P2P-Zone  

Go Back   P2P-Zone > Peer to Peer
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology!

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Old 17-02-16, 09:43 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 20th, '16

Since 2002


































"The County was working cooperatively with the FBI when it reset the iCloud password at the FBI’s request." – San Bernardino County


"Make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a back door." – Tim Cook


"If just five percent of phones in a city use the [P2P] app, the company says, then messages can travel through the mesh of off-the-grid phones to cross the entire city within a few minutes." – Cate Lawrence






































February 20th, 2016




Kanye West’s ‘Life of Pablo’ Already Pirated 500,000 Times
Bryan Clark

Kanye West’s new album ‘The Life of Pablo’ may have been released as exclusive to Jay-Z’s streaming music service Tidal, but it didn’t stay that way for long.

The BBC reports today that West’s new album has over 500,000 pirated copies in circulation and is at the top of the download charts on The Pirate Bay.

Piracy is at historic lows, but if current trends continue ‘The Life of Pablo’ stands to be one of the most ripped off albums of all time. You have to wonder if the strategy to forego popular streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music — in favor of a platform many deemed to be a complete failure — was the linchpin for the spark in piracy.

My album will never never never be on Apple. And it will never be for sale… You can only get it on Tidal.

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 15, 2016


After all, listeners can’t even purchase the album if they wanted to. When you take away the option to buy and force listeners to subscribe to a platform they may not even like, you’re essentially asking them to:

1. Drop the $10 subscription elsewhere and subscribe to Tidal for one album — or —

2. Keep both subscriptions, which is really asking them to pay $10 a month for a Kanye album and then $10 a month for the rest of their music and playlists elsewhere

‘The Life of Pablo’ won’t save Tidal, but decisions like these could lead more users away from streaming music and back into pirating it.

But for now:

Shut the fuck up and enjoy the greatness.

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) February 15, 2016

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/0...-500000-times/





Cox Won't Spy On Customers To Appease Copyright Holders
Paul Lilly

Cox Communications is standing up for its subscribers by so far refusing to spy on their online activities and take legal action against those who download copyrighted material. That stand has already cost the ISP $25 million, the amount a Virginia federal jury recently came up with when it ruled that Cox was responsible for the activities of those using its service, and it could cost Cox even more.

The ruling against Cox took place last December. Since then, music publisher BMG has followed up by asking a court to issue a permanent injunction against Cox. BMG also wants the ISP to boot customers who have pirated content and share the details of those subscribers with copyright holders.

It doesn't stop there. On top of it all, BMG wants Cox to be proactive in preventing future infringement, and while the details of how it would do that remain unclear, the topic of deep packet inspection technology has come up. Despite all this, Cox is holding firm on its position.

"To the extent the injunction requires either termination or surveillance, it imposes undue hardships on Cox, both because the order is vague and because it imposes disproportionate, intrusive, and punitive measures against households and businesses with no due process," Cox stated in its reply.

To be clear, Cox isn't advocating illegal behavior, nor is it trying to defend those who infringe on copyrights. The concern is that BMG wants Cox to spy on its subscribers willy-nilly with no regard to circumstances. In its reply, Cox points out that BMG's demand completely ignores false positive hits, as could be the case if a person's PC was infected with malware or if someone's network password was stolen.

"The injunction also threatens the public interest, blindly punishing consumers by terminating their Internet accounts based on mere accusations, with no due process. The injunction provides no opportunity for customers to respond to accusations or submit counter notices, and it raises the specter that they may lose Internet access with a single notice," Cox continues.

Cox also takes issue with BMG wanting to force the disclosure of private customers details to Rightscorp, "a company with a long track record of using deception and unlawful tactics."
http://hothardware.com/news/cox-wont...yright-holders





Sony Music Issues Takedown On Copyright Lecture About Music Copyrights By Harvard Law Professor
Mike Masnick

Oh, the irony. First pointed out by Mathias Schindler, it appears that a copyright lecture about music copyright done by famed copyright expert and Harvard Law professor William Fisher has been taken down due to a copyright claim by Sony Music.

Fisher is well-known in copyright circles and has long advocated for a major reform to copyright to effectively spread a compulsive license to other uses, effectively legalizing file sharing, but with systems in place to still have artists paid. He's detailed versions of this proposal in his book, Promises to Keep: Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment. That said, this takedown appears to have nothing to do with that whatsoever.

The lecture itself appears to be a part of his online course, CopyrightX, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Thankfully, on the CopyrightX website, there are downloadable versions of the lectures, so I was able to download and watch the full lecture to see what the takedown was about. If you want to follow along at home, the lecture is the third one in section 3. Section three goes into detail on the "Subject Matter of Copyright," and the third lecture is about... "Music." You can download it here.

The lecture itself is 24 minutes long, and the vast majority of it is dedicated to creating and explaining this chart, which shows (partially) the messy nature of music copyright licensing today (as a side note, I really appreciate that Fisher is so thorough as to include under the table "payola" as a part of this chart).

However, towards the very end of the lecture, Fisher does play a few sound recording clips to demonstrate a point around cover songs and compulsory licenses (along with his personal opinions on the quality of Stevie Ray Vaughn v. Jimi Hendrix). The clips played are all versions of the Jimi Hendrix classic song Little Wing. You've heard it. In the lecture, Fisher plays approximately the first 45 seconds of the song, from 17:44 in his lecture to 18:31. Then, to demonstrate specific points about cover songs, he plays approximately 15 seconds of a cover by Santana and Joe Cocker. Then about 35 seconds of a version by Stevie Ray Vaughn, and finally about 40 seconds of a version by The Corrs. By my count, a little over 2 minutes of the entire 24-minute video are music clips.

Let's be clear here: this is unquestionably fair use. It's not entirely clear to me if this was an explicit takedown or merely a YouTube ContentID match, but either way there is no reason for YouTube to have allowed this to be blocked. If you run through the four factors test of fair use, all four suggest that it's fair use. The purpose and character of the use is clearly for educational purposes, which the fair use part of the law explicitly calls out as an example of fair use. The "nature" of the work is a song, but that seems to have little bearing here on the fair use question. The amount and substantiality of the portion taken was fairly small -- basically just enough for Fisher to make his point showing the differences between the songs and how that applies to the compulsory licenses issued for cover songs. And, finally, the effect of the use upon the potential market is nil. No one is listening to Fisher's lecture as a "replacement" for going out and getting the Hendrix song, or any other version of Little Wing. And I don't think there's a huge "market" in "licensing music to copyright lectures."

In fact, considering how frequently we hear the RIAA and other copyright system supporters (especially within the recording industry) arguing that what the world really needs is better education on copyright issues so that the public better understands it, it seems particularly stupid to issue a takedown over a free lecture explaining music copyright. But, of course, no one ever suggested that the recording industry is particularly intelligent in how it goes about fighting its peculiar war.

This story is reminiscent of when Warner Music issued a DMCA takedown on a presentation by another famed Harvard Law professor, Larry Lessig. Similar things have happened a few times to Lessig, including one case where Lessig sued in response, seeking a declaratory judgment of non-infringement along with damages under DMCA 512(f), which forbid "misrepresentations" in filing DMCA notices. That case eventually settled, with the record label (an Australian label called Liberation Music) paying a sum of money that went to the EFF. It's unclear what Fisher will do in this situation, but I imagine that as this story begins to get attention, both Sony Music and YouTube may want to reconsider the original move to take down the video.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...rofessor.shtml





Embattled Copyright Lawyer Uses DMCA to Remove Article About Himself

Marc Randazza tells Wordpress that the unflattering story "is not fair use."
Joe Mullin

Well-known copyright lawyer Marc Randazza used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to delete an online article about a dispute between his former employer and himself.

Randazza says he sent the notice on behalf of Xbiz.com, a porn-industry news site that he represents. Last July, Xbiz (NSFW) published an article about Randazza's legal dispute with a former employer, gay porn publisher Liberty Media. The brouhaha with Liberty Media was also featured here at Ars in a story titled "Bribery, gay porn, and copyright trolls: the rise and fall of lawyer Marc Randazza." It describes how an arbitrator found that Randazza—the Nevada lawyer once championed for helping bring down copyright troll Righthaven—solicited a bribe in a bid to settle a copyright case for Liberty. Randazza soon found himself under investigation by the State Bar of Nevada.

A blog called Fight Copyright Trolls (FCT) mentioned the arbitration award as well. The blog's owner, who goes by "SJD," also noticed that the Xbiz article had been changed—but he had kept an original copy, saved and published as a PDF file on his site. On Feb. 1 nearly seven months after the FCT blog published the Xbiz article and related commentary, SJD was on the receiving end of Randazza's copyright takedown request. The FCT blog had re-published the entire Xbiz story, and Randazza claimed that made it a piratical, infringing copy.

It was Randazza himself who was instrumental in proving that even reposting an entire article can be fair use in one of the cases where he bested Righthaven. Nevertheless, Randazza sent the DMCA notice about the FCT blog to Automattic, which owns the WordPress blogging platform. Randazza was demanding that an unflattering article about himself be wiped from the Internet—in the name of his client, Xbiz, which continues to host an almost-identical version.

The DMCA legal notice didn't lead to quick compliance, however. Instead, Randazza got into a back-and-forth about copyright law with Wordpress' "Community Guardians."

“So what's the verdict?”

"It looks like Rhett Pardon is the author of the article infringed upon, and you’re actually the subject of the article," a WordPress Community Guardian, identified in e-mails as Sal P., told Randazza. "Do you work for XBiz, and are you authorized to represent them in this way?"

Sal reminded Randazza that "all information you furnish in connection with DMCA notices (including your authorization to act on behalf of the copyright holder) is submitted under penalty of perjury."

"I may be the subject of the article, but I am also legal counsel to Xbiz," Randazza wrote in response. "Rhett Pardon is a pen name for the author, but Adnet Media d/b/a Xbiz is the copyright owner. I submit this information under penalty of perjury. If you would feel more comfortable with a declaration from the actual writer, I will get that for you."

It wasn't over yet. The next day, a WordPress employee identified as Leroy responded, asking Randazza if he had considered fair use before sending the takedown request. Leroy had noticed that there was a key difference between the current article up on Xbiz and the original Xbiz article preserved by SJD.

"As you may know, the DMCA is frequently abused by complainants who are not authorized to act on behalf of a copyright holder, but nevertheless seek to remove certain materials from the Internet on copyright grounds," Leroy wrote. "We’re very vigilant about this issue."

He continued:

While the blog post you cite, “Arbitrator: Marc Randazza must pay $600K+ for ‘clear and serious breaches of fiduciary duty’ against his former client,”... does include an article from your client’s website, it appears that the article was included for the purpose of commentary by the blogger. In particular, the article includes and makes reference to an earlier copy of your client’s article (later revised on your client’s website), and notes/comments on the deletion of two paragraphs from that article. At first glance, this seems like a colorable instance of fair use by the blogger; a copy of the earlier version of the article is essential to the blogger’s commentary.

If fair use is applicable here, the blogger’s use of your article in this context would not constitute infringement, regardless of authorization (or not) by the copyright holder. Did you consider this fair use defense when submitting your notice? Do you agree or disagree with this assessment? Would be interested to know your thoughts before proceeding further—particularly given your firm’s experience defending small publishers against similar takedown requests (which we very much applaud!).


"My client’s position," Randazza responded minutes later, "is that this infringes upon their copyright and that it is not fair use."

About two hours later, Randazza wrote another note to Leroy. "So what’s the verdict? Do you want to have a phone call about it? You can feel free to record it, if you announce that in advance. I just think that dealing with someone with just a first name, with multi-hour delays in between messages, is not constructive."

Later that night, Randazza changed his mind without warning. "Making this one easy," he wrote. "My client has authorized me to withdraw the DMCA request."

(Ars was given a copy of the e-mail correspondence between Randazza and WordPress community guardians.)

Missing paragraphs

In telephone interview with Ars, Randazza said his request to remove the article about him was simply one of "many DMCA notices" he had sent on behalf of Xbiz.

