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Old 04-12-13, 09:11 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Join Date: May 2001
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 7th, '13

Since 2002


































"Relaxing sharing restrictions does not impact all albums equally; it increases the sales of lower-selling albums (the 'long tail') significantly by 30% but does not benefit top-selling albums." – Laurina Zhang


"You have to walk there, because we have this network of license plate readers now." – Nicholas Weaver






































December 7th, 2013




Unhappy Thanksgiving for Prenda Law, Ordered to Pay $261K to Defendants

Suing ISPs was a huge blunder; new award more than doubles Prenda's fee orders.
Joe Mullin

The "copyright trolling" law firm formerly known as Prenda Law has been hit with a succession of punishing judicial orders since the original slapdown by US District Judge Otis Wright in May. Prenda, which has sued thousands of Internet users over allegations of illegal porn downloads, has been accused of forging signatures on key documents and planting the porn files it sued over.

Wednesday evening, just before the Thanksgiving holiday, Prenda got its latest fee order. Coming in at a whopping $261,025.11, the order (PDF) by US District Judge Patrick Murphy more than doubles the amount that Prenda-linked lawyers owed from four previous decisions and tells them to pay defendants' legal fees.

The newest order isn't just about the Benjamins, though. Judge Murphy has issued the most sharply worded opinion yet. He points out additional evidence that despite their protestations to the contrary, Paul Hansmeier, John Steele, and Paul Duffy "are closely associated and acted in concert" to file the lawsuit in question. Under this order, the trio are "jointly and severally liable" for the fees.

Not only do they originate from the same law firm, but they used the same login information on the court's electronic filing system.

At a November hearing, Hansmeier and Steele "both flat-out lied about their association with Prenda Law," writes Murphy. He continues:

These men have shown a relentless willingness to lie to the Court on paper and in person, despite being on notice that they were facing sanctions in this Court, being sanctioned by other courts, and being referred to state and federal bars, the United States Attorney in at least two districts, one state Attorney General, and the Internal Revenue Service.

Murphy also dismisses other Prenda claims that came up, such as Hansmeier and Steele's complaints that they weren't properly served—a complaint they have made in other cases. The judge writes that "Hansmeier and Steele both received all the process they were due." He goes on to note that notices were sent to several addresses on Steele's constantly rotating list of e-mail addresses, including docket@wefightpiracy.com, an address used by both Duffy and Steele.

They both had "adequate notice" of the motion and the deadline for response, but they "chose to disregard it."

That has resulted in this whopper of a fee award. Unlike other awards, Hansmeier, Steele and Duffy are personally liable for this award. This case in Murphy's court is the Prenda case where they made the ill-fated choice to actually sue Comcast and AT&T directly. The two ISPs weren't producing customer information as fast as Prenda wanted it. Ars writer Tim Lee suggested at the time that the move was a "strategic blunder." The Prenda "porn trolls" were really just an annoyance to the ISPs until they sued the companies; that put AT&T and Comcast in a situation where "they will be strongly motivated to win the case and ensure that no one tries this tactic again," wrote Lee.

Last month, Murphy said that he would be awarding fees in this case. The poor showing by Hansmeier, Steele, and Duffy since then has obviously made him more upset, resulting in Wednesday's massive fee award.

"By naming Comcast and AT&T as Defendants without any valid claims in an attempt to make an end run around the Illinois Supreme Court’s denial of discovery, Plaintiff unreasonably and vexatiously multiplied the proceedings in this matter," writes Murphy.

That resulted in Murphy giving the ISPs every penny in fees they asked for. AT&T was awarded $119,637, Comcast was awarded $69,021. That's all in addition to $72,367 awarded to the defendant, Anthony Smith, for a total of $261,025.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...to-defendants/





Judge: MPAA Can’t Call Hotfile Founders “Pirates” or “Thieves” at Trial

MPAA's first trial against a "cyberlocker" site is scheduled for next week.
Joe Mullin

In years past, the Motion Picture Association of America has had success in shutting down peer-to-peer file-sharing sites like Napster, Grokster Kazaa, and recently, Isohunt.

Then the MPAA turned its attention to so-called "cyberlocker" sites that allow for easy sharing of large files, including copyrighted files. In 2011, the group filed a lawsuit against Hotfile and its alleged manager Anton Titov, saying the site had encouraged its users to infringe copyright on a "massive" scale. Among other things, Hotfile had an incentive program that paid its users to steer downloaders toward content they had stored on Hotfile. "Their files are indeed 'hot,' as in 'stolen,'" said MPAA's general counsel at the time.

That type of tough talk is likely to remain in the entertainment industry's statements on the case, but it won't be allowed in court. During the Hotfile jury trial, scheduled to begin Monday Dec. 9, MPAA lawyers won't be allowed to use the terms "piracy," "theft," "stealing," or any derivatives of those words.

The ruling disallowing the "pejorative" terms was issued on Friday by US District Judge Kathleen Williams, who is overseeing the case. The ruling is part of a larger order laying the framework for the upcoming trial and was first reported by TorrentFreak.

"In the present case, there is no evidence that the Defendants (or Hotfile’s founders) are 'pirates' or 'thieves,' nor is there evidence that they were 'stealing' or engaged in 'piracy' or 'theft,'" wrote Hotfile lawyers in arguing for the ban.

MPAA lawyers countered that it would be inappropriate and practically impossible to keep the word "piracy" out of the trial.

"Terms like 'piracy' and 'theft' are commonplace terms often used in court decisions, statutes, and everyday speech to describe the conduct in which Hotfile and its users engaged, and for which the Court has already found Defendants liable," MPAA lawyers wrote earlier this month. The world "piracy" is literally in the job title of key personalities in the case, including the head of Warner Brothers' "Global Corporate Anti-Piracy" division. It's a word that has become part of popular culture and is used in prominent copyright legal rulings, such as the 2005 Supreme Court case MGM v. Grokster. Still, the ruling stands.

Hotfile lost on another motion over what could be brought up at trial. It asked for any reference to the criminal action against Megaupload, another "cyberlocker" site, to be disallowed, but Williams sided with the MPAA on this issue.

Despite the small victory for Hotfile over "piracy," it's going into this trial at a clear disadvantage. Key legal issues have already been decided in favor of the movie studios. In August, Williams ruled (PDF) that Hotfile did not qualify for a DMCA "safe harbor" provision, making it possible for the company to be liable for the actions of its users. Hotfile "failed to properly exercise control in light of the number of users who were blatantly infringing," the judge wrote. By building a financial incentive system for encouraging downloads, Hotfile went beyond being a storage company—it was actively promoting a distribution network.

At that time, the MPAA said it had won the case, which was only a slight overstatement. With Hotfile found to be "vicariously liable" for its users' actions, the main focus of the upcoming trial may be damages.

A second silver lining for Hotfile is that the company will be allowed to pursue a counterclaim against Warner for certain improper DMCA takedown notices.

If the case doesn't settle in the next week, it will be an interesting trial.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...eves-at-trial/





Hotfile to Pay Hollywood Studios $80m Damages in Filesharing Settlement

Online storage service must also shut down unless it adopts technology to filter out infringing films
Stuart Dredge

Filesharing website Hotfile has been ordered to pay $80m to movie studios, and shut down unless it starts using filtering technology to prevent copyright infringement of their works.

The settlement came just before a court case triggered by a lawsuit against the online storage service, led by industry body the MPAA – its second such victory in a matter of months, following the shutdown of BitTorrent search engine IsoHunt in October.

"This judgment by the court is another important step toward protecting an Internet that works for everyone," said MPAA chairman and chief executive Chris Dodd in a statement.

"Sites like Hotfile that illegally profit off of the creativity and hard work of others do a serious disservice to audiences, who deserve high-quality, legitimate viewing experiences online."

While the MPAA claims that suitable filtering technology is available for sites like Hotfile to use, the website appears to have opted to close instead. "As a result of a United States federal court having found Hotfile.com to be in violation of copyright law, the site has been permanently shut down," explains a message on its homepage.

"If you are looking for your favorite movies or TV shows online, there are more ways than ever today to get high quality access to them on legal platforms."

Hotfile is one of the larger "cyberlockers", having launched in 2009 and grown to 5.3m registered users. In documents filed as part of the lawsuit, the company said the 123m files stored on its servers had generated more than 2.9bn total downloads.

The studios had claimed that more than 90% of Hotfile's daily downloads were of copyrighted content, although the company had argued that it was merely an online storage service that was not responsible for its users' behaviour.

That defence strategy had already been given a major setback when, ahead of the trial, US District Judge Kathleen Williams ruled that Hotfile did not qualify for "safe harbor" protection under US copyright laws – legislation that protects internet companies from being held liable for copyright infringement if they remove offending materials when notified by a copyright holder.

The MPAA is celebrating the settlement as "the first time that a US court has ruled on whether so-called cyberlockers like Hotfile can be held liable for their infringing business practices". More lawsuits may follow, with the MPAA and its equivalent bodies from other creative industries focus their anti-piracy strategies on websites rather than individual filesharers.

The MPAA had already secured the shutdown of IsoHunt in October, in a similar settlement ahead of a court case that saw the company agree to pay studios $110m in damages.

Meanwhile, the criminal copyright infringement case involving the most famous cyberlocker of them all, Megaupload, remains up in the air as the company's founder Kim Dotcom battles extradition from New Zealand.

Since his site was shut down in January 2012, Dotcom has launched a new service, Mega, which has attracted 5 million users since its launch in January 2013.

This week's settlement may not be the final curtain for Hotfile, however. Within days of IsoHunt shutting down, the site had been resurrected by a group unaffiliated with the original website claiming that "IsoHunt can definitely be called a filesharing icon. People got used to it and they don’t want to simply let it go."
http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...g-damages-mpaa





Court: Open Source Project Liable For 3rd Party DRM-Busting Coding
Andy

A judgment handed down by a German court against an open source software project is being described as “worrisome” by the company at the heart of the case. Appwork, the outfit behind the hugely popular JDownloader software, can be held liable for coding carried out by third-party contributors, even when they have no knowledge of its functionality. Appwork informs TorrentFreak that the judgment will be a burden on the open source creative process.

One of the most popular multi-purpose downloading tools on the web today is JDownloader, a Java-based tool compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac. The software is able to download video files, files from file-hosting sites, and extract them all once completed.

Back in June the software became embroiled in court proceedings over a specific feature present in an unofficial beta of JDownloader2 which enabled the downloading of RTMPE video streams on top of existing RTMP. It wasn’t created by AppWork themselves but was a contribution from an open source developer who had worked on the project before.

Since the plug-in handled encrypted streams the Hamburg Regional Court decided that this represented a circumvention of an “effective technological measure” under Section 95a of Germany’s Copyright Act. As a result the Court issued a preliminary injunction against JDownloader2 and threatened its makers, Appwork, with a 250,000 euro fine for “production, distribution and possession” of an ‘illegal’ piece of software.

Appwork found out about the functionality of the plug-in months before the court case and had already disabled it, but the judgment had the potential to have a chilling effect on open source development.

“Are developers really liable if another developer in the community commits code that might be protected somewhere in a software patent? How are Open Source communities supposed to check? What if a program that is included in another Open Source program makes an update that adds illegal functionality?” the company told TorrentFreak at the time.

To find out, Appwork filed an appeal and this week the project received the decision of the court. It was bad news not only for the company but also the open source community in general.

“In the eyes of the judges, our company ‘made the open source contributions our own’ mostly by having a copyright sign in the info dialogue,” Appworks’ Alex informs TorrentFreak.

“Therefore we are liable and must actively screen every code contribution and/or have protective mechanisms in place against someone committing something that might be illegal.”

Alex says that the decision is “worrisome” for the open source community and has the potential to deter people from getting involved in such projects when they discover they must take responsibility for the work of others.

“It doesn’t matter if the project owner did not do anything (i.e. write any line of code) or even if the project owner knows about anything illegal being committed,” Alex says.

“In our case, even when we didn’t even know about the functionality, which was part of an open source binary one of our open source developers used (rtmpdump), we were held liable anyway. Not from the moment on that we got notified about it, but even before,” he explains.

“This means that if any company or individual wants to use an open (or closed) source binary (commercial or not), they are liable for it if it contains any illegal functions. This practically means they are obligated to check every single line of code, which is almost impossible for smaller projects.”

Appwork are looking into the details of the judgment and are currently considering their options for appeal.
http://torrentfreak.com/court-open-s...coding-131205/





What Piracy? Removing DRM Boosts Music Sales by 10 Percent
Ernesto

DRM was once praised as the ultimate tool to prevent music piracy, but new research shows that the opposite is true. Comparing album sales of four major labels before and after the removal of DRM reveals that digital music revenue increases by 10% when restrictions are removed. The effect goes up to 30% for long tail content, while top-selling albums show no significant jump. The findings suggest that dropping technical restrictions can benefit both artists and the major labels.

For more than a decade the music industry has been struggling with online piracy.

To prevent music from spreading like wildfire all the major labels have experimented extensively by adding DRM to digital music files. While this did little to stop piracy, the restrictions did hurt legitimate consumers.

It turns out that consumers find music with DRM less attractive than the pirated alternative, and some people have argued that it could actually hurt sales. A new working paper published by University of Toronto researcher Laurina Zhang confirms this.

For her research Zhang took a sample of 5,864 albums from 634 artists and compared the sales figures before and after the labels decided to drop DRM.

“I exploit a natural experiment where the four major record companies – EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner – remove DRM on their catalogue of music at different times to examine whether relaxing an album’s sharing restrictions impacts the level and distribution of sales,” she explains.

This is the first real-world experiment of its kind, and Zhang’s findings show that sales actually increased after the labels decided to remove DRM restrictions. “I find that the removal of DRM increases digital sales by 10%,” Zhang notes.

This effect holds up after controlling for factors such as album release dates, music genre and regular sales variations over time.

Interestingly, not all albums are affected equally by the decision to remove DRM. Older albums selling less than 25,000 copies see their sales increase by 41% and overall lower-selling albums get a 30% sales boost. The top selling work, on the other hand, doesn’t benefit from less restrictions.

