Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 14th, '09

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"[Vote tracking is] the possibility that is most troubling to us. There are limitations and need for precautions that we might not have been aware of before." – Alex Halderman


"The closer I get to putting this camera eye in, the more freaked out people are about me. People aren't sure they want to hang around someone who might be filming them at any time." – Rob Spence



































March 14th, 2009




Feds Demand Prison for Guns N' Roses Uploader
David Kravets

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are pursuing a 6-month prison term for a Los Angeles man who pleaded guilty in December to one misdemeanor count of uploading pre-release Guns N' Roses tracks, according to court documents.

Kevin Cogill was arrested last summer at gunpoint and charged with uploading nine tracks of the Chinese Democracy album to his music site — antiquiet.com. The album, which cost millions and took 17 years to complete, was released November 23 and reached No. 3 in the charts.

The sentence being sought — including the calculation of damages based on the illegal activity of as many as 1,310 websites that disseminated the music after Cogill released it — underscores how serious the government is about punishing those for uploading pre-release material.

"Making a pre-release work available to the worldwide public over the internet where it can be copied without limit is arguably one of the more insidious forms of copyright infringement," prosecutor Craig H. Missakian wrote in court documents. "That is because once released it is virtually impossible to prevent unlimited dissemination of the work."

As part of the 28-year-old Cogill's guilty plea, he informed the authorities that he received the music online and unsolicited — a confession Missakian said might pave the way for more "targets" to be prosecuted.

"Needless to say, artists like the band Guns N' Roses put their blood, sweat, toil and tears into the creative process," Missakian said. "And this country has seen fit to protect their rights — and in doing so foster and encourage the creative process by which all of society benefits."

The government claimed the amount of infringement equaled $371,622. The higher the number the larger the potential prison term. The government said it produced a "reasonable estimate" and gave the defendant the "benefit of the doubt" in its calculations, which were based on each infringement being worth 99 cents on iTunes.

The Recording Industry Association of America, however, told the judge overseeing the case that the defendant's conduct resulted in more than a $2.2 million loss based on a "$6.39 legitimate wholesale value" for the nine tracks the RIAA claims were downloaded about 350,000 times.

Regardless of the phantom figures, the numbers floated by the government and the RIAA assume that the music would have been purchased had it not been downloaded for free.

Here's how the feds concluded the $371,622 in damages:

They said the music was streamed from Cogill's site 1,123 times to 801 IP addresses over a two-hour period. The authorities, based on a "conservative estimate," concluded nearly 400,000 downloads.

"This number is based on a sample of 30 out of 1,310 unauthorized web sites that offered the leaked songs to the public between June 19, 2008 and November 21, 2008," Missakian wrote. "Of the 1,310 web sites identified as having unauthorized copies of the music that defendant streamed, 30 of those contained information showing the number of downloads from their sites."

Of those 30 sites, the government said there were 16,976 downloads of Chinese Democracy.

"It is most likely that this number represents the number of downloads of the group of 9 leaked songs, for a total of 152,784 downloads of individual songs (16,976 x 9)," Missakian wrote. "It is, however, not possible to say at this time whether the figure represents the group of 9 songs or individual songs. Giving the defendant the benefit of the doubt, the government will assume that the 16,976 figure represents downloads of individual songs."

But wait, the prosecution wrote more:

In addition to the above number, the Court should also add an additional number for the number of downloads from the remaining 1,200-plus web sites that offered the songs for download. The average number of downloads from the 30 sites for which actual data exists is 565. Again, giving the defendant the benefit of the doubt, the Court could reduce that number by one half and estimate that each other site accounted for 280 individual downloads, or a total of 358,400 (1,310-30 x 280), during the relevant period. By taking the total number of downloads of 375,376 (16,976 +358,400) and multiplying that number by $.99 per song downloaded, the infringement about becomes $371,622.

According to court records, Cogill uploaded nine songs from the 14-track album on June 18. Court records show he confessed to the FBI. The case was cracked by an investigator with the Recording Industry Association of America, according to court records.

Cogill's attorney, David Kaloyanides, told the court that no jail time was warranted. He added that, "There is no way to determine how many downloads were made."

Sentencing is set for May 4.

By the way, the RIAA said it would be willing to accept $30,000, instead of $2.2 million in restitution, if Cogill "was willing to participate in a public service announcement designed to educate the public that music piracy is illegal."
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...emand-6-m.html





Peer-to-Peer Protection Bill Introduced
By Ben Bain

A bill designed to protect people from the risks to security and privacy associated with computer-to-computer file-sharing programs has been introduced in the House.

The legislation, introduced March 5, would prohibit certain types of behavior on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks on computers and make them punishable as unfair or deceptive actions under consumer protection laws.

P2P programs let users easily share videos, music and other data, but have also been used to extract sensitive information from someone’s computer without the victim’s knowledge. P2P networks automatically search hard drives for files that are available for sharing, and the security risks associated with the programs have drawn concern from lawmakers.

The legislation would require the file-sharing programs to show users a “clear and conspicuous notice” that computer’s files could be made available to another computer if the program is used. It would require informed consent from the computer's owner immediately before the program is installed.

The measure would also require notice about which files will be made available and informed consent from the user before the initial activation of the file sharing program. The bill would also make it illegal to prevent the authorized user of a computer to block the installation of a P2P file-sharing program, disable or remove the program.

The bill was introduced by Reps. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.), John Barrow (D-Ga.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) and has been referred to the Energy and Commerce Committee.

A statement on Bono Mack’s Web site that announced the legislation mentioned recent reports that indicated P2P software was involved in a security breach with Marine One, the presidential helicopter, and an incident involving a Supreme Court Justice. During a congressional hearing on inadvertent file-sharing over P2P networks held in July 2007, a House committee heard about the extent of government data that was readily available and easily obtained on P2P networks.
http://fcw.com/articles/2009/03/09/p2p-bill.aspx

Specifically, the Informed P2P User Act:

• Ensures that P2P file sharing programs cannot be installed without providing clear notice and obtaining informed consent of the authorized computer user.
• Makes it unlawful to prevent the authorized user of a computer to prevent reasonable efforts to
o 1) Block the installation of a peer-to-peer file sharing program, and
o 2) Disable or remove any peer-to-peer file sharing program.
• Gives enforcement authority to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).





French Anti-P2P Law Toughest in the World

France's long talked-out law to kick repeat copyright infringers off the Internet has finally come up for debate in Parliament. If passed, it would be illegal not to secure one's Internet connection, and even public WiFi hotspots will have to offer only a "white list" of approved sites.
Nate Anderson

The French attempt to pass the world's toughest "graduated response" law against P2P file-sharers has been en retard for months. But the negotiations are finally over, the "Création et Internet" bill has been drafted, and today it finally came up before the National Assembly for debate. Despite furious opposition, the bill could well pass soon, laying down severe penalties for "not securing one's Internet connection" and forcing public WiFi operators to allow access only to a "white list" of acceptable sites. And all this for one industry.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité... HADOPI?

The French law goes by many names. Officially called "Création et Internet," it is also known as the "Loi Olivennes" after Denis Olivennes, the head of French electronics giant FNAC. Olivennes headed the group that came up with the plan, which will be implemented by a new group called HADOPI—which is why the bill is also known as HADOPI.

But whatever one calls it, the principles remain the same. When ISPs are notified about alleged file-sharing, they first send an e-mail to the customer involved. The second time, the customer gets a registered letter. The third time, the customer gets booted off the 'Net for three months to a year. (A HADOPI blacklist will apparently keep blocked users from simply switching ISPs.)

In return, French DVDs will appear a couple of months closer to their theatrical release date and music and movie groups will have to drop much of their DRM.

Global music trade group IFPI thinks this is a wonderful trade-off. CEO John Kennedy, last seen testifying at The Pirate Bay trial in Sweden, said today that "our future, like that of the film industry and other media depends on whether we can sustain a legitimate business in an environment that has been swamped by unauthorised free music. Over the last two years the French government has led the way in addressing this critical challenge. It has recognised that involving ISPs in addressing the massive flow of infringing content on their networks is not only essential to protect the rights of creators and producers, but can provide a sensible and proportionate solution that will work effectively in practice."

Critics aren't convinced. Those critics include the European Parliament, which last year twice expressed its displeasure with such schemes on the ground that the punishment was grossly disproportionate to the crime and that only judges should be allowed to order such disconnections. That has not dissuaded the Sarkozy government, which has continued to push the idea hard.

The toughest in tout le monde

It wouldn't be too much to say that the world is watching. Although Agence-France Presse said today in an article that "the new law would make France the fourth country, after the United States, Ireland and Italy, to cut off web access for illegal downloaders," the reality is that no countries currently have such a national policy in place. In the US, only "discussions" have been announced, and those are voluntary; in Ireland, a single ISP has voluntarily agreed to adopt graduated response principles; and Italy's parliament has simply agreed to follow the French model at some point in the future.

The UK, which is considering graduated response legislation, has already taken "Internet disconnection" off the table as a potential penalty. New Zealand, which has actually passed a law requiring ISPs to boot repeat copyright infringers off the 'Net, has delayed implementation after a public outcry.

But even if the New Zealand law does go into effect before the French, the French law is much stricter. For instance, "Création et Internet" requires home Internet users to install certain approved security software and to secure their networks. The old "I had an open WiFi network and someone across the hall probably logged on and downloaded all those episodes of The Office" won't work; while that may be what happened, the law tries to avoid such controversies by simply making each Internet subscriber responsible for what happens on their connection.

One obvious retort is that people will simply slip down the boulevard to the café for a cup of overpriced espresso, a waiter with bad case of ennui, and an afternoon of torrenting. But the Law will not be mocked so easily. When French Minister of Culture Christine Albanel answered some parliamentary questions about public WiFi networks, she said that the solution was simple: such hotspots would offer only a "white list" of approved websites.

This sort of "plug every hole in the dike, the consequences be damned!" strategy shows just how far the government is willing to go in order to protect the copyright industries; not even rank censorship is a bridge too far. And the logic of this approach suggests that the current practice of scanning BitTorrent swarms for IP addresses will have to give way to deep packet inspection of Web content as users shift to streaming media, direct download links, and darknets.

"This return to a centralized, state-controlled network is as scary as inapplicable," said Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net, a lobby group that works for an open Internet. "Yet, this is emblematic of how a government legislates with the same ignorance and archaism as the entertainment industries that promote the 'graduated response.' They are, like this law, doomed to fail."

Consumer group UFC Que Choisir compared the entire project to France's ill-fated Maginot Line, examples of World War I thinking that were famously bypassed early in World War II by blitzkrieging German panzer units.

Instead, UFC Que Choisir calls for new thinking—in this case, a license fee paid for total access to movies and music. Such a solution is backed by some French artistic groups "et même... par le groupe Warner aux Etats-Unis" (an apparent reference to Warner's Choruss project). The implication is clear: even the music labels can see the future, and this law is straight out of the past.

True or not, however, the bill appears to have a good chance of passing into law, and the European Commission has so far (under French pressure) resisted the European Parliament's efforts to block France from implementing it.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-the-world.ars





Access to Documents: The European Parliament Demands More Transparency

No legislative documents should be kept secret: this must be a basic principle of the reformed policy on access to documents, the European Parliament says in a vote on a new EU rules on the issue. Members adopted amendments to the draft proposal but postponed the vote on the legislative resolution, leaving the door open for further negotiations and a first-reading agreement.

The European Parliament adopted amendments on the basis of a codecision report drafted by Michael CASHMAN (PES, UK) in order to revise the 2001 regulation on access to documents, which has been followed by a number of rulings by the Court of Justice. The revised regulation will incorporate these rulings into a single framework for all the institutions, but MEPs want to go further.

Legislative vote postponed

MEPs adopted the amended proposal by 439 votes in favour, 200 against and 57 abstentions, but postponed the vote on the legislative resolution in order to leave the possibility for the European commission to modify its proposal, and for the European Parliament to negotiate a first reading agreement with Council after the summer, as a new parliamentary term will start in June. Council will then be chaired by the Swedish presidency, which made a priority of the issue of transparency and already welcomed the Cashman report in a public declaration.

In its report, the House includes amendments clarifying the term "document", defining it as any data or content, whatever its medium, concerning a matter relating to the policies, activities and decisions falling within the institution's sphere of responsibility. MEPs also make a distinction between legislative and non-legislative documents: the former should always be available to the public and may not be kept secret on the grounds that this could undermine the decision-making process of the institutions. Measures of general scope adopted by the Council and the Commission without associating the European Parliament shall also be considered "legislative" by way of exception.

Transparency in Member States too

Documents originating from a Member State and received by the EU institutions should also be disclosed, after consultation of the Member state - but this does not give them a right of veto, MEPs say. Member States shall seek to ensure that an equivalent level of transparency is granted in relation to national measures implementing acts of the EU.

The text also protects political activity and independence of MEPs, reminding that documents and electronic records which an MEP has received, drafted or sent are not to be considered as "documents" in the sense of this regulation, as they are covered by the Statute for Members of the European Parliament.

A single EU portal on the web

Parliament added an article on legislative transparency, stating that these documents must be available on an inter-institutional website. Preparatory documents, impact studies, legal opinions and other documents must also be published.