"There are hundreds of infringements that we deal with," Randazza said. "When this one was brought to my attention, and there was some question as to my potential objectivity on it, I asked my client to allow me to withdraw it and refer it to another lawyer. I don't know who’s going to handle it going forward."

The Xbiz article was written by "Rhett Pardon," a pseudonym used by Don Parret, Xbiz's executive editorial director. Phone and e-mail requests for comment sent to Parret, Xbiz publisher Alec Helmy, and Xbiz's press relations department received no response. Randazza declined to say who at Xbiz authorized the DMCA takedown notice.

As for SJD, the pseudonymous author of the Fight Copyright Trolls blog, he views the Randazza DMCA notice as an attempt to erase history.

"I felt what was going on was censorship," SJD said in an telephone interview with Ars. "The notion that I drew page views from them is so ridiculous it doesn’t pass the smell test."

The Xbiz article discusses the same Randazza employment dispute that Ars reported on in November. Liberty Media, called by its brand name Corbin Fisher in the Xbiz piece, won an award against Randazza of more than $600,000 through binding arbitration. The arbitrator found that Randazza had improperly worked for Liberty competitors and had "successfully concluded negotiations for a bribe in the amount of $75,000." Court proceedings to finalize the award are on hold due to Randazza's declaration of bankruptcy last year. (The arbitrator did not conclude, however, that Randazza actually received the $75,000.)

As WordPress' Leroy saw, however, there's a critical difference between the article currently up at Xbiz.com and the original, preserved one on the FCT blog. Even though the DMCA notice was dropped, SJD has removed the full PDF and updated the post with a screenshot of two paragraphs Xbiz deleted from the story it originally published.

The two paragraphs describe a proposal by Randazza's attorney to settle Randazza's employment dispute with Liberty Media by offering, in part, $20,000 per bar license that Randazza is able to keep from having suspended or revoked. Liberty COO Brian Dunlap had described the offer as an unethical "bounty on his bar licenses" intended to encourage Liberty not to cooperate with state bar investigators.

The deleted paragraphs read:

“[P]art of his settlement offer was to pay us $20,000 per bar license he is able to keep from having suspended/disbarred,” [Liberty Media COO Brian] Dunlap said. “In other words, he offered us a bounty on his bar licenses — we’d get more of the award if we did not cooperate with bar investigators or send follow–up complaints."

“In his attorneys' own words, they said they expect suspension/disbarment in [Florida], so we could expect $80,000 if none of the other four bars took action. We refused this offer because it was insulting, it was unethical — an attorney cannot offer such a bounty on their license — and because we know most all bars use reciprocal discipline — if one suspends/disbars, the others usually do as well."

The original e-mail, which was provided to Ars, shows that the settlement offer included at least $200,000 in addition to the $20,000 per non-suspended bar license. The offer was made in June, shortly after Liberty had received the favorable arbitration decision. Liberty rejected the offer.

Randazza didn't respond to Ars' questions regarding the deleted paragraphs. Asked if he was the subject of any bar investigations, he said, "None that have not been closed."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...about-himself/





Russian Premier Bypasses Ban on File-Sharing Site

Determined users can easily slip past Russia’s strict anti-piracy laws.
Piers Lawson

Dmitry Medvedev used his personal iPad to reach the site during a meeting in which measures to combat piracy were under discussion.

The prime minister accessed the banned file-sharing website RuTracker during a government council meeting to discuss piracy in the film industry, Vedomosti reported.

RuTracker has been outlawed in perpetuity by a court for repeated acts of digital piracy, Vedomosti says.

During the meeting Medvedev used his iPad to reach the site, where he was immediately able to find a link to illegal copies of the Hollywood movie “The Revenant.”

The prime minister performed his digital rule-breaking while the general director of television station Channel One was speaking about the ineffectiveness of measures taken by the authorities to combat piracy, AppleApple.top reported.

Konstantin Ernst said RuTracker is supposed to be permanently blocked in Russia although in practice the site is still available.

Medvedev decided to see for himself if this was the case, AppleApple reported, and accessed the site without encountering any restrictions.

Communications Minister Nikolay Nikiforov – no doubt a little uncomfortable over the ease and speed by which his boss could perform his online piracy – promised he would look into the matter.

• Although RuTracker is officially blacklisted by Russia, AppleApple says, Internet users can usually get at least limited access to it, while more determined users can access the torrent site through third-party services and plugins.

• Russia announced in May that it was strengthening measures to tackle online piracy, the BBC reported. Those accused of harboring pirated media have just 72 hours to respond to a complaint before a permanent ban is put in place.

• President Vladimir Putin's recently appointed special adviser on Internet matters has ties to a Russian torrent site listing pirated content, Torrentfreak.com reported in January. It said that far from coming out with tough talk against Internet piracy after his appointment, German Klimenko instead criticized web-blocking and suggested that copyright holders should wait for a better economic conditions before “terrorizing” people over the piracy issue.

• Medvedev is a keen fan of Apple products, ABC News reports. In May he was spotted wearing a $350 Apple Watch Sport and in 2010 was photographed with an iPhone 4 alongside Apple founder Steve Jobs.

http://www.tol.org/client/article/25...rutracker.html





Sneaky Change to the TPP Drastically Extends Criminal Penalties
Jeremy Malcolm

When the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was first released in November last year, it included provisions dictating the kinds of penalties that should be available in cases of copyright infringement. Amongst those provisions, the following footnote allowed countries some flexibility in applying criminal procedures and penalties to cases of willful copyright infringement on a commercial scale:

With regard to copyright and related rights piracy provided for under paragraph 1, a Party may limit application of this paragraph to the cases in which there is an impact on the right holder’s ability to exploit the work, performance or phonogram in the market.

Following the footnote back to its source, it is apparent that the reference to limiting “the application of this paragraph” is to a more specific list of criminal procedures and penalties that the parties are required to make available in such cases. Paraphrased, these are:

• sentences of imprisonment as well as deterrent-level monetary fines;
• higher penalties in more serious circumstances, such as threats to public health or safety;
• seizure of suspected infringing items, the materials and implements used to produce them, and documentary evidence relating to them;
• the release of those items, materials, implements and evidence for use in civil proceedings;
• forfeiture or destruction of those items, materials and implements;
• forfeiture of any assets (such as money) derived from the infringement; and
• the ability for officials to take legal action against the alleged infringer on their own initiative, without requiring a complaint from the rights holder (this is called “ex officio action”).

As of the date of writing, the text excerpted at the top of this page is still the version of the text found on the United States Trade Representative (USTR) website. However on January 26, a slightly different version was uploaded to the website of the official host of the agreement, New Zealand. This version provides:

With regard to copyright and related rights piracy provided for under paragraph 1, a Party may limit application of this subparagraph to the cases in which there is an impact on the right holder’s ability to exploit the work, performance or phonogram in the market.

Spot the difference? No? Let's try again:

With regard to copyright and related rights piracy provided for under paragraph 1, a Party may limit application of this subparagraph to the cases in which there is an impact on the right holder’s ability to exploit the work, performance or phonogram in the market.

What does this surreptitious change from “paragraph” to “subparagraph” mean? Well, in its original form the provision exempted a country from making available any of the criminal procedures and penalties listed above, except in circumstances where there was an impact on the copyright holder's ability to exploit their work in the market.

In its revised form, the only criminal provision that a country is exempted from applying in those circumstances is the one to which the footnote is attached—namely, the ex officio action provision. Which means, under this amendment, all of the other criminal procedures and penalties must be available even if the infringement has absolutely no impact on the right holder's ability to exploit their work in the market. The only enforcement provision that countries have the flexibility to withhold in such cases is the authority of state officials to take legal action into their own hands.

Sneaky, huh?

This is a very significant change. Let's look at an example of how it might work. Take a website that shares multilingual subtitle files for movies. Although a technical copyright infringement, there are many legitimate uses for these files; for example, they allow you to lawfully purchase a foreign movie that isn't available in your own country, and then to add subtitles to view the film in your own language. The sale of such subtitle files is as good an example as any of a niche service that copyright owners have never bothered to commercially fill, and probably never will, particularly for less commonly spoken languages.

Under the TPP's original terms, a country could limit the exposure of the owner of such a website to prison time, or to the seizure and possible destruction of their server, on the grounds that by definition their infringement didn't cause any lost sales to the copyright owner. (Note that they would be liable for civil damages to the copyright owner in any case.)

Although a country still has the option to limit criminal penalties to “commercial scale” infringements (which is so broadly defined that it could catch even a non-profit subtitles website), the new language compels TPP signatories to make these penalties available even where those infringements cause absolutely no impact on the copyright holder's ability to profit from the work. This is a massive extension of the provision's already expansive scope.

A Devious Move

How could this happen, when the TPP had supposedly already been finalized when the original text was released in November? The answer is that the original text had not been “legally scrubbed.” The legal scrubbing process, which was ongoing from November until the re-release of the text last month, was meant to be a process in which lawyers, trade ministry staff, and translators, go over the deal word-by-word, to ensure that it is legally consistent and free of unintended errors or loopholes.

It is most certainly not an opportunity for the negotiators to make any substantive changes to the text. Since the change highlighted above is unarguably a substantive change, the only basis for the change to be made during legal scrubbing would be if it were an error. But is it an error?

We don't know for sure—though EFF has contacted the USTR for clarification, and we will update this post if we receive an answer. But logically, the original text doesn't seem to have been an error, because there seems to be no rational basis why countries should be allowed to limit the availability of ex officio action, but not to similarly limit the availability of the other criminal remedies.

Think about it. What sense is there in sending someone to jail for an infringement that causes no harm to the copyright holder, whether they complain about it or not? And why should it matter that the copyright holder complains about something that didn't affect them anyway? Surely, if the copyright holder suffers no harm, then a country ought to be able to suspend the whole gamut of criminal procedures and penalties, not only the availability of ex officio action.

This is no error—or if it is, then the parties were only in error in agreeing to a proposal that was complete nonsense to begin with. But most likely, this is an underhanded attempt to renegotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership before its ink is even dry. In an agreement that was an undemocratic power grab from the outset, this devious move marks the lowest point to which the negotiators have yet sunk. It gives us all even more reason, as if any were needed, to demand that our representatives refuse to ratify this dreadful agreement.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/0...inal-penalties





The Federal Circuit Sticks to Its Guns: Patent Owners Can Prevent You From Owning Anything
Vera Ranieri

A “notice” slapped on the outside of a package saying “single use only” continues to ensure a manufacturer selling you the product can sue for patent infringement should someone dare reuse its goods. This is what the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held on Friday, reaffirming its previous case law, despite intervening Supreme Court law and compelling arguments against its earlier case law.

The issue is one of “patent exhaustion.” This is the patent law version of “first sale,” the doctrine in copyright law that says that once a consumer buys a copy of a work, she owns it, and can do what she wants with that copy. Patent law is similar. Once a patent owner sells a product, it cannot later claim its use is infringing.

Yet the full court of the Federal Circuit held that so long as the sale was “restricted” by something as simple as a notice placed on the disposable packaging of a product, patent rights could be reserved by the patent owner and not result in exhaustion. So, if you happen to use a product twice, but the patent owner had sold it as “single use,” you could find yourself at the receiving end of a patent lawsuit. And because patent infringement generally does not require “intent,” a consumer could be liable even if they never saw the notice or agreed to it (for example, if they bought the product used without the original packaging).

In other areas, this sort of “restricted” sale is categorically not enforceable. The Supreme Court ruled long ago that a notice inside a book purported to restrict its resale to only under certain conditions was unlawful. So, for example, a copyright owner’s attempt to limit resale through a “SINGLE READ ONLY” notice would fail miserably. This is why we can have libraries, video rental stores, and can sell used or refurbished devices that contain copyrighted software.

The Federal Circuit distinguished all of these cases, and instead relied on a Supreme Court case that found that a licensee of a patent could not do things outside the scope of that license, and if they did, there was no exhaustion. The Federal Circuit said that there was “no sound reason” for a distinction that gives less control to a patent owner that makes products to one that merely licenses its patent.

