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Old 13-11-13, 08:10 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 16th, '13

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"One could see the TPP as a Christmas wish-list for major corporations, and the copyright parts of the text support such a view." – Matthew Rimmer


"I never had to use it on the job and didn’t have to use it at home for any reason. So I never really learned to do it — and never really got interested." – Jim Crawford






































November 16th, 2013




Distributel File-Sharing Lawsuit Dropped

A Canadian movie production company’s effort to sue unauthorized downloaders of its films has failed, with the company abandoning its lawsuit.

NGN Prima Productions launched a lawsuit last year against 50 unnamed internet subscribers who allegedly downloaded the company’s straight-to-video movies “Recoil,” “Crash Site” and “Dawn Rider.”

The suit asked several small internet providers — the largest of which is Distributel — to identify the subscribers, whose IP addresses were located using forensic software.

In court arguments earlier this year, Distributel fought back against the lawsuit aggressively, using a vast array of arguments to hold off NGN’s request and accusing the production company of “copyright trolling,” tech law expert Michael Geist reported on his blog.

The internet provider suggested NGN was misleading the public, entering into evidence a letter from NGN to an alleged copyright infringer, asking the infringer for $1,500 or face $20,000 in lawsuit damages.

But Canada’s recently-enacted copyright law caps liability for non-commercial infringement at $5,000, not $20,000.

Distributel argued companies that are filing these lawsuits appear to be targeting smaller internet service providers that have fewer resources with which to fight court battles. It pointed to a lawsuit, currently before the courts, by U.S.-based Voltage Pictures targeting customers of Ontario-based indie ISP TekSavvy.

This is not the first time that a file-sharing lawsuit in Canada has been abandoned; in fact, it appears so far copyright holders have gained little from repeated efforts to sue internet users over unauthorized sharing.

Voltage Pictures last year gave up on a lawsuit against subscribers of three internet providers — Bell, Cogeco and Videotron. The company never offered any reasons for abandoning the suit.

Another suit — Voltage’s suit against TekSavvy subscribers — is currently before the courts.

In both the TekSavvy case and the Distributel case, the copyright enforcement group Canipre provided information on web users allegedly identified as having engaged in unauthorized downloading.

Canipre last year said it had identified one million Canadians as unauthorized file-sharers — news that was seen as a possible prelude to a wave of litigation against internet subscribers.

A recent study found Canadians are fourth in the world for illegal downloads of music, behind only the U.S., Britain and Italy. On a per capita basis, though, it’s likely Canadians download more than any of those countries.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/11...n_4268464.html





Google Defeats Authors in U.S. Book-Scanning Lawsuit
Jonathan Stempel

Google Inc on Thursday won dismissal of a long-running lawsuit by authors who accused the Internet search company of digitally copying millions of books for an online library without permission.

U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin in Manhattan accepted Google's argument that its scanning of more than 20 million books, and making "snippets" of text available online, constituted "fair use" under U.S. copyright law.

The decision, if it survives an expected appeal, would let Google continue expanding the library, which it said helps readers find books they might not otherwise locate.

It is also turning point for litigation that began in 2005, when authors and publishers sued. Google has estimated it could owe more than $3 billion if the Authors Guild, an advocacy group that demanded $750 for each scanned book, prevailed.

"This is a big win for Google, and it blesses other search results that Google displays, such as news or images," said James Grimmelmann, a University of Maryland intellectual property law professor who has followed the case.

"It is also a good ruling for libraries and researchers, because the opinion recognizes the public benefit of making books available," he added.

Chin wrote that the scanning makes it easier for students, teachers, researchers and the public to find books, while maintaining "respectful consideration" for authors' rights.

He also said Google's digitization was "transformative," meaning it gave the books a new purpose or character, and could be expected to boost rather than reduce book sales.

The judge noted that Google takes steps to keep people from viewing complete copies of books online, including by keeping some snippets from being shown.

"In my view, Google Books provide significant public benefits," Chin wrote. "Indeed, all society benefits."

AUTHORS GUILD PLANS TO APPEAL

Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, said the group is disappointed in the decision and plans to appeal.

"Google made unauthorized digital editions of nearly all of the world's valuable copyright-protected literature and profits from displaying those works," Aiken said. "Such mass digitization and exploitation far exceeds the bounds of the fair use defense."

Among the three individual plaintiffs is former New York Yankees baseball pitcher Jim Bouton, who wrote the memoir "Ball Four."

Google welcomed the decision.

"This has been a long road and we are absolutely delighted with today's judgment," the Mountain View, California-based company said in a statement. "As we have long said, Google Books is in compliance with copyright law and acts like a card catalog for the digital age."

Google began creating the library after the company agreed in 2004 with several major research libraries to digitize current and out-of-print works.

Among the libraries that have had works scanned are Harvard University, Oxford University, Stanford University, the University of California, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library.

Chin said the scanning has given "new life" to "out-of-print and old books that have been forgotten in the bowels of libraries."

The decision does not concern the ability of people to buy books by using Google.

PRIOR SETTLEMENT REJECTED

In March 2011, Chin rejected a $125 million settlement with authors and publishers, saying it raised copyright and antitrust issues by giving Google a "de facto monopoly" to copy books en masse.

Then in May 2012, Chin said the authors could sue as a group in a class action.

But last July, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where Chin now sits, said the judge was premature in certifying the case as a class action before evaluating the fair use defense.

Chin had overseen the Google Books case as a trial judge, and kept jurisdiction after joining the 2nd Circuit.

While publishers settled with Google last year, the company faces other litigation over digitizing content, including from groups of photographers and graphic artists.

The Authors Guild is separately appealing, on fair use grounds, an October 2012 dismissal by U.S. District Judge Harold Baer in Manhattan of its copyright case against the HathiTrust digital library, a partnership between five major university libraries to create a shared digital repository.

Grimmelmann, the law professor, said Chin's decision, which drew on Baer's, bolsters the fair use defense for online content providers.

"As long as you are not substituting for content by showing readers all of it, and instead simply show where to find content or tell things you learn about it, this opinion means you are legally in the clear," Grimmelmann said.

The case is Authors Guild Inc et al v. Google Inc, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 05-08136.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Jeffrey Benkoe)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9AD0TT20131114





Warner Bros: Our False DMCA Takedowns Are Not a Crime
Ernesto

In a few weeks movie studio Warner Bros. will have to defend itself against DMCA fraud and abuse allegations from file-hosting service Hotfile. The two parties are currently preparing for this clash, and in recent filings Warner asks the court to exclude Hotfile’s “perjury” accusation. The movie studio admits that mistakes were made but insists that they’ve committed no crime.

In response to a copyright infringement lawsuit launched by the MPAA, Hotfile counter sued Warner Bros. two years ago for abuse of its DMCA takedown process on numerous occasions.

The file-hoster alleged that after giving Warner access to its systems the studio wrongfully took down hundreds of files including demos and Open Source software without holding the copyrights to them. The takedowns continued even after the movie studio was repeatedly notified about the false claims.

While Warner later admitted the accusations, the movie studio argue that they are not to blame because the mistakes were made by a computer, not a person. As a result, the false takedown request were not “deliberate lies.”

However, not all false takedowns were unintentional. Warner admitted that one of their employees deleted Open Source software from Hotfile on purpose. Their rationale for this was that the software in question could have speeded up infringing downloads.

Warner nonetheless asked the court for summary judgment in its favor, but in September Florida District Court Judge Kathleen Williams decided to let the issue be heard before a jury later this year. She stated that there is enough evidence showing that “Warner intentionally targeted files it knew it had no right to remove.”

Through several new filings Warner is hoping to limit the potential damage, by asking the court to exclude two issues from being discussed during the upcoming trial. The first issue deals with Hotfile’s claim that Warner committed perjury, and the other relates to an audit of the movie studio’s anti-piracy system.

The perjury motion relates to Hotfile’s Special Rightsholder Account (SRA) which Warner used to remove links from the site. This tool required the movie studio to check a box confirming “under penalty of perjury that I am owner or an authorized legal representative of the owner of the copyrights in this material.”

Since Warner admitted that they submitted false takedown requests and Hotfile specified the above requirements in its terms of service, the file-hoster argued that the studio committed a crime. However, Warner disagrees with this line of reasoning.

“That is not how perjury works, not how the DMCA works, is irrelevant to the claims the jury must decide, and would unfairly prejudice the jury against Warner by suggesting that Warner’s errors amounted to criminal acts,” Warner writes.

Warner adds that the DMCA only requires the penalty of perjury statement to confirm that the sender represents the copyright holder, not that the allegedly infringing links point to their copyrighted material, they say.

“The DMCA ‘penalty of perjury’ language is thus narrower than the SRA language that Hotfile employed. The DMCA’s language applies only to impersonating a copyright owner or sending notices on their behalf without authorization; mere misidentification of the files being taken down or the works represented therein are at most incorrect ‘statements’.”

However, Warner also removed copies of JDownloader, which they were certainly not authorized to do. But this was also not a crime either according to the the studio, since it never claimed to be representing JDownloader’s developer Appwerk GmbH.

“To fall under the ‘penalty of perjury’ language in [the DMCA section], however, Warner would have needed not to misidentify instances of JDownloader as infringing Warner works (which is what happened), but instead to correctly identify the taken-down files as JDownloader and then misrepresent itself as acting under authority from Appwerk GmbH, JDownloader’s developer.”

Interestingly, the above reasoning confirms that Warner deliberately used Hotfile’s DMCA tools to take down files that they are not the owner of, an issue that will certainly be brought up during trial.

Warner believes that the above is reason enough to exclude the “perjury” issue from trial. Hotfile can’t just make up crimes by extending the scope of the DMCA, and should not be allowed to present an argument which could mislead the jury, they claim.

In a separate motion Warner wants the court to exclude evidence Hotfile has gathered on an audit of the movie studio’s anti-piracy system, and changes that were made as a result. Warner argues that the audit is irrelevant, since it was performed after the false takedown notices were sent.

If Hotfile would use the audit to argue that the movie studio was aware of the errors in their system, this could potentially confuse the jury.

“There is a substantial risk that the jury will see evidence of Warner’s efforts to investigate the claims in Hotfile’s lawsuit and correct any sources of errors as evidence that Warner ‘knew’ about potential inaccuracies in its system at the relevant times, and improperly attribute such knowledge to Warner months earlier.”

“Because Hotfile has selectively cherry-picked the instances in which Warner located and corrected errors as part of its August 2011 audit, there is further risk that the jury will misread the evidence as ‘proving’ that Warner’s system was error-prone and seek to punish Warner for it,” Warner adds.