"EU classified": a new category of documents

MEPs have also devised a scale for classifying documents, from "EU restricted" to "EU top secret", for documents whose unauthorised disclosure could harm the interests of the European Union or its Member States. Reasons must be given why access to a document is refused. And documents on legislative procedures must not be classified, say MEPs.

Exceptions shall only apply for the period during which protection is justified and may only apply for 30 years, unless the exception relates to the privacy or integrity of the individual.

Financial transparency

Information relating to the EU budget, its implementation and beneficiaries of EU funds and grants should also be public and accessible to citizens via a specific website.

Documents on International agreements to be made public

International accords on the sharing of confidential information concluded in the name of the EU (such as the agreement with the USA on passenger name records or "PNR"), must not give a non-EU country or an international organisation the right to prevent the European Parliament from accessing confidential information.

Members also call the Commission to make available all documents related to the ongoing international negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) - which will contain a new international benchmark on intellectual property right enforcement.

A register of lobbyists

MEPs call for an inter-institutional register of lobbyists to be set up, and the names, titles and functions of the lobbyists should be made public, as should those of EU officials, unless this information would affect the privacy or integrity of the individual.

A special oversight committee made up of MEPs should be set up and should have access to classified documents. Each directorate-general of every institution should designate a person responsible for ensuring that the regulation is properly implemented.

Lastly, requests for paper copies of documents must be processed within 15 days, as compared to the 30 days suggested in the initial proposal.

Link





Copyright Treaty is Classified for 'National Security'
Declan McCullagh

Last September, the Bush administration defended the unusual secrecy over an anti-counterfeiting treaty being negotiated by the U.S. government, which some liberal groups worry could criminalize some peer-to-peer file sharing that infringes copyrights.

Now President Obama's White House has tightened the cloak of government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a discussion draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and related materials are "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958."

The 1995 Executive Order 12958 allows material to be classified only if disclosure would do "damage to the national security and the original classification authority is able to identify or describe the damage."

Jamie Love, director of the nonprofit group Knowledge Ecology International, filed the Freedom of Information Act request that resulted in this week's denial from the White House. The denial letter was sent to Love on Tuesday by Carmen Suro-Bredie, chief FOIA officer in the White House's Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Love had written in his original request on January 31--submitted soon after Obama's inauguration--that the documents "are being widely circulated to corporate lobbyists in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. There is no reason for them to be secret from the American public."

The White House appears to be continuing the secretive policy of the Bush administration, which wrote to the Electronic Frontier Foundation on January 16 that out of 806 pages related to the treaty, all but 10 were "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958."

In one of his first acts as president, Obama signed a memo saying FOIA "should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure."

Love's group believes that the U.S. and Japan want the treaty to say that willful trademark and copyright infringement on a commercial scale must be subject to criminal sanctions, including infringement that has "no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain."

A June 2008 memo from the International Chamber of Commerce, signed by pro-copyright groups, says: "intellectual property theft is no less a crime than physical property theft. An effective ACTA should therefore establish clear and transparent standards for the calculation and imposition of effective criminal penalties for IP theft that...apply to both online and off-line IP transactions." Similarly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has called for "criminal penalties for IP crimes, including online infringements."

Last fall, two senators--Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter (R-Penn.)--known for their support of stringent intellectual property laws, expressed concern that the ACTA could be too far-reaching.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10195547-38.html





Who Are the Cleared Advisors That Have Access to Secret ACTA Documents?
James Love

The negotiating text of ACTA and many other documents, including even the lists of participants in the negotiations, are secret. The White House claims the secrecy is required as a matter of national security. But that does not mean the documents are off limits to everyone outside of the government. Hundreds of advisors, many of them corporate lobbyists, are considered “cleared advisors.” They have access to the ACTA documents.

Who are these cleared advisors? They are the members of these 27 USTR advisory boards:

http://www.ustr.gov/Who_We_Are/List_...ommittees.html

All members of the advisory boards can request access to classified ACTA documents. Below are the members of just four of the advisory boards, ITAC 15, 8, 10 and 3.

Industry Trade Advisory Committee On Intellectual Property Rights
ITAC 15

Chairman , Mr. Eric H. Smith
President
International Intellectual Property Alliance

Vice-Chairman
Mr. Jacques J. Gorlin
President
The Gorlin Group

Sandra M. Aistars, Esq.
Senior Counsel, Intellectual Property
Time Warner Inc.

Kira M. Alvarez, Esq.
Director, International Government Affairs
Eli Lilly and Company

Mark Chandler, Esq.
Senior Vice President, General Counsel,
and Secretary
Cisco Systems, Inc.

Ms. Erin L. Ennis
Vice President
The U.S.-China Business Council

Francis (Frank) Z. Hellwig, Esq.
Senior Associate, General Counsel
Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc.

J. Anthony Imler, Ph.D.
Director, Public Policy, Latin America
Merck & Co., Inc.
Ms. Mary A. Irace
Vice President, Trade and Export Finance
National Foreign Trade Council, Inc.

Jeffrey P. Kushan, Esq.
Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood LLP
Representing Biotechnology Industry
Organization

Stevan D. Mitchell, Esq.
Vice President, Intellectual Property Policy
Entertainment Software Association

Douglas T. Nelson, Esq.
Executive Vice President, General Counsel,
and Secretary
CropLife America

Timothy P. Trainer, Esq.
President
Global Intellectual Property
Strategy Center, P.C.
Representing the Thomas G. Faria
Corporation

Neil I. Turkewitz, Esq.
Executive Vice President
Recording Industry Association of America

Ms. Susan C. Tuttle
Governement Programs Executive
IBM Corporation

Mr. Herbert C. Wamsley
Executive Director
Intellectual Property Owners Association

Ms. Anissa S. Whitten
Trade Director
Motion Picture Association of America, Inc.

Ms. Deborah E. Wiley
Senior Vice President
John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Association of American Publishers, Inc.

Shirley Zebroski, Ph.D
Director, Legislative Affairs
General Motors Corporation

Total Members = 19

Industry Trade Advisory Committee On Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals, Health Science Products and Services
ITAC 3

Chairman
Mr. V. M. (Jim) DeLisi
President
Fanwood Chemical, Inc.

Primary Vice-Chairman
Robert E. Branand, Esq.
Representative
National Paint & Coatings Association

Secondary Vice-Chairman
W. Martin (Marty) Strauss, Ph.D.
Vice President, Consumer Traits and Food Policy
Monsanto Company

Karen L. Bland, Esq.
Consultant
Representing The Society of the Plastics Industry, Inc.

Mr. Michael D. Boyd
Vice President, Public Affairs International
Schering-Plough Corporation

Shawn M. Brown
Vice President of State Affairs
Generic Pharmaceutical Association

Mr. P. Claude Burcky
Divisional Vice President, Global Government Affairs and Policy
Abbott Laboratories, Inc.

Mr. Morris A. Chafetz
President
Hemisphere Polymer and Chemical
Company, Inc.

Mr. Harrison C. Cook
Director, International Government Affairs
Eli Lilly and Company

Mr. Donald E. Ellison
Representative
Government Relations, LLC
SACMA

D. Geoffrey B. Gamble, Esq.
Director, International Government Affairs
E.I. DuPont de Nemours & Company

Mr. Edward L. Gibbs
President
North Coast Medical Equipment, Inc.

Trevor J. Gunn, Ph.D.
Director, International Relations
Medtronic, Inc.

Ms. Tine K. Hansen-Turton
Chief Executive Officer
National Nursing Centers Consortium

Ms. Regina L. Harper
Regulatory Affairs Manager
Milliken Chemical

Ms. Mary A. Irace
Managing Director, Global Affairs
American Chemistry Council

Mr. Ralph F. Ives
Executive Vice President, Global Strategy and Analysis
Advanced Medical Technology Association

Mr. Craig S. Kramer
Vice President, International
Government Affairs
Johnson & Johnson

Mr. Adrian Krygsman
Director, Product Registration
Troy Corporation

Ms. Nancy R. Levenson
Director, U.S. Federal Government Relations
S.C.Johnson & Son, Inc.

Matthew T. McGrath, Esq.
Partner
Barnes, Richardson and Colburn
Representing Intermune, Inc.

Mr. Lloyd N. Moon
Vice President
Chemtura Corporation

Ms. Tracey J. Norberg
Vice President, Environment and Resource
Recovery
Rubber Manufacturers Association

Ms. Rosemary L. O’Brien
Vice President, Public Affairs
CF Industries, Inc.

Mr. Gerald R. Prout
Vice President, Government and Public
Affairs
FMC Corporation

Mr. J. Lawrence Robinson
President
Color Pigments Manufacturers Association, Inc.

George L. Rolofson, Ph.D.
Consultant in Agricultural Science and Environmental, Regulatory, and Trade Policy

Rolofson Consulting
Representing Gowan Company

Ms. Lisa M. Schroeter
Director, International Policy
The Dow Chemical Company

Ms. Marjory E. Searing
Vice President, Public Affairs - Japan/Asia and Latin America
Pfizer Inc.

Mr. Isi A. Siddiqui
Vice President, Science and Regulatory Affairs
CropLife America

Mr. Arthur J. Simonetti
Director, Trade Legislation and Regulation
Honeywell International, Inc.

Mr. Henry P. Stoebenau
President
Efficient Global Trade, Inc.
Representing American Association of Exporters and Importers

Mr. Albert C. (Cal) Sutphin
President Braden Sutphin Ink Company

Mr. Ford B. West
President
The Fertilizer Institute

Mr. Andrew C. Zamoyski
President
Zamoyski and Company
Representing Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association

Total Members = 35

Industry Trade Advisory Committee On Information and Communications Technologies, Services, and Electronic Commerce
ITAC 8

Chairman
Mr. SteveW. Stewart
Director, Public Affairs
IBM Corporation

Primary Vice-Chairman
Ms. B. Anne Craib
Director, International Trade and Government Affairs
Semiconductor Industry Association

Secondary Vice-Chairman
Mr. Robert J. Mulligan
Senior Vice President International
AeA: Advancing the Business of Technology

Mr. Arun K. Bhumitra
Chief Executive Officer
Arjay Telecommunications

Mark F. Bohannon, Esq.
General Counsel and Senior Vice President, Public Policy Software and Information
Industry Association

Mr. Anthony Caldwell
President
Global Business Communication Solutions, LLC
Representing XSelData

Ms. Melika D. Carroll
Director, Federal Government Affairs
Micron Technology, Inc.

Ms. Susan D. Chapman
Director, e-Commerce Policy and Asia Pacific Trade Policy
General Motors Corporation

Mr. Calman J. Cohen
President
Emergency Committee for American Trade

Tod H. Cohen, Esq.
Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Government Relations
eBay Inc.

Holly A. Evans, Esq.
President
Strategic Counsel, LLC
Representing Advanced Micro Devices

Mark E. Foster, Esq.
Attorney
Law Offices of Mark E. Foster
Representing Transaction Network Services,
Inc.

Ms. Meredith L. Golemon-Anderson
Director, International Trade Policy
Oracle Corporation

Mr. John P. Goyer
Vice President, International Trade
Negotiations and Investment
U.S. Coalition of Service Industries

Mr. Christopher G. Hankin
Director, Federal Affairs
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Ms. Tania W. Hanna
Director, Government Relations
Corporate Washington Office
Harris Corporation

Mr. Christopher J. Hirth
Director, Web Commerce Group
Intuit Inc.

Mr. David M. Leifer, Esq.
Senior Counsel
American Council of Life Insurers

Mr. Charles B. O’Hara
Manager, National Government Relations
The Procter & Gamble Company

Ms. Wendy E. Owens
Chief Executive Officer
AbleMedia LLC

Mr. Joseph A. Pasetti
Manager, Government Affairs
Applied Materials, Inc.

Mr. Daniel J. Peterson
Vice President, Industry and Government Affairs
Cook Group Incorporated

Mr. Edward M. Rozynski
Vice President, Global Government Affairs
Stryker Corporation

Jacquelynn Ruff, Esq.
Vice President, International Public Policy and Regulatory Affairs
Verizon Communications Inc.

Ms. Loretta L. Schmitzer
Vice President, Government Affairs
The Boeing Company

Mr. Gregory S. Slater
Director, Trade Policy
Intel Corporation

Ms. Sarah G. Smiley
Associate Vice President
Advanced Medical Technology Association

Stephen B. Whitaker, Ph.D.
President
Whitaker Strategies, LLC
Representing BOSE Corporation

Total Members = 28

Industry Trade Advisory Committee On Services and Finance Industries
ITAC 10

Chairman
Mr. J. Robert Vastine, Jr.
President
U.S. Coalition of Service Industries

Vice-Chairman
Ms. Elizabeth R. Benson
President
Energy Associates

Mr. Thomas A. Allegretti
President and Chief Executive Officer
The American Waterways Operators

Mr. Fredric S. Berger, P.E.
Senior Vice President
The Louis Berger Group, Inc.

