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Old 10-09-14, 07:40 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 13th, '14

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"You make the most off your ticket receipts and T-shirts. Now the sexy thing is 'How many T-shirts did you sell,' not records. No one talks about records." – Duff McKagan, Guns N’ Roses


"U2 had zero albums on the iTunes chart the day before Tuesday's Apple event." – Brian Anthony Hernandez


"No one wants to have 300 channels on your wireless device. It will go to a la carte." – Lowell McAdam






































September 13th, 2014




Gene Simmons Says Rock Is Dead. Gene Simmons Is Wrong.
Mike Tuttle

Kiss founder and co-frontman, Gene Simmons, is a businessman. It’s as simple as that. He will do and say almost anything to protect and promote his investments and properties. So when Gene Simmons says something authoritative, outlandish or controversial, you have to take it with a palmful of Kosher salt.

Recently, in an interview with Esquire magazine, and interview conducted by his son, Nick, Gene Simmons made the summary statement that Rock music is dead.

“ ‘Don’t quit your day job’ is a good piece of advice. When I was coming up, it was not an insurmountable mountain. Once you had a record company on your side, they would fund you, and that also meant when you toured they would give you tour support. There was an entire industry to help the next Beatles, Stones, Prince, Hendrix, to prop them up and support them every step of the way. There are still record companies, and it does apply to pop, rap, and country to an extent. But for performers who are also songwriters — the creators — for rock music, for soul, for the blues — it’s finally dead.

“Rock is finally dead.”

And what killed rock? According to Simmons, file-sharing.

“The death of rock was not a natural death. Rock did not die of old age. It was murdered. And the real culprit is that kid’s 15-year-old next-door neighbor, probably a friend of his. Maybe even one of the bandmates he’s jamming with. The tragedy is that they seem to have no idea that they just killed their own opportunity — they killed the artists they would have loved. Some brilliance, somewhere, was going to be expressed, and now it won’t, because it’s that much harder to earn a living playing and writing songs. No one will pay you to do it.

“The masses do not recognize file-sharing and downloading as stealing because there’s a copy left behind for you — it’s not that copy that’s the problem, it’s the other one that someone received but didn’t pay for. The problem is that nobody will pay you for the 10,000 hours you put in to create what you created. I can only imagine the frustration of all that work, and having no one value it enough to pay you for it.”

Simmons, like others before him, confuses the “death of rock music” with what it really is “the death of the music industry as I knew it”. These two things are not the same.

Contained within Simmons answer are the clues that he is clueless about what is happening around him in the business he started out in. For example, he equates “file sharing” and “downloading”.

A similar gripe was made by country superstar Vince Gill. Back in 2012, Gill griped about how cheap it is to buy music digitally.

“Income streams are dwindling,” said Gill. “Record sales aren’t what they used to be. The devaluation of music and what it’s now deemed to be worth is laughable to me. My single costs 99 cents. That’s what a (single) cost in 1960. On my phone, I can get an app for 99 cents that makes fart noises — the same price as the thing I create and speak to the world with. Some would say the fart app is more important. It’s an awkward time. Creative brains are being sorely mistreated.”

What Gill and others miss is that the profit margin on a 99¢ download is almost 100% — for an independent musician. The trouble with older, established acts is that their record labels are selling digital downloads like mad, but not cutting them in on the action. They see the world through the lens of their old business models, angry that this new digital thing is paying them less.

But, despite Simmons’ fears, new musicians are not going his old route — the route of begging an A&R guy to come sign them up for the Sugar Daddy treatment at the expense of their creative freedom. The new vanguard is recording their stuff at home on Garageband, putting it straight onto iTunes and Myspace, and keeping more money off each download than Simmons or Gill get.

We’re not worried about the future of rock, Gene. You’re just worried about the future of Kiss. You guys have an old-school contract model. Sorry.

By contrast, Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters — a band that sells like mad — looks at it this way:

“I think it’s a good idea because it’s people trading music. It has nothing to do with industry or finance, it’s just people that want music and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the same as someone turning on the fucking radio, it’s the same as someone putting a cassette in a cassette deck when the BBC plays a special radio session. I don’t think it’s a crime, it’s been going on for years. It’s the same as people making tapes for each other. The industry is more threatened by it because it’s the worldwide web and it’s a broader scope of trading, but I don’t think it’s such a fucking horrible thing. The first thing we should do is get all the fucking millionaires to shut their mouths, stop bitching about the 25 cents a time they’re losing.”
http://www.webpronews.com/gene-simmo...-wrong-2014-09





26 U2 Albums Hit iTunes Top Albums Chart at Once After Apple Stunt
Brian Anthony Hernandez

U2's surprise free album on iTunes was ridiculed by some iPhone users for forcing its way onto their devices this week, but U2 is having the last laugh as the Apple stunt for the band's new Songs of Innocence inspired fans to purchase other U2 titles on iTunes.

At one point Thursday afternoon, 26 U2 titles charted simultaneously on iTunes top 200 albums rankings, Apple and Interscope Records representatives confirmed to Mashable on Friday. Meanwhile, U218 Singles landed in the top 10 in 46 countries.

U2 had zero albums on the iTunes chart the day before Tuesday's Apple event.

"Obviously this demonstrates the high level of engagement in the aftermath of the release — it's an unprecedented feat," Interscope's Dennis Dennehy told Mashable, crediting Apple's major marketing push at Tuesday's iPhone 6 event and U2's inherent global reach as a veteran rock band. "Besides giving away a new U2 album as a gift to iTunes store customers, the initiative with iTunes clearly encouraged discovery for new fans and a rediscovery for existing ones."

Bono and the band joined Apple CEO Tim Cook onstage in Cupertino, California, on Tuesday to announce the new album and its unconventional release strategy. The album, U2's first studio release in five years, became available that day on iTunes, iTunes Radio and Beats Music, with Apple securing exclusivity until Oct. 13.

After that, iTunes users started exploring U2's catalog and buying the band's albums, compilations and live versions. As of Friday evening, 18 titles were still in the top 200.

"It’s disruptive, and it has never been done before," U2's manager Guy Oseary told Mashable about the album release. "This will probably be dissected for many years to come. ... I’m just happy that a lot more people are listening to this album than they would have."

Oseary added that it's too early to know download figures, though Recode is reporting 2 million downloads.

"From what I'm hearing, they're very promising," he said. "But it's hard to tell because somebody new may listen to it in a month. Somebody new may listen to it in a year."

A revamped Songs of Innocence, with four additional songs and several acoustic renditions, will go on sale at other retailers starting Oct. 14. Upon that release, Billboard will start calculating its sales, as it won't take into account Apple's release.
http://mashable.com/2014/09/12/u2-al...apple-release/





Duff McKagan, Guns N’ Capital
Joel Stein

Business majors can party. They can get wasted, wake up the next morning, hit 18 holes, and still make afternoon classes. But few have the expertise of Duff McKagan, bassist for Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver, and student at the Albers School of Business and Economics at Seattle University. In his autobiography, It’s So Easy: And Other Lies, McKagan, 47, explains how he stopped his gallon-of-vodka-a-day habit by switching to 10 bottles of wine. How he drank his own vomit, because it had alcohol in it. How he used cocaine just so he could drink more. How he drank so much beer at one point that Guns N’ Roses lead singer Axl Rose introduced him as “The King of Beers” and a producer from The Simpsons called to ask if he could name the show’s beer, Duff, after him, which they did. How his pancreas basically exploded, causing third-degree burns on his other internal organs. He also gives the reader helpful tips, such as buying tetracycline in the fish section of the pet store as a cheap antibiotic cure for venereal disease and how to rebalance an investment portfolio.

After his emergency room hospitalization for acute pancreatitis at age 30, McKagan quit drinking, started mountain biking, trained in a martial art called ukidokan, lost 50 pounds, and learned to read his Guns N’ Roses profit-and-loss statements. Soon he figured out that despite listed expenses such as yachts and private jets, he wasn’t in bad financial shape. That’s because the profit side of the ledger showed that Guns N’ Roses released the most successful debut album ever.

All the founding members owned an equal share, and McKagan, unlike many musicians, wasn’t cheated by his accountants. Mostly because they were honest, but maybe also because when he hired them he got their home addresses. “Because I came from a big family, I didn’t do the knuckleheaded things,” he says over sushi near his second home in Sherman Oaks, Calif., where he lives when he’s not in Seattle. “When I bought a Corvette—which in 1989 was a $28,000 car—my brother Jon said, ‘This is what you’re going to do? Blow all your money?’”

McKagan, who is 6’3” and has long blond hair, a lot of silver jewelry, and many tattoos, trimmed his locks while in college. He enrolled soon after he got his girlfriend, Susan Holmes McKagan (model, swimsuit designer, and co-star of E!’s rock-star-wives reality show, Married to Rock), pregnant with their first daughter. She’s his third wife. “I don’t even think of her as my third wife,” he says. “She’s my only sober wife.”

Searching the restaurant for low-sodium soy sauce, McKagan has that calm friendliness that a lot of people who grew up in Seattle have. So even though he was 10 years older than his fellow students at Seattle University, he fit in. His first $100,000 in stock investments in 1994 turned out pretty well, largely because he was in Seattle: He bought Starbucks (SBUX), Microsoft (MSFT), and Amazon.com (AMZN). When he formed Velvet Revolver in 2002 with ex-Guns N’ Roses bandmate Slash, McKagan helped negotiate the band’s record deal. “It was really refreshing to know what I was talking about,” he says.

The college courses have also helped him manage his two bands, Velvet Revolver and Duff McKagan’s Loaded, which takes more business savvy than it did when he was in Guns N’ Roses. “We were playing shows then where shows were a loss leader to sell albums. Now it’s completely the opposite,” he says. “You make the most off your ticket receipts and T-shirts. Now the sexy thing is ‘How many T-shirts did you sell,’ not records. No one talks about records.” He knows that in the middle of the U.S., people like big shirts that hang loose and are made of thicker material than the thin, tight style on the coasts: “It’s like you’re a garmento, too.”

Bands now seek tour sponsors and sell VIP packages tied to credit cards. Not long ago, McKagan was backstage at a Queens of the Stone Age concert, hanging out with the band whose albums include Lullabies to Paralyze. “I ended up in the corner talking average fuel costs for the year for tour buses,” he says. “‘Make sure you fill up in Alabama. Don’t wait until you get to Louisiana.’”

Even before he headed to Seattle for school—he was taking a class at a community college—his friends in other bands brought up his studies. But not to make fun of him. “I was only taking math classes. And I was getting calls from peers wanting help investing their dough,” he says. So for the last four years he sought a partner to start a wealth management firm for musicians, which he did, with Andy Bottomley, a co-founder of Imprimatur Capital, a British venture capitalist firm. They just opened Meridian Rock Capital Management, named after the Cormac McCarthy novel both love, Blood Meridian.

McKagan’s own investment strategy is pretty conventional: He’s got 65 percent of his money in stocks, the rest in bonds and real estate trusts (plus a big house in Seattle, three investment properties, and a cabin). He doesn’t seek out hot stocks, but just prunes ones that take on too much debt: “I’m the anti-Jim Cramer. I don’t want to pimp or unpimp any company.”

