respectful of each other."

Despite Grohl's desire to move on, the legacy of Nirvana's groundbreaking album still haunts him, and for good reason. Nevermind changed popular culture. Until the release of that album in 1991, music was dominated by pop giants such as Madonna, Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston. The alternative music scene was just that: lo-fi, raw-sounding and based on a punk DIY ethos that came to be known as grunge.

"Grunge emerged from the Pacific north-west," explains the writer Mark Yarm, whose book Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge will be published in September to coincide with Nevermind's anniversary. "It's unclear who coined the term, but it came to mean guitar bands who had a certain unkempt style and usually came from Seattle. It was a movement that was always supposed to transcend the cash. Success was viewed very warily. People like Nirvana's lead singer Kurt Cobain were resistant to success, yet very much sought it at the same time."

Grohl, who never imagined himself becoming a doctor, lawyer or writer, recorded his first album at 15 in a studio near his parents' house in Springfield, Virginia—a suburb of Washington, DC. "The intention wasn't to become U2, it was to satisfy that need to accomplish something outside of the mainstream system," he says.

That early anti-commercial intent symbolised the ethos of the alternative music scene. In 1990, Grohl became the drummer for Seattle-based band Nirvana, which had been formed by singer Kurt Cobain and bass player Krist Novoselic in 1987. Nirvana had already released a debut album, Bleach (1989), and the three-piece—Cobain, Novoselic and Grohl—toured small venues in a tiny van. It was a love of music that fuelled them, not the desire to become rich, famous rock stars.

All that changed when they teamed up with producer Butch Vig on their second album Nevermind. Where Bleach was a bona fide indie album released on the tiny Seattle-based Sub Pop label to which the band signed for an initial $600 advance, Nevermind was released by Geffen, a label owned by the Universal Music Group that was also home to the band's idols Sonic Youth.

"Sonic Youth's major label debut came out in 1990 and sold about 200,000 copies, which was considered a huge number in indie-rock circles back then," explains Yarm. "It was just inconceivable that another 'weird', underground band like Nirvana, who really looked up to Sonic Youth, could sell millions and millions of albums." Yet Nevermind, which was expected to sell around 200,000 copies, exploded.

"Many people point to the week in January 1992 when Nirvana knocked Michael Jackson—the King of Pop—off the top of the American charts as the moment alternative music truly went mainstream," says Yarm. To date, Nevermind has sold more than 26 million copies worldwide.

The album marked a sea-change in popular culture: it was the birth of a sound, a fashion and a lifestyle that was as big as punk or the swinging 60s before it. In the same year as Nevermind was released, Douglas Coupland published his famous novel Generation X and the theme tune for this new generation was Nirvana's breakthrough single "Smells Like Teen Spirit"—a raw, angry rallying cry that touched a nerve around the world.

Yet, for Grohl—at least initially—little changed. "It was just as much a shock to us as it was to everybody else. I think we were the last ones to believe it. Our world wasn't changing within all of that. We had a gold record and we were still touring in a van. And then it went platinum—we sold a million records—and we were still touring in a van; I was still sharing a room with Kurt when we had a platinum record. Even after we sold 10 million albums I was still living in a back room at my friend's house with a futon and a lamp." He does remember being sent his first credit card though. Never a big spender, he immediately rushed to his local Benihana, the chain of Japanese restaurants.

Thanks to Nirvana's success, record companies descended on Seattle, snapping up any band they could find. "It was a feeding frenzy," says Yarm. "One executive told me that all the flights from LA to Seattle were constantly booked. If one of those planes had gone down, it would have destroyed the music industry."

After the stratospheric success of Nevermind, Nirvana released just one further studio album, 1993's In Utero, and toured to breaking point. In 1994, lead singer Kurt Cobain, struggling with the pressure, was flown home to the US from Rome after taking an overdose during the European leg of the band's tour. On April 8 1994, Cobain was found dead at the house in Seattle he shared with his wife Courtney Love and their daughter Frances Bean. He had taken a heroin overdose and shot himself. His suicide shook the music world to its core, made global headlines and, in the eyes of many devastated fans, established Cobain as a tragic-romantic figure in the mould of Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix. He was 27 years old.

In the months after Cobain's death, Grohl couldn't bring himself to play music. "After Nirvana ended in April 1994, I didn't really do much that year," explains Grohl. It wasn't until October 1994 that he felt ready to go back into the studio. "I didn't have a plan or any major career aspiration," he says. "I just felt like I needed to do something."

Over the course of five days, he recorded 13-14 of his songs in a small studio near his house, playing all the instruments and singing every song. Grohl distributed 100 copies of the recording to friends and music industry insiders and, reticent to step into the limelight so soon after Nirvana, he called the project Foo Fighters, the second world war term for an unidentified flying object, as it "sounded more like a band". Those recordings, which cost Grohl around $5,000, became Foo Fighters' self-titled debut album. Released in 1995, it established Grohl as one of the biggest rock musicians in the world.

It's practically unheard of for a drummer to make it as a lead singer—perhaps the only other famous example is Phil Collins, who forged a solo career after his time in Genesis. Yet Collins is not playing stadium gigs 20 years on. When almost every other band of his generation has fallen by the wayside, what is it about Grohl and Foo Fighters that still resonates?

"Their music is no nonsense, blue-collar everyman music," explains Butch Vig, who has produced the band's new album Wasting Light. "I think that people feel like they know the band. They can relate to their songs, but they can also relate to them as individuals." Today, after some personnel changes over the years, Foo Fighters consist of drummer Taylor Hawkins, guitarists Chris Shiflett and Pat Smear, bass player Nate Mendel and Grohl. They are a friendly, close-knit five-piece, who share jokes nonstop and banter about moments on tour. Over the course of 16 years and seven studio albums, the band has honed a particular brand of emotionally charged rock that has transcended their early grunge influences. Grohl writes melodies with the energy of punk rock that form an enviable greatest hits package guaranteed to fill any stadium in the world (in June 2008 the band played two consecutive shows at the 90,000-capacity Wembley Stadium).

The band's new album is in some ways a return to the sound and approach of their early records. "There's no question that history is a big part of this record," admits Grohl. Despite his shiny, well-equipped studio, he decided to record Wasting Light in his garage at home, and in a nod to his lo-fi, DIY roots, recorded to tape rather than digitally on a computer. Like Nevermind, Wasting Light is something of an antidote to the overproduced mainstream pop that currently fills the charts. It's not the only thing that sets the band apart.

The music industry has changed since Foo Fighters released their first album in 1995. "Historically record sales accounted for the majority of band revenues," explains Chris Carey, senior economist at PRS for Music, a not-for-profit organisation which collects and distributes public performance royalties for composers, songwriters and music publishers. "As record sales have suffered in recent years the industry has looked to other areas for revenue. Synchronisations [music used in computer games and TV programmes] and merchandise sales have become increasingly important, and the boom in live music is well reported. It used to be that bands would tour at a loss to sell CDs. Nowadays music is often given away in order to generate buzz and promote live events."

How does this seismic shift in the record industry affect a band such as the Foo Fighters? "They've got an established fan base and a good track record, they're an act coming to the top of the market," says Carey. "Their revenues won't be representative of what a band coming into the market now would experience. That existing fan base, I'd imagine, will still buy physical albums and, I would expect, have a good amount of money to spend on concert tickets so what you can charge for a Foo Fighters gig is more than you could for a newer band. As a result their earning profile will be quite healthy: a good mix of live and recorded."

Today, thanks to industry pressures, many popstars often have to take the money wherever they can get it, whether it's corporate gigs, sponsorship deals or product placement in music videos. In the week I met Foo Fighters, the Libyan revolution was erupting and Beyoncé, Nelly Furtado and Usher had donated to charity their million-dollar fees earned playing for the Gaddafi family. "We've done corporate gigs to pay for touring," says Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, "but we've never played for the Gaddafis! There's nothing wrong with getting paid to play music as long as it's in the realms of whatever moral standards you have … "

Despite the shift in the music industry, Foo Fighters, with a secure fan base and stable income have been able to pick and choose what they do. "I think at this point we've exceeded any of the expectations we had for this band—musically or financially," explains Grohl. "The most important thing is that we do what we do with the same integrity we had when we started 16 years ago. We're not a financially ambitious band—we're doing just fine. It comes down to how much do you really need?"

Nate Mendel, the band's bassist and longest-serving member after Grohl himself, agrees: "All these ways you can exploit your band commercially, we've done a lot of it, but compared to a band similar to us, we've held back. We wanted to be in a band that didn't have to do that. It's only our generation that's ever had a problem with it. Prior to and after 80s punk rock and the alternative music of the 90s nobody cared. It's only our generation that was cautious about exploiting their music."

"Punk-rock guilt," laughs Hawkins. "I'm flying in this private jet and eating lobster thermidor—but I'm not giving a song to Honda!"

As internet piracy has taken its toll on the record industry, revenue from live gigs and merchandise has become ever more important. "If you're not making money from records you have to make it somewhere else," says Carey. "Merchandise was up more than 20 per cent in 2009 growing at a good rate and in 2008 live music was up about 13-14 per cent which is boom growth."

Piracy and the decline in record sales won't have hit the Foo Fighters as hard as many other newer bands—which may explain why Grohl, who is president of his own label, Roswell Records, is unconcerned about file sharing. When he was growing up Grohl and his friends would swap tapes of their favourite bands despite campaigns warning that "home taping is killing the record industry". Today, the internet has really put a dent in the music business, Grohl acknowledges, but for him file sharing is simply an extension of those home-made mix-tapes. "To me, the most important thing is that people come and sing along when we pull into town on tour," he says. "Sharing music is not a crime. It shouldn't be. There should be a deeper meaning to making music than just selling downloads."

Grohl's experience with Nirvana has coloured the way he now runs Foo Fighters. "I learnt a lot of lessons from being in Nirvana. A lot of beautiful things and a lot of …" he pauses, "lessons of what not to do. I'm not a businessman, but when it comes to making music I've kind of figured out a way of doing it without anyone getting hurt." He drums his fingers, performing a short paradiddle against the arm of the leather sofa.

After his death, Cobain's estate passed to his wife, the singer Courtney Love, who in 1997, with Cobain's bandmates, formed Nirvana LLC, a limited liability company to oversee their interests. The three have at times fought over Nirvana's legacy, almost going to court in 2002 (a settlement was reached the day before proceedings were due to begin) and in 2009 scrapping over the use of Cobain's likeness in computer game Guitar Hero 5. In April 2006, Love sold 25 per cent of her share in Nirvana's catalogue to Primary Wave Music for a reported $50m.

When he formed Foo Fighters, Grohl set up Roswell Records as a holding company for the band's entire music catalogue, which is then licensed to a record company for a six- to seven-year period at a time. "Unfortunately, a lot of musicians sign away their freedoms when they enter into these big business contracts. It's an age-old story. It's still happening. I don't think there's a place for that kind of outside control when it comes to being creative."

Are you a control freak? I ask. "Absolutely. No question. I am a controlling freak. I'm not a control freak, I'm a controlling freak. This is our baby. When it comes to making music, we have our own process, we have our own crooked democracy …"

Democracy? Or is it a benign dictatorship? "Well, yeah. Show me a band of five people where there's no leader … I just don't think it could happen. At the end of the day, it's my name at the bottom of the cheque."

Foo Fighters are now embarking on another stadium-filling world tour. As Grohl, the perfect rock star, headed off, I couldn't help thinking of the two fortune cookies I'd spotted earlier pinned to his fridge. "An interesting musical opportunity is in your near future," read one. The other said simply: "Study and prepare yourself and one day, your day will come."
http://www.slate.com/id/2290837





Blowin’ in the Idiot Wind
Maureen Dowd

Bob Dylan may have done the impossible: broken creative new ground in selling out.

The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.

Before Dylan was allowed to have his first concert in China on Wednesday at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing, he ignored his own warning in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” — “Better stay away from those that carry around a fire hose” — and let the government pre-approve his set.

Iconic songs of revolution like “The Times They Are a-Changin,’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” wouldn’t have been an appropriate soundtrack for the 2,000 Chinese apparatchiks in the audience taking a relaxing break from repression.

Spooked by the surge of democracy sweeping the Middle East, China is conducting the harshest crackdown on artists, lawyers, writers and dissidents in a decade. It is censoring (or “harmonizing,” as it euphemizes) the Internet and dispatching the secret police to arrest willy-nilly, including Ai Weiwei, the famous artist and architect of the Bird’s Nest, Beijing’s Olympic stadium.

Dylan said nothing about Weiwei’s detention, didn’t offer a reprise of “Hurricane,” his song about “the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done.” He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.

“The Times They Are Not a-Changin’,” noted The Financial Times under a picture of the grizzled 69-year-old on stage in a Panama hat.

“Imagine if the Tea Party in Idaho said to him, ‘You’re not allowed to play whatever,’ you’d get a very different response,” said an outraged Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch.

A 22-year-old Dylan did walk off “The Ed Sullivan Show” when CBS censors told him he couldn’t sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.”

But he’s the first to admit he cashes in.

David Hajdu, the New Republic music critic, says the singer has always shown a tension between “not wanting to be a leader and wanting to be a celebrity.”

In Hajdu’s book, “Positively 4th Street,” Dylan is quoted saying that critics who charged that he’d sold out to rock ’n’ roll had it backward.

“I never saw myself as a folksinger,” he said. “They called me that if they wanted to. I didn’t care. I latched on, when I got to New York City, because I saw (what) a huge audience there was. I knew I wasn’t going to stay there. I knew it wasn’t my thing. ... I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.”

“Folk music,” he concluded, “is a bunch of fat people.”

He can’t really betray the spirit of the ’60s because he never had it. In his memoir, “Chronicles,” he stressed that he had no interest in being an anti-establishment Pied Piper and that all the “cultural mumbo jumbo” imprisoned his soul and made him nauseated.

“I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he said.

He wrote that he wanted to have a house with a white picket fence and pink roses in back, live in East Hampton with his wife and pack of kids, eat Cheerios and go to the Rainbow Room and see Frank Sinatra Jr. perform.

“Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it,” he wrote. He complained of being “anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent.”

Performing his message songs came to feel “like carrying a package of heavy rotting meat,” he wrote.

Hajdu told me that Dylan has distanced himself from his protest songs because “he’s probably aware of the kind of careerism that’s apparent in that work.” Dylan employed propaganda to get successful but knows those songs are “too rigidly polemical” to be his best work.

“Maybe the Chinese bureaucrats are better music critics than we give them credit for,” Hajdu said, adding that Dylan was now “an old-school touring pro” like Frank Sinatra Sr.

Sean Wilentz, the Princeton professor who wrote “Bob Dylan in America,” said that the Chinese were “trying to guard the audience from some figure who hasn’t existed in 40 years. He’s been frozen in aspic in 1963 but he’s not the guy in the work shirt and blue jeans singing ‘Masters of War.’ ”

Wilentz and Hajdu say you can’t really censor Dylan because his songs are infused with subversion against all kinds of authority, except God. He’s been hard on bosses, courts, pols and anyone corrupted by money and power.

Maybe the songwriter should reread some of his own lyrics: “I think you will find/When your death takes its toll/All the money you made/Will never buy back your soul.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/opinion/10dowd.html





Record Label Boss Is a Former Notorious Warez Scene Pirate
enigmax

During March, Sumerian Records boss Ash Avildsen made the news on a couple of piracy-related occasions. First, he orchestrated a hoax to trick BitTorrent users into downloading a fake band promo, then later got serious with a YouTube broadside against music piracy. As Sumerian gets ready to launch their own music store, TorrentFreak has discovered that they have Long John Silver’s skeleton in the closet.

In recent years, it’s become fashionable to use online file-sharing networks to generate publicity for both well-known bands and those with a lower profile. If done properly it’s a great and free way to reach a large audience.

Early March, the Sumerian Records label decided to utilize an increasingly popular method of getting some free publicity for a band on their label, i.e tell everyone that their music has leaked to file-sharing networks and all concerned are very angry about it.

“Hey all you jobbers who like to steal our albums – word out on the ocean (pirates don’t use streets) is that the BOO [Born of Osiris] album has leaked.. perhaps the pirate ship will leak too and sink in to the sea. In any case, enjoy pirating the record and hopefully you guys choke on a cannonball. Happy torrenting you cowards!” label founder Ash Avildsen declared.

As it turns out, the entire tirade was a hoax designed to get people to download a copy of the album – but with the band chatting, farting and generally messing around over the top. Apparently the whole thing was quite funny, especially the Charlie Sheen samples. Welcome to music marketing 2011-style. And why not?

However, just a few days later Avildsen’s attitude towards file-sharing networks changed somewhat. In a YouTube video which began with the industry line that music piracy ‘robs’ the United States of 71,000 jobs and $12.5 billion in economic output, Avildsen asked people for just 3 minutes of their time to ‘open their minds’.

This was quickly followed up by the cover of the upcoming Born of Osiris album merging into a view, accompanied by a note that file-sharing is only good for unsigned bands to get publicity and established bands and labels only suffer at their hands. At around the 2 minute mark, Avildsen sank his teeth into torrent sites and their “corporate” advertisers.

“Let’s call a spade a spade – there’s nothing more pathetic than making a living off being a thief,” said Avildsen. His anti-piracy message was widely reported in the music media and you can see the full thing at the bottom of this article, but for something rather more eye-opening, read on.

“I used to run in the same circles as Sumerian Records founder, Ash Asvilden,” Jason Fisher of heavy metal music site The Gauntlet told TorrentFreak this morning.

They’re both in the music business, so perhaps nothing too surprising there? But rewind a few years and things get very interesting indeed. Fisher now admits he was a member of multiple warez groups – Amnesia, the mighty Razor 1911 and ROR (Release on Rampage).

“As I listened to Ash’s statement, it really bothered me when he states ‘there is nothing more pathetic than making a living off of being a thief.’ So as Ash puts it, let’s ‘call a spade a spade,’” Fisher explained.

“What Ash doesn’t tell you is that when he was in high school, we ran in the same circles…the software piracy/hacking circles.”

Surprisingly, Fisher and Asvilden had crossed paths with their shared connections to ROR (Release on Rampage).

Having existed in other forms, 1995 saw ROR transform into a games release group and was taken over by a new leader known as The Krazy Little Punk (TKLP). He and the group became infamous in warez circles for claiming to have pre-released the most-anticipated game of the time – Quake – the follow up to ID Software’s massive hit, Doom2.

However, when the dust settled it was discovered that the release was actually a repackaged beta version of the game. ROR was banned from the scene for their sins and TKLP was forced to start a new group called Reflux (more background here).

So with that history out of the way, how does that relate to Sumerian Records? Well, according to Jason Fisher, the leader of ROR (The Krazy Little Punk) is none other than Sumerian Records founder, Ash Asvilden.

“When I first heard Ash was starting Sumerian Records, I thought he was probably the one guy out there smart enough to change this lagging industry around. I was interested to see what new ideas for running a record label he would have. I thought surely if anyone could do it, it would be Ash, the dude is brilliant,” Fisher explains.

“But it turns out he is going to go down the same road that so many others have gone down and never recovered from. Let’s hope it isn’t too late. He is right, piracy is a huge problem in the music industry, I’d just like a little more disclosure coming from a guy who has cost software companies millions of dollars.

“He ended up getting busted for releasing the alpha source for some major ID software release,” Fisher told us, adding that he too had received “visits” from the FBI.