Mr. Stuart J. Brahs
President
Stuart J. Brahs Consulting
American Council of Life Insurers

Timothy C. Brightbill, Esq.
Member, American Bar Association
Wiley Rein LLP

Stephen J. Canner, Ph.D.
Vice President, Investment and Financial Services
United States Council for International
Business

Ms. Ellen M. Delage
Director, International Relations
The American Institute of Architects

Paul H. DeLaney III
FedEx Express

Linda Menghetti Dempsey, Esq.
Vice President
Emergency Committee for American Trade

Peter D. Ehrenhaft, Esq.
Senior Counsel
Peter D. Ehrenhaft Consulting
Representing Harkins Cunningham, LLP

Mr. Gregory M. Frazier
Executive Vice President
Worldwide Government Policy
Motion Picture Association of America, Inc.

Madeleine F. Green, Ph.D.
Vice President and Director,
Center for International and Institutional Initiatives
American Council on Education

Ms. Leslie C. Griffin
Vice President, International Governmental Affairs
New York Life Insurance Company

Mr. Charles P. Heeter Jr.
Principal, International Government Affairs
Deloitte and Touche USA LLP

Ms. Selina E. Jackson
Vice President, International Public Affairs
UPS

Mr. William A. Jordan
Senior Director, Government Affairs and Communications
The McGraw-Hill Companies

Mr. Leonard N. Karp
President and Chief Executive Officer
Philadelphia International Medicine

Mr. Robert D. Kramer
Vice President, Public Policy
Computing Technology Industry Association

Mr. Gary W. Kushnier
Vice President, International Policy
American National Standards Institute

Ms. Laura J. Lane
Senior Vice President,
International Government Affairs
Citigroup Inc.

Dr. Marjorie Peace Lenn
President
Center for Quality Assurance in International Education

Mr. Shawn C. McBurney
Vice President, Governmental Affairs
American Hotel and Lodging Association

Mr. DeRohn S.T. Mitchell
Deputy Director, Government and Business Relations
Alvarez & Marsal, LLC

Mr. Kevin C.W. Mulvey
Assistant Vice President, Corporate and International Affairs
American International Group, Inc.

Mr. Patrick J. Natale, P.E.
Executive Director
American Society of Civil Engineers

Mr. Bryan M. Pickel
Vice President, Federal Government Affairs and External Affairs
Prudential Financial, Inc.

Mary S. Podesta, Esq.
Senior Counsel
Investment Company Institute

Jean M. Prewitt, Esq.
President and Chief Executive Officer
Independent Film & Television Alliance

Mr. Ivan J. Sotomayor
Managing Partner
Sotomayor & Associates, LLP

Ms. Sarah F. Thorn
Director, International Trade
Federal Government Relations
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

Mr. Philip M. Vaughn
Senior Director, Government Relations
Fluor Corporation

Mr. Carlos C. Villarreal, P.E.
Executive Vice President, Operations
Wilbur Smith Associates

Christian (Chris) E. Wolfe, Esq.
Partner, Business Planning and Taxation
Haynes and Boone, L.L.P.

Total Members = 34

http://www.keionline.org/blogs/2009/...ared-advisors/





MPAA Study Links Piracy to Gangs and Terrorists
Ben Jones

A new study by the RAND corporation has attempted to put the focus on ‘movie piracy’ squarely on the shoulders of terrorist groups and criminal gangs. The report, which claims to have been ‘peer reviewed’, seems to show that no matter which gang, thug, or terrorist – they all pirate movies.

On reading the report’s summary, there is a strong wave of deja-vu. It hardly seems like 4 years have passed similar claims put out by a UK industry group were debunked. Worse still, the same old tricks are being used again to cloud the issue. The only difference is that instead of just concentrating on the situation in UK and Ireland, they’ve now gone global.

The MPAA funded report report titled ‘Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism’ claims that terrorist groups use film piracy to finance their activities, while organized gangs see it as a significant revenue stream. Selling pirated goods is a ‘low-risk, high-profit enterprise’ which attracts criminals of all sorts according to the report. And, as if that is not bad enough, in some areas the influence of these pirating gangs extends into law enforcement and political leaders, who are bought, intimidated, or induced to create “protected spaces” where crime flourishes.

Something that jumped out during the first glance at the report is the blurring of terms. On page 3 of the report, one of the reasons things can, and are, overstated is explained as a footnote.

“The terms “piracy” and “counterfeiting” are used interchangeably in this report, although they can mean different things.”

Unfortunately for the study, they do mean VERY different things. ‘Piracy’ in this context tends to refer mostly to digitally representable items, while counterfeit goods can run the gamut from aircraft parts, to cigarettes. In France, you can’t sell certain brands of handbag on eBay easily, because they might be counterfeit. Fake aircraft parts (which don’t meet specs) are a major problem for the airline industry (also counterfeiting) and fake cigarettes are a commonly seized item at international borders. If you want another example, just look no further than your spam folder – count the number of Viagra, and other medications you are offered – all counterfeit.

It only goes downhill from there. Early in the report, it moves on to talk about definitions of organized crime, including some that are so loose it’s hard to see anything except a lone person’s opportunistic crime as being ‘organized’. In fact, by the definitions given, the RIAA may be an organised crime gang, or the UMP party in France, making 3-strike Sarkozy, the head of a crime syndicate.

Digression aside, the case studies that underpin these findings also fail to pass scrutiny. The very first one mentions a seizure of 9400 discs in a shipment. Using a standard weight of a DVD (60g, with box), it comes to about half a ton, and assuming each disc can be sold for $10 (a high price) that’s only $94,000. A kilo of cocaine has a higher street value (about $160,000 right now, according to Cleveland Police), and is much easier to transport. In addition, drugs don’t tend to suffer from the ‘do it yourself’ aspect that gives sites like the Pirate Bay and Mininova such heavy traffic. No value is ever given for the ‘profit’ made either, only..

The combined proceeds from CD/DVD piracy and drug sales were estimated, for the purpose of assigning asset forfeiture, at $3 million.

Throughout many of the case studies listed, there is little hard evidence to actually link crimes. One cites packages arriving at a location containing copied DVDs, and when the police arrived, several men with false papers attempted to run. This leads the author to the assumption of using immigrants to work a copying operation, despite the only evidence mentioned being a single person trafficked.

If movies are the easy, safe and profitable way, as the report suggests, then someone’s not telling these gangs. A little chart is even produced, which lists gangs worldwide and the work they’re involved in. There are no prizes for guessing that they all apparently participate in DVD copying, but more surprisingly, its the only activity they all share.

The true purpose of the report is of course to force authorities worldwide to do something about piracy, or criminal gangs and terrorist groups will take over. We have no doubt that the MPAA will cite this study in nearly every press release they issue from now on, and bring it onto the political agenda. Here are a few recommendations the report gives.

* Piracy should be made a priority offense within anti-gang strategies.
* Laws should be enacted to grant investigators greater authority to sustain investigations, conduct surveillance, and obtain search warrants.
* Key piracy cases should be fought in the organized-crime or money-laundering divisions of prosecutors’ offices.
* Governments should share intelligence with industry-led anti-piracy efforts.

It is likely that the MPAA will use these findings to get tougher anti-piracy laws. This wouldn’t really be a problem if it would only affect commercial piracy. However, as a side-effect people might have to prove that the music on their iPod is legit when they go through customs, and at home their ISP might be looking into their download behavior.

Unsurprisingly, a large percentage of sources given in footnotes, happen to be the very groups that have funded the story, the MPA(A) and FACT, which should seriously dent the credibility of the report. However, it is to be expected that this report will be given the same credibility as other MPAA-financed studies, despite their dubiousness. As a result, expect more laws to tackle this ‘threat’, which will only ever be used against everyday citizens, and that’s just how the likes of the MPAA like it.
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-study-l...orists-090304/





TelstraClear Rejects Copyright Code

TelstraClear has dealt a death blow to section 92a of the Copyright Act, saying it would not support a code being drafted by the Telecommunications Carriers Forum that sets out how telcos would interpret the controversial law change.

Section 92a would oblige internet service providers "in appropriate circumstances" to cut off "repeat copyright infringers".

Prime Minister John Key announced last month that the introduction of section 92a would be delayed by a month till March 27 to give internet providers and the recording industry time to agree a code of practice setting out how they would interpret the clause.

If no agreement was reached, section 92a could be "suspended" and rewritten.

The Telecommunications Carriers Forum, which has represented the major telcos during negotiations, had hoped to hammer out a compromise with the recording industry that would have seen copyright infringers disconnected after a series of warnings, with the right of appeal to an independent arbiter.

But the forum needs unanimous support from its members - which include TelstraClear to ratify such an arrangement.

TelstraClear spokesman Mathew Bolland said the Government had been informed TelstraClear would not provide that support.

"You have got to have sympathy for the Government. They have inherited an ambiguous mess and you can understand why they might have hoped a code would make this go away. But we have had unprecedented customer concern and we can't try to make a bad law work.

"The idea our customers can be disconnected on accusation and not proof does not pass the 'fair test'."

Mr Bolland said other telcos knew where TelstraClear stood. "I think there will be general support. We have decided to stick our neck out - somebody has got to."

The original architect of section 92a, associate Commerce Minister Judith Tizard in the last Labour government, said the aim of the clause was to crack down on the piracy of music and movies over peer-to-peer networks.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/22...copyright-code





Rogers, Shaw Argue Against ISP Levy

Cable and internet service providers oppose regulation of new media
CBC News

Cable and internet service providers Rogers and Shaw told a CRTC hearing Tuesday they were strongly against proposals to impose levies on ISPs to support Canadian content online.

The two companies, however, presented very different views on how to meet the needs of Canadian content providers in promoting their programming in a wide open internet or wireless world.

Rogers proposed an online video platform similar to Hulu in the U.S. as a means of ensuring Canadian broadcasting content has a home on the internet, a move it says would eliminate the need for the CRTC to impose regulations on new media in Canada.

Rogers' proposed service for broadband video wouldn't require that a consumer have Rogers as an internet service provider, the company told a Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission panel Tuesday looking into whether to regulate new media broadcasting over the internet and wireless.

It would, however, require the consumer to be a Rogers' cable subscriber, although Rogers' head of regulatory affairs, Ken Engelhart, said the company was open to partnering with other cable providers on the service.

In that sense, the service might resemble the video site Hulu, which is backed by News Corp. and NBC Universal and consists mainly of network-produced shows, such as NBC's The Office and Fox's The Simpsons.

"This would solve many of the problems addressed during these hearings," said Rogers vice-chairman Philip B. Lind.

CRTC commissioner Leonard Katz questioned whether such a service would be legal under provisions in Canada designed to restrict "tied selling," or making one service available only if another service is purchased.

Engelhart said online services tied to other broadcasting services "is not an uncommon model," citing Sirius Radio's online services available only to Sirius satellite radio customers as an example.

But Shaw Communications Inc. president Jim Shaw told the CRTC panel Tuesday he didn't believe Rogers' plan of a specialized site would work as a business model in the wide open internet.

Shaw said he was fundamentally opposed to the idea of setting aside funding for Canadian content providers, either through a levy or any other tax.

"The internet is about the World Wide Web, not the Canadian Wide Web," Shaw told the hearing.

Courts to decide legality of ISP levy: CRTC commissioner

The CRTC panel has for eight days heard a number of proposals on how to ensure Canadian content is given a prominent place on new media platforms, including imposing a levy on internet service providers and forcing ISPs to give preference to Canadian content.

Rogers, Shaw and Cogeco Cable Inc. all told the commission on Tuesday that these measures are impractical.

"The barriers to broadcasting on the internet cannot be remedied by an ISP levy," said Rogers vice-chairman Lind in his opening remarks. "Our position is the imposition of an ISP levy would be harmful to the growth of the internet."

The company said any extra costs to ISPs would cost consumers as well.

Rogers also argued an ISP levy was unlawful under the Broadcasting Act, but CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein disagreed, and said settling that issue, should the CRTC decide to impose a levy, would be up to the courts to decide.

Engelhart argued that ISPs function as telecommunications providers and are not broadcasters, and therefore shouldn't be subject to broadcasting regulations.

"ISPs are pipes, not broadcasters," Engelhart told the commission. He likened their role to that of a Telesat satellite that transmits satellite signals. A company like Starchoice is the broadcaster in this case, he said, not Telesat.

Shaw agreed, saying his company doesn't look at the content.

"Internet traffic is doubling every 14 months, but we have no idea what it is people are watching," he said.

Tracking Cancon difficult, Rogers says

As for other measures designed to track and give prominence to Canadian content, Rogers said such measures were either beyond the ability of the company or impractical.

Engelhart said it is technically possible for an ISP like Rogers to give prominence to certain websites using a "white list," in much the same way pornography filters are used to block websites that are blacklisted. The challenge, he says, is coming up with a list of which sites represent "Canadian" content.

But University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist pointed out in his blog Tuesday that a ".ca" domain makes "a very poor metric for identifying Canadian content" as foreign companies can obtain a .ca website as long as they acquire a Canadian trademark, while many Canadian companies choose to use ".com" domains.

Rogers' chief strategy officer Mike Lee also told the commission that tracking Canadian content by server is also impractical, as content Rogers packages for broadcasters such as the CBC can come to Canada via U.S. servers.

With measures designed to regulate ISPs lacking or beyond the scope of the Broadcasting Act, Rogers told the commission it feels the best way to address concerns is through its role as a broadcaster.

While Rogers had previously outlined its opposition to a levy on ISPs, it's the first time it proposed its planned broadband video streaming service as an alternative solution to the issue of how to get Canadian content on the internet.