The above suggests that Warner is not totally confident that the trial will end well for them. It is now up to the judge to decide whether or not the issues above can be raised during trial.

The judge is also still considering a motion from Hotfile to exclude terms such as “piracy,” “theft” and “stealing” from their trial against the MPAA.

To be continued.
http://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-...-crime-131115/





Chinese Internet Firms Sue Baidu for Online Piracy
Paul Carsten

A group of Chinese Internet firms, including Tencent Holdings and Sohu.Com Inc, has joined a top U.S. film industry body in seeking 300 million yuan ($49.2 million) in damages from China's Baidu Inc and QVOD for copyright violation.

The Joint Action Against Online Video Piracy in China, which also includes Youku Tudou Inc, Dalian Wanda Group and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), said in a statement that Baidu and others had been using an automated process to obtain content from the other companies.

Baidu, the largest Internet search engine in China, said in a statement it was committed to fighting piracy.

A spokeswoman for Shenzhen-based software company QVOD said: "We are just a video player, we don't provide content." She declined to elaborate on the piracy allegations.

QVOD's mobile and desktop video player links to the web and allows users to stream videos.

China has long been known for its weak intellectual property protection and enforcement, leading to numerous disputes with the United States.

If successful, the case could hurt Baidu's business in the online video market, which was worth 3.25 billion yuan in advertising in the third quarter and is estimated to create 16.2 billion yuan in sales next year.

Baidu shelled out $370 million to acquire PPStream in May, to merge with its own iQiyi.com video site, and in September announced the launch of a line of Smart TV products.

"We can't continue to compete in the situation because law-abiding people can't survive in a place where robbers and thieves rampage," Charles Zhang, chief executive of Beijing-based Sohu.Com, told a news conference on Wednesday.

Zhang said that efforts to negotiate with Baidu had been unsuccessful, and Baidu refused to stop violating copyright until QVOD also agreed to stop pirating videos.

Baidu said in a statement it has "always attached a great deal of importance to the issue of copyright protection in the video industry" and that piracy is a shared problem for the domestic video industry which it would continuously strengthen its efforts to fight.

"We hope to collaborate with industry partners and, through technological innovation and close collaboration, together promote the development the legalization of the video industry," it said.

($1 = 6.0919 Chinese yuan)

(Reporting by Paul Carsten and Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Jonathan Standing)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9AC06O20131113





Trade Deal Could be Bitter Medicine
Phillip Dorling

WikiLeaks has exposed details of secret trade negotiations that could leave Australians paying more for drugs and medicines, movies, computer games and software, and be placed under surveillance as part of a US-led crackdown on internet piracy.

A leaked draft of a controversial chapter of the Trans Pacific Partnership free trade agreement reveals the negotiating positions of 12 countries – including Australia – on copyright, patents and other intellectual property issues, with a heavy focus on enforcement measures against internet piracy.

Intellectual property experts are critical of the draft treaty, which they say would help the multinational movie and music industries, software giants and pharmaceutical manufacturers to maintain and increase prices by reinforcing the rights of copyright and patent owners, clamping down on online piracy and raising obstacles to the introduction of generic drugs and medicines.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has indicated that he is keen to see the trade talks pushed to a conclusion next month, saying "there’s always horse-trading in these negotiations, but in the end ... everyone is better off"’.

An expert in intellectual property law, Matthew Rimmer, said the draft was "very prescriptive" and strongly reflected US trade objectives and multinational corporate interests "with little focus on the rights and interests of consumers, let alone broader community interests".

"One could see the TPP as a Christmas wish-list for major corporations, and the copyright parts of the text support such a view," Dr Rimmer said.

"Hollywood, the music industry, big IT companies such as Microsoft and the pharmaceutical sector would all be very happy with this."

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade recently excluded journalists from TPP industry briefings held in anticipation of the next round of negotiations, which begins in Salt Lake City, Utah, next week.

Dr Rimmer said that Australia appeared "generally supportive" of the US or otherwise "quite passive" in the negotiations.

The leaked draft shows that the US and Japan oppose wording, supported by most of the other countries, that highlights the importance of "maintain[ing] a balance between the rights of intellectual property holders and the legitimate interests of users and the community".

In April, the then US ambassador to Australia, Jeffrey Bleich, accused Australian consumers of habitually stealing copyrighted content and of being "some of the worst offenders with amongst the highest piracy rates ... in the world".

New federal Attorney-General George Brandis has signalled his intention to introduce more stringent copyright laws to crack down on online piracy.

The leaked treaty text also reveals new American and Japanese proposals designed to enhance the ability of pharmaceutical manufacturers to extend and widen their patents on drugs and medicines.

Proposals with the potential to impact significantly on Australia’s Pharmaceuticals Benefits Scheme include a requirement that patents be available for new uses of existing drugs, effectively allowing for the "ever-greening" of existing patents.

The proposals also include compensation to companies for delays in the granting or extension of patents, and measures to ensure data exclusivity.

This would enable companies to prevent competitors, specifically manufacturers of generic medicines, from using past clinical safety data to support approval of new products.

Australia is recorded as having indicated opposition to these proposals, but the strength of this is unclear as neither the former Labor government nor the new Coalition government has publicly challenged the US position.

The draft text also shows that Australian negotiators have not sought any specific exemption to protect Australia’s tobacco plain-packaging laws from the treaty’s strong protection for the rights of trademark owners.

The Australian Greens spokesman on communications and the digital economy, Scott Ludlam, described the treaty as "hugely dangerous" and said people should be "deeply concerned about what is being negotiated".

Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson on Wednesday moved a motion that calls on Trade and Investment Minister Andrew Robb to table the draft text of the TPP agreement in the Senate.

However, a spokesman for Mr Robb said the treaty negotiations would remain confidential but insisted there had been "a lot of consultation across all industry sectors that could be impacted by the agreement".

WikiLeaks has condemned the TPP negotiations as a "corporatist trade deal".

Donation pledges to WikiLeaks exceeding $US73,000 ($A78,000) have been crowdsourced to support the publication of the TPP negotiating text.

The full text of the leaked negotiating text can by found at www.wikileaks.org.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politi...#ixzz2kcnFeORE





Why DRM in Cars Is Going to Drive Everyone Mad
Parker Higgins

Forget extra cup holders or power windows: the new Renault Zoe comes with a "feature" that absolutely nobody wants. Instead of selling consumers a complete car that they can use, repair, and upgrade as they see fit, Renault has opted to lock purchasers into a rental contract with a battery manufacturer and enforce that contract with digital rights management (DRM)restrictions that can remotely prevent the battery from charging at all.

We've long joined makers and tinkerers in warning that, as software becomes a part of more and more everyday devices, DRM and the legal restrictions on circumventing it will create hurdles to standard repairs and even operation. In the U.S., a car manufacturer who had wrapped its onboard software in technical restrictions could argue that attempts to get around those are in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)—specifically section 1201, the notorious "anti-circumvention" provisions. These provisions make it illegal for users to circumvent DRM or help others do so, even if the purpose is perfectly legal otherwise. Similar laws exist around the world, and are even written into some international trade agreements—including, according to a recently leaked draft, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

Since the DMCA became law in 1998, Section 1201 has resulted in countless unintended consequences. It has chilled innovation, stifled the speech of legitimate security researchers, and interfered with consumer rights. Section 1201 came under particular fire this year because it may prevent consumers from unlocking their own phones to use with different carriers. After a broadly popular petition raised the issue, the White House acknowledged that the restriction is out of line with common sense.

The problem extends beyond inconvenience. In plenty of cases, DRM has led to users losing altogether the ability to watch, listen to, read, or play media that can't be "authenticated."Video games with online components now routinely reach an end-of-life period where the company providing the authentication decides it's no longer worth it to operate the servers. That raises the frightening possibility of a company like Renault deciding that it's not cost-effective anymore to verify new batteries—and leaving car owners high and dry.

And these are all just the problems with the DRM running as expected. Unfortunately, the intentional restrictions created by DRM can also create security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by other bad actors. The most prominent example may be the "rootkit" that Sony included on music CDs and which led in some cases to further malware infection. The stakes may be even higher when it comes to cars. Security researchers uncovering security problems in cars already face restrictions on publishing; that stands to get worse as DRM enters the picture.

As our friends at iFixit say, if you can't fix it, you don't own it. Users need the right to repair the things they buy, and that is incompatible with blanket restrictions on circumventing DRM.

Copyright maximalists like to point to the 1201 safety valve—a rulemaking procedure to identify narrow exemptions. But the process happens every three years in the Copyright Office, and it's pretty dysfunctional: the exemptions require extensive work, must be justified from scratch each time, and have no established appeal process. Permission to "jailbreak" cars can't even be considered until 2015, and even if it is granted, consumers may be wary to invest in a new car if their right to repair it could be revoked three years later.

There's a better way, but it requires legislation. Representative Zoe Lofgren and a group of bipartisan sponsors have proposed the Unlocking Technology Act, to limit the anti-circumvention provisions to cases where there is actual infringement. That's a common sense change that is long overdue.

More fundamentally, though, users must push back on the creeping imposition of DRM in more and more places. As EFF Fellow and former staff member Cory Doctorow has noted, computers are increasingly devices that we depend on for our own health and safety. It's critically important, then, that consumers actually own our stuff. Stay tuned: We'll be pushing hard on this issue on many fronts in the coming year, and we'll need your help.
http://gizmodo.com/why-drm-in-cars-i...mad-1464282432





MPAA Backs Anti-Piracy Curriculum for Elementary School Students

Groups representing Hollywood studios, music labels and Internet service providers are supporting a push to educate elementary school students about the evils of piracy and the value of copyrights.
Richard Verrier

First there was the Boy Scouts' "Respect Copyrights" activity patch, backed by the Motion Picture Assn. of America.

Then there was "Crime-Fighting Canines," a weekly anti-piracy comic strip series for children in which two black Labrador retrievers named Lucky and Flo sniffed out bootleg DVDs. The series was part of a school education campaign led by the MPAA.

Now that group, along with the Recording Industry Assn. of America and the nation's main Internet service providers, is quietly backing another controversial push to educate schoolchildren about the evils of piracy.

A nonprofit group called the Center for Copyright Information, which is supported by the MPAA and other groups, has commissioned a school curriculum to teach elementary-age children about the value of copyrights.

The proposed curriculum is still in draft stage, but it's already taking flak.