Whether these brushes with the law led to a Road to Damascus-style recovery for Asvilden remains to be seen. But let’s not forget, this was many years ago and a lot has altered since then. Times change, attitudes change. People get mortgages.

TorrentFreak contacted Sumerian Records for comment but at the time of publication we have received no response.
http://torrentfreak.com/record-label...pirate-110412/





Google Threatens to Destroy Not Only Pop Sensation Adele, But Britain's Film and Music Industries

So why is No.10 in thrall to this parasitic monster?
Alex Brummer

The music and books retailer HMV and the music giant EMI are two of the grand old dames of Britain’s music industry. But the future of both these historic enterprises, with a pedigree of recording talent going back almost a century, is in doubt.

Together with other UK-based creative champions such as Warner Music as well as a host of imaginative, independent record producers, they are in danger of extinction — as is this country’s extraordinarily successful music business.

From Dame Vera Lynn to Tom Jones and The Beatles, Britain has long had the knack of producing music superstars capable of conquering the world. Indeed, we are still the world’s second- largest exporters of music.

Take our latest remarkable prodigy, Adele — a North London soul singer whose second album, 21, has spent ten weeks at the top of the charts, breaking Madonna’s record set in 1990. Like The X Factor winner Leona Lewis, she is a product of the BRIT School in Croydon, South London.

Artists like Adele, together with ground-breaking television production and gaming companies, have made the creative industries an important and growing sector of the British economy, accounting for seven per cent of total national wealth.

They ought to be a major theme in the Coalition Government’s much-vaunted growth strategy, as the country seeks to shake off the ghastly Labour legacy of the banking crisis, recession and a bloated public sector.

But, as many of the key figures in our vibrant and very British recording and digital industries have told me, nothing of the sort is happening.

Instead, David Cameron — who only last week sent me, and I assume other City Editors, a letter promising to put the right conditions in place for a strong private sector-led recovery — appears to be pinning his hopes on the American behemoth Google as the best gateway to Britain’s digital future.

Cameron sees Google as an example to us all of how the nation can develop its creative and digital industries.

So why is Cameron so fascinated by Google, its wealth, trendiness, innovation and glamour? Could it be down to his media and strategy adviser Steve Hilton, the man described as the Prime Minister’s ‘best political friend’?

After all, Mr Hilton — who often wears T-shirts, pads around shoeless in No 10 and is described as a genius by admirers — has a direct line to the company.

His wife Rachel Whetstone, the former political secretary to Michael Howard when he was Tory leader, is Head of Communications for the company. Whetstone was godmother to Cameron’s late son Ivan.

And when she was promoted from being head of Google communications in Europe to the worldwide head in 2008, it required her to spend time at the company’s global HQ in Mountain View, in the San Francisco Bay area of California.

Hilton put his Tory strategist role on ice and duly followed his wife west. But he returned to Downing Street in September 2009. And with the recent departure of Cameron’s communications chief, the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, from No 10, Hilton’s power base and influence over the Prime Minister’s thinking has been enormously expanded.

At the same time, the devotion of Cameron’s inner circle to Google has become even stronger. Indeed, the Prime Minister makes no secret of the fact that he believes Google offers the pathway to turning Britain — and East London in particular — into a new Silicon Valley.

Executives of the company are said to have had open access to the Prime Minister and all those around him in recent months. And in No 10, there is an overwhelming belief that Google holds many of the keys to bringing the digital revolution to Britain.

In a speech in November last year, Cameron disclosed that he had been meeting the leaders of Google to plot Britain’s digital future.

He said: ‘The founders said they could never have started their company in Britain.’ The reason? Google told him that the British ‘copyright system is not as friendly to this sort of innovation as it is in the United States’.

This all sounds innocent enough. But the fact is that Google was urging Britain to throw away decades if not centuries of intellectual copyright while at the same time lobbying governments all over the world in a bid to drive a coach and horses through the laws.

The reason is very simple. The company wants to plunder intellectual property —songs by Adele and other British singers — so that it can disseminate it free to anyone who logs on to Google anywhere in the world.

The more people who log on to Google, the more the company will receive in advertising revenue. And who isn’t going to log on if all their favourite pop songs are offered for free?

The Prime Minister, cocooned in his Downing Street bubble with his Google cheerleaders, seems blissfully unaware that, far from being an influence for good on the world wide web, Google has become a global predator ruthlessly gobbling up potential rivals such as YouTube and ‘stealing’ the creative work of writers, film makers and the music industry.

Significantly, other countries seem more aware of the huge cultural dangers posed by the digital giant.

A Federal Court in the U.S. ruled last month that a proposed settlement to Google's alleged exploitation of a copyright loophole was unfair.

The irony is that Google is alien to much that Britain holds dear. It has no respect for private property.

Our Englishman’s Castle has been turned into public property by Google Earth — which offers aerial views — and Street View, created when an army of Google cars travelled the length and breadth of the country taking pictures of our streets and our homes to put on the internet.

It was during this process that unprotected computer data was harvested from thousands of homes. There is now no hedge high enough to protect ourselves from online snoopers or criminals.

Much of the fortune of Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and its investors has been built on its astonishing success as an advertising vehicle — capturing some $28 billion (£17 billion) of advertising revenue in 2010.

So dominant has it become that it has helped to destroy great swathes of other media in its wake, from regional newspapers in Britain and the United States to business directory companies.

So dominant has it become that it has helped to destroy great swathes of other media in its wake, from regional newspapers in Britain and the United States to business directory companies.

As a result of allegations of anti-competitive behaviour in the advertising market, it is now facing full-scale monopoly inquiries on both sides of the Atlantic.

The European Commission has opened a preliminary investigation into charges that it manipulates the market place by demoting competing websites and browsers to the lower orders of its searches — less prominent positions on its pages.

Only this week there were reports that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) may launch its own broad-based investigation into Google’s dominance of search engine space.

What Cameron and his team seem not to have understood is that Google and other internet service providers — by running roughshod over UK copyright and intellectual property — are in danger of destroying some of our premier creative industries.

Take HMV for a moment. Clearly, in the internet age a retail group selling CDs through its HMV stores, and books through its Waterstone’s shops, might look to be on a losing wicket.

But HMV’s chances of avoiding the knacker’s yard are not made any easier by an unrestrained and rampant Google.

In Britain, some 70 per cent of music sales are still in the form of CDs and come through the High Street, where HMV is now the main retailer following the collapse of Woolworths and Zavvi in the early part of 2009.

Continued dominance of retail — or High Street — distribution in the music industry is among the reasons that our recording industry remains a global powerhouse.

The industry’s ability to charge sensible prices for CDs and their spin-offs means that there is cash to invest in new performers and to keep the creative juices flowing by paying good royalties to established singers, orchestras and musicians.

One only has to switch on the computer, call up the Google search engine and type in the name of a star like Adele to understand why the digital channel is such a threat to the UK’s performers, and for that matter our whole creative industry.

Nine out of the first ten websites which pop up on Google’s search engine are run by pirates who have downloaded Adele’s output and offer it online far more cheaply than official copyrighted sites and High Street retailers.

In effect, Google has granted these piracy sites a licence to steal. Instead of the proceeds going into future investment in artists, it ends up in the hands of internet buccaneers.

What has this to do with David Cameron and the Coalition Government?

In its determination to boost the Google model and to encourage other internet search sites to follow it, the Government seems to believe the internet should be free and open to everyone.

Critics say that, at best, Cameron’s government is going slow, at worst being deliberately obstructive, in the implementation of the Digital Economy Act of 2010 which seeks to protect the nation’s intellectual property from thieves.

The Act gives the authorities powers to prosecute or even close down internet search providers that host pirates.

This would allow for genuine price competition on the web rather than an unfair war between the pirates and the legitimate outlets.

None of this might be enough to save HMV, or for that matter EMI or Warner Music. The latter two big record producers, the bedrock of British rock and classical recordings, are currently owned by the big banks after their private equity owners failed to make loan repayments.

They find themselves squeezed by the aftermath of the financial crisis on the one hand and the march of digital piracy on the other which has made it all but impossible to sustain heavy investment in new artists.

Google may have won over the hearts and minds of the Prime Minister and his aides, but all over the world it is increasingly recognised that the search engine is like a giant vacuum cleaner parasitically sucking up content from media companies, publishers, film makers and musicians without paying anything back into the creative process that produces such high cost entertainment.

At the same time it is controlling the advertising slots on the web in its own pursuit of profit. And despite the fact that it generates billions of pounds of income in Europe this unwelcome guest, which has located its European operation in low tax Ireland, paid just £9 million tax in Europe last year.

So has the PM been blinded by the enthusiasm of those around him who see Google as a force for good which can transform the economy and make this country a centre of digital excellence?

In fact, the monster does almost the opposite. It undermines investment in the very creative industries that have become such an important part of our national prosperity, and employ hundreds of thousands of people.

So the question is this: will the Government only be satisfied when every last independent book publisher and specialist music store has been closed, our recording industry hollowed out and investment in brilliant new artists — capable of taking on the world — has been eliminated.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ndustries.html





YouTube Sentences Copyright Offenders to School
Nick Bilton

In many countries around the world, if you break the law by stealing copyrighted content you can be sentenced to prison and heavily fined. But if Google catches you breaking copyright laws, the punishment is more akin to being caught smoking in the boys room in high school: You’re forced to take an online class at YouTube’s Copyright School.

Copyright School isn’t your normal edition of detention. Copyright violators are asked to watch a four-and-a-half minute minute video and then required to take a multiple choice quiz that asks questions pertaining to copyright. One question, for example, asks if music videos and photographs fall under copyright protection.

The copyright video is hosted by Russell, a cartoon pirate character, who inadvertently breaks copyright laws by taping scenes from a film in a movie theater and then uploading the clips to YouTube. (Russell does all this with what seems to be an Apple iPhone, not a Google Android device, by the way.)

In the past, Google suspended users from the site who broke copyright rules three times or more. In a company blog post, Google said that although the old rules were a “strong deterrent to copyright offenders,” the one-size-fits-all approach was sometimes unfair to users.

The company also said it will give certain limited users who have been suspended from the site in the past an opportunity to remedy their YouTube account, and return to the site, “contingent upon the successful completion of YouTube Copyright School, as well as a solid demonstrated record of good behavior over time.”

The new copyright policy updates, which were added to the site on Thursday, will take effect immediately.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/0...ers-to-school/





The End of Content Ownership

The cloud, along with subscription and on-demand services, will transform our perception of content access and ownership.
Lance Ulanoff By Lance Ulanoff

The cloud is, finally, about to change our lives—and it will all start with content.

A couple of weeks ago I dragged some of my favorite super-large hardcover books out of the attic and placed them on a shelf in my living room. I may read them again, but it's more likely they'll live out their golden years as decorative objects. Interestingly, I think most of my old VHS, CDs, and even DVDs and Blu-rays may soon be joining these books as objects d'art instead of useful content objects.

Until recently, I derided "the cloud," insisting that it's simply an airy label for "the Internet." When you store stuff or access anything from the cloud, you're simply tapping into the Internet and touching a far-flung server. Nothing lives above you in the stratus or cirrus vapors over our heads. No, it's just terrestrial miles and miles (hundreds or even thousands) away and speeding to you at the speed of an electron or, in the case of fiber, light.

That argument, however, now misses the point. In recent weeks companies like Amazon, Sony, Google, Verizon, 24symbols and others have started to roll out "cloud-based" content streaming and on-demand services (or plans) for movies, music and even books. Video on demand is nothing new. Nor is streaming. Roku and Netflix more or less pioneered the mass adoption of the latter concept. The difference now, though, is that companies like Amazon want you to stream your own content.

Ten, 15 years from now, we will look back on this time as a quaint, yet painful transition period: one where consumers learned to give up the physical manifestation of content in favor of constant access to what they own from anywhere they can find Internet access.

It's almost shocking to watch the fundamental distrust of "the cloud" fade away in favor of cloud-based content storage and access. As recently as last year, the cloud came under attack with every Google service failure on Gmail or Google Docs. "There it is," the critics cried, "proof positive that the cloud cannot be trusted. You must have constant access to all of your e-mail and files 24/7. Anything less than that is a disaster." This point of view assumes, of course, that we are online 24/7 and, more importantly, never stop working.

We do take breaks from work and even the computer, so there are times when cloud access is not an issue. It's finally dawning on cloud naysayers that even with the cloud's occasional blips, it's still more efficient for content access than, say your home. While you have easy access to your home library of books, movies, and CDs, they're not all digitized and it does take time to queue up DVDs and movies. As for books—is every book you've ever read sitting on your shelves right now? Unlikely. Even among the ones you still own, many are probably in storage. Even the home and office computer looks a little less attractive when compared to a network that'll offer you file access from anyone's computer. Your dead PC is no longer an impediment to getting things done.

What's Possible

Cloud-based storage and access makes the impossible, possible. 24Symbols, which launches next summer in Europe, takes Amazon's Kindle ebook concept to new almost dizzying heights. Even though book files are some of the smallest you'll find (its super easy to compress those files because they're just letters and you only need one representation for each letter), 24Symbols wants to stream you book access on a subscription basis. You'll no longer own any books. Instead you'll be able to stream and read as much as you want. The fact that 24Symbols is an ad-supported book network is not the riskiest proposition here. Instead, it's the concept of streaming a book pages (or perhaps words) at a time. In other words, the entire tome never resides on your computer, smartphone, or ereader. Will avid readers ever trust a service that forever runs the risk of blocking access to the final chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows or Pillars of the Earth because you can't access the Internet or the site is down?

Some will surely say 24Symbols is going too far. At least with the movies and music Amazon, Google (and likely one day Apple) want to rent you, the content lasts from a few minutes to two or three hours, max. A 1,000-page book might take someone weeks to read. On the other hand, ebooks have already shown us how we can trust a battery-powered device with not one but hundreds and hundreds of our books. We read, charge every once in a while, and never worry. Surely, the average bookworm will come to trust and love streaming books, as well.

It's clear to me, however, that we're turning a corner. Content ownership—with copyright laws always a fuzzy thing at best—is ready to transform into content access. Consumers want to sample a wide array of content styles and there is no better way than the cloud.

There will still be those who buy books, movies and music, because they know no other way, even though the reason for buying content in the first place—constant access—will no longer be a factor. The parent whose child wants to watch "Dora the Explorer: Big Sister Dora" over and over and over again doesn't have to own the DVD or even the digital file. Cloud-based ownership and access means that their child can see Dora play big sister at home, on the iPad, in the car, and on mommy's smartphone. They own the movie or, more likely, have an all-you-can eat subscription service, so each viewing costs nothing except the price of Internet access.

For the majority of consumers, however, they will come to fully trust the cloud and believe in subscription pricing for everything. Ownership will become an anathema as consumers realize they don't want to risk losing content as they switch services, and they tire of finding requisite space on their own local storage for all those digital files. The benchmark for a good service will be based on the richness of each library. Consumers will pay companies like Amazon, a fixed amount for full-boat, yearly access.

At home, our bookshelves will contain artifacts of a bygone content-ownership era. We'll touch those books, Blu-rays and CDs, but only to dust them.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383373,00.asp





Spotify to Set Limits on Free Music Streaming

Swedish music streaming service Spotify has announced plans to implement new limits on its free service in hopes of encouraging more users to pay for the services premium features.

"It’s vital that we continue offering an on-demand free service to you and millions more like you, but to make that possible we have to put some limits in place going forward," Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek wrote in a blog post.

The new limits, set to go into effect on May 1st, will limit users to six months of free, unrestricted access to Spotify's catalogue of songs.

After the six-month introductory period, users will be limited to ten hours of free listening per month, and will only be able to play any individual track a total of five times.

The changes have the greatest impact on heavy users who use Spotify's free service to discover new music, according to Ek, pointing out that such users currently listen to about 50 new tracks every month.

"The average user won’t reach the limit on plays for 7 out of 10 tracks, even after a year," said Ek, who went on to encourage users who may reach the new limits to consider moving over the Spotify's fee-based services, which won't be affected by the changes.

Ek said the restrictions on Spotify's free service were necessary to "continue making Spotify available to all in the long-term" but emphasised that the company nevertheless saw its free service as "vital".

Launched in in 2006, Spotify is one of the world's largest streaming websites boasting over one million paying users.

The service allows users to stream music to their computers for free in exchange for listening to advertising.

Users can also pay 49 or 99 kronor ($7.75 or $15.70) to gain ad-free access to the service.

The 99 kronor version allows users to listen to their playlists offline and to access their music through their mobile phones.

In his blog post, Ek also mentions "awesome new features" are in store for Spotify in the coming months as well as "exciting developments" to be revealed in within a few weeks, a possible reference to the long-rumoured launch of Spotify in the United States.

According to the TT news agency, Spotify's free service has been a stumbling block in the protracted negotiations involved with bringing Spotify to the US market.

The changes announced on Wednesday may help ease discussions, thus paving the way for Spotify to establish itself in the United States.
http://www.thelocal.se/33208/20110414/





4Shared Turns Your Android Phone Into An All-You-Can Eat Streaming Music Player
Steve Kovach

Android owners who have been using Amazon's Cloud Player can quit now. Online file sharing company 4Shared just outdid it.

4Shared is similar to most other online file sharing services we've written about, except it is heavily focused on music. You get a generous 10 GB of storage space for free.

With 4Shared's desktop app, you can upload your music to your online locker. After launching the Android app and signing in, you can stream your tunes over the internet.

Thanks to Amazon, that's pretty standard by now. But 4Shared has one killer feature Amazon doesn't: The ability to share and stream your music publicly.

From the Android app, all you do is search for a song title or artist and the list populates with tracks other 4Shared users have loaded to the service. Tap the song, and it immediately begins streaming. Awesome.

We are worried that 4Shared may not last too long in its current version. After all, Google cut Grooveshark from the Android Market last week even though it wasn't a music swapping service.

Either way, between the 10 GB of storage and the ability to stream practically any song on demand, 4Shared is our new favorite app for listening to music on Android.

You can download 4Shared's Android app, 4Music, free in the Android Market.
http://www.businessinsider.com/4shar...android-2011-4





The Information Will Get Out: A New Religion for File-Sharers
Nicholas Jackson

Nineteen-year-old philosophy student Isaac Gerson believes that sharing files is important. He calls it "the most beautiful thing in the world," according to a TorrentFreak. Instead of "Thou shall not steal," Gerson's proposed religion, which has grown out of his Missionary Church of Kopimism, argues that we should steal -- and share -- more frequently.

"The congregation at Missionary Kopimistsamfundet" -- Gerson and his followers are based in Sweden -- "believe that copying is to be embraced by religion and they hope that very shortly this way of life will be officially accepted by the authorities," according to a story posted today on TorrentFreak. "To have your information copied is a token of appreciation, say the church, a sure sign that people think you have done something good."

Late last year, Gerson's church applied to authorities in Sweden to be accepted and recognized as an official religion. Two weeks ago, authorities denied Gerson's application, arguing that, while the church is a community, one of the listed requirements, "its meetings did not constitute 'worship,'" according to TorrentFreak. "Undeterred, the church founders have requested a meeting to find out what is required in order to gain official acceptance. They certainly aren't giving in."

From the church: "In our belief, communication is sacred. Communication needs to be respected. It is a direct sin to monitor and eavesdrop on people. Absolute secrecy is holy in the Church of Kopimism." And: "To appropriate software (to keep source code hidden from others), is comparable to slavery, and should be banned."