“Relaxing sharing restrictions does not impact all albums equally; it increases the sales of lower-selling albums (the “long tail”) significantly by 30% but does not benefit top-selling albums. My results are consistent with theory that shows lowering search costs can facilitate the discovery of niche products.”

According to Zhang, the 30% sales increase for lower-selling albums can be explained by the fact that DRM-free music makes it easier for consumers to share files and discover new music. The finding that removing DRM from top-selling albums has no effect on sales makes sense in this regard, since the discovery element is less important for well promoted musicians.

While DRM is still prevalent in the book industry and elsewhere, most of the major labels are now in agreement that it’s not a good fit for music.

Those who look around will find that there’s hardly any music being sold with classic DRM in place. Even the RIAA admitted that DRM is an endangered species, probably because what the researchers report today is rather accurate.

The late Steve Jobs already knew this a long time ago. “DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy,” he said back in 2007.
http://torrentfreak.com/what-piracy-...ercent-131130/





Copyright Takedown Requests to Google Have Doubled Since Last Year
Ben Richmond

Last month, a company working on behalf of the publisher Random House, asked Google to remove links to a free copy of Stephen King’s Carrie from search results. Google complied for three out of the four requested links, but didn’t remove Kim Dotcom’s new website Mega.co.nz as requested—for even if Mega is hosting pirated copies of Carrie, they sure aren’t on the homepage.

But leaving that link up was an exception to the rule. More and more, copyright owners and the organizations they employ are cutting off where the websites and the public meet—the search engine. Google’s transparency reports show that requests to remove links to copyrighted material rose steadily in 2013. The search giant received 6.5 million requests during the week of November 18, 2013, which is over twice as many as the same week a year ago. Google said it complies with 97 percent of requests.

TorrentFreak has been compiling the weekly data, and found that “copyright holders have asked Google to remove more than 200,000,000 allegedly infringing links from its search engine this year.” And if your mind needs extra boggling, TorrentFreak explained, “that means Google is now removing nine allegedly-infringing URLs from its indexes every single second of every single day.”

The organizations that file the most requests are exactly who you would suspect they would be: companies working on behalf of the RIAA and BPI. And they go after exactly whom you would expect too: mp3 sites such as Dilandau.eu, zippyshare.com, and filestube.com. Takedown requests are easily made through a web form, and take an average of six hours for Google to process.

And when copyright interests can't make headway through private firms, governments get involved. In France, the High Court of Paris has concluded a 2011 case by ordering Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and the French company Orange to completely de-list 16 video streaming sites from search results, saying that the sites were “dedicated or virtually dedicated to the distribution of audiovisual works without the consent of their creators.” French ISPs were also instructed to block access to the sites.

TechDirt called the court "clueless" and pointed out that clumsy or overly-broad rulings hold the potential to crush nascent creativity and utility for websites that are, as effectively-as possible, made to disappear.

The French court might not be totally savvy about how the internet works, and whether or not its ruling will actually stop anyone from violating copyrights, but it's following the seasoned leaders and villains of copyright hunting. Of course, given the success rate of the RIAA, this could seem clueless, but it also has a certain logic: it puts the responsibility for blocking access to the content squarely on a company that actually does understand the internet.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/cop...ince-last-year





UK Court Rules That Software Functionality Is Not Subject To Copyright
Glyn Moody

Yesterday, Mike wrote about some worrying indications that the US Appeals Court may be considering overturning a ruling that APIs aren't covered by copyright. Happily, over in Europe, there's better news. The long-running battle between SAS and World Programming Limited (WPL) over the more general issue of whether copyright covers software functionality has now been settled by the UK Court of Appeal in favor of WPL. Here's a good report on the judgment from Out-law.com:

The Court confirmed that the way computer programs operate is not copyrightable. This is because computer program functionality is not "a form of expression" and therefore does not qualify for protection it said, ruling on a dispute involving rival software developers SAS Institute (SAS) and World Programming Limited (WPL).

"The ruling means that it will now be very difficult for software developers to challenge a competitor's software with identical functionality unless the underlying code for their software has been copied," intellectual property law expert Indradeep Bhattacharya of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said. "Even the general design, program interfaces and non coding structural elements of software are not protected by copyright. It is also not an infringement to take the ideas behind a computer program from its accompanying documents such as user manuals and technical specifications, though copying non technical descriptions would still be an infringement."


As that indicates, this is a strong affirmation that reverse-engineering software is legal, provided the code itself is not copied. It confirms an earlier decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union, whose opinion had been sought by the original UK judge that heard the SAS case. This multi-layered consideration of the key issues by different courts means that the question is pretty much settled across Europe.

However, one other part of the ruling by the UK Court of Appeal may offer a way for software companies to combat reverse engineering. The licensing agreement from SAS had not made it clear that the software could only be used by one person; this allowed others to study and test SAS's software with the aim of reverse-engineering its functions. Out-law.com points out how software companies can make this harder in future:

"In order to try to limit who can access learning or development editions of software products, companies may want to think about restricting who is the 'lawful user' of their software," Bhattacharya said. "This can be done by entering into the licence with individual users rather than the company. Doing this would help restrict the ability of rivals to have dedicated teams of people observing, studying and testing your software to develop alternative programs."

This shows once again how contracts can be used to add restrictions beyond what copyright law dictates. It will be interesting to see if software companies try to adopt this approach, and what effect it has. Meanwhile, we can be grateful for the UK Court of Appeal's sensible ruling that will allow competition and innovation to flourish, and we must hope that the US Appeals Court follows suit.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...opyright.shtml





Without Anyone Paying Attention, Canada Is About To Change Its Laws To Support ACTA
Mike Masnick

Thought ACTA was dead? While the EU Parliament may have strongly rejected it, and even with the EU Commission (who negotiated it) admitting that ACTA is dead, a variety of other countries still did sign on to the agreement. And, now, it appears that with basically no one paying any attention at all, Canada may be about to pass some laws to effectively tie itself to ACTA's ridiculous requirements. The bill was originally introduced back in March, but was never considered by the Canadian Parliament. However, in late October, it was reintroduced under a new code, C-8, and it looks like it's moving forward, despite almost no public discussion of it anywhere.

The whole point of ACTA, and this bill, are to unite two very different issues: counterfeiting and copyright infringement. The legacy copyright players have been trying to conflate these things for years. That's because they can point to the tiny, but very real, problem of counterfeit drugs or safety equipment that can cause serious damage... and then mix it with the very "large" issue of copyright infringement (where they can't show any actual damage or harm) and pretend that it's a big problem which puts tons of people at risk. Of course, none of that is true. Counterfeiting may be an issue, but it's a very small issue, and in the vast, vast majority of cases, with little to no threat of harm. But, the copyright legacy players have figured out that tying their bandwagon to the claim that "counterfeit drugs kill people" may help them to pass draconian copyright laws.

Bizarrely, the Canadian government appears to have bought this bogus argument, despite nearly all of the evidence suggesting it's wrong. Michael Geist made exactly this point to the Canadian Parliament, but nearly everyone else they heard from were industry folks insisting that they needed this new "anti-counterfeiting" bill. And the end result is it appears that the Canadian Parliament is about to move forward on the bill without hearing from anyone other than Geist who might represent the interests of the public at large. As Howard Knopf notes:

What this exercise it will do – and has done – is to allow lobbyists with a maximalist agenda to use this fake problem of fakes to create the potential for interference with legitimate trade in parallel imports, vastly increased criminalization of everyday “infringement”, shifting of enforcement costs from the private sector to the taxpayer, and the interference with the transshipment of generic drugs and other legitimate products. The new law will allow incredible opportunity for abusive or even simply incompetent enforcement. This can be very costly to large and SME business, not to mention consumers. This is perhaps the most sweeping legislation in Canadian IP law in 70 years, and it is being done without adequate hearings, study or the demonstration of any need. Anyone looking for counterfeit products can find them on the street in mid-town and downtown Manhattan. One doesn’t find this kind of flagrant counterfeiting in Canada. The “evidence” of a major problem with counterfeit good that can’t already be dealt with via existing laws almost entirely anecdotal or absent. Piling on of responsibility to border officials is an unnecessary and costly mistake. The DNA and fingerprints of the movie and record industries are all over this bill.

Tragically, there appears to be almost no media coverage of this at all. Basically, it looks like Canadian politicians waited until everyone was looking elsewhere, and then tried to sneak ACTA right through the Parliament. This would be a major win for the movie and recording industries in the US, but a massive loss for Canadians and Canadian innovation.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...oin-acta.shtml





Federally Funding Filesharing: Should Screen Australia Fund P2P Distribution?

The body is funding drama to be shared freely over peer-to-peer networks rather than distributed through traditional platforms
Lauren Carroll Harris

Is filesharing the way forward for Australian filmmakers? Screen Australia, through its multi-platform drama fund, is funding Airlock – a science-fiction series of three, 30-minute episodes, to be distributed freely over peer-to-peer networks for audiences to share, burn and copy to their heart’s desire.

In an age of geo-blocking, copyright lawsuits and internet censorship, handing $350,000 to pro-pirate filmmakers creates alarm among those who believe cinema is dying, and digital theft is to blame.

Whether Screen Australia should be directly funding content that uses torrent networks is a contentious question. On the one hand, these are the same peer-to-peer networks that Village Cinemas claim cost the Australian film industry $230m a year in lost sales. On the other, they are so ubiquitous that more than a quarter of Australians currently use them for illegal filesharing. It’s becoming the wholehearted norm.

Airlock’s producer, Enzo Tedeschi, says Screen Australia’s decision is indicative of an acceptance that pirating is the new status quo, and that filesharing can be used as a powerful distribution method.

“It’s in part a recognition of the fact that there is a very large audience on certain parts of the internet for a certain kind of content and there’s a legitimate way for filmmakers to take advantage of that,” says Tedeschi, who is also using crowdfunding to ensure an active fanbase that will, in effect, pay for the series in advance.

“Ignoring piracy is not going to make it go away. We’ve convinced Screen Australia that our audience is on pirate networks, and we’ve got a system by which to distribute the film and find our audience there.”

This logic stands in total opposition to those pre-movie advertisements we’re all familiar with, the ones with the grungy music, graffiti-like slogans and blaring sirens: “You wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn't steal a handbag, you wouldn't steal a movie … piracy, it’s a crime.” Here piracy could be the start of a new business model that monetises one of the most effective, fast and available distribution technologies: BitTorrent.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the producers of Airlock see their free, peer-to-peer distribution tactic as a path to turning a profit. “There will be other avenues where you’ll be able to buy the film that will be monetised,” says Tedeschi. The BitTorrent version of the series, he argues, will merely be a free advertisement for these paid avenues.

Though Airlock is a series of 30-minute episodes, Tedeschi’s production team Distracted Media applied this same distribution approach to their first feature film, The Tunnel. It makes more sense than “trying to go out theatrically first which is your biggest risk and biggest expense and you can’t be certain there’s an audience for it”, says Tedeschi. “We’re working backwards: feeding it out early and getting audience attention early.”

The production team will then sell the series to other platforms and distributors once they’ve proved there’s a market out there for it. Although nothing’s yet locked in, they sold their first feature film, The Tunnel, to DVD retailers and online streaming channels after its free BitTorrent launch, as well as doing special event screenings at cinemas.

It’s turning the usual business model, by which films are released at theatres first, before spreading out to other arenas, on its head. “It doesn’t sound like a strategy,” admits Tedeschi, “but there’s value in being visible.”

Federally funding filesharing may be a first for Australia, but there are overseas precedents. Canada’s public broadcaster, CBC, offered the program Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister to audiences via BitTorrent in 2008 without copyright protection. Norway’s NRK and the Netherlands’ VPRO have also experimented with BitTorrent broadcasting, using Creative Commons licences and content for which they own the rights. And back in Australia, the South Australian Film Corporation has just funded an apocalyptic miniseries called Wastelander Panda that will broadcast free on YouTube.

Perhaps torrenting isn’t so different from free-to-air television? This is not torrenting as “piracy”, this is torrenting as a supported distribution channel, authorised by broadcasters and filmmakers.

What about the ethics? In giving away content free on peer-to-peer networks, do we risk devaluing media products altogether and sanctioning illegal downloading? The argument is that pirates become used to the idea that film and television content should be free, and are less likely to pay creative producers for their work by buying a DVD or a movie ticket in the future.

“It’s certainly not an argument to be completely discarded; it merits discussion,” says Tedeschi. “But I would also ask, is there any more value in an indie filmmaker taking a whole lot of finance then handing their film over to a distributor, who doesn’t distribute the film well, which nobody sees? Does that give any more value to a product? Films like Patrick – has that film been helped by everyone knowing it bombed at the box office? Or has that brand been harmed?”

Indeed, the viability of filesharing as a fully fledged business model is only just being tested. It’s too hard to tell who the real winners and losers will be, and what new and self-sustaining systems might arise. But the fact that filmmakers are willing to try, and that funding agencies are willing to support them, shows there’s value in thinking creatively about getting films out there.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/aust...r-distribution





Deutsche Telekom Plans New Packages After Internet Cap Blocked

Deutsche Telekom plans to repackage its internet offering rather than appeal against an October court ruling that blocked it from capping connection speeds when customers exceed data limits on flat-rate contracts.

After announcing its decision not to launch an appeal, the former German monopoly said on Monday that it will introduce new deals with flat rates or fixed data volumes.

The telecoms operator's head of German operations, Niek Jan van Damme, told reporters that the company aims to be more transparent, adding: "We want to win back customer confidence we have lost."

Public outrage this year prompted Deutsche Telekom to water down plans to cap data speeds over fixed broadband lines.

It had said that, from 2016, customers who sign up for flat-rate internet deals and who exceed their monthly data download limit would see their surfing speed capped at 2 megabits per second (Mbit/s).

The Cologne district court ruled in favor of the consumer lobby group Verbraucherzentrale NRW, which had brought the case to court.

Deutsche Telekom's Van Damme declined to indicate how much customers will have to pay for the new packages, but he said that the new flat-rate packages would be more expensive than the contracts with fixed data volumes.

He added that it is unlikely that the new tariffs would be introduced in the next 12 months.