Some critics say the curriculum promotes the biased agenda of Hollywood studios and music labels. Others contend it would use up valuable classroom time when U.S. public schools are already struggling to teach the basics.

"While it's certainly a worthy topic of discussion with students, I'm sure some teachers would have a concern that adding anything of any real length to an already packed school day would take away from the basic curriculum that they're trying to get through now," said Frank Wells, spokesman for the California Teachers Assn.

The MPAA blames the illegal distribution of movies and TV shows for causing billions of dollars annually in lost revenue and damaging the livelihoods of workers who depend on the industry. The trade group has tried various tactics over the years to fight the problem, from filing lawsuits against college students who illegally downloaded movies to backing ill-fated federal laws that would shut down rogue websites.

The next battleground could be the classroom.

Called "Be a Creator," the proposed copyright curriculum is for students in kindergarten through sixth grade. It includes lesson plans, videos and activities for teachers and parents to help educate students about the "importance of being creative and protecting creativity," with topics such as "Respect the Person: Give Credit," "It's Great to Create," and "Copyright Matters."

The program is being prepared by the California School Library Assn. and the Internet Keep Safe Coalition, known as iKeepSafe, a nonprofit focused on helping children thrive in the digital environment. The group partners with educators, law enforcement agencies and major corporations, including Google, Comcast and AT&T.

"It's important to prepare children to succeed and thrive and learn how to share and create and move files in a way that's ethical and responsible," said Marsali Hancock, president of iKeepSafe.

The MPAA declined to comment and referred calls to the Center for Copyright Information, which is also working with iKeepSafe on the curriculum.

Jill Lesser, the center's executive director, told a House subcommittee in September that she hoped the curriculum would be tested as a pilot program in California in the current academic year, and eventually be adopted at schools nationwide.

In one 45-second video for second-graders, a student browses his photograph collection to decide which photos he wants to give to friends, post online or sell to neighbors. After the video, the teacher is guided to say:

"You're not old enough yet to be selling your pictures online, but pretty soon you will be. And you'll appreciate if the rest of us respect your work by not copying it and doing whatever we want with it."

A lesson for sixth-graders likens using copyrighted material without permission to copying someone else's homework assignment.

A draft of the curriculum, first published by Wired magazine, was blasted for presenting what critics said was a one-sided view of intellectual property by omitting the concept of fair use, which allows for the reproduction of copyrighted works without permission in certain cases, such as commentary and parody.

"It sends the message that you always have to get permission before you can copy anything and that sharing is always theft and that if you violate copyright law all kinds of bad things will happen to you," said Corynne McSherry, intellectual property director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It's a scare tactic."

Fabio Marino, intellectual property rights attorney with the law firm McDermott Will & Emery, added, "The idea of educating the public starting with children about copyrights is a good one, but if you're going to do it, you should do it in an unbiased way."

Even those who represent content owners have questioned the program.

"The idea that time would be taken out of kids' days to teach them copyright law, when they ought to be learning reading, writing and arithmetic, I find to be strange," said Stephen Smith, managing partner at the firm Greenberg Glusker and an expert on copyright law. "I just don't think it's appropriate curriculum for kindergartners to sixth-graders."

Hancock has said the criticism was "premature" because the curriculum was still in draft stage and had not yet been approved. She said legal doctrines such as "fair use" are more appropriate for teenagers and would be included in curriculum for middle and high school students, consistent with model public school library standards adopted by the state board of education.

IKeepSafe is working closely with a panel of education and digital media experts to strike a balanced approach, Hancock said, adding that the elementary school portion of the curriculum should be complete by early next year.

The Center for Copyright Information has not yet approved the curriculum, Lesser said. "It's unfortunate this got out because we were nowhere near done," she said.

The center — established two years ago in a pact among the nation's top Internet providers, the MPAA and others — implements the copyright alert system that notifies Internet users who download copyrighted information and reduces Internet speeds for repeat violators.

It also educates consumers about online piracy, a goal that aligns with the proposed school curriculum, Lesser said.

"We're on this road to try to figure out what concepts you can teach kids at what age and how best to protect our kids who are going online as young as 7 years old," she said. "I know this is a super-political issue."
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...#axzz2kOC7lZW5





NMPA Targets Unlicensed Lyric Sites, Rap Genius Among 50 Sent Take-Down Notices
Alex Pham

The National Music Publishers Association on Monday fired an opening salvo at lyric sites that it believes have not obtained licenses to publish those lyrics, including Rap Genius, a high-flying New York startup that last year landed a $15 million investment from Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

The NMPA said it has sent take-down notices to 50 sites identified in an October report by University of Georgia researcher David Lowery as likely not having licenses to publish lyrics. The notices demand that the sites obtain licenses or remove copyrighted lyrics from their sites.

Rap Genius Co-Founder Ilan Zechory said his New York company had not heard from the NMPA, "but we can't wait to have a conversation with them about how all writers can participate in and benefit from the Rap Genius knowledge project."

Zechory added, "Rap Genius is so much more than a lyrics site! The lyrics sites the NMPA refers to simply display song lyrics, while Rap Genius has crowdsourced annotations that give context to all the lyrics line by line, and tens of thousands of verified annotations directly from writers and performers. These layers of context and meaning transform a static, flat lyric page into an interactive, vibrant art experience created by a community of volunteer scholars. Furthermore, music is only a small part of what we do. Rap Genius is an interactive encyclopedia for annotation of all texts - anyone can upload and annotate texts relating to music, news, literature, religion, science, their personal lives, or anything else they want."

David Israelite, Chief Executive of the NMPA, said his organization was not targetting fan sites, but rather commercial websites.

"This is not a campaign against personal blogs, fan sites, or the many websites that provide lyrics legally," Israelite said. Rather, the NMPA "is targeting fifty sites that engage in blatant illegal behavior."

The group claims that more than five million searches for "lyrics" occur each day on Google, and that over 50% of all lyric page views are on unlicensed lyric sites. LyricsMania.com, which displays advertising, claims on its site that it has 12 million unique visitors a month. The site did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Israelite said that the take-down notices are a precursor to filing copyright infringement lawsuits against sites that continue to publish song lyrics that they don't have the licenses to. His organization, on behalf of Warner Chappell Music, Peermusic and Bug Music, last year won a $6.6 million judgement against LiveUniverse, a company founded by Brad Greenspan that operated unlicensed lyrics sites. In 2010, the NMPA successfully sued Motive Force, a company that operated LyricWiki, and received an undisclosed amount of "funds associated with the exploitation of the unauthorized content."

It's unclear how much money is at stake. Rap Genius, for example, currently does not have advertising. Lowery's study, however, points to the potential for lyrics to generate large amounts of advertising dollars in a digital environment.

"Based on the popularity of lyric searches, it is possible that unlike the sound recording business, the lyric business may be more valuable in the Internet age," Lowery wrote in his Oct. 22 report. "Indeed, the vast majority of these websites seem to have well established monetization schemes based on advertising. Many of the sites appear to have accounts with major online advertising exchanges and prominently feature advertising from!major brands. There are even companies that appear to specialize in matching specific lyrics to key demographics for advertisers."

Here's a list of the 50 sites that have been sent take-down notices by the NMPA.

www.rapgenius.com

www.lyricsmania.com

www.lyricstranslate.com

www.stlyrics.com

www.lyricsreg.com

www.lyricstime.com

www.lyrster.com

www.paroles-musique.com

www.kovideo.net

www.songonlyrics.com

www.index-of-mp3s.com

www.lyricstranslations.com

www.karaoke-lyrics.net

www.romantic-lyrics.com

www.maxilyrics.com

www.poemhunter.com

www.metal-head.org

www.songteksten.nl

www.lyricsres.com

www.lyricsdepot.com

www.songtextemania.com

www.lyricsboy.com

www.elyricsworld.com

www.e-chords.com

www.popdust.com

www.hotnewsonglyrics.co

www.anysonglyrics.com

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http://www.billboard.com/biz/article...p-genius-among





Booming Unauthorized Mobile File-sharing Opens Up Big Risks

As far as mobile habit statistics go, the fact that most employees (81%) access work documents on the go is far from shocking. But unfortunately, most companies don’t provide an enterprise-grade file sharing alternative, so 72% of those workers are resorting to unauthorized, free file-sharing services, according to a new report released by Workshare.

The company’s Workforce Mobilization report showed that users are increasingly circumventing policies set by IT departments and using unsanctioned applications to share large files and collaborate on documents outside of the office. That in turn raises major concerns over the security of corporate documents and personal information, and highlights the challenges facing IT when it comes to enabling mobility while ensuring data governance and mitigating risk.

The results are trending in the wrong direction too: that 72% that had not received authorization from their IT department to use a consumer-based file sharing application is up from 66% in 2012. The trend has snowballed in some industries, especially in the financial and healthcare industries, where 91% and 80% of employees, respectively, access documents on the move.

The majority (69%) of mobile file-sharers also use free services to collaborate and access shared documents, which is a 3% increase over the last year. Employees working in legal and professional services (88%) and financial services (78%) report the highest usage of free services, followed by healthcare (55%), creative sectors (66%) and government (42%).

Within these organizations, those working in sales (78%) and legal (78%) departments were the most likely to use free file sharing applications.

The issue is only exacerbated by the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend: more than half (62%) of knowledge workers use their personal devices for work. BYOD is especially prevalent in legal (77%), sales (76%), and marketing (72%) departments. Employees in administrative roles are the least likely to use their own device for work purposes, with only 18% stating that they use their mobile device or tablet for work.

“By 2015, most very large enterprises will have to provide more structured and formalized support for employees who elect to use personal mobile devices for work – including smartphones and tablet PCs,” said Brownlee Thomas, Forrester Research, in a statement. “We [have] learned that supporting more types of mobile devices and platforms will be a critical or high priority during the next 12 months for 73% of firms with 5,000-plus employees, and also for 67% of firms with 1,000 to 4,999 employees.”

In the Workshare survey, larger companies, with more than 20,000 employees, had a greater grasp of data security issues around file-sharing applications. In contrast, companies with fewer than 500 employees had a much lower proportion (24%) of employees using authorized file sharing solutions.
http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com...-up-big-risks/





Malware Analysts Say Breaches Are Not Being Disclosed by Their Employers

According to a recent study from ThreatTrack Security, nearly 6 in 10 malware analysts at U.S. enterprises have investigated or addressed a data breach that was never disclosed by their company.

These results indicate that known data breaches may be significantly underreported and are putting customers and partners at risk. Moreover, according the survey, companies with more than 500 employees are even more likely to have had an unreported breach, with 66% of malware analysts with enterprises of that size reporting undisclosed data breaches.