Should you be interested, joining the church is easy. You just have to agree that all files should be shared and free. For more information on Kopimists, read "How the Kopimists Conquered Internets -- and Launched a War," an informative blog post from 2006. The term gained a lot of recognition when thepiratebay.org, a popular sharing site, attempted to purchase a man-made island to turn into a sovereign micronation where copyright laws would not exist.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...harers/237058/





Judge to Copyright Troll: Your "Business Model" Isn't My Problem
Nate Anderson

Ars Technica freelancer Eriq Gardner was recently sued over a photo that appeared in a piece he wrote for us last year. The flimsy lawsuit was quickly dismissed, but the company behind it lives on—and has sued 50+ people in Colorado for their use of the same photo. Now, the federal judge overseeing all these cases has made it clear that he sees through the company's "lawsuit as revenue generation" strategy, and that he's not interested in enabling it. Righthaven is already backing down.

The company at issue here is a Las Vegas litigation firm that finds allegedly infringing newspaper posts and images online, contracts with the newspaper in question for control of the the copyright, and files federal lawsuits against its targets. Since its inception, Righthaven has made the obviously outrageous demand that the entire domain name for the site in question be locked and then turned over to the company. This has never happened, but the threat of massive damages and of losing one's Web address seem calculated to force people into settlements of a few thousand dollars.

Recently, Righthaven has filed dozens of suits in Colorado over a Denver Post photo of a TSA airport security pat-down. One of those suits targeted Brian Hill, a 20-year-old North Carolina man who ran an "alternative news" site. Hill is a "mentally and physically disabled young man who has been unwittingly swept up in this unforgiving 'business model,'" said his lawyer in a court filing. Hill has "autism, as well as a rare and severe form of diabetes known as brittle type-1 diabetes, Attention Deficit Disorder, and hyperactivity." He is cared for at home by his mother.

Judge John Kane, who is overseeing all the Colorado Righthaven suits, last week weighed in on Hill's case. Righthaven asked for a three-week extension of time to file a response in the case, hoping to settle with Hill and to avoid drafting additional court briefs in the case. Such extension requests are generally routine, but this one was opposed by Hill's lawyer, David Kerr, who absolutely blasted Righthaven in his lengthy filing.

"Neither The Denver Post nor Righthaven attempted to mitigate any damages by simply sending a cease and desist letter," wrote Kerr, "nor any other request to discontinue the alleged infringement, prior to initiating this action. Instead, Righthaven has brought this lawsuit (and apparently 251 others) against alleged infringers, further exacerbating the Court’s overloaded docket. Righthaven’s motivation for avoiding the simple act of requesting that Mr. Hill cease and desist is simple, it is using these lawsuits as a source of revenue. Such abuse of legal process should be rejected."

The judge concurred that no extension of time would be given, and he appeared sympathetic to Kerr's argument against using federal courts in this way.

"Whether or not this case settles is not my primary concern," wrote the judge last week. "Although Plaintiff’s business model relies in large part upon reaching settlement agreements with a minimal investment of time and effort, the purpose of the courts is to provide a forum for the orderly, just, and timely resolution of controversies and disputes. Plaintiff’s wishes to the contrary, the courts are not merely tools for encouraging and exacting settlements from Defendants cowed by the potential costs of litigation and liability."

It's a mere procedural order, but coming from the judge who will handle Righthaven's other cases in the state, it's clear that Judge Kane has no interest in simply making things quick and cheap for Righthaven. And with IP lawyers like Kerr lined up and ready to litigate on everything from the appropriateness of the venue to questions about whether Righthaven even has the right to bring such suits, these cases could become a real drain on Righthaven resources.

In a move that proved the judge's point, Righthaven yesterday dismissed the case against Hill. Though the case was moving forward, Righthaven made clear it wasn't actually interested in litigating the suit; it wanted to settle. "Righthaven is no longer willing to engage in settlement discussions over trivial issues while the Defendant and his counsel seek to extend this action for publicity purposes," said the company. With settlement not a possibility, the company now just wants the suit to go away.

But other Righthaven targets should still tread carefully. "While the Defendant may believe the Notice of Dismissal evidences his authorization to misappropriate copyright protected material in the course of his Internet-related conduct, he can continue to do so at his own peril," wrote Righthaven attorneys. "Others observing these proceedings should so likewise heed this advice because this Notice of Dismissal in no way exonerates any other defendant in any other Righthaven action for stealing copyright protected material and republishing such material without consent."

Tough words—but defense lawyers will conclude that they need only to raise a little publicity, fight Righthaven in court, and watch as the snarling dog backs away with a whimper.

As for Kerr, he's not ready to let Righthaven off the hook so easily. "While we are pleased that Brian has been dismissed from the case, there are several outstanding issues that we believe still need to be addressed with the Court," he told Ars. "Quite frankly, we were anticipating Righthaven's response to our motion; however, we will take time to digest this development and react accordingly.

"I will not speculate as to why Righthaven chose to drop Brian's case instead of answering his motion. I believe that facts speak for themselves and each person can draw their own conclusion."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...my-problem.ars





Distributor Offers To ‘Purify’ and Monetize Pirate Files

A manga creator and distributor has offered to do something positive with thousands of unauthorized copyright files to be found on file-sharing networks. In what appears to be a first of its kind project, users will be encouraged to upload their illicit media to a website where they will be repackaged with advertising and subsequently reintroduced legally back into the wild.

Turning Internet piracy into profit is the holy grail for many content creators and distributors. Whether it be music, movies or software, people have been looking for ways to monetize media on file-sharing networks for as long as they’ve been around.

While there are ultra-aggressive approaches – such as the pay-up-or-else schemes flooding Europe and the United States – occasionally individuals come up with more creative approach worthy of attention.

One such individual is manga creator Ken Akamatsu, who today announced that he will start an ambitious scheme to monetize illicit copies of out-of-print manga currently residing in huge volumes on file-sharing networks.

Akamatsu will launch the “Illegal Manga File Purification Project” tomorrow via his J-Comi site. While noting that all fans have obtained illicit out-of-print manga via file-sharing networks “at least once”, Akamatsu is offering to ‘purify’ these files so that the creators can be paid for their work and subsequent downloaders can do so legally. According to AnimeNewsNetwork, the scheme will work as follows.

Manga fans with illicit files on their hard drive will be asked to upload them (or links to them on file-sharing networks) to the J-Comi site. Whilst keeping uploader identities private, J-Comi will contact the original creators of the files and obtain permission to monetize the content.

Once they have agreement, J-Comi will bundle advertising into the manga releases and reintroduce them back onto file-sharing networks. For this service there will be no charge and the original creators will receive 100% of the advertising revenue.

If agreement with the creators cannot be reached “the files will be abandoned and the files will continue to drift through hell [file-sharing networks]. Perhaps forever…,” Akamatsu predicts.

While this attempt at returning some revenue to the creators of these files is to be applauded, Ken Akamatsu could find himself an extremely busy man indeed, and maybe one with a rather large headache. Nevertheless, we wish him good luck for trying something positive. It has to be better than the alternative.
http://torrentfreak.com/distributor-...-files-110411/





Miss G.: A Case of Internet Addiction
Virginia Heffernan

There are certain popular diversions — television, video games, the Internet — that we pursue so deliriously we end up hating ourselves for loving them. Others we brightly recast as the duties of citizenship: newspapers, public radio, sports.

All the while, cottage industries crop up to freak us out about our every last cultural pursuit. In recent years, it’s Internet use that’s been styled as potentially sick, and “Internet addiction” a new reason for self-hatred.

If you’re inclined to worry about your habits, you may have already stumbled onto a strange and influential self-evaluation questionnaire by Dr. Kimberly Young, a professor of business at St. Bonaventure University. Though Dr. Young developed the test in 1998, early in Web life, it still dominates the Google returns for “Internet addiction” and steadily stirs up anxiety.

Dr. Young told me she believes the Internet is addictive in part because it “allows us to create new personalities and use them to fulfill unmet psychological needs” — which sounds worrying except that art, entertainment and communications systems are designed explicitly to permit self-exploration and satisfy psychological needs.

The way the test loads the cultural dice in favor of reality over fantasy should make hearts sink. In the hierarchy of the test, any real-world task or interaction, no matter how mundane or tedious, is more important — and, worse, ought to be more fulfilling — than online fantasy, research or social life. “Do you neglect household chores to use the Internet?” one question asks, and undone laundry is later cited as a warning sign. “How often do you block out disturbing thoughts about your life with soothing thoughts of the Internet?” goes another question.

Can this really be science? (And might another psychologist find something to admire in a person who quiets his mind with mere thoughts of the Internet?) I wondered whether other habits of cultural consumption were considered pathological enough to inspire tests. The Web carries a few tests for television addiction, and none for movies. Over on operaddiction.com, there are no tests, only recordings to order.

In general, if a pastime is not classy, those who love it are “addicted.” Opera and poetry buffs are “passionate.”

Virtually all non-work activities have, at one time or another, been represented as craven and diseased. Opera obsession leads to delinquency in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1981 film “Diva”; an intense movie habit deepens the alienation of the hero of Walker Percy’s 1961 novel “The Moviegoer.”

Novels themselves, now the signature pursuit of the sound and literate mind, have also been considered toxic, as in the 1797 analysis, “Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity.” The 18th-century worry about female literacy is not unlike the contemporary anxiety that Web use above all makes girls vulnerable to “predators”: “Without this poison instilled, as it were, into the blood, females in ordinary life would never have been so much the slaves of vice.” Taken together, these warnings against the very stuff that makes life worth living often seem either like veiled boasts (“I’m addicted to the symphony!”) or just absurd.

So why are authors and educators hellbent on using this shopworn rhetoric when it comes to Internet use?

Two weeks ago, I met a professed Internet addict, a 20-year-old college student in New York named Gabriela. (Like many addicts, she preferred that only her first name be used.) One of Gabriela’s professors had told me she slept with her laptop, and was wired in the extreme. She told me she had taken Dr. Young’s test and was worried about her Internet habits.

In e-mail, Gabriela struck a note between irony and concern as she described her symptoms. She told me she keeps an extremely late bedtime, sometimes 4 a.m., because she’s up noodling around online.

She then described a typical surfing session: “I’ll be on Facebook and see a status update of song lyrics, and I’ll Google them and find the band name, that I will subsequently Wikipedia and discover that the lead singer is interesting and briefly look at his Twitter and try his music on Grooveshark” — a music search engine and streaming service — “while looking at pictures of him on Tumblr” — the multimedia microblogging platform — “that will lead me to a meme I’ve never heard of that I’ll explore until I find hilarious photos I will subsequently share with friends of mine on Facebook.” Gabriela, who sometimes dresses in the futuristic Victoriana known as steampunk, also loves Webcomics, a site for graphic novels and comic books, and Neopets, a game that lets players care for virtual pets.

She indeed sleeps with her laptop in her bed, “partly so I can have my iTunes play my Sleep playlist.” Even on the Sabbath, when she refrains from Internet use for religious reasons, she talks and thinks about the Internet. She told me she considers surfing the Web not so much a regimen but “a state of being” that, like a meditative state, took her years to achieve.

Aha. I’m no addiction expert, but Gabriela strikes me as a bright, self-effacing, religious young woman who keeps student hours and prefers logic games, jokes, graphic novels, trivia quizzes, music, Victoriana and socializing on Facebook to prefab pop bands.

This kind of Internet use isn’t usefully described as an addiction, even if there’s some shirking of chores and insomnia to it. Fantasy life and real life should, ideally, be brought into balance — but no student who’s making decent grades needs to get off the Internet just because it would look more respectable or comprehensible to be playing chess, throwing a Frisbee or reading a George Orwell paperback. The Internet as Gabriela uses it simply is intellectual life, and play. She’s just the person I’d want for a student, in fact — or a friend, or a daughter.

It’s no accident that “search” is the dominant metaphor of the Internet. And it’s no accident that the Internet attracts a certain kind of young, dreamy mind at some liberty to find itself — the type that in earlier eras might have been drawn to novels or movies. As Binx Bolling puts it in “The Movie goer”: “What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple; at least for a fellow like me. So simple that it is often overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...net-addiction/





Popularity of Books in Digital Platforms Continues to Grow, According to AAP Publishers February 2011 Sales Report

E-Books Rank as #1 Format among All Trade Categories for the Month
Andi Sporkin

Powerful continuing growth of books on digital platforms--both e-Books and Downloaded Audiobooks--are highlights of the February 2011 sales report of the Association of American Publishers, which is being released today.

The report, produced by the trade association of the U.S. book publishing industry, tracks monthly and year-to-date publishers’ net sales revenue in all categories of commercial, education, professional and scholarly books and journals.

According to the February results, once again e-Books have enjoyed triple-digit percentage growth, 202.3%, vs February 2010. Downloaded Audiobooks, which have also seen consistent monthly gains, increased 36.7% vs last February.

For February 2011, e-Books ranked as the #1 format among all categories of Trade publishing (Adult Hardcover, Adult Paperback, Adult Mass Market, Children’s/Young Adult Hardcover, Children’s/Young Adult Paperback).

This one-month surge is primarily attributed to a high level of strong post-holiday e-Book buying, or “loading,” by consumers who received e-Reader devices as gifts. Experts note that the expanded selection of e-Readers introduced for the holidays and the broader availability of titles are factors.

Additionally, Trade publishing houses cite e-Books as generating fresh consumer interest in--and new revenue streams for--“backlist” titles, books that have been in print for at least a year. Many publishers report that e-Book readers who enjoy a newly-released book will frequently buy an author’s full backlist.

For the year to date (January/February 2011 vs January/February 2010), which encompasses this heavy post-holiday buying period, e-Books grew 169.4% to $164.1M while the combined categories of print books fell 24.8% to $441.7M.*

According to Tom Allen, President and Chief Executive Officer of AAP, “The February results reflect two core facts: people love books and publishers actively serve readers wherever they are. The public is embracing the breadth and variety of reading choices available to them. They have made e-Books permanent additions to their lifestyle while maintaining interest in print format books.”

Allen added that book publishers have been leaders among content providers in identifying and serving new audiences. “Publishers have always strategically expanded into all the markets and formats where readers want to find books, whether it was Trade Paperback, Mass Market or now digital. By extending their work as developers, producers and marketers of high-quality content to emerging technologies, publishers are constantly redefining the timeless concept of ‘books.’”

Other highlights in the February 2011 report (all February 2011 vs February 2010 unless otherwise noted):

Digital categories:
E-Book sales were $90.3 Million, growing 202.3% vs February 2010. Downloaded Audiobooks were $6.9M, an increase of 36.7%.

Trade categories:
Adult Trade categories combined (Hardcover, Paperback and Mass Market) were $156.8M, down 34.4%. Children’s/Young Adult categories combined (Hardcover and Paperback) were $58.5M, a decline of 16.1%

*Year-to-date 2011 vs YTD 2010: E-Books increased by 169.4% while all categories combined of print Trade books declined by 24.8%

Religious books:
February sales of $48.5M were an increase of 5.5%; this reflects growth as well in the category for year-to-date, up 6.1% to $93.9M.

Education categories:
Higher Education sales for YTD (January and February 2011) were $406.9M, down slightly by 5.6% vs YTD 2010. In K-12, YTD sales were $173M, declining 8.9% from 2010.

Professional/Scholarly categories:
Total sales for professional books and journals were $42.9M, a slight drop of 3.6% vs February 2010. Combined sales of University Press (hardcover and paperback) were $6.7M, falling 6% vs last year.
http://www.publishers.org/press/30/





The New Yorker Puts Jonathan Franzen Story Behind a Wall of Likes
Todd Wasserman

Following a music industry model, the New Yorker this week is attempting to increase engagement on its Facebook Page with exclusive content.

In this case, the content is an article by Jonathan Franzen in which the author visits Alejandro Selkirk, the island where Robinson Crusoe was said to have been based, to get a break after a grueling book tour and grieve the loss of his friend, the writer David Foster Wallace.

To read the story online (it will appear in print, but not in full on the New Yorker‘s website), users have to go on the Conde Nast title’s Facebook Page and “Like” it. The title’s Facebook Page has about 200,000 fans. “Our goal with this isn’t just to increase our fans,” says Alexa Cassanos, a spokeswoman for the New Yorker. “We want to engage with people who want to engage on a deeper level.”

The New Yorker‘s not the first magazine title to try to use exclusive content to spur Facebook engagement. Self magazine last month held a “Dish with Kim” event in which fans got the chance to chat with Kim Kardashian by “Liking” Self.

The technique has also been used in the music industry. Last month, for instance, Jennifer Lopez
offered the song “I’m Into You” on iTunes, but only after enough fans “Liked” it. Lil Wayne also premiered the first single off his new album on Facebook, requiring a Like to unlock it.
http://mashable.com/2011/04/11/new-y...athan-franzen/





Charles Laufer, Founder of Tiger Beat, Dies at 87
Douglas Martin

Charles Laufer, who as a high school teacher in 1955 despaired that his students had nothing entertaining to read and responded with magazines aimed at teenage girls desperate to know much, much more about the lives of their favorite cute stars, died April 5 in Northridge, Calif. He was 87.

The cause was heart failure, his brother, Ira, said.

Mr. Laufer’s best-known magazine was Tiger Beat, published monthly. With its spinoff publications and its competitors, of which the most popular was 16 Magazine, Tiger Beat had it all covered — or at least what mattered most to girls from about 8 to 14. The Beach Boys’ loves! Jan and Dean’s comeback! The private lives of the Beatles!

Exclamation points, sometimes as many as 50 a page, added emphasis. Pix, as pictures were known, were glossy, glamorous and frequently poster-size. Fax, as facts were known, often included “101 things you never knew about (fill in star’s name)”: he uses a blue toothbrush!

Titles were catchy, oddly innocent by later standards: “Shaun: A Junk Food Junkie?,” “Leif’s Sad Childhood,” “Bobby’s Favorite Type of Girls” and “Marie: Fighting With Donny?”

Mr. Lauder told The Los Angeles Times in 1974 that the newsstand price of Tiger Beat, then 75 cents, was the same as the price of a hot-fudge sundae, and that the magazine probably provided the same dollop of entertainment. He was even clearer in describing his mission in a 1979 interview with Parade magazine: “Let’s face it, we’re in the little girl business.”

Charles Harry Laufer was born on Sept. 13, 1923, in Newark, where his father, Isadore, owned a taxi company and was a state assemblyman. Charles was a star basketball player in high school before moving to Los Angeles, where he graduated from the University of Southern California. He taught English, journalism and history at two high schools.

To tempt his students to read more, Mr. Laufer in 1955 started a magazine called Coaster, which later became Teen, and which he sold in 1957. In 1965 he published a one-shot magazine crammed with Beatles photos. It sold 750,000 copies in two days. Later in 1965 he started Tiger Beat. Its mainstay, copied by so-called teenzines to this day, was “guys in their 20s singing La La songs to 13-year-old girls,” Mr. Laufer said in an interview with The Seattle Times in 1992.

His brother put up half the initial capital for Tiger Beat, but Charles ran it as publisher. His strategy to compete with 16 Magazine was to build promotional relationships with production and record companies.