(Reporting by Harro ten Wolde; Editing by David Goodman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9B10BT20131202





FCC Chair: ISPs Should be Able to Charge Netflix for Internet Fast Lane

Wheeler's stance appears to contradict the FCC's own net neutrality rule.
Jon Brodkin

Newly anointed Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said this week that it would be OK for Internet service providers to charge Netflix and other companies for a faster lane to consumers.

Wheeler's stance is surprising given that it appears to contradict the FCC's Open Internet Order, passed under his predecessor in 2010. That order, which sets out the country's network neutrality rules, says that fixed broadband providers may not "unreasonably discriminate" against any type of traffic. The order specifically calls out pay-for-play arrangements as being potential violations.

"[b]roadband providers that sought to offer pay-for-priority services would have an incentive to limit the quality of service provided to non-prioritized traffic," the rules state. "For a number of reasons... a commercial arrangement between a broadband provider and a third party to directly or indirectly favor some traffic over other traffic in the broadband Internet access service connection to a subscriber of the broadband provider (i.e. 'pay for priority') would raise significant cause for concern. ... [A]s a general matter, it is unlikely that pay for priority would satisfy the 'no unreasonable discrimination' standard."

The Open Internet Order is being challenged in court by Verizon. A Verizon win would let ISPs block content or charge providers for a faster lane to customers. But the rule is still in place, at least until the US Court of Appeals makes a decision.

Wheeler (a former lobbyist for the cable and wireless industries) spoke positively about the order but said he wouldn't mind if Netflix has to pay for a faster lane to consumers while answering questions Monday after a policy speech at Ohio State University.

"I am a firm believer in the market," he said. “I think we’re also going to see a two-sided market where Netflix might say, ‘well, I’ll pay in order to make sure that you might receive, my subscriber receives, the best possible transmission of this movie.’ I think we want to let those kinds of things evolve. We want to observe what happens from that, and we want to make decisions accordingly, but I go back to the fact that the marketplace is where these decisions ought to be made, and the functionality of a competitive marketplace dictates the degree of regulation."

Wheeler's comment implies that he believes the Open Internet Order already allows such arrangements or that he wants to change it.

The remark came just seconds after Wheeler said, "we stand for an open Internet." He said he expects the court decision on the net neutrality rule to come this month or next month and that he hopes it will at least affirm the FCC's position that ISPs shouldn't be allowed to block content. "We're hopeful that the court will affirm the fact that reasonable means that [we can require] carriers to make sure they provide access," he said.

“ISP subscribers are not hostages to be auctioned off”

The consumer advocacy groups Public Knowledge and Free Press criticized Wheeler's comments.

"[H]e appeared to endorse the opposite of net neutrality: allowing ISPs to charge websites and services in order to reach that ISP’s subscribers," Public Knowledge VP Michael Weinberg wrote. "In other words, giving ISPs the power to pick winners and losers online. This endorsement was all the more unexpected because it followed his explicit endorsement of 'net neutrality' and a speech that touted the FCC's role in protecting the public interest."'

Wheeler should clarify his position because his statement "could possibly be interpreted as endorsing CDNs instead of net neutrality violations," Weinberg wrote.

"ISPs should not be allowed to charge some websites or services extra just so those websites and services actually work," Weinberg continued. "ISP subscribers are not hostages to be auctioned off to Web services. There are all sorts of reasons for this but, just to pick one, in order for this type of 'fast lane' to make sense there needs to be a 'slow lane' that is bad enough to make someone like Netflix need to pay to get out of it. And just to pick two, this sort of pricing structure works to freeze out new innovation from companies that cannot afford to outbid incumbents.

Free Press CEO Craig Aaron and Research Director Derek Turner also called out the "mixed messages" sent by Wheeler:

Say Netflix (which, by the way, is already paying a lot to put its content on the network where you can find it) did cut such a deal with Comcast. Netflix would likely then turn around and raise the prices you pay to cover its costs. But there’s no chance Comcast would lower your monthly bill. It would just line its own pockets. So Wheeler’s vaunted “two-sided market” just means you end up paying Comcast twice.

Since the existing market for broadband and cable is already so uncompetitive, any company that wants to reach Comcast’s customers is at its mercy. And the next Netflix out there probably couldn’t afford the new tolls, so it would never have a chance to get into the new priority fast lane.

Allowing ISPs to charge for prioritization would encourage artificial scarcity, depress competition, harm online innovation, and threaten the very existence of the open Internet.

When ISPs and video providers fight over money, Internet users suffer.
As we've written, consumers can already get subpar service from Netflix and YouTube when negotiations between ISPs and video services over peering and caching agreements stall. In one case, Verizon was accused of not upgrading the infrastructure required to let Netflix and other traffic pass freely to consumers' homes.

Those sorts of disagreements affect Netflix and YouTube in an indirect way. While Netflix and YouTube seem to suffer disproportionately because of the high bandwidth requirements of streaming video, peering infrastructure is used to pass all types of traffic between Internet companies. The Open Internet Order specifically excludes paid peering arrangements from its purview, but it is usually interpreted to prevent direct payments from companies like Netflix to ISPs to gain faster access to consumers. Letting ISPs directly charge Netflix (or any other company) for such access would ratchet things up to a new level.

Stay tuned.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...net-fast-lane/





A La Carte TV Pricing Would Cost Industry Billions, Report Says

A new report tries to calculate the costs of breaking up TV bundles, such as those offered by Time Warner Cable, and letting consumers subscribe to individual channels.
Meg James

Consumers want to choose the channels they get from their pay-TV providers but such a move would not only undermine the business model for media companies, it could also lead to higher prices for customers, according to a new report by Needham & Co.

Few have been able to put a price tag on the cost to the industry of a la carte programming, but Needham & Co. media analyst Laura Martin took a stab at it in her study.

"Our calculations conclude that $80 billion to $113 billion of U.S. consumer value would be destroyed by this shrinking channel choice," Martin wrote in her report, released Wednesday.

She determined that the economic costs would be enormous because so many smaller channels would disappear -- at least 124 channels -- wiping out an estimated 1.4 million jobs in media.

Martin figured that at least $45 billion in TV advertising would be at risk.

The Needham report estimates that it costs media companies an average of $280 million annually to run an entertainment cable channel. (The costs to program a sports channel -- with big-ticket sports -- are much higher).

That means a channel requires at least 165,000 viewers over the course of a year to break even.

"By implication, about 56 channels would survive, and 124 channels would disappear, based on 2012 viewing levels," Martin wrote.

Families typically watch only about 16 to 20 channels even though they have access to an average of 180 different channels -- which is why so many consumers are eager to be able to pick and choose which channels they receive rather than being forced to buy packages with dozens of channels they may not want.

Calls for a la carte programming in the U.S. are expected to increase as the Canadian government demands a la carte packages in Canada.

In October, top Canadian officials said that TV companies should begin unbundling TV channel packages offered to consumers by next year.

Martin believes the current system in the U.S. benefits consumers not only because of the level of choice but because the industry provides so many jobs and pays billions of dollars each year in taxes.

What's more, advertisers shoulder a higher proportion of the cost of programming than do consumers.

"Americans derive enormous value through diverse channel choices, as evidenced by 4,400 hours of TV viewing per year, virtually all of it funded by public capital markets," Martin wrote. "Because consumers lose so much value through unbundling, we recommend no changes in the U.S."

Martin previously made the case that switching to a la carte pricing would probably lead to much higher costs for individual channels. That means that bills for consumers might not necessarily come down, even if they subscribed to fewer channels.

“I may feel that Bravo, A&E, History Channel and Food Network justify the $70 a month fee, while my husband attributes more value to the sports channels,” Martin wrote in July. “In each case, the price/value relationship is intact, but predicated on different channels for each person in the household.”

In other words, if Bravo -- which is currently in about 100 million homes -- was suddenly available only in half as many homes, it would have to double what it charges distributors to cover its programming costs. If Bravo didn't double or triple its fees, it would have to greatly reduce what it spends on original and acquired shows.

Martin, in her latest report, also took a poke at Commonwealth countries.

"We have no opinion on what Canada should do," Martin wrote. "But in the U.S., we believe that our founding fathers had it right: decisions made by monarchs aren't always in America's best interest."
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...#ixzz2mbrVfZLD





Coming Soon, a Night Watchman With Wheels?
John Markoff

The night watchman of the future is 5 feet tall, weighs 300 pounds and looks a lot like R2-D2 – without the whimsy. And will work for $6.25 an hour.

A company in California has developed a mobile robot, known as the K5 Autonomous Data Machine, as a safety and security tool for corporations, as well as for schools and neighborhoods.

“We founded Knightscope after what happened at Sandy Hook,” said William Santana Li, a co-founder of that technology company, now based in Sunnyvale, Calif. “You are never going to have an armed officer in every school.”

But what is for some a technology-laden route to safer communities and schools is to others an entry point to a post-Orwellian, post-privacy world.

“This is like R2-D2’s evil twin,” said Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, a privacy rights group based in Washington.

And the addition of such a machine to the labor market could force David Autor, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, to rethink his theory about how technology wrecks the middle class.

The minimum wage in the United States is $7.25, and $8 in California. Coming in substantially under those costs, Knightscope’s robot watchman service raises questions about whether artificial intelligence and robotics technologies are beginning to assault both the top and the bottom of the work force as well.

The K5 is the work of Mr. Li, a former Ford Motor Company executive, and Stacy Dean Stephens, a former police officer in Texas. They gained some attention in June for their failed attempt to manufacture a high-tech police cruiser at Carbon Motors Corporation in Indiana.

Knightscope plans to trot out K5 at a news event on Thursday — a debut that is certain to touch off a new round of debate, not just about the impact of automation, but also about how a new generation of mobile robots affects privacy.

The co-founders have chosen to position their robot not as a job killer, but as a system that will upgrade the role of security guard, even if fewer humans are employed.

“We want to give the humans the ability to do the strategic work,” said Mr. Li in a recent telephone interview, describing a highly skilled analyst who might control a herd of security robots.

The robot, which can be seen in a promotional video, is still very much a work in progress. The system will have a video camera, thermal imaging sensors, a laser range finder, radar, air quality sensors and a microphone. It will also have a limited amount of autonomy, such as the ability to follow a preplanned route. It will not, at least for now, include advanced features like facial recognition, which is still being perfected.

Knightscope settled in Silicon Valley because it was hoping for a warm reception from technology companies that employ large security forces to protect their sprawling campuses.

Over all, there are about 1.3 million private security guards in the United States, and they are low paid for the most part, averaging about $23,000 a year, according to the Service Employees International Union. Most are not unionized, so they are vulnerable to low-cost automation alternatives.

K5 also raises questions about mass surveillance, which has already set off intense debate in the United States and Europe with the expansion of closed-circuit television systems on city streets and elsewhere. The Knightscope founders, however, have a radically different notion, which involves crime prediction, or “precog” — a theme of the movie “Minority Report.”

“We have a different perspective,” Mr. Li said. “We don’t want to think about ‘RoboCop’ or ‘Terminator,’ we prefer to think of a mash up ‘Batman,’ ‘Minority Report’ and R2-D2.”

Mr. Li envisions a world of K5 security bots patrolling schools and communities, in what would amount to a 21st-century version of a neighborhood watch. The all-seeing mobile robots will eventually be wirelessly connected to a centralized data server, where they will have access to “big data,” making it possible to recognize faces, license plates and other suspicious anomalies.

Mr. Rotenberg said such abilities would rapidly encroach on traditional privacy rights.

“There is a big difference between having a device like this one on your private property and in a public space,” he said. “Once you enter public space and collect images and sound recordings, you have entered another realm. This is the kind of pervasive surveillance that has put people on edge.”

Mr. Li said he believed he could circumvent those objections by making the data produced by his robots available to anyone in a community with access to the Internet.

“As much as people worry about Big Brother, this is as much about putting the technology in the hands of the public to look back,” he said. “Society and industry can work together on this issue.”

This is essentially a reprise of the debate over Google’s Street View system, which has drawn opposition from privacy advocates. But while Google’s cars captured still images infrequently, a pervasive video and audio portal that autonomously patrolled a neighborhood would in effect be a real-time Street View system.

For the moment, the system is unarmed, and it is certain to become the target of teenagers who will undoubtedly get a thrill from knocking the robot over. Mr. Li said he believed this was not an insurmountable challenge, given the weight, size and video-recording ability of the bots.

Mr. Rotenberg said a greater challenge would be community opposition. He acknowledged, however, that K5’s looks were benign enough. “It doesn’t look like Arnold Schwarzenegger,” he said. “Unless he was rolled over and pressed into a ball.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/sc...th-wheels.html





Delivery Drones Are Coming: Jeff Bezos Promises Half-Hour Shipping With Amazon Prime Air
David Pierce

Jeff Bezos is nothing if not a showman. Amazon's CEO loves a good reveal, and took the opportunity afforded by a 60 Minutes segment to show off his company's latest creation: drones that can deliver packages up to 5 pounds to your house in less than half an hour. They're technically octocopters, as part of a program called "Amazon Prime Air."

A drone sits at the end of a conveyer belt, waiting to pick up a package — Bezos says 86 percent of Amazon's packages are under 5 pounds — and can carry them up to 10 miles from the fulfillment center. As soon as Amazon can work out the regulations and figure out how to prevent your packages from being dropped on your head from above, Bezos promised, there will be a fleet of shipping drones taking the sky.

The segment focused primarily on holiday shopping, particularly the annual shopping extravaganza that is Cyber Monday. It's a huge day for Amazon — more than 300 items will be ordered each second — and does much to reveal the company's true ambitions. Amazon doesn't just want to reinvent the way we shop for and buy things, it wants to upend every step of the process — including how our purchases come to us.

Charlie Rose spoke to a number of Amazon executives and employees, and toured one of the company's 96 massive warehouses, known as "fulfillment centers." Its burgeoning same-day delivery infrastructure was on full display and Rose explored the company's sprawling moves into fashion, groceries, web hosting, tablets, and strange political shows starring John Goodman.

"We like to pioneer, we like to explore. We like to go down dark alleys and find out what's on the other side."

But Jeff Bezos was predictably the star of the segment. He talked about how, 18 years ago, he'd drive packages to the post office himself and dreamed of one day owning a forklift. (Things have changed a bit since then.) He says we're four or five years from drones being able to deliver small packages right to your house, largely because the company has to work with the FAA to make sure it's legally allowed to run the Prime Air program — Amazon doesn't have Zookal's luxury of operating in Australia without the FAA's regulatory oversight.