But there is a very big reason to make such a distinction: consumers’ expectations based on long-standing law disfavoring these “restraints on alienability of property.” For almost 400 years, it has been widely accepted that those who manufacture goods shouldn’t be able to reach out and exercise a “dead-hand” of control over the goods once the manufacture has long passed ownership on to the consumer.

And this distinction between licensees of a right and purchasers of embodiments of that right is routinely made. That is, the law routinely distinguishes between rights attached to a copy of a work and rights attached to the work. For example, the purchaser of a copyrighted book can resell that copy of the work, but cannot make new copies of that book (unless of course, some other right such as fair use applies).

Patents are now routinely granted on even the smallest part of a product (and even for the smallest design in the product). Yet it is often difficult, if not impossible, for consumers to find out what patents a manufacturer claims are embodied in their products, and therefore when those patents expire. (The patent statutes try to incentivize disclosure of that information, but it nonetheless remains optional). But what’s more, under the Federal Circuit’s rule a patent “restriction” could be on packaging that’s later separated from the item, creating even more ongoing uncertainty for resellers and repurchasers.

The Federal Circuit’s rule privileges patent owners over consumers, and helps ensure even less competition in the resale market. We hope the Supreme Court takes a hard look at this case, and restores consumers’ rights in products they purchase.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/0...wning-anything





The Anti-Piracy Tech That's Giving Hackers Fits
Patrick Klepek

More than two months after release, it’s still not possible to pirate Just Cause 3. The same is true for Rise of the Tomb Raider, released for PC in late January. Cracking computer games used to be measured in hours or days, but now, it’s turning into weeks and months. The nature of piracy is changing in a big way.

The surest sign of that was a rare note of surrender from China-based 3DM, one of the world’s most popular cracking groups. They’ve made waves recently for suggesting “there will be no free games to play” in two years. They’ve reportedly backed away from cracking single player games, too, but there’s dispute over those reports.

3DM and every other group in the cracking scene has been frustratingly banging their head against the piracy roadblock that is relatively new “anti-tamper” tech from the Austrian company Denuvo. That’s the tech that Square Enix used to protect Just Cause 3, the tech they also used for the new Tomb Raider, and the tech that Ubisoft is using on next week’s Far Cry Primal.

Anti-tamper, according to Deunvo, is different from Digital Rights Management (DRM), which has a historically poor reputation with players.

“Anti-tamper prevents the debugging, reverse engineering and changing of executable files,” a company spokesperson told me recently.

That’s a confusing non-explanation about how Denuvo works. But since Denuvo seems to have pirates on their heels, they won’t spill their dark secrets to me.

Here’s how Denuvo describes the technology on their website:

The license management from Steam or Origin grants legitimate consumers access to the game and our Anti-Tamper solution ensures that these DRM systems are not bypassed.

The million dollar question: what makes anti-tamper so hard to crack? Breaking Denuvo’s anti-tamper tech, even for a single game, amounts to a trade secret in these circles. Denuvo doesn’t have much incentive to give any answers, so I asked a few hackers to take a look at it.

Steam DRM? What Steam DRM?

Denuvo works as a shield for existing DRM protections baked into PC services like Steam and Origin. According to everyone I talked to, it’s trivial to get around Steam’s DRM.

“It is business as usual to see cracks for Steam games within minutes of the game’s Australian release,” said a hacker who goes by the pseudonym MTW. “Obviously this is a bad sign; DRM should not take single digit minutes to crack. There are other, non-Denuvo DRM solutions for Steam games. None of them are worth a shit.”

Denuvo uses a unique piggybacking approach. Because Steam and Origin require an Internet connection to buy, purchase, and authenticate a game the first time around, Denuvo can ride this wave and collect details about the computer to, in a sense, generate a unique key for that copy of the game. If the game isn’t running on that exact machine, the game can assume the game’s been pirated.

“Machine-specific triggers are peppered everywhere,” said MTW. “The game will appear to be insanely buggy, but it’s just copy protection crap. [...] Game developers get to specify points in gameplay where they want a copy protection trigger. A game can be unplayable.”

In other words, even if a cracking team can get the game running, it can’t assume it’ll remain stable.
“It is business as usual to see cracks for Steam games within minutes of the game’s Australian release. Obviously this is a bad sign; DRM should not take single digit minutes to crack.”

DRM has a history of onerous requirements for legit consumers, including a requirement that you keep your internet on all the time, register the game, etc. Denuvo largely sidesteps that. (In the past, Denuvo tech has been accused of slowing performance, but seems to have been largely debunked.)

Anti-tamper has reportedly been used in games recently from Electronic Arts, Warner Bros, Square Enix, Ubisoft, Konami, and CI Games. The company doesn’t publicly list clients.

Interestingly, Denuvo isn’t claiming it can protect games forever.

“No DRM or anti-tamper solution can stop piracy entirely,” said the spokesperson. “The goal of Denuvo anti-tamper is to keep a game piracy-free for a game’s initial sales release window, when most of the sales are made.”

For Just Cause 3, that’s 78 days. For Rise of the Tomb Raider, that’s 20 days. Denuvo’s longest record is 272 days for Lords of the Fallen, a Dark Souls-style game from late 2014.

The one group that’s had success against Denuvo is the aforementioned 3DM. Most notably, they broke Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, one of last year’s most anticipated games. But they haven’t been able to maintain that success, as Denuvo has modified their process along the way.

“Denuvo has a staff of highly skilled and dedicated software engineers which constantly monitors every conceivable threat to a DRM system’s integrity,” said a Denuvo spokesperson. “Our job is to stay one step ahead of the hackers/crackers to make sure our anti-tamper system can keep a game publisher’s chosen DRM system safe.”

I wanted to hear 3DM’s side of things, but that’s easier typed than done. My attempts to speak with them have been unsuccessful, but what makes 3DM unique is how the group doesn’t hide in the shadows, as most of the other big cracking groups do. Several 3DM “employees” have public profiles on the social network Weibo, aka China’s Twitter. Their leader, a woman who goes by the nickname Bird Sister, regularly updates a blog discussing 3DM’s activities.

The cracking scene is competitive, as groups vie to break through a game’s copy-protection and upload it to the world. It’s the equivalent of shouting “first!” in a comment at the bottom of an article, but you’re releasing a hot new $60 game for free. This competition can get so fierce that one group will claim another ripped off their work. (Whatever you think of piracy, it’s not exactly easy to crack software.)

Game developers and many gamers may hate piracy, but 3DM has its happy followers. Bird Sister’s personal blog is full of comments from people thanking her for 3DM’s hard work.

Despite the efforts of Bird Sister and the rest of 3DM, though Denuvo, as a whole, remains uncracked.

A Long Time Ago In A DRM Far, Far Away

The concept of preventing people from playing a game they didn’t pay for existed long before games went “digital.” Adventure games in the 90s, for example, asked players specific questions that could only be answered by looking in the game’s physical manual. (i.e. What’s the seventh word in the second paragraph on page 14?)

Over the years, game creators wrestled with how much friction to introduce in the quest to curb piracy. Too often, piracy measures meant to prevent people from stealing the game had more of an impact on paying consumers, leading to a general distrust of any form of anti-piracy.

It was common in the 90s and 2000s to require a CD or DVD in the drive, which was profoundly annoying. This led people who’d legally bought the game to apply “no-cd” patches to remove the requirement.

A modern form of this tactic, SecuROM, forced players to register copies of the game online, and players could only authorize a small number of computers per copy. This famously backfired on Spore, partially causing it to become the most pirated game of 2008. EA was hit with a class action lawsuit over SecuROM, arguing SecuROM was installed on computers without proper consent. EA later settled and agreed to better disclose SecuROM’s existence.

Denuvo was formed after Sony DADC DigitalWorks, the creators of SecuROM, were bought out. This new DRM company rose from the ashes of Sony DADC Digital Works, and if you browse Denuvo’s website, developers can still buy SecuROM. (It doesn’t seem very common.)

Denuvo’s goal is to keep hackers and pirates at bay for at least 60 days before a game is cracked. But when a game is broken, the genie can be partially put back in the bottle by updating the game with a fresh layer of Denuvo protection. (It’s why “Denuvo cracked” headlines don’t usually mean very much.) With that approach, only one instance of the game is cracked. The crack doesn’t gain them access to every other Denuvo-locked game, nor access to future versions of the game in question. Denuvo can add new locks when DLC is released or through a patch so that pirates are then stuck with that specific version of the game.

The Not-So-Patient Future

Most torrent websites these days have comments and message boards, and if you take a look at the conversations around Rise of the Tomb Raider or Just Cause 3, there’s a lot of anxiety that Denuvo spells the end of cracked big-budget games.

This doesn’t surprise Andy Maxwell, a reporter at TorrentFreak.

“Some pirates have a tendency to panic,” said Maxwell. “After all, something like Denuvo’s latest iteration upsets their assumption that their next game is coming for free. While some people can’t afford to pay and will always pirate, I think a lot of pirates are too impatient to wait months for a crack.”

If Denuvo is able to keep slowing pirates down, Maxwell says that’s a huge win for the game companies.

“The key here is to break pirates’ motivation,” he said.

To him, that doesn’t involve merely delaying a crack. It’s also about making games cheaper, more accessible, and consumer-friendly. A lack of demos is a sore point, for example. (I’m with him there.) For most people, the end goal is to play a video game.

“The last thing gamers want to do is screw around trying to get a cracked game to work when they could be having fun,” he said. “Some people like that challenge, millions don’t.”

Just Cause 3 will be cracked at some point, and so will Rise of the Tomb Raider. The question is what happens in a world where people don’t know when that’ll happen. Will sales go up, as pirates grumble and buy real copies? Or are people willing to wait? Even Electronic Arts’ new cutesy platformer, Unravel, has Denuvo’s protection. It may not be long before most games do.

“Rules are there to be broken,” said Maxwell. “History tells us that when the motivation is there, pirates will eventually catch up.”
http://kotaku.com/the-anti-piracy-te...s-a-1759518600





Original 1977 Star Wars 35mm Print has Been Restored and Released Online

There's no Jabba, no CGI, and Han most definitely shoots first.
Mark Walton

A restored HD version of the original Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope 35mm print has appeared online. While this isn't the first time that attempts have been made to restore Star Wars to its original theatrical version—that's the one without the much-maligned CGI effects and edits of later "special" editions—it is the first to have been based entirely on a single 35mm print of the film, rather than cut together from various sources.

The group behind the release, dubbed Team Negative 1, is made up of Star Wars fans and enthusiasts who spent thousands of dollars of their own cash to restore the film without the blessing of creator George Lucus, or franchise owner Disney. Lucas has famously disowned the original theatrical version of Star Wars, telling The Today Show back in 2004:

The special edition, that’s the one I wanted out there. The other movie, it’s on VHS, if anybody wants it. ... I’m not going to spend the—we’re talking millions of dollars here, the money and the time to refurbish that, because to me, it doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it.

Lucasfilm later claimed that the original negatives of Star Wars were permanently altered for the special edition releases, making restoration next to impossible. How Team Negative 1 got its hands on a 35mm print of the 1977 release of the movie is a mystery. But for fans who don't want to see ropey CGI, a pointless Jabba the Hutt scene, and know for a fact that Han shoots first, this restored version of the film—even with some pops, scratches, and colour issues—is the one to watch.

The only official digital release of the original theatrical print was made back in 2006 as an extra feature on the DVD special edition. Unfortunately, those transfers—which were made from the same source as the 1995 Laserdisc release—weren't anamorphic, and only featured compressed Dolby 2.0 audio. That's not to mention that the transfer itself used an aggressive form of digital noise reduction, which erased some of the finer details of the film.

The only issue with Team Negative 1's version of the film is that it isn't exactly legal. That said, it isn't hard to track down online. While that might be a bit too risky for some, Team Negative 1 believes that plenty of people will want to watch its "Silver Screen" restoration.

"We know that anyone under 30 kind of prefers the clean, sharp, detailed look," Team Negative 1 told Movie Mezzanine. "Then the older crowd, the retro crowd, is like, 'give me the grain and give me the matte boxes and give me a little weave in the picture.' It's kind of like CD vs. vinyl."
http://arstechnica.com/the-multivers...leased-online/





‘Deadpool’ Breaks Box Office Records for R-Rated Film
Brooks Barnes

Welcome to the A-list, Deadpool.