But it was often Mr. Laufer’s own perspicacity that yielded the advantage. At a screening of new television shows in 1965 he saw the Monkees for the first time, and recognized Davy Jones from his performance in “Oliver!” on Broadway. Recognizing the Monkees’ potential, he put them on the cover of Tiger Beat. That put the still-struggling publication in the black, and he signed an exclusive deal for special Monkee magazines, Monkee picture books and Monkee love beads, which added to the bonanza.

Tiger Beat also used glossy paper (16 used newsprint) and a more advanced process for colored pictures. And it gave away bonus posters and ran contests in which readers could compete for stars’ personal belongings.

The Laufer brothers sold Tiger Beat in 1978 for a reported $15 million. Its circulation was then 700,000.

Charles Laufer stayed on as a consultant to the new owners for several years, then retired. Various combinations of his family members have since owned Bop and other teenage publications, as ownership of Tiger Beat passed through five or six companies. In 2003 Mr. Laufer’s son, Scott, bought Tiger Beat, which he now publishes with Bop.

Mr. Laufer’s first marriage, to Ottile Hangst, ended in divorce. In addition to his brother and his son, he is survived by his wife of 55 years, the former Dorothy Lacey; his daughters, Kerry Laufer, Laurie Fitzgerald and Julie Jenkins; and 10 grandchildren.

In 1985, Mr. Laufer told The Los Angeles Times that it would be hard to duplicate his success if he were just starting. “Today you have rock stars coming out and saying they’re bisexual, or you see four-letter words in print,” he said.

Still, some things never change: the cluttered collages of the covers of his day featuring the likes of David Cassidy and Bobby Sherman bear a striking resemblance to today’s Tiger Beat, with its endless renderings of Justin Bieber.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/b.../13laufer.html





AOL/HuffPo Shuts Down Download Squad
Violet Blue

In a surprise move Monday night, popular software blog Download Squad became the latest tech casualty in Huffington/AOL’s so-called ‘consolidation’ of its content sites. In an end-of-the-day email, Download Squad’s staff was told that the blog was closed and they were jobless, effective immediately.

From that moment, no further blog posts were made on Download Squad.

Arguably the best, if not considered the only significant software blog, it’s a move that’s left more than editor Sebastian Anthony saying WTF: fans of the blog, of which there were many were just as surprised at the news.

Anthony Tweeted, “In a world where software is moving towards ubiquity, AOL-HuffPo has seen fit to shut down the best software blog on the Web. Insane.”

“@M0zilla nope, no fools — this is for real. Will be made official tomorrow morning. (…) It’ll be made official in the next 12 hours, I think.”

According to Anthony, the news will be official tomorrow morning.

“It seems somehow fitting that @DownloadSquad’s last post is about Angry Birds…”

Strategy vs. The Buckshot Effect?

As part of the AOL merger last month with Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington became Editor In Chief of 56 sites and took the reins to make major changes. These changes included her decision to fold 30 brands (blogs) into other properties that Huffington saw as “stronger” than the absorbed brands.

Huffington’s changes also include her decision to mothball brands that were at the center of AOL’s content strategy only a few years ago.

Brand consolidation isn’t all: for many freelancers and blogging staff it’s been a fast moving massacre. Last week, Huff/AOL finished firing all freelancers at their business and finance sites - except the few writers that made the narrow cut into full-time employment.

Last Tuesday, AOL’s television bloggers got an email saying, “Many of you will be receiving an email saying your services will no longer be required.” However, they were invited “to remain as part of our non-paid blogger system.”

It was later said that [AOL blog] Moviephone’s Editor was scapegoated by AOL/HuffPo for the upsetting emails, a move than angered [AOL blog] Cinematical’s Eric D. Snider.

Download Squad Will Be Missed

Download Squad was part of AOL Tech, including TechCrunch, TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), Massively, WoW Insider, Joystiq, Switched, and Engadget. The weekend of March 12 saw Engadget having a significant walkout by Editor-In-Chief Johsua Topolsky and Managing Editor Nilay Patel.

Download Squad was a very popular blog, and the sudden shutdown has many in shock. One of the Weblogs, Inc. blogs, it was named among Computerworld’s list of the ten best written blogs in 2008.

Getting laid off via email is not a positive way to end a great blog - and we’re told that traffic was good. Here’s hoping the talented staff move on to more expansive opportunities.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/aol...ad-squad/16797





TV Airwaves Needed to Counter Wireless Crunch: FCC
Jasmin Melvin

Some U.S. airwaves used for free, over-the-air TV signals must be repurposed for mobile broadband use to tackle a looming spectrum crisis, the top U.S. communications regulator said on Tuesday.

The Federal Communications Commission wants Congress to grant it authority to hold incentive auctions that would compensate television broadcasters for giving up some of their spectrum to wireless companies.

"I believe the single most important step that will drive our mobile economy and address consumer frustration is authorizing voluntary incentive auctions," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski told broadcasters at their annual convention in Las Vegas.

But broadcasters have been resistant to the agency's proposal, worried about the unintended consequences that parting with airwaves could have on their TV signals and the viewers they serve.

"We're talking about putting the whole system at risk," Alan Frank, chief executive of Post-Newsweek Stations Inc, said earlier in the week at the conference.

Repacking the TV band, to clear large contiguous blocks of spectrum considered best for mobile broadband use, could increase interference and degrade the signal strength of broadcasters not parting with spectrum, said Frank.

"We need to start defining not how the auction works, but what this is going to mean for the broadcasters who don't participate in the auction," Frank said.

Genachowski said he understood the concerns broadcasters had, and said he would work closely with them to implement policy that benefited them and the economy.

He noted that broadcasters, under the FCC proposal, would be fully compensated for any expenses related to repacking.

"However, voluntary can't mean undermining the potential effectiveness of an auction by giving every broadcaster a new and unprecedented right to keep their exact channel location," Genachowski said, adding that doing so would give a single broadcaster veto power over the success of an auction.

He praised the industry for looking to take advantage of "a multi-platform broadband world" by introducing new technologies, platforms and business models to reach viewers.

But he made it clear that while the agency is working on multiple fronts to solve the spectrum crunch, the authority to hold voluntary incentive auctions is vital to meeting demand.

The FCC hopes to repurpose 120 megahertz of spectrum through incentive auctions where television broadcasters would voluntarily give up spectrum in exchange for a portion of the proceeds.

Some 25 million Americans watch video on their cell phones, and tablet computers like Apple Inc's iPad put 120 times more demand on spectrum than older phones.

"This growing demand is not going away. The result is a spectrum crunch," Genachowski said. "The only thing that can address the growing overall demand for mobile is increasing the overall supply of spectrum and the efficiency of its use."

Wireless carriers have lobbied for help, saying a spectrum shortage would mean clogged networks, more dropped calls and slower connection speeds for wireless customers.

AT&T Inc last month announced a $39-billion plan to buy Deutsche Telekom AG's T-Mobile USA, in part to deal with its impending spectrum shortage.

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has questioned the existence of a nationwide spectrum shortage, but the group said they would only oppose the auctions if they appeared to harm broadcasters who opt not to part with spectrum or seemed to harm viewers.

Some 43 million Americans rely exclusively on over-the-air television.

(Reporting by Jasmin Melvin; Editing by Tim Dobbyn, Phil Berlowitz)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...73C06Y20110413





Lawsuits to Strengthen Net Traffic Rules Possible
Jasmin Melvin

Public interest groups are keeping the option of lawsuits against the Federal Communications Commission on the table to fight for stronger Internet "neutrality" rules, an executive at a public interest law firm said on Saturday.

So-called net neutrality rules adopted by the FCC in December would prevent network operators from blocking lawful content but still let them ration access to their networks.

Public interest groups criticized the rules, intended to preserve the openness of the Internet, saying they had been bent too heavily to the will of big industry players like AT&T Inc and Comcast Corp.

"To go and say the FCC should have made stronger rules is something that my organization and others could be prepared to argue," said Matt Wood, associate director of the nonprofit public interest law firm Media Access Project.

Net neutrality advocates speaking at the National Conference for Media Reform, hosted by the public interest group Free Press, were not discouraged by lawmakers' attempts to overturn the rules this week.

House Republicans, in a 240-179 vote, pushed through a measure on Friday disapproving the FCC's rules. The resolution would overturn the order and prevent the FCC from adopting any rules related to it.

"It removes the FCC's jurisdiction in this space," Markham Erickson, an attorney and executive director of the Open Internet Coalition, said on Saturday at the conference.

A similar measure has been offered in the U.S. Senate and has 39 co-sponsors, but the White House said on Monday President Barack Obama's advisers would recommend he veto any such resolution.

More Legal Challenges

Erickson doubted the measure would ever make it to the president's desk. "My sense is the vote in the Senate will be less of a substantive vote on net neutrality and more of a caucus vote on trying to keep the Democrats aligned as one party voting against this," he said.

He added the Senate would likely take up the measure toward the end of the summer or early fall and vote down the resolution to deter Republicans from making a habit of trying to repeal regulations.

"At its core, the debate about net neutrality is really the notion that users should decide what they want to see and do online," Free Press' policy counsel Aparna Sridhar said.

The Internet traffic rules -- aimed at ensuring consumer access to content such as huge movie files while letting Internet providers manage their networks to prevent congestion -- still face legal challenges.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit granted on Monday the FCC's motions to dismiss as premature lawsuits filed by Verizon Communications Inc and MetroPCS Communications Inc.

A spokesman for Verizon said the company plans to file a second lawsuit following the traditional process for overturning rulemakings, which requires rules to first be published in the Federal Register.

Wood predicted more lawsuits to come, challenging the substance of the rules as well as the FCC's statutory authority to implement them. He also said that while lawsuits from public interest groups are "very much on the table," it would not be an easy case to make.

"We're certainly looking at judicial avenues, but right now everybody's kind of in a holding pattern" until Federal Register publication, Wood said.

(Reporting by Jasmin Melvin; Editing by Todd Eastham)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...73839O20110409





Only a Carrier Could Trumpet $500 Per Gigabyte as a Price Cut

AT&T has lowered its data price premium for poor, prepaid users from 500 times to 50 times what regular folks pay -- how nice
Galen Gruman

AT&T announced today that it was cutting the price of data access for prepaid customers -- those who don't sign contracts but instead pay as they go -- to $5 for 10MB of data access on select smartphones, a major cut from the previous $5 for 1MB. But press reports haven't done their math: The costs are 50 times what so-called postpaid customers -- those who sign a contract and get a bill each month -- are charged. An AT&T GoPhone customer pays $500 per gigabyte of data usage, whereas a postpaid Android or iPhone user pays $10 per gigabyte.

Of course, there are other plans: One costs $150 per gigabyte if you buy 100MB increments (15 times what regular customers pay), and the other costs "only" $50 per gigabyte if you buy 500MB increments (5 times over the regular customer cost). Such a deal!
Even pay-as-you-go iPad users pay $10 per gigabyte, so the shocking price difference can't be attributed to the prepaid business model's costs versus the postpaid model's costs. After all, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint have 3G data pricing that's all over the map for the same amount of data, even with each carrier's suite of plans. The differences just aren't as scandalous as these GoPhone charges.

"There's a lot of talk now about wireless prices potentially going up, [but] here are...examples to suggest otherwise," said Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman, in announcing the cuts, according to Computerworld. Presumably he said this with a straight face, as AT&T and the other carriers years ago perfected the art of earnest customer screwovers.

No doubt this price decrease is meant to show how AT&T really won't raise prices if it gets federal permission to buy T-Mobile and that consolidating the U.S. mobile market into two and a half carriers rather than two and two halves will bolster competition. Oligarchies are good for the marketplace, don't you know?

What's sad is that products like the GoPhone target the poor and those living paycheck to paycheck. Because they can't commit to two-year contracts, they pay a lot more for the services than their better-off counterparts. Telecom is hardly the only example of that; banking and credit are other critical areas of daily life where the poor pay more to get less.

I suppose the fact that GoPhone customers will pay only 50 times more than better-off customers, rather than the previous 500 times poverty premium, is a good thing. So why does it feel so icky? (Because it is.)
http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-plan...-price-cut-641





T-Mobile's New Plans Get Official: Starting at $60 for Unlimited Everything, Throttling Included
Jacob Schulman

T-Mobile's just gone official with the new unlimited plans we caught wind of a few days ago, and while they are truly unlimited by numbers, they're not completely unlimited in functionality.

The plans cost $79.99 for Even More customers (buy a subsidized device on contract) and $59.99 for Even More Plus subscribers (bring your own phone commitment-free). Either way this gets you unlimited data, domestic calling, and domestic messaging, with a $5 surcharge for BlackBerry users.

Unlike Sprint's similar offering, once you pass the 2GB bandwidth mark, "data speeds will be reduced for the remainder of that bill cycle," essentially informing users that throttling will most certainly take place.

In all, we're pleased to see the compromise T-Mo's put in place for data (whereas most other carriers are simply axing the unlimited option altogether), and we hope some of the competition takes heed.

It does sound like a pretty sweet deal for those of you not grandfathered in on unlimited data plans. Still, for those of you interested, we suggest getting a jump on, as the (potentially leaked) press release reveals that these plans might only be available for a limited time.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/12/t...for-unlimited/





HTC’s New Android Phone to Offer Netflix-Like Video Service
Mike Isaac

HTC revealed its latest high-end Android smartphone offering, the Sensation 4G, on Tuesday. Along with the phone, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer is also debuting its new mobile media rental-and-purchase service, HTC Watch.

The Sensation will debut in Europe in mid-May alongside HTC’s tablet offering, the Flyer, and in Britain, Germany and other European markets in June. HTC Watch will be available on both devices, and will launch with over 500 titles. Users have the option to either rent or buy movies on Watch, but purchased videos can be viewed on up to five different HTC devices.

The Sensation and Flyer will arrive on American shores later — in the summer. The Sensation 4G will be exclusive to T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network. (Whether you consider HSPA+ to be 4G or not, however, is another issue.)

The new media service, HTC Watch, highlights the media-hub qualities of the Sensation’s hardware. The phone will sport a massive 4.3-inch LCD screen, and the 8-megapixel back-facing camera is capable of recording HD video at 1080p resolution. For quick editing of your footage, the phone will also include the Video Trimmer tool which allows for clip cropping straight from the handset.

The Sensation will also launch with a new version of HTC Sense, the company’s custom interface for Android.

HTC recently launched another high-end Android smartphone on Verizon’s 4G LTE network to much acclaim: the Thunderbolt. The phone has been reportedly selling well since its debut, and is said to be outselling the iPhone 4 in a number of Verizon stores.

HTC wouldn’t provide pricing details on the new video service, or the Sensation, when we asked. The company says it will make that info available closer to the phone’s release date.

The Sensation is HTC’s second announced device to feature a dual-core processor, the 1.2-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon. The company’s upcoming Evo 3D also sports a 1.2-GHz Snapdragon, though it has yet to launch.

Rival device manufacturers have also debuted dual-core smartphones this year. The Motorola Atrix and LG Optimus 2X were announced in January — carried on AT&T and T-Mobile, respectively.

For a hands-on first look, check out Wired UK’s initial impressions of the Sensation.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/...-dual-core-4g/





For Flip Video Camera, Four Years From Hot Start-Up to Obsolete
Sam Grobart and Evelyn M. Rusli

It was one of the great tech start-up success stories of the last decade.

The Flip video camera, conceived by a few entrepreneurs in an office above Gump’s department store in San Francisco, went on sale in 2007, and quickly dominated the camcorder market.

The start-up sold two million of the pocket-size, easy-to-use cameras in the first two years. Then, in 2009, the founders cashed out and sold to Cisco Systems, the computer networking giant, for $590 million.

On Tuesday, Cisco announced it was shutting down its Flip video camera division.

Even in the life cycle of the tech world, this is fast.

From the outset, the acquisition was an odd fit for Cisco, which is known for its enterprise networking services. To some analysts, the decision to shutter Flip was an admission by Cisco that it made a mistake.

“Cisco was swayed by the sexiness of selling to the consumer,” said Mo Koyfman, a principal at Spark Capital, a Boston venture capital firm. “They’re not wired to do it themselves, so they do it by acquisition. Flip was one of the most visible targets out there. But it’s really hard to turn an elephant into a horse. Cisco’s an elephant.”

But the rapid rise, and now demise, of Flip is also a vivid illustration of the ferocious metabolism of the consumer marketplace and of the smartphone’s power to destroy other gadgets.

“It was unusually fast,” said Brent Bracelin, an analyst with Pacific Crest Securities. “It’s a testament to the pace of innovation in consumer electronics and smartphone technology. More and more functionality is being integrated into smartphones.”

The rapid innovation of smartphones, he said, is “one of the most disruptive trends we’ve seen.”

As newer and faster technologies beget newer and faster technologies, consumers move on to the next big thing with alacrity. In four years, Flip has gone from start-up, to dominant camcorder maker, to defunct. It took I.B.M. about four years just to reach dominance with its PC in the early 1980s. The iPad is only one year old.

Just as the Flip was reaching its zenith, the smartphone was gaining traction among consumers. With its versatility in recording video and still images, as well as its ability to perform myriad other functions, the smartphone has since proved to be a far more desirable product than a single-function device like the Flip.

At the same time, the smartphone has crushed the market for GPS devices, put a serious dent in the point-and-shoot camera industry and threatens the existence of many other everyday devices — the wristwatch, the alarm clock and the portable music player.

For technology entrepreneurs, the Flip story may be a cautionary tale of another sort. Many entrepreneurs look at Facebook’s ability to rebuff suitors as an inspiration to stay independent. But Flip’s founders were paid more than half a billion dollars for their invention from one of the most deep-pocketed companies in Silicon Valley, offering an alternate lesson in the fine art of cashing out at the right time.

“There are a lot of young entrepreneurs who look at Flip as a huge success, and they should continue to,” said Jonathan Kaplan, a co-founder and former chief executive of the start-up that invented the Flip. “The demise of Flip has nothing to do with how great a product it is. Companies have to make decisions that sometimes people like you and I don’t always understand.”

Cisco said its decision to shut down the Flip division was part of an overall restructuring plan of its consumer business. “We are making key, targeted moves as we align operations in support of our network-centric platform strategy,” said John T. Chambers, Cisco’s chief executive, in a statement.

Cisco had made inroads into the consumer market over the last decade by purchasing Pure Digital Technologies, maker of the Flip, as well as Linksys, the home-network router manufacturer. Mr. Chambers embodied the exuberance for consumer products, saying he owned eight Flip devices.

The company declined to elaborate on its reasons for shutting the Flip division, but it has faced mounting pressure to shore up its profit margins. It remains the top-selling camcorder on Amazon today, and inspired many imitators. Existing camera heavyweights like Sony and Kodak rushed to release their own Flip-like camcorders, trying to chase Flip’s runaway sales.

Still, Flip’s luster began to fade, as a spate of smartphones with built-in cameras and editing applications hit the market. The unit, which sells cameras for $100 to $200, also struggled to match the rich margins of Cisco’s enterprise services, Mr. Bracelin said. In another sign of trouble, Mr. Kaplan, who became Cisco’s general manager of consumer products after Cisco acquired Pure Digital, left the company in February.

Several analysts saw the decision as an inevitable consequence of a mistake.

“I don’t think there’s an analyst on the planet who thought that Flip was a good acquisition,” said Alex Henderson, an analyst with Miller Tabak & Company. “Cisco had this idea that they wanted to be in the consumer’s home network, but they had a grand vision that was not grounded in reality.”

Stephen Baker, an analyst with NPD Group, “Cisco was never really committed to the product.”