The company also dismissed claims made Monday that wireless carriers were creating "walled gardens" for mobile devices that prevented real competition in the wireless arena.

'Big wide-open pipe'

Score Media Inc. and Pelmorex Media Inc., which owns The Weather Network, both expressed concerns about carriers giving programs preferential treatment to some services over others on mobile devices.

But Engelhart said closed mobile devices are becoming an obsolete business model.

"It has all been a flop," he said. "We're not gatekeepers keeping them out, we're standing at the gate begging people to come through the gate and they're not coming.

"We're moving away from the thing Pelmorex was concerned about and moving to a big wide-open pipe, so a lot of these things people are complaining about won't be a problem," he said.

In an earlier presentation, advertiser Astral Media Inc. called for the new media exemption to remain, arguing new regulations would hinder progress in accessing Canadian content.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2...gers-crtc.html





Broadcasters Testify On Performance Rights Act
FMQB

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing yesterday regarding the Performance Rights Act, which would require radio stations to pay royalties to artists for the music they air. NAB Radio Board Chairman Steve Newberry, President and CEO of Kentucky-based Commonwealth Broadcasting Corporation, testified today on behalf of NAB, as did Larry Patrick, managing partner of media brokerage firm Patrick Communications and owner of 14 radio stations in Wyoming. Both men testified that radio is facing an extremely difficult time in this economy as it is, and said that enacting a performance royalty would be devastating to the industry.

"Under H.R. 848, your local radio stations will be forced to cut services or employees, may be forced to move from a music format to a talk format, or may be facing bankruptcy. But the damage resulting from H.R. 848 will run far beyond local radio stations," said Newberry. He pointed out that the bill would hurt others, including composers, new artists, minority ownership and listeners, because the bill creates a financial disincentive to play music, less new artists would be played and there would be less diversity in music. "Stations that listen to and serve their local communities may disappear," he added. "In many of these cases, the radio stations in peril of possibly going off the air are serving very rural areas, where they may be the only station serving their local communities."

Patrick added that, "I have been a part of the radio industry for 40 years, and I can tell you that over the course of my career, I have never seen what the radio industry is currently experiencing. The economic downturn is having a significant and devastating effect on local radio. But as bad as the current local radio landscape is, it will deteriorate even further and more dramatically if H.R. 848 were to be enacted... At this time, stations are laying off employees, reducing wages by 5-10 percent and a number of radio companies are literally teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. If this bill is enacted, it will put at risk an industry that employs nearly 106,000 people across America. I am not overstating the situation when I say that such extraordinary fees imposed on local radio stations in light of the current economic plight of local radio could be absolutely devastating."

Newberry also pointed out that the true conflict exists between artists and record labels, not artists and radio. "At its heart, this bill attempts to create a conflict between artists and radio stations where no conflict exists. In reality, local radio has been supporting the music industry for decades," he testified. "Which is why it boggles my mind that a bill that is supposed to be about benefiting artists, takes 50 percent of the performance fee and puts it into the pockets of the big four record labels, most of which are not even American companies. The record labels actually walk away with more money under this bill than do the featured artists. The real problem, which this bill does not address, is between the artists and these mega-record labels. Artists, often find themselves in such difficult financial straights because of the one-sided, unfair contracts they signed with their record label. If these artists had fair contracts with their labels that included fair royalty clauses, they would have benefited from the promotional value of free radio airplay that they should have enjoyed."

In related news, the Spanish Broadcasting Association (SBA) called on the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to oppose the Performance Rights Act. In a letter last week, charter member Frank Flores wrote, "Although Latinos account for half of the U.S. population growth since 2000, native-born Hispanics had the second highest rate of unemployment (9.5 percent) in the fourth quarter of 2008. If the performance tax is implemented on radio — an industry that is already struggling — even more Hispanic jobs will disappear. A performance tax will mean programming cuts, as stations scramble to find additional revenue to cover these new and unbudgeted fees. For non-English speaking Latinos, it can cut off access to information that isn’t conveyed elsewhere."

Last week, the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters (NABOB) raised concerns about the disparate impact of the performance tax on African-American communities with members of the Congressional Black Caucus as well.
http://fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1208152





Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation Sets Up its Own Bittorrent Tracker
Eirik Solheim

Information in Norwegian
Dette er en egnelsk artikkel som informerer om at NRK har satt opp sin egen BitTorrent-tracker. Noe som kan være av internasjonal interesse. Vi har også en egen artikkel som forklarer hvorfor vi av og til skriver på engelsk her på NRKbeta.

After some very successful tests through 2008 the Norwegian state broadcaster has decided to set up their own BitTorrent tracker and start offering content through this form of distribution on a more regular basis.

The tracker is based on the same OpenTracker software that the Pirate Bay has been using for the last couple of years. But it will only be used to distribute content from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK).

NRK is license funded and aims to reach their audience with the best possible quality. Tests with traditional download methods have proven difficult because of the large files and extreme load on the servers.

“By using BitTorrent we can reach our audience with full quality media files. Experience from our early tests show that if we’re the best provider of our own content we also gain control of it.”

With our own tracker we will get better statistics and gather important data about how this technology works. And as we did with our early tests we’ll also try to share the knowledge as we grow this service.

The first show we’re putting on our new tracker is a very popular television series about people living in remote places in Norway. It features fascinating people and spectacular scenery. We have provided all the Norwegian subtitle files and if people want to fansub any of the episodes we’re more than happy to let you do that. Please let us know in the comments and we’ll link to your translations.
Rights issues

We are providing full quality video files with no DRM. The biggest problem regarding this project is to clear all the rights we need to be able to distribute content in such an open system. NRK is a big content producer, but record labels, actors, external production companies and format rights owners usually have contracts that prevent us from distributing our content freely in the internet. We are in constant negotiations over these issues. And it seems like it should be possible to find a solution where NRK gets the rights it needs and the rights holders get the compensation they want.

In addition to this we look into new providers. Pump Audio, Magnatune and other companies with easier licensing systems are interesting sources.
Miro

The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation is promoting the free and opensource Miro software as their preferred BitTorrent client. It is user friendly and contains everything you need to both download and play the high quality video files.

You can subscribe to the show in Miro using the 1-click button below:

Links to the torrent files:

Full RSS-feed:
http://nl.nrk.no/torrent/deringensku...nskulletru.rss

http://nrkbeta.no/norwegian-broadcas...rrent-tracker/





SXSW 2009 on BitTorrent: 6 GB of Free Music
Ernesto

The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the largest and most popular in the United States. For the fifth year in a row, SXSW has released a DRM-free, RIAA-safe collection of songs totaling 6 GB, which can all be downloaded for free, thanks to BitTorrent.

For some of the previous editions, SXSW itself has offered torrents showcasing the artists scheduled to perform at the festival. Starting last year, however, SXSW stopped releasing a torrent of their own.

Since all of the mp3s are available for download on the festival’s site, it only takes one person to get a torrent up and running. Last year it was Greg Hewgill who took the time and effort to put all the MP3s into one big torrent, and for the 2009 edition Ben Stolt did the same.

Since there’s over 6 GB of DRM-free music, using torrents makes it much easier than laboriously downloading every MP3 separately. In addition, using BitTorrent instead of the server based system saves SXSW money in bandwidth costs. The good news is that, for once, the RIAA isn’t watching over your shoulder when downloading music.

There are three torrents for the 23rd SXSW edition which contain a record breaking 1267 MP3s of both upcoming, as well as established artists who will appear at this year’s festival. Needless to say there should be something to suit everyone’s tastes, and all in all it’s a great way to expand your horizons and discover new and upcoming artists, all for free.

This year’s SXSW music festival takes place from March 18-22 in Austin Texas. All the tracks released for the previous editions are also still available for those people who want to fill up their iPod without having to invest thousands of dollars.
http://torrentfreak.com/sxsw-2009-on...-music-090312/





Torrent Droid: Scan Barcodes, Get Torrents
enigmax

You are standing in a store looking for a new DVD to buy. Rather than buying it, you photograph the barcode with your phone and press a couple of buttons. By the time you make it home, the movie is waiting for you in your torrent client. You can with Torrent Droid.

Around a month ago, Android-orientated website Androidandme launched ‘Android Bounty’, a new initiative which has led to the creation of nice little torrent app. To find out more, we spoke to Taylor Wimberly from the site.

“Android Bounty is a new kind of developers challenge we started for creating applications on Google Android,” he told TorrentFreak. “Users submit ideas which can be voted up by others who pledge money to the bounty. The first developer who delivers a working application is rewarded with the bounty.” Taylor explained the idea is similar to how users promote stories on Digg, except people vote with cash.

To start things rolling, a few days later Androidandme set a challenge to its readers - create an Android-compatible BitTorrent application to scan UPC barcodes and find related torrents on the larger BitTorrent search engines. Users would be able to find and start torrents remotely, and the music album or movie would be fully downloaded by the time they got home.

There were some terms and conditions to the challenge. The software would use the G1 cellphone’s inbuilt camera to scan a retail DVD UPC barcode, and use the capture to identify the official details of the product from a database.

Once the product is positively identified, the software should be able to send the results directly to a BitTorrent search engine, such as The Pirate Bay or Mininova. After the search results appear, the user could then choose which torrent to start.

Once selected, the .torrent file would be downloaded and sent to the webUI of uTorrent and the download would begin, hopefully ready for when the user reaches his or her home machine. No typing input would be required for the above.

Just a few weeks later, Alec Holmes of Zerofate had stepped up to the challenge, created the app and collected the modest bounty of $90.00.

“This version of Torrent Droid is a work in progress but the video shows the core features work,” said Alec.

The full version of Torrent Droid will be released within a month but in the meantime, here is a video of it in action.
http://torrentfreak.com/torrent-droi...rrents-090311/





Fight Over Internet Filtering Has a Test Run in Europe
Kevin J. O’Brien

As European lawmakers debate how to keep access to the Internet free and equal — so-called network neutrality — they are inundated, not unsurprisingly, by lobbyists.

But the corporate envoys roaming the halls of Brussels trying to make their case, more often than not, do not represent the Continent’s myriad telecommunications and Internet companies, but rather those from the United States. Europe has become the world’s technology regulator. So the AT&Ts and Verizons are pitted against the Googles and Yahoos to shape European law in the hopes that American regulators will follow suit.

“The U.S. companies see the outcome of the fight in Europe as key,” said Jeremie Zimmermann, a lobbyist for La Quadrature du Net, an Internet advocacy group based in Paris. “Each side is hoping to score points on the issue here so they can take it back to the States to influence the outcome there.”

Net neutrality, which La Quadrature supports, is a proposal backed by some free-speech advocates and Internet businesses that would bar network operators from filtering Internet traffic. Internet service providers, however, say that basic traffic management is necessary to balance the soaring demand for bandwidth from video and popular sites.

For consumers in Europe and the United States, the outcome of the debate could influence whether they will continue to be able to download unlimited data using their flat-rate broadband plans or be forced to pay higher rates related to the amount of data they download.

The outcome could also legally empower operators to focus on users of file-sharing software that can be used for illegal downloading.

During the last two months, lobbyists for the American operators and Internet businesses have sent letters to European Union lawmakers promoting their agendas.

Lobbyists for AT&T and Google have also discussed the issue — and in one case directly debated it — in forums held in Brussels for lawmakers and other policy makers.

The question before lawmakers — in Europe at the moment and in the United States probably later this year — is whether such filtering could lead to access fees on Internet businesses and, according to some free speech advocates, de facto censorship.

The approach to net neutrality in the United States has been shaped largely by the Federal Communications Commission, which in August drew up a set of four neutrality principles as it penalized Comcast, a cable broadband operator, for slowing the speed of broadband service to high-volume users.

Comcast is appealing the decision. The outcome of the case is expected this year and could be a major test of network neutrality in the United States, said Markham Erickson, a lawyer for the Open Internet Coalition, an advocacy group in Washington.

In the meantime, the lobbying focus has shifted temporarily to Belgium, where lawmakers are closer to making a decision. Two committees are expected to vote on the legislation on March 31, before a final vote by the full Parliament on April 22. European telecommunications ministers must also approve the plan.

European lawmakers remain split over the issue, which may be more limited in Europe. Richard Allan, Cisco’s head of European regulatory affairs, said lawmakers were likely to let network operators continue to use reasonable management practices, like unclogging traffic bottlenecks when necessary.

With more than 200 network operators in Europe, compared with just five major broadband and four cable operators in the United States, the danger that one operator could filter Net traffic for commercial gain is low, said Manuel Kohnstamm, director of public affairs at Liberty Global, a cable TV operator with 12 million customers in 11 countries. “This is an issue that has been to an extent exported from the States,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/te...09neutral.html





Berners-Lee Says No to Internet 'Snooping'
Tom Espiner

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has attacked deep packet inspection, a technique used to monitor traffic on the internet and other communications networks.

Speaking at a House of Lords event to mark the 20th anniversary of the invention of the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee said that deep packet inspection (DPI) was the electronic equivalent of opening people's mail.

"This is very important to me, as what is at stake is the integrity of the internet as a communications medium," Berners-Lee said on Wednesday. "Clearly we must not interfere with the internet, and we must not snoop on the internet. If we snoop on clicks and data, we can find out a lot more information about people than if we listen to their conversations."