Bezos knows there's work to do, but his overwhelming message was simple: get ready. "It will work, and it will happen, and it's going to be a lot of fun."
http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/1/51...-hour-shipping





China Could Become the First Country to Legalize Parcel Delivery by Drone
Gwynn Guilford

In building drones that kill people, the US has a couple-decade head start on China. But when it comes to domestic uses, US businesses are hamstrung because the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) isn’t required to issue commercial drone rules until 2015. In the meantime, one of China’s biggest delivery companies is tinkering with using drones—with Chinese government permission. 1

SF Express is testing a drone it has built for delivering packages to remote areas, according to Chinese media reports. The drone can hit an maximum altitude of 100 meters (328 feet) and deliver parcels within two meters of its target. It’s not clear what sort of weight these puppies can handle, but Beijing journalists calculated that it probably can’t carry more than 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds).

The news broke yesterday morning, after a Sina Weibo user noticed what looked like a UFO hovering above a street in Dongguang, in southern China, and after noticing a SF Express logo, posted images online. +

In July, a Shanghai bakery launched aerial cake delivery—or “pie in the sky,” as the Telegraph put it (video below). However, as an anonymous government official told the Shanghai Daily at the time, businesses that want to use drones must be granted approval from the local civil aviation authorities first. The bakers forgot to do that, apparently. +

However, the Dongguan police said that, except during certain sensitive times, commercial operators who receive permission from the civil aviation regulator and air traffic control are allowed to fly drones (links in Chinese). SF Express says it’s strictly complying with the policies. +

Drone delivery undoubtedly has a certain appeal to the Chinese authorities, who are increasingly struggling to control both traffic and pollution in China’s major cities. On top of that, e-commerce is growing much faster than delivery infrastructure in rural and mountainous parts of China, such that logistics systems are emerging as a big area of investment (paywall). In fact, a consortium including CITIC Capital took a 25% stake in SF Express in late August.

In the US, meanwhile, the jury on commercial drones is still out (even as the postal service sometimes reaches remote areas of the US via mules and sled dogs). The FAA estimates that there will be 30,000 drones in US airspace by 2020. But the prospects will be unclear until it issues its new rules in 2015. And while it okayed two drones for commercial use in early August, both were costly, state-of-the-art drones owned by prominent companies—Boeing and AeroVironment Inc—making it hard to guess the FAA’s views on cheaper drones. In the meantime, a slew of US state laws designed to protect citizens from surveillance by law-enforcement drones threaten to limit the use of commercial drones too, at least the FAA rules come out.
http://qz.com/120654/china-could-bec...very-by-drone/





Google Puts Money on Robots, Using the Man Behind Android
John Markoff

In an out-of-the-way Google office, two life-size humanoid robots hang suspended in a corner.

If Amazon can imagine delivering books by drones, is it too much to think that Google might be planning to one day have one of the robots hop off an automated Google Car and race to your doorstep to deliver a package?

Google executives acknowledge that robotic vision is a “moonshot.” But it appears to be more realistic than Amazon’s proposed drone delivery service, which Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, revealed in a television interview the evening before one of the biggest online shopping days of the year.

Over the last half-year, Google has quietly acquired seven technology companies in an effort to create a new generation of robots. And the engineer heading the effort is Andy Rubin, the man who built Google’s Android software into the world’s dominant force in smartphones.

The company is tight-lipped about its specific plans, but the scale of the investment, which has not been previously disclosed, indicates that this is no cute science project.

At least for now, Google’s robotics effort is not something aimed at consumers. Instead, the company’s expected targets are in manufacturing — like electronics assembly, which is now largely manual — and competing with companies like Amazon in retailing, according to several people with specific knowledge of the project.

A realistic case, according to several specialists, would be automating portions of an existing supply chain that stretches from a factory floor to the companies that ship and deliver goods to a consumer’s doorstep.

“The opportunity is massive,” said Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business. “There are still people who walk around in factories and pick things up in distribution centers and work in the back rooms of grocery stores.”

Google has recently started experimenting with package delivery in urban areas with its Google Shopping service, and it could try to automate portions of that system. The shopping service, available in a few locations like San Francisco, is already making home deliveries for companies like Target, Walgreens and American Eagle Outfitters.

Perhaps someday, there will be automated delivery to the doorstep, which for now is dependent on humans.

“Like any moonshot, you have to think of time as a factor,” Mr. Rubin said. “We need enough runway and a 10-year vision.”

Mr. Rubin, the 50-year-old Google executive in charge of the new effort, began his engineering career in robotics and has long had a well-known passion for building intelligent machines. Before joining Apple Computer, where he initially worked as a manufacturing engineer in the 1990s, he worked for the German manufacturing company Carl Zeiss as a robotics engineer.

“I have a history of making my hobbies into a career,” Mr. Rubin said in a telephone interview. “This is the world’s greatest job. Being an engineer and a tinkerer, you start thinking about what you would want to build for yourself.”

He used the example of a windshield wiper that has enough “intelligence” to operate when it rains, without human intervention, as a model for the kind of systems he is trying to create. That is consistent with a vision put forward by the Google co-founder Larry Page, who has argued that technology should be deployed wherever possible to free humans from drudgery and repetitive tasks.

The veteran of a number of previous Silicon Valley start-up efforts and twice a chief executive, Mr. Rubin said he had pondered the possibility of a commercial effort in robotics for more than a decade. He has only recently come to think that a range of technologies have matured to the point where new kinds of automated systems can be commercialized.

Earlier this year, Mr. Rubin stepped down as head of the company’s Android smartphone division. Since then he has convinced Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Mr. Page, that the time is now right for such a venture, and they have opened Google’s checkbook to back him. He declined to say how much the company would spend.

Mr. Rubin compared the effort with the company’s self-driving car project, which was started in 2009. “The automated car project was science fiction when it started,” he said. “Now it is coming within reach.”

He acknowledged that breakthroughs would still be necessary in areas like software and sensors, but said that hardware issues like mobility and moving hands and arms had been resolved.

Mr. Rubin has secretly acquired an array of robotics and artificial intelligence start-up companies in the United States and Japan.

Among the companies are Schaft, a small team of Japanese roboticists who recently left Tokyo University to develop a humanoid robot, and Industrial Perception, a start-up here that has developed computer vision systems and robot arms for loading and unloading trucks. Also acquired were Meka and Redwood Robotics, makers of humanoid robots and robot arms in San Francisco, and Bot & Dolly, a maker of robotic camera systems that were recently used to create special effects in the movie “Gravity.” A related firm, Autofuss, which focuses on advertising and design, and Holomni, a small design firm that makes high-tech wheels, were acquired as well.

The seven companies are capable of creating technologies needed to build a mobile, dexterous robot. Mr. Rubin said he was pursuing additional acquisitions.

Unlike Google’s futuristic X lab, which does research on things like driverless cars and the wearable Google Glass device, the robotics effort — moonshots aside — is meant to sell products sooner rather than later. It has not yet been decided whether the effort will be a new product group inside Google or a separate subsidiary, Mr. Rubin said.

The Google robotics group will initially be based here in Palo Alto, with an office in Japan. In addition to his acquisitions, Mr. Rubin has begun hiring roboticists and is bringing in other Google programmers to assist in the project.

While Google has not detailed its long-term robotics plans, Mr. Rubin said that there were both manufacturing and logistics markets that were not being served by today’s robotic technologies, and that they were clear opportunities.

This is not the first time that Google has strayed beyond the typical confines of a tech company. It has already shaken up the world’s automobile companies with its robot car project. Google has not yet publicly stated whether it intends to sell its own vehicles or become a supplier to other manufacturers. Speculation about Google’s intentions has stretched from fleets of robotic taxis moving people in urban areas to automated delivery systems.

Mr. Rubin said that one of his frustrations about today’s consumer electronics industry was its complexity. He is hoping robotics will be different.

“I feel with robotics it’s a green field,” he said. “We’re building hardware, we’re building software. We’re building systems, so one team will be able to understand the whole stack.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/04/te...d-android.html





Editor Describes Pressure After Leaks by Snowden
Ravi Somaiya

The top editor of the British newspaper The Guardian told Parliament on Tuesday that since it obtained documents on government surveillance from a former National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden, it has met with government agencies in Britain and the United States more than 100 times and has been subjected to measures “designed to intimidate.”

The testimony by the editor, Alan Rusbridger, gave a public airing to the debate over how to balance press freedom against national security concerns, an issue that became more acute once The Guardian began publishing material leaked by Mr. Snowden in June.

The American and British governments have said the disclosures, which detail how the National Security Agency and its equivalent in Britain, Government Communication Headquarters, gather vast amounts of data, damage national security and help hostile governments. Journalists and transparency advocates have countered that the leak spurred a vital debate on privacy and the role of spy agencies in the Internet age.

Mr. Rusbridger said Tuesday that the governments’ measures “include prior restraint,” as well as visits by officials to his office, the enforced destruction of Guardian computer disks with power tools and repeated calls from lawmakers “asking police to prosecute” The Guardian for disclosing the classified material in news articles.

As he testified before a Parliamentary committee on national security, he faced aggressive questioning from lawmakers, particularly those of the ruling Conservative Party. Some asserted that The Guardian had handled the material irresponsibly, putting it at risk of interception by hostile governments and others. Others said the paper had jeopardized national security.

At one point during the hearing, Mr. Rusbridger was asked, to his evident surprise, whether he loved his country. He answered yes, noting that he valued its democracy and free press. After Mr. Rusbridger’s testimony, a senior British police officer, Cressida Dick, refused to rule out prosecutions as part of an investigation into the matter.

Since the revelations, newspapers, particularly those that have dealt with Mr. Snowden’s material, have also had to adjust to a harsh new reporting environment, security experts and journalists said, as governments and others seek secret material held by reporters.

“The old model was kind of like your house,” said Marc Frons, the chief information officer of The New York Times. “You locked your front door and windows, but not your desk drawer, even if it had your passport inside. In the new model, you have locks on everything.”

The Guardian, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal declined to comment about internal security arrangements.

But Mr. Rusbridger told Parliament that the newspaper “went to more precautions over this material than any other story we have ever handled.”

Senior Guardian editors were initially skeptical this year when asked to hand over their cellphones before discussing Mr. Snowden’s documents, said a person with knowledge of the reporting process, who did not want to be named discussing confidential security procedures.

That soon changed when they reviewed the information Mr. Snowden had supplied, this person said. The documents, they came to realize, would be of intense interest not only to the American and British governments, from which they were taken, but also to other governments like China and Russia seeking an espionage edge and hackers seeking to embarrass either government agencies or the publications reporting on the material.

Eventually the same editors insisted that meetings be held in rooms without windows and that any electronic devices nearby be unplugged. Computers that contained the information could never be connected to the Internet. And reporters who needed to consult with colleagues in other countries about the documents had to fly them over physically and meet in person, despite the extra costs. On one occasion, Mr. Rusbridger said, encrypted documents were sent via FedEx.

Nicholas Weaver, a computer security researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, said effective countermeasures for all reporters covering such issues begin with first contact with a source.

Devices “leave fingerprints everywhere you go,” he said. “Leave all your high-tech gadgets at home; meet in a public location that’s kind of noisy, and wear a hat so you don’t get caught on camera.”

“You have to walk there, because we have this network of license plate readers now,” he said, or buy a transit ticket with cash and dispose of it afterward. As for making first contact with a sensitive source, Mr. Weaver said, “You have to wait for them to contact you.”

Communicating with existing sources, said Ashkan Soltani, a security expert and reporter who has worked with The Guardian, The Journal and The Post, should be done on a computer isolated from all other “promiscuous communications” like web browsing and downloading files, to avoid the secret installation of software to monitor activity.

“If the computers have malware, no amount of secure email, no amount of encryption is going to help,” he said.

The threat is not abstract: Several news organizations have been victimized by hacking in recent years. In 2012, Chinese hackers infiltrated The New York Times’s systems, seeking access to reporters’ inboxes.

The United States government, too, seeks access to email information involving news organizations. Several secret subpoenas to companies like Google for data related to accounts linked with WikiLeaks have surfaced.

But those briefed on security plans, and several recent reports, suggest that tech companies are also trying to resist the government’s drive for information.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/04/bu...urnalists.html





Edward Snowden Revelations Prompt UN Investigation Into Surveillance

UN's senior counter-terrorism official says revelations 'are at the very apex of public interest concerns'
Nick Hopkins and Matthew Taylor

The UN's senior counter-terrorism official is to launch an investigation into the surveillance powers of American and British intelligence agencies following Edward Snowden's revelations that they are using secret programmes to store and analyse billions of emails, phone calls and text messages.

The UN special rapporteur Ben Emmerson QC said his inquiry would also seek to establish whether the British parliament had been misled about the capabilities of Britain's eavesdropping headquarters, GCHQ, and whether the current system of oversight and scrutiny was strong enough to meet United Nations standards.

The inquiry will make a series of recommendations to the UN general assembly next year.

In an article for the Guardian, Emmerson said Snowden had disclosed "issues at the very apex of public interest concerns". He said the media had a duty and right to publish stories about the activities of GCHQ and its American counterpart the National Security Agency.

"The astonishing suggestion that this sort of responsible journalism can somehow be equated with aiding and abetting terrorism needs to be scotched decisively," said Emmerson, who has been the UN's leading voice on counter-terrorism and human rights since 2011.

"It is the role of a free press to hold governments to account, and yet there have even been outrageous suggestions from some Conservative MPs that the Guardian should face a criminal investigation. It has been disheartening to see some tabloids giving prominence to this nonsense."

Emmerson's intervention comes ahead of Tuesday's hearing of the home affairs select committee, which is conducting its own inquiry into counter-terrorism.

The Guardian's editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, will give evidence to MPs on the committee on Tuesday afternoon, followed by the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, and assistant commissioner Cressida Dick.

Over the past six months the Guardian – along with other international media organisations – has revealed the existence of mass surveillance programmes, such as GCHQ's Tempora, which taps into the cables that carry internet traffic in and out of the UK. Last month the heads of Britain's three intelligence agencies, MI5, GCHQ and MI6, gave evidence before parliament's intelligence and security committee.