In a triumph of audacious marketing, risky filmmaking and cost consciousness — at an old-line movie studio, no less — 20th Century Fox’s extremely R-rated “Deadpool,” starring Ryan Reynolds in a career-defining role (at last), broke box office records over the weekend, taking in about $135 million at North American theaters.

Going into the Valentine’s Day weekend, Hollywood expected ticket sales of roughly $70 million. But multiplex audiences, apparently hungering for the originality promised by Fox’s unusual advertising campaign, powered “Deadpool” to the biggest domestic opening on record for an R-rated movie. The previous record-holder was “The Matrix Reloaded,” which took in $118.3 million in May 2003, after adjusting for inflation.

“This tells me without any question that new and creative is what audiences want,” said Chris Aronson, Fox’s president of domestic distribution. Mr. Aronson said “Deadpool” could take in another $20 million on Monday, when many Americans are off work for Presidents’ Day. “My wrists are getting a little tired, but I will tape them up,” he added, joking that he had spent the weekend doing cartwheels.

Comedic, violent and sexually charged, “Deadpool” stars Mr. Reynolds as the title character, a Marvel Comics antihero with freakish self-healing powers. Directed by Tim Miller, a first-time feature filmmaker, the movie openly mocks Marvel films and finds Mr. Reynolds doing unconventional things for this genre, like talking directly into the camera.

The “mind-boggling” turnout could have ripple effects across Hollywood, said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst at comScore. From a business perspective, other studios — namely the Disney-owned Marvel — could face pressure from investors to spend less. Fox made “Deadpool” for a relatively inexpensive $58 million. To compare, Marvel’s “Ant-Man,” starring Paul Rudd, arrived to $57.2 million in ticket sales in July but cost $130 million to make.

3-D? Who needs it? “Deadpool” was released in a traditional format, relying instead on Imax theaters and a network of extra-large screens known as Premium Large Format, both of which charge higher prices, to bolster ticket sales.

Another takeaway involved advertising, said Shawn Robbins, a senior analyst at BoxOffice.com. Rather than playing it safe, Fox allowed its president of domestic marketing, Marc Weinstock, to go for broke. His subversive campaign included billboards depicting the red-suited Deadpool holding handguns in provocative positions; an extremely raunchy online trailer; having Mr. Reynolds live-tweet an episode of “The Bachelor” in character; and stunts tied to the Super Bowl, including Mr. Reynolds (as Deadpool) serving chimichangas from a food truck.

One of the more bizarre efforts included fake billboards that make “Deadpool” look like a Nicholas Sparks-style romantic drama. Mr. Weinstock also advertised the movie on billboards using an emoji for excrement; they were placed in fewer than 10 locations yet generated coverage from hundreds of websites and trended across social networks.

“The film ended up generating more mentions on Twitter than any movie other than ‘Star Wars’ over the past few months — and significantly more than ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ and ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ to boot,” Mr. Robbins said in an email. The sharp-edged campaign succeeded in attracting not just the built-in in comic-book audience, but also what has become Hollywood’s hardest-to-reach audience: young men. Fox said that 60 percent of the audience was male.

“Deadpool” could do for Mr. Reynolds what “Iron Man” did for a struggling Robert Downey Jr. in 2008. (“Deadpool,” to compare, easily beat the first “Iron Man,” which arrived to $108.5 in adjusted ticket sales, spawning two blockbuster sequels.) Until now, Mr. Reynolds has struggled to find his footing in Hollywood. He notably suffered a misfire in 2009 by playing a sanitized version of Deadpool in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.” Comic book fans had a fit.

After suffering a mega-flop last summer with “Fantastic Four,” Fox has lately been on a roll. The studio also had the No. 2 movie for the weekend, “Kung Fu Panda 3,” which took in $19.7 million, for a three-week domestic total of $93.9 million. Third place went to “How to Be Single” (New Line and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), a $37 million romantic comedy. It collected about $18.8 million.

Ben Stiller’s heavily hyped “Zoolander 2” (Paramount Pictures) flopped in fourth place, taking in about $15.6 million, or roughly 24 percent less than the original, after adjusting for inflation. The movie, which cost about $50 million to make and is loaded with celebrity cameos, received dismal reviews and was poised to generate poor word of mouth. Ticket buyers gave it a C-plus grade in CinemaScore exit polls.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/15/mo...ated-film.html





‘WarGames’ and Cybersecurity’s Debt to a Hollywood Hack
Fred Kaplan

Movies rarely influence public policy, but Washington’s policies on cyberattacks, computer surveillance and the possibility of cyberwarfare were directly influenced by the 1983 box-office hit “WarGames.”

The film — starring Matthew Broderick as a tech-whiz teenager who unwittingly hacks into the computer of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and nearly sets off World War III — opened nationwide that June 3. The next night, President Ronald Reagan watched it at Camp David. And that is where this strange story — culled from interviews with participants and Reagan Library documents — begins.

The following Wednesday, back in the White House, Reagan met with his national-security advisers and 16 members of Congress to discuss forthcoming nuclear arms talks with the Russians. But he still seemed focused on the movie.

At one point, he put down his index cards and asked if anyone else had seen it. No one had, so he described the plot in detail. Some of the lawmakers looked around the room with suppressed smiles or raised eyebrows. Three months earlier, Reagan had delivered his “Star Wars” speech, imploring scientists to build laser weapons that could shoot down Soviet missiles in outer space. The idea was widely dismissed as nutty. What was the old man up to now?

After finishing his synopsis, Reagan turned to Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and asked: “Could something like this really happen?” Could someone break into our most sensitive computers? General Vessey said he would look into it.

One week later, the general returned to the White House with his answer. “WarGames,” it turned out, wasn’t far-fetched. “Mr. president,” he said, “the problem is much worse than you think.”

Reagan’s question set off a series of interagency memos and studies that culminated, 15 months later, in his signing a classified national security decision directive, NSDD-145, titled “National Policy on Telecommunications and Automated Information Systems Security.”

The first laptop computers had barely hit the market; public Internet providers wouldn’t exist for another few years. Yet NSDD-145 warned that these new machines — which government agencies and high-tech industries had started buying at a rapid clip — were “highly susceptible to interception.” Hostile foreign powers were “extensively” hacking into them already; “terrorist groups and criminal elements” had the ability to do so, too.

General Vessey could answer the president’s question so promptly — and national-security aides could compose NSDD-145 in such detailed language — because, deep within the bureaucracy, a small group of scientists and spies had been concerned about this looming threat for more than a decade.

In the 1960s, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency undertook a program called the ARPAnet. The idea, a precursor to the Internet, was to let Pentagon labs and contractors share data and research on the same network.

Just before the program’s rollout, in April 1967, an engineer named Willis Ware wrote a paper called “Security and Privacy in Computer Systems.” A computer pioneer dating back to the ’40s, Mr. Ware headed the computer science department at the RAND Corporation, the think tank in Santa Monica, Calif.

In his paper, he lauded the goals of the ARPAnet but explained some risks of what he called “on-line” networks. As long as computers sat in isolated chambers, security wasn’t a problem. But once multiple users could gain access to data from unprotected locations, anyone with certain skills could hack into the network — and, once inside, roam at will, pilfering unclassified and secret files alike. Mr. Ware’s warnings went unheeded for decades, though he remained a frequent consultant. (He died in 2013, at the age of 93.)

In 1980, Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes, former Yale classmates in their late 20s, were writing the screenplay for “WarGames.” (It would be nominated for an Oscar but would lose to Horton Foote’s “Tender Mercies.”) A hacker friend had told them about “demon-dialing,” in which a telephone modem searched for other modems by automatically dialing each phone number in an area code and letting it ring twice before proceeding to the next number. If a modem answered, it would squawk; the demon-dialing software would record the number, so the hacker could call back later. In their screenplay, this was how their hero broke into NORAD. But they wondered if this was plausible: Didn’t the military close off its computers to public telephone lines?

Mr. Lasker lived in Santa Monica, a few blocks from RAND. Figuring someone there might be helpful, he called the public affairs office, which put him in touch with Mr. Ware, who invited the pair to his office.

They’d come to the right man. Not only had he long known about the vulnerability of computer networks, but he’d also helped design the software for the real NORAD computer. And Mr. Ware proved remarkably open, even friendly. Listening to the writers’ questions, he waved off their worries. Yes, he told them, the computer was supposed to be closed, but some officers wanted to work from home on weekends, so they’d leave a port open. Anyone could get in, if the right number was dialed.

“The only computer that’s completely secure,” Mr. Ware told them with a mischievous smile, “is a computer that no one can use.”

Ware gave the writers the confidence to go ahead with their project. It’s fitting that the scenario of “WarGames” — which aroused Reagan’s curiosity and led to the first national policy on reducing the vulnerability of computers — owed a crucial debt to the man who’d first warned that they were vulnerable.

Meanwhile, Reagan’s directive hit a roadblock. It put the National Security Agency in charge of securing all of the nation’s computer servers and networks — government, business and personal. The agency had been established in 1952 to intercept foreign communications; it was expressly barred from spying on Americans. Representative Jack Brooks, a Texas Democrat and a fiery civil-liberties advocate, wasn’t about to let a classified presidential decree blur the distinction. He sponsored and got passed a law overriding that directive.

The main author of Reagan’s NSDD-145 was Donald Latham, the Pentagon’s liaison to the National Security Agency — and a former N.S.A. analyst himself. General Vessey had assigned him to answer Reagan’s question on “WarGames” (Could something like this really happen?). Mr. Latham answered as he did (The situation is much worse than you think.) because he knew that the N.S.A. had long been hacking into the communications systems of the Soviet Union and China — and what we were doing to them, they could someday do to us.

Mr. Ware had been among the first to draw this conclusion. Mr. Latham knew about it early on because the two were longtime friends, Mr. Ware having served on the N.S.A.’s scientific advisory board. The N.S.A. was the most secretive branch of the American intelligence community. Reagan’s screening of “WarGames” brought Mr. Ware’s concerns into high policy-making circles for the first time. And it sparked the first public controversy over the tensions between security and privacy on the Internet, as well as the first public power struggle about the subject between the N.S.A. and Congress — a debate and a struggle that persist today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/mo...wood-hack.html





Judge Orders FBI to Reveal Complete Code for TOR Exploit Used in Playpen Sting
Bryan Clark

In January we dove into a dubious operation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Justice (DOJ) that resulted in the former running the world’s largest child sex abuse site, Playpen.

Jay Michaud, one of the accused, and his attorneys had previously argued the operation was “gross misconduct by government and law enforcement agencies” and called into question the warrant obtained to use the network investigative technique (NIT) — an exploit designed to penetrate a users computer over the TOR network — as well as jurisdiction and how exactly this piece of malware worked.

Today, a federal judge ordered that the FBI disclose how it went about gathering this evidence by revealing the complete source code for the TOR exploit used to ensnare Michaud, and others, during its operation of Playpen.

The order would require the FBI deliver the source for its exploit so that Michaud’s attorney’s could better understand how it worked and if the evidence gathered was covered under the scope of the warrant in order to prepare a proper defense for their client.

Of course, if the FBI declined to provide the information, it wouldn’t be the first time it’s ignored a court order.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/0...playpen-sting/





Tor: 'Mystery' Spike in Hidden Addresses
Chris Baraniuk

A security expert has noticed an unprecedented spike in the number of hidden addresses on the Tor network.

Prof Alan Woodward at the University of Surrey spotted an increase of more than 25,000 .onion "dark web" services.

Prof Woodward said he was not sure how best to explain the sudden boom.

One possibility, he said, might be a sudden swell in the popularity of Ricochet, an app that uses Tor to allow anonymous instant messaging between users.

Tor, or The Onion Router, allows people to browse the web anonymously by routing their connections through a chain of different computers and encrypting data in the process.

'Unprecedented' activity

On his blog, Prof Woodward noted there had not been a similar increase in .onion sites in the history of the Tor network.

"Something unprecedented is happening, but at the moment that is all we know," he told the BBC.