Although the company never disclosed specific numbers on Flip, analysts estimated it accounted for a fraction of the Cisco’s business. Simon Leopold, an analyst with Morgan, Keegan & Company, said Flip probably had about $400 million in annual revenue, compared with roughly $40 billion for Cisco over all.

Cisco said that the changes would result in 550 layoffs and a pretax charge of less than $300 million in the third and fourth quarter of the fiscal year.

Verne G. Kopytoff contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/t...gy/13flip.html





Anti-Porn MP Caught on Sex Websites
AP

An Indonesian MP who helped pass a tough anti-pornography law has resigned after being caught watching sexually explicit videos on his computer during a parliamentary debate.

A photographer saw the man, a member of the staunchly Islamic Prosperous Justice Party, gazing at the porn sites last Friday.

The blurred images have been published on the front pages of newspapers and commentators said the MP, who has uses the single name Arifinto, should be prosecuted under the terms of the law which he helped pass.

Arifinto, 50, has apologised to his constituents and said he is stepping down from parliament immediately.

"It's my decision," said the father of five, insisting he was not acting on the orders of his party. "Nobody tried to coerce me."

Indonesia, with a population of 237 million people, has more Muslims than any other country in the world. Although most are moderate, a small extremist fringe has become more vocal in recent years. They have pushed through several controversial laws, including the pornography law.

The law calls for prison terms of up to 15 years and fines for everything from kissing in public and exposure of a woman's "sensual" body parts to displaying "erotic" artworks. Broadcasting, possessing and storing pornographic material also is prohibited.
Arifinto, who oversees a parliamentary commission dealing with transportation, telecommunications and rural development, was an outspoken supporter of the law. He was caught watching the video clip for several minutes as fellow legislators debated plans to build a new parliament building.

The anti-porn law was used in January to sentence Nazril "Ariel" Irham, lead singer of the country's most popular band Peterpan, to 40 months in jail after two home-made sex tapes found their way to the internet

The editor in chief of Playboy Indonesia was last year sentenced to two years behind bars.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ne...-15140980.html





US Police Increasingly Peeping at E-mail, Instant Messages

A security researcher warns there is lax oversight of law enforcement requests for electronic communications
Jeremy Kirk

Law enforcement organizations are making tens of thousands of requests for private electronic information from companies such as Sprint, Facebook and AOL, but few detailed statistics are available, according to a privacy researcher.

Police and other agencies have "enthusiastically embraced" asking for e-mail, instant messages and mobile-phone location data, but there's no U.S. federal law that requires the reporting of requests for stored communications data, wrote Christopher Soghoian, a doctoral candidate at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, in a newly published paper.

"Unfortunately, there are no reporting requirements for the modern surveillance methods that make up the majority of law enforcement requests to service providers and telephone companies," Soghoian wrote. "As such, this surveillance largely occurs off the books, with no way for Congress or the general public to know the true scale of such activities."

That's in contrast to traditional wiretaps and "pen registers," which record non-content data around a particular communication, such as the number dialed or e-mail address that a communication was sent to. The U.S. Congress mandates that it should receive reports on these requests, which are compiled by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Soghoian wrote.

If law enforcement wants to intercept e-mail or instant messages in real-time, they are required to report it. Since 1997, federal law enforcement has requested real-time intercepts only 67 times, with state law enforcement agents obtaining 54 intercept orders.

Soghoian wrote that those low figures may seem counterintuitive given the real-time nature of electronic communications. But all of the communications are stored, he noted.

"It is often cheaper and easier to do it after the fact rather than in real-time," Soghoian wrote.

Cox Communications, a major U.S. service provider, charges $3,500 for a wiretap and $2,500 for a pen register. Account information, however, costs a mere $40.

Soghoian found through his research that law enforcement agencies requested more than 30,000 wiretaps between 1987 and 2009. But the scale of requests for stored communications appears to be much greater. Citing a New York Times story from 2006, Soghoian wrote that AOL was receiving 1,000 requests per month.

In 2009, Facebook told the news magazine Newsweek that it received 10 to 20 requests from police per day. Sprint received so many requests from law enforcement for mobile-phone location information that it overwhelmed its 110-person electronic surveillance team. It then set up a Web interface to give police direct access to users' location data, which was used more than 8 million times in one year, Soghoian wrote, citing a U.S. Court of Appeals judge.

Those sample figures indicate the real total number of requests is likely much, much higher, since U.S. law does not require reporting and companies are reluctant to voluntarily release the data.

"The reason for this widespread secrecy appears to be a fear that such information may scare users and give them reason to fear that their private information is not safe," Soghoian wrote.

In 2000, the House of Representatives considered legislation that would have set standards for reporting requests by police for location information, such as the tracking of mobile phones. But the Department of Justice opposed the bill, Soghoian wrote, saying the reporting requirements would be too time consuming.

Soghoian argues that Congress should have oversight of these new surveillance powers. He recommended mandating that the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts compile statistics on requests for stored communications as they do now for wiretap orders. The information could be sent to the office by the courts rather than the DOJ.

"These reporting requirements would provide Congress with the information necessary to make sound policy in the area of electronic surveillance," Soghoian wrote.
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/...tant_messages/





Obsessed with Jacob

The US government keeps harassing a UW researcher who speaks for WikiLeaks
Goldy

One day after being detained at the Canadian border trying to enter Washington State, Jacob Appelbaum jokes about writing the first Yelp reviews of all of our nation's airport detention areas. "Two thumbs up my ass," he quips, referring to the invasive welcome he gets every time he reenters the country.

But Appelbaum's bravado belies an angst that might seem paranoid if it weren't justified. The 28-year-old University of Washington researcher recently earned notoriety as the American face of WikiLeaks, and with it the ire of US government officials eager to punish somebody—anybody—for last year's leak of embarrassing helicopter footage and massive dump of diplomatic cables. The harassment is beginning to take its intended toll.

Stranger Personals

"In the middle of the night, when I hear a noise, I have to ask myself, 'Is this it? Do they have guns? Do I accidentally get shot?'" Only this time, Appelbaum's not joking.

One of only five persons named in a controversial Department of Justice subpoena and national security letter demanding that Twitter provide identifying information on more than 600,000 followers of WikiLeaks, Appelbaum has every reason to fear the worst. WikiLeaks editor in chief Julian Assange is already under house arrest in Britain, awaiting extradition to Sweden, while accused whistle-blower Bradley Manning is being held in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia. "You don't look like you're going to do so well in prison," Appelbaum says a US Army interrogator taunted him during his first detainment, implying that he would soon meet a similar fate.

"To me, they are a clear and present danger to America," Representative Peter King (R-NY), chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said of WikiLeaks members on WNIS radio in November. King urged the State Department to declare WikiLeaks a "foreign terrorist organization... By doing that, we will be able to seize their funds and go after anyone who provides them with any help or contributions or assistance whatsoever."

Although he volunteered for WikiLeaks for a couple of years as a data-security and anonymity expert, Appelbaum's troubles began only last August, shortly after delivering a keynote address on Assange's behalf at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference in New York. Two weeks later, when he was flying into Newark from a conference in Berlin, customs agents met him at the plane and detained him for "random" screening. Appelbaum was thoroughly frisked ("They actually put on the gloves and felt my testicles," he says) and his belongings were searched, his receipts photocopied, and his laptop and three cell phones seized. Then he was handed over to a US Army official for further questioning. It's a cliché to describe a run-in with government bureaucrats as "Kafkaesque," but when people from the government tell you that they're handing you over to agents they describe as "people from the government," that qualifies.

Four hours later, after being questioned about everything from Assange's whereabouts to his own opinions on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and after being denied access to a lawyer, a phone call, and a restroom—Appelbaum was finally released. But like the army official promised, this is now his life, and the same routine of humiliation and intimidation is repeated every time he crosses the border, something Appelbaum does frequently in his part-time job as a developer and evangelist for the Tor Project, an open-source routing network used by dissidents worldwide to shield their online identity from oppressive regimes. (In one of the many ironies surrounding Appelbaum's predicament, Tor—which brought him to WikiLeaks, and which preserves the anonymity of WikiLeaks contributors—was originally funded by US government research grants.)

The latest incident occurred on March 30, when Appelbaum was detained for hours by US customs officials in the prescreening area of the Toronto airport as he attempted to catch a flight back to Seattle. Nobody would tell him why he was being held. Nobody seemed interested in letting him catch his flight. He missed it. Appelbaum eventually booked a flight to Vancouver, BC, rented a car, and attempted to drive across the border. Not surprisingly, he was again detained, again denied a phone call, and again denied the use of a restroom.

"It's total fucking bullshit," Appelbaum vents. "They can make you miss your flight and piss your pants, and treat you like a criminal."

As for what's next, Appelbaum can only speculate. The Twitter subpoena is secret, so he has no idea what, if any, crimes have been alleged, and the border agents consistently refuse to explain why he's being detained, though they assure him it's serious.

What he does know is that his life is not going to get easier anytime soon. Once you fall into the system—the system he's spent his career helping others avoid—there's no recourse, he laments.

"You always lose."
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/o...nt?oid=7560624





Special Report: In Cyberspy vs. Cyberspy, China Has The Edge
Brian Grow and Mark Hosenball

As America and China grow more economically and financially intertwined, the two nations have also stepped up spying on each other. Today, most of that is done electronically, with computers rather than listening devices in chandeliers or human moles in tuxedos.

And at the moment, many experts believe China may have gained the upper hand.

Though it is difficult to ascertain the true extent of America's own capabilities and activities in this arena, a series of secret diplomatic cables as well as interviews with experts suggest that when it comes to cyber-espionage, China has leaped ahead of the United States.

According to U.S. investigators, China has stolen terabytes of sensitive data -- from usernames and passwords for State Department computers to designs for multi-billion dollar weapons systems. And Chinese hackers show no signs of letting up. "The attacks coming out of China are not only continuing, they are accelerating," says Alan Paller, director of research at information-security training group SANS Institute in Washington, DC.

Secret U.S. State Department cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to Reuters by a third party, trace systems breaches -- colorfully code-named "Byzantine Hades" by U.S. investigators -- to the Chinese military. An April 2009 cable even pinpoints the attacks to a specific unit of China's People's Liberation Army.

Privately, U.S. officials have long suspected that the Chinese government and in particular the military was behind the cyber-attacks. What was never disclosed publicly, until now, was evidence.

U.S. efforts to halt Byzantine Hades hacks are ongoing, according to four sources familiar with investigations. In the April 2009 cable, officials in the State Department's Cyber Threat Analysis Division noted that several Chinese-registered Web sites were "involved in Byzantine Hades intrusion activity in 2006."

The sites were registered in the city of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province in central China, according to the cable. A person named Chen Xingpeng set up the sites using the "precise" postal code in Chengdu used by the People's Liberation Army Chengdu Province First Technical Reconnaissance Bureau (TRB), an electronic espionage unit of the Chinese military. "Much of the intrusion activity traced to Chengdu is similar in tactics, techniques and procedures to (Byzantine Hades) activity attributed to other" electronic spying units of the People's Liberation Army, the cable says.

Reconnaissance bureaus are part of the People's Liberation Army's Third Department, which oversees China's electronic eavesdropping, according to an October 2009 report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Commission, a panel created by Congress to monitor potential national security issues related to U.S- China relations. Staffed with linguists and technicians, the Third Department monitors communications systems in China and abroad. At least six Technical Reconnaissance Bureaus, including the Chengdu unit, "are likely focused on defense or exploitation of foreign networks," the commission report states.

The precise relationship with the Chinese Army of suspected hacker Chen Xingpeng could not be immediately determined by Reuters. A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The U.S. State Department declined to comment.

But the leaked cables and other U.S. government reports underscore how Chinese and other state-sponsored and private hackers have overwhelmed U.S. government computer networks. In the last five years, cyber-intrusions reported to the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, have increased more than 650 percent, from 5,503 incidents in fiscal 2006 to 41,776 four years later, according to a March 16 report by the Government Accountability Office.

The Business Of Spying

The official figures don't account for intrusions into commercial computer networks, which are part of an expanding cyber-espionage campaign attributed to China, according to current and former U.S. national security officials and computer-security experts.

In the last two years, dozens of U.S. companies in the technology, oil and gas and financial sectors have disclosed that their computer systems have been infiltrated.

In January 2010, Internet search giant Google announced it was the target of a sophisticated cyber-attack using malicious code dubbed "Aurora," which compromised the Gmail accounts of human rights activists and succeeded in accessing Google source code repositories.

The company, and subsequent public reports, blamed the attack on the Chinese government.

The Google attack "was certainly an escalation of Chinese network operations against the U.S.," says Joel Brenner, former counterintelligence chief for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "Thousands" of U.S. companies were targeted in the Aurora attacks, Brenner says -- far more than the estimated 34 companies publicly identified as targets so far -- a scale which Brenner says demonstrates China's "heavy-handed use of state espionage against economic targets."

Many firms whose business revolves around intellectual property -- tech firms, defense group companies, even Formula One teams -- complain that their systems are now under constant attack to extract proprietary information. Several have told Reuters they believe the attacks come from China.

Some security officials say firms doing business directly with Chinese state-linked companies -- or which enter fields in which they compete directly -- find themselves suffering a wall of hacking attempts almost immediately.

The full scope of commercial computer intrusions is unknown. A study released by computer-security firm McAfee and government consulting company SAIC on March 28 shows that more than half of some 1,000 companies in the United States, Britain and other countries decided not to investigate a computer-security breach because of the cost. One in 10 companies will only report a security breach when legally obliged to do so, according to the study.

"Simply put, corporations cannot afford negative publicity (about computer security breaches)," says Tom Kellermann, vice president of security awareness at Core Security Technologies and a contributor to the study.

Gone Phishing

What is known is the extent to which Chinese hackers use "spear-phishing" as their preferred tactic to get inside otherwise forbidden networks. Compromised email accounts are the easiest way to launch spear-phish because the hackers can send the messages to entire contact lists.

The tactic is so prevalent, and so successful, that "we have given up on the idea we can keep our networks pristine," says Stewart Baker, a former senior cyber-security official at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and National Security Agency. It's safer, government and private experts say, to assume the worst -- that any network is vulnerable.

Two former national security officials involved in cyber-investigations told Reuters that Chinese intelligence and military units, and affiliated private hacker groups, actively engage in "target development" for spear-phish attacks by combing the Internet for details about U.S. government and commercial employees' job descriptions, networks of associates, and even the way they sign their emails -- such as U.S. military personnel's use of "V/R," which stands for "Very Respectfully" or "Virtual Regards."

The spear-phish are "the dominant attack vector. They work. They're getting better. It's just hard to stop," says Gregory J. Rattray, a partner at cyber-security consulting firm Delta Risk and a former director for cyber-security on the National Security Council.

Spear-phish are used in most Byzantine Hades intrusions, according to a review of State Department cables by Reuters. But Byzantine Hades is itself categorized into at least three specific parts known as "Byzantine Anchor," "Byzantine Candor," and "Byzantine Foothold." A source close to the matter says the sub-codenames refer to intrusions which use common tactics and malicious code to extract data.

A State Department cable made public by WikiLeaks last December highlights the severity of the spear-phish problem. "Since 2002, (U.S. government) organizations have been targeted with social-engineering online attacks" which succeeded in "gaining access to hundreds of (U.S. government) and cleared defense contractor systems," the cable said. The emails were aimed at the U.S. Army, the Departments of Defense, State and Energy, other government entities and commercial companies.

Once inside the computer networks, the hackers install keystroke-logging software and "command-and-control" programs which allow them to direct the malicious code to seek out sensitive information. The cable says that at least some of the attacks in 2008 originated from a Shanghai-based hacker group linked to the People's Liberation Army's Third Department, which oversees intelligence-gathering from electronic communications.

Between April and October 2008, hackers successfully stole "50 megabytes of email messages and attached documents, as well as a complete list of usernames and passwords from an unspecified (U.S. government) agency," the cable says.

Investigators say Byzantine Hades intrusions are part of a particularly virulent form of cyber-espionage known as an "advanced persistent threat." The malicious code embedded in attachments to spear-phish emails is often "polymorphic" -- it changes form every time it runs -- and burrows deep into computer networks to avoid discovery. Hackers also conduct "quality-assurance" tests in advance of launching attacks to minimize the number of anti-virus programs which can detect it, experts say.

As a result, cyber-security analysts say advanced persistent threats are often only identified after they penetrate computer networks and begin to send stolen data to the computer responsible for managing the attack. "You have to look for the 'phone home,'" says Roger Nebel, managing director for cyber-security at Defense Group Inc., a consulting firm in Washington, DC.

It was evidence of malicious code phoning home to a control server -- a computer that supervises the actions of code inside other computers -- that provided confirmation to U.S. cyber-sleuths that Chinese hackers were behind Byzantine Hades attacks, according to the April 2009 State Department cable.

As a case study, the cable cites a 10-month investigation by a group of computer experts at the University of Toronto which focused in part on cyber-intrusions aimed at Tibetan groups, including the office of the exiled Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India.

Referencing the Canadian research, the cable notes that infected computers in the Dalai Lama's office communicated with control servers previously used to attack Tibetan targets during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Two Web sites linked to the attack also communicated with the control server.

Targets Detailed

The same sites had also been involved in Byzantine Hades attacks on U.S. government computers in 2006, according to "sensitive reports" cited in the cable -- likely a euphemistic reference to secret intelligence reporting.

The computer-snooping code that the intrusion unleashed was known as the Gh0stNet Remote Access Tool (RAT). It "can capture keystrokes, take screen shots, install and change files, as well as record sound with a connected microphone and video with a connected webcam," according to the cable.

Gh0st RAT succeeded in invading at least one State Department computer. It "has been identified in incidents -- believed to be the work of (Byzantine Hades) actors -- affecting a locally employed staff member at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, Japan," according to the cable.

Evidence that data was being sucked out of a target network by malicious code also appears to have led cyber-security investigators to a specific hacker, affiliated with the Chinese government, who was conducting cyber-espionage in the United States. A March, 2009 cable identifies him as Yinan Peng. The cable says that Peng was believed to be the leader of a band of Chinese hackers who call themselves "Javaphile."

Peng did not respond to three emails seeking comment.

The details of alleged Chinese military-backed intrusions of U.S. government computers are discussed in a half dozen State Department cables recounting intense global concern about China's aggressive use of cyber-espionage.

In a private meeting of U.S., German, French, British and Dutch officials held at Ramstein Air Base in September 2008, German officials said such computer attacks targeted every corner of the German market, including "the military, the economy, science and technology, commercial interests, and research and development," and increase "before major negotiations involving German and Chinese interests," according to a cable from that year.

French officials said at the meeting that they "believed Chinese actors had gained access to the computers of several high-level French officials, activating microphones and Web cameras for the purpose of eavesdropping," the cable said.

Testing The Waters

The leaked State Department cables have surfaced as Reuters has learned that the U.S. is engaged in quiet, proxy-led talks with China over cyber issues.

Chronic computer breaches have become a major source of tension in U.S. relations with China, which intensified after the major Google hack was disclosed in January 2010, according to U.S. officials involved in the talks. Even before the Google hack, Chinese officials had recognized the problem as well.