DPI involves examining both the data and the header of an information packet as it passes a 'black box' on a network, in order to reveal the content of the communication. Targeted advertising services, such as Phorm in the UK, use DPI to monitor anonymised user behaviour and to target adverts at those users. In addition, UK government initiatives such as the Intercept Modernisation Programme have proposed using DPI to perform mass surveillance of the web comunications of the entire UK population.

Speaking to ZDNet UK at the event, Berners-Lee declined to comment about any particular company or government initiative, but said that internet service providers (ISPs) should not perform DPI.

"If [third parties] are using the data for political ends or commercial interest, there we have to draw the line," Berners-Lee said. "There's a gap between running a successful internet service and looking inside data packets."

Anyone who uses the internet needs to be aware of DPI, its uses and potential misuses

Berners-Lee expressed concern that the UK government had taken no action over DPI, in contrast to the US government's response to the use of DPI by targeted advertising company NebuAd. Last autumn, the US Congress decided to review privacy concerns around the start-up, after which the company's chief executive, Bob Dykes, stepped down.

"I'm embarrassed, as a UK citizen and as a US resident, that the US has drawn a line firmly against DPI and this country hasn't," Berners-Lee said.

Nicholas Bohm, the general counsel for the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR), said the UK government may not have taken any action over DPI as it was in the process of developing the Intercept Modernisation Programme itself. "The government's desire to know all about us may be hampering its doing anything about others who are snooping," he said.

Kent Ertugral, the chief executive of Phorm, said his company had ensured that privacy principles are adhered to by anonymising the data it collects, while at the same time giving websites the ability to fine-hone their advertising. "We have created something that reconciles the need for privacy, but also for commerce," said Ertugral.

Prominent cross-bench peer Lord Erroll said DPI to target adverts did not concern him as much as the UK government's plans.

"The Intercept Modernisation Programme worries me hugely more than [targeted advertising]," said Erroll. "The impact of an incorrect interpretation of communications by government means anyone could end up in jail, or worse. It's hugely dangerous."
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1...9625971,00.htm





Giant Server Seized in Raid on File-Sharing Site

Swedish police find computer with 65 terabytes of files

Police have made a major crackdown on illegal file-sharing by seizing a giant computer server during an apartment raid in a Stockholm suburb, an official said Saturday.

Henrik Ponten, a spokesman at the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau, said the server contained about 65 terabytes of files, corresponding to around 16,000 full-length movies.

"The size of the works are gigantic," he said, noting it was one of the biggest pirate server confiscations ever in Sweden.

Police raided the apartment in Brandbergen, in southern Stockholm, in the beginning of February after the anti-piracy bureau filed a report about it, he said.

Ponten said one suspect had been questioned by police, but was released shortly afterward since the confiscation was the main objective of the raid.

"Basically he admitted he was in charge of it (the server)," he said.

According to Ponten the server is part of an international pirate network called "The Scene," providing users of Internet file-sharing sites such as Sweden's The Pirate Bay with extensive access to copyright protected material.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29566891/





Swedish Police: Recent Bust the Source of all The Pirate Bay’s Content
Steve Ragan

Police raided a Stockholm suburb on Friday as a part of the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau’s crackdown on piracy. Proving that they have no understanding of how P2P networks work when it comes to illegal files, instantly assumed and claimed that the 65 TB of data on the 10 severs are the source of the illegal files located on The Pirate Bay (TPB). The servers belonged to a Topsite by the name of Sunnydale, which is a part of a Nordic file sharing ring.

The Associated Press quotes Henrik Pontén, a spokesman at the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau and the Agency’s lawyer, as saying that the size of the works were gigantic, noting that it was one of the biggest private server confiscations ever in Sweden. However, when speaking to Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, he said the Sunnydale ring was the source of all the materials on TPB.

Pontén, told the Svenska Dagbladet that, “The well-organized pirates on the scene seem to have an inflated sense of their own ability to conceal themselves, but this raid shows that we can get to them. Copyright applies to the internet too and we will continue to prioritize efforts to counteract these well-organized groups.”

If they can get them, why is there still so much piracy? They have targeted TPB for years, and only recently have they gotten them in to court with a long list of charges, most of which were dropped.

If anything, the bust will prove the existence of the hydra theory, that is – while they have one cluster of servers and 65TB of illegal data, they will never have it all, and others will simply replace what was lost in the raid. There has to be a better approach to dealing with piracy. The materials on the servers included movies, music, television programs, and games.

TBP’s Peter Sunde said, when speaking about the claim that the bust will hurt TPB as the source of all the content on the site, “More than 800,000 people have uploaded to The Pirate Bay, so I don't believe it's the source of everything. But it is possible that it's a major source.”

The assumption that sites like TPB or other Torrent tracking services offer only access to illegal materials is a claim that is constantly disputed. During the TBP trial, this fact was raised several times. While there has been and always will be illegal files traded on Torrent networks, not everything is illegal. The main point missed by many is that tracking services host none of the content, end users do.

In the end, all the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau got was a collection of servers seeding redundant source material. Nothing changes, as of 9:31 PM EST on March 8, there are over 1.6 million torrent files, and almost 9.5 million seeding servers listed on TPB. This bust did little to stop anything.
http://www.thetechherald.com/article...-Bay-s-content





isoHunt Takes on the CRIA in Court
Ernesto

Just a week after the Pirate Bay trial ended, another site finds itself up against the music industry. IsoHunt, one of the leading BitTorrent sites, is fighting out a dispute with the CRIA in court today. Of course, everything can be followed through Twitter.

Last September, isoHunt decided to sue the CRIA looking for confirmation that the site is not doing anything illegal. In an act of self defense, isoHunt owner Gary Fung filed a petition asking the Court of British Columbia to confirm that isoHunt –and sister sites Torrentbox and Podtropolis– do not infringe copyright.

“This is our preemptive strike with a narrowly defined petition for Declaratory Relief that we do not infringe, in anticipation they are going to file their own lawsuit that we do infringe (their copyright),” Fung told TorrentFreak at the time.

IsoHunt has asked the court to decide whether .torrent files, and BitTorrent search engines in particular, are infringing copyright or not. In other words, should BitTorrent search engines be held liable for the .torrent files that might point to copyrighted data? If so, what does this mean for other search engines, and sites such as YouTube?

Today, isoHunt and the CRIA appeared in court. While isoHunt asked the court to rule that they do not break any laws, the CRIA is demanding a full trial against the BitTorrent site.

This landmark case might be the one to define how files can be distributed online. Among other things, isoHunt argues that they are just a search engine, like Google, and that they have no control over the files they find elsewhere on the web. In court today, they showed that a filetype:torrent search for Coldplay on Google returns plenty of torrent files, similar to a search on isoHunt.

All isoHunt does is index other BitTorrent trackers and indexers, without human intervention. The files that can be found on isoHunt are scattered all over the Internet, and even these files are just metadata.

IsoHunt founder Gary Fung told TorrentFreak that the judge converted their petition into action at the end of today’s hearing. “He just thinks the issues are too complicated and consequences far reaching legally and technically, and a full trial is more appropriate for discovering all documents,” Gary said.

“The important issue is not about the complexity or ramifications of our case which we won’t dispute, but rather CRIA liking to use full action and discovery because it’s costly for all parties and the court and was exactly why we decided to bring our petition first for efficiency before they were going to sue with an action,” Gary told TorrentFreak in a response. IsoHunt is likely to appeal the order for conversion.
http://torrentfreak.com/isohunt-take...-court-090311/





RIAA Files Notice Basically Telling Judge Gertner to 'Stick It', in SONY BMG Music v. Tenenbaum
Ray Beckerman

After letting the March 11th deadline for submission of its reconsideration motion, in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, expire, the RIAA has filed a document it calls a "notice" stating that

In response to the District Court's March 4, 2009, Order, Plaintiffs note that the District Court's January 14, 2009, Order has been stayed by the First Circuit Court of Appeals and that any issues surrounding that Order are currently pending in the First Circuit. The First Circuit can resolve the broadcasting issue expeditiously without additional briefing or further appeals.

Notice by RIAA

[Ed. note. This vividly demonstrates that the RIAA has the kind of legal representation it deserves.

I have never seen anything like this.

The presiding judge suggested that they file a reconsideration motion, the primary purposes of which were (a) to enable the RIAA lawyers to brief something they had neglected to brief in their initial papers, and (b) to enable the Court to resolve the issue, after having been properly briefed, prior to its having to be resolved by the appeals court..... and the RIAA has simply thumbed its nose at the judge.

What makes this even more astonishing is that the reason the judge has been placed in this awkward position is the RIAA lawyers' incompetence in failing to have brought the 1996 Judicial Council resolution to her attention in the first place.

If there were any doubters among you as to the overwhelming incompetence of the RIAA's lawyers, this should remove whatever doubt is left.

And you nonlawyers out there, don't ask me what this indicates or why the RIAA lawyers did it; or where in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure it provides for such a "notice". Because I am sure the seasoned litigators out there are as shocked and perplexed as you are.

All I can say is: I guess they feel that the tactic of humiliating the judge who presides over all of their Massachusetts cases, and who has granted them hundreds of judgments and dozens of ex parte orders on meager evidence and insufficient pleadings, against defenseless people, in connection with a situation brought about by their own negligence, is as prudent a course of action as suing one's customers. -R.B.]
http://www.megaplatinum.net/v5/html/ftopict-64432.html





Tax Violent Video Games to Beat Knife Crime, Says Damilola Taylor's Father

Gordon Brown should levy a tax on violent video games to help tackle knife crime, according to the Richard Taylor, the father of murdered schoolboy Damilola Taylor.
Christopher Hope

Richard Taylor said he was “saddened” when he saw youngsters buying games that had a “negative impact” on their behaviour.

Mr Taylor, who advises Gordon Brown on knife crime, said he would be urging the Prime Minister to impose new taxes on the games.

The news comes as Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is set to announce fresh Government plans this morning [wed] to cut the number of knife crimes.

The Tackling Knives Action Plan is a £2million programme aimed at reducing deaths and serious violence among teenagers due to knives.

Violent games are “too cheap” and taxes on them should be “very high”, Mr Taylor told MPs.

He told the Home Affairs Committee: “I have young people who I mentor and I see them go up and buy the games and it saddens me that they are being able to have such a negative impact.”

Mr Taylor declined to say how much tax should be levied on the video games however.

Mr Taylor, who set up a trust in his son’s name to try to turn inner city youths away from crime, is preparing a manifesto to present to the Prime Minister as part of his role.

He bemoaned the attitude of some young people, who he said “feel that the law has no control over them. They just feel that they can go on the streets and do whatever they like,” he said.

Mr Taylor also told MPs that he was concerned about the content of much rap music.

“It is creating more of a problem because of the language that is used. It is language that, as a father, I would not allow my children to hear.

“To me, there is a lot of negativity that comes out of this music, especially that which is coming from America.”

Gary Trowsdale, special projects director for the trust, attacked one game based on the violent Quentin Tarantino film 'Reservoir Dogs’ video game which gave extra points to players for stabbing a cigar out in someone’s eye.

Mr Taylor became Mr Brown’s special envoy on youth violence and knife crime last month.

Part of his role is to offer new ideas to the Premier on how to change young people’s behaviour.

Ten-year-old Damilola was stabbed to death in Peckham in November 2000. Asked if knife crime had got worse since his son then, Mr Taylor added: “Yes. It has really has increased in the last nine years.”

Article





Portrait of German Gunman Emerges
Carter Dougherty

A portrait of a troubled, depressed teenager with easy access to an unsecured pistol has begun to emerge in the days after the youth went on a rampage, killing 15 people before taking his own life.

The police have established that the teenager, Tim Kretschmer, 17, last year broke off a round of psychological counseling for depression.

Searching his bedroom, the police found violent computer games — in which, experts say, players digitally clothe and arm themselves for combat — plus brutal videos and play weapons that fire small yellow pellets, said Siegfried Mahler of the Stuttgart prosecutors’ office.

But the police on Friday disputed the authenticity of a reported posting to a chat room in which someone warned of an attack on the school in Winnenden near here, where the attacks began on Wednesday and which the teenage gunman attended until his graduation last year. The day before, the police had announced the posting with confidence of its validity.

A police spokesman, Nikolaus Brenner, told the German news agency DPA that there was no indication that the purported warning had originated on Mr. Kretschmer’s personal computer. He said there might have been a “communications error” in the initial assessment.

Investigators have not discussed any specific motive, but have described Mr. Kretschmer as a classic case of a conflicted young man who wreaked havoc in real life after savoring imaginary violence in the digital world.

“If we had known this in advance, we would have called him a prototype of a rampager,” said Erwin Hetger, the chief of police in Baden-Württemberg, the southwestern German state where the crimes took place.

The brutality of the crimes was overwhelming.

Of the 12 people Mr. Kretschmer killed at the school, 8 were girls, 3 were female teachers and one was a male student. Several were killed with carefully placed shots to the head. After killing an employee of a clinic for the mentally ill, he sprayed at least 13 rounds to kill two people at a Volkswagen dealership before turning the gun on himself.