"It is hard to know for certain what the reason is for the jump because one of the goals of Tor is to protect people's privacy by not disclosing how they are using Tor," said Dr Steven Murdoch at University College London.

Another curiosity described by Prof Woodward was the fact that, despite the rise of hidden addresses, traffic on the network has not seen a comparable spike.

He said there was a chance the spike was due to a network of computers called a botnet suddenly using Tor - or hackers launching ransomware attacks.

It could even be the result of malware that might be creating unique .onion addresses when it infects a victim's computer - though there is no evidence yet for this.

Prof Woodward said that he believed a rise in the use of an anonymous chat app called Ricochet - which has just received a largely positive security audit - is the most likely explanation.

Dr Murdoch said this was indeed a possibility but added that the spike could also be the result of someone running an experiment on Tor.
What is Ricochet?

Ricochet uses the Tor network to set up connections between two individuals who want to chat securely.

The app's website states that this is achieved without revealing either user's location or IP address and that, instead of a username, each participant receives a unique address such as "ricochet:rs7ce36jsj24ogfw".

Ricochet has been available for some time, but on 15 February reasonably positive results of an audit by security firm NCC Group were published.

On his blog, Prof Woodward noted that every new user of Ricochet would create a unique .onion address when setting up the service.

That could account for the surge in services, though he admitted 25,000 new users for the app in just a few days would suggest "spectacular" growth.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35614335





The Woman Who Aims to Take Tor Mainstream
William Turton

“Tor is essential,” Shari Steele says over the phone. “Tor is so critically important. We can’t afford to not have Tor.”

That’s the kind of thing someone might say when all hell is about to break loose, but Steele sounds downright ecstatic. Over her career, she has taken on United States Department of Justice (DOJ), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). She built the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) into an international powerhouse for protecting online rights.

Today, she has a new mission, perhaps her heaviest challenge yet: Take the Internet’s most powerful privacy tool mainstream.

Steele is the new executive director of the Tor Project, the nonprofit behind Tor, a tool that offers users the ability to completely shield their identities online. Beloved in certain corners of the Internet, Tor's anonymity cuts both ways. Thieves, murders, child pornographers, drug dealers—these are the shady characters most people likely think of when they think of Tor, if they think of Tor at all. Steele’s job is to transform Tor’s image in the public eye, build its organization, and convince the world that strong privacy—not the weak kind you get through tweaking your Facebook settings—is a necessity in the 21st century.

Launched by the U.S. Navy in 2002 as a way to protect military communications, Tor technology has since become a cornerstone of the free and open Internet. Tor—originally known as “the Onion Router”—uses advanced, open-source software that allows anyone to use the Web anonymously. By encrypting a user's connection and routing it though three out of some 7,000 random Tor “nodes”—computers connected to the Tor network—that are maintained by volunteers around the world, Tor grants a level of anonymity and security impossible to achieve with a normal Web browser.

The Tor Project, which develops and maintains the Tor network and software, launched in 2006. Over the past decade, the Tor Project team has turned a cumbersome technology almost unusable by the average person into a fully featured browser that's available on virtually every platform and works like Chrome or Firefox.

Tor has become essential for people in oppressive regimes like Iran, Russia, and China, where information is censored and free speech only happens beyond the reach of governments.

“They're incredibly intelligent people,” Steele says of the Tor staff and community. “Like, really, really bright.” The problem, says Steele, is that the Tor team has resorted to using “masking tape and wire” to solve their operational challenges.

“It really is a case,” she says, “of really brilliant people coming up with an answer of how to solve something when they don’t really have any knowledge of how it’s done in other places.”

Because of this institutional blindspot, a significant part of Steele’s initial work involves peeling off the masking tape and installing some more robust mechanisms to ensure the Tor Project’s structure is solid. It’s a task Steele knows all too well.

“They’re kicking butt in what they’ve developed, especially considering it’s this ragtag group of serious, brilliant technologists,” Steele says of the Tor team, which includes both staff and volunteer developers. “You could see from the outside that they were so critically in need of some leadership—not leadership on the program side. It was the leadership on the organizational side. I looked at it and thought they couldn’t fail.”

Steele joined the EFF in 1992, two years after the organization’s founding, as a staff attorney, after spotting an ad posted at the Georgetown Law campus.

“My husband—at the time, boyfriend—who was a techie, was like, ‘Oh my god, that’s so cool,’” says Steele. (Her husband, Bill Vass, is currently vice president of engineering at Amazon Web Services.) “The World Wide Web didn’t even exist at the time! There were bulletin board systems, that was kind of where the free speech stuff was happening.”

After eight years with the EFF, in 2000, Steele took lead as the organization’s executive director. This is when she first learned the importance or an organization's image.

“When I first took over at EFF, we had a rift with folks in D.C., and they were spreading words about us being hippie weirdos out in San Francisco,” Steele says. “And it took some time to kind of build back up the reputation of the organization.”

The EFF Steele joined 24 years ago looks nothing like it does today. “When I got to EFF, it was really hurting,” Steele says. “We were down to five employees.” Guided by Steele, the EFF became the preeminent digital-rights organization in the U.S., made up of world-class lawyers, technologists, and activists who have their hands in most major legal cases that involve digital privacy, copyright, and user security.

Steele's speciality, her former colleagues say, is empowering those around her to do their best work. Cindy Cohn, who took the reins as EFF’s executive director after Steele’s departure, worked with Steele at the organization for 22 years. “The thing that struck me about Shari from the very beginning was that she had a huge heart,” Cohn says, “a huge passion for making sure that we built the Internet that supported people, that supported freedom and privacy, that the possibilities of the digital world made for freedom and democracy were actually happening.”

Cohn says Steele has an innate ability to tackle her work with a “sunny approach” that adds levity to the dense work of defending the Internet and its users against powerful forces.

“We were always doing very serious work,” says Cohn, who worked with Steele on one of the EFF’s first high-profile cases, Bernstein v. United States, a 1999 case that dealt with the exportation of cryptography outside of the United States. “We were fighting the NSA, but Shari always ... created an atmosphere where things were positive, it was fun, and we took good care of the people who worked with us.”

Under Steele’s leadership, the EFF hired a staff technologist—a first for a nonprofit, according to Steele and Cohn—bolstering the organization’s legal work with developers who built free and open-source products that empowered their users to protect their privacy or security. They also made provocative statements. One of their first projects, the DES cracker, was able to crack a popular encryption algorithm in just a matter of days, essentially proving that the algorithm wasn’t strong enough to be secure.

“We couldn’t just be a bunch of policy wonks or lawyers trying to do tech,” Cohn says. “You needed to have the techs involved.” More recently, the EFF released browser plugins like Privacy Badger, which disables trackers that follow users across the Web, and HTTPS everywhere, which forces a user's browser to always fetch an encrypted version of a webpage, if available.

“It’s really not an exaggeration to say that [Steele] built the EFF,” says Cohn. “She built this incarnation from 2000. She’s really the heart of it. She’s not in the spotlight. … But instead, what she did was that she built an engine, and she built a place where talented people wanted to come.”

When Steele left the EFF last year, she was in dire need of some time off. Before she could get comfortably away from the Internet’s relentless grind, however, the Tor Project announced it was looking for a new executive director.

“Right away, I was like, ‘I’m exhausted, no way,’” says Steele. Wendy Seltzer, policy counsel at the World Wide Web Consortium and a visiting fellow with Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, tried to recruit Steele for the job, but Steele “avoided her all summer,” she says. After her kids returned to school, Steele found herself with nothing to do but “unpack boxes” after moving her family into a new house.

“I was like, I don’t want to unpack boxes! That’s not what I want to do with my life right now,” Steele says. “Then I get a note from Wendy. The timing was perfect. She sends me this note asking to talk, and I’m like, ‘Hmm, yeah, let’s talk.’ We talk, and she tells me about the job.”

Steele sat on the idea for the weekend. By Sunday night, she had made her decision.

“I thought, this is going to be a lot of work,” says Steele. “‘Am I really ready to go back?’ And that was kind of the conversation I was having with my friends. I said, ‘Yeah, you know what, I’m ready,’ so I threw my hat in the ring.”

In addition to her experience building great teams, Steele’s other area of expertise is fundraising—something the Tor Project desperately needs. The EFF’s budget this year, according to Cohn, is $10 million. “That’s Shari,” she says. With greater funding, the Tor Project could afford more developers and paid volunteers, which in turn would mean better, faster, and more secure Tor technology—a necessary improvement after a recent attack on Tor, led by Carnegie Mellon University and funded by the FBI, allowed law enforcement to unmask users.

All of which leads back to the Tor Project’s greatest obstacle: its infamous image.

So far, the organization has struggled to counter the notion that Tor is equivalent to the Dark Net—the name for sites and services on the Tor network that promote or enable illegal activity. When I mention Tor’s notorious image in the mainstream, Steele turns from chipper and excited to solemn and direct.

“Yes, this is a problem,” she says. “I think it has worn down a lot of the people at Tor so that it almost becomes self-fulfilling—that that’s the way we get described because we are fearful, and almost expect the way we are going to be described.”

At the heart of Tor’s image problems are what’s known as “hidden services,” sites that are only accessible through the Tor network. Hidden services have been home to drug and gun marketplaces, child pornography forums, fraud and hacking sites, and sites where you can place bets on when a high-profile target may be assassinated. While the media tends to focus on the nefarious elements Tor enables, hidden services make up only about 1 percent of the Tor network, according to Steele, and are in no way operated by the Tor Project.

“I’m trying to teach everyone that we need to recognize that we are doing the work of the angels,” Steele says. “What we are providing is really important and really great, and there happen to be uses that are residual that aren’t what we’re doing. We’re not creating this for [illegal activity]. And OK, maybe it’s being used for that, but that’s not what we’re about!”

The key to counteracting this negative narrative about Tor, says Steele, is to reinforce the positive things Tor does “over and over again—and make sure it’s a positive message.”

But changing the outlook and message of the Tor team is “tough,” Steele says. “People really do feel like they’ve been attacked. Not just the network, but the community is always under attack.”

As Steele begins to tackle the reputation challenges facing the Tor Project, its staff has reason to feel hopeful. Since Edward Snowden’s 2013 release of secret NSA documents that revealed the full breadth of the spy agency’s surveillance powers, the use of Tor has exploded. Its increased popularity has led to more mainstream adopters. Tor is now home to its own literary journal, Facebook, and it even hosts a version of ProPublica, an investigative news outlet.

Despite the hurdles remaining in Tor’s path, supporters like Steele and Cohn say its potential pushes everything else aside.

“I just think the sky's the limit,” Cohn says, “because I just think that Tor is so important to our movement that saves lives.”
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/sha...r-project-eff/





Government Launches Porn Site Age Checks Consultation
Chris Baraniuk

A public consultation over plans to implement age checks on pornography websites has been launched by the UK government.

The proposals follow a Conservative Party manifesto commitment that "all sites containing pornographic material" must check that users are over 18.

Internet providers, charities, academics and others will be asked to contribute to the consultation.

A security expert said the plans would struggle to tackle porn on free sites.

In the consultation document, the government proposes that the checks should apply to content that would receive - if formally classified - an 18 or R18 rating from the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC).

"We are keen to hear from parents, schools, child protection experts, the pornography industry, internet service providers and online platforms that provide access to pornographic content," the consultation document explained.

As part of the plans, the government intends to establish a new regulatory framework to enforce compliance with any rules that are made law.

'Matter of urgency'

"Just as we do offline, we want to make sure children are prevented from accessing pornographic content online which should only be viewed by adults," said Baroness Shields, the Internet Safety and Security Minister.

Peter Wanless, chief executive of the NSPCC said the issue was "a matter of urgency" and that children who had ready access to content rated over 18 could develop a "warped" view of sexual relationships.

Prior to the general election, then Culture Secretary Sajid Javid said that the appointed regulator would have the power to force internet service providers to block sites that did not perform effective age checks.

He also said providers who did not cooperate could be fined.

The consultation document explains that the regulator of age checks on porn sites could be given powers to impose "sanctions" - including fines.