Although he’s always given investment advice to musician friends, he hasn’t helped any of his former Guns N’ Roses members. Looking at their investments would be way too personal. These are guys, remember, that he’s seen naked and smoked crack with. “It’s a very private thing, even though we all made the same amount of money,” he says. “It’s private because, who knows? What’s your old lady spending?” McKagan, in fact, was embarrassed to show Bottomley his portfolio when they first started talking about working together: “It’s intellectually personal. How smart is this guy? What does he know?” If that seemed too revealing, wait until Bottomley reads his book.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...-09292011.html




BBC: ISPs Should Assume Heavy VPN Users are Pirates
Andy

In a submission to the Australian Government on the issue of online piracy, the BBC Worldwide indicates that ISPs should be obliged to monitor their customers' activities. Service providers should become suspicious that customers could be pirating if they use VPN-style services and consume a lot of bandwidth, the BBC says.

After cutting its teeth as a domestic broadcaster, the BBC is spreading its products all around the globe. Shows like Top Gear have done extremely well overseas and the trend of exploiting other shows in multiple territories is set to continue.

As a result the BBC is now getting involved in the copyright debates of other countries, notably Australia, where it operates four subscription channels. Following submissions from Hollywood interests and local ISPs, BBC Worldwide has now presented its own to the Federal Government. Its text shows that the corporation wants new anti-piracy measures to go further than ever before.

The BBC begins by indicating a preference for a co-operative scheme, one in which content owners and ISPs share responsibility to “reduce and eliminate” online copyright infringement. Educating consumers on both the impact of piracy and where content can be obtained legally online would be supported by improved availability of official offerings.

After providing general piracy statistics, the BBC turn to the recent leaking of the new series of Doctor Who to file-sharing networks which acted “as a spoiler” to the official global TV premiere.

“Despite the BBC dedicating considerable resources to taking down and blocking access to these Doctor Who materials, there were almost 13,000 download attempts of these materials from Australian IP addresses in the period between their unauthorized access and the expiration of the usual catch-up windows,” the BBC write.

So what can be done?

In common with all rightsholder submissions so far, the BBC wants to put pressure on ISPs to deal with their errant subscribers via a graduated response scheme of educational messages backed up by punitive measures for the most persistent of infringers.

“ISPs should warn any alleged copyright infringers through a graduated notification system that what they are doing is illegal and, at the same time, educate them about the law, the importance of copyright to funding content and services they enjoy and where they can access the material they want legally. However. if the consumers do not abide by the notifications then more serious action may need to be taken,” the BBC note.

Those sanctions could lead to a throttling of a users’ Internet connection but should not normally lead to a complete disconnection. However, the BBC doesn’t rule that out, adding that such measures could be employed “in the most serious and egregious circumstances, as is the case in the United States.”

While little in the foregoing presents much of a surprise, the BBC goes further than any other rightsholder submission thus far in suggesting that ISPs should not only forward notices, but also spy on their customers’ Internet usage habits.

VPNs are pirate tools

“Since the evolution of peer-to-peer software protocols to incorporate decentralized architectures, which has allowed users to download content from numerous host computers, the detection and prosecution of copyright violations has become a complex task. This situation is further amplified by the adoption of virtual private networks (VPNs) and proxy servers by some users, allowing them to circumvent geo-blocking technologies and further evade detection,” the BBC explain.

“It is reasonable for ISPs to be placed under an obligation to identify user behavior that is ‘suspicious’ and indicative of a user engaging in conduct that infringes copyright. Such behavior may include the illegitimate use by Internet users of IP obfuscation tools in combination with high download volumes.”

While the BBC goes on to state that “false positives” would need to be avoided in order to “safeguard the fundamental rights of consumers”, none of this will sit well with Internet service providers or the public. Throwing around accusations of illegal activity based on the existence of an encrypted tunnel and high bandwidth consumption is several steps beyond anything suggested before.

Site blocking

The BBC says it supports the blocking of overseas infringing sites at the ISP level after obtaining a court injunction. Of interest is a proposal to use a system which allows for injunctions to be modified after being issued in order to deal with sites finding ways to circumvent bans.

“It is important to have the ability to get existing injunctions varied by the court when defendants reappear in different guises, a useful tool in the United Kingdom,” the BBC writes.

Who foots the bill?

Who pays for all of the above has been the major sticking point in all Australian negotiations thus far. The ISPs largely believe they shouldn’t have to pay for anything, but most rightsholders – the BBC included – think that the costs need to be shared.

“In light of the fact that a large inducement for internet users to become customers of ISPs is to gain access to content (whether legally or illegally), it is paramount that ISPs are required to take an active role in preventing and fighting online copyright infringement by establishing and contributing meaningfully to the cost of administering some form of graduated response scheme,” the BBC concludes.
http://torrentfreak.com/bbc-isps-sho...irates-140908/





Europeans Bracing for Netflix
Doreen Carvajal

With Netflix poised to make its debut in six European countries next week, the expansion of that online streaming giant’s international territory is stirring a mix of anticipation, anxiety and “House of Cards”-style political intrigue.

French headlines warn of a “Tsunami Netflix” that could challenge the customary offerings of dubbed American programs and homegrown shows. German cable competitors are slashing the price of monthly subscriptions. Switzerland’s largest cable operator introduced a new counteroffer and is rushing production of a sitcom about a couple approaching retirement.

The stakes are high. Europe’s unified market and high Internet use have created ripe territory for American technology companies like Netflix, Amazon and Google. But as their power and reach grow, companies like Netflix are also being assailed by European politicians and business rivals over issues like taxes and competition.

The fiercest resistance to the California-based company, which has a market capitalization of almost $29 billion, is emerging in France, where, so far, telecommunications operators like Orange are refusing to carry the service on popular television-top devices that enable Internet streaming because they have not settled on financial terms. Netflix is nonetheless available on tablets, computers and smartphones.

The local film producers association is complaining that Netflix is engaging in “fiscal dumping” by establishing its European base in Amsterdam and thus avoiding the French audiovisual taxes that national television channels and rival streaming services pay to subsidize French films.

Last spring, top French politicians joined the fray, with the culture minister calling Netflix a “stowaway” for entering the local market with a headquarters in a different country. In August, those voices vanished in a government shake-up, clearing the path for Netflix to mount a relentless charm offensive in a series of news releases and interviews with French reporters that the company flew to California.

Netflix has been gradually extending its reach in waves in Canada, Latin America, Britain and the Scandinavian countries, and it is now available in 40 nations. Analysts are predicting that Netflix could add four to six million users in the six countries where it starts operating next week: France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and Luxembourg.

To demonstrate its investment in France, Netflix announced this week that it had purchased streaming rights to “Wakfu,” an animated French television series mingling manga and Marvel comic-book styles and featuring an orphan with supernatural powers.

Netflix is also financing the Mediterranean answer to its original series “House of Cards,” the critically acclaimed political drama set in Washington. “Marseille,” an eight-episode French-language drama about power and corruption, will be filmed in that southern port city and depict shady politicians, drug lords and others battling for control, according to its creators.

“It’s a very Shakespearean story, and I think it can also be very universal,” said Pascal Breton, who heads Federation Entertainment and is producing the series.

This week Mr. Breton himself became engulfed in political combat related to Netflix’s arrival when the French magazine L’Express reported that Fleur Pellerin, the new minister of culture, vacationed at his Corsican villa this summer. In her first week as culture minister, she then shifted the government’s stance on Netflix in a radio interview by calling it a “rational economic choice” to seek tax advantages in other countries. As the Corsican vacation report spread, the culture minister’s staff scoffed at the news, calling it “rumors” and “libel.” But Mr. Breton said the debate simply reflected apprehension about Netflix’s advance.

“I am a very good friend of Fleur Pellerin,” he said, adding that she was not yet the culture minister when she stayed at his home. (Previously, she was a secretary for commerce abroad, promoting tourism.) “Some aspects of this story are really rubbish. It’s absolutely nothing that I had dinner or spent the weekend with a friend..”

The new subscriptions will cost about 8 euros, or about $10.30, a month. To expand the new audience, Netflix aims to develop serial dramas, comedies and documentaries that appeal across borders, languages and interests. The strategy reflects a gradual shift beyond its main activity, buying rights to existing titles.

“Our technology can quickly learn and make recommendations, based upon each individual’s tastes,” said Joris Evers, a Netflix spokesman in Amsterdam. “We’re at a scale where we can economically create original content that debuts exclusively on Netflix. By personalizing promotion of the right title to the right member, we have a large opportunity to promote our original titles.”

The international Netflix menu favors tales of intrigue. In Britain, it is backing “The Crown,” a series on Queen Elizabeth’s reign with an emphasis on political machinations. In Mexico, it is funding a Spanish-language comedy series about a family feud among soccer club heirs.

French animators are also counting on Netflix for new opportunities.

“The business model of animation is honestly only possible if you are capable of being broadcast in many countries, because animation is quite expensive,” said Olivier Comte, the managing director of Ankama, which is based in northern France and negotiated the deal for Netflix to stream its “Wakfu” series. ”

But some producers worry that the country’s long tradition of art films will wither in a competitive market catering to mass tastes. The Association of Cinema Producers in France contacted Netflix executives to suggest discussions, but the calls were never returned, according to Frédéric Goldsmith, the head of the association, who said members were stunned by the sum Netflix offered for rights to some French films — as low as 1,500 euros (less than $2,000), compared with the standard 10,000 euros ($13,000).

Netflix’s chief rival, Canal+, is battling back with television ads for its counteroffer for streaming. It enlisted the actor John Malkovich as a pitchman: Wearing vampire teeth, he declares in American-accented French, “Since I am immortal, l signed up with Canalplay to watch thousands and thousands of films.”

Manuel Alduy, head of Canal OTT, a new division of the company that includes the Canalplay streaming service, argues that the Netflix catalog is “not really adjusted to local taste.” He characterized Netflix’s plans for the “Marseille” series as a “communication trick.” For Mr. Breton of Federation Entertainment, however, Netflix offers an opportunity to shake up the competition and create fresh programming.

“French drama is still a bit like old-fashioned politics — a bit slow, people talk too much, and quite well written,” he said. “It doesn’t have the same tension as foreign shows, and we have to catch up with that. That’s what Netflix is offering us.”

Yann Cres contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/13/bu...r-netflix.html





Nielsen Finds Older Adults Are Embracing Digital Video
Emily Steel

Digital video may be most popular with children and young adults, but it increasingly is being embraced by viewers of an older set.

People 50 to 64 years old watched an average of 19 minutes a day of digital video during the second quarter of 2014, up from 11 minutes a day during the same period last year, according to a Nielsen report being released on Monday.

The jump in online video viewing comes as adults in that age group have cut back the time they spend in front of television screens by six minutes, to 6 hours and 12 minutes a day.

Media executives closely scrutinize the viewing habits of children and young adults in an effort to forecast future changes in the business. But the new research underscores how technology is fast upending the media habits of all viewers — not just younger people.

“Today we are challenged with an important transition in how media is consumed,” Dounia Turrill, senior vice president for insights at Nielsen, wrote in the report. “Yet, it’s not just a young versus ‘older’ story.”