The independent blind survey of 200 security professionals dealing with malware analysis within U.S. enterprises was conducted by Opinion Matters on behalf of ThreatTrack Security in October 2013.

"While it is discouraging that so many malware analysts are aware of data breaches that enterprises have not disclosed, it is no surprise that the breaches are occurring," said ThreatTrack CEO Julian Waits, Sr. "Every day, malware becomes more sophisticated, and U.S. enterprises are constantly targeted for cyber espionage campaigns from overseas competitors and foreign governments. This study reveals that malware analysts are acutely aware of the threats they face, and while many of them report progress in their ability to combat cyber-attacks, they also point out deficiencies in resources and tools."

Outmanned, Outgunned and Out of Time

Not surprisingly, 40% of respondents said that one of the most difficult aspects of defending their organization's network was the fact that they don't have enough highly-skilled security personnel on staff.

According to the company, malware analysts often spend their time "tackling easily avoidable malware infections originating at the highest levels of their organization."

In the survey, malware analysts revealed a device used by a member of their senior leadership team had become infected with malware due to executives:

• Visiting a pornographic website (40%)

• Clicking on a malicious link in a phishing email (56%)

• Allowing a family member to use a company-owned device (45%)

• Installing a malicious mobile app (33%)

When asked to identify the most difficult aspects of defending their companies' networks from advanced malware, 67% said the complexity of malware is a chief factor; 67% said the volume of malware attacks; and 58% cited the ineffectiveness of anti-malware solutions.

More than half (52%) of all malware analysts said it typically takes them more than 2 hours to analyze a new malware sample. Conversely, only 4% said they are capable of analyzing a new malware sample in less than an hour, with 35% saying they did not have access to an automated malware analysis solution.

The study asked also malware analysts for their opinions on government-sponsored cyber espionage. 37% of respondents said the U.S. is the country most adept at conducting cyber espionage. China was a close second at 33%.
http://www.securityweek.com/malware-...heir-employers





Don't Expect Data on P2P Networks to be Private, Judge Rules

Defendants claimed that searching for files on their computers violated Fourth Amendment rights
Jaikumar Vijayan

There can be no expectation of privacy in data exposed to the Internet over a peer-to-peer file-sharing network, a federal judge in Vermont ruled in a case involving three individuals charged with possession of child pornography.

The three men had argued that police illegally gathered information from their computers using an automated P2P search tool and then used that information to obtain probable cause warrants for searching their computers. Each of the defendants was later charged with possession of child pornography based on evidence seized from their computers.

In a motion filed earlier this year, defendants Derek Thomas, Douglas Neale and Stephan Leikert asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont to suppress the evidence, claiming it had been obtained illegally.

The defendants contended that the initial use of the automated P2P search tool to gather information on the contents of their computers, constituted a warrantless search of their systems. They maintained that police violated Fourth Amendment provisions against unreasonable search by looking at private files on each of their systems using the P2P search tool.

They also argued that several of the statements made by investigators to show probable cause for the search warrants were based on incorrect information.

In a 39-page ruling released Friday, District Court Judge Christina Reiss denied the motion to suppress and held that the defendants had essentially given up privacy claims by making the data publicly available on the Internet over a P2P network.

"The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that the only information accessed was made publicly available by the IP address or the software it was using," Reiss wrote. "Accordingly, either intentionally or inadvertently, through the use of peer-to-peer file sharing software, Defendants exposed to the public the information they now claim was private."

The ruling is similar to ones reached by other courts in disputes involving documents exposed on the Internet via peer-to-peer networks. Courts in the 11th Circuit, 10th Circuit and 8th Circuit have all held that there can be no expectation of privacy if the contents of a computer can be accessed freely over the public Internet via a file sharing network.

Law blog FourthAmendment.com was the first to report the judge's ruling in the case.

Thomas, Neale and Leikert were arrested and indicted last year in a federal and state law enforcement operation named "Operation Greenwave," that targeted people who use peer-to-peer file sharing networks to distribute child pornography.

As part of the operation, investigators used a suite of software tools, collectively known as the Child Protection System, from privately held TLO LLC, to conduct automated searches for files containing images of child porn on P2P networks. The system allowed investigators to search multiple file-sharing networks using query terms commonly associated with such files.

When a computer on any of the networks responded with a query-hit message indicating it had a file matching the query term, the software recorded the IP address, hash values of the files, the actual file names, date and time of response and other details of the computer. The hit message identified files on a particular system that matched the query terms and were available for download by other users on the same P2P network.

The software allowed investigators to automate the process of sending out queries and receiving search results. It even allowed them to filter results in such a manner as to ensure that the only hits returned were from IP addresses within each investigator's jurisdiction.

The searches showed that computers belonging to the three defendants contained files with digital signatures that exactly matched files that were known to contain images depicting the exploitation of children. Investigators used this information to obtain the probable cause search warrants that eventually led to the arrest and indictments of the three individuals.

In rejecting the motion to suppress the evidence, Reiss noted that the automated search tool had not opened or downloaded any of the files on the defendants' computers. All the tool did was identify files that the defendants themselves had made publicly available for download on the Internet via a P2P network.

The fact that the tool used to conduct the search was proprietary or automated does not make a difference, the judge ruled. The same results would have ensued if investigators had conducted the searches manually.

"This software is designed to replace the searches that were previously done manually by law enforcement and the public. The software reports information that is discoverable by the general public using publicly available P2P software," the judge said. There was nothing in the evidence or the arguments presented by the defense to show that the tool had somehow accessed private files that were not meant for sharing, she said.

Pointing to previous rulings in similar cases, the judge noted that even if the defendants had meant to keep the files private, the fact that they were publicly accessible negated any expectations of privacy. "Defendants conveyed certain information to the public when they used peer-topeer file sharing software and made certain files available for sharing," she wrote.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...te_judge_rules





Netflix and YouTube Dominate Online Video. Can Amazon Catch Up?
Joshua Brustein

Wondering what other people are doing on the Internet? More likely than not they’re watching something on Netflix (NFLX) or YouTube (GOOG). Measured by bytes, the two sites now make up more than half of Internet traffic in the U.S, according to Sandvine’s latest Global Internet Phenomena Report pdf) using data from September.

Video always dominates these traffic surveys because of the vast amount of information required. Last year, for instance, Netflix and YouTube made up 47.8 percent of total downstream traffic (what people are consuming rather than creating). This year the duo crossed the halfway point, hitting 50.3 percent. Netflix lost a bit of ground, while YouTube ticked up, but the rest of the online video pack sure doesn’t seem to be gaining much ground on the leaders.

Notably lagging are two other widely discussed video services: Hulu and Amazon (AMZN). Both companies are slipping from their already lowly traffic numbers: Amazon accounted for 1.6 percent of total downstream traffic in September, compared with an average of 1.75 percent in the second half of 2012. For Hulu, meanwhile, September’s 1.29 percent came up short of the 1.38 percent it captured last year.

This mammoth disparity is a way to set the stage for what should be a big week for Amazon’s video streaming service, which is releasing its first original television series. Starting Friday, the first three episodes of Alpha House about several boozy lawmakers sharing a house in Washington, will be available to Amazon Prime subscribers (and the pilot is already available online.)

Lavishly financing the production of an original drama about Washington politics in a bid to lure new subscribers sounds like a familiar strategy. House of Cards was the first show in Netflix’s foray into original content, and it seems to be working. Netflix told investors that each subsequent show it launches has more viewers in the first week than the last. Richard Greenfield, an analyst with BTIG, a New York institutional broker, singled out original content as a major reason that Netflix viewers have been streaming more shows and movies.

Another interesting tidbit from the traffic report: File sharing is losing ground. BitTorrent, the dominant file-sharing technology, accounted for only 7.4 percent of total traffic in September, down from more than 10 percent last year, and file sharing as a whole has dropped from 31 percent of traffic in 2008 to less than 10 percent today. If you want to argue that legal alternatives are the best way to cut down on piracy, this seems like a pretty compelling statistic.

More legal options are coming. Netflix currently spends less than 10 percent of its content acquisition budget on original content but recently said it could see that doubling over time. Last week it said it would produce several new shows based on characters from Marvel Comics (DIS).

Netflix said last month it has more than 30 million subscribers. Amazon doesn’t reveal how many people have subscribed to Prime, but R.J. Hottovy, an analyst at Morningstar (MORN), said that Prime had 10 million customers and accounted for one-third of Amazon’s operating income.

Not every Prime subscriber is even interested in watching online video, but Amazon’s chief financial officer, Thomas Szkutak, told investors this summer that streaming video was a major factor in inspiring new customers to pay the $79 subscription fee for its Prime service, which also offers free two-day shipping and the ability to borrow Kindle content. Even as it insists it is making progress with streaming, Prime’s distinguishing feature continues to be moving boxes. Exhibit A: Amazon’s new Sunday delivery option through the U.S. Postal Service.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles...mazon-catch-up





Bill Would Give Netflix, Hulu and Aero Same Access to Programs That Cable Firms Have
Cecilia Kang and Hayley Tsukayama

As consumers increasingly turn to the Internet for their television, members of Congress are looking for ways to support the trend and encourage industry competition.

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) introduced a bill Tuesday that could greatly expand the video libraries of online services such as Netflix, Hulu and Aereo, giving them the same access to programs that cable and satellite firms are guaranteed today.

A growing movement is underway to help highly plugged-in Americans step away from technology.

That means an Internet service such as YouTube would be able to negotiate deals to distribute live sports and network prime-time shows such as “Scandal” by paying the same sorts of licensing fees that cable and satellite operators give to local broadcasters.

Analysts say the proposal will face steep challenges from the power lobbying arms of cable firms, which hope to maintain the industry’s bundling model.

No vote has been scheduled, and industry observers doubt the bill will advance during a time of congressional gridlock. Some lawmakers will point to the surge in online video viewing as evidence of markets working well without new government rules.

“We don’t need another layer of regulation when we already have mountains of red tape covering the marketplace,” said Adam Thierer, a senior research fellow at the free-market think tank Mercatus Center.

The growing importance of these Web-based entertainment providers was highlighted this week in a new report showing that half of all broadband Internet traffic in North America comes from YouTube and Netflix. YouTube also dominates mobile Internet video traffic, according to the report from Sandvine, a broadband research firm.

Netflix alone has 30 million subscribers in the United States — almost 10 million more than the biggest cable television operator, Comcast.