Companies which support or provide services to the producers of pornographic content online could be "directed" to withdraw those services if sites were found to be persistently non-compliant.

This could involve directing payment firms to cease processing transactions for porn producers.

How would age checks work?

Ofcom's guidance on age checks for online video content suggest a range of options - from confirmation of credit card ownership to cross-checking a user's details with information on the electoral register.

"Age checking is nothing new," said Ben Jordan from Aristotle, which provides such services.

"The online gambling industry has been doing this for years and it's been very effective."

Dr Victoria Nash, at the Oxford Internet Institute, was the lead author of a report for the government on child use of online pornography.

She said that gambling sites may well also check registered users' credentials against data in the electoral roll or driving licence databases.

Dr Nash added that it was likely porn site age checks would use similar methods to ensure users are 18 or over.

Free porn concerns

However, a leading security researcher has said this would not stamp out much of the pornography that is freely available online.

"My initial response to this release is that while the UK government may get some traction with payment processors, and that that could have some effect, it won't affect the free pornography," said Dr Gilad Rosner, who is a member of the Cabinet Office Privacy and Consumer Advocacy Group.

Dr Rosner added that much pornographic content was available on free sites and blogs which do not take any payments from users.

"I would wager that we won't see much in the way of tangible results for the next five years," he said, "This is a particularly challenging regulatory goal."

Even so, one of the most visited free sites for pornography has already signalled its intention to co-operate.

"Pornhub will comply fully with any robust legislative and relevant local measures that emerge from this consultation," said a spokeswoman for the site.

"As members of the Digital Policy Alliance, we have already been working to carve out a technical solution which works for all.

"It's essential that all explicit adult content is covered, and non-compliant sites are quickly taken down."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35581860





N.S.A. Gets Less Web Data Than Believed, Report Suggests
Charlie Savage

A newly declassified report by the National Security Agency’s inspector general suggests that the government is receiving far less data from Americans’ international Internet communications than privacy advocates have long suspected.

The report indicates that when the N.S.A. conducts Internet surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act, companies that operate the Internet are probably turning over just emails to, from or about the N.S.A.’s foreign targets — not all the data crossing their switches, as the critics had presumed.

The theory that the government is rooting through vast amounts of data for its targets’ messages has been at the heart of several lawsuits challenging such surveillance as violating the Fourth Amendment.

The report, obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, was classified when completed in 2015, and it still contains many redactions. But several uncensored sentences appear to indicate how the system works: They suggest that the government supplies its foreign targets’ “selectors” — like email addresses — to the network companies that operate the Internet, and they sift through the raw data for any messages containing them, turning over only those.

The distinction is important for evaluating crucial constitutional issues raised by how to apply Fourth Amendment privacy rights to new communications and surveillance technologies. Government secrecy about Internet wiretapping has prevented judges from adjudicating the issues in open court.

Still, Patrick Toomey, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who is helping lead one of several lawsuits challenging the N.S.A.’s Internet surveillance, argued that even if the companies were sifting the data themselves, the constitutional issues were the same if the companies were doing something they would not otherwise do at the government’s direction.

“The equivalent would be if AT&T were compelled to put every phone call through a voice transcription and then give to the government” copies of only those calls that were linked to a suspect, Mr. Toomey said. “We would find that disturbing, not just because it could be abused, but because it involves the phone company listening to every phone call.”

The network companies that operate the Internet, like AT&T and Verizon, do not publicly discuss how the surveillance system works, and the government declined to comment about the newly disclosed report.

Congress commissioned the inspector general report after the leaks about surveillance by the former intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden. A central focus was the FISA Amendments Act program, which permits warrantless collection of communications on domestic soil so long as the target is a noncitizen abroad — even if the target is communicating with an American.

One part of the program is called Upstream. It involves the collection of emails and other Internet messages as they cross network switches. The report discusses how network providers are legally compelled to give the N.S.A. communications “related to tasked selectors.” A little later, after a redacted paragraph, it says, “The providers should deliver only communications meeting these criteria to N.S.A.”

And the report said that “for each source of collection, N.S.A. employs processes to determine whether” — the middle of the sentence is redacted, before it picks up with, “are sending communications only for selectors currently tasked and authorized for collection.”

A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said there had been no official policy decision, as part of disclosing the inspector general report, to say more about how Upstream collection works than what the government had said previously.

Still, in previous reports and court documents about the Upstream system, the government has tended to use language that leaves it ambiguous whether the telecommunications companies or the government is filtering and scanning the raw Internet data.

(The inspector general report does not address how the N.S.A. collects foreign-to-foreign Internet messages passing through the American network. Such messages are not protected by domestic law, and the government does collect them in bulk, just as it could do if it intercepted them abroad, according to leaked documents and officials familiar with that system.)

The new report’s discussion of how the Upstream collection system works under the FISA Amendments Act dovetails with an article by The Times and ProPublica in August, which was largely based on “top-secret” documents provided by Mr. Snowden. But those documents remain classified. And in public, the government has been vague about the system’s details, including in its responses to lawsuits.

The cases are important because Internet technology works differently from the telephone technology for which wiretapping rules were developed and tested in court. A suspect’s phone call can be intercepted without touching any other people’s calls. But on the Internet, data from different messages are broken up and intermingled, so collecting a suspect’s email requires temporarily copying and sifting data from many people’s messages.

Privacy advocates want a court to address whether that violates the Fourth Amendment. So far, they have not succeeded.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/17/us...suspected.html





Judge Tells Apple to Help FBI Access San Bernardino Shooters' iPhone

Apple insists it can't break the iPhone's encryption, but the FBI has some ideas.
Richard Lawler

After a couple shot 14 people in San Bernardino, CA before being killed themselves on December 2nd, the authorities recovered a locked iPhone. Since then, the FBI has complained it is unable to break the device's encryption, in a case that it has implied supports its desire for tech companies to make sure it can always have a way in. Today the Associated Press reports that a US magistrate judge has directed Apple to help the FBI find a way in. According to NBC News, the model in question is an iPhone 5c, but Apple has said that at least as of iOS 8 it does not have a way to bypass the passcode on a locked phone.

In a separate case in New York, Apple is already awaiting a ruling about unlocking an iPhone for the police, as authorities continue to insist encryption is standing in their way. On the other side of the argument, tech companies, privacy advocates and regular end users are arguing that any kind of intentional backdoor access is too big of a risk. Back in 2013, reports said Apple could, and did, unlock iPhones upon law enforcement's request, and it remains to be seen if they can or will return to that state. Apple has five days to respond to the request, we have contacted the company and will update this post if we receive a response.
http://www.engadget.com/2016/02/16/j...o-shooters-ip/





Apple to Fight Order to Help FBI Unlock Shooter's iPhone
Tami Abdollah and Eric Tucker

Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook says his company will fight a federal magistrate's order to help the FBI hack into an encrypted iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino, California shooters. The company said that could potentially undermine encryption for millions of other users.

Cook's response, posted early Wednesday on the company's website, set the stage for a legal fight between the federal government and Silicon Valley with broad implications for conflicts over digital privacy and national security.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym had ordered Apple to help the FBI break into an iPhone belonging to Syed Farook, one of the shooters in the Dec. 2 attack that killed 14 people. Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, died in a gun battle with police.

The ruling by Pym, a former federal prosecutor, requires Apple to supply software the FBI can load onto Farook's county-owned work iPhone to bypass a self-destruct feature that erases the phone's data after too many unsuccessful attempts to unlock it. The FBI wants to be able to try different combinations in rapid sequence until it finds the right one.

The Obama administration has embraced stronger encryption as a way to keep consumers safe on the Internet but has struggled to find a compelling example to make its case.

Cook said "this moment calls for public discussion, and we want our customers and people around the country to understand what is at stake." He argued that the order "has implications far beyond the legal case at hand." He said it could undermine encryption by using specialized software to create an essential back door akin to a "master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks."

"In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone's physical possession," Cook wrote. "The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a back door. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control."

Federal prosecutors told Pym that they can't access Farook's work phone because they don't know his passcode and Apple has not cooperated. Under U.S. law, a work phone is generally the property of a person's employer. The magistrate judge told Apple in Tuesday's proceeding to provide an estimate of its cost to comply with her order, suggesting that the government will be expected to pay for the work.

Apple has provided default encryption on its iPhones since 2014, allowing any device's contents to be accessed only by the user who knows the phone's passcode. Previously, the company could use an extraction tool that would physically plug into the phone and allow it to respond to search warrant requests from the government.

The magistrate's order requires that the software Apple provides be programmed to work only on Farook's phone, and said Apple has five days to notify the court if it believes the ruling is unreasonably burdensome.

It was not immediately clear what investigators believe they might find on Farook's work phone or why the information would not be available from third-party service providers, such as Google or Facebook, though investigators think the device may hold clues about whom the couple communicated with and where they may have traveled.

The phone was running the newest version of Apple's iPhone operating system. It was configured to erase data after 10 consecutive unsuccessful unlocking attempts. The FBI said that feature appeared to be active on Farook's iPhone as of the last time he performed a backup.

Farook and Malik took pains to physically destroy two personally owned cell phones, crushing them beyond the FBI's ability to recover information from them. They also removed a hard drive from their computer; it has not been found despite investigators diving for days for potential electronic evidence in a nearby lake.

Farook was not carrying his work iPhone during the attack. It was discovered after a subsequent search.

The judge didn't spell out her rationale in her three-page order, but the ruling comes amid a similar case in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

Investigators are still working to piece together a missing 18 minutes in Farook and Malik's timeline from that day. Investigators have concluded they were at least partly inspired by the Islamic State group; Malik's Facebook page included a note pledging allegiance to the group's leader around the time of the attack.
http://www.newstimes.com/business/te...no-6835058.php





Justice Department Calls Apple’s Refusal to Unlock iPhone a ‘Marketing Strategy’
Eric Lichtblau

The Justice Department, impatient over its inability to unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino killers, demanded Friday that a judge immediately order Apple to give it the technical tools to get inside the phone.

It said that Apple’s refusal to help unlock the phone for the F.B.I. “appears to be based on its concern for its business model and public brand marketing strategy,” rather than a legal rationale.

In court documents, prosecutors asked a federal judge to enforce an earlier order requiring Apple to provide the government with a tool to extract the data from a locked iPhone 5c. They are trying to get into the phone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the attackers in the San Bernardino rampage, which left 14 dead.

“Rather than assist the effort to fully investigate a deadly terrorist attack by obeying this court’s order of February 16, 2016,” prosecutors wrote in their latest filing, “Apple has responded by publicly repudiating that order.”

The Justice Department’s latest filing escalated what has already been a contentious showdown with Apple and its chief executive, Timothy D. Cook.

On Wednesday, in an 1,100-word letter to his customers, Mr. Cook accused the Justice Department of mounting a “chilling” attack on privacy and Internet security. He said that what prosecutors were demanding amounted to forcing Apple to create a “backdoor” to get around its own security protocols.

But Justice Department prosecutors say that Apple’s technical help is crucial to unlocking Mr. Farook’s iPhone and whatever clues it may hold to his actions and communications both before and immediate after the shootings.

Apple’s lawyers are expected to file by next Friday their formal response to this week’s order from Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of the Federal District Court for the Central District of California. They are likely to argue that the Justice Department’s demands and the judge’s order go beyond the government’s statutory powers in gathering and searching for evidence under the All Writs Act, a law dating to 1789 used in the current case.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/20/bu...-strategy.html





San Bernardino Officials: Apple ID Password For Terrorist’s iPhone Reset At FBI Request

Company executives said they had been helping federal officials with the investigation when the password change was discovered.
John Paczkowski

The Apple ID password linked to the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino terrorists was changed less than 24 hours after the government took possession of the device, senior Apple executives said Friday. If that hadn’t happened, Apple said, a backup of the information the government was seeking may have been accessible.

Now, the government, through a court order, is demanding Apple build what the company considers a special backdoor way into the phone — an order that Apple is challenging. The government argues Apple would not be creating a backdoor.