In mid-2009, representatives of the China Institutes for Contemporary International Relations, a nominally-independent research group affiliated with China's Ministry of State Security, contacted James A. Lewis, a former U.S. diplomat now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Lewis said that in his first meeting with his Chinese counterparts, a representative of the China Institutes asked: "Why does the Western press always blame China (for cyber-attacks)?" Lewis says he replied: "Because it's true."

There was no response to request for comment on the talks from the Chinese embassy in Washington.

Preliminary meetings at CSIS have blossomed into three formal meetings in Washington and Beijing over the last 14 months. According to two participants, the talks continue to be marked by "a lot of suspicion." Attendees have focused on establishing a common understanding of cyber-related military, law enforcement and trade issues. Cyber-espionage isn't being discussed directly, according to one participant, because "the Chinese go rigid" when the subject is raised.

One reason: for China, digital espionage is wrapped into larger concerns about how to keep China's economy, the world's second largest, growing. "They've identified innovation as crucial to future economic growth -- but they're not sure they can do it," says Lewis. "The easiest way to innovate is to plagiarize" by stealing U.S. intellectual property, he adds.

There have been a few breakthroughs. U.S. and Chinese government officials from law enforcement, intelligence, military and diplomatic agencies have attended in the wings of each discussion. "The goal has been to get both sides on the same page," says Lewis. "We're building the groundwork for official discussions."

A former senior national security official who has also attended the talks says, "Our reports go straight to the top policymakers" in the Obama administration.

Chinese participants have sought to allay U.S. concerns about a Chinese cyber-attack on the U.S. financial system. With China owning more than $1.1 trillion in U.S. government debt, Lewis says China's representatives acknowledged destabilization of U.S. markets would, in effect, be an attack on China's economy, itself.

Despite the talks, suspected Chinese cyber-espionage has hardly tapered off. Documents reviewed by Reuters show that CSIS itself recently was the target of a spear-phish containing malicious code with a suspected link to China.

On March 1, an email sent from an address on an unofficial U.S. Armed Forces family welfare network called AFGIMail was sent to Andrew Schwartz, chief spokesman for CSIS. Attached to the message was an Excel spreadsheet labeled "Titan Global Invitation List."

An analysis conducted for Reuters by a cyber-security expert who asked not to be identified shows the email may have been sent from a compromised AFGIMail email server. The Excel spreadsheet, if opened, installs malicious code which searches for documents on the victim's computer. The code then communicates to a Web-site hosting company in Orange County, California that has additional sites in China.

(Reporting by Brian Grow in Atlanta and Mark Hosenball in Washington; additional reporting by Peter Apps in London; editing by Jim Impoco and Claudia Parsons)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...73D24220110414





Analysis: Russian Internet Attacks Stifle Political Dissent
Thomas Grove

Russian hacker attacks on the country's biggest blog site and a spy agency's warning to Gmail and Skype have raised fears that authorities are tightening their grip on dissent in a China-like assault on free speech.

With an eye on Arab unrest that has toppled two North African leaders and spurred Western military intervention in Libya, Moscow is keen to defuse potential turmoil ahead of a December parliamentary election and a 2012 presidential vote.

In a country where much media is state-run, the Internet is one of the last bastions of free speech. Russian bloggers freely criticize authorities, often scathingly, question high-level corruption and swap information without fear of censorship.

But the price of open dissent on the Internet may be too high ahead of next March's presidential election that could see Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who served as president in 2000-2008, sweep back into Russia's top seat of power.

"People close to the government believe the Internet will be more crucial in the upcoming elections than traditional media," said Andrei Soldatov, head of the think-tank Agentura.ru.

The Internet has played a crucial role in the unrest that has rocked Northern Africa and the Middle East, prompting some governments to shut it down. Similar turmoil is unlikely in Russia, but authorities want to be prepared for the worst.

Last week, nearly five million bloggers -- including President Dmitry Medvedev -- were left in the dark due to a cyber attack that temporarily closed top Russian blogging site Live Journal www.livejournal.ru.

"This is a test drive during a very important year to see if it's possible to close down web sites, in particular social networking sites in case of demonstrations," Soldatov said.

Putin and his protege Medvedev both enjoy approval ratings of nearly 70 percent, but their popularity has eased, partly on perceptions that vast revenues from high oil prices are not reaching the population. They have said they will decide together which of them will stand for election in 2012.

National Security

The United States, itself wary of Russian and Chinese cyber attacks, said in its 2010 human rights report that Internet systems route Russian web traffic to the Federal Security Services (FSB), the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB.

The head of the FSB special communications center, Alexander Andreyechkin, said last week uncontrolled use of Gmail, Hotmail and Skype were "a major threat to national security" and called for access to the encrypted communication providers.

Google had no immediate comment on the likelihood of it sharing access to its Gmail with Russian authorities.

The Web search leader has clashed with China over Internet censorship and last month accused the Chinese government of making it difficult for Gmail users to access the service.

Microsoft, which owns Hotmail, said in an emailed statement: "Account security and privacy is a top priority for Hotmail, and we keep all customers' data private. We work closely with industry leaders and governments worldwide."

The FSB declined comment when contacted by Reuters.

The mastermind behind the latest cyber attacks has been a subject of speculation. Russian hackers are often contracted out by security organs to carry out attacks inside and outside the country, said Agentura's Soldatov in a book he co-authored, 'The New Nobility'.

The Live Journal site was brought down by a denial of service attack -- a tried and tested method of disrupting websites by flooding their servers with requests.

Chechen separatists and the Georgian and Estonian governments have been high-profile victims of similar attacks in the past. Supporters of WikiLeaks also used this method to attack organizations that blocked support for WikiLeaks.

A study released last month by internet research firm Comscore found that Russians are the world's most active social networking users, with visitors spending an average of 9.8 hours on social networks monthly, more than double the global average.

Overall use of the Internet has also soared over the past decade. Some 43 percent of Russians regularly use it today, up from just 6 percent in 2002, said Public Opinion Foundation, an independent Russian pollster.

Many in Russia's blogging community, outraged by the hacker attacks, remain defiant.

"It doesn't matter whether or not they close Facebook, Twitter or other popular means of communication," said user Viktor Korb on his Live Journal blog late last week.

"They will never realize that the more they forbid and pressure, the more they will suffer a blowback from their actions," he wrote.

(Additional reporting by Alissa DeCarbonnel and Georgina Prodhan; editing by Gareth Jones)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...73C1P520110413





Hacker 'Handshake' Hole Found in Common Firewalls

NSS Labs tested Cisco, Check Point, Fortinet, Juniper, the Palo Alto Networks, and SonicWall firewalls
Ellen Messmer

Some of the most commonly-used firewalls are subject to a hacker exploit that lets an attacker trick a firewall and get into an internal network as a trusted IP connection.

NSS Labs recently tested half a dozen network firewalls to evaluate security weaknesses, and all but one of them was found not to be vulnerable to a type of attack called the "TCP Split Handshake Attack" that lets a hacker remotely fool the firewall into thinking an IP connection is a trusted one behind the firewall.

"If the firewall thinks you're inside, the security policy it applies to you is an internal one, and you can run a scan to see where machines are," says Rick Moy, president of NSS Labs. An attacker can then pretty much run wild in the network because the firewall mistakenly considers the IP address as a trusted one coming from behind the firewall.

This week NSS Labs published its "Network Firewall 2011 Comparative Test Results" research paper about the findings. NSS Labs is a well-known product testing organization that evaluates a wide range of security gear, sometimes as vendor-sponsored comparative tests, sometimes as completely independent tests under its own determination. The Network Firewall 2011 Comparative Test published this week is in the latter category, where costs were assumed wholly by NSS Labs itself.

NSS Labs independently tested the Check Point Power-1 11065, the Cisco ASA 5585-40, the Fortinet Fortigate 3950, the Juniper SRX 5800, the Palo Alto Networks PA-4020, and the SonicWall NSA E8500.

Moy pointed out that vendors were generally reluctant to participate in the battery of tests that NSS Labs did and that in fact about half the firewall equipment in the tests was contributed directly by end-user customers, such as financial services firms, which supported the tests because they wanted to find out about possible vulnerabilities in their firewalls.

The NSS Labs report says, "Five of the six products allowed external attackers to bypass the firewall and become an internal 'trusted machine.'" The only firewall tested by NSS labs that didn't was the Check Point one.

Moy says the exploit used in the test is known as the "TCP Split Handshake," which begins during the point that the firewall and any connection is being initiated during the TCP "handshake" process to set up a connection. Moy says attack code in the wild has been known for about a year. It's '"an easy way for an attacker to become part of the network," he says. What's particularly insidious about it is that since it occurs at the handshake stage, they are unlikely to be logs and alerts associated with the attack, Moy says.

The vendors whose equipment did not pass the "TCP Split Handshake" security test are in varying stages of remediation, according to the report.

Cisco is said to be currently working with NSS Labs on this issue and "recommendations will be provided as soon as they are available."

"Fortinet does not currently provide their customers protection against the TCP Split handshake attack," the report says, but NSS Labs says Fortinet has advised the lab that one will be included in an upcoming release in May.

"By default, Juniper does not enable protection against the TCP Split Handshake attack," the report states, but NSS labs recommends that Juniper customers examine their firewall configuration and follow the guidelines described in the report. NSS Labs warns the "protection may have a negative impact on performance and/or break applications that are not using TCP properly."

Palo Alto has indicated they are targeting an official fix in an upcoming release, according to NSS Labs, adding there may be "a negative impact on performance and/or break applications that are not using TCP properly."

By default, SonicWall does not enable protection against the TCP Split handshake, and NSS Labs advises those customers "to examine their firewall configuration at the earliest opportunity."

Other findings in the NSS Labs security evaluation include insight into what performance throughput rates were in specific conditions for all the half dozen different firewalls tests in comparison to the line speed rates advertised publicly by vendors.

"Performance claims in vendor data sheets are generally grossly overstated," NSS Labs points out.

In addition, three of the six products tested crashed when subject to certain types of stability tests, a troubling situation because an attacker could exploit this over time, especially as the instability may be due to a software flaw, the report states. The Check Point Power-1 and the Cisco ASA firewall 5585-40 and the Palo Alto PA-4020 passed the test, called a protocol fuzzing and mutation test, but the Fortinet 3950B and the SonicWall NSA E8500 did not.

The NSS Labs report also includes analysis related to purchase price and total cost of ownership for all the firewalls tested.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/201...firewalls.html





Is Your Computer Listed “For Rent”?
Brian Krebs

When it’s time to book a vacation or a quick getaway, many of us turn to travel reservation sites like Expedia, Travelocity and other comparison services. But there’s a cybercrime-friendly booking service that is not well-known. When cyber crooks want to get away — with a crime — increasingly they are turning to underground online booking services that make it easy for crooks to rent hacked PCs that can help them ply their trade anonymously.

We often hear about hacked, remote-controlled PCs or “bots” being used to send spam or to host malicious Web sites, but seldom do security researchers delve into the mechanics behind one of the most basic uses for a bot: To serve as a node in an anonymization service that allows paying customers to proxy their Internet connections through one or more compromised systems.

As I noted in a Washington Post column in 2008, “this type of service is especially appealing to criminals looking to fleece bank accounts at institutions that conduct rudimentary Internet address checks to ensure that the person accessing an account is indeed logged on from the legitimate customer’s geographic region, as opposed to say, Odessa, Ukraine.” Scammers have been using proxies forever it seems, but it’s interesting that it is so easy to find victims, once you are a user of the anonymization service.

Here’s an overview of one of the more advanced anonymity networks on the market, an invite-only subscription service marketed on several key underground cyber crime forums.

When I tested this service, it had more than 4,100 bot proxies available in 75 countries, although the bulk of the hacked PCs being sold or rented were in the United States and the United Kingdom. Also, the number of available proxies fluctuates daily, peaking during normal business hours in the United States. Drilling down into the U.S. map (see image above), users can select proxies by state, or use the “advanced search” box, which allows customers to select bots based on city, IP range, Internet provider, and connection speed. This service also includes a fairly active Russian-language customer support forum. Customers can use the service after paying a one-time $150 registration fee (security deposit?) via a virtual currency such as WebMoney or Liberty Reserve. After that, individual botted systems can be rented for about a dollar a day, or “purchased” for exclusive use for slightly more.

I tried to locate some owners of the hacked machines being rented via this service. Initially this presented a challenge because the majority of the proxies listed are compromised PCs hooked up to home or small business cable modem or DSL connections. As you can see from the screenshot below, the only identifying information for these systems was the IP address and host name. And although so-called “geo-location” services can plot the approximate location of an Internet address, these services are not exact and are sometimes way off.

I started poking through the listings for proxies that had meaningful host names, such as the domain name of a business. It wasn’t long before I stumbled upon the Web site for The Securities Group LLC, a Memphis, Tenn. based privately held broker/dealer firm specializing in healthcare partnerships with physicians. According to the company’s site, “TSG has raised over $100,000,000 having syndicated over 200 healthcare projects including whole hospital exemptions, ambulatory surgery centers, surgical hospitals, PET Imaging facilities, CATH labs and a prostate cancer supplement LLC with up to 400 physician investors.” The proxy being sold by the anonymization service was tied to the Internet address of TSG’s email server, and to the Web site for the Kirby Pines Retirement Community, also in Memphis.

Michelle Trammell, associate director of Kirby Pines and president of TSG, said she was unaware that her computer systems were being sold to cyber crooks when I first contacted her this week. I later heard from Steve Cunningham from ProTech Talent & Technology, an IT services firm in Memphis that was recently called in to help secure the network.

Cunningham said an anti-virus scan of the TSG and retirement community machines showed that one of the machines was hijacked by a spam bot that was removed about two weeks before I contacted him, but he said he had no idea the network was still being exploited by cyber crooks. “Some malware was found that was sending out spam,” Cunningham said, “It looks like they didn’t have a very comprehensive security system in place, but we’re going to be updating [PCs] and installing some anti-virus software on all of the servers over the next week or so.”

Other organizations whose IP addresses and host names showed up in the anonymization service include apparel chain The Limited; Santiam Memorial Hospital in Stayton, Ore.; Salem, Mass. based North Shore Medical Center; marketing communications firm McCann-Erickson Worldwide; and the Greater Reno-Tahoe Economic Development Authority.

Anonymization services add another obstacle on the increasingly complex paths of botnets. As I have often reported, tracing botnets to their masters is difficult at best and can be a Sisyphean task. And as TSG’s experience shows, it’s far easier to keep a PC up to date with the latest security protections than it is to sanitize a computer once a bot takes over.
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/04/i...sted-for-rent/





DOJ Gets Court Permission to Attack Botnet

The DOJ seizes servers and serves search warrants in an effort to take down the long-running Coreflood botnet
Grant Gross

The U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation have obtained a temporary restraining order allowing them to disrupt a computer virus that created an international botnet controlling more than 2.3 million computers as of early 2010, the DOJ announced Wednesday.

In an unprecedented move, the temporary restraining order, issued Tuesday, will allow the FBI and the U.S. Marshal for the District of Connecticut to set up servers at the Internet Systems Consortium or other ISPs that would stop infected computers from continuing to spread the Coreflood virus, according to court records.

The order allows the law enforcement agencies to send commands to infected computers that stops the Coreflood virus, the DOJ said.

"Allowing Coreflood to continue running on the infected computers will cause a continuing and substantial injury to the owners and users of the infected computers, exposing them to a loss of privacy and an increased risk of further computer intrusions," wrote Judge Vanessa Byrant of the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.

The DOJ and FBI have also filed a civil lawsuit and delivered criminal seizure warrants in an effort to stop Coreflood and the botnet it has created, the DOJ said.

This week, the DOJ and FBI seized five servers that controlled Coreflood-infected computers, the DOJ said in a press release. The agencies also seized 29 domain names used by the Coreflood botnet to communicate with the servers.

In addition, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Connecticut filed a civil complaint Monday against 13 unnamed defendants, alleging that the defendants engaged in wire fraud, bank fraud and illegal interception of electronic communications. The DOJ also obtained search warrants for computer servers across the country, it said.

"Botnets and the cyber criminals who deploy them jeopardize the economic security of the United States and the dependability of the nation's information infrastructure," Shawn Henry, executive assistant director of the FBI's Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch, said in a statement. "These actions to mitigate the threat posed by the Coreflood botnet are the first of their kind in the United States and reflect our commitment to being creative and proactive in making the Internet more secure."

Coreflood records computer keystrokes and other private communications, the DOJ said. Coreflood steals user names, passwords and other private personal and financial information allegedly used by the defendants for a variety of criminal purposes, including stealing funds from the compromised accounts.

In one case described in court documents, criminals used Coreflood to take over an online banking session and cause the transfer of funds to a foreign account.

Law enforcement officials believe that the Coreflood botnet has been operating for nearly a decade, the DOJ said.

The Connecticut criminal complaint said a Michigan real estate company lost more than $115,000 to fraudulent wire transfers because of the Coreflood virus. A South Carolina law firm lost more than $78,000, and a North Carolina investment company lost more than $151,000, the complaint said. A defense contractor in Tennessee lost more than $241,000 due to the botnet, the complaint said.

"The full extent of the financial loss caused by the Coreflood Botnet is not known, due in part to the large number of infected computers and the quantity of stolen data," the complaint said.

The DOJ urged computer users to update their security software and scan their computers for viruses.
http://www.itworld.com/security/1557...-attack-botnet





'Scrapers' Dig Deep for Data on Web
Julia Angwin and Steve Stecklow

At 1 a.m. on May 7, the website PatientsLikeMe.com noticed suspicious activity on its "Mood" discussion board. There, people exchange highly personal stories about their emotional disorders, ranging from bipolar disease to a desire to cut themselves.

It was a break-in. A new member of the site, using sophisticated software, was "scraping," or copying, every single message off PatientsLikeMe's private online forums.

PatientsLikeMe managed to block and identify the intruder: Nielsen Co., the privately held New York media-research firm. Nielsen monitors online "buzz" for clients, including major drug makers, which buy data gleaned from the Web to get insight from consumers about their products, Nielsen says.

"I felt totally violated," says Bilal Ahmed, a 33-year-old resident of Sydney, Australia, who used PatientsLikeMe to connect with other people suffering from depression. He used a pseudonym on the message boards, but his PatientsLikeMe profile linked to his blog, which contains his real name.

After PatientsLikeMe told users about the break-in, Mr. Ahmed deleted all his posts, plus a list of drugs he uses. "It was very disturbing to know that your information is being sold," he says. Nielsen says it no longer scrapes sites requiring an individual account for access, unless it has permission.

The market for data about Web users is hot-and one of the methods used is "scraping," harvesting online conversations. In May, Nielsen scraped private forums where patients discuss illnesses. How can web users prevent their data from being scraped? Julia Angwin joins Digits to discuss.

The market for personal data about Internet users is booming, and in the vanguard is the practice of "scraping." Firms offer to harvest online conversations and collect personal details from social-networking sites, résumé sites and online forums where people might discuss their lives.

The emerging business of web scraping provides some of the raw material for a rapidly expanding data economy. Marketers spent $7.8 billion on online and offline data in 2009, according to the New York management consulting firm Winterberry Group LLC. Spending on data from online sources is set to more than double, to $840 million in 2012 from $410 million in 2009.

The Wall Street Journal's examination of scraping—a trade that involves personal information as well as many other types of data—is part of the newspaper's investigation into the business of tracking people's activities online and selling details about their behavior and personal interests.

Some companies collect personal information for detailed background reports on individuals, such as email addresses, cell numbers, photographs and posts on social-network sites.