But there are still many programs a consumer can get only through cable or satellite firms. Rockefeller said too many powerful cable and media firms are trying to edge out new online rivals through anticompetitive means.

His bill is the latest legislative effort by to wade into the complex marketplace for entertainment, which is pitting giant corporations from a variety of industries — cable, phone, Internet, media, retail — against one another to win viewers’ eyeballs. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) co-sponsored a bill in July that would force cable and telecom television providers to offer subscribers the ability to pick and choose which channels they want.

The lawmakers criticize the tight partnerships between cable firms and media companies designed to force fat cable bundles on viewers. They say consumers should be able to just pay for the videos they want to watch.

“We have all heard the familiar complaint that we have five hundred channels, but there is nothing to watch,” Rockefeller said in a statement. “My legislation aims to enable the ultimate a la carte — to give consumers the ability to watch the programming they want to watch, when they want to watch it, how they want to watch it, and pay only for what they actually watch.”

He said online video services need the same kind of help that satellite providers received from Congress in the 1990s. With laws that guaranteed satellite providers certain programs and access to markets, that industry was able to compete with cable firms.

The proposal sets ground rules for how media firms and online video services reach “carriage agreements,” which determine when and how online video companies can offer certain shows and movies in their catalogs. It would make the Federal Communications Commission a stronger watchdog over the practices of broadband and cable firms.

Broadband providers wouldn’t be able to restrict Internet access to online videos from competitors and couldn’t manipulate data traffic in a way that the quality of streaming videos is degraded, according to the bill.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...6d4_story.html





Millions in U.S. Still Lack Internet Access
Andrea Peterson

Sixty-three years old and retired from a career as a welder, Jim Crawford doesn’t have much use for the Internet.

“I never had to use it on the job and didn’t have to use it at home for any reason,” said Crawford, who lives in Manhattan, Kan. “So I never really learned to do it — and never really got interested.”

The only time he goes online is to read through the automotive listings in the office of a local online auction company. If he sees something he likes, he says, he asks his mechanic to bid on it for him.

Crawford is far from alone: About 15 percent of Americans older than 18 don’t use the Internet, according to a study released in September by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. An additional 9 percent use it only outside the home.

They make up a shrinking, but not insignificant, segment of the population. And the gap between them and our increasingly digitized society is growing wider every day.

“There is a group of Americans being left behind as technology advances without them,” Lawrence E. Strickling, head of the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, told an audience at the Brookings Institution recently. “Americans who don’t have access to the Internet are increasingly cut off from job opportunities, educational resources, health-care information, social networks, even government services.”

These people are being left out even as access to broadband — Internet service provided by cable, fiber, DSL and other high-speed networks, as opposed to the older, slower dial-up service — has expanded dramatically in the past 20 years. Because of a national infrastructure upgrade that Strickling compares to the rural electrification effort of the 1930s, well over 90 percent of U.S. households are either wired for high-speed broadband or can get high-speed wireless access.

But actual adoption of that service lags behind availability: In 2011, the most recent year for which data are available, the NTIA found that 69 percent of homes used broadband Internet service. That’s remarkable growth from 2000, when only 4 percent of homes used broadband, but it still indicates a significant gap.

Who’s offline?

So who are these Americans who remain disconnected from the online world?

“They are disproportionately older,” says Kathryn Zickuhr, who wrote the Pew study. According to the survey, which was done in May, 9 percent of non-Internet users are older than 65.

They also are, in general, less educated. Although nearly everyone in the United States with a college degree is online, 41 percent of adults without a high school diploma are offline.

The digital divide linked to household income is less extreme but still substantial. Nearly a quarter of adults in households making less than $30,000 per year don’t use the Internet, the survey showed, as opposed to fewer than 1 in 20 adults in households with annual incomes above $75,000.

There also are racial disparities — particularly when it comes to Internet use at home. Seventy-nine percent of whites surveyed by Pew used the Internet at home vs. 70 percent of African Americans and 63 percent of Hispanics. Urban and suburban Americans are more likely than rural residents to be online at home.

The Pew survey asked these people why they don’t go online. Perhaps surprisingly, cost wasn’t the most common answer.

The most prevalent reason, given by 34 percent of offline respondents, was that the Internet is not relevant to them. Like Jim Crawford, they aren’t interested, don’t want to use it or have no need for it.

“Man, it just drives me nuts,” Crawford says of the young people he sees consumed by their smartphones. “It seems like all kids do is play on video games or the Internet and never go outside. That might be part of the reason I’m not interested in it — just seems like there’s so much else to do.”

A slightly smaller group, 32 percent, cited problems with using the technology: They said that getting online was difficult or frustrating, or that they were worried about issues such as privacy or hackers.

Nineteen percent of non-users cited concerns about the expense of owning a computer or paying for an Internet connection.

Daily disadvantages

Like Strickling, most policymakers would disagree with that sense of irrelevance. They point out that people who aren’t online have a harder time accessing vital services such as Medicare and Medicaid or the new health-care exchanges created under President Obama’s health-care law. They can’t perform useful daily functions that most Americans take for granted, such as looking up directions when traveling, using e-mail for speedy written correspondence, or being able to see and talk with faraway friends or relatives via Skype or FaceTime. They can’t easily search for competitive prices for housing, cars, appliances or other goods.

Perhaps most important, they are at a major disadvantage when looking for a job: NTIA statistics show that 73 percent of unemployed Internet users reported going online to look for work.

The Pew study found that only 14 percent of offline adults were previous Internet users. There’s good reason to believe if the rest of them tried it, they would find the service rewarding rather than irrelevant.

“We’ll hear anecdotally about seniors who start using Facebook or another site and how that lets them connect to younger generations, connect to their families, and connect to friends in different places,” she said. “A lot of seniors, for instance, will become more enthusiastic about using some online services once they see what exactly that could mean for them.”

Seeta Peña Gangadharan, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, described “intergenerational interactions between seniors who were timid and concerned about going online” and younger relatives. Seniors often rely on grandchildren to assist them, she says, then realize they need to learn how to use the technology themselves when those family members move away.

The technology institute studied a Philadelphia project called the Broadband Technology Opportunity Program that worked with local social service and community organizing groups to welcome offline adults “into online worlds in a way that really makes them comfortable.” Once these people started to get involved, she said, “users really did recognize the value of the Internet and they thought it was incredibly relevant to their lives.”

A program in the D.C. area funded by the AARP Foundation and administered by Family Matters of Greater Washington seemed to confirm that point. Using an established social service organization, it distributed iPads and offered computer classes as well as discounted home Internet service to seniors, many of whom had never been online . Two months into the pilot program this summer, only five of the original 55 participants had dropped out.

The advent of smartphones is also helping to narrow the Internet gap, says Lee Rainie, director of Pew’s Internet project. At a Washington Post forum last week, he said the relatively fast and inexpensive devices, which provide Internet connection via cellphone networks, have had a particularly positive effect on African American and Latino communities.

Learning to use the Internet isn’t going to solve everybody’s economic and social problems, Gangadharan cautions. “It’s both powerful and complex; it’s not like the magic wand of the Internet fairy comes and you’re instantly transformed.”

But she says that access and skills can have tremendously positive outcomes for former non-users when “learning how to apply for a job, how to create résumés, how to search for prospective employers . . . and reaching out to family members and friends in faraway places, which I think is a very important aspect of feeling connected to their communities.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...351_story.html





Yikes: Nearly 1 In 4 Adults Surf The Internet While Driving
Richard Read

Bad news for foes of distracted driving: a new survey from State Farm says the problem is getting worse, even though drivers know better.

In July 2013, the Annual State Farm Distracted Driving Survey polled 1,014 adults across the U.S., asking them about their behavior behind the wheel and their suggestions for addressing the problem of distracted driving.

The survey's most remarkable finding was that the number of motorists who access the internet (e.g. check email, surf websites, etc.) has nearly doubled over the past four years. In 2009, just 13 percent of motorists admitted that they'd accessed the internet while driving. In 2013, that figure had jumped to 24 percent.

The reason for the increase seems clear: more drivers are accessing the internet because increasingly ubiquitous smartphones have made doing so very, very easy. Over 80 percent of drivers under 50 now own a smartphone, and the numbers are edging upward, even among seniors. In 2011, for example, 23 percent of motorists 65 and older had smartphones; today, that figure hovers at 39 percent.

The good news is that older, experienced drivers are aware of distracted driving's dangers. In 2011, 61 percent of motorists 30 and older admitted to talking on a cell phone while driving. In 2013, that number had fallen to 55 percent. The figures for texting ticked up slightly among the 30+ demographic -- 32 percent admitted that they'd texted while driving in 2011 and 33 percent said they'd done the same in 2013 -- but that's nearly flat.

The bad news is that drivers 18 to 29 still don't get the message. In 2011, 68 percent of motorists in that age range said that they talked on a hand-held cell phone while driving; in 2013, that figure hit 76 percent. The figures for texting are just as grim: in 2011, 61 percent of drivers under 30 said that they'd texted from behind the wheel; in 2013, 70 percent said the same.

Of course, as with smoking, alcohol abuse, and other bad habits, distracted drivers know that what they're doing is wrong. In fact, 91 percent of those surveyed said they agreed either "strongly" (74 percent) or "somewhat" (17 percent) with a law or other measure that would prevent motorists from texting or emailing while driving. Whether such laws would have any effect on motorists' habits is up for debate, though: over half of all respondents said distracted driving laws currently on the books are rarely enforced.

OUR TAKE

It's comforting to see that motorists 30 and over get the message about distracted driving. However, those 29 and younger are still a problem spot, and that spot is only going to get bigger as smartphones become the only option for cell phone owners. (And let's not even think about the subject of wearable tech.)

Handset makers: now might be a good time to roll out "car mode". Or maybe an autonomous car? Please?
http://www.thecarconnection.com/news...ving#src=10065





IBM to Announce More Powerful Watson Via the Internet
Quentin Hardy

Welcome to the age of supercomputing for everyone.

On Thursday IBM will announce that Watson, the computing system that beat all the humans on “Jeopardy!” two years ago, will be available in a form more than twice as powerful via the Internet.

Companies, academics and individual software developers will be able to use it at a small fraction of the previous cost, drawing on IBM’s specialists in fields like computational linguistics to build machines that can interpret complex data and better interact with humans.

IBM’s move to make its marquee technology more widely available is the latest effort among big technology companies to make the world’s most powerful computers as accessible as the Angry Birds video game.