The Apple executives said the company had been in regular discussions with the government since early January, and that it proposed four different ways to recover the information the government is interested in without building a backdoor. One of those methods would have involved connecting the iPhone to a known Wi-Fi network and triggering an iCloud backup that might provide the FBI with information stored to the device between the October 19th and the date of the incident.

Apple sent trusted engineers to try that method, the executives said, but they were unable to do it. It was then that they discovered that the Apple ID password associated with the iPhone had been changed. (The FBI claimed earlier Friday that this was done by someone at the San Bernardino Health Department.)

Friday night, however, things took a further turn when the San Bernardino County’s official Twitter account stated, “The County was working cooperatively with the FBI when it reset the iCloud password at the FBI’s request.”

County spokesman David Wert told BuzzFeed News on Saturday afternoon the tweet was an authentic statement, but he had nothing further to add.

The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday; an Apple spokesperson said the company had no additional comment beyond prior statements.

Had that password not been changed, the Apple executives said Friday, the government would not need to demand the company create a “backdoor” to access the iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who died in a shootout with law enforcement after a terror attack in California that killed 14 people. The Department of Justice filed a motion to compel the company to do that earlier Friday.

The Apple senior executives spoke with reporters on Friday afternoon to respond to the government’s filing, noting that the government had opened the door to discussion of Apple’s prior efforts in the case by discussing those actions in their Friday filing.

Creating the backdoor access, the executives said, would put at risk the privacy of millions of users. It would not only serve to unlock one specific phone, they said, but create a sort of master key that could be used to access any number of devices. The government says the access being sought could only be used on this one phone, but Apple’s executives noted that there is widespread interest in an iPhone backdoor, noting that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said Thursday that his office has 175 Apple devices he’d like cracked. They also claimed that no other government in the world has ever asked Apple for the sort of FBiOS the government is demanding that it build now.

Asked why the company is pushing back so hard against this particular FBI request when it has assisted the agency in the past, Apple executives noted that the San Bernadino case is fundamentally different from others in which it was involved. Apple has never before been asked to build an entirely new version of its iOS operating system designed to disable iPhone security measures.

The Apple senior executives also pushed back on the government’s arguments that Apple’s actions were a marketing ploy, saying they were instead based on their love for the country and desire not to see civil liberties tossed aside.

The U.S. Department of Justice has not yet responded to a request for comment.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkows...ust#.luZvRwead





Pro-Encryption Lawmaker Ted Lieu: San Bernardino iPhone Court Order Sets a Bad Precedent
Patrick Howell O'Neill

A federal judge's order directing Apple to help the FBI break into the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone effectively "forces private-sector companies like Apple to be used as an arm of law enforcement," one of the most prominent pro-encryption voices in Congress said Tuesday night.

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a Stanford University computer-science graduate, wondered where the use of the All Writs Act—on which the magistrate judge based her ruling—might lead.

Critics of the order argue that, based on its wording, all software companies could be forced to insert potentially harmful code into their products, because, as the government argued, "writing software code is not an unreasonable burden for a company that writes software code as part of its regular business."

"Can courts compel Facebook to provide analytics of who might be a criminal?" Lieu said in an email to the Daily Dot. "Or Google to give a list of names of people who searched for the term ISIS? At what point does this stop?"

Lieu is far from alone in his misgivings about the order, which Apple said Wednesday morning that it would fight.

The judge's ruling on Tuesday instantly disrupted a long-running conversation about government attempts to weaken encryption to make investigators' jobs easier. The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced hours later that it would file an amicus brief supporting Apple in the ongoing legal battle.

"We are supporting Apple here because the government is doing more than simply asking for Apple’s assistance," Kurt Opsahl, Deputy Executive Director and General Counsel of the EFF, wrote on Tuesday night.

Essentially, the government is asking Apple to create a master key so that it can open a single phone. And once that master key is created, we're certain that our government will ask for it again and again, for other phones, and turn this power against any software or device that has the audacity to offer strong security.

Christopher Soghoian, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Principal Technologist, saw larger ambitions behind the order.

"Surely the NSA can help the FBI do this," Soghoian wrote. "That they're going the legal route suggests they just want to set precedent."

"The U.S. government wants us to trust that it won't misuse this power," the EFF's Opsahl argued. "But we can all imagine the myriad ways this new authority could be abused. Even if you trust the U.S. government, once this master key is created, governments around the world will surely demand that Apple undermine the security of their citizens as well."

Apple and the Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment.
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/app...i-court-order/





Secret Memo Details U.S.’s Broader Strategy to Crack Phones
Michael Riley and Jordan Robertson

• ‘Decision memo’ directs agencies to find ways to access data
• Officials met around Thanksgiving to discuss encryption plans

Silicon Valley celebrated last fall when the White House revealed it would not seek legislation forcing technology makers to install “backdoors” in their software -- secret listening posts where investigators could pierce the veil of secrecy on users’ encrypted data, from text messages to video chats. But while the companies may have thought that was the final word, in fact the government was working on a Plan B.

In a secret meeting convened by the White House around Thanksgiving, senior national security officials ordered agencies across the U.S. government to find ways to counter encryption software and gain access to the most heavily protected user data on the most secure consumer devices, including Apple Inc.’s iPhone, the marquee product of one of America’s most valuable companies, according to two people familiar with the decision.

The approach was formalized in a confidential National Security Council “decision memo,” tasking government agencies with developing encryption workarounds, estimating additional budgets and identifying laws that may need to be changed to counter what FBI Director James Comey calls the “going dark” problem: investigators being unable to access the contents of encrypted data stored on mobile devices or traveling across the Internet. Details of the memo reveal that, in private, the government was honing a sharper edge to its relationship with Silicon Valley alongside more public signs of rapprochement.

On Tuesday, the public got its first glimpse of what those efforts may look like when a federal judge ordered Apple to create a special tool for the FBI to bypass security protections on an iPhone 5c belonging to one of the shooters in the Dec. 2 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California that killed 14 people. Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has vowed to fight the order, calling it a “chilling” demand that Apple “hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers.” The order was not a direct outcome of the memo but is in line with the broader government strategy.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Wednesday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice have the Obama administration’s “full” support in the matter. The government is “not asking Apple to redesign its product or to create a new backdoor to their products,” but rather are seeking entry “to this one device,” he said.

Security specialists say the case carries enormous consequences, for privacy and the competitiveness of U.S. businesses, and that the National Security Council directive, which has not been previously reported, shows that technology companies underestimated the resolve of the U.S. government to access encrypted data.

“My sense is that people have over-read what the White House has said on encryption,” said Robert Knake, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations who formerly served as White House Director of Cybersecurity Policy. “They said they wouldn’t seek to legislate ‘backdoors’ in these technologies. They didn’t say they wouldn’t try to access the data in other ways.”

“Backdoors” refer to security holes that are intentionally inserted into software to create the equivalent of a skeleton key for law enforcement -- what wiretapping systems are for telephone lines, for instance. The problem with backdoors in computer networks is they create vulnerabilities for any hacker to find.

What the court is ordering Apple to do, security experts say, does not require the company to crack its own encryption, which the company says it cannot do in any case. Instead, the order requires Apple to create a piece of software that takes advantage of a capability that Apple alone possesses to modify the permanently installed “firmware” on iPhones and iPads, changing it so that investigators can try unlimited guesses at the terror suspect’s PIN code with high-powered computers. Once investigators get the PIN, they get the data.

Knake said that the Justice Department’s narrowly crafted request shows both that FBI technical experts possess a deep understanding of the way Apple’s security systems work and that they have identified potential vulnerabilities that can provide access to data the company has previously said it can’t get.

In this case, the government wants Apple’s help in exploiting such weaknesses. But experts say they could find ways to do it themselves, and the NSC “decision memo” could lead to more money and legal authorization for a smorgasbord of similar workarounds.

National Security Council spokesman Mark Stroh declined to comment on the memo. But he provided a statement from a senior Obama administration official: “We should not preemptively conclude that technical and policy options to address this challenge are out of reach. While creating mechanisms for accessing encrypted information does create vulnerabilities, there may be technical and process steps that can be implemented to limit such risks.”

The memo was approved by the NSC’s Deputies Committee, according to the people familiar with it. While the deputies’ committee changes depending on the subject matter, it typically includes at least a dozen sub-cabinet level officials, among them the deputy attorney general, the vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and the deputy national security adviser.

Such memos can have lasting impact. A similar decision memo was used in the early years of the Iraq war to address the problem of Improvised Explosive Devices, which were then killing hundreds of U.S servicemen. The response ultimately led to new anti-IED technology and expanded intelligence capabilities to disrupt the cells building and planting the bombs.

Silicon Valley and Washington have had a decades-long distrust of each other over encryption, stemming from a failed Clinton administration push in the 1990s for a government backdoor in telecommunications networks. In that case, the National Security Agency developed a technology called the Clipper Chip, which the White House approved as a government standard. Security experts assailed it as insecure and a violation of privacy.

Security experts say the U.S.’s insistence on finding ways to tap into encrypted data comes in direct conflict with consumers’ growing demands for privacy.

“The government’s going to have to get over it,” said Ken Silva, former technical director of the National Security Agency and currently a vice president at Ionic Security Inc., an Atlanta-based data security company. “We had this fight 20 years ago. While I respect the job they have to do and I know how hard the job is, the privacy of that information is very important to people.”

In addition to the demands against Apple, the FBI will almost certainly seek more money and expanded legal authorization to track suspects and access encrypted data, without the involvement of companies that make the technologies, several experts say. Intelligence services already have sophisticated tools for cracking encryption, and the White House’s efforts will likely lead to broader use of those techniques across the government, even in ordinary criminal investigations that don’t involve foreign intelligence or national security.

The workarounds could involve trying to force companies like Apple to develop their own tools to help law enforcement or enlisting government hackers to find previously unknown software vulnerabilities that enable the decryption of large amounts of data flowing across networks.

Apple infuriated law enforcement when it announced in 2014 that it would encrypt data stored on users’ iPhones and iPads with a PIN code that the company could not access, even if ordered to by a judge. Prior to that decision, the FBI and local police agencies routinely sent seized devices to Apple to extract data relevant to their investigations.

To security experts, creating hacking tools -- capabilities to gain access to encrypted data -- is simply a matter of money and focused effort.

“My guess is you could spend a few million dollars and get a capability against Android, spend a little more and get a capability against the iPhone. For under $10 million, you might have capabilities that will work across the board,” said Jason Syversen, a former manager of advanced cyber security programs at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and now the CEO and co-founder of Siege Technologies in Manchester, New Hampshire.

This week’s federal court order undermines years of effort by Apple to design a system that makes accessing encrypted data impossible without the participation of the phone’s legitimate user. Company officials appeared to believe the enhanced encryption would remove Apple from the efforts of any government to sabotage the security of their customers. Instead, federal agents have detailed in a public document several ways in which that encryption can be bypassed.

“Apple has two options now: They can go back to the judge and say this isn’t possible. Or they can service the warrant,” said James Lewis, a senior cyber security fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “I don’t think they can say it’s not possible, because it looks like it is.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...o-crack-phones





Why I Don't Like Smartphones
Hugo Landau

I don't own a smartphone. I consider there to be numerous issues with them:

They are unequal devices. Smartphones are unapologetically devices for consumption. In this regard they differ critically from PCs, because PCs are equal devices in the sense that the same device is used for creation and consumption. This means that anyone with a PC can create as well as consume, if they so wish. This cultural equality is diminished by an exodus to devices which can only really be used for consumption.

They are not real network clients. Smartphones have powerful CPUs and fast network connections, except that you aren't actually allowed to use these resources in any meaningful sense, because doing so consumes battery power, and people don't want the precious battery life of their phones drained unnecessarily.

So there's a massive amount of computer power and network connectivity that in practice you can't use. This leads to an even more unfortunate and ridiculous consequence: you can't implement many existing network protocols on a smartphone. Or at least, you can, but not without draining the battery; but in practice, this isn't done.