In total, the amount of time adults are spending in front of a television screen declined 2 percent during the period, according to Nielsen. But an increase in viewing on computers and mobile devices is fueling 4 percent overall growth in media consumption. Digital viewing is growing most quickly for adults older than 35.

Younger viewers are spending much less time in front of the television screen and more time watching digital video. Children 12 to 17 are spending about 2 hours and 43 minutes a day watching television — the least amount of time of any age group.

The report also points to a rapid increase in the amount of time that people are spending in using a smartphone. On average, adults spent 1 hour and 25 minutes using a smartphone during the second quarter, up from just 48 minutes during the same period two years ago.

“The overarching data suggests that the growth of media consumption is and will continue to be in digital for all consumers,” Ms. Turrill said. “We can surmise that having tasted the freedom of choice, the American consumer will not go back to old ways.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/bu...tal-video.html





Verizon Tips a La Carte Internet TV Service in 2015
Chloe Albanesius

Verizon is looking to roll out its Internet TV service by mid-2015, with an offering that will allow viewers to pick and choose the channels they want.

During a Thursday appearance at a Goldman Sachs technology conference, Verizon Communications chief Lowell McAdam said the service will likely include access to the "big four" broadcast networks, as well as "custom channels."

"No one wants to have 300 channels on your wireless device," McAdam said. "And I think everyone understands. It will go to a la carte."

Major cable and pay TV services have long resisted an "a la carte" approach that would let customers pick and choose the channels they want to pay for rather than pay for a bundle of 300+ channels. For about a decade, they have argued that a la carte would result in increased pricing and less channel diversity.

And while that probably won't change for traditional cable customers anytime soon, McAdam acknowledged that when it comes to the Web and mobile, a different approach is necessary.

"We do see that the millennials really want to look at...content over the iPads and other tablet devices and their smartphones," McAdam said. Attitudes in the industry about accessing content online is "changing dramatically," he said, and execs are more open to the idea now than they were two years ago.

"I don't think there is any one that would stand up here and say the only way it's going to be offered five years from now is linear and it's going to be tied to your TV set because frankly they will miss the market and they will be the ones left behind," McAdam said.

In January, Verizon Communications bought Intel's TV business for an undisclosed sum, picking up the intellectual property rights and other assets that powered Intel's OnCue Cloud TV platform. At the time, Verizon said it planned to integrate IP-based TV services with FiOS video as well as expand its mobile video offerings.

As for what type of custom channels viewers can expect, McAdam pointed to AwesomenessTV, which DreamWorks acquired last year, but didn't delve too much more into possible partners, except to say that they will probably be "out of the West Coast, where a lot of this is more home grown content."
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817...069TX1K0001121





TV Monitoring Service is Fair Use, Judge Rules

Fox News sued TVEyes, which records television 24/7/365—but it's fair use.
Joe Mullin

Last year, Fox News sued a media-monitoring service called TVEyes, which allows its clients to search for and watch clips of TV and radio stations.

Fox lawyers argued the service violated copyright law and should be shut down. In a ruling (PDF) published yesterday, US District Judge Alvin Hallerstein disagreed, finding that TVEyes' core services are a transformative fair use.

It's a significant digital-age fair use ruling, one that's especially important for people and organizations who want to comment on or criticize news coverage.

Keeping an eye on television

TVEyes constantly records more than 1,400 television and radio stations, using closed caption and speech-to-text technology to make a comprehensive and searchable database for its subscribers, who generally pay $500 per month for the service. The company has more than 2,200 subscribers, including the White House, 100 members of Congress, the Department of Defense, as well as big news organizations like Bloomberg, Reuters, ABC, and the Associated Press.

The service is used by a wide range of clients who want to keep an eye on the media, from police departments seeking to know how widely a public safety announcement has disseminated, to members of Congress who want to know what's being said about them.

It's also—perhaps not coincidentally—used by media critics, including those who keep an eye on Fox News. For instance, Media Matters for America has used TVEyes to analyze Fox News' Benghazi-flavored coverage of Hillary Clinton, as well as what it calls the network's "selective outrage" over gay rights.

One common use for TVEyes is to let users search for a keyword to find out when a term was mentioned in the news, then view a video clip that starts 14 seconds before the keyword is mentioned, and goes on for up to 10 minutes. Most clips are shorter than two minutes.

Users can also download and save the clips and share them via social media or e-mail. TVEyes subscribers all agree to only use downloaded clips for "internal purposes" like review, analysis, or research.

In Fox's view, those products all compete unfairly with its own TV clip licensing, which is done through ITN Source; that company maintains a library of 80,000 Fox News videos and is searchable using keywords. Through ITN Source, Fox News has made about $2 million in licensing fees.

“Arch of an Eyebrow”

TVEyes relied on legal precedents allowing for electronic cataloging of book material, including the Authors Guild v. Google case, in which a district court judge found that Google Books' copying into a database, then showing text snippets, created a "highly transformative" database that was protected by fair use.

Fox News, meanwhile, looked to precedents in which "defendants were copying the plaintiff's work and then selling it for the very same purpose as plaintiff," wrote Hallerstein. The one exception was Associated Press v. Meltwater, in which a court ruled that a digital news-clipping service wasn't fair use.

There, Hallerstein saw distinctions. Meltwater was dealing with text, which didn't show "the actual images and sounds depicted on television," as TVEyes does. Those images can be "as important as the news information itself—the tone of voice, arch of an eyebrow, or upturn of a lip can color the entire story, powerfully modifying the content."

By indexing and excerpting all TV content, "TVEyes provides a service that no content provider provides."

Also, Meltwater's gleaning of print news stories was crawling the Internet for the same information that would be available to a determined searcher. TVEyes created a comprehensive database of what's broadcast on television, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "That, in and of itself, makes TVEyes' purpose transformative and different in kind from Meltwater's," wrote Hallerstein.

Fox News failed to show that the clips could be watched sequentially, or that TVEyes could be used as a substitute for Fox News' channels.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Hallerstein wrote that while TVEyes was a for-profit company, it also provided a "substantial benefit to the public." He explained:

TVEyes subscribers use this service to comment on and criticize broadcast news channels. Government bodies use it to monitor the accuracy of facts reported by the media so they can make timely corrections when necessary. Political campaigns use it to monitor political advertising and appearances of candidates in election years. Financial firms use it to track and archive public statements made by their employees for regulatory compliance. The White House uses TVEyes to evaluate news stories and give feedback to the press corps. The United States Army uses TVEyes to track media coverage of military operations in remote locations, to ensure national security and the safety of American troops. Journalists use TVEyes to research, report on, compare, and criticize broadcast news coverage. Elected officials use TVEyes to confirm the accuracy of information reported on the news and seek timely corrections of misinformation.

Those benefits outweighed the possibility of market harm for Fox News, which was small in any case.

Hallerstein also disposed of other non-copyright claims brought by Fox News, including a "Hot News misappropriation claim, as well as a state-law misappropriation claim, finding they were preempted by copyright.

Not quite over

While Hallerstein ruled that TVEyes' core business is protected by fair use, he didn't rule on a few features. Features allowing subscribers to "save, archive, download, email and share clips" and use a "date and time search function" weren't decided on yesterday. "The factual record should be further developed before I can decide this issue," wrote Hallerstein.

An additional hearing is scheduled for October 3.

In an e-mail to Ars, TVEyes CEO David Ives said he was "very pleased" with the decision, declining to comment further.

A Fox News spokesperson emphasized the unfinished parts of the case, stating via e-mail:

The Court only ruled that a specific portion of TVEyes’ service — its keyword search function—was fair use. The Court expressly said that it required more information to decide whether TVEyes’ other features—including allowing video clips to be archived, downloaded, emailed, and shared via social media—were fair use.

Since keyword searches represent 94.5 percent of the clips played on TVEyes, however, the bulk of their business looks safe. The remaining issues are add-on features to the core business—albeit important ones. Saving clips, especially, is vital for any organization wanting to research news coverage over time, since the TVEyes database holds only 32 days of content.

While the TVEyes ruling is good news for fair use, it's important to remember that a key part of the ruling is based on its "internal use only" rule. Anyone hoping to use the power of digital TV-clipping in public will have to fight their own fair use battle. A company called Redlasso tried to give bloggers the ability to watch, clip, and post TV shows, but was sued in 2008 and promptly shut down.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...e-judge-rules/





A Win for Dotcom Over Seized Property

Police have been ordered to release back to Kim Dotcom clones of computers and electronic devices seized in 2012 from his Coatesville mansion.

The Court of Appeal ruled in February this year that search warrants of Dotcom's multimillion-dollar property, and the home of his computer programmer Bram van der Kolk, executed at the request of the United States Department of Justice which is seeking to extradite them on online piracy charges, was legal.

But it found that the seizure of electronic items including laptops, computers, portable hard drives, flash storage devices and servers, was unauthorised.

It upheld a High Court declaration that the decision to allow police to give cloned copies of information harvested from the devices to the FBI without direction from the Solicitor-General wasn't authorised and was unlawful.

Now, the Court of Appeal has ruled that New Zealand Police "must as soon as reasonably practicable" release clones of any device back to Dotcom and his co-accused.

The clones must also be free from encrypted material, according to the judgment released today. Dotcom, van der Kolk and co-accused Finn Batato and Mathias Ortmann are all defending charges of mass copyright infringement, online piracy, and money laundering and are facing extradition proceedings next February.

At a Court of Appeal hearing on August 14, the four accused raised concerns that they have not yet been provided with clones of all the electronic devices seized from them by police on January 20, 2012.

Today's judgement says police must release the clones immediately.

It adds that encryption codes may only be provided to two nominated and named New Zealand police officers who must provide a written undertaking that they will "maintain the confidentiality of any and all encryption codes provided to me; will not transmit the encryption codes electronically; and will not disclose the encryption codes to any other person or any other party, and in particular to any representative of the Government of the United States of America".

The judgement also says that the clones release can be done in tranches, if that will speed the process up.

Either party can also apply to the Court of Appeal at short notice if further orders are necessary.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ar...ectid=11320761





Publishers Gave Away 122,951,031 Books During World War II

And, in the process, they created a nation of readers.
Yoni Appelbaum

In 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, America's book publishers took an audacious gamble. They decided to sell the armed forces cheap paperbacks, shipped to units scattered around the globe. Instead of printing only the books soldiers and sailors actually wanted to read, though, publishers decided to send them the best they had to offer. Over the next four years, publishers gave away 122,951,031 copies of their most valuable titles.

"Some of the publishers think that their business is going to be ruined," the prominent broadcaster H. V. Kaltenborn told his audience in 1944. "But I make this prediction. America's publishers have cooperated in an experiment that will for the first time make us a nation of book readers." He was absolutely right. From small Pacific islands to sprawling European depots, soldiers discovered the addictive delights of good books. By giving away the best it had to offer, the publishing industry created a vastly larger market for its wares. More importantly, it also democratized the pleasures of reading, making literature, poetry, and history available to all.

Serious books were hard to find before the war. An industry study in 1931 highlighted the book trade's limited audience. Nineteen out of every 20 books sold by the major publishing houses cost more than two dollars, a luxury even before the Depression. Those who could afford them often struggled to find them. Two out of three counties in America lacked any bookstore, or even so much as a department store, drugstore, or other retailer selling enough books to have an account with a publishing house. In rural areas, small towns, and even mid-sized cities, dedicated customers bought their books the way they bought other household goods, picking the titles out of mail-order catalogs. Most did not bother.