Prosecutors said they could file criminal charges against the shooter’s parents for failing to secure the pistol that he used, as required by German law. The gun was a 9-millimeter Beretta pistol that his father kept unsecured in a bedroom; other firearms owned by his father were under lock and key, the authorities said.

The confusion over the Internet posting began early Thursday. A senior state official told reporters that it had been reported to the police by the father of a youth identified only as Bernd. The information indicated that someone on a German-language chatroom had written: “I have weapons and will go to my old school and really burn them up. I might get out alive, but you will certainly hear about me tomorrow. Remember the name Winnenden.”

But after the Web site that the police named denied that there had been such a posting, the police said they were investigating that new information.

Heribert Rech, the state official who first made the purported posting public, was quoted in a German newspaper on Friday as saying: “Some crazy person sent a false message to the world.”

The posting “must have been constructed after the event,” he said.

After a shooting seven years ago at a school in Erfurt in the east of the country, German teachers and police officers were trained to respond to violent episodes. That training was on display minutes after the shooting began Wednesday. And on Thursday, offers of help came in from people who had experienced the aftermath of the Erfurt shooting.

But a consensus was building that even the best plans could not prevent every emergency.

“We did a lot in Germany,” said Christine Alt, director of the school in Erfurt where the shooting took place. “But it seems we will never find a recipe that is 100 percent effective.”

Some German officials said that some people always slipped through the system undetected.

“We need to recognize that there is no such thing as absolute security; that we cannot simply prevent everything,” Volker Kauder, the leader of the conservative bloc in Parliament, told German public radio. Wolfgang Schäuble, the interior minister who is in a wheelchair after being partly paralyzed by a bullet to the spine in an October 1990 assassination attempt, played down the need to tighten already tough gun laws.

But with the computer having played such a role in the young man’s life, the Winnenden shootings seem likely to renew a debate in Germany over banning violent video games.

“These games basically program the minds of young men a thousand times over,” said Alina Wilms, a psychologist involved in treating people affected by the Erfurt shooting, who advocates a ban. “If ever it were going to be possible,” she said, “then now.”
Carter Dougherty reported from Frankfurt, Germany. Victor Homola contributed reporting from Berlin, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/wo...ermany.html?hp





No More Sex in Second Life? - Linden Lab Cracks Down on Adult Content

Linden Lab lab announced today in their blog a huge crackdown on adult content in Second Life.

If you remember the outlawing of gambling in Second Life, crackdown on advertising in Second Life, or the new virtual land restrictions then this may not come as a surprise change for the virtual world.

In fact I predicted this change when Linden Lab bought Xstreet SL and OnRez via my question at a press conference asking if Xstreet SL would remove adult content. In fact adult content is currently hidden on the Xstreet SL site by default (a change) and you must now select to show the adult content.

Will Usership and Virtual Economy in Second Life Drop as with the Gambling Ban?

Some will argue that these moves choke off the lifeblood of Second Life. While it is true that short term use of Second Life typically declines after these types of moves as does the virtual economy (as it did with the gambling ban) it is in the best interest of Linden Lab to continue to add rules and regulations and make Second Life more mainstream.

What Second Life Adult Changes will Look Like:

1. Creation of a Red Zone Adult Island

2. Filtered Search Results

3. Payment/ Age Verification to see Adult Content in Second Life

4. Estate Owners can Flag Adult Content

5. Guidelines on what is “Adult” Coming Soon.
http://www.secondlifeupdate.com/news...adult-content/





Amazon Uses DMCA to Restrict Where You Can Buy E-Books

As some of you may already know, this week we received a DMCA take-down notice from Amazon requesting the removal of the tool kindlepid.py and instructions associated with it. Although we never hosted this tool (contrary to their claim), nor believe that this tool is used to remove technological measures (contrary to their claim), we decided, due to the vagueness of the DMCA law and our intention to remain in good relation with Amazon, to voluntarily follow their request and remove links and detailed instructions related to it.

A quick backgrounder: kindlepid.py is a small Python script allowing you to derive a Mobipocket-compatible personal identifier (PID) for your Kindle reader. This PID in itself has nothing at all to do with reading any copyrighted content. It is only used to make legitimate e-book purchases at stores other than Amazon's.

We believe in the freedom of speech and we encourage you to continue expressing your views and thoughts on tools like kindlepid.py. We only ask you not to provide any how-to instructions, source codes and/or links for obtaining kindlepid.py.

We would like to remind you to apply common sense when using the private message system, and not to use it for sharing information how to obtain or use kindlepid.py. We stress that we respect your privacy and that we do not monitor private messages.

Lastly, I would like to ask you for assistance and to contact us - using the report post feature for example - should you detect content that might not follow the guideline above.

Thank you for your understanding!

Alexander

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=41929





Wolfram Alpha is Coming -- and It Could be as Important as Google
Nova Spivack

Stephen Wolfram is building something new -- and it is really impressive and significant. In fact it may be as important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.

Stephen was kind enough to spend two hours with me last week to demo his new online service -- Wolfram Alpha (scheduled to open in May). In the course of our conversation we took a close look at Wolfram Alpha's capabilities, discussed where it might go, and what it means for the Web, and even the Semantic Web.

Stephen has not released many details of his project publicly yet, so I will respect that and not give a visual description of exactly what I saw. However, he has revealed it a bit in a recent article, and so below I will give my reactions to what I saw and what I think it means. And from that you should be able to get at least some idea of the power of this new system.

A Computational Knowledge Engine for the Web

In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a "computational knowledge engine" for the Web. OK, so what does that really mean? Basically it means that you can ask it factual questions and it computes answers for you.

It doesn't simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn't just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. It doesn't simply parse natural language and then use that to retrieve documents, like Powerset, for example.

Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions -- like questions that have factual answers such as "What country is Timbuktu in?" or "How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?" or "What is the average rainfall in Seattle this month?," "What is the 300th digit of Pi?," "where is the ISS?" or "When was GOOG worth more than $300?"

Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn't simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions.

How Does it Work?

Wolfram Alpha is a system for computing the answers to questions. To accomplish this it uses built-in models of fields of knowledge, complete with data and algorithms, that represent real-world knowledge.

For example, it contains formal models of much of what we know about science -- massive amounts of data about various physical laws and properties, as well as data about the physical world.

Based on this you can ask it scientific questions and it can compute the answers for you. Even if it has not been programmed explicity to answer each question you might ask it.

But science is just one of the domains it knows about -- it also knows about technology, geography, weather, cooking, business, travel, people, music, and more.

It also has a natural language interface for asking it questions. This interface allows you to ask questions in plain language, or even in various forms of abbreviated notation, and then provides detailed answers.

The vision seems to be to create a system wich can do for formal knowledge (all the formally definable systems, heuristics, algorithms, rules, methods, theorems, and facts in the world) what search engines have done for informal knowledge (all the text and documents in various forms of media).

How Smart is it and Will it Take Over the World?

Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain. It provides extremely impressive and thorough answers to a wide range of questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers, it doesn't merely look them up in a big database.

In this respect it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google. Google simply retrieves documents based on keyword searches. Google doesn't understand the question or the answer, and doesn't compute answers based on models of various fields of human knowledge.

But as intelligent as it seems, Wolfram Alpha is not HAL 9000, and it wasn't intended to be. It doesn't have a sense of self or opinions or feelings. It's not artificial intelligence in the sense of being a simulation of a human mind. Instead, it is a system that has been engineered to provide really rich knowledge about human knowledge -- it's a very powerful calculator that doesn't just work for math problems -- it works for many other kinds of questions that have unambiguous (computable) answers.

There is no risk of Wolfram Alpha becoming too smart, or taking over the world. It's good at answering factual questions; it's a computing machine, a tool -- not a mind.

One of the most surprising aspects of this project is that Wolfram has been able to keep it secret for so long. I say this because it is a monumental effort (and achievement) and almost absurdly ambitious. The project involves more than a hundred people working in stealth to create a vast system of reusable, computable knowledge, from terabytes of raw data, statistics, algorithms, data feeds, and expertise. But he appears to have done it, and kept it quiet for a long time while it was being developed.

Relationship to the Semantic Web

During our discussion, after I tried and failed to poke holes in his natural language parser for a while, we turned to the question of just what this thing is, and how it relates to other approaches like the Semantic Web.

The first question was could (or even should) Wolfram Alpha be built using the Semantic Web in some manner, rather than (or as well as) the Mathematica engine it is currently built on. Is anything missed by not building it with Semantic Web's languages (RDF, OWL, Sparql, etc.)?

The answer is that there is no reason that one MUST use the Semantic Web stack to build something like Wolfram Alpha. In fact, in my opinion it would be far too difficult to try to explicitly represent everything Wolfram Alpha knows and can compute using OWL ontologies. It is too wide a range of human knowledge and giant OWL ontologies are just too difficult to build and curate.

It would of course at some point be beneficial to integrate with the Semantic Web so that the knowledge in Wolfram Alpha could be accessed, linked with, and reasoned with, by other semantic applications on the Web, and perhaps to make it easier to pull knowledge in from outside as well. In this area, the standards of the Semantic Web could be quite useful to the project. However for the internal knowledge representation and reasoning that takes places in the system, it appears Wolfram has found a pragmatic and efficient representation of his own, and I don't think he needs the Semantic Web at that level. It seems to be doing just fine without it.

Wolfram Alpha is built on hand-curated knowledge and expertise. Wolfram and his team have somehow figured out a way to make that practical where all others who have tried this have failed to achieve their goals. The task is gargantuan -- there is just so much diverse knowledge in the world. Representing even a small segment of it formally turns out to be extremely difficult and time-consuming.

It has generally not been considered feasible for any one group to hand-curate all knowledge about every subject. This is why the Semantic Web was invented -- by enabling everyone to curate their own knowledge about their own documents and topics in parallel, in principle at least, more knowledge could be represented and shared in less time by more people -- in an interoperable manner. At least that is the vision of the Semantic Web.

But doing anything as sophisticated as Wolfram Alpha on existing decentralized Semantic Web data would simply not be practical today, if ever. I think Wolfram's approach is more pragmatic. The centralized hand-curation of Wolfram Alpha is simply more manageable and efficient for a project of this scale and complexity. It's also a potential bottleneck and most certainly a cost-center. But it appears to be a tradeoff that Wolfram can afford to make, and one worth making as well.

Building Blocks for Knowledge Computing

Wolfram Alpha is almost more of an engineering accomplishment than a scientific one -- Wolfram has broken down the set of factual questions we might ask, and the computational models and data necessary for answering them, into basic building blocks -- a kind of basic language for knowledge computing if you will. Then, with these building blocks in hand his system is able to compute with them -- to break down questions into the basic building blocks and computations necessary to answer them, and then to actually build up computations and compute the answers on the fly.

Wolfram's team manually entered, and in some cases automatically pulled in, masses of raw factual data about various fields of knowledge, plus models and algorithms for doing computations with the data. By building all of this in a modular fashion on top of the Mathematica engine, they have built a system that is able to actually do computations over vast data sets representing real-world knowledge. More importantly, it enables anyone to easily construct their own computations -- simply by asking questions.

The scientific and philosophical underpinnings of Wolfram Alpha are similar to those of the cellular automata systems he describes in his book, "A New Kind of Science" (NKS). Just as with cellular automata (such as the famous "Game of Life" algorithm that many have seen on screensavers), a set of simple rules and data can be used to generate surprisingly diverse, even lifelike patterns. One of the observations of NKS is that incredibly rich, even unpredictable patterns, can be generated from tiny sets of simple rules and data, when they are applied to their own output over and over again.

In fact, cellular automata, by using just a few simple repetitive rules, can compute anything any computer or computer program can compute, in theory at least. But actually using such systems to build real computers or useful programs (such as Web browsers) has never been practical because they are so low-level it would not be efficient (it would be like trying to build a giant computer, starting from the atomic level).

The simplicity and elegance of cellular automata proves that anything that may be computed -- and potentially anything that may exist in nature -- can be generated from very simple building blocks and rules that interact locally with one another. There is no top-down control, there is no overarching model. Instead, from a bunch of low-level parts that interact only with other nearby parts, complex global behaviors emerge that, for example, can simulate physical systems such as fluid flow, optics, population dynamics in nature, voting behaviors, and perhaps even the very nature of space-time. This is the main point of the NKS book in fact, and Wolfram draws numerous examples from nature and cellular automata to make his case.

But with all its focus on recombining simple bits of information and simple rules, cellular automata is not a reductionist approach to science -- in fact, it is much more focused on synthesizing complex emergent behaviors from simple elements than in reducing complexity back to simple units. The highly synthetic philosophy behind NKS is the paradigm shift at the basis of Wolfram Alpha's approach too. It is a system that is very much "bottom-up" in orientation.

Wolfram has created a set of building blocks for working with formal knowledge to generate useful computations, and in turn, by putting these computations together you can answer even more sophisticated questions and so on. It's a system for synthesizing sophisticated computations from simple computations. Of course anyone who understands computer programming will recognize this as the very essence of good software design. But the key is that instead of forcing users to write programs to do this in Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha enables them to simply ask questions in natural language questions and then automatically assembles the programs to compute the answers they need.