For example, a disproportionate number of IM (XMPP, etc.) clients for, say, Android, appear to rely on a central server operated by the software maker, with some proprietary protocol between the client and that server, rather than simply implementing the protocol directly. In other words, there appear to be enough issues with implementing such protocols on smartphones that it isn't done. This leads to the next issue:

They have led to massive centralization. Part of the “cloud” movement is probably driven by the fact that while smartphones have substantial computational resources, you can't actually use them because of battery life. So instead the computation is done in the cloud, creating a dependency on a centralized entity.

How many of these smartphone applications being sold would still work if their makers went bust? By comparison, there is much PC software no longer sold but which is still cherished and used.

They have ruined web design. But I should probably write a whole article on that. Suffice to say however that I am very, very tired of the epidemic of (often massive) position: fixed headers on websites nowadays.

There are no secure smartphones. See this article.

They are devices of unclear alignment, or of clear malevolence. We can of course first rule out all iOS devices. This leaves Android. Supposedly, with Android you are free to install software from arbitrary sources and replace the OS. Except that these capabilities are all too often restricted by device manufacturers or carriers.

Except that if you look closely this doesn't quite add up. With Android devices there is a distinction between “rooted” and “unrooted” devices, which sounds suspiciously similar to “jailbroken” and “unjailbroken”. With a PC, I don't have to perform some arcane operation to actually have control of the device. Moreover, it seems to be common to discriminate against people who have the gall to “root” their device, or to disable some functionality of the device if such “rooting” is performed.

I believe there are even online banking applications which reserve the right, in their terms, to detect if a device is “rooted” and refuse to operate on them. In other words, discrimination against people who exercise control over their devices is common, and even sandboxed applications are permitted to detect this.

There is thus a prevailing expectation that people will not exercise control over their device, to the point where those who do are in a sufficient minority to be discriminated against, and have the functionality of their devices reduced for doing so. I suppose the PC equivalent would be a PC where, if you ever ran “sudo”, certain functionality would be permanently disabled and many applications would refuse to run forever after.
https://www.devever.net/~hl/smartphones





T-Mobile Profit Nearly Triples as it Adds More Customers
Malathi Nayak and Anya George Tharakan

T-Mobile US Inc (TMUS.O) nearly tripled its profit in the fourth quarter as it gained more than 2 million subscribers drawn by aggressive promotions like free video streaming.

Net income jumped to $297 million, or 34 cents per share, in the quarter from $101 million, or 12 cents per share, a year earlier. This surpassed the average analyst estimate of earnings of 15 cents per share.

Total revenue rose 1.1 percent to $8.25 billion, beating the average analyst estimate of $8.20 billion.

To lure customers from rivals Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) and AT&T Inc (T.N), it has launched promotions like data rollover offers and lower-priced phone leasing plans in recent months.

In November, it launched a new service "Binge On" in November to give customers the option to stream video from services such as Netflix Inc (NFLX.O), on their mobile devices without having it count against their data plans.

T-Mobile added a net 2.1 million customers, including 1.3 million new monthly or postpaid customers in the three months ended Dec. 31. In 2016, it said it expects to add a net 2.4 million to 3.4 million postpaid customers, compared with the 4.5 million it added in 2015.

The company's average revenue per postpaid user fell marginally to $48.05 in the fourth quarter from $48.26 a year earlier, mainly due to promotions.

To upgrade its network, the company plans to invest up to $10 billion to buy low-frequency airwaves in a U.S. government auction that starts on March 29. In addition to its bigger rivals Verizon and AT&T, it will go up against with Comcast Corp and Silicon Valley investment firm Social Capital that have filed to participate in the auction.

T-Mobile shares, which have fallen about 7 percent this year through Tuesday, were up 4.1 percent in pre-market trading after closing at $36.45 on Tuesday on the Nasdaq.

(Reporting by Malathi Nayak in New York and Anya George Tharakan in Bengaluru; Editing by Don Sebastian and W Simon)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/us-t-m...-idUKKCN0VQ17M





Firechat Adopts Ant Wireless

Enhancing Peer To Peer Smart Phone Connections
Cate Lawrence

Open Garden is adopting ANT wireless technology, which will be available in the new release of its flagship mobile app, FireChat. FireChat is the first “off the grid” mobile app that enables people to communicate for free, even if they do not have access to the Internet, a cellular network, or a data plan.

FireChat allows people and communities to create their own free communications networks thanks to its unique peer-to-peer mesh networking technology. In order to significantly enhance direct connections between Android smartphones, FireChat now uses the ANT protocol, in addition to Bluetooth and peer-to-peer WiFi, to let smartphones connect to each other to exchange messages and photos when offline.

With this technology, people don't need a phone signal or Internet connection to send or download messages -- instead, it connects phones using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radio signals as long as they are no more than 200 feet apart. If just five percent of phones in a city use the app, the company says, then messages can travel through the mesh of off-the-grid phones to cross the entire city within a few minutes.

ANT is an ultra low power (ULP) wireless networking protocol that enables direct connections between devices and can be found in everything from fitness sensors to apps and consumer devices, including over 200 million mobile devices.

Christophe Daligault, CMO of Open Garden sees Firechat as an enabler for mobile communication in most countries where people can barely afford to buy a smartphone, let alone a data plan or credits.

"Unsurprisingly, more and more people are using FireChat in countries such as India, Malaysia, Mexico, and the Philippines. To enable free communications in these countries, robust direct connectivity between Android mobile devices is critical. This is precisely what ANT helps us accomplish.”

The app has been used extensively in countries when governments threaten to shut down cellular wifi such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Iraq, and Russia. It also has great implications for situations when conventional communication is down due to events such as severe storms or earthquakes and is also useful in situations like crowded concerts and sporting events.

Off the grid technology is not new but it has been limited to a lack of range. The adoption of ANT wireless technology by Open Garden will take the concept further than before and this is an innovation that is definitely one to watch.
http://readwrite.com/2016/02/15/open-garden-gets-ant





Mobile Operator Three Group to Block Online Advertising
Martin Anderson

In a move which seems likely to cause consternation across the publishing community, mobile provider Three Group has announced its intention to block online advertising across all its European networks.

In a press release today the company, a subsidiary of Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison Holdings, revealed that it will work with Israeli start-up Shine Technologies on implementing network ad blocking. The ad-blocking will work both on web-pages viewed in a mobile environment, and in apps, so long as both of these use known ad-serving networks.

The release says that the roll-out of Shine’s adblocking will begin in the UK and Italy, and eventually will take in all the countries in 3 Group Europe, including Ireland, Austria, Denmark and Switzerland. No mention has been made of implementing the system in Three’s Asian territories, Hong Kong and Indonesia.

The release indicates that the ad-blocking will not be absolute and non-negotiable, and lays out three goals for the transition: that Three’s customers should not pay data charges to receive adverts, the cost of which should instead be borne by the advertiser; that customers need to be protected from mobile ads which mine and exploit customer data without their consent or awareness; that customers should be protected from ‘excessive, intrusive, unwanted or irrelevant adverts’.

A spokesman for three says ‘Irrelevant and excessive mobile ads annoy customers and affect their overall network experience. We don’t believe customers should have to pay for data usage driven by mobile ads. The industry has to work together to give customers mobile ads they want and benefit from.’

Shine’s estimation of what advertising costs consumers in a gaming app

Roi Carthy, chief marketing officer at Shine, has compared mobile ads to someone siphoning off a dollar of gas when you fill up with $10, as ‘smog’, and as ‘ecosystem in which the cat has been allowed to protect the milk’. Talking to Business Insider last year Carthy said “We believe ad blocking is a right, full-stop. If the consumer decides to use it, we believe that it should be their right, and they should be able to do it with full integrity… There will be [casualties], absolutely, but I know I’m not losing any sleep knowing remnant inventory ad networks will disappear.”

Shine made its initial deployment to Caribbean operator Digicel last year, causing a storm of portents about the disruption the disappearance of advertising will cause to sites that rely on inventory systems such as AdTech and Google’s DoubleClick (banner ads rather than native text ads).

It is reported that Three may only target the most disruptive and data-gobbling of ads, such as autoplay videos – and, more cynically, that advertisers will actually be able to run anything they like; except that now it’s time to pay, both for the privilege and the bandwidth.

Further announcements on the implementation of Three’s ad-block will follow in the next three months, whilst sources told The Telegraph that the partnership will be officially announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Comment I’ve commented before that the critical mass which the subject of online ad-blocking is now reaching seems likely to presage a move away from server-based inventory advertising, where the originating URL is easy to identify and block, towards proprietary advertising served from the same origin as the website content itself. Since there are philosophical and practical obstacles to any hope that open source will provide a solution, it seems an opportune moment for a start-up to bring forth a workable and trustworthy solution that can provide trustworthy reporting and revenue generation – without leaving the home domain.
https://thestack.com/cloud/2016/02/1...e-advertising/





'5D' Discs Can Store Data Until Well After the Sun Burns Out

They're like Superman's memory crystals, but real.
Andrew Tarantola

Researchers at the University of Southampton's Optical Research Center announced on Tuesday that they've perfected a technique that can record data in 5 dimensions and keep it safe for billions of years. The method etches data into a thermally stable disc using femtosecond laser bursts. The storage medium itself holds up to 360 TB per disc, can withstand temperatures up to 1000 degrees C and are estimated to last up to 13.8 billion years at room temperature without degrading.

Each file is comprised of three layers of nanoscale dots. The dots' side and orientations, as well as their position within the three standard dimensions, constitute its five dimensions. These dots change the polarization of light travelling through the disc which is read using a microscope and polarizer.

The Southampton team originally demonstrated the technology back in 2013 though, at that point, they could only fit a 300kb test file onto a disc. In the three years since their first demonstration, they've essentially perfected the recording technique and have since recorded the entirety of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Newton's Opticks, Magna Carta and Kings James Bible.

"It is thrilling to think that we have created the technology to preserve documents and information and store it in space for future generations," Professor Peter Kazansky from the ORC said in a statement. "This technology can secure the last evidence of our civilisation: all we've learnt will not be forgotten."
http://www.engadget.com/2016/02/16/5...sun-burns-out/





Kanye West is Reportedly Considering Legal Action Against The Pirate Bay
Emil Protalinski

Kanye West apparently has a new mission: to sue The Pirate Bay.

Last weekend, West announced that his new album, The Life of Pablo, would be sold exclusively as a download from his website and the artist-driven streaming music service Tidal. The news sent Tidal to No. 1 on the U.S. Apple App Store, so West pulled the album from his site and announced it wouldn’t be released on other streaming services. The Internet responded by pirating his album in droves. This naturally pissed off West.

“Kanye is going to meet with his legal team to discuss the possibilities of starting legal action against torrent site Pirate Bay,” a source told Hollywood Life. “He’s going to talk to his lawyers and see where he stands, and hopefully Tidal will partner up with him in any legal proceedings because it was supposed to be an exclusive release. He certainly feels he has a case, with the two factors he’s mulling over being copyright infringement and loss of earnings.”

Attempting to sue The Pirate Bay is a fool’s errand; West winning would be an incredibly long shot.

First of all, the Pirate Bay administrators would have to actually show up in court. Then they would have to lose the standard argument that hosting torrents is not the same as hosting pirated content. Then they would have to actually remove the torrents in question.

Oh, and this would all have to happen quickly (cases like these could take years). A quick check on The Pirate Bay shows there are over 9,000 users currently sharing the album for others to download at any given moment.

And they would keep doing so, even if The Pirate Bay disappeared off the Internet tomorrow. Even if all torrent sites and BitTorrent clients disappeared overnight, it wouldn’t change much. There was sharing before torrents and there will be sharing after torrents.

As we’ve seen time and time again, West has a better chance of recouping lost profits by offering his album on more platforms. But if he absolutely wants to pick just one, it probably shouldn’t be Tidal.
http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/18/ka...he-pirate-bay/

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

February 13th, February 6th, January 30th, January 23rd

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public."
- Hugo Black
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 16th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-07-11 06:43 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 9th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 06-07-11 05:36 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 30th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 27-01-10 07:49 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 16th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-01-10 09:02 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 5th, '09 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 02-12-09 08:32 AM






All times are GMT -6. The time now is 07:25 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
© www.p2p-zone.com - Napsterites - 2000 - 2024 (Contact grm1@iinet.net.au for all admin enquiries)