It is also an indication of how quickly the technology industry is changing, from complex systems that cost millions to install to pay-as-you-go deals that provide small companies and even individuals access to technology that just a few years ago only the largest companies could afford.

“The next generation will look back and see 2013 as a year of monumental change,” said Stephen Gold, vice president of the Watson project at IBM.

“This is the start of a shift in the way people interact with computers.”

IBM is wielding Watson in a fight to control the world of cloud computing — huge collections of computer servers connected over the Internet — with other big technology companies like Amazon.com, Google and Microsoft. It is no coincidence that IBM discussed its Watson news the same week Amazon was hosting clients at a conference here to pitch its own computing cloud, called Amazon Web Services or A.W.S.

The competition is still young, but its impact will be significant.

“Companies, governments and people will struggle to figure out what to do with all this,” said Jamie Popkin, an analyst with the research company Gartner. “It means there is going to be a new pace and velocity, making people rethink when humans make decisions, while machines make other decisions.”

Watson, a project on which IBM spent 14 years, is an artificial learning system that digests large volumes of information to find hidden meanings. Initial uses — besides besting humans on game shows — include examining medical patients and records to find an unexpected diagnosis, a bit like the genius portrayed in the television show “House.” Other uses include an online personal shopper and a virtual health aide that tailors exercises by asking questions.

IBM is opening Watson to more people in part to see what additional businesses might be created.

Watson is prominent, but similar projects are being run by other companies. On Tuesday, a company appearing at the Amazon conference said it had run in 18 hours a project on Amazon’s cloud of computer servers that would have taken 264 years on a single server.

The project, related to finding better materials for solar panels, cost $33,000, compared with an estimated $68 million to build and run a similar computer just a few years ago. Akin more to conventional supercomputing than Watson’s question-and-answer cognitive computing, the project was the first of several announced at the Amazon conference.

“It’s now $90 an hour to rent 10,000 computers,” the equivalent of a giant machine that would cost $4.4 million, said Jason Stowe, the chief executive of Cycle Computing, the company that did the Amazon supercomputing exercise, and whose clients include The Hartford, Novartis, and Johnson & Johnson. “Soon smart people will be renting a conference room to do some supercomputing.”

While revenues of Amazon’s cloud business are still small enough that the company does not have to disclose them, Amazon officials say Jeff Bezos, the company’s chief executive, believes A.W.S. could eventually dwarf Amazon’s businesses in books and merchandise, enterprises with $51 billion in revenue. This year, Gartner calculated that A.W.S. had five times the computing power of 14 other cloud computing companies, including IBM, combined.

Since then, IBM has spent an estimated $2 billion to acquire a cloud company called SoftLayer and has reconfigured Watson as a cloud product. It also hired buses that drove around the A.W.S. conference in Las Vegas, sporting ads that said they showed its superiority in cloud computing.

Besides gaining bragging rights and a much bigger customer base, IBM may be accelerating the growth of Watson’s power by putting it in the cloud. Mr. Gold said that Watson would retain learning from each customer interaction, gaining the ability to do things like interacting in different languages or identifying human preferences. IBM has taken steps to keep these improvements for its own benefit, by retaining rights in user agreements that customers are required to sign.

What is not yet clear is IBM’s plan to make money from taking Watson to the computing cloud. The company is experimenting with charging for data storage, or selling computing on a metered basis, like water or electricity. “There is no question the model will change,” Mr. Gold said. “You have to have flexibility to handle the breadth of cases we expect to see.”

It is likely that the competition among advanced computing systems will increase, lowering prices and delivering more capabilities to whatever use companies make of them.

This year, Google and a corporation associated with NASA acquired for study an experimental computer that appears to make use of quantum properties to deliver results sometimes 3,600 times faster than traditional supercomputers. The maker of the quantum computer, D-Wave Systems of Burnaby, British Columbia, counts Mr. Bezos as an investor.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/te...-internet.html





Conservatives Erase Internet History
Mark Ballard

The Conservative Party has attempted to erase a 10-year backlog of speeches from the internet, including pledges for a new kind of transparent politics the prime minister and chancellor made when they were campaigning for election.

Prime minister David Cameron and chancellor George Osborne campaigned on a promise to democratise information held by those in power, so people could hold them to account. They wanted to use the internet transform politics.

But the Conservative Party has removed the archive from its public facing website, erasing records of speeches and press releases going back to the year 2000 and up until it was elected in May 2010.

It also struck the record of their past speeches off internet engines including Google, which had been a role model for Cameron and Osborne's "open source politics".

And it erased the official record of their speeches from the Internet Archive, the public record of the net - with an effect as alarming as sending Men in Black to strip history books from a public library and burn them in the car park.

Sometime after 5 October, when Computer Weekly last took a snapshot of a Conservative speech from the Internet Archive, the Tory speech and news archive was eradicated.

Conservatives posted a robot blocker on their website, which told search engines and the Internet Archive they were no longer permitted to keep a record of the Conservative Party web archive.

The Internet Archive was unavailable for comment. But a fortnight after Computer Weekly started asking its San Francisco HQ for an explanation, the Conservative speeches have begun reappearing on its site.

CW had asked the Internet Archive to explain how the historic record of the lead party in the coalition that holds power in the UK could simply be erased.

The Conservative Party's robot blocker forced the Internet Archive to remove the entire record of speeches and news it had collected, in 1,158 snapshots it took of the Conservative website since 8 May 1999.

The Conservative bot blocker listed all the pages barred for public consumption thus (excerpt):

Disallow: /News/News_stories/2000/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2001/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2002/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2003/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2004/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2005/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2006/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2007/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2008/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2009/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2010/01/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2010/02/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2010/03/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2010/04/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2010/05/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2000/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2001/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2002/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2003/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2004/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2005/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2006/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2007/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2008/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2009/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2010/01/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2010/02/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2010/03/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2010/04/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2010/05/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2000/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2001/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2002/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2003/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2004/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2005/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2006/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2007/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2008/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2009/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2010/01/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2010/02/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2010/03/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2010/04/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2010/05/
For pages at these addresses, the Internet Archive reported: "Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt".

An administrator at the Internet Archive HQ in San Francisco said its guidance for lawyers explained the mechanism. That was that if a website, like Conservatives.com, put up a robot blocker, those pages it blocked would simply be erased from the record as a matter of etiquette.

The erasure had the effect of hiding Conservative speeches in a secretive corner of the internet like those that shelter the military, secret services, gangsters and paedophiles.

The Conservative Party HQ was unavailable for comment. A spokesman said he had referred the matter to a "website guy", who was out of the office.

It wasn't always going to be like this.

Such as when the prime minister first floated his groovy idea that the democratisation of information would transform politics, at the Google Zeitgeist Europe Conference, on 22 May 2006.

"You've begun the process of democratising the world's information," he told the Googlers. "Democratising is the right word to use because by making more information available to more people, you're giving them more power.

"Above all, the power for anyone to hold to account those who in the past might have had a monopoly of power - whether it's government, big business, or the traditional media," said Cameron, who was then campaigning for power as leader of the Conservative opposition.

Cameron was going to make sure the information revolution would hold people like prime ministers to account, he said another speech on 11 October 2007, at the Google Zeitgeist Conference in San Francisco.

"It's clear to me that political leaders will have to learn to let go," he said then. "Let go of the information that we've guarded so jealously."

Transparency would make public officials accountable to the people, said Cameron then. He was riding at the front of the wave that would wash us into a new world, and a new age.

Likewise the chancellor, who on delivering his landmark "Open Source Politics" speech at the Royal Society of Arts on 8 March 2007, declared his ambition was "to recast the political settlement for the digital age".

"We need to harness the Internet to help us become more accountable, more transparent and more accessible - and so bridge the gap between government and governed," said Osborne.

"The democratization of access to information... is eroding traditional power and informational imbalances.

"No longer is there an asymmetry of information between the individual and the state, or between the layperson and the expert," said the Chancellor when he was campaigning for election.

If the Conservative Party had moved its speeches and news archive to a more convenient location it had managed to do it in a way that hid it from the search engines. It might before long end up at the Oxford University's Bodleian Library, which keeps the official Conservative Party archive of really old stuff like speeches from the days before the internet.

The robot blocker - a robots.txt file - tells software bots run by sites like Google and the Internet Archive to bog off. The bots grab web pages for the benefit of plebs like those Cameron and Osborne claimed to be speaking for in those years before they were elected. The bots were what made the democratization of information possible. It was bots that inspired Cameron and Osborne. It was bots that were going to free us from serfdom in the way they said we would be. Without the bots you just had pockets of power and privilege for those in the know. Without the bots you just had the same old concentration of wealth and power there had always been, since long before the Internet Archive started taking snapshots of the Conservative website in 1999.
http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/...nternet-h.html





Sidestepping the Digital Demimonde
Melena Ryzik

In 1979, the photographer Lucian Perkins stumbled into a seminal moment in music history. He didn’t know it at the time, of course. He was 26, a photography intern at The Washington Post, when by chance he heard an emerging punk band, Bad Brains, playing above a Washington restaurant. Investigating, he found a roomful of teenagers dancing with sweaty abandon. “It was a cool scene that no one really knew about,” said Mr. Perkins, now a two-time Pulitzer winner, “and it piqued my interest to start documenting it.”

At makeshift clubs, his was habitually the only camera in the room. “He said, ‘Can I take your picture?,’ and I probably tried to look cool, as any 14-year-old would,” said Vivien Greene, whom Mr. Perkins captured in her bleached-blonde years. “But I was there for a show, not to be photographed.”

Those kinds of happenings — indie, cheap, frenetic — still take place today, at countless grungy spaces around the country, except there’s not one camera in the room but hundreds. Grotty basement shows, scavenged-art installations, far-flung site-specific performances: All are zoomed in on and shared, mapped and located, turning what were niche events into potential spectacles.

Word of mouth is instant, publicly broadcast over social media. The boundary around the mainstream is more porous now, changing the very definition of being underground.

“It really is an amazing transformation,” said Ross Haenfler, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Mississippi and the author of “Subcultures: The Basics,” published last month.

“You used to have to be really in the know,” he said. “If you’re at a certain punk show at CBGB’s, that had a certain cachet. If you had an original T-shirt from a first Metallica show, that is really something. You’d have to scour record bins to get an original pressing. Now all of that stuff is available via YouTube and eBay. It really changes the dynamic.”