During a 90-minute hearing they accused Snowden of leaking material that had been "a gift to terrorists".

But Emmerson said such claims "need to be subjected to penetrating scrutiny".

He said his inquiry will be requiring further testimony from GCHQ's director, Sir Iain Lobban, the director of MI5, Andrew Parker, and MI6 chief Sir John Sawers.

"I will be seeking a far more detailed explanation than security chiefs gave the (ISC) committee. They must justify some of the claims they have made in public, because as matters stand, I have seen nothing in the Guardian articles which could be a risk to national security. In this instance, the balance of public interest is clear."

He added: "When it comes to assessing the balance that must be struck between maintaining secrecy and exposing information in the public interest there are often borderline cases. This isn't one of them. The Guardian's revelations are precisely the sort of information that a free press is supposed to reveal."

Emmerson said nobody had suggested the Mail on Sunday should be prosecuted when it published revelations from the former MI5 officer, David Shayler, and that the attorney general had rightly abandoned a prosecution against Katharine Gun, the GCHQ whistleblower who in 2003 revealed the US and UK were trying to manipulate a vote at the UN security council in favour of military intervention in Iraq.

No jury would ever have convicted her even though she had broken the Official Secrets Act, Emmerson said.

"The Guardian has revealed there is an extensive programme of mass surveillance which potentially affects every one of us, but has been assiduous in avoiding the revelation of any detail which could put sources at risk. The Mail on Sunday, on the other hand, published material that was of less obvious public interest."

Emmerson said the Snowden disclosures had caused reverberations across the world.

"There can be no doubt the revelations concern matters of international public interest. Wholesale reviews have been mooted by President Obama, Chancellor Merkel and Nick Clegg. In the US, a number of the revelations have already resulted in legislation.

"In Europe, the political class is incandescent. Many states have registered serious objections at the UN, and there are diplomatic moves towards an international agreement to restrict surveillance activity."

Chaired by Keith Vaz, the home affairs select committee called for the Guardian to give evidence following the ISC hearing.

However, a number of civil liberties groups and campaigners have raised concerns about the intense political pressure put on the Guardian, and condemned the UK government's demand that it destroy the Snowden files it was researching in the UK.

The freedom of expression group Article 19 and the Open Rights Group are among two signatories to a letter sent to Vaz ahead of Tuesday's session.

They describe their deep concerns that the review of the Guardian "could restrict media freedom in the UK by discouraging future reporting on important matters of public interest".

The letter calls on MPs to take into account "international human rights standards, and in particular those that relate to the right to freedom of expression and media freedom".
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...n-surveillance





NSA Tracking Cellphone Locations Worldwide, Snowden Documents Show
Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani

The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.

The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.

The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.

One senior collection manager, speaking on the condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data are often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year.

In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programs that have been disclosed since June. Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among the people using them.

U.S. officials said the programs that collect and analyze location data are lawful and intended strictly to develop intelligence about foreign targets.

Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said “there is no element of the intelligence community that under any authority is intentionally collecting bulk cellphone location information about cellphones in the United States.”

The NSA has no reason to suspect that the movements of the overwhelming majority of cellphone users would be relevant to national security. Rather, it collects locations in bulk because its most powerful analytic tools — known collectively as CO-TRAVELER — allow it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.

Still, location data, especially when aggregated over time, are widely regarded among privacy advocates as uniquely sensitive. Sophisticated mathematical techniques enable NSA analysts to map cellphone owners’ relationships by correlating their patterns of movement over time with thousands or millions of other phone users who cross their paths. Cellphones broadcast their locations even when they are not being used to place a call or send a text message.

CO-TRAVELER and related tools require the methodical collection and storage of location data on what amounts to a planetary scale. The government is tracking people from afar into confidential business meetings or personal visits to medical facilities, hotel rooms, private homes and other traditionally protected spaces.

“One of the key components of location data, and why it’s so sensitive, is that the laws of physics don’t let you keep it private,” said Chris Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. People who value their privacy can encrypt their e-mails and disguise their online identities, but “the only way to hide your location is to disconnect from our modern communication system and live in a cave.”

The NSA cannot know in advance which tiny fraction of 1 percent of the records it may need, so it collects and keeps as many as it can — 27 terabytes, by one account, or more than double the text content of the Library of Congress’s print collection.

The location programs have brought in such volumes of information, according to a May 2012 internal NSA briefing, that they are “outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store” data. In the ensuing year and a half, the NSA has been transitioning to a processing system that provided it with greater capacity.

The possibility that the intelligence community has been collecting location data, particularly of Americans, has long concerned privacy advocates and some lawmakers. Three Democratic senators — Ron Wyden (Ore.), Mark Udall (Colo.) and Barbara A. Mikulski (Md.) — have introduced an amendment to the 2014 defense spending bill that would require U.S. intelligence agencies to say whether they have ever collected or made plans to collect location data for “a large number of United States persons with no known connection to suspicious activity.”

NSA Director Keith B. Alexander disclosed in Senate testimony in October that the NSA had run a pilot project in 2010 and 2011 to collect “samples” of U.S. cellphone location data. The data collected were never available for intelligence analysis purposes, and the project was discontinued because it had no “operational value,” he said.

Alexander allowed that a broader collection of such data “may be something that is a future requirement for the country, but it is not right now.”

The number of Americans whose locations are tracked as part of the NSA’s collection of data overseas is impossible to determine from the Snowden documents alone, and senior intelligence officials declined to offer an estimate.

“It’s awkward for us to try to provide any specific numbers,” one intelligence official said in a telephone interview. An NSA spokeswoman who took part in the call cut in to say the agency has no way to calculate such a figure.

An intelligence lawyer, speaking with his agency’s permission, said location data are obtained by methods “tuned to be looking outside the United States,” a formulation he repeated three times. When U.S. cellphone data are collected, he said, the data are not covered by the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures.

According to top-secret briefing slides, the NSA pulls in location data around the world from 10 major “sigads,” or signals intelligence activity designators.

A sigad known as STORMBREW, for example, relies on two unnamed corporate partners described only as ARTIFICE and WOLFPOINT. According to an NSA site inventory, the companies administer the NSA’s “physical systems,” or interception equipment, and “NSA asks nicely for tasking/updates.”

STORMBREW collects data from 27 telephone links known as OPC/DPC pairs, which refer to originating and destination points and which typically transfer traffic from one provider’s internal network to another’s. That data include cell tower identifiers, which can be used to locate a phone’s location.

The agency’s access to carriers’ networks appears to be vast.

“Many shared databases, such as those used for roaming, are available in their complete form to any carrier who requires access to any part of it,” said Matt Blaze, an associate professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. “This ‘flat’ trust model means that a surprisingly large number of entities have access to data about customers that they never actually do business with, and an intelligence agency — hostile or friendly — can get ‘one-stop shopping’ to an expansive range of subscriber data just by compromising a few carriers.”

Some documents in the Snowden archive suggest that acquisition of U.S. location data is routine enough to be cited as an example in training materials. In an October 2012 white paper on analytic techniques, for example, the NSA’s counterterrorism analysis unit describes the challenges of tracking customers who use two different mobile networks, saying it would be hard to correlate a user on the T-Mobile network with one on Verizon. Asked about that, a U.S. intelligence official said the example was poorly chosen and did not represent the program’s foreign focus. There is no evidence that either company cooperates with the NSA, and both declined to comment.

The NSA’s capabilities to track location are staggering, based on the Snowden documents, and indicate that the agency is able to render most efforts at communications security effectively futile.

Like encryption and anonymity tools online, which are used by dissidents, journalists and terrorists alike, security-minded behavior — using disposable cellphones and switching them on only long enough to make brief calls — marks a user for special scrutiny. CO-TRAVELER takes note, for example, when a new telephone connects to a cell tower soon after another nearby device is used for the last time.

Side-by-side security efforts — when nearby devices power off and on together over time — “assist in determining whether co-travelers are associated . . . through behaviorally relevant relationships,” according to the 24-page white paper, which was developed by the NSA in partnership with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Australian Signals Directorate and private contractors.

A central feature of each of these tools is that they do not rely on knowing a particular target in advance, or even suspecting one. They operate on the full universe of data in the NSA’s FASCIA repository, which stores trillions of metadata records, of which a large but unknown fraction include locations.

The most basic analytic tools map the date, time, and location of cellphones to look for patterns or significant moments of overlap. Other tools compute speed and trajectory for large numbers of mobile devices, overlaying the electronic data on transportation maps to compute the likely travel time and determine which devices might have intersected.

To solve the problem of undetectable surveillance against CIA officers stationed overseas, one contractor designed an analytic model that would carefully record the case officer’s path and look for other mobile devices in steady proximity.

“Results have not been validated by operational analysts,” the report said.

Julie Tate contributed to this report. Soltani is an independent security researcher and consultant.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...fac_story.html





India Seeks US Help to Intercept Chats from Online Platforms
Aman Sharma

India will ask the US to share its technology on how to decrypt conversations over various services like Viber, Whatsapp, Skype, Wechat and Blackberry messenger while complaining about service providers in US who invariably reject New Delhi's request for co-operation in investigating cyber crimes.

As per an agenda note circulated by the Union Home Ministry ahead of the Indo-US Police Chiefs conference on December 4-5, India plans to tell the US that the above-mentioned chatting services pose a "challenge" to security agencies to intercept and decipher communications and US should share its technology on how it does the same, unless the chatting services share their decryption keys.

"The availability of their web servers in India is required for legal interception of communications in real time for timely action by security and intelligence agencies. The communication over these services is encrypted and the encryption-decryption technologies available with the service providers will be required by security agencies even if the facility for lawful interception of these communications is extended to security agencies in India. The technology in use by US agencies may be an area of co-operation," the agenda note said. India has been pressing the said chatting services to share decryption keys with the agencies. Intelligence Bureau has inputs that anti-social elements and terrorists may be using such chatting services to draw up plans and conspiracies.

India will complain to US that services providers like Hotmail, Google, Facebook and Twitter - based in US - have "never even in a single case" provided profile or e-mail contents requested by India for investigations and have refused to remove hate speech contents from the social networking websites.

"In many instances, hate speeches on various sites have created communal violence within India. Even in such important matters, service providers have refused to remove contents from their servers blocking the same from public viewing citing the legal provisions of the country where their servers are based," the agenda note says.

Intelligence Bureau Chief Asif Ibrahim recently made a case for US service providers to be brought under the ambit of Indian law. India is proposing to set up an 'Indo-American Alert, Watch and Warn network' of law enforcement agencies of both countries to rapidly co-operate in cyber crimes as even for simple internet logs, the service providers take 15-80 days to respond to Indian requests. "In terms of cyber crime investigations, this is akin to a lifetime. Further, there is no guarantee that the required information will be provided at all," the note says, pointing that service providers have not provided even week-old logs.

No co-ordination post H'bad blasts

In a presentation to the US authorities including Ambassador Nancy Powell, India is expected to admit that there was 'no proper co-ordination' between various investigative agencies like NIA and state police units like CID and Octopus after the Hyderabad blasts on February 21, 2013 and that there was no standard operating procedure to handle terror attacks.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/...w/26759440.cms





Revealed: Australian Spy Agency Offered to Share Data About Ordinary Citizens
Ewen MacAskill, James Ball and Katharine Murphy

• Secret 5-Eyes document shows surveillance partners discussing what information they can pool about their citizens

• DSD indicated it could provide material without some privacy restraints imposed by other countries such as Canada

• Medical, legal or religious information 'not automatically limited'

• Concern that intelligence agency could be 'operating outside its legal mandate'

Man typing on a computer keyboard The secret document shows the partners discussing whether or not to share citizens' "medical, legal or religious information". Photograph: Kacper Pempel/Reuters

Australia's surveillance agency offered to share information collected about ordinary Australian citizens with its major intelligence partners, according to a secret 2008 document leaked by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The document shows the partners discussing whether or not to share "medical, legal or religious information", and increases concern that the agency could be operating outside its legal mandate, according to the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC.

The Australian intelligence agency, then known as the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), indicated it could share bulk material without some of the privacy restraints imposed by other countries, such as Canada.

"DSD can share bulk, unselected, unminimised metadata as long as there is no intent to target an Australian national," notes from an intelligence conference say. "Unintentional collection is not viewed as a significant issue."

The agency acknowledged that more substantial interrogation of the material would, however, require a warrant.

Metadata is the information we all generate whenever we use technology, from the date and time of a phone call to the location from which an email is sent.

"Bulk, unselected, unminimised metadata" means that this data is in its raw state, and nothing has been deleted or redacted in order to protect the privacy of ordinary citizens who might have been caught in the dragnet. Metadata can present a very complete picture of someone's life.

The working document, marked secret, sheds new light on the extent to which intelligence agencies at that time were considering sharing information with foreign surveillance partners, and it provides further confirmation that, to some extent at least, there is warrantless surveillance of Australians' personal metadata.

The DSD joined its four intelligence-sharing partners – the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand, collectively known as 5-Eyes – to discuss what could and what could not be shared under the different jurisdictions at a meeting hosted by Britain’s GCHQ at its headquarters in Cheltenham on 22-23 April, 2008.

The notes, published today by Guardian Australia, suggest that Australia was open to pooling bulk data that almost certainly includes information about Australian citizens.

Clearly indicating the different attitudes between the intelligence partners, the Canadians insisted that bulk collection could only be shared if information about its citizens was first "minimised”, meaning deleted or removed. The various techniques used in "minimisation" help protect citizens' privacy.

The GCHQ memo taker, reporting on this, said that “bulk, unselected metadata presents too high a risk to share with second parties at this time because of the requirement to ensure that the identities of Canadians or persons in Canada are minimised, but re-evaluation of this stance is ongoing”.

By contrast, DSD, now renamed the Australian Signals Directorate, offered a broader sweep of material to its partners.

DSD offered to share bulk, unselected, unminimised metadata – although there were specific caveats. The note taker at the meeting writes: “However, if a ‘pattern of life’ search detects an Australian then there would be a need to contact DSD and ask them to obtain a ministerial warrant to continue.”