There was another, less-reputable class of books, though, that enjoyed broader distribution. Cheap mysteries, westerns, and comics could be snapped up at newsstands in paperbound editions that cost far less to produce than hardcover books. Throughout the 1920s and '30s, publishers tried to take advantage of this format to publish a wider range of books. Most efforts failed. Then, in 1939, two new entrants changed the equation. Pocket Books and Penguin Books each offered a mix of new titles and reprints of hardcover books, including some of a literary bent. More importantly, they sold these paperback books on magazine racks.

Americans could put down a quarter and pick up a book all over town, from train stations and drugstores. Within a year, Americans bought 6 million paperback books. By 1943, Pocket Books alone printed 38 million copies. "It's unbelievable," said the head of Random House. "It's frightening."

Old-line publishers had good reason to be scared. They were in the business of selling a premium product to an affluent audience. The sudden flood of paperbacks threatened to swamp their refined trade and erode its prestige. The cheap, disposable format seemed best suited to works of little lasting value. That Penguin and Pocket Books included some distinguished titles on their lists threatened the stability of these categories, even as their sales still tilted heavily toward the lower end of the spectrum. Paperbacks were expanding the market for books, but that market remained divided.

Then, war intervened. The key actors in the book trade organized themselves into the Council on Books in Wartime, hoping to use books to advance the war effort. In February of 1943, they circulated an audacious proposal. They proposed to print and sell millions of books to the army, for just six cents a volume.

Hardcover books could not possibly be produced so cheaply. But magazines could. So the Council decided to use magazine presses, printing two copies on each page, and then slicing the book in half perpendicular to the binding. The result was a book wider than it was tall, featuring two columns of text for easier reading in low light. The real innovation, though, was less technological than ideological. The publishers proposed to take books available only in hardcover form, and produce them in this disposable format.

The plan, breathtaking in its ambition, was sure to engender skepticism among publishers asked to donate the rights to some of their most valuable property. So the chair of the committee, W.W. Norton, took care to appeal not just to the patriotism of his fellow publishers, but also to their pursuit of profits. "The net result to the industry and to the future of book reading can only be helpful," he explained. "The very fact that millions of men will have the opportunity to learn what a book is and what it can mean is likely now and in postwar years to exert a tremendous influence on the postwar course of the industry."

Not everyone agreed. Some publishers worried that the books, reserved for soldiers, would flood back into the civilian market. Others were concerned that, if soldiers became accustomed to six-cent books, it would be impossible to sell two-dollar hardcovers.

Even those skeptical of the program as a business initiative, though, had to cede its power as a statement of American values. The Council contrasted its own efforts to distribute all kinds of books with the book-burning of the Nazi regime. "People of the Axis Lands are prevented by force from knowing the facts of the time, and are told what to think," The New York Times editorialized. "People of this free nation are supplied with the truth as free men see it and are confidently left to think for themselves."

The army and the navy endorsed the program, and in July of 1943, began shipping the books around the world. The Council aimed to produce one box of books for every 150 soldiers and sailors, and also sent boxes to smaller, isolated detachments. By the spring of 1945, the program shipped 155,000 crates of these Armed Services Editions each month, with 40 new books packed into each box. Wherever they arrived, soldiers tore them open, and began to read.

"Dog-eared and moldy and limp from the humidity those books go up the line," wrote a war reporter from the southwest Pacific. "Because they are what they are, because they can be packed in a hip pocket or snuck into a shoulder pack, men are reading where men have never read before." A lieutenant in the Marshall Islands wrote of seeing men devour books "by a dim flashlight under a shelter half, even after the air-raid siren has already blown and they should be in a foxhole." Another soldier reported that "the books are read until they fall apart."

Even as millions of books arrived overseas, demand often outpaced the supply. One rifleman who served in Europe recalled the books as "real life savers," but complained that the brass and rear-area units snatched them up before they could trickle down to the front-line troops. Another private, who managed to find just two books in three-and-a-half years, finally asked in desperation if he could just buy copies at his own expense.

The books were "as popular as pin-up girls," reported a GI stationed in New Guinea. Indeed, they often served much the same purposes. "The principal favorites," a study found, "are novels that deal frankly with sexual relations (regardless of tone, literary merit and point of view, no matter whether the book is serious or humorous, romantically exciting or drably pedestrian)." Sex sold. So did westerns and mysteries.

Despite this, the Council made a deliberate effort to skew its selections toward the more literary end of the spectrum. An early plan, drafted by the army scarcely a week after Pearl Harbor, specified that the books be "of a popular or recreational nature, with picture and cartoon books in quantity." The army simply wanted to entertain its troops. When the Council assumed control of the effort, it set its sights substantially higher.

The box of 30 or 40 books shipped to thousands of units each month might include This is Murder, Mr. Jones or a Zane Grey western, but also Carl Sandburg's poems or Tristram Shandy or The Making of Modern Britain. Almost all were available only as expensive hardbacks on the civilian market, and a few were original compilations made exclusively for the program. The goal, as W. W. Norton explained, was to offer "new books and books of enduring value," that might keep soldiers and sailors "in touch with thought and currents of life in their country." The Council on Books aimed not merely to entertain, but also to educate and inspire.

In this, publishers mixed high-minded idealism with enlightened self-interest. Stranded in overseas bases, fighting off boredom, many readers picked up books they might not otherwise have touched, grateful to have anything to read at all. Some were annoyed to be stuck with histories, poetry, or literary novels. Many more, though, found their first exposure to serious books addictive.

One GI with an unusual vantage point was Joe Allen, who went from the Council directly into the ranks as a private soldier, and had a chance to see its impact first hand. "You are instilling in them, whether you are aware of it or not, a taste for good reading that will surely persist come victory," he reported . "I have seen many a man who never before had the patience or inclination to read a book, pick up one of the Council's and become absorbed and ask for more." Soldiers are "acquiring a new habit, that of reading," concurred a lieutenant in the Pacific, writing that it would "result in additional book sales in the future."

The books belonged to the soldiers themselves. They passed them around. They sliced them apart to share in installments. They read them aloud to their buddies. Literature, no longer restricted to those who could afford it, became their common possession. A fighter pilot in the China-Burma-India theater reported that his British counterparts found the program "smashing," helpfully translating that as "super-dooper." The Armed Services Editions had, he wrote, "put good literature on a democratic (small d) level that it has never enjoyed before."
Servicemen bound for Guadalcanal grab books as they board. (U.S. Navy)

Some of the selections were idiosyncratic. In 1945, Council picked out an older novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald that had never achieved popular success. It sold just 120 copies the previous year, and another 33 in 1945 before going out of print. The 155,000 copies of The Great Gatsby that they shipped out to the troops dwarfed all its previous print runs combined. Buoyed by that exposure, it would go on to become one of the great publishing successes of the 20th century.

More often, though, participation came at a substantial short-term cost for the publishing industry. No book generated more passion among its readers than A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a gritty coming-of-age novel. On a Pacific island, a lucky soldier given a new copy "howled with joy," but knew he'd have to sleep on top of it if he hoped to hang onto it long enough to finish it. A 20-year-old Marine "went through hell" in two years of combat, but wrote from his stateside hospital bed that the book had made him feel human again. It might, he conceded, be "unusual for a supposedly battle-hardened marine to do such an effeminate thing as weep over a piece of fiction," but he was now making his way through the book for the third time. In France, the colonel commanding an anti-aircraft battalion being shelled by German artillery found one of his soldiers reading the book between explosions. "He started to read us a portion ... and we laughed like hell between bursts. It sure was funny." The tough West Pointer later found a copy of his own, and was tempted to pull it out and read it while wounded and pinned down by enemy fire. "It was that interesting," he recalled, in a letter to the publisher.

But A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was not an old classic that had passed out of copyright, nor a title that had exhausted its market and sat languishing on a backlist. The coming-of-age tale was a bestseller in 1943, when ASE printed up 52,000 copies and shipped them abroad. It was third on the bestseller list in 1944, when ASE produced a second run of 76,000 copies. Civilian readers snapped up the expensive hardcover editions. GIs read the book for free. With royalties for ASE editions set at just a penny a volume, split between the author and the publisher, both were passing up enormous sums by allowing their book to be distributed as an Armed Services Edition. This was an act of patriotism, but also a gamble that they would benefit, in the long run, from such exposure.

And it was a real gamble. It was far from certain that GIs would continue to read after returning home, much less that they would look for serious books once lighter fare was again abundant. Sales had stagnated during the First World War, and then slumped with peace. Publishers feared the same might happen again. In World War Two, soldiers picked up books out of boredom and desperation. "They read them because they had nothing else to do ... or read," conceded Willis Jacobs, an army private returning to his job as an English professor. At home, though, there would be a host of alternatives competing for their attention. And how could former soldiers be persuaded to see books as valuable, when they had grown used to viewing them as disposable?

Jacobs offered an answer. Veterans would keep reading if books remained ubiquitous. Sell paper-bound books at newsstands and drugstores and grocers, and make them as abundant, and almost as cheap, as they had been during the war. "It won over the soldier; it can equally win over the civilian," Jacobs concluded. Some soldiers might abandon books, but "the reading habits acquired by millions ... are unlikely to be broken," agreed Time Magazine. "And the public appetite is certain to be fed and stimulated by mass production and distribution of books on an unprecedented scale."

Sales of paperbacks did slump, precisely as feared, in 1946. Surprisingly, though, it was the lighter fare that failed to sell. More serious works held their ground. Publishers adjusted, and redoubled their efforts at marketing. They found thousands of new outlets, precisely as Jacobs envisioned. They expanded their selection of titles, offering up literary novels, histories, collections of poetry, and books about science alongside their mysteries and westerns. Sales picked up. By 1950, publishers sold 214 million copies of 642 separate paperback titles, enough for every adult in the country to have bought a couple books.

Far from destroying the traditional market, H. V. Kaltenborn had prophesied back in 1943, cheap and abundant books would help it flourish. "Tomorrow's books will be sold to the public in ten cent as well as two dollar editions. And the ten cent book will make even the two dollar book more popular than it is today." The books cost a quarter. Otherwise, he was absolutely correct.

Suddenly, anyone who wanted to could fill a shelf with books. Paperbacks lost their stigma. The Armed Services Editions succeeded in "conditioning the younger generation to be perfectly at home with books in paper covers." The new technology, initially feared and scorned, proved to be the industry's salvation. Many readers first hooked with paperbacks later purchased hardcovers, fueling sales and providing the old-line publishing industry with a vastly larger market for its wares.

Students bought paperbacks for their courses, as they headed back to school on the Montgomery GI Bill. Dozens of commercial book clubs flourished, sending a volume each month to their members. Once a marker of elite status, a shelf full of books became a membership badge in the burgeoning middle class. The decades following the war were boom years for the publishing trade, as audiences exploded and sales doubled and then redoubled again.