By contrast, few of Mr. Perkins’s punk images were seen until decades later, when an assistant came across the unlabeled negatives in his archives. A book, “Hard Art, DC 1979,” published in June, reveals the origins of the movement that birthed the band Minor Threat and Dischord Records. If he had taken those same photos now, Mr. Perkins said, he would have posted them online right away. The underground culture that no one knew about, that had time to percolate and find its voice, might have instead been discovered tout de suite, with who knows what effect on its artistic output and reach.

Where once the counterculture prided itself on obscurity, now “the idea of being invisible is less seductive to people,” said Fred Ritchin, a professor of photography and imaging at New York University. “More and more things are done to be photographed. They don’t count unless they’re photographed.”

And it once took time for the mainstream to catch up to those images, “for Macy’s to carry a line of clothes that looked punk,” said Ms. Greene, the teenage D.C. punker, now a senior curator of early 19th- and 20th-century art at the Guggenheim Museum. “Now I think the cycles are much more abbreviated.”

Artists who transitioned from avant-garde to pop experienced the pressure of visibility firsthand.

“It was relatively easy,” said David Byrne, “back in the day, to work with only a smallish number of people watching, as we sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed.” In the mid-’70s, the early days of his band Talking Heads, “we felt comfortable trying out different things, songs that were quickly abandoned and stage wear that proved impractical,” he wrote in an email. “That’s all hugely important (the songs part anyway) as it allowed us to explore, refine our identity and go down those musical dead ends without the embarrassment of public scrutiny.”

Now, online exposure can make for an overnight viral sensation. But “it can also destroy and eliminate that crucial period of anonymity,” he said. “The Internet giveth, and the Internet taketh away.”

Artists who document life on the fringes have a bird’s-eye view of these changes. Tod Seelie, a Brooklyn photographer, has spent 15 years shooting in mosh pits and abandoned buildings, images collected in “Bright Nights: Photographs of Another New York,” published this month. It showcases a thriving outsiderness, which has lately become much less rarefied, in part because Mr. Seelie himself has been posting photos online since 2003.

Chroniclers of the underground have always existed. But the visual record, and the urge toward self-portraiture, has made a deeper mark. “People can sort of buy into an aesthetic easier when they have all these images available to them,” Dr. Haenfler said.

Mr. Seelie, 35, who grew up immersed in the punk scene around Cleveland and earned a degree in photography at the Pratt Institute, said his book was heavily inspired by Nan Goldin’s “Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” the 1980s visual diary of her downtown tribe. He lives economically but has few qualms about trading his DIY cred for traditional professional advancement. In his view, authenticity and making a living are not mutually exclusive. What was stigmatized in Mr. Seelie’s punk youth as selling out has been redefined, he said: “Instead of selling out it’s called becoming successful.”

That’s a major leap from the outlook of bohemia in generations past. “We wouldn’t have used the word ‘career,’ ” said the artist and educator Martha Rosler, who made her name in the 1970s. “That is one sure sign that things are changing.”

Mr. Byrne, in his email, noted that the decision, by musicians especially, to commercialize their work — licensing it for ads, for example — was less a creative decision than a pragmatic one, driven by the collapse of the music industry and other fields. “It’s hard to hold on to principles if you can’t pay the rent,” he said.

Self-promotion online may be the norm, but not all digital-age creators are prepared for recognition. Born in 1985, Mike Brodie, a.k.a. the Polaroid Kidd, first picked up a camera at 17, shortly before he hopped his first freight train. He rode away from his home in Pensacola, Fla., making it only as far as Jacksonville, snapping maybe five photos. He was hooked. For the next seven or so years, Mr. Brodie crisscrossed the country, living on trains, taking photos of his fellow hobos. On Polaroids and later 35 millimeter, they are artfully posed and romantically hued images of life on the smudgy social edges.

Naturally, Mr. Brodie put his photos online, uploading them to his website on public library computers and tracking their spread as he continued on the road. His portraits of defiant punks and blissed-out runaways, glimpses of a modern-day, tattooed Robert Frank America on the rails, quickly attracted notice. Soon the Polaroid Kidd had a gallery show and a $10,000 photography prize.

He was 22, and the attention freaked him out.

“I was like, ‘I’m not ready yet,’ ” he said. “My mind was still in the game of taking the pictures. If all of a sudden, I started to get in the art aspect of it and navigating that, it would’ve messed up what I was doing.” His rail-yard friends, too, were not enthused about having their lifestyle identified and enlarged.

He took his website down but returned to the trains, with a new sense of the weight of his work and an urgency about capturing his adventures before they, too, transformed. At the urging of a friend, a collection, “A Period of Juvenile Prosperity,” was published this year, with gallery exhibits in New York and Los Angeles. (Mr. Brodie reluctantly put up a new website.)

The vortex of Internet notoriety is impossible to ignore, Mr. Seelie said, and people who are serious about remaining underground must now keep themselves offline. (Mr. Seelie occasionally photographs events whose organizers ask him not to post the images.) At 28, Mr. Brodie has stopped riding trains and given up photography. He studied to be a diesel mechanic and is now apprenticing in Oakland, Calif.

He’s proud of his work but wishes he hadn’t put the photos online. ““It would’ve just been cool,” he said, adding: “A lot of people did take to riding trains after seeing the pictures online, and they wear the whole outfit, the suspenders and the hats with feathers in it, and don’t wash their pants for three months. More power to them.”

Mr. Seelie, too, did not bemoan the loss of exclusivity that the Internet affords. “People who are like, ‘I’m the only one that knows about this cool subculture’ — you’re a snob,” he said. “It’s kind of un-punk to be a snob.”

If renegade artists once stood in opposition, now they may welcome crossover. Mr. Byrne cautioned that commercial forces could still ghettoize artists, but “the breaking down of boundaries and definitions is indeed encouraging,” he said. “I love that part.”

And aided by technology, subcultures are expanding, Dr. Haenfler pointed out. There are more tools and inspiration, more examples of how to succeed on the margins, and so more people try. The net effect, though, is that it’s just as hard to be found.

The underground is closer to the surface now. But it takes an equal amount of resolve to dive in.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/ar...demimonde.html





Court: Homeland Security Must Disclose ‘Internet Kill Switch’

DHS protocol governs shutting down wireless networks to prevent bomb detonation
CJ Ciaramella

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) must disclose its plans for a so-called Internet “kill switch,” a federal court ruled on Tuesday.

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the agency’s arguments that its protocols surrounding an Internet kill switch were exempt from public disclosure and ordered the agency to release the records in 30 days. However, the court left the door open for the agency to appeal the ruling.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is seeking “Standard Operating Procedure 303,” also known as the “Internet kill switch” from Homeland Security. The protocols govern shutting down wireless networks to prevent the remote detonation of bombs.

The broad government power to shut down communications networks worries civil libertarians. However, the agency argues the protocols must be kept secret to protect national interests and the safety of individuals.

EPIC filed a FOIA request for the protocols in July 2012. The Department of Homeland Security originally said it could not find any records on the kill switch.

After EPIC appealed, the agency located the protocol, but redacted nearly all of the information. The agency cited exemptions that allow the withholding of information that could “disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions” or “could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual.”

The court said Homeland Security wrongly claimed that it could withhold Standard Operating Procedure 303 as a “technique for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions.”

The court also found that interpreting a safety exemption to “encompass possible harm to anyone anywhere in the United States within the blast radius of a hypothetical unexploded bomb also flies in the face of repeated Supreme Court direction to read FOIA exemptions narrowly.”

While the court rejected the agency’s broad interpretation of FOIA exemptions, it left the door open for further appeals by Homeland Security. The agency has 30 days to release the protocols to EPIC, but the court issued a 30-day additional stay on its opinion to allow the agency time to appeal.
http://freebeacon.com/court-homeland...t-kill-switch/





Surveillance Leaves Writers Wary
Noam Cohen

A survey by the writers’ organization PEN American Center has found that a large majority of its members are deeply concerned about recent revelations regarding the extent of government surveillance of email and phone records, with more than a quarter saying that they have avoided, or are seriously considering avoiding, controversial topics in their work.

The findings show that writers consider freedom of expression under threat in the United States, with 73 percent of respondents saying they have “never been as worried about privacy rights and freedom of the press as they are today.” The survey, to be released on Monday night, was conducted online with 528 PEN members from a membership of more than 6,000 fiction and nonfiction writers, editors, translators and agents.

Smaller percentages of those surveyed described already changing their day-to-day behavior: 28 percent said they had “curtailed or avoided activities on social media,” with another 12 percent saying they had seriously considered doing it; similar percentages said they had steered clear of certain topics in phone calls or email (24 percent had done so; 9 percent had seriously considered it).

Sixteen percent reported that they had avoided writing or speaking on a particular topic, with another 11 percent saying that they had seriously considered doing so.

In total, the results offer “signs of a chilling effect” from the details disclosed by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden, said the PEN American Center’s executive director, Suzanne Nossel. “Writers are kind of the canary in the coal mine in that they depend on free expression for their craft and livelihood,” she said.

The survey took pains to test that premise, asking the same question that appeared in surveys by the Pew Research Center of the public’s attitude toward the surveillance revelations. Among writers, 66 percent said they disapproved of “the government’s collection of telephone and Internet data as part of antiterrorism efforts,” compared with 44 percent of the general public.

The survey, conducted in October by the FDR Group, does not necessarily reflect the views of all writers in the United States. Members of PEN without an email address and those who do not regularly check their email are not represented. One PEN member, the literary biographer Charles J. Shields, said he was among the 16 percent who avoided a specific writing topic — in his case, the history of civil defense in the United States, with its talk of mass casualties and “dirty bombs” — fearing their research would set off alarms.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/12/bo...g-members.html





How Silicon Valley Helped the NSA
Abraham Newman

Last month, Silicon Valley purported to be shocked by revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) has routinely accessed the servers of tech giants Google and Yahoo, which store data for hundreds of millions of users. In response, the companies pledged to step up privacy protections.

There is only one problem: Such protections run counter to the business model and public policy agenda that tech companies have pursued for decades. For years, U.S. information technology (IT) firms have actively backed weak privacy rules that let them collect massive amounts of personal data. The strategy enabled the companies to work their way into every corner of consumers’ lives and gave them a competitive edge internationally. Those same policies, however, have come back to haunt IT firms. Lax rules created fertile ground for NSA snooping. In the wake of the surveillance scandals, as consumer confidence plummets, technology companies’ economic futures are threatened.