This is not to say that Wolfram Alpha IS a cellular automata itself -- but rather that it is similarly based on fundamental rules and data that are recombined to form highly sophisticated structures. The knowledge and intelligence it contains are extremely modularized and can be used to synthesize answers to factual questions nobody has asked yet. The questions are broken down to their basic parts and then simple reasoning takes places, and answers are computed on the vast knowledge base in the system. It appears the system can make inferences and do some basic reasoning across what it knows -- it is not purely reductionist in that respect; it is generative, it can synthesize new knowledge, if asked to.

Wolfram Alpha perhaps represents what may be a new approach to creating an "intelligent machine" that does away with much of the manual labor of explicitly building top-down expert systems about fields of knowledge (the traditional AI approach, such as that taken by the Cyc project), while simultaneously avoiding the complexities of trying to do anything reasonable with the messy distributed knowledge on the Web (the open-standards Semantic Web approach). It's simpler than top down AI and easier than the original vision of Semantic Web.

Generally if someone had proposed doing this to me, I would have said it was not practical. But Wolfram seems to have figured out a way to do it. The proof is that he's done it. It works. I've seen it myself.

The Hairy Questions

Of course, questions abound. It remains to be seen just how smart Wolfram Alpha really is, or can be. How easily extensible is it? Will it get increasingly hard to add and maintain knowledge as more is added to it? Will it ever make mistakes? What forms of knowledge will it be able to handle in the future?

I think Wolfram would agree that it is probably never going to be able to give relationship or career advice, for example, because that is "fuzzy" -- there is often no single right answer to such questions. And I don't know how comprehensive it is, or how it will be able to keep up with all the new knowledge in the world (the knowledge in the system is exclusively added by Wolfram's team right now, which is a labor intensive process). But Wolfram is an ambitious guy. He seems confident that he has figured out how to add new knowledge to the system at a fairly rapid pace, and he seems to be planning to make the system extremely broad.

And there is the question of bias, which we addressed as well. Is there any risk of bias in the answers the system gives because all the knowledge is entered by Wolfram's team? Those who enter the knowledge and design the formal models in the system are in a position to both define the way the system thinks -- both the questions and the answers it can handle. Wolfram believes that by focusing on factual knowledge -- things like you might find in the Wikipedia or textbooks or reports -- the bias problem can be avoided. At least he is focusing the system on questions that do have only one answer -- not questions for which there might be many different opinions. Everyone generally agrees for example that the closing price of GOOG on a certain data is a particular dollar amount. It is not debatable. These are the kinds of questions the system addresses.

But even for some supposedly factual questions, there are potential biases in the answers one might come up with, depending on the data sources and paradigms used to compute them. Thus the choice of data sources has to be made carefully to try to reflect as non-biased a view as possible. Wolfram's strategy is to rely on widely accepted data sources like well-known scientific models, public data about factual things like the weather, geography and the stock market published by reputable organizatoins and government agencies, etc. But of course even this is a particular worldview and reflects certain implicit or explicit assumptions about what data sources are authoritative.

This is a system that reflects one perspective -- that of Wolfram and his team -- which probably is a close approximation of the mainstream consensus scientific worldview of our modern civilization. It is a tool -- a tool for answering questions about the world today, based on what we generally agree that we know about it. Still, this is potentially murky philosophical territory, at least for some kinds of questions. Consider global warming -- not all scientists even agree it is taking place, let alone what it signifies or where the trends are headed. Similarly in economics, based on certain assumptions and measurements we are either experiencing only mild inflation right now, or significant inflation. There is not necessarily one right answer -- there are valid alternative perspectives.

I agree with Wolfram, that bias in the data choices will not be a problem, at least for a while. But even scientists don't always agree on the answers to factual questions, or what models to use to describe the world -- and this disagreement is essential to progress in science in fact. If there is only one "right" answer to any question there could never be progress, or even different points of view. Fortunately, Wolfram is desigining his system to link to alternative questions and answers at least, and even to sources for more information about the answers (such as the Wikipeda for example). In this way he can provide unambiguous factual answers, yet also connect to more information and points of view about them at the same time. This is important.

It is ironic that a system like Wolfram Alpha, which is designed to answer questions factually, will probably bring up a broad range of questions that don't themselves have unambiguous factual answers -- questions about philosophy, perspective, and even public policy in the future (if it becomes very widely used). It is a system that has the potential to touch our lives as deeply as Google. Yet how widely it will be used is an open question too.

The system is beautiful, and the user interface is already quite simple and clean. In addition, answers include computationally generated diagrams and graphs -- not just text. It looks really cool. But it is also designed by and for people with IQ's somewhere in the altitude of Wolfram's -- some work will need to be done dumbing it down a few hundred IQ points so as to not overwhelm the average consumer with answers that are so comprehensive that they require a graduate degree to fully understand.

It also remains to be seen how much the average consumer thirsts for answers to factual questions. I do think all consumers at times have a need for this kind of intelligence once in a while, but perhaps not as often as they need something like Google. But I am sure that academics, researchers, students, government employees, journalists and a broad range of professionals in all fields definitely need a tool like this and will use it every day.

Competition

Where Google is a system for FINDING things that we as a civilization collectively publish, Wolfram Alpha is for ANSWERING questions about what we as a civilization collectively know. It's the next step in the distribution of knowledge and intelligence around the world -- a new leap in the intelligence of our collective "Global Brain." And like any big next-step, Wolfram Alpha works in a new way -- it computes answers instead of just looking them up.

Wolfram Alpha, at its heart is quite different from a brute force statistical search engine like Google. And it is not going to replace Google -- it is not a general search engine: You would probably not use Wolfram Alpha to shop for a new car, find blog posts about a topic, or to choose a resort for your honeymoon. It is not a system that will understand the nuances of what you consider to be the perfect romantic getaway, for example -- there is still no substitute for manual human-guided search for that. Where it appears to excel is when you want facts about something, or when you need to compute a factual answer to some set of questions about factual data.

I think the folks at Google will be surprised by Wolfram Alpha, and they will probably want to own it, but not because it risks cutting into their core search engine traffic. Instead, it will be because it opens up an entirely new field of potential traffic around questions, answers and computations that you can't do on Google today.

The services that are probably going to be most threatened by a service like Wolfram Alpha are the Wikipedia, Metaweb's Freebase, True Knowledge, and any natural language search engines (such as Microsoft's upcoming search engine, based perhaps in part on Powerset's technology among others), and other services that are trying to build comprehensive factual knowledge bases.

As a side-note my own service, Twine.com, is NOT trying to do what Wolfram Alpha is trying to do, fortunately. Instead, Twine uses the Semantic Web to help people filter the Web, organize knowledge, and track their interests. It's a very different goal. And I'm glad, because I would not want to be competing with Wolfram Alpha. It's a force to be reckoned with.

Future Steps

I think there is more potential to this system than Stephen has revealed so far. I think he has bigger ambitions for it in the long-term future. I believe it has the potential to be THE online service for computing factual answers. THE system for factual knowlege on the Web. More than that, it may eventually have the potential to learn and even to make new discoveries. We'll have to wait and see where Wolfram takes it.

Maybe Wolfram Alpha could even do a better job of retrieving documents than Google, for certain kinds of questions -- by first understanding what you really want, then computing the answer, and then giving you links to documents that related to the answer. But even if it is never applied to document retrieval, I think it has the potential to play a leading role in all our daily lives -- it could function like a kind of expert assistant, with all the facts and computational power in the world at our fingertips.

I would expect that Wolfram Alpha will open up various API's in the future and then we'll begin to see some interesting new, intelligent, applications begin to emerge based on its underlying capabilities and what it knows already.

In May, Wolfram plans to open up what I believe will be a first version of Wolfram Alpha. Anyone interested in a smarter Web will find it quite interesting, I think. Meanwhile, I look forward to learning more about this project as Stephen reveals more in months to come.

One thing is certain, Wolfram Alpha is quite impressive and Stephen Wolfram deserves all the congratulations he is soon going to get.
http://www.twine.com/item/122mz8lz9-...tant-as-google





"Watchmen" Falls Short of Expected Box Office Take

"Watchmen," an unorthodox superhero movie that took two decades to reach the big screen, took the No. 1 spot at the weekend box office in North America on Sunday, but fell a bit short of expectations.

The adaptation of a cult comic book series sold an estimated $55.7 million in tickets in its first three days, distributor Warner Bros. Pictures said, becoming the biggest opening of the year.

But pundits had expected an opening in the $60 million-plus range, and the tally was considerably lower than the $71 million start two years ago for "300," the previous film from "Watchmen" director Zack Snyder. The ancient battle epic holds the record for a March opening. "Watchmen" ranks at No. 3.

"Our expectations were met," said Dan Fellman, president of domestic theatrical distribution at the Time Warner Inc-owned studio.

He said the film's 161-minute running time inevitably affected business, restricting theaters to one main evening screening. Male moviegoers accounted for about two-thirds of the audience, with the "sweet spot" aged between 17 and 35, Fellman said.

Internationally, where the film was released by Viacom Inc's Paramount Pictures, "Watchmen" earned a respectable $27.5 million from 45 territories. Top markets included Britain with $4.6 million and France with $2.5 million. The only major country still waiting is Japan, where it will open on March 28.

Obscure Actors, Characters

"Watchmen," which cost about $120 million to make, revolves around a team of crime fighters targeted in a dastardly plot with dangerous implications for mankind.

A relatively unknown cast plays a similarly obscure lineup of characters, including the vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), the naked blue giant Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), and the occasionally topless Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman).

Top critics were largely underwhelmed by "Watchmen," according to Rotten Tomatoes (http://www.rottentomatoes.com), a web site that aggregates reviews.

The project is based on the sprawling 1980s "Watchmen" comic books by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, which were long considered unfilmable because of their multiple characters, violence, digressions and abundance of dialogue.

That did not stop studios including Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount from attempting adaptations. Warner Bros. came aboard in late 2005, and brought on Snyder who was working on the effects-heavy "300" at the time.

But all the hard work on "Watchmen" was almost ruined earlier this year by a last-minute legal challenge from Fox, which claimed it held the distribution rights. Under a settlement announced in January, the News Corp-owned studio will take 8.5 percent of gross profits.

Along with Warner Bros. and Paramount, the other major participant is closely held producer Legendary Pictures, which finances a slate of WB films including "The Dark Knight."

After two weekends at No. 1, "Madea Goes to Jail" slipped to a distant No. 2 with $8.8 million, taking its 17-day haul to $76.5 million, a record for prolific actor/writer/director Tyler Perry. The black-themed comedy was released by Lionsgate, a unit of Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.

Fox's unstoppable Liam Neeson thriller "Taken" rose one place to No. 3 with $7.5 million on its sixth weekend. It has earned $118 million to date.

(Editing by Anthony Boadle and Todd Eastham)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...5250NQ20090309





Webcam Brings 3-D to Topps Sports Cards
Eric A. Taub

Since the 1950s, Topps has sold baseball trading cards filled with photos and stats, bringing the game to life. Now the company is bringing its cards to life.

Beginning Monday, collectors who hold a special Topps 3D Live baseball card in front of a webcam will see a three-dimensional avatar of the player on the computer screen. Rotate the card, and the figure rotates in full perspective. It’s called “augmented reality,” a combination of a real image with a virtual one.

“This is the ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ version of a baseball card that will get kids to buy more. We see this baseball season as a redefining moment for us,” said Steve Grimes, chief digital officer at Topps.

Topps needs to augment reality because baseball cards are struggling in the Internet age. Today’s collectors, most of whom are still boys, can just as easily and less expensively find the sports facts they want online.

While once a $1 billion business, the market for sports trading cards has shrunk to $200 million in yearly revenue today, according to information provided by Major League Baseball Properties in a recent lawsuit against a former card licensee. (The players’ association licenses the right to use players’ likenesses.)

The baseball card business is dominated by Topps, based in New York, and Upper Deck, based in Carlsbad, Calif. According to Chris Olds, editor of Beckett Baseball, a card collectors’ publication, Topps has the edge. “When people think baseball cards, they think of Topps,” he said.

Michael Eisner, the former chief of Walt Disney, did too, and in 2007 his Tornante Company and Madison Dearborn Partners bought Topps for $385 million. They hatched big plans to make trading cards relevant again.

Total Immersion, a French company, brought Topps the augmented reality technology. It has already been used in a theme park and for some auto design work. Using the technology, card collectors see a three-dimensional version of a player and can play elementary pitching, batting and catching games using the computer keyboard.

Mr. Eisner said Topps expected to ship 10 million packs of Series 1 (12 cards for $2) and Topps Attax cards this year (5 for $1). Scott Kelnhofer, editor of Card Trade, an industry publication, says the Total Immersion technology could strike a chord with boys. “This is the boldest technology idea we’ve seen in sports cards so far. The key is not to have it be a novelty and then it’s on to the next one.”

Mr. Eisner says he does not see Topps as a trading card business. “I see it as a cultural, iconic institution not that different from Disney; it conjures up an emotional response that has a feel good, Proustian kind of uplift,” he said.

Mr. Eisner has also created Back on Topps, a 17-episode Internet comedy that spoofs his acquisition of the company. He is developing a movie based on another of the company’s products, Bazooka Joe bubble gum. He also wants to create sports films.