"No one in this world, so far as I know," the social critic H.L. Mencken once quipped, "… has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." With the Armed Services Editions, publishers gambled that by putting good books in the hands of average Americans, they could cultivate an appetite for more. The publishing industry made a fortune by betting on the intelligence of the great masses, and proving Mencken wrong.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...ngle_page=true





Libraries May Digitize Books Without Permission, EU Top Court Rules
Loek Essers

European libraries may digitize books and make them available at electronic reading points without first gaining consent of the copyright holder, the highest European Union court ruled Thursday.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled in a case in which the Technical University of Darmstadt digitized a book published by German publishing house Eugen Ulmer in order to make it available at its electronic reading posts, but refused to license the publisher’s electronic textbooks.

Eugen Ulmer sought to prevent the university from digitizing the book and also wanted to prevent users of the library from printing out the book or copying it to a USB stick for use outside the library, the CJEU said in a news release.

Under the EU Copyright Directive, authors have the exclusive right to authorize or prohibit the reproduction and communication of their works, the CJEU said. However, the directive also allows for exceptions or limitations to that right, it said.

“This option exists notably for publically accessible libraries which, for the purpose of research or private study, make works from their collections available to users by dedicated terminals,” it added.

The directive does not prevent EU member states from granting libraries the right to digitize the books from their collections, if it becomes necessary for the purpose of research or private study, to make those works available to individuals through dedicated terminals, the CJEU ruled.

“The right of libraries to communicate, by dedicated terminals, the works they hold in their collections would risk being rendered largely meaningless, or indeed ineffective, if they did not have an ancillary right to digitize the works in question,” the court said.

Even if the rights holder offers a library the possibility of licensing his works on appropriate terms, the library can use the exception to publish works on electronic terminals, the court ruled. “Otherwise, the library could not realize its core mission or promote the public interest in promoting research and private study,” it said.

However, libraries cannot permit visitors to use the terminals to print out the works or store them on a USB stick, the CJEU said. By doing so, the visitor reproduces the work by making a new copy. This copying is not covered by the exception, particularly since the copies are made by individuals and not by the library itself, it said.

The library could however permit the users to print or store the works on a USB stick if fair compensation is paid to the rights holder, the CJEU said.

The CJEU’s ruling followed the advice given to the court in a formal opinion in June by Advocate General Niilo Jääskinen. He said that libraries should be allowed to digitize books without consent, but copying an electronic book to a USB stick or printing it should be illegal.

The case will now go back to the Federal Court of Justice of Germany that had asked the CJEU to clarify the scope of the copyright directive. The CJEU does not decide the dispute itself. It is for the national court or tribunal to dispose of the case in accordance with the CJEU’s decision, which is binding on other national courts or tribunals before which a similar issue is raised.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/26061...urt-rules.html





Stop the Presses! Casting Reporters as Noble and Evil

‘Hack Attack’ puts a spotlight on Rupert Murdoch
Jo Becker

There is an emerging subgenre of British nonfiction in which journalists from The Guardian fearlessly recount their own derring-do in David-and-Goliath battles waged against omnipotent state interests in the pursuit of Big Important Truths.

David Leigh’s “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy” showcased how The Guardian “defied the world’s biggest superpower” and released a torrent of American military and diplomatic secrets. More recently, Luke Harding’s “The Snowden Files” detailed how the “famous newspaper” took on “some of the most powerful people on the planet” to expose the surveillance state.

Now comes Nick Davies, an award-winning special correspondent for The Guardian, with “Hack Attack: The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch.”

This book, too, is a Guardian-centric tale: in this case, about the pivotal role the newspaper played in exposing the British phone-hacking scandal that forced the closure of Mr. Murdoch’s tabloid The News of the World, and cast an unforgiving light on the incestuous ties among the country’s most powerful media conglomerate, the police and the political elite.

Lawyers who won court orders forcing the disclosure of information that underpinned much of The Guardian’s early reporting on The News of the World’s widespread use of voice mail interception to land front-page “splashes” are supporting characters in this telling. So, too, is Tom Watson, a member of Parliament whose relentless inquiries helped keep the story alive. For their trouble, they found themselves under surveillance, their private lives laid bare in reports commissioned by the News of the World’s parent company, News International. The whistle-blower Sean Hoare risked jail when he became the first former News of the World reporter to go on the record to say that phone hacking was endemic in the newsroom and encouraged by top editors.

That said, if any one person deserves to place himself squarely at the center of this tale, it is Mr. Davies, who spent three years chipping away at a tower of lies, enduring attacks on his credibility and overcoming stonewalling of the first order to produce his account of tabloid criminality and British officialdom’s role in covering it up.

In 2007, The News of the World’s royal reporter and a private investigator the tabloid employed pleaded guilty to intercepting voice mail left for the royal family. The editor at the time, Andy Coulson, resigned, but he and the company insisted it was an isolated incident involving a rogue reporter. Two years later, Mr. Davies landed several scoops that suggested otherwise, but the rest of the British press didn’t seem to care, even though Mr. Coulson was now the chief spin doctor for Prime Minister David Cameron. Though “a blind man in a dark room could see that these people were lying,” Mr. Davies writes, a Parliamentary inquiry into the matter had produced a whitewash.

Frustrated, Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian’s editor in chief, reached out to Bill Keller, then the executive editor of The New York Times. Send a team of reporters, and do your own investigation, Mr. Rusbridger urged, which is how I came to meet Mr. Davies and his editor a few days later in The Guardian’s offices.

“Reporting is not a spectator sport,” Mr. Davies writes in “Hack Attack.” “You can’t sit and wait for the information to present itself like a postman knocking at your door.” Instead, “you have to get in there and make it happen.”

If that meant briefing reporters from another newspaper on everything he had managed to dig up so far, in the hope that they would be able to turn up something new, so be it. (Mr. Davies graciously credits The Times with breaking new ground and reinvigorating the story.)

In the United States, the mainstream news outlets like to portray themselves as observers, content to let events play out without interference. But in Britain, where crusading journalistic campaigns are part of the tradition, it is far more acceptable for reporters to become active participants, with a specific outcome in mind.

Mr. Davies writes of plotting strategy with lawyers whose clients had been stalked and tormented by The News of the World, of “feeding information” to Labour Party politicians who had “shown signs of wanting to get to the truth,” and even giving evidence to Parliament, all in the name of breaching “Murdoch’s castle” instead of “watching him and his court feasting.” His blow-by-blow approach occasionally bogs down with unnecessary detail about peripheral characters and story lines, and his efforts to protect sources can border on obfuscation. Mr. Davis is at his candid best writing about moments of self-doubt and mistakes made along the way, as when he learns that he most likely got a crucial detail wrong in the story — about the hacking of a murdered schoolgirl’s phone messages — that finally brought The News of the World to its knees.

As Mr. Davies pursues his quarry, readers are introduced to the seamy underside of Fleet Street, a brutally transactional place of “casual treachery” where people volunteer “to sell the secrets of those who most trust them.” Scotland Yard muckety-mucks sit on mountains of phone-hacking evidence, as they are wined and dined by the powerful editors and reporters they are charged with investigating. Bent cops are put on the tabloid’s payroll, while dodgy private eyes, some with criminal pasts, lurk about. Nothing is sacred; medical records, even a person’s precise location at any given moment as determined by cellular tower triangulation technology, can be had for a price. Politicians, fearful of the enormous power wielded by the Murdoch press, cower in corners.

It’s journalism noir, and it’s not surprising that last week George Clooney announced that he plans to direct a film version of “Hack Attack.”

Still, Mr. Davies did not get the Hollywood ending he clearly wanted. The News of the World closed, and Mr. Murdoch’s company has been forced to settle hundreds of hacking lawsuits at a cost that, combined with legal fees, could exceed $1 billion. But despite his best efforts, Mr. Davies was unable to prove complicity within the highest echelons of Mr. Murdoch’s empire. Mr. Coulson was convicted, along with reporters and midlevel editors, but Rebekah Brooks, the most senior member of News International to be charged, was acquitted. Mr. Murdoch’s son James once at the center of the scandal, was never charged.

The “brief humbling of Rupert Murdoch seduced us into thinking that we had won a great victory, that truth had caught up with power,” Mr. Davies writes, when, in fact, as “the scandal slipped into the past, the elite simply took back their power, as if we had never challenged it.”

And that, in the end, is the moral of the story. As Mr. Davies puts it, “Power enjoys secrecy, because it increases its scope.” It takes tenacious muckrakers like Mr. Davies to upend that dynamic.

HACK ATTACK

The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch

By Nick Davies

Illustrated. 430 pages. Faber and Faber. $27.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/bo...t-murdoch.html





The CIA’s Mop-Up Man: L.A. Times Reporter Cleared Stories With Agency Before Publication
Ken Silverstein

A prominent national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times routinely submitted drafts and detailed summaries of his stories to CIA press handlers prior to publication, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.

Email exchanges between CIA public affairs officers and Ken Dilanian, now an Associated Press intelligence reporter who previously covered the CIA for the Times, show that Dilanian enjoyed a closely collaborative relationship with the agency, explicitly promising positive news coverage and sometimes sending the press office entire story drafts for review prior to publication. In at least one instance, the CIA’s reaction appears to have led to significant changes in the story that was eventually published in the Times.

“I’m working on a story about congressional oversight of drone strikes that can present a good opportunity for you guys,” Dilanian wrote in one email to a CIA press officer, explaining that what he intended to report would be “reassuring to the public” about CIA drone strikes. In another, after a series of back-and-forth emails about a pending story on CIA operations in Yemen, he sent a full draft of an unpublished report along with the subject line, “does this look better?” In another, he directly asks the flack: “You wouldn’t put out disinformation on this, would you?”

Dilanian’s emails were included in hundreds of pages of documents that the CIA turned over in response to two FOIA requests seeking records on the agency’s interactions with reporters. They include email exchanges with reporters for the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other outlets. In addition to Dilanian’s deferential relationship with the CIA’s press handlers, the documents show that the agency regularly invites journalists to its McLean, Va., headquarters for briefings and other events. Reporters who have addressed the CIA include the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius, the former ombudsmen for the New York Times, NPR, and Washington Post, and Fox News’ Brett Baier, Juan Williams, and Catherine Herridge.

Dilanian left the Times to join the AP last May, and the emails released by the CIA only cover a few months of his tenure at the Times. They show that in June 2012, shortly after 26 members of congress wrote a letter to President Obama saying they were “deeply concerned” about the drone program, Dilanian approached the agency about story that he pitched as “a good opportunity” for the government.

The letter from lawmakers, which was sent in the wake of a flurry of drone strikes that had reportedly killed dozens of civilians, suggested there was no meaningful congressional oversight of the program. But Dilanian wrote that he had been “told differently by people I trust.” He added:

Not only would such a story be reassuring to the public, I would think, but it would also be an opportunity to explore the misinformation about strikes that sometimes comes out of local media reports. It’s one thing for you to say three killed instead of 15, and it’s another for congressional aides from both parties to back you up. Part of what the story will do, if you could help me bring it to fruition, is to quote congressional officials saying that great care is taken to avoid collateral damage and that the reports of widespread civilian casualties are simply wrong.

Of course, journalists routinely curry favor with government sources (and others) by falsely suggesting that they intend to amplify the official point of view. But the emails show that Dilanian really meant it.

Over the next two weeks, he sent additional emails requesting assistance and information from the agency. In one, he suggested that a New America Foundation report alleging that drone attacks had killed many civilians was exaggerated, writing that the report was “all wrong, correct?”