Since the 1990s, companies from Google to Yahoo and Microsoft have done their best to ward off national privacy rules, calling instead for self-regulation. Early attempts to pass privacy laws, such as the Online Privacy Protection Act in 2000, died thanks to lobbying by the Direct Marketing Association and the Information Technology Association of America, which represent most of the country’s major information and communications technology firms. The firms have stood behind an older 1997 government framework, “Privacy and Self-Regulation in the Information Age,” which maintained that the best way to protect consumers was to let the technology market handle sensitive issues on its own.

More recent efforts at reform have stalled as well. Bills have included the Do Not Track Me Online Act of 2011, brought by Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D–Calif.), a new Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights of 2011, brought by then Senator John Kerry (D–Mass.) and Senator John McCain (R–Ariz.), and the Do Not Track Online Act of 2011, brought by Senator Jay Rockefeller (D–W. Va.). Each has faced stiff opposition from the IT industry. Linda Woolley, vice president of the Direct Marketing Association, has even gone so far as to argue that such legislation would “kill the Internet.”

For its part, the Obama administration has seemed all too happy to go along with this self-regulatory agenda, recently putting forward a set of best practices known as a “privacy bill of rights.” The rights range from transparency about how data is used to better security for the data that is collected. Yet barring congressional action (which seems unlikely), these codes will never become mandatory. For now, they are simply another recommendation for companies to take under advisement as they build their own policies for personal-data management.

U.S. Internet companies have also backed lax privacy rules outside of the United States. Under the auspices of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, a regional trade organization linking the economies of North America and Asia, Google has actively campaigned for a new privacy framework for all member countries. In contrast to Europe’s legally enforceable privacy rights for consumers, the APEC guidelines once again stress self-regulation and internal solutions, such as codes of conduct based on principles similar to those in the Obama privacy bill of rights.

The APEC framework would allow companies to transfer personal information around the globe, following only their internal codes of conduct rather than national privacy legislation. Supporters of the APEC plan suggest that it could serve as an alternative to the European privacy rules, which impose strict legal restrictions on such international data transmissions. Meanwhile, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook have also lobbied heavily within Europe to weaken EU standards, specifically those relating to cross-border data transfers, transnational cloud computing, and data breaches. Their efforts have been so aggressive that a group of European nongovernmental organizations recently called on U.S. IT companies to stay out of EU legislative affairs.

Until this year, the self-regulation strategy paid off: With their nearly unrestricted access to U.S. consumer data, IT companies were able to mine information in ways that many of their European competitors could never imagine. For example, Acxiom, one of the major direct marketing companies in online advertising, developed software called “Audience Operating System,” which allows companies such as Facebook to link consumers’ online and offline data -- from credit card purchases to web interests -- even when those consumers use different names for each activity.

What has become all too clear, though, is that what was good for Google was also good for the NSA, which could use the lax rules and resulting hoards of data to its own advantage. The public is aware of that now, and it will be less trusting of IT giants in the future, especially as the companies develop technologies that increase the amount and types of personal information that they can collect. Take Google Glass, which will digitize our visual experiences, creating a whole new world of personal data based on what we are looking at in real time.

To regain consumer confidence and ensure their economic fortunes, technology firms will have to transform the way they view the regulation of personal information. Self-regulation is necessary but not sufficient. A better privacy system would have four key parts. First, consumers need an advocate that can help them navigate the overly complex and technical world of information technology. Something like the European data privacy offices would be a good start. Independent agencies offer individuals a point of contact and help in responding to data breaches or abuses. They also focus on working with governments and industry to build technology that takes privacy and security into account.

Second, Congress should pass national data-breach legislation. Such rules, which have already been passed in California, require companies to notify consumers when their data has been lost or stolen. By giving individuals notices when their data has been compromised -- and naming the companies responsible -- these rules raise awareness about the amount of information in circulation and the risks associated with its use. By mobilizing consumers, data-breach rules build a constituency that can push companies to take privacy and security seriously.

Third, much as energy companies have had to reconfigure their attitudes about natural resources, IT companies must change their attitudes toward consumer information. Far from a limitless good that can be exploited forever, personal data is precious and requires good husbandry. Firms, then, need to find ways to limit unnecessary data collection and integrate privacy and consumer stakeholders into their business models. Privacy by Design, an initiative that helps raise privacy concerns at each stage of a technology’s lifecycle, offers one concrete example of how firms might do this. Rather than thinking of themselves as data vacuums (as the NSA does), IT companies should build a system of data stewardship. Doing so will make good business sense: The trustworthy companies will sell more products.

Finally, U.S. IT firms need to play a constructive role in building a global framework for the protection of personal information. This model should not seek to undermine strong privacy rules, such as those in Europe, but extend the lessons learned from the best privacy policies around the globe. This approach would promote technological innovation over the long term: New products such as Google Glass will be better received if consumers do not think that they will misuse the data that they collect. In the end, constructing a better privacy system will not only help the IT sector grow, but it is also the right thing to do.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articl...ivacy-pretense





NSA Transparency Hurts Americans’ Privacy, Feds Say With Straight Face
David Kravets

Adding limited public accountability to the NSA’s vast electronic spying programs would actually harm the privacy of Americans, Obama administration officials told a Senate hearing today.

A subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning debated legislation that would force the government to release statistics on how many Americans have had their data scooped into various spy programs exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The legislation, proposed by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota), requires annual disclosure of the number of Americans whose information was collected, even if they were not the direct targets of the surveillance. The Surveillance Transparency Act would also allow internet companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and others to divulge the number of their users targeted under the programs.

The measure comes amid fierce debate over two other legislative proposals: one to legally strengthen the NSA’s snooping authority, and the other to dramatically reduce it.

Robert Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Bradford Wiegmann, deputy assistant attorney general, told the Committee on Privacy, Technology and the Law today that it would have a “privacy diminishing effect” if intelligence officials were forced to review every piece of data vacuumed up under its internet and phone surveillance programs.

“Attempting to identify the numbers of persons or U.S. persons whose communications or information may be incidentally collected would, in practice, have a privacy-diminishing effect directly contrary to the aims of this bill,” they testified in a joint, written statement.

“Attempting to make this determination would require the intelligence community to research and review personally identifying information solely for the purpose of complying with the reporting requirements, even if the information has not been determined to contain foreign intelligence,” they argued. “Such an effort would conflict with our efforts to protect privacy.”

Litt, while addressing the panel, added that such a requirement “would perversely” undermine privacy.

Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney with the Center for Democracy and Technology, told the Senate panel that the administration’s position “doesn’t make sense to me.”

“The privacy has already been violated,” he said.

Among other things, Franken’s measure requires the government to disclose annually the number of Americans whose phone metadata has been acquired by the NSA.

Snowden revealed in June that the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has been ordering phone companies to hand over a wealth of information to the NSA on every call made to, from and within the United States. The metadata includes the phone numbers of both parties involved in all calls, the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) number for mobile callers, calling card numbers used in the call, and the time and duration of the calls. The content of the calls is not collected.

The government said in court documents that it queried the database in 2012 using “300 unique identifiers” searching for terrorist activity under a standard of “reasonable, articulable suspicion.”

Franken’s measure also requires the same type of disclosure about the government’s so-called PRISM program, in which the authorities obtain customer data from internet companies. The data — authorized to be collected by secret orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — includes audio, video, photos, emails and documents, as well as connection logs.

“There is no question the American people need more information about these types of programs,” Franken said.

Franken’s package also would allow tech companies to divulge the number of secret court orders they received and complied with, and the number of users whose information was produced. The companies, who have been lobbying for this right, are legally gagged from disclosing this information. They say lifting the veil of secrecy could show their customers that they have not opened a data spigot to the NSA.

“I think we need some reform to allow the user to know that the intelligence community and the collection of data is rule bound,” Richard Salgado, a Google lawyer, testified to the committee.

Moments before, he said the legislation was “essential to make sure the users have confidence in their ability to place their data with us.”

Litt countered, saying the companies should remain gagged.

“The more detail we provide out there, the more easy it becomes for our adversaries to talk, and where not to talk,” he said.

The hearing came two weeks after the Senate Intelligence Committee sent to the full Senate a measure that would give congressional blessing to the NSA’s bulk collection of domestic telephone metadata, and bolster the legal underpinnings of the controversial snooping program. A Senate vote on the pro-spying bill by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) has not been set.

The Feinstein proposal sets the stage for a major legislative battle with a competing measure – sponsored by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) — which prohibits the phone metadata collection program that the secret court first authorized in 2006. That measure, the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-collection, and Online Monitoring Act” has not had a committee hearing.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...arency-effect/





Author Of The PATRIOT Act Goes To EU Parliament To Admit Congress Failed, And The NSA Is Out Of Control
Mike Masnick

It's already strange enough that the author of the PATRIOT Act, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, has come out strongly against the NSA's mass spying, said that James Clapper should be fired and prosecuted, and introduced sweeping new legislation that would significantly curtail the NSA's activities. If you've followed civil liberties issues over the past dozen years or so, Sensenbrenner used to be very much in the camp of folks like Rep. Mike Rogers and Senator Dianne Feinstein -- seen as carrying water for the intelligence community (and industry). The change of heart (even if he claims the original PATRIOT Act was never meant to allow this stuff) is quite impressive.

Even so, it's perhaps even more incredible to see that Sensenbrenner has now gone over to the EU Parliament to admit that the NSA is out of control and needs to be reined in. While it doesn't sound like he got all the way to a complete apology, he appears to have come pretty close. According to Bridget Johnson's writeup at the PJ Tatler:

Sensenbrenner told the EU parliamentarians that “Congress knew the country needed new tools and broader authorities to combat those who meant to harm us, but we never intended to allow the National Security Agency to peer indiscriminately into the lives of innocent people all over the world.”

Sensenbrenner noted that he “worked under strict time constraints” to forge the Patriot Act and get it passed.

“I firmly believe the Patriot Act saved lives by strengthening the ability of intelligence agencies to track and stop potential terrorists, but in the past few years, the National Security Agency has weakened, misconstrued and ignored the civil liberty protections we drafted into the law,” he said, adding that the NSA “ignored restrictions painstakingly crafted by lawmakers and assumed a plenary authority we never imagined.”

“Worse, the NSA has cloaked its operations behind such a thick cloud of secrecy that, even if the NSA promised reforms, we would lack the ability to verify them.”

Sensenbrenner said the “constant stream of disclosures about US surveillance since June has surprised and appalled me as much as it has the American public and our international allies.”


Sensenbrenner promised more strict oversight from Congress, but also noted (realistically) that Congress's authority is mostly limited to domestic spying -- and that the US government needed to work more closely with foreign governments concerning foreign spying. Given who's saying it, this is a rather startling statement.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...-control.shtml
















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