Others offer what are known as listening services, which monitor in real time hundreds or thousands of news sources, blogs and websites to see what people are saying about specific products or topics.

One such service is offered by Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Journal. Dow Jones collects data from the Web—which may include personal information contained in news articles and blog postings—that help corporate clients monitor how they are portrayed. It says it doesn't gather information from password-protected parts of sites.

It's rarely a coincidence when you see Web ads for products that match your interests. WSJ's Christina Tsuei explains how advertisers use cookies to track your online habits.

The competition for data is fierce. PatientsLikeMe also sells data about its users. PatientsLikeMe says the data it sells is anonymized, no names attached.

Nielsen spokesman Matt Anchin says the company's reports to its clients include publicly available information gleaned from the Internet, "so if someone decides to share personally identifiable information, it could be included."

Internet users often have little recourse if personally identifiable data is scraped: There is no national law requiring data companies to let people remove or change information about themselves, though some firms let users remove their profiles under certain circumstances.

California has a special protection for public officials, including politicians, sheriffs and district attorneys. It makes it easier for them to remove their home address and phone numbers from these databases, by filling out a special form stating they fear for their safety.

Data brokers long have scoured public records, such as real-estate transactions and courthouse documents, for information on individuals. Now, some are adding online information to people's profiles.

Many scrapers and data brokers argue that if information is available online, it is fair game, no matter how personal.

"Social networks are becoming the new public records," says Jim Adler, chief privacy officer of Intelius Inc., a leading paid people-search website. It offers services that include criminal background checks and "Date Check," which promises details about a prospective date for $14.95.

"This data is out there," Mr. Adler says. "If we don't bring it to the consumer's attention, someone else will."

Scraping for Your Real Name

PeekYou.com has applied for a patent for a way to, among other things, match people's real names to pseudonyms they use on blogs, Twitter and online forums.

New York-based PeekYou LLC has applied for a patent for a method that, among other things, matches people's real names to the pseudonyms they use on blogs, Twitter and other social networks. PeekYou's people-search website offers records of about 250 million people, primarily in the U.S. and Canada.

PeekYou says it also is starting to work with listening services to help them learn more about the people whose conversations they are monitoring. It says it hands over only demographic information, not names or addresses.

Employers, too, are trying to figure out how to use such data to screen job candidates. It's tricky: Employers legally can't discriminate based on gender, race and other factors they may glean from social-media profiles.

One company that screens job applicants for employers, InfoCheckUSA LLC in Florida, began offering limited social-networking data—some of it scraped—to employers about a year ago. "It's slowly starting to grow," says Chris Dugger, national account manager. He says he's particularly interested in things like whether people are "talking about how they just ripped off their last employer."

Scrapers operate in a legal gray area. Internationally, anti-scraping laws vary. In the U.S., court rulings have been contradictory. "Scraping is ubiquitous, but questionable," says Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University. "Everyone does it, but it's not totally clear that anyone is allowed to do it without permission."

Scrapers and listening companies say what they're doing is no different from what any person does when gathering information online—they just do it on a much larger scale.

"We take an incomprehensible amount of information and make it intelligent," says Chase McMichael, chief executive of InfiniGraph, a Palo Alto, Calif., "listening service" that helps companies understand the likes and dislikes of online customers.

Scraping services range from dirt cheap to custom-built. Some outfits, such as 80Legs.com in Texas, will scrape a million Web pages for $101. One Utah company, screen-scraper.com, offers do-it-yourself scraping software for free. The top listening services can charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to monitor and analyze Web discussions.

Some scrapers-for-hire don't ask clients many questions.

"If we don't think they're going to use it for illegal purposes—they often don't tell us what they're going to use it for—generally, we'll err on the side of doing it," says Todd Wilson, owner of screen-scraper.com, a 10-person firm in Provo, Utah, that operates out of a two-room office. It is one of at least three firms in a scenic area known locally as "Happy Valley" that specialize in scraping.

Screen-scraper charges between $1,500 and $10,000 for most jobs. The company says it's often hired to conduct "business intelligence," working for companies who want to scrape competitors' websites.

One recent assignment: A major insurance company wanted to scrape the names of agents working for competitors. Why? "We don't know," says Scott Wilson, the owner's brother and vice president of sales. Another job: attempting to scrape Facebook for a multi-level marketing company that wanted email addresses of users who "like" the firm's page—as well as their friends—so they all could be pitched products.

Scraping often is a cat-and-mouse game between websites, which try to protect their data, and the scrapers, who try to outfox their defenses. Scraping itself isn't difficult: Nearly any talented computer programmer can do it. But penetrating a site's defenses can be tough.

One defense familiar to most Internet users involves "captchas," the squiggly letters that many websites require people to type to prove they're human and not a scraping robot. Scrapers sometimes fight back with software that deciphers captchas.

Some professional scrapers stage blitzkrieg raids, mounting around a dozen simultaneous attacks on a website to grab as much data as quickly as possible without being detected or crashing the site they're targeting.

Raids like these are on the rise. "Customers for whom we were regularly blocking about 1,000 to 2,000 scrapes a month are now seeing three times or in some cases 10 times as much scraping," says Marino Zini, managing director of Sentor Anti Scraping System. The company's Stockholm team blocks scrapers on behalf of website clients.

At Monster.com, the jobs website that stores résumés for tens of millions of individuals, fighting scrapers is a full-time job, "every minute of every day of every week," says Patrick Manzo, global chief privacy officer of Monster Worldwide Inc. Facebook, with its trove of personal data on some 500 million users, says it takes legal and technical steps to deter scraping.

At PatientsLikeMe, there are forums where people discuss experiences with AIDS, supranuclear palsy, depression, organ transplants, post-traumatic stress disorder and self-mutilation. These are supposed to be viewable only by members who have agreed not to scrape, and not by intruders such as Nielsen.

"It was a bad legacy practice that we don't do anymore," says Dave Hudson, who in June took over as chief executive of the Nielsen unit that scraped PatientsLikeMe in May. "It's something that we decided is not acceptable, and we stopped."

Mr. Hudson wouldn't say how often the practice occurred, and wouldn't identify its client.

The Nielsen unit that did the scraping is now part of a joint venture with McKinsey & Co. called NM Incite. It traces its roots to a Cincinnati company called Intelliseek that was founded in 1997. One of its most successful early businesses was scraping message boards to find mentions of brand names for corporate clients.

In 2001, the venture-capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, In-Q-Tel Inc., was among a group of investors that put $8 million into the business.

Intelliseek struggled to set boundaries in the new business of monitoring individual conversations online, says Sundar Kadayam, Intelliseek's co-founder. The firm decided it wouldn't be ethical to use automated software to log into private message boards to scrape them.

But, he says, Intelliseek occasionally would ask employees to do that kind of scraping if clients requested it. "The human being can just sign in as who they are," he says. "They don't have to be deceitful."

In 2006, Nielsen bought Intelliseek, which had revenue of more than $10 million and had just become profitable, Mr. Kadayam says. He left one year after the acquisition.

At the time, Nielsen, which provides television ratings and other media services, was looking to diversify into digital businesses. Nielsen combined Intelliseek with a New York startup it had bought called BuzzMetrics.

The new unit, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, quickly became a leader in the field of social-media monitoring. It collects data from 130 million blogs, 8,000 message boards, Twitter and social networks. It sells services such as "ThreatTracker," which alerts a company if its brand is being discussed in a negative light. Clients include more than a dozen of the biggest pharmaceutical companies, according to the company's marketing material.

Like many websites, PatientsLikeMe has software that detects unusual activity. On May 7, that software sounded an alarm about the "Mood" forum.

David Williams, the chief marketing officer, quickly determined that the "member" who had triggered the alert actually was an automated program scraping the forum. He shut down the account.

The next morning, the holder of that account e-mailed customer support to ask why the login and password weren't working. By the afternoon, PatientsLikeMe had located three other suspect accounts and shut them down. The site's investigators traced all of the accounts to Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

On May 18, PatientsLikeMe sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nielsen. Ten days later, Nielsen sent a letter agreeing to stop scraping. Nielsen says it was unable to remove the scraped data from its database, but a company spokesman later said Nielsen had found a way to quarantine the PatientsLikeMe data to prevent it from being included in its reports for clients.

PatientsLikeMe's president, Ben Heywood, disclosed the break-in to the site's 70,000 members in a blog post. He also reminded users that PatientsLikeMe also sells its data in an anonymous form, without attaching user's names to it. That sparked a lively debate on the site about the propriety of selling sensitive information. The company says most of the 350 responses to the blog post were supportive. But it says a total of 218 members quit.

In total, PatientsLikeMe estimates that the scraper obtained about 5% of the messages in the site's forums, primarily in "Mood" and "Multiple Sclerosis."

"We're a business, and the reality is that someone came in and stole from us," says PatientsLikeMe's chairman, Jamie Heywood.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...288117888.html





Not Anonymous: Attack Reveals BitTorrent Users on Tor Network
Thomas Lowenthal

Think that anonymizing BitTorrent tracker connections through Tor makes you harder to track? Think again. A vulnerability was used to identify over 10,000 users' IP addresses via their BitTorrent tracker connections. But it's not just your BitTorrent downloads that are at risk: an attacker can use your BitTorrent connections to de-anonymize other, more secure applications run over Tor.

In a paper released a few weeks ago at the USENIX conference's workshop on Large-scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET), researchers from INRIA France revealed a class of vulnerabilities in the Tor system which threatens the anonymity of many BitTorrent users. The research team, led by Stevens Le Blond, explained an attack methodology which it developed and deployed. The attack exploits a feature of Tor originally introduced to improve anonymity and efficiency, but it also relies on certain aspects of the BitTorrent protocol.

Tor is a system for protecting online anonymity that works by forwarding TCP traffic over a low-latency "onion-routing" network of nodes maintained by volunteers. Tor establishes circuits of three nodes to pass traffic across; the actual operation is quite complex, but it's explained lucidly on the Tor Project website. The end result is that connections are slower but more secure than they would otherwise be, and a user's original IP address is obscured.

One Tor efficiency and anonymity feature involves multiplexing many different TCP streams over the same circuit. This improves efficiency, because it takes a lot of computationally intensive public-key encryption work to set up a circuit, but established circuits are not computationally taxing to use. In addition, there's a privacy benefit, because reusing circuits reduces the total number of nodes used, and therefore reduces the risk of coming into contact with a "hostile" node (one set up, for instance, by a government trying to peek at the Tor traffic of dissidents or mobsters).

Most modern BitTorrent clients allow users to specify a detailed selection of proxy settings. Many BitTorrent users crave anonymity, but the BitTorrent data transfer protocol does not perform well over Tor, making downloads prohibitively slow. However, a common compromise finds users sending the low-bandwidth initial connections to BitTorrent trackers over Tor, while leaving the bulk data traffic to the actual peers unprotected. This prevents the tracker from recording the true IP address of the user, which is a valuable first step against unwanted observation.

Malicious nodes and honeypots

To execute an attack on this system, the French researchers set up a number of malicious Tor exit nodes and some honeypot BitTorrent clients running on researcher machines. When one of the malicious exit nodes sees an attempted connection to a BitTorrent tracker, it intercepts the response and adds the IP address of one of the honeypot clients under researcher control. The user's BitTorrent client then attempts to make a data connection directly to the honeypot without using Tor, thus revealing the user's IP address to the honeypot.

A similar attack is used to identify users connecting via DHT, so even users who try to forward all of their BitTorrent traffic over Tor are not safe. The DHT version of the attack relies on the fact that Tor is only compatible with TCP, while BitTorrent's DHT uses the less-common UDP protocol, forcing some of the traffic to be sent in the clear. Information such as client ID and listening port help the honeypot to determine which incoming connections come from which users.

At this point in the attack, the researchers have identified a particular Tor circuit on one of their exit nodes, and they've associated it with a particular IP address. They can now be sure that any other traffic sent over that circuit comes from the same user. But the attack doesn't stop at this exit node; because the user can now be reliably identified based on the information transmitted to the tracker, the attacker can identify the user's connections made on other circuits, through other malicious exit nodes, if those circuits also carry identifiable BitTorrent requests.

Because Tor multiplexes many different TCP streams over the same circuit, streams from a variety of applications may be bundled together. This could include traffic from applications where anonymity is more crucial, like a user's Web browser or IM client. The fact that the user is running a BitTorrent client partially or fully over Tor means that his otherwise-anonymous communications can now be reliably identified across all the attacker's malicious nodes.

Commenting on the attack, Roger Dingledine, leader of the Tor Project, praised the INRIA researchers for identifying this vulnerability, but criticized them for actually executing the attack on 10,000 users. Dingledine suggested that the researchers crossed an ethical line by placing the anonymity of these users in jeopardy, and that this step was unnecessary, done for the purpose of publicity.

Protection

This vulnerability may be nerve-wracking for some users who rely upon Tor to protect themselves when using a variety of applications. In a blog post responding to a prior version of this research, Dingledine advised that users can protect themselves right now if they stop using BitTorrent over Tor. This is a step that the Tor Project generally recommends, since BitTorrent traffic is antisocial on the Tor network, subjecting the entire network to significant load (and it's quite slow for the user).

Running one instance of Tor for BitTorrent, and a separate instance for all other applications, will provide an effective defense for non-BitTorrent traffic, but it still leaves your BitTorrent traffic vulnerable to deanonymization. The Tor project has a design proposal to more effectively fix this class of attacks by using various methods to separate TCP streams. However, the best way to separate and bundle different traffic over anonymity networks remains an open research question.

Users interested in anonymous download solutions should consider OneSwarm, a University of Washington project to design a BitTorrent client with anonymity and privacy built in. More advanced users may wish to investigate I2P, an onion-routing network which was designed to handle BitTorrent traffic from the start. In addition, uTorrent features an advanced array of proxy settings, some of which may mitigate parts of this attack, although their effectiveness has not been independently verified.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...or-network.ars





Self-Wiping Hard Drives from Toshiba

Toshiba announces a family of self-encrypting hard disk drives (HDDs) engineered to automatically invalidate protected data when connected to an unknown host.

The new Toshiba Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) models enable OEMs to configure different data invalidation options that align with various end-user scenarios.

Designed to address the increasing need for IT departments to comply with privacy laws and regulations governing data security, the drives are ideally suited for PC, copier and multi-function printer, and point-of-sale systems used in government, financial, medical, or similar environments with an acute need to protect sensitive information.

Building on the industry-standard Trusted Computing Group “Opal” Specification, the new Toshiba MKxx61GSYG models leverage advanced access security and on-board encryption alongside second generation data wipe technology.

Whether to protect against data loss resulting from lost or stolen notebooks or to maintain the security of document image data stored within copier and printer systems, Toshiba SEDs can securely invalidate protected data.

Data invalidation attributes can be set for multiple data ranges, enabling targeted data in the drive to be rendered indecipherable by command, on power cycle, or on host authentication error—an industry first.

With the latest enhancement to Toshiba’s SED technology, the risk of data theft is reduced in cases where the drive is removed from its defined host environment and connected to an unknown system. At power ON, the SED and host perform an authentication process. If the authentication fails, the drive can be configured to simply deny access or crypto-erase sensitive user data.

Scott Wright, product manager, Toshiba Storage Device Division, notes, “Digital systems vendors recognize the need to help their customers protect sensitive data from leakage or theft. Toshiba’s security technologies provide designers of copiers, printers, PCs, and other systems with new capabilities to help address these important security concerns.”
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=10894





Garry’s Mod Catches Pirates the Fun Way

A few hours ago, Garry Newman – the creator of Garry’s Mod – asked, quite innocently, whether anyone was unable to shade polygon normals.

He received a few comments, mostly jokes, but a quick look at Google suggests that there are indeed a few people who are experiencing problems with their game.

…you can hear Newman’s chuckling from here. Not the normal response to a wide-spread bug report, but this is no normal bug. It seems that the developer has deliberately enabled an error in GMod, which will only affect people who have pirated the game.

People started discussing the error on the game’s own forums, wondering why their game simply wouldn’t work:

Problem:
I need help with my garrys mod. Everytime I launch Garrys Mod, it starts up then about 5 seconds later after it is done loading, it crashed with the

Engine Error:Unable to shade polygon normals(#################)

Not long after posting the request, the user found themselves permabanned from the forums for using pirated software.

Making the situation even sweeter, the number which appears in brackets after the error statement is in fact the gamer’s 64-bit steamid.

Y’see, Steam keeps a list of which accounts have actually forked over the $9.99 for a legit copy of GMod – so it’s a simple matter of checking ids and turfing out the pirates.

Just another lesson on why piracy is bad, supporting indie developers is good, and why you shouldn’t mess with the nerds.
http://www.gamepron.com/news/2011/04...s-the-fun-way/





Good Old Games: DRM Drives Gamers to Piracy
Ben Hardwidge

Independent retro games retailer Good Old Games has spoken out about digital rights management (DRM), saying that it can actually drive gamers to piracy, rather than acting as a deterrent.

Speaking to bit-tech for a future feature about DRM in Custom PC, Good Old Games' PR and marketing manager, Lukasz Kukawski, said that the effectiveness of DRM as a piracy-deterrent was 'None, or close to none.'

'What I will say isn’t popular in the gaming industry,' says Kukawski, 'but in my opinion DRM drives people to pirate games rather than prevent them from doing that. Would you rather spend $50 on a game that requires installing malware on your system, or to stay online all the time and crashes every time the connection goes down, or would you rather download a cracked version without all that hassle?'

According to Kukawski, the situation with restrictive DRM has reached the point where gamers often feel pushed into buying a game at full price, but then still download a cracked version to avoid the DRM. 'I know people that buy an original copy of the game just so they don't feel guilty,' says Kukawski, 'and then they will play a pirated version which is stripped of all DRM. That’s not how it should be. Let’s treat legitimate customers with respect and they will give that back.'

In addition to driving gamers to cracked versions of games, Kukawski also asks how anyone can believe that DRM acts as a deterrent to piracy. 'If you see the news on gaming portals that a highly anticipated title has leaked before the release date, and you can download it from torrents without any copy protection because it has been already cracked, how can you possible believe that DRM works in any way to reduce piracy?'

Despite heavily criticising DRM, however, Kukawski still has no love for pirates. 'Piracy is evil,' he says. 'By pirating a game, a movie, or a song you’re stealing from people who put a lot of hard work into creating something for your enjoyment. That’s disrespecting the creator who’s providing you with something that adds joy to your day.'

While Kukawski's comments themselves aren't revolutionary in the DRM debate, it's interesting to see them coming from an online game retail business, as well as a game developer. After all, Good Old Games is owned by CD Projekt; developer of The Witcher 2, which will also be DRM-free. You can check out the trailer for The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings below.

'We are making a bold step by putting up this highly-anticipated title without any sort of DRM,' says Kukawski. 'We believe it’s going to be a huge success, which should really open doubters’ eyes.'
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/...amers-piracy/1





Sony Buries Hatchet with GeoHot in PS3 Modding Case

Jailbreaker promises no more console hacks
Dan Goodin

Sony has agreed to drop a lawsuit against a hacker who published the secret key used to jailbreak the PlayStation 3, in exchange for promises he will drop all future attempts to unlock the game console.