A number of early news accounts reported that more than a dozen people died in the June 4, 2012, drone strike that killed Al Qaeda leader Abu Yahya al-Libi in Pakistan. But in a June 20 email to the CIA, Dilanian shared a sentence from his story draft asserting that al-Libi had died alone. “Would you quibble with this?” he asked the CIA press officer.

On June 25, the Times published Dilanian’s story, which described thorough congressional review of the drone program and said legislative aides were allowed to watch high-quality video of attacks and review intelligence used to justify each strike. Needless to say, the agency hadn’t quibbled with Dilanian’s description of al-Libi’s solitary death. Video provided by the CIA to congressional overseers, Dilanian reported, “shows that he alone was killed.”

That claim was subsequently debunked. In October of 2013, Amnesty International issued a report, based on statements from eyewitnesses and survivors, that the first missile strike targeting al-Libi killed five men and wounded four others. Al-Libi was not even among those victims; he and up to fifteen other people died in a follow up attack when they arrived at the scene to assist victims. Some of those killed were very likely members of al Qaeda, but six were local tribesmen who Amnesty believed were there only as rescuers. Another field report published around the same time, this one by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, also reported follow-up drone strikes on civilians and rescue workers — attacks that constitute war crimes.

Dilanian has done some strong work and has at times been highly critical of the CIA. For example, in July 2012 he wrote a piece about sexual harassment at the agency that angered the press office. In reply to an email from a spokesperson, Dilanian said that complaints about his story were “especially astonishing given that CIA hides the details of these complaints behind a wall of secrecy.”

But the emails reveal a remarkably collegial relationship with the agency. “I am looking forward to working with you, Ken,” a newly hired agency flack wrote him in a March 1, 2012, email.

“Hooray!” Dilanian replied. “Glad to have you guys.”

On March 14, 2012, Dilanian sent an email to the press office with a link to a Guardian story that said Bashar Al-Assad’s wife had been buying a fondue set on Amazon while Syrian protesters were gunned down. “If this is you guys, nice work,” he wrote. “If it’s real, even better.”

The emails also show that Dilanian shared his work with the CIA before it was published, and invited the agency to request changes. On Friday April 27, 2012, he emailed the press office a draft story that he and a colleague, David Cloud, were preparing. The subject line was “this is where we are headed,” and he asked if “you guys want to push back on any of this.”

It appears the agency did push back. On May 2, 2012, he emailed the CIA a new opening to the story with a subject line that asked, “does this look better?”

The piece ran on May 16, and while it bore similarities to the earlier versions, it had been significantly softened.

Here’s the original opening, from Dilanian’s email:

Teams of CIA officers, private contractor and special operations troops have been inserted in southern Yemen to work with local tribes on gathering intelligence for U.S. drone strikes against militants, U.S. officials and others familiar with the secret operation said.

Here’s the version that was published:

In an escalation of America’s clandestine war in Yemen, a small contingent of U.S. troops is providing targeting data for Yemeni airstrikes as government forces battle to dislodge Al Qaeda militants and other insurgents in the country’s restive south, U.S. and Yemeni officials said.

In another case, Dilanian sent the press office a draft story on May 4, 2012, reporting that U.S. intelligence believed the Taliban was growing stronger in Afghanistan. “Guys, I’m about to file this if anyone wants to weigh in,” he wrote.

On May 7, 2012, the AP, Dilanian’s current employer, broke a story about a secret CIA operation that “thwarted an ambitious plot by al-Qaida’s affiliate in Yemen to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner.” The next day, Dilanian sent the CIA a detailed summary of a planned piece that followed up on (and took issue with) the AP story. “This is what we are planning to report, and I want to make sure you wouldn’t push back against any of it,” he wrote.

Dilanian also closely collaborated with the CIA in a May 2012 story that minimized the agency’s cooperation with director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal on their film about the assassination of Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty. Republicans had been criticizing the Obama Administration for revealing classified details about the operation to Boal and Bigelow while withholding them from the public.

“My angle on this is that…this is a pretty routine effort to cooperate with filmmakers and the sort of thing the CIA has been doing for 15 years,” Dilanian wrote in an email to Cynthia Rapp, the head of the agency’s press office. “This is a storyline that is in your interest, I would think, to the extent you could provide information about how routine it is to offer guidance to entertainment people who seek it out—including ones who are Democrats!—it would show that this latest episode is hardly a scandal.”

Dilanian’s pitch appears to have worked. His subsequent story included an on the record comment from CIA spokesman Todd Ebitz. One year later, internal CIA documents released under the FOIA showed that the agency’s office of public affairs—the same people Dilanian had been working with–had asked for and received changes to the Zero Dark Thirty script that portrayed the agency in a more favorable light.

Reached by The Intercept for comment, Dilanian said that the AP does not permit him to send stories to the CIA prior to publication, and he acknowledged that it was a bad idea. “I shouldn’t have done it, and I wouldn’t do it now,” he said. “[But] it had no meaningful impact on the outcome of the stories. I probably should’ve been reading them the stuff instead of giving it to them.”

Dilanian said he was not sure if Los Angeles Times rules allow reporters to send stories to sources prior to publication. The Time’s ethics guidelines, however, clearly forbid the practice: “We do not circulate printed or electronic copies of stories outside the newsroom before publication. In the event you would like to read back quotations or selected passages to a source to ensure accuracy, consult an editor before doing so….”

Bob Drogin, the Times’ deputy bureau chief and national security editor, said he had been unaware that Dilanian had sent story drafts to the CIA and would have not allowed him to do it. “Ken is a diligent reporter and it’s responsible to seek comment and response to your reporting,” he told me. “But sharing story drafts is not appropriate.”

AP spokesman Paul Colford told The Intercept that the news organization is “satisfied that any pre-publication exchanges that Ken had with the CIA before joining AP were in pursuit of accuracy in his reporting on intelligence matters,” adding that “we do not coordinate with government agencies on the phrasing of material.”

Dilanian’s emails were included in a FOIA request that sought communications between the CIA and ten national security reporters sent from March to July 2012. That request turned up correspondence between the press office and Dilanian, Adam Goldman, then at the AP and now at The Washington Post, Matt Apuzzo, then at AP and now at The New York Times, Brian Bennett of The Los Angeles Times, Siobhan Gorman of The Wall Street Journal, Scott Shane of the New York Times, and David Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist.

It’s impossible to know precisely how the CIA flacks responded to reporters’ queries, because the emails show only one side of the conversations. The CIA redacted virtually all of the press handlers’ replies other than meager comments that were made explicitly on the record, citing the CIA Act of 1949, which exempts the agency from having to disclose “intelligence sources and methods” or “the organization, functions, names, official titles, salaries, or numbers of personnel employed by the Agency.” The contents of off-the-record or background emails from CIA press handlers clearly don’t disclose names, titles, or salaries (which can easily be redacted anyway); they may disclose sources and methods, depending on whether you view manipulation of American reporters as an intelligence method. (The Intercept is appealing the redactions.)
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2...a-publication/





Government’s Threat of Daily Fine for Yahoo Shows Aggressive Push for Data
Vindu Goel and Charlie Savage

The federal government was so determined to collect the Internet communications of foreign Yahoo customers in 2008 that it threatened the company with fines of $250,000 a day if it did not immediately comply with a secret court order to turn over the data.

The threat — which was made public Thursday as part of about 1,500 pages of previously classified documents that were unsealed by a federal court — adds new details to the public history of a fight that unfolded in secret at the time, as Yahoo challenged the constitutionality of a statute that legalized a form of the Bush administration’s program of warrantless surveillance of foreigners — and lost. Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, companies that receive data requests are prohibited by law from talking about the substance of specific requests or even acknowledging they occurred.

Yahoo’s 2008 challenge to the warrantless surveillance law and an appeals court’s rejection of that challenge were first reported by The New York Times last year, shortly after Edward J. Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, exposed a more extensive government surveillance program called Prism through classified documents leaked to The Washington Post and The Guardian.

The documents released on Thursday show that the government expected Internet providers to begin complying with orders under the law — which Congress later replaced with another statute called the FISA Amendments Act — before the intelligence court had approved the procedures for targeting specific accounts and protecting any private information about Americans collected incidentally in the course of the warrantless surveillance aimed at people abroad.

The records also provide perhaps the clearest corroboration yet of the Internet companies’ contention that they did not provide the government with direct access to vast amounts of customer data on their computers.

When the Snowden revelations surfaced last summer, there were reports that the government had direct access to look into the databases of Internet companies for any information they wanted, which the companies have denied. Instead, they said, the government had to send them a lawful request for information on a specific individual and only then would they hand it over.

In a document reporting on its compliance with the 2008 order to turn over customer data, Yahoo said it had begun surveillance on the requested accounts, beginning with the government’s highest-priority targets. That indicates that the government was sending Yahoo the names of the people it was investigating and waiting for the company to send the information, as opposed to directly accessing Yahoo’s servers.

Over all, the cache of documents shows how Yahoo fought the government and eventually lost its appeal. That helped set the stage for a vast expansion of the federal government’s surveillance of Internet users through the secret Prism program. Ultimately, Yahoo and seven other companies had to give data to the government under the program.

Yahoo described the government’s threat to seek fines in a blog post on Thursday. A Yahoo spokesman further explained that the court ordered it to comply while its appeal was pending.

Proceedings in front of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are usually secret, and Yahoo had been pressing for months for the declassification and release of the documents.

“We consider this an important win for transparency, and hope that these records help promote informed discussion about the relationship between privacy, due process and intelligence gathering,” Ron Bell, Yahoo’s general counsel, wrote in the blog post.

The Justice Department has posted many of the documents online and Yahoo said it would work to make more of them available to the public.

Yahoo brought its challenge after the 2007 enactment of the Protect America Act, which gave the first, temporary legalization to a form of the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program. It authorized the government to collect, from domestic networks and providers, the communications of people thought to be located abroad.

In 2008, the Protect America Act expired and Congress replaced it with the FISA Amendments Act, which reauthorized a more permanent version of the program. The 2008 law extended some protections for Americans abroad — an issue Yahoo had concerns about — by limiting the targets of the warrantless surveillance to noncitizens abroad.

While Yahoo’s challenge was technically to the Protect America Act, however, most of its concerns applied equally to the FISA Amendments Act. The rulings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and its review panel upholding the Protect America Act became an important, though secret, precedent for the constitutionality of expansive government surveillance powers.

Yahoo did not seek Supreme Court review of the issue. One complication, the Yahoo spokesman noted, was that the Protect America Act had expired and such a challenge might have had to start over again addressing the FISA Amendments Act. The spokesman did not say how much the litigation had cost, but said it was considerable.

In 2012, Congress reauthorized the FISA Amendments Act, and that same year a constitutional challenge to the law, brought by Amnesty International and other plaintiffs, reached the Supreme Court. But the justices dismissed the case without examining the merits on the grounds that the plaintiffs could not prove they had been wiretapped and so lacked standing.

Yahoo’s only victory was that the intelligence courts agreed that it had standing to file a challenge on behalf of its users, rejecting the Bush administration’s argument that it could not raise the concerns in court, the newly disclosed documents show.