A "pattern of life" search is more detailed one – joining the dots to build up a portrait of an individual’s daily activities.

It is technically possible to strip out the metadata of Australian nationals from bulk collection methods used by the 5-Eyes countries, such as cable taps – ensuring the information is not stored, and so could not be pulled in to searches and investigations by agents.

The Snowden documents reveal Australia’s intelligence services instead offered to leave the data in its raw state.

Australian politicians have insisted that all surveillance undertaken is in accordance with the law.

But Geoffrey Robertson, writing in the Guardian today, says if what was described in the memo took place, this would be a breach of sections eight and 12 of the Intelligence Services Act 2001. The act sets a strict requirement that ministerial authorisation is required if the data of an Australian citizen is involved, and indicates that the citizen must be a "person of interest", such as someone involved in terrorism or organised crime.

The Cheltenham gathering, which appears to have been convened to consider the issues around the burgeoning collection of metadata and to reach common positions, resolved to avoid pre-emptive efforts to categorise various materials and "simply focus on what is shareable in bulk".

The memo flags privacy concerns around the collection of various types of data, but the meeting, according to the record, resolved not to set "automatic limitations" – leaving judgment calls to each country's own agencies.

"Consideration was given as to whether any types of data were prohibited, for example medical, legal, religious or restricted business information, which may be regarded as an intrusion of privacy," the memo says.

"Given the nascent state of many of these data types then no, or limited, precedents have been set with respect to proportionality or propriety, or whether different legal considerations applies to the 'ownership' of this data compared with the communications data that we were more accustomed to handle."

"It was agreed that the conference should not seek to set any automatic limitations, but any such difficult cases would have to be considered by 'owning' agency on a case-by-case basis."

The document also shows the agencies considering disclosure to "non-intelligence agencies". It says: "Asio and the Australian federal police are currently reviewing how Sigint [signals intelligence] information can be used by non-intelligence agencies."

The record of the Cheltenham meeting does not indicate whether the activities under discussion in April 2008 progressed to final decisions or specific actions. It appears to be a working draft.

Since Snowden leaked the NSA documents to the Guardian and the Washington Post in May, controversy has raged around the world over revelations that surveillance agencies are collecting information in bulk about ordinary citizens' day-to-day activities, without first getting a warrant.

In Australia, the Greens party and the South Australian independent senator Nick Xenophon have been pursuing questions about the extent to which Australian citizens have been caught up in the dragnet, and the extent of Australian intelligence agencies' involvement.

So far, those questions have largely met with stonewalling, both under the previous Labor government and the new Abbott administration.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...inary-citizens





'Nazi Shazam': Police Devise App to Curb Far-Right Music

German police have developed a Shazam-like smartphone app that allows them to identify far-right rock songs by playing just a brief sample. It could make it harder for neo-Nazis to lure under-18s with music, which is seen as a "gateway drug" into the scene.

German authorities are considering using software akin to a smartphone app that would help them identify neo-Nazi music in seconds, SPIEGEL has learned.

The interior ministers of the country's 16 regional states will meet this week to discuss an new method dubbed "Nazi Shazam," in reference to the mobile phone-based music identification service Shazam, which can identify music bands and song titles from a short sample picked up via the phone's microphone.

The new software would let police quickly identify neo-Nazi rock music, which officials regard as a "gateway drug" into the far-right youth scene.

The regional police office in the eastern state of Saxony has developed a prototype system of registering audio fingerprints from neo-Nazi rock. It has the advantage of "sparing resources and enabling very quick investigations," said an internal government assessment.

Legal Concerns

Police could use it to recognize neo-Nazi music being played on Internet radio stations or to intervene quickly if it is played at gatherings.

Last year, the Federal Review Board for Media Harmful to Minors indexed a total of 79 pieces of music for espousing neo-Nazi ideology or having racist lyrics. The indexing imposes restrictions on sales and forbids them from being made accessible to people aged under 18.

It's unclear whether Germany's interior ministers will adopt the system, though. A number of legal issues need to be addressed before it can be deployed. For example, lawyers need to determine whether the automatic identification of music being played in a hall would constitute acoustic surveillance.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-936711.html





After Snowden, We're Self-Censoring and We Don't Care
Suzanne Nossel

When Edward Snowden unleashed the flood of classified documents and surveillance data secreted from U.S. spy agencies earlier this year, it is unclear if he anticipated the high-level damage it would do to U.S. international relations.

Headlines have focused on irate calls by heads of state to President Barack Obama and parliamentary moves to restore privacy. Diplomats have been summoned to repair fractured relationships.

And just this week, the United Nations' senior counterterrorism special rapporteur, Ben Emmerson, announced that he would launch an investigation into the surveillance tactics used by American and British intelligence agencies citing the Snowden leaks at "the very apex of public interest concerns."

Yet for all the ruckus globally, the most enduring damage from omnipresent surveillance may be right here at home.

Early evidence suggests that knowing that our e-mails, phone calls and social media circles are being vacuumed up into a giant government database may reshape what we say and write, and whom we associate with.

Surveillance may be chipping away not just at our privacy, but at the American values of freedom of expression and association enshrined in the First Amendment.

Invasion of privacy or no big deal?

Yet while foreign politicians are up in arms, many Americans are shrugging their shoulders. There have been lawsuits, bills introduced in Congress and even a few public demonstrations. But surveys from Pew Research indicate that the National Security Agency programs are actually supported by roughly half of Americans, even though many believe that their own personal e-mails and calls have been read or listened to.

However, a survey of American writers done in October revealed that nearly one in four has self-censored for fear of government surveillance. They fessed up to curbing their research, not accepting certain assignments, even not discussing certain topics on the phone or via e-mail for fear of being targeted. The subjects they are avoiding are no surprise -- mostly matters to do with the Middle East, the military and terrorism.

Because they rely on free expression for their work and livelihoods, some writers may be more prone to caution in what they say and who they say it to for fear of activating an NSA tripwire.

But as awareness of mass surveillance sets in for the general public, it is hard to imagine the rest of us will be far behind. In a country that has prided itself for the world's staunchest protections of free speech and association, certain subjects, names, and ideas may become virtually off-limits for all those who'd rather not tangle with the NSA.

Topics that are foreign, alien or frightening may become all the more so if researchers, writers, journalists and even students are afraid to investigate and explain them.

Surveillance so intrusive it is putting certain subjects out of bounds would seem like cause for alarm in a country that prides itself as the world's most free. Americans have long protested the persecution and constraints on journalists and writers living under repressive regimes abroad, yet many seem ready to accept these new encroachments on their freedom at home.

We've already given it away

Some Americans' relative nonchalance toward the government prying into e-mails and calls we long thought were private may stem in part from knowing that we have already ceded so much of our privacy voluntarily. Social media, online shopping, and simple browsing have become semi-public acts. It's hard to know who can see what, and worrying about it can stand in the way of buying a birthday present, posting a great photo or getting your taxes done.

Moreover, for most Americans, learning that the government is a lurking hidden online "friend" doesn't evoke the fears it would have in communist Eastern Europe or today's Russia or Iran.

Because we are all subject to the NSA's intrusions, there is no single group -- not Muslims, or African-Americans, or people of Middle Eastern descent -- that has emerged as a target of these newly revealed programs.

While Americans are used to fighting against discrimination, we are less accustomed to standing up for rights to privacy, expression and association that belong to us all.

Finally, because of the utter secrecy of the programs -- schemes we would not even know about short of Snowden's astonishing breach -- unless you're Angela Merkel you wouldn't know whether you were under investigation, questioned at the airport, or denied a visa because of something you said or wrote.

It may be years, if ever, before stories come to light of people done in by their own texts, web-surfing or Facebook posts.

Did it really matter?

When the Snowden story first broke, Obama claimed that the newly exposed programs had foiled 50 terrorist plots. After reading through a classified list of the thwarted assaults, Sen. Patrick Leahy called the figure "plainly wrong."

In the few cases where details have been released, journalists and intelligence experts have argued that the evidence gathered through surveillance could have been obtained in other ways, or wasn't crucial.

Not all surveillance powers are bad. The Congress and courts have, for decades, focused on where to draw the boundaries to ensure that both we and our constitutional rights are kept safe.

With new and expansive surveillance technologies, and new evidence that our most treasured rights may be at risk, the public is depending on judges and representatives to demand the information they need to properly weigh up the purported benefits of surveillance, as well as its harms.

Americans shouldn't be out-outraged by the international community about a program that puts our own liberties at risks.

The public's dulled senses when it comes to online privacy should not be grounds for forfeiting the rights the Founding Fathers put first above all others.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/opinio...ect/index.html





How Violent Porn Site Operators Disappear Behind Internet Privacy Protections
Craig Timberg

Researcher Garth Bruen long has investigated the seamier corners of the Internet, but even he was shocked to discover Rapetube.org, a site urging users to share what it called “fantasy” videos of sexual attacks.

Bruen gradually discovered dozens of similar sites offering disturbing variations — attacks on drunken women, on lesbians, on schoolgirls — to anyone with a credit card. Some made clear that the clips were fictional, but other sites had the word “real” in their titles. At least a few touted videos that he feared might show actual crimes.

Sickened, Bruen tried to determine who operated the sites, a first step toward possibly having them shut down. But he quickly hit a wall: The contact information listed for Web sites increasingly is fictitious or intentionally masked by “privacy protection services” that offer ways around the transparency requirements built into the Internet for decades.

That is especially true for sites offering illicit or controversial content, studies have found. As a result, although governments have increasingly powerful tools for tracking individual behavior on the Internet, it’s harder than ever for private citizens to learn who is responsible for online content, no matter how objectionable.

To Bruen, this is the dark side of Internet privacy.

“That’s not privacy. That’s secrecy,” said Bruen, 42, a security fellow at the Digital Citizens Alliance, a Washington-based advocacy group that combats online crime. “That’s corporate secrecy.”

The desire for sunshine is at odds with the libertarian ethos of cyberspace, where free speech often has been understood to include the freedom to share content anonymously. Bruen seeks a finer line that, while shielding personal conversations and other private behavior, would demand those selling content to accept a measure of accountability by making their identities known.

That long has been required by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a California-based nonprofit group that, under contract with the U.S. Commerce Department, has broad authority over the issuing of Web addresses worldwide. The group, typically called by its acronym, ICANN, requires that site operators provide “accurate and reliable contact details” but has struggled to enforce compliance amid the transnational lawlessness of cyberspace.

An ICANN study released in September found massive problems with contact information throughout the Internet. Among “adult” Web sites, nearly half used services to mask the identities of site operators or listed no contact number at all. When investigators attempted to reach site operators whose numbers were listed, the effort was successful for less than 6 percent of the “adult” sites surveyed.

“In principle, the information is supposed to be accurate,” said Stephen D. Crocker, chairman of ICANN’s board. Yet he acknowledged that it often is not, with the “dark corners” of the Internet most resistant to efforts at accountability.

For Rapetube.org, the official contact information listed a man with an East Asian last name, a French phone number and an e-mail address issued by a Chinese company. When Bruen sent e-mails, they bounced back as “undeliverable.” When he called the phone number, nobody answered.

Still, whoever operated the site remained active, promising in text posted amid pictures of bound, sometimes bloodied women that there would be “regular updates” to what it claimed was “the biggest rape porn site for violent sex videos.”

Transparency vs. privacy

Transparency was built into the Internet from its earliest days, when site operators needed to reach one another to resolve technical problems. That led to the creation of the “Whois” database, a consolidated source of contact information that became a popular tool for police, journalists, political activists and companies looking to combat abuse of their brand names and registered trademarks.

When activists against domestic violence in 2001 discovered a site called wifebeatersunion.com — it featured an animated image of a fist punching a woman’s face — there was enough information available to lodge complaints that eventually got the site shut down.

“It felt really good to take some action,” said Cindy Southworth of the National Network to End Domestic Violence. “If there is horrible, hateful content out there, it would be useful to know who hosts it.”

More recently, pressure from activists and advertisers persuaded Facebook in May to crack down on what it called expressions of “gender-based hate.” But such tactics have little chance of success when protesters can’t figure out whom to target in their protests.

The declining reliability of the Whois database is quietly embraced by many privacy advocates, who see the forced provision of contact information as contrary to free speech protections. U.S. courts recognize a right to speak anonymously as central to the First Amendment, on the grounds that voicing controversial ideas can be dangerous.

“We benefit from creating breathing room for anonymous and pseudonymous content,” said Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, in Silicon Valley. “Some categories of highly valuable information to society are especially susceptible to legal threats, and allowing content publication without attribution can help that content see the light of day.”

But courts also distinguish among kinds of speech, with pornography receiving less protection than, for example, political commentary or literature.

Most nude images of people younger than 18 are illegal to record, share or view. Some activists for women’s rights in recent years have been pushing for legal sanctions against non-consensual pornography — often called “revenge porn” — in which pictures or videos of sexual acts are uploaded to Web sites after a relationship ends, typically to embarrass a former romantic partner.

“Here we have images of private people,” said Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland. “The public has no legitimate right to know about that.”

In a world of more than a billion smartphones, clips of sexual encounters recorded by bystanders are also increasingly appearing online. Some of these depict consensual acts, but others are from assaults, as was the case with video last year of a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville, Ohio, who was raped while intoxicated.

But if Web sites show videos of attacks that are not real, there are few practical legal restrictions.

When asked about sites that feature “rape porn,” the FBI said in a statement: “These types of Web sites are not unknown to law enforcement. We use a variety of operational strategies to combat this problem and remain committed to identifying those people who would exploit children. In terms of other types of pornography (other than child pornography) that would draw FBI scrutiny — we make that determination on a case by case basis.”

Rapetube.org appeared to operate in this gray area, as part of an extreme niche within the multibillion-dollar online porn industry. Sites offering what they describe as “fantasy” videos of sexual assaults receive little attention from law enforcement or the kinds of activist groups that track child pornography. Determining the amount of money involved — or even who receives the profits — is made difficult by the sketchy information available in the Whois database.

Archived versions of Rapetube.org carry claims that the people depicted are professionals who are at least 18 years old. “We do not condone non-consensual sex,” it says. “This site is about ROLE PLAYING FANTASY only and performed by professional actors and models.”