The agreement ending Sony's controversial legal attack on George Hotz, aka GeoHot, was laid out in a permanent injunction filed in federal court on Monday. In it, Sony agreed to dismiss the lawsuit, and the New Jersey-based hacker promised to permanently cease any “unauthorized access to any Sony product”. That means Hotz may never reverse engineer, or disassemble any portion of the product, use any tools to bypass its encryption or security, or design or distribute unauthorized software or hardware for use with a Sony product.

US District Judge Susan Illston, who is presiding over the case, must still approve the settlement for it to be final.

"I am not able to speak on this matter without breaching my settlement agreement,” the 21-year-old Hotz wrote in an email to The Register. “Therefore, I have no comment other than this one. With that said, I do not like censorship, and I do not like censoring myself. Rest assured I am still fighting the good fight, in the best way I know how."

Riley Russell, General Counsel for Sony Computer Entertainment America said in a blog post that the company was satisfied with the agreement.

“Our motivation for bringing this litigation was to protect our intellectual property and our customers, Russell said. “We believe this settlement and the permanent injunction achieve this goal.”

Sony filed the lawsuit in US District Court in San Francisco in January that targeted Hotz and 100 other hackers who independently published technical details used to run PlayStation games and applications not authorized by the Japan-based console maker. Sony accused Hotz of violating provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that prohibit the trafficking of “circumvention devices” that bypass technology designed to prevent access to copyrighted material.

Sony filed the complaint after Hotz deduced and published the secret “metldr” key that allows the rooting of the PS3. Ironically, it was the secret related key that was tweeted a month later on an official Sony Twitter account reserved for public relations.

The lawsuit represented a major PR problem for Sony because it enraged some of the PS3's most loyal fans, who said they wanted to restore Linux functionality to the console after Sony abruptly removed it.

The critics argued they should be free to modify hardware they legally purchased without running afoul of the DMCA, which carries stiff criminal and civil penalties for violations. Indeed, the US Copyright Office has exempted the jailbreaking of iPhones from the statute, but that move had no bearing at all on the unlocking of game consoles.

During the lawsuit, Sony gained access to Hotz's PayPal, YouTube and Twitter accounts, and also won the right to view the IP addresses of anyone who visited his website for more than two years. Sony also won an order requiring Hotz to turn over his computer and hard drives and remove all online postings about his PS3 hack.

While the settlement is likely to end the most controversial battle in Sony's campaign to control how customers use the console, other skirmishes continue. One pending lawsuit brought by PS3 customers challenges Sony's removal of the “otherOS” feature that allows it to run Linux applications. While a judge recently gutted most of that suit, plaintiffs' attorneys have since amended their complaint, giving them another shot. In February, a German PS3 hacker published a jailbreaking “bible” after Police raided his home.

What's more, Sony has yet to announce any settlement with members of a hacking collective known as fail0verflow, which spoke about hacking the PS3 in December at the Chaos Communication Congress in late December. The fail0verflow members were named as DOES in the same suit that targeted GeoHot.

So while Sony's campaign against PS3 hackers is likely to become much lower profile, don't expect it to end anytime soon.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04...ystation_suit/





Fellow Hackers Blast Geohot For Sony Settlement
Jesse Emspak

On Monday Sony Computer Entertainment America settled with George Hotz, also known as Geohot. The company had filed suit against Hotz in January for not only modifying his PlayStation 3 console so that it could run other operating systems, but for publicizing his method on the Internet. Sony claimed the actions violated copyright. Hotz said he was modifying a console that belonged to him.

The terms of the settlement were not fully disclosed, though part of it involved enjoining Hotz from modifying a Sony console or publicizing any exploits of its systems again. If he does he will have to pay $10,000 for each violation.

On Hotz's blog, Geohot Got Sued, Hotz posted Monday that he is joining the Sony Boycott, and never buying another product from Sony again. As of Tuesday morning there are 320 comments. Many fault Hotz for not trying to force Sony to allow users to put other operating systems on the consoles.

Hotz himself may have set the stage for some of the criticism. In an earlier blog post he wrote, "What if SCEA tries to settle? Let's just say, I want the settlement terms to include OtherOS on all PS3s and an apology on the PlayStation blog for ever removing it. It'd be good PR for Sony too, lord knows they could use it. I'm also willing to accept a trade, a legit path to homebrew for knowledge of how to stop new firmwares from being decrypted."

One commenter, "MX," says, "Sure, it's nice that it's over and people can move on with their lives... but I just think people expected a bit more of a fight than this."

Some were more pointed, such as "Night Breed." "So basically you settled for a job and took people's money giving them a false hope of settling for their rights? What do you plan to do with the money that was donated to you to provide a cushion for the legal battle? I hope you will be paying all those people back since you obviously didn't live up to your word."

Others also said they were disappointed after contributing funds for Hotz's legal battle. "Hotz I paid because I thought you were fighting our fight, not just to save your own a--... Anyway thanks for your efforts and good luck and anytime you feel like repaying my £10 feel free, and just for the record I never used your hack I just paid because of what i THOUGHT you were standing for..... "

Another commenter, "webmaster," called for those who donated to contact PayPal and rescind them, and called Hotz a fraud. "I bet you they paid him off in the settlement. Things just got settled like that so quick. Geohot is fraud and all you geohot supporters are a bunch of losers like him."

Not everyone was angry, and a few were supportive. "You did a great favor to many, and there are plenty of others to pick up the torch. It's all about fear. They'll never make it illegal for everyone. We've (You've) won this one," said commenter "BricksLamp."

Jason Blanton wrote: "I think he made the best decission [sic] possible all things considered. You have to pick your fights, and we all had nothing to gain by Geohot winning or losing this battle."

Hotz did not comment on the settlement or the blog comments.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/1333...settlement.htm





Hotz Lawyer: PS3 Hacking Case Over, DMCA and IP Abuse Live On
Ben Kuchera

The legal action between Sony and George Hotz has come to a close, with both sides seemingly happy with the results. Sony has Hotz agreeing not to do bad things to its hardware, and Hotz gets to be left alone and continue with his life. Neither side has admitted any liability in the matter, and things seemed to have worked out... for the best?

Ars Technica spoke with Yasha Heidari, one of Hotz's lawyers, who said the most important thing to take from this case is a knowledge of how large companies strong-arm their opponents when it comes to copyright issues and the DMCA, and to be aware of your rights. The best way to fight back? Don't give companies who do these things your money. The conversation was enlightening on a number of levels.

According to the settlement agreement, Hotz will not be "engaging in any unauthorized access to any SONY PRODUCT under the law," nor will he be "engaging in any unauthorized access to any SONY PRODUCT under the terms of any SCEA or SCEA AFFILIATES' license agreement or terms of use applicable to that SONY PRODUCT, whether or not Hotz has accepted such agreement or terms of use."

The terms of the agreement are listed in detail, and they essentially boil down to the fact that Hotz will not work to get around any Sony encryption, nor will he help others do so in any way. What's odd about this wording is that Hotz has agreed not to use the hardware in any unauthorized way, while Sony did not get a chance to prove that the original charges constituted unauthorized use under the DMCA. The terms used in the agreement were under contention during the case, and those issues were never settled in a legal setting. So the question of what a PS3 owner can legally do with the console she legally acquired is still an open one.

It would have been a long, expensive fight

While many people are disappointed that the case didn't result in precedent-setting vindication for Hotz, Heidari is sympathetic to the decision to settle. "It's easy for someone to stand on the sidelines and want someone else to spend the next five years fighting for something, but once you're in the fight, and you're being called 24/7 and you can't do anything without facing public scrutiny, and it's having tangible effects on your personal life, I think people think differently about it," he told Ars. "People don't remember that George is only 21, and he's fighting a multibillion dollar corporation. It's a hard fight for anyone, much less a single individual."

The other issue is that Sony was more or less silent during the case, while Hotz and his team were available for interviews, helping the press with coverage. "I'm not sure I'd say it helped the case, but that's one of the most significant things I was trying to accomplish with this case, which is to get these issues into the public light," Heidari explained. "I believe it's very important, when it comes to IP issues, to have the public discourse focus on what's taking place."

One of the things Heidari thought it was important to share was the strong-arm tactics companies like Sony use when they invoke the DMCA: seizing property, subpoenaing personal records from companies such as Google and PayPal, and even utilizing the police to invade people's homes in other countries. "Being forced to defend a lawsuit across the country is a big issue for everyone. My client had no notion he would face a legal battle in California," Heidari said. The issue is that people just click accept on online agreements or click that they agree, and suddenly they're facing legal battles across state lines.

Heidari told Ars that he sees a danger in the expansion of intellectual property laws, which were originally meant to foster the growth of original thought. "We have to ask ourselves if [copyright law is] actually promoting the arts and sciences. I believe that it's not. You have to ask yourself if society, in the end, is benefiting from people like George Hotz, prodigies and geniuses who are making creative technologies and innovations. Are there benefits from people like George being sued?" He brought up cases where companies sue people like Hotz and then try to recruit those like him or benefit from their work.

First, be aware. Second, vote with your dollar

"With the current IP laws and the DMCA, end users and consumers are the losers and will continue to be the losers until we pass some effective reforms on these subjects," Heidari said. "These lawsuits happen every day. People are dragged across the country every day. People are having to fight through interpretations of the DMCA every day." It's his belief that this will continue to happen until there is some change in the law, or a larger public outcry.

"The very first thing is to get this into the public discourse, to have people speak about it and have people learn about their rights. If people aren't talking about it and people don't know, it flies under the radar until they're sued." The next step is tricker: putting pressure on lawmakers and promoting reforms in the law, and then having customers vote with their wallets and punish companies who treat their users in ways they don't support. "That's the best way people can send a message saying they don't support a company's actions."

So who won?

Well, no one, unless you count Hotz not getting ground under Sony's boot a "win." Hotz has agreed to not do the things he claimed he never did, based on wording that was under some contention. The stipulation limits his work on Sony's hardware in a number of ways, and Sony was able to send a clear signal that it is willing and able to attack those who it feels compromise its hardware.

Neither side said uncle, but in the end George Hotz is able to walk away knowing that while he may not have wrestled the giant to the ground, he at least gave as good as he got. For a 21 year-old hacker going against a multinational corporation, that's no small thing.

For now, I hope you will join me in putting the popcorn down, if only for a moment.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2...se-live-on.ars





ShairPort 0.05 Released
jhl::mafipulation

My girlfriend moved house, and her Airport Express no longer made it with her wireless access point. I figured it'd be easy to find an ApEx emulator - there are several open source apps out there to play to them. However, I was disappointed to find that Apple used a public-key crypto scheme, and there's a private key hiding inside the ApEx. So I took it apart (I still have scars from opening the glued case!), dumped the ROM, and reverse engineered the keys out of it.

So, here is ShairPort, an open-source (Perl/C) replacement.
shairport-0.05.tar.gz
13/4: Updated to 0.05 - cleaner, more informative error handling.
12/4: Updated to 0.04 - compile fixed on non-x86 platforms
11/4: Updated to 0.03 - bugfix release: broken with IPv6 (Mac troubles with iTunes). You must install IO::Socket::INET6 for Perl to fix this - Debian/Ubuntu users, this is lib-io-socket-inet6-perl.

Update: 13/4
So, this does everything I want, and I don't intend to issue any further releases here. Others (with infinitely more patience) have been working on the code; you can find a nice branch with Mac support on albertz's github repo.
http://mafipulation.org/blagoblig/2011/04/08#shairport





Once the Hobby of Tech Geeks, iPhone Jailbreaking Now a Lucrative Industry
Ian Shapira

Kevin Lee, a George Mason University senior, says he earns about $50,000 a year with an illicit-sounding pitch on Craigslist: “Get Your iPhone Jailbroken Today.”

Within minutes, the computer science major can download code onto his customers’ iPhones and fling open the portal to an alternative world of apps and software that Apple condemns. The jailbreak perks include: tethering the iPhone’s Internet connection to a laptop or iPad without paying extra AT&T charges; swapping out the AT&T or Verizon service for a cheaper carrier; or, customizing the iPhone with 3-D screens, bouncing icons or funkier fonts.

An early form of jailbreaking started shortly after Apple unveiled the iPhone in 2007, but the practice has now evolved into a lucrative industry with millions of consumers. Quashing many doubts about jailbreaking’s legality, the Library of Congress ruled in July that the practice did not violate Apple’s copyright.

“To be honest, when I first started, I did it for my friends, myself, but it has snowballed from there,” said Lee, who jailbreaks iPhones to enable new screen designs, then “unlocks” them so customers can switch wireless carriers. “I was getting five to 10 customers a week, now it’s 30 to 40. I just had one customer from the Mongolian embassy who was moving to the capital of Mongolia, and he wanted to use the iPhone there.”

The primary jailbreak apps store, Cydia — named after the insect that bores into apple trees — now earns about $10 million in annual revenue and counts about 4.5 million active weekly users hunting for apps. Its dominance in the jailbreak world has grown so much that last year, when a rival store began eating into its market share, Cydia simply merged with the competitor, unleashing howls about a monopoly.

Some developers, meanwhile, are raking in tens of thousands of dollars in sales off their apps, technically called “packages,” “themes” or “tweaks” in jailbreak parlance.

In what might be the ultimate sign that the jailbreak industry is losing its anti-establishment character, Toyota recently offered a free program on Cydia’s store, promoting the company’s Scion sedan. Once installed, the car is displayed on the background of the iPhone home screen, and the iPhone icons are re-fashioned to look like the emblem on the front grill.

Toyota was also the first major corporation to offer an ad to the jailbreaking site, www.modmyi.com, whose traffic and revenue have doubled since 2010.

“We’ve seen expansion across the board. The Toyota ad and theme, to me, meant there was a turning of the tides and that jailbreaking is becoming more mainstream,” said Kyle Matthews, the co-owner of Modmyi.com. “The industry just keeps increasing; there are even repair stores that will jailbreak for you.”

Apple and AT&T have been trying to crack down on the booming black market. Matthews said Apple pressed Toyota to remove the theme and the ad this past week, which it did. Apple declined comment for this article.

In the past, Apple has said jailbreaking the iPhone or iPad might void the device’s warranty. Two years ago, Apple argued to the Library of Congress, which oversees copyright, that the “unauthorized modifications” constituted a violation, and that the company incurs “very substantial expenses” investigating customer complaints about jailbroken iPhones that don’t work.

Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman, said the company can detect which customers are tethering their iPhones to other devices using an unauthorized hack; those customers, he said, are sent “polite” letters laying out three options: they can pay AT&T $20 a month on top of the data plan costs; stop the unapproved tethering altogether; or ignore AT&T but get automatically enrolled and billed anyway.

Siegel declined to say how much revenue is lost from the tethering tools, saying only that a small number of customers do it. He also declined to discuss whether or how AT&T challenges the creators of the hacks. Because of its technology, AT&T is more vulnerable than Verizon to unlocking, programmers say.

At the top of the jailbreaking hierarchy sits Jay Freeman, 29, the founder and operator of Cydia, the biggest unofficial iPhone app store, which offers about 700 paid designs and other modifications out of about 30,000 others that are free. Based out of an office near Santa Barbara, Calif., Freeman said Cydia, launched in 2008, now earns about $250,000 after taxes in profit annually. He just hired his first full-time employee from Delicious, the Yahoo-owned bookmarking site, to improve Cydia’s design.

“The whole point is to fight against the corporate overlord,” Freeman said. “This is grass-roots movement, and that’s what makes Cydia so interesting. Apple is this ivory tower, a controlled experience, and the thing that really bought people into jailbreaking is that it makes the experience theirs.”

Not everyone is as open as Freeman about their contributions to this black market apps store. Some jailbreakers and developers declined speak publicly. And the Craigslist ad and e-mail address posted by Lee, the George Mason senior, is no longer online. After an initial interview with The Washington Post, he declined further comment through an assistant.

Many of the programs offered by these developers are unavailable at the Apple app store, and some of the most popular items are not inexpensive:

The $10 Wi-Fi Sync app lets you wirelessly sync your iPhone to iTunes without needing a USB cord. For $2.19, AdBlocker lets you surf the Apple Safari browser without ads, potentially reducing data usage and speeding up page loads. And the $2 Elert app allows users to keep playing Doodlejump, for instance, without having to leave the game to see incoming e-mails.

Freeman says he takes 30 percent from developers that list programs on his store. He spends most of that money on PayPal transaction fees and server costs.

Freeman himself has had to fend off accusations that he has been playing overlord in the underworld. A new jailbreak store called Themeit opened in January, but only after its owner, a French Web consultant executive, refused to give in to Freeman’s requests that it not launch.

“Once he heard about Themeit, he wrote me super long e-mail telling me not to do it, that it was going to break up the jailbreak community,” said Gabriel Faucon, Themeit’s owner. “There’s a lot of money involved, and he is trying to pass himself off as the little guy communist trying to save the world.”

Last year, Freeman was more successful in gobbling up an even bigger rival, Rock Your Phone, whose owner Mario Ciabarra, runs a jailbreak app design firm. The terms: Freeman has to promote the apps Ciabarra’s company creates on Cydia’s home page; and, instead of the usual 70-30 revenue split, Ciabarra’s business gets to keep virtually all of the sales, according to Freeman.

“Sometimes, eliminating competition may not be that great, but the reality is that we didn’t compete on prices, but on attracting audiences,” said Ciabarra, 33. “With the audience, you get the money. And I saw an exit strategy and I wanted to focus on developing” apps.

Ciabarra has created some of the more popular — and pricey — jailbreak apps, which have been downloaded on more than 5 million devices in more than 150 countries, he said. His $20 MyWi app hooks up your iPhone’s Internet connection to your iPad or laptop, but he says he does not endorse using the program to avoid monthly charges.

Ciabarra said AT&T or Apple have never contacted him or his company, Intelliborn. “We have spent a good amount of legal research making sure we’re not in the wrong,” he said. “We’re trying to stay one step ahead of what Apple does. We’re now offering MyWi OnDemand, which disconnects the wireless service when you’re not using your devices. That way, you can save power, and don’t have to turn your phone on and off to get online.”

While many are raking it in from their black market apps, others are still making smaller but respectable incomes. Rob Grohman, an IT technician from Mechanicsburg, Pa., has earned about $100,000 in the past two years off of his handful of paid themes that redesign a user’s iPhone screens. Most of that was made in 2010.

In his regular job, Grohman said he makes about $50,000 a year repairing computers at a health insurance company. “I made more money off of themes than my day job,” he said with a chuckle.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...VpC_story.html





Hack Lets You Unlock Your iPhone Without Jailbreaking it
Emil Protalinski

GSM Phone Source is offering a new service that claims to unlock your iPhone so that you can use it on any GSM carrier, without jailbreaking your device first. It works by adjusting your phone's IMEI, the number unique for every GSM phone that allows your carrier to identify your device. The unlocking process will set you back $180, but it does reportedly work, according to BGR.

When you sign up for the service, you must provide your iPhone's IMEI (connect your iPhone to your computer, launch iTunes, click the Summary tab for the device, and then click on Phone Number). They'll email you within 48 hours to confirm that your phone has been unlocked. You'll then have to sync with iTunes before inserting any GSM SIM card into your iPhone.

For those in the US, remember that this will only work with the AT&T iPhone, not the Verizon iPhone.

There's just one problem. As easily as someone can add your IMEI to the database to whitelist your iPhone, it can be removed as well. As a result, your iPhone will be locked again as soon as you connect it to iTunes. In other words, use this service at your own risk.
http://www.techspot.com/news/43275-h...eaking-it.html















Until next week,

- js.



















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