The American Civil Liberties Union praised the court’s decision to release the documents.

“Yahoo should be lauded for standing up to sweeping government demands for its customers’ private data,” Patrick C. Toomey, a staff lawyer at the group, said in a statement. “But today’s release only underscores the need for basic structural reforms to bring transparency to the NSA’s surveillance activities.”

Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/te...-requests.html





Nancy Pelosi Urges FCC to Reclassify Broadband as a Utility
Jacob Kastrenakes

A good number of politicians have recently made statements in favor of net neutrality, but House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is going further than most of them today and asking that the Federal Communications Commission reclassify broadband as a utility using Title II of the Communications Act — exactly what net neutrality advocates have been pushing for. In a letter to FCC chair Tom Wheeler, Pelosi writes that Title II is "an appropriate tool to refine modern rules," and that it can do so without the FCC overburdening broadband providers.

The reason that the FCC is currently amid this whole internet "fast lane" debacle is that it's chosen to regulate internet providers using a less stringent allowance in the Communications Act. Though the commission could go ahead and use Title II — allowing it to impose more significant regulations and avoid fast lanes — it would be a politically tricky move that would upset internet giants who have a large lobbying force in Washington. The FCC is currently accepting public comments on its proposal to use the method that would allow for fast lanes, and advocates are looking for it to change course.

""An appropriate tool to refine modern rules""

"I remain concerned ... that the Federal Communications Commission may act in a way that would permit broadband providers to discriminate against the content consumers and innovators create and enjoy," Pelosi writes. "Innovators prefer bright-line rules and worry the proposed rules would force them into commercial arrangements that require payment of tolls in cash or equity to get their ideas on the internet."

Though Pelosi can't directly alter the FCC's decision, her position as minority leader of the House gives her opinion significant sway and should set an example for other Democrats. Her language already echoes exactly what we've seen from other net neutrality advocates — the only difference is that most haven't gone so far as to explicitly endorse the controversial Title II classification. Pelosi also notes that Title II will allow the commission to protect consumers against fraudulent billing and privacy infringements.

The FCC's period for reply comments on its net neutrality proposal closes next Monday. Its initial commenting period received 1.1 million replies from the public.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/8/612...n-of-broadband





FCC May Put Mobile Under Same Net Neutrality Rules as Wired Broadband

The past double standard is a big issue in many public comments, FCC Chairman Wheeler said
Stephen Lawson

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is reexamining how it treats wireless net neutrality, in response to public comments on the agency's proposed Open Internet rules.

Under the Net neutrality rules the FCC set in 2010, wireless was set apart from wired access and mobile operators were given more leeway to treat some streams of traffic differently from others. But that distinction is a major concern for "tens of thousands" of people who have commented on the agency's new proposal, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said today.

An open Internet encourages innovation, which in turn drives network use and infrastructure buildout, Wheeler said. "Mobile wireless broadband is a key component of that virtuous cycle," he said.

The wireless industry's role has changed since 2010, with LTE delivering higher speeds that in some places are comparable to wired services. In 2010, there were only 200,000 LTE subscribers in the U.S., and now there are 120 million, with networks reaching 300 million residents, Wheeler said.

Mobile operators have claimed they don't need the same degree of Net neutrality regulation as wired broadband providers because the wireless industry is more competitive. But that logic doesn't necessarily follow, Wheeler said. There was plenty of mobile carrier competition in the era before independent app stores, when carriers approved all apps and put them in so-called "walled gardens," he said.

"At least in the short run, this suggests that competition does not assure openness," Wheeler said.

Carriers should be allowed "reasonable network management" to ensure their networks run properly, but the FCC will hold them strictly to that definition, he said, citing his recent letter to Verizon Wireless that attacked the carrier's plan to throttle speeds for some subscribers with unlimited data plans.

Wheeler also signaled that the FCC will stand by its insistence on a U.S. mobile industry with four major providers. The agency fought both AT&T's attempt to buy T-Mobile in 2011 and Sprint's contemplated bid for the same fourth-place carrier earlier this year.

"I know that achieving scale is good economics, and that there is a natural economic incentive to accrue ever-expanding scale," he said. "We will continue to be skeptical of efforts to achieve that scale through the consolidation of major players."

Wheeler also called on all mobile carriers to publicly commit to participating in the FCC's planned incentive auction, in which TV broadcasters will be encouraged to give up some of their spectrum in exchange for part of the auction proceeds. Strong support from the mobile industry will be needed to bring broadcasters to the table, he said. The broadcast incentive auction is critical because it will form the template for other future auctions to reallocate spectrum, Wheeler said.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobile-te...oadband-250173





Comcast Wi-Fi Serving Self-Promotional Ads Via JavaScript Injection

The practice raises security, net neutrality issues as FCC mulls Internet reforms.
David Kravets

Comcast has begun serving Comcast ads to devices connected to one of its 3.5 million publicly accessible Wi-Fi hotspots across the US. Comcast's decision to inject data into websites raises security concerns and arguably cuts to the core of the ongoing net neutrality debate.

A Comcast spokesman told Ars the program began months ago. One facet of it is designed to alert consumers that they are connected to Comcast's Xfinity service. Other ads remind Web surfers to download Xfinity apps, Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas told Ars in telephone interviews.

The advertisements may appear about every seven minutes or so, he said, and they last for just seconds before trailing away. Douglas said the advertising campaign only applies to Xfinity's publicly available Wi-Fi hot spots that dot the landscape. Comcast customers connected to their own Xfinity Wi-Fi routers when they're at home are not affected, he said.

"We think it's a courtesy, and it helps address some concerns that people might not be absolutely sure they're on a hotspot from Comcast," Douglas said.

The Comcast advertising campaign came to Ars' attention after Ryan Singel, the co-founder of startup Contextly, was reading Mediagazer at a café in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco on Labor Day.

A small red advertisement saying "XFINITY WiFi Peppy" scooted across the bottom of the Mediagazer page and disappeared into the ether. It happened a few times, he said. Singel took screen shots of the advertisement loading and as it appeared on his screen. He captured some code, too.

"When a user requests to view a page, Comcast injects its JavaScript into the packets being returned by the real server," Singel said during an instant-message chat.

Singel's suspicions were correct that Mediagazer didn't place the ad there, and Mediagazer is none too happy about it. "Indeed, they were not ours," Gabe Rivera, who runs Mediagazer and Techmeme, said in an e-mail. In another e-mail, he said, "someone else is inserting them in a sneaky way."

Unwanted injections

Security implications of the use of JavaScript can be debated endlessly, but it is capable of performing all manner of malicious actions, including controlling authentication cookies and redirecting where user data is submitted.

Comcast's Douglas says Comcast has nothing nefarious up its sleeve. What's more, Comcast has multiple layers of security "based on industry best practices" to keep out hackers wanting to exploit the Xfinity network, he said.

Seth Schoen, the senior staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, reviewed the data pulled by Singel and said that "there ended up being JavaScript in the page that was not intended by the server."

Even if Comcast doesn't have any malicious intent, and even if hackers don't access the JavaScript, the interaction of the JavaScript with websites could "create" security vulnerabilities in websites, Schoen said. "Their code, or the interaction of code with other things, could potentially create new security vulnerabilities in sites that didn't have them," Schoen said in a telephone interview.

One way to prevent this from happening, he said, is for websites to encrypt and serve over HTTPS. But many sites do not do that.

Security expert Dan Kaminsky said in an e-mail that JavaScript injection has the potential to break "all sorts of stuff, in that you no longer know as a website developer precisely what code is running in browsers out there. You didn't send it, but your customers received it."

Net Neutrality Déjà vu

What Comcast is doing isn't without precedent. Airports have deployed so-called branded promotional hotspots, and there are plenty of companies that help businesses set up Wi-Fi hotspots that append ads via JavaScript injection. One of those companies is Front Porch, of Northern California, whose clients include Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, Bright House and Cablevision.

But Comcast is one of the nation's leading ISPs, with more than 22 million customers nationwide. And there's no other major company that symbolizes the high-pitched fight over net neutrality, especially at a time when the Internet's future sits at a regulatory crossroads. That's because the Federal Communications Commission is taking public and industry comments through September 15 on whether it should adopt net neutrality and place broadband providers under the same law, known as Title II, that governs utilities like those delivering telephone service.

If the FCC decided to regulate broadband like a telephone utility, Comcast's JavaScript practice could come under scrutiny. And the policy question of whether broadband companies must deliver broadband without altering or initiating data packets could come front and center for a decision. "I think it shows why the FCC should have the authority under Title II to address this question," Marvin Ammori, an attorney and network neutrality activist and scholar, said in a telephone interview. "The FCC should be able to say, 'Hey Comcast, don't interfere with Internet connections by injecting these ads into Websites.'"

Many consumer advocates say that Title II regulation is needed to free the FCC or Congress to impose strong network neutrality rules that would force ISPs to treat all traffic equally, to not degrade competing services, or speed up Web services in exchange for payment. ISPs have argued that this would saddle them with too much regulation and would force them to spend less on network upgrades and be less innovative.

But there's a deeper, more nuanced point to be made on the topic, according to Robb Topolski, a network expert whose findings in 2007 helped launch the words "net neutrality" into the national consciousness. That year, Topolski concluded that Comcast was throttling BitTorrent by sending disconnect commands to customers engaged in peer-to-peer file sharing. A year later, the FCC ordered Comcast to stop the practice. A federal appeals court eventually reversed the FCC's decision because of a technicality, and the FCC is now mulling the idea of regulating broadband under Title II. A decision could come within months.

To Topolski, what Comcast is now doing is no different from before: Comcast is adding data into the broadband packet stream. In 2007, it was packets serving up disconnection commands. Today, Comcast is inserting JavaScript that is serving up advertisements, according to Topolski, who reviewed Singel's data.

"It's the duty of the service provider to pull packets without treating them or modifying them or injecting stuff or forging packets. None of that should be in the province of the service provider," he said. "Imagine every Web page with a Comcast bug in the lower righthand corner. It's the antithesis of what a service provider is supposed to do. We want Internet access, not another version of cable TV."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...et-neutrality/





“Internet Slowdown Day” Sends Over 111,000* New Comments on Net Neutrality to FCC
Alexander Howard

Today, dozens of websites “slowed down” for a cause, collectively advocating against Open Internet rules proposed by the Federal Communication. None of the participants in today’s “Internet Slowdown Day” actually delayed access to their websites: instead, they used code to add a layer to visitors’ Web browsers with one of the loading icons grimly familiar to anyone who’s ever waited for a long download or crufty operating system function to finish in an overlay and linked to BattleForThenet.com/September10, which encouraged visitors to sign a letter supporting net neutrality, or to use online tools to call Congress.

While many big tech companies didn’t participate, millions of visitors to Reddit, Tumblr, Netflix, Free Press, Reddit, Netflix, Mozilla, Kickstarter, Upworthy, Automattic, Digg, Vimeo, Boing Boing, Urban Dictionary, Foursquare, Cheezburger and the Sunlight Foundation saw the spinning icon, among others.