Elsewhere, however, the site makes clear that any registered user can upload content. “Submit your own videos, rate the vids you watched and join the community. Enjoy your stay! Bookmark Rape Tube!

Many of the videos listed on archived versions of the site carried a simple, two-word description: “Real rape."

A deepening concern

Bruen, a father of two, has degrees in criminal justice, public policy and software engineering and is an elected user representative to an ICANN advisory board. He runs a small security-research firm called KnujOn.com — “no junk” spelled backward — out of a Tudor-style house shaded by maples in suburban Boston.

KnujOn, which grew out of work Bruen did in a previous job as an IT manager for a state agency, investigates sources of spam, those solicitations that jam e-mail inboxes worldwide with offers of easy money or discounts on drugs such as Viagra.

During one investigation, Bruen came across hundreds of sites — featuring pirated software, unlicensed pharmaceuticals and get-rich schemes — registered to a name, Henry Nguyen Gong, with an address and phone number supposedly based in France. Both the Web address and the privacy protection service came from a domain registrar, Bizcn.com, headquartered in the coastal Chinese city of Xiamen.

As Bruen searched for other sites registered to the same person, he was startled to find Rapetube.org. The images and descriptions Bruen found there only deepened his concern, prompting him to complain to ICANN and raise questions about the site in an e-mail to the organization’s chief executive, Fadi Chehade. Bruen eventually would file more than 1,400 complaints against Bizcn.com about flawed information on sites registered to Henry Nguyen Gong. They were among more than 8,000 complaints Bruen filed to ICANN about faulty contact information in one four-month period last year.

Chehade replied warmly, at one point saying in an e-mail to Bruen, “I appreciate your dedication and commitment to the ICANN community.” But ICANN’s compliance staff rejected 11 percent of his 8,000 complaints, mostly on the grounds that the filings “lacked sufficient detail;” for the other 89 percent, Bruen received no response at all, he said.

When Bruen requested a review of the cases from ICANN’s in-house ombudsman, the ombudsman wrote in a report, “There is no substance to the complaints” and ruled the contractual requirement that sites provide “accurate and reliable contact details” did not mean that the information had to be “verifiable.”

Bruen was more angry than surprised at the outcome. ICANN has repeatedly voiced support for transparency and required domain registrars — the companies such as GoDaddy and Enom that sell Web addresses — to collect contact information on site operators. Their contracts give ICANN authority to suspend registrars that failed to do so, but enforcement has been lax for years, according to experts and studies.

Investigators from the Government Accountability Office in 2005 submitted error reports to ICANN about 45 randomly selected Web sites that had “patently false” contact information, including phone numbers listed as “(999) 999-9999” and postal codes as “XXXXX.” After 30 days, the errors remained for 33 of the sites, nearly three-quarters of those checked.

“ICANN has not enforced these rules. Enforcing these rules is hard. . . . It would be a lot easier to ignore the problem,” said Benjamin G. Edelman, a Harvard Business School professor and former ICANN employee, who once testified to Congress that the Whois database was “substantially fiction.”

Those seeking to falsify contact information once favored fanciful names, such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Now they increasingly rely on “privacy protection services” that typically are offered, for a small fee, by the same domain registrars that sell Web addresses. These services are supposed to furnish contact information upon request, but in practice, they rarely do, according to Bruen and other critics.

The ICANN report in September found that the use of such services was “very high” or “extremely high” for sites featuring pornography, financial scams and unlicensed pharmaceuticals. For legal pharmacies, law firms and executive search consultants, the use of “privacy protection services” was much less common.

Suddenly, it’s not there

The FBI and other law enforcement agencies around the world have lobbied ICANN to create a more accurate, accessible Whois database to assist their investigations. Even the domain registrar’s industry group, the Domain Name Association, has endorsed the idea of a more accurate database, at least in concept. The association also has argued that more rigorous record keeping would add to the costs for registrars if they have to verify identities through passports or other official documents. Buying a new Web address now typically costs less than $15 a year.

“You’ve got to make the process transparent. You’ve got to make sure it’s policed. And we think it’s ICANN’s role to do so,” said Adrian Kinderis, chairman of the Domain Name Association.

Efforts by The Washington Post to reach the operator of Rapetube.org, based on the information on file in the Whois database, were no more successful than Bruen’s. Calls were not answered. E-mails were returned as undeliverable. Efforts to mail a letter failed because the listed address in Nimes, a city in southern France, is on a street that does not appear to exist.

The domain operator, Bizcn.com, had no additional information on Gong and was not aware of having been contacted by ICANN about problems with sites registered in his name, said Wu Weiqiang, a product manager for the company. “We are just the domain registrar, and it’s hard for us to tell who is behind a Web site.”

For months, Bruen continued to periodically check the Whois database to see whether the contact information for Rapetube.org had been corrected. It never was. But after Bruen expressed his frustration publicly, in a post on his personal blog in September, Rapetube.org suddenly went dark. Instead of images of naked women with gags in their mouths or shackles on their bodies, error messages appeared.

He wasn’t sure why, although he guessed that some Internet providers had quietly blacklisted the site, making it impossible for users to access it.

A few days later, with Rapetube.org still offline, Bruen decided to see how many similar sites were still online by running a search for Web addresses with the word “rape” in their names. He quickly found more than 40.

“There’s really a commercial interest in promoting this material,” Bruen said, “and it’s much, much bigger than I thought.”

The sites carried links to one another, allowing customers to have access to several for a single payment, but they also appeared to compete. One site bragged: “This is, without a doubt, the sickest and most depraved rape fantasy content I have EVER seen. . . . Even if you are a seasoned fan, like me, you may STILL come away shocked.”

Again, the contact information was of little use, with most sites listing only a “privacy protection service” run by their domain registrars. Nearly a year after discovering this extreme pornographic niche, Bruen was little closer to learning who operated the sites.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...8ea_story.html





AT&T Responds to Shareholders’ Concerns on User Data
Brian X. Chen

In November, shareholders of AT&T and Verizon Communications sent resolutions to the two companies demanding that they publish regular reports on how they share customer information with the government for surveillance efforts.

Now AT&T has issued a response: It’s none of your business.

AT&T on Thursday sent its response to the resolution, written by Thomas P. DiNapoli, the New York’s comptroller who is the trustee of the $160.7 billion New York State Common Retirement Fund. The letter, which was sent to Mr. DiNapoli, the Securities and Exchange Commission and other parties, said that the shareholder resolution demanding transparency should be excluded from the ballot for AT&T’s annual shareholder meeting in the spring.

AT&T said in the letter that matters of “ordinary business operations” should not be controlled by shareholders, but by managers and the board, and therefore the proposal should be excluded from the ballot.

Toward the end of the letter, AT&T also noted that if it were to publish transparency reports, the company would be limited to disclosing its responses to law enforcement requests for information like cellphone records; any information related to the government’s foreign intelligence surveillance activities would be classified. It noted that the so-called transparency reports published by technology companies like Yahoo and Google face the same limitations.

In his shareholder resolution, Mr. DiNapoli argued that customer trust was at stake for AT&T. If customers lose trust, they could switch to other services, which would hurt the companies’ profits, he said in the resolution. Mr. DiNapoli is likely to send a response to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“AT&T is trying to prevent the vital issue of customer privacy from coming before its shareholders,” he said in a statement regarding AT&T’s response. “This issue is an important one for customers and shareholders alike and we feel strongly that it should be on AT&T’s ballot this spring.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/1...-on-user-data/





Internet Firms Step Up Efforts to Stop Spying
Nicole Perlroth and Vindu Goel

When Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive, recently announced the company’s biggest security overhaul in more than a decade, she did not exactly receive a standing ovation.

Ordinary users asked Ms. Mayer why Yahoo was not doing more. Privacy activists were more blunt. “Even after today’s announcement, Yahoo still lags far behind Google on web security,” said Christopher Soghoian, a technology analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union.

For big Internet outfits, it is no longer enough to have a fast-loading smartphone app or cool messaging service. In the era of Edward J. Snowden and his revelations of mass government surveillance, companies are competing to show users how well their data is protected from prying eyes, with billions of dollars in revenue hanging in the balance.

On Thursday, Microsoft will be the latest technology company to announce plans to shield its services from outside surveillance. It is in the process of adding state-of-the-art encryption features to various consumer services and internally at its data centers.

The announcement follows similar efforts by Google, Mozilla, Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo in what has effectively become a digital arms race with the National Security Agency as the companies react to what some have called the “Snowden Effect.”

While security has long simmered as a concern for users, many companies were reluctant to employ modern protections, worried that upgrades would slow down connections and add complexity to their networks.

But the issue boiled over six months ago, when documents leaked by Mr. Snowden described efforts by the N.S.A. and its intelligence partners to spy on millions of Internet users. More than half of Americans surveyed say N.S.A. surveillance has intruded on their personal privacy rights, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted in November.

The revelations also shook Internet companies, which have been trying to reassure customers that they are doing what they can to protect their data from spying. They have long complied with legal orders to hand over information, but were alarmed by more recent news that the N.S.A. was also accessing their data without their knowledge.

“We want to ensure that governments use legal process rather than technological brute force to obtain customer data — it’s as simple as that,” said Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, in an interview.

Mr. Smith said his company would also open “transparency centers” where foreign governments can inspect the company’s code in an effort to assure them that it does not plant back doors for spy agencies in its products.

Already, the Snowden revelations threaten to erode the market share of American technology companies abroad.

In India, government officials are now barred from using email services that have servers located in the United States. In Brazil, lawmakers are pushing for laws that would force foreign companies to spend billions redesigning their systems — and possibly the entire Internet — to keep Brazilian data from leaving the country.

Forrester Research projected the fallout could cost the so-called cloud computing industry as much as $180 billion — a quarter of its revenue — by 2016.

“The world is quickly being divided into companies that are secure and companies that are not,” said Bhaskar Chakravorti, a dean of international business and finance at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

One by one, technology companies have been scrambling to plug security holes.

The best defense, security experts say, is using Transport Layer Security, a type of encryption familiar to many through the “https” and padlock symbol at the beginning of Web addresses that use the technology. It uses a long sequence of numbers — a master key — that scrambles sensitive data like passwords, credit card details, intellectual property and personal information between a user and a website while in transit.

Banks and other financial sites have used such security for years, and Google and Twitter along with Microsoft’s email service made it standard long ago. Facebook adopted https systemwide this year. And Ms. Mayer said Yahoo would finally allow consumers to encrypt all their Yahoo data in January.

But as many sites move to https, security experts say more advanced security measures are needed. If a government can crack the master key — or obtain it through court orders — it could go back and decrypt past communications for millions of users.

That’s why companies like Google, Mozilla, Facebook and Twitter have added another layer of protection, called Perfect Forward Secrecy. That technology adds a second lock to each user’s transmissions, with the key changed frequently. Microsoft plans to add the encryption method next year, but Yahoo has not said whether it will add it.

“Perfect Forward Secrecy is a billion different secrets, and it’s not protected by one central secret,” said Scott Renfro, a Facebook software engineer who works on the company’s security infrastructure.

So even if an outsider obtained the master key, it would still have to crack the other keys, over and over again.

“This type of protection should have been engineered into all web systems and all Internet systems to begin with,” said Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, an engineer at Twitter.

The technology has existed for two decades, but companies were slow to adopt it because it added complexity and introduced a delay to Internet transactions, which can encourage impatient users to flee for faster sites. But many of those issues were resolved by Google when it applied Perfect Forward Secrecy in 2011, said Adam Langley, a software engineer at the company. Google shared its improvements with the broader tech community.

Still, technical solutions can be trumped by law. While https and Perfect Forward Secrecy protect the data transmission, law enforcement agencies can still compel companies to hand the data over from their servers, where it is stored.

So Internet companies are trying to ensure they are at least blocking unauthorized access by addressing other security issues, including a hole that leaves users vulnerable at the very beginning of a site visit. When users want to log into, say, Google’s Gmail, their Internet browser checks the site’s security certificate to make sure it’s not an impostor.

Some security experts believe that hackers are nearly capable of cracking the 1024-bit encryption keys that protect the certificates. But an industry standards group is requiring that, starting next year, all new and renewed certificate keys use 2048-bit encryption, which is far more difficult to break.

Ultimately, however, every security advance is met by new threats. “Attacks don’t get worse,” Mr. Langley said. “They only get better.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/te...op-spying.html





Microsoft’s General Counsel: N.S.A. Hacks Were an ‘Earthquake’ for Tech
Nicole Perlroth

Microsoft is the latest company to try to protect its data from its own government.

An article on Thursday indicates that Microsoft is in the process of expanding and strengthening the encryption for popular services including the email service Outlook.com, Office 365 apps, the Azure cloud-computing service and Skydrive online storage. It is also adding an encryption technology, called Perfect Forward Secrecy, that thwarts eavesdropping.

The company is also scrambling the links between its data centers in an effort to assure users and foreign governments that their data is not free for the National Security Agency’s taking.

The company says encryption and Perfect Forward Secrecy will become the default setting for users by the end of 2014.

The announcement follows similar efforts by Google, Twitter, Mozilla, Facebook and Yahoo. But Microsoft said it will also go several steps further, by making a contractual promise to business and government customers that it will alert them if it receives legal orders related to their data — and fight every gag order in court.

Microsoft will also open up so-called transparency centers, where governments can inspect its products code for back doors.

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said the company had long considered such efforts, but was jolted to action after recent reports that the N.S.A. may be gaining access to companies’ data without their knowledge.

“The idea that the government may be hacking into corporate data centers was a bit like an earthquake, sending shock waves across the tech sector,” Mr. Smith said in an interview. “We concluded that we better assume that there might be such an attempt at Microsoft, or has already been.”

The end goal, Mr. Smith said, is to force would-be snoops to go to court — not hack into its data centers — for customers’ data. “We all want to live in a world that is safe and secure, but we also want to live in a country that is governed by the Constitution.”

And therein lies the rub. Microsoft’s efforts — and for that matter Google’s, Twitter’s, Mozilla’s, Facebook’s and Yahoo’s — still do not prevent the government from gaining access to their data through a court order. And some security experts point out that even if companies like Microsoft allow outsiders to inspect their code, that only eliminates one mode of attack; snoops could still find holes in other parts of the system.