The effort appears to have made a difference: According to the FCC*, by 6 PM ET the agency saw 111,449 new public comments added to the already record-setting total, with some 41,173 filed into the 14-28 docket of the FCC’s website since and another 70,286 sent to the openinternet@fcc.gov inbox, setting a new high water mark of some 1,515,144 to date, with more yet to come. *Update: Fight for the Future claims that more than 500,000 comments have been submitted through Battleforthenet.com and that the FCC hasn’t caught up. According to the nonprofit,
“this happened during our last big push too when their site crashed. We are storing comments and will deliver all.”

“We sent 500K+ comments,” wrote Tiffaniy Cheng, co-founder of Fight for the Future, in an email. “They’re getting backlogged as the FCC can’t handle the amount of data. The FCC asked us to hold as they could not accept them and can’t handle all the load. So, they only just got to accepting them again.”

These numbers are still dwarfed by the millions of calls and emails sent to Washington during the campaign to halt the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act in Congress in 2012, when Google and Wikipedia connected visitors to their websites to switchboards on Capitol Hill. They may also have less of an effect on an independent regulatory agency that has yet to chart a sustainable legal course in the storm of online criticism and intense lobbying by affected industries.

According to a FCC spokesman, the agency expected an increased volume of traffic due to the “slowdown.” Perhaps anticipating the interest, the @FCC’s first tweet today encouraged people to submit comments via email:

Next Monday 9/15 is the deadline for the 2nd round of #OpenInternet comments. Submit via openinternet@fcc.gov.

— The FCC (@FCC) September 10, 2014

That means there have been at least 409,522 reply comments filed since July 18, with five days left in the reply comment period, with more than one quarter of them coming in a single day. (If Fight for the Future’s total is correct, the number of reply comments filed passed 800,000, with the total nearing 2 million.) The FCC will host a public Open Internet roundtable discussion on September 16, the day after the period closes. According to an analysis of the first 800,000 public comments by the Sunlight Foundation, less than 1 percent of the submissions were clearly opposed to net neutrality.

The total number of comments on the Open Internet proceeding is sure to grow in the remaining week, with the number of emails sent to the FCC’s dedicated inbox likely to go past a million.

In many ways, that outcome feels appropriate. When the FCC’s 16 year-old website has groaned under a huge volume of online traffic, people have routed around the downed comment system and used the original killer app of the Internet: email, the “tremendous, decentralized, open platform on which new, innovative things can and have been built,” based upon the same kinds of open protocols that enabled the unprecedented growth of a wealth of networks to grow around the world.
http://e-pluribusunum.com/2014/09/11...rality-to-fcc/





WD Leapfrogs Seagate with World’s Highest Capacity 10TB Helium Drive, New Flash Drives

WD said it will end production of air-filled hard drives for the data center
Lucas Mearian

Western Digital's (WD) HGST subsidiary today announced it has added 8TB and 10TB hard drives to its HelioSeal product line, which hermetically seals in helium in order to reduce internal drive friction and power use.

WD also announced its first NVMe (non volatile memory express) product with a PCIe-attached flash drive; the company also announced a new 2.5-in solid-state drive (SSD).

Additionally, WD unveiled a new "flash fabric" software and hardware platform that acts as a multi-server volume manager, linking up to 128 servers and 16 PCIe drives for up to 38TB of pooled flash storage. HGST is rebranding Virident Solutions 2.0 software.
hgst activearchiveplatform HGST

The HGST Virident Solutions 2.0 software can create a high availability, mirrored cluster that can be managed through a graphical user interface for shared storage applications like Oracle RAC and Red Hat Global File System that traditionally rely on dedicated SANs.

It also provides MySQL environments with greater levels of availability and efficiency where a single stand-by server can be deployed as an alternative to dedicated replication pairs, saving as much as 37% on total server count, according to HGST.

The Virident Solutions 2.0 software can be added to HGST's already-shipping Virident ClusterCache for SAN acceleration, Virident Share for Flash pooling and remote access to Flash, and Virident HA for replication.

"Companies that invest in flash are going to want to be able to scale out and share that capacity without compromising the performance of their flash," said Mike Gustofson, a general manager at HGST. "

Massive hard drive upgrade

Today, HGST said that by 2017, it plans to end production of air-filled hard drives for use in corporate data centers, replacing all of its models with helium filled products.

Along with the thinner gas's ability to reduce power use, the helium-drives run at four to five degrees cooler than today's 7200rpm drives, HGST stated. Sealing air out of the drive also keeps humidity and other contaminates from getting in.

HGST's announcement comes less than two weeks after Seagate announced its highest capacity enterprise hard drive, an 8TB model that bypassed helium for air.

Instead of helium, Seagate uses a technology called shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to increase the capacity of its drives beyond 4TB. Seagate has said SMR holds the promise of creating 20TB drives by 2020.

With SMR technology, Seagate has been able to increase bit density on its platters by 25% or more. Unlike standard perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), where data tracks rest side by side, SMR overlaps the tracks on a platter like shingles on a roof, thereby allowing Seagate to squeeze more tracks together on a hard drive platter.

HGST's new 3.5-in 8TB drive uses traditional PMR technology, but the new 10TB hard drive marks WD's foray into SMR in conjunction with the helium gas. Both drives use a 12Gbps SAS interface. By using helium instead of air, HGST said it was able to stack 7 platters and reduce power usage at idle by 23% and watts per terabyte of capacity by 44% over its 6TB drive.
he8 label on drive withqr HGST

The 8TB drive is being marketed as nearline storage for faster access. The 10TB helium-filled hard drive is being targeted at cloud and archive "cold storage" applications because there are performance hindering implications related to the SMR technology, including file systems and software drivers, according to Dave Tang, general manager of HGST's Elastic Storage Platforms Group.

Both new drives come with a 128MB cache buffer, a five year warranty and a two million hour meantime between failures (MTBF) rating.

The new hard drives also come with WD's "Instant Secure Erase" feature, which overwrites data multiple times to ensure deletion.

Both 8TB and 10TB drives are shipping or sampling today.

PCIe SSDs

HGST's new series of NVMe-compliant Ultrastar SN100 PCIe SSDs, integrate Toshiba's current MLC NAND flash chips. The SSDs come in 800GB, 1.6TB and 3.2TB capacities.

HGST's new Ultrastar SN150 PCIe flash module comes in a half-height/half-length form factor add-in card with 1.6TB and 3.2TB capacities.

"We expect to see significant growth in PCIe-based SSD demand, especially as businesses implement server-side flash in conjunction with Flash-optimized software and applications," Gustafson said.

The Ultrastar SN100 Series PCIe SSDs will offer 2X the performance and endurance over HGST's current family of FlashMAX PCIe SSDs.
http://www.computerworld.com/article...sh-drives.html





Cyborg Unplug

For Sale Soon: The World’s First Google Glass Detector
Andy Greenberg

Earlier this summer, Berlin-based artist and coder Julian Oliver released Glasshole.sh, a simple and free piece of software designed to detect Google Glass and boot it from any local Wi-Fi network. That DIY idea, says Oliver, was so popular among Glass’s critics that he’s now offering his cyborg-foiling hack to the masses in a much more polished form: an easy-to-use commercial product selling for less than $100.

Later this month, Oliver says he’ll start taking pre-orders for Cyborg Unplug, a gadget no bigger than a laptop charger that plugs into a wall and patrols the local Wi-Fi network for connected Google Glass devices, along with other potential surveillance gadgets like Google Dropcams, Wi-Fi-enabled drone copters, and certain wireless microphones. When it detects one of those devices, it can be programmed to flash an alert with an LED light, play a sound through connected speakers, and even ping the Cyborg Unplug owner’s smartphone through an Android app, as well as silently booting those potential spy devices from the network.

“Basically it’s a wireless defense shield for your home or place of work,” says Oliver. “The intent is to counter a growing and tangibly troubling emergence of wirelessly capable devices that are used and abused for surveillance and voyeurism.”

The plug can seek out and disconnect nearby surveillance devices on any network it connects to—a more legally ambiguous use of the gadget.

Oliver says he’ll offer Cyborg Unplug in two versions: A cheaper version called “Little Snipper” equipped with only an LED blinker alert will sell for around $50. The higher-end version, which he’s dubbed “the Axe,” will sell for about $85 and also include the Android app, an audio connection to any nearby speakers for an audible beeping alert, and a 5G Wi-Fi connection often used by businesses as well as the more common 2.4G connection. The two devices are built from cheap, plug-in Wi-Fi routers made by Qualcomm Atheros and Ralink but with their firmware replaced with Oliver’s own version of the Linux-based software Open-WRT. “It’s just modified router hardware, but instead of allowing devices to get to the internet, it does precisely the opposite,” he says.

In addition to a default state called “Territory Mode” designed to defend the user’s own network, Oliver says Cyborg Unplug will also offer an “All Out Mode.” With that more aggressive setting switched on, the plug will seek out and disconnect nearby surveillance devices on any network it connects to, including Glass’s wireless connection to their owners’ phones. That’s a more legally ambiguous use of the gadget that Oliver says he doesn’t recommend. “Please note that this latter mode may not be legal within your jurisdiction,” reads a disclaimer on Cyborg Unplug’s website. “We take no responsibility for the trouble you get yourself into if you choose to deploy your Cyborg Unplug in this mode.”

A Google spokesperson declined to comment.

The idea for Glasshole.sh came to Oliver in June after an artist friend complained that a Glass-wearing visitor had potentially uploaded content from a gallery exhibition he’d hosted. Oliver soon found that Google’s augmented reality headsets used a unique prefix in their MAC addresses that he could easily detect. He quickly wrote and published a free script that could be installed on a cheap Wi-Fi-connected computer like a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBoard to seek out Glass headsets and and use the program Aircrack-NG to send a “DeAuth” command that cuts their internet connections.

As his idea spread, Oliver says he began receiving requests from restaurants, casinos, and clubs asking how they could implement the DIY script. He soon decided to build and sell the device himself. “The dominant enthusiasts were women,” says Oliver. “They were concerned about guys at nightclubs taking a little bit home for later, or guys across from them on the train looking them up and down. Even if they didn’t know if the device was recording, they felt threatened by its presence.”

Cutting the Wi-Fi uplink of Google Glass or most other surveillance gadgets doesn’t necessarily do much to prevent that sort of snooping, as long as it’s stored locally on the device. In fact, Cyborg Unplug wouldn’t even detect any Glass user who doesn’t attempt to connect to Wi-Fi. But Oliver argues that it would at least make it more difficult to surreptitiously stream video or images to a remote location without leaving evidence on the snoop’s local device. “A casino owner, for instance, might catch someone with some device and take it off them, but could never prove they were recording because they were streaming to somewhere else,” Oliver says.

Of course, Cyborg Unplug will do nothing to stop the most common surveillance devices of all: our smartphones. Oliver says his invention will “focus on objects actively made for surveillance,” not general purpose devices like phones.

But the demand for a Glass-foiling device like Oliver’s shows just how uncomfortable many people may be with the idea of constant, eye-level recording—more so than even with smartphone snooping. Glass wearers have already been banned from bars, attacked in the street, and even questioned by Homeland Security for wearing the headset in a movie theater. “The growing ubiquity and pervasiveness of these objects has incited a real fear that we don’t quite know where the private recordings of our person may be streamed,” says Oliver. “There’s a growing market for a device like this.”
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/for-sal...lass-detector/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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Old 10-09-14, 10:10 AM   #2
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