To make governments’ jobs more difficult, executives at Lavabit and Silent Circle, two secure message providers, have been lobbying major Internet companies to adopt a new Dark Mail e-mail protocol that would encrypt user data and metadata in such a way that it would leave the keys with the user, not the provider. Dark Mail would thereby force governments, or hackers, to go straight to the user to unscramble their data.

But Mike Janke, a co-founder at Silent Circle, said he was skeptical they would adopt the protocol because companies rely on access to user data to serve up targeted ads.

“The real friction point is that Yahoo, Google and Microsoft make money mining off free email,” Mr. Janke said in an interview. “They say they’re concerned about user privacy. Now we’ll see if they really care.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/1...uake-for-tech/





We Need Anonymity to Make Democracy Safe – Stallman Talks Bitcoin

Although enthusiasm for ‘crypto-currency’ bitcoin is expanding, it is not going to save people’s privacy from US NSA spy agency data mining. A truly anonymous online currency is needed, Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation told RT.

Just as bitcoin soared above $1,200 mark, almost matching current gold prices, some 1500 proponents of the digital currency gathered in London to discuss the problems of the ‘crypto-money’ and how it could change the world.

The speakers included well-known freedom of information activists, such as Cody Wilson and Richard Stallman, bitcoin developer Michael Parsons, Cryptoauction founder Daryl Cusack, as well as RT’s Stacy Herbert of Keiser Report.

Bitcoin supporters – from investors and academics, to political radicals and internet geeks – have apparently been keen to discuss the challenges that face the currency, which they believe could become a global alternative for cash.

Five years since its creation by an enigmatic programmer nicknamed Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin has been recognized as legitimate cyber currency garnering increasing popularity.

However, while more and more online and offline services are mulling accepting payments in bitcoin, the currency still faces uncertainty. Seeing how it quadrupled in value just in one month, some fear that bitcoin is yet another large economic bubble.

Others say that bitcoin remains a very limited medium of exchange. It remains difficult to swap the digital currency for ordinary cash, and it can hardly be used for storing assets due to large value fluctuations.

There is also no central monetary authority for bitcoin. Having one would ensure liquidity, allowing people to appeal in the event that their digital money had been lost or stolen. As hackers are constantly looking for ways of hijacking someone else’s bitcoin wallets, Internet security could also be one of the key issues discussed at bitcoin expo.

However, another issue that concerns people in the wake of the global US National Security Agency (NSA) spying revelations is whether the transactions made with “miraculous” cyber money are protected from a watchful eye.

Speaking to RT from London, where he has been taking part in the Bitcoin Expo, Richard Stallman said that while bitcoin has its benefits, it is not up to the standard of a safe digital currency that would shield a payer from being tracked by companies and, ultimately, by intelligence agencies.

Stallman has been advocating free ('libre') software for 30 years, proclaiming it “the first step” in a quest to “recover our freedom and restore democracy.” According to Stallman, an anonymous payment system is also required for us to start “taking control of our digital lives.”

RT: Is bitcoin a financial miracle or a bubble waiting to burst?

Richard Stallman: Bubbles can happen in bitcoin just as they can happen in housing, or in tulips, or anything that people speculate in. Bubbles can happen, and that’s nothing special or different. Is bitcoin a miracle? I’m not sure what that would mean – there are good and bad things about bitcoin. One good thing about bitcoin is, you can send money to someone without getting the permission of a payment company. So for instance, if you want to support WikiLeaks – which is very good thing, and which the US government doesn’t want to let people support – and has used extrajudicial means to chase off the Internet partially – well, with bitcoin you can do it.

On the other hand, there is a potential problem with bitcoin, which is, it might get used for tax evasion. I’m not in favor of tax evasion, but we have to realize that the biggest and most harmful cases of tax evasion are lawful. Governments don’t dare make businesses pay the sort of taxes that they ought to and they wouldn’t dare make rich people pay the taxes that they ought to. And thus, if we really want to put an end to tax dodging, we really need to change the tax laws so that businesses can’t offshore their profits. Now, we’re speaking from London, and as we know, there were big protests against the offshoring of profits that the UK government doesn’t have the courage to stop.

RT: Why is there so much appetite for bitcoin? What possible advantages does it have over conventional currency?

RS: Well, its advantage is that you can send the money without getting some company to send it for you.

RT: And do you think the recent revelations of NSA spying have done anything for bitcoin?

RS: I have to point out that bitcoin is not anonymous – that’s not part of its design. People don’t necessarily give their names when they do bitcoin transactions, but the government can probably figure out, who is doing the transaction. How are you going to get bitcoins after all, unless you set up a bitcoin money computer, which is how bitcoins are made, you are going to get them by buying them from someone. If you are an ordinary person, the way you could do it is by paying with a credit card to a company that will exchange government currency for bitcoins. The credit card identifies you, so when you get bitcoins in return, the government can see who you are.

I believe, that we need on the World Wide Web a system for truly anonymous payment to a website. But it’s the payer that has to be anonymous; it doesn’t have to be anonymous for which website received the payment. So that’s what I advocate setting up. We know the technology; it was developed 20 years ago to do this work. What’s needed is business and the social task of getting it set up, so that lots of people can use it.

We must have an anonymous way to pay websites so that they can’t have the excuse that the only way to get any money is by advertising that tracks people. We know that if companies track people, then the NSA or GCHQ is going to look at that data, it’s going to be tracking people through these companies. So I almost never use a credit card to buy anything, the only exception is airline tickets, because they do have my name anyway, so I’m not losing anything by paying with a credit card. The point is, we need anonymity to make democracy safe.
http://rt.com/news/bitcoin-not-anonymous-stallman-522/





Tim Berners-Lee: Spies' Cracking of Encryption Undermines the Web

World wide web inventor dismayed about US and UK attempts to undermine privacy and security, revealed by Edward Snowden
Ed Pilkington

Tim Berners-Lee is known as the gentle genius with the mild touch, a man who is strikingly modest despite having created one of the epochal inventions of the modern age, the world wide web. But get him on the subject of what the National Security Agency and its British equivalent, GCHQ, have been doing to crack encryption used by hundreds of millions of people to protect their personal data online, and his face hardens, his eyes squint and he fumes.

"I think that's appalling, deliberately to break software," he says in an entirely uncharacteristic outburst of ire. Of all the reasons he is concerned about Edward Snowden's disclosures relating to UK and US spying on the web – and there are many, as we shall see – it is the cracking of encryption revealed by the Guardian in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica that seems to rile him most.

"Internet security is hard," he says with emphasis. "All systems have undiscovered holes in them, and it's only a question of how fast the bad guys can discover the holes compared with how fast the good guys can patch them up."

We are talking in his office in the wildly shiny and curvaceous Frank Gehry building at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Berners-Lee leads the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a global community working to develop standards for the web. He continues with the encryption theme: "So it's naive to imagine that if you introduce a weakness into a system, you will be the only one to use it. A lot of the IT industry feels that's a betrayal."

Berners-Lee is astounded by the internal contradiction in the way London and Washington have handled the threat of cyberwarfare. The two governments have elevated the fight against organised hacker gangs and militarised cyber-attacks from states such as China to the rank of a top national security priority. Yet at the same time their spying branches have actively aided cybercriminals by weakening encryption.

"It's foolish from their point of view," he says, adding that it's also ethically misguided: "Any democratic country has to take the high road; it has to live by its principles. I'm very sympathetic to attempts to increase security against organised crime, but you have to distinguish yourself from the criminal."

Many people will know of Berners-Lee from his cameo role in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. Towards the climax of Danny Boyle's spectacle, the stage opened up and the spotlight fell on the computer scientist sitting at a desk in the middle of the Olympic Stadium typing the words: "This is for everyone."

In a sense, all Berners-Lee's worries about Snowden's disclosures flow from this one simple slogan. "What do I mean when I say the web is for everyone?" he says. "I mean that everybody should be empowered by it, not just to read it but to have their voice heard and to participate in the democratic process."

Berners-Lee was convinced about the importance of what he calls "universality" from the instant in 1989 when he circulated to a few colleagues a memo proposing the creation of a web of information that would connect everything and everyone through links. Over time, though, he has come to realise there is a second imperative that is almost as vital as the first.

"What is obvious now is that not only must the web be for everyone, we also need everyone to be for the web. The ability to use the web, and the power of it, comes with an obligation: individual web users have to stick up for their rights. The obligation of a web user is to look at the way the internet is provided and complain very loudly if it deviates from being neutral."

Berners-Lee is not your average web user, but he certainly has been complaining very loudly about the deviations he perceives. He warns that the universality and openness of the web, for which he has so long campaigned, is "under very serious threat" from the systematic surveillance of people's internet metadata in programs such as the NSA's Prism and GCHQ's Tempora.

"You can argue about the legality or illegality of what the NSA and GCHQ were doing," he says. "But look at the ethics of it." The secret foreign intelligence surveillance court, often referred to as the Fisa court, that is supposed to be overseeing internet spying by the NSA, "was dysfunctional and unaccountable. Even if the court had been blocking a lot of things the NSA was doing, it would still have been unaccountable".

Well before the Guardian began publishing stories drawn from Snowden's leaked files, Berners-Lee was concerned that surveillance could damage the web by reducing confidence in its privacy. "When you think about privacy you have to think about how intimate our use of technology has become," he says. "When someone is worried about a social or medical issue, about their sexuality or whether they have cancer, they can put their trust in the complete secrecy of the web. Maybe they are a minor, and too embarrassed to go through their parents. It's important to preserve the ability to do things over the internet that are very intimate."

A loss of faith in privacy caused by government collection of metadata could have a chilling effect, he believes. "The chilling effect is where the teenager does not click on the button and ends up being misinformed. Or when somebody does not want to admit they are depressed and commits suicide because they are worried they were being watched when they clicked on a site. The chilling effect is when people know something is wrong but don't report it because they fear it will damage their career or put them in jail."

There's another, potentially even greater, danger that flows from interfering governments – that it could stymie what Berners-Lee calls "intercreativity", or the act of creativity that happens when people interact freely and safely with each other on the web. He tried to embed that quality in the architecture of the web right as he devised it at its very inception.

"Intercreativity is where people share half-formed ideas, brainstorm, put parts of a solution together over great distances through the web. It's clear that you need a very safe space for people to brainstorm. When people think their ideas will be reviewed, they will not do that. When you take away the safe space, you take away a lot of the power of human problem-solving."

Berners-Lee's personal brand of intercreativity is visibly on display on the whiteboard in his office. It is covered in a dense swirl of words, symbols and flow lines in several colours – a mad professor's frenzied splurge of ideas. To the uninitiated, the scribblings are gobbledegook. Take the sequence scrawled on one corner of the board: "html js / deeps / me. forts / msg / BBT subscribe files / ADD support / Facebook".

Berners-Lee talks in much the same way as he writes on the whiteboard, his thoughts rushing over each other in such a flurry he sometimes stumbles over his words. He browses widely in his search for examples to illustrate a point, drawing from internet geekery, politics and social sciences with such seamlessness that it provokes the feeling that the world wide web is nothing but a binary expression of its creator's own roaming mind.

Which leads us to talk about the most existential threat to the web that Berners-Lee fears could result from state surveillance – the risk that the simple act on which the power of the web depends, the ability to link from one page to the next in just one click, could be jeopardised. Already, governments such as Brazil are looking at ways to uncouple their internet networks from the US to curb NSA snooping, raising warnings that the internet is about to be Balkanised.

Any move in that direction would damage a central principle of the internet, that it should be multiply-connected. "If you try and really split up the web, then it fails," he says bluntly. "The power of the web is that you can link to anything. If there's any category of things you can't link to then the value of the whole system drops tremendously, so much so that people would no longer use it."

Any country that tries to create what he calls a "walled garden" of the internet would find the value of its GDP drop through the floor. Trade would be disrupted, cross-cultural exchange wither. "Boy, would it increase the cost of the system! It would be a horrible constraint and it wouldn't really help – it wouldn't stop the NSA getting its hand on the data."

Berners-Lee is clear-eyed about the various threats posed by state surveillance, but it doesn't end there. He is also clear about what needs to be done to redress the problem. He begins by saying he agrees with the British and US governments that they have to be able to pursue criminal activity on the internet. "Clearly we do have to have investigative police powers," he says. But he goes on: "Clearly too we need to have people to guard the guards themselves, and in both the UK and US we have been complete failures in setting up that system. We can't be naive. We've failed. When you look at who guards the guards, there has been only one answer to that: in practice it has been the whistleblowers."

Berners-Lee believes that the challenge of devising a new system of checks and balances that will protect the universality and vibrancy of the web while allowing the NSA and GCHQ to carry out necessary investigative functions needs to be met by an engaged and informed public. "The future of the internet must be in multi-stakeholder governance," he says, in which state agencies and large internet companies participate, but at arm's length.

Next year, the 25th anniversary of the birth of the world wide web as defined by that first memo he circulated in 1989, is the perfect moment, he suggests, to devise what he calls a charter of rights for the internet.

I ask him how he would he frame such a charter were he to write it himself. He answers the question with a stream of consciousness, firing out bullet points about the fundamentals he would expect as an internet user:

• "I can behave as though I'm not being spied on.

• "If I'm being spied on, I know it's by somebody I trust for reasons that I approved, even if it's done secretly, and I know there's a system in place that ensures it is accountable to the public.

• "I can communicate with everybody and I won't find my packets suddenly delayed because I go to an abortion site and my ISP provider disapproves of abortions.

• "That the internet is neutral politically from the point of view of race, colour, creed, sexual preference – all the things where we do not discriminate."

Berners-Lee, who was brought up in south-west London and still spends a part of every month in the UK, has a special message for his country of birth. He is convinced such a proactive search for an internet charter could be transformative for the UK. After all, he quips, isn't the British constitution famously not worth the paper it isn't written on?

"Maybe it's time for Brits to decide that being constitution-less has lasted long enough. That it's time to put down some basic rights. We've seen our rights being violated, so let's write down what they are. Let's include the rights of the internet, let's include the independence of the fourth estate which is parallel but different. And let's include something that Britain can learn from America – the right to freedom of speech."
http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...on-web-snowden
















Until next week,

- js.



















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