Topps and Upper Deck already drive collectors to the Web by inserting special cards with unique codes in the packs. Entering the codes at Toppstown.com or UpperDeckU.com allows fans to create avatars, trade virtual cards and enter virtual worlds and interact with other visitors.

On deck: virtual cards that “come alive and contain video,” said Louise Curcio, vice president for marketing at Upper Deck.

For Mr. Eisner, the Topps 3D Live cards are a natural extension of the brand. “We take technology as our friend,” he said. “The playing card is the beginning, not the end.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/te...y/09topps.html





Circumventing Adobe ADEPT DRM for PDF

One unpublished algorithm and a full PDF parser later, the same ADEPT per-user key-pair allows full decryption of ADEPT-encrypted PDF files. Nothing terribly exciting here from a security perspective, except to note that Adobe putting all its “content-protection” eggs in one DRM basket has only made breaks in the system more fruitful. If all/most e-book suppliers used a single common DRM scheme across all formats – as argued for by some people at Adobe – how long do they honestly think the system would remain secure? As turned out to be the case with the DVD Content Scramble System, more implementations meant more opportunities for breaks. Wider use of the system meant more incentive to break the system. Not a good combination, from the DRM-provider perspective.

But now what you’re really here for – the PDF decryption tool: REMOVED. (And if you don't already have it, the key-retrieval tool: REMOVED.)

And I wasn’t originally going to go here, but I’ve decided Adobe just left themselves too open by calling their DRM system “ADEPT”. The overall ADEPT-removal system is now called “INEPT,” for I♥cabbages iNformation Extraction and Preservation Technology. Sorry, Adobe. ^_^

Edit: Links to tools removed due to DMCA complaint from Adobe.
http://i-u2665-cabbages.blogspot.com...m-for-pdf.html

Circumventing Adobe ADEPT DRM for EPUB

By way of a concrete reverse-engineering contribution, I have successfully circumvented Adobe's ADEPT DRM scheme for EPUB files. The same circumvention probably also allows decryption of ADEPT-encrypted PDF files, although I haven't looked into it yet.

ADEPT is pretty close to faultless as a crypto system -- a per-user RSA key encrypts a per-book AES key which encrypts the content. It uses AES in CBC mode with a random IV. It uses RSA with PKCS#1 v1.5 padding, which is perfectly adequate for this case. Unfortunately for Adobe, this isn't a crypto system, but a DRM system. DRM systems ultimately depend not on the strength of their cryptography, but the complexity of their obfuscation. There is very little obfuscation in how Adobe Digital Editions hides and encrypts the per-user RSA key, allowing fairly simple duplication of exactly the same process Digital Editions uses to retrieve it.

In practical terms, this breaks ADEPT circumvention into two components: key retrieval and decryption. Key retrieval depends only on the details of Digital Editions and can change seamlessly with an update to the same. Decryption however is a property of the architecture of the system as a whole. Preventing circumventing decryption with previously retrieved keys would require changes to both DE and Adobe Content Server and would take quite some time to propagate to all ACS customers. The upshot being that if you want to decrypt ADEPT books in the future, grab your key now -- no garauntees that you'll be able to do so in the future, but a previously-retrieved key should keep on working.

Here are the scripts:

Key-retrieval script: http://pastebin.com/f26972321 (version 3)

Decryption script: http://pastebin.com/f28fdd6b3 (version 2)

To use, install Python 2.6 and PyCrypto, run the key-retrieval script, then run the decryption script using the retrieved key.

And on a preachy note, please don't be a jerk with these. DRM is bad, but piracy is wrong kids, and only validates the opinions of those who think they need DRM in the first place.

Edit: script links will change reflect dropped pastebins and new versions.
http://i-u2665-cabbages.blogspot.com...-for-epub.html





PDF Flaw in Adobe Acrobat and Reader Gets a Fix, But Just for the Latest Versions.
Nicole Kobie

Adobe has issued a patch for a flaw in its Reader and Acrobat PDF software, weeks after the serious, already-exploited vulnerability was discovered – but the fix is just for the latest versions.

The flaw crashes systems, letting hackers take control. Adobe has admitted that the flaw has already been used by hackers. Sourcefire researcher Lurene Grenier released her own fix just days after the vulnerability was discovered in mid-February.

Adobe yesterday posted updates for Adobe Reader 9.1 and Acrobat 9.1, fixing the flaw – as well as a more serious “no-click” version of the vulnerability.

Anyone using older versions of both Reader and Acrobat will have to either upgrade to 9.1 or wait until 18 March, Adobe said. Unix users of Adobe Reader 9.1 will have to wait until 25 March for a fix.

As before, Adobe told such users to look to anti-virus for protection in the meantime. Click here to download the Adobe update.
http://www.itpro.co.uk/610148/adobe-...tches-pdf-flaw





BBC Team Exposes Cyber Crime Risk

Software used to control thousands of home computers has been acquired online by the BBC as part of an investigation into global cyber crime.

The technology programme Click has demonstrated just how at risk PCs are of being taken over by hackers.

Almost 22,000 computers made up Click's network of hijacked machines, which has now been disabled.

The BBC has now warned users that their PCs are infected, and advised them on how to make their systems more secure.

Concerted attack

Click managed to acquire its own low-value botnet - the name given to a network of hijacked computers - after visiting chatrooms on the internet.

The programme did not access any personal information on the infected PCs.

If this exercise had been done with criminal intent it would be breaking the law.

But our purpose was to demonstrate botnets' collective power when in the hands of criminals.

Click ordered its PCs to send out spam to two specific test e-mail addresses set up by the programme.

Within hours, the inboxes started to fill up with thousands of junk messages.

But a botnet can also be used to launch a concerted attack on commercial websites to take them out of action.

Hefty ransom

By prior agreement, Click launched a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on a backup site owned by security company Prevx.

Click then ordered its slave PCs to bombard its target site with requests for access to make it inaccessible.

Amazingly, it took only 60 machines to overload the site's bandwidth.

DDoS attacks are used by extortionists who threaten to knock a site offline unless a hefty ransom is paid.

Jacques Erasmus from Prevx said that high-traffic websites with big revenues are a "massive target" for this kind of attack.

"Cyber criminals are getting into contact with websites and threatening them with DDoS attacks.

"The loss of trade is very substantial so a lot of these websites just pay-up to avoid it," he explained.

Evolving threat

Click has now destroyed its botnet, and no longer controls any hijacked machines.

However, the owners of unprotected PCs have been made aware that they are vulnerable to future attacks.

In addition, Click advised them on what steps to take to make their systems more secure. Most computers have protection systems that need to be switched on and kept updated to protect them against the evolving threat from hackers.

Machines can be compromised simply by visiting an infected web page or opening an e-mail containing a virus as an attachment.

'Very professional'

Hackers exploit unprotected computers for valuable data such as banking and credit card details.

Criminals use botnets to send out thousands of spam messages, store stolen data, and fraud.

For instance, "phishing" e-mails which attempt to trick people into revealing their bank details are often routed through a botnet.

Users are normally unaware that their PCs are being controlled remotely by cyber criminals because there are almost no symptoms.

Greg Day from security firm McAfee explained that the people who control botnets are "very skilled professionals."

"We've seen this move from what used to be a hobbyist bit of fun into something now that is very professional," he said.

Hackers are keen to recruit new PCs to a botnet to create a resource that they sell or hire out to other cyber criminals.

But some networks of hijacked computers are of "much more value" than others, according to Mr Erasmus.

"Computers from the US and the UK go for about $350 to $400 (£254-£290) for 1,000 because they've got much more financial details, like online banking passwords and credit cards details," he said.

This report will be broadcast in this week's edition of Click on Saturday 14 March at 1130 GMT on the BBC News Channel.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...ne/7932816.stm





Did BBC Botnet Break the Law?

A forthcoming BBC Click TV programme will show how easy it is to operate a network of compromised PCs -- but that would appear to be illegal under UK's Computer Misuse Act

On Saturday, a BBC Click television programme will show how botnets -- networks of compromised PCs -- are used to send spam and attack web sites. What has raised eyebrows is that the BBC bought its own botnet to do the job. You can pick them up cheap in internet chatrooms, though one security consultant reckons "the BBC got scammed on their way to expose the scammers by overpaying them".

The BBC posted two short excerpts from the programme on its website, with the headlines Cyber crime risk exposed (on BBC News) and BBC team exposes cyber crime risk.

Security expert Graham Cluley from Sophos, a UK-based antivirus company, pointed out on his blog that: "The Computer Misuse Act makes it an offence in the United Kingdom to access another person's computer, or alter data on their computer, without the owner's permission." He says:

Sure, a TV report like this can raise awareness of the serious problem of computers being controlled by hackers. But is it appropriate for a broadcaster to use innocent people's computers without their permission for the purposes of their experiment?

Out-Law.com duly asked a lawyer -- Struan Roberrtson, a technology lawyer with Pinsent Masons -- who also happens to be editor of Pinsent Masons' Out-Law.com. He confirmed that the BBC "appears to have broken the Computer Misuse Act," adding: "It does not matter that the emails were sent to the BBC's own accounts and criminal intent is not necessary to establish an offence of unauthorised access to a computer."

The maximum penalty for the offence is two years' imprisonment, but Roberrtson does not expect a prosecution "because the BBC's actions probably caused no harm. On the contrary, it probably did prompt many people to improve their security," he said.

The BBC said that, following its demonstration, it warned users that their PCs had been compromised, and it had closed down the botnet.

If the users pay attention and secure their PCs, they should be better off than if the BBC had not become involved.

Cluley says that his company has often been approached to help with similar demos and has always refused for ethical reasons: "Even if the BBC felt the impact would be minimal - it doesn't make it right."

Most visitors who voted in a straw poll at Cluley's site appear to agree: at the time of writing, 17% had voted "No, it's against the law" and 50% "No, it sets a dangerous precedent".

[Update] The BBC responded that there was "a powerful public interest in demonstrating the ease with which such malware can be obtained and used," and that it would encourage people to defend their PCs from such attacks. Also: "The BBC has strict editorial guidelines for this type of investigation, which were followed to the letter."

"Bots" -- robot PCs controlled remotely by hackers -- are a huge problem on the internet. Botnets are assembled and run by commercial -- though illegal -- operations on a professional basis: some will even give you service level agreements. Huge botnets are used to send billions of spam emails that create costs for everyone else. And as BBC Click also demonstrated, they can be used to swamp sites with traffic so that they stop working.

But security companies are not able to rescue and clean up these compromised PCs -- potentially to the benefit of their owners, as well as everyone else -- because of the legal and ethical issues.

After all, if you let people remove the Trojans that connect PCs to botnets, why not let them remove, for example, copyright music and movies, or pornography? Where does it stop?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ity-questioned





From Nov.

PARAGUAY: Internet Access? What About Just a Telephone?
Alejandro Sciscioli

When Emilio Contrera, a small farmer in Paraguay who is nearly 80 years old, wants to phone his daughter in the capital, he must first overcome a number of hurdles.

He says it is getting more and more difficult for him to walk the two kilometers from his house to the telecentre run by Paraguay's public telephone company, the Compañía Paraguaya de Comunicaciones (COPACO) in the town of Yegros, 280 km east of Asunción.

"There is almost never anyone attending the phone booth, and you have to wait for the employee to show up," says Contrera. But he adds that he is "lucky" because one of the officials is his friend, and helps Contrera make the phone call whenever he sees the elderly farmer coming down the road.

In addition, the office is only open from 8:00 to 19:00. Outside of the office hours, more than 90 percent of the local residents remain incommunicado from the rest of the world, since they have neither fixed telephone lines nor access to mobile phones.

"There is no cell phone signal around here," said the farmer.

As Contrera's case illustrates, telephones are still a luxury item in this South American country.

The elderly farmer is one of the 5.64 million Paraguayans - 94 percent of the population - who have no fixed telephone line in their homes, and one of the 4.2 million - 70 percent of the population - who have no cell phone.

COPACO has a monopoly over basic telephony services, while four local companies, in partnership with transnational corporations, offer mobile phone services.

Telecommunications coverage is concentrated in the triangle comprised of Asunción and the eastern cities of Encarnación and Ciudad del Este.

Making information and communication technologies (ICTs) available to the poor and to remote communities was one of the central issues discussed at the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), which took place Wednesday through Friday in the Tunisian capital.

In 1995, Paraguay's telecommunications law established a "universal services fund" to expand ICTs to rural areas and low-income neighbourhoods.

The fund was created with the aim of subsidising the providers of public telecommunications services in areas where such subsidisation is justified, says article 97 of the telecoms law.

The National Telecommunications Commission (CONATEL), a regulatory agency, is in charge of administering the fund, which is financed by a one percent tax on the net earnings of providers of telecoms services.

The subsidised efforts to expand services got underway in 1999, the manager of the universal services fund, Oscar Duarte, told IPS.

"Under the concept of subsidies for the companies implementing the projects, we supply the initial capital for the service they will provide, but they assume the risk that the activity will not be profitable," he explained.

He pointed out, for instance, that newly created phone booths in rural areas might not bring profits to the subsidised firm.

Since 1999, CONATEL granted nearly 16 million dollars to 13 projects to install public phones in rural areas, provide 287 high schools with Internet connectivity, open community telecentres in the country's 17 provinces, and create and expand the 911 emergency telephone service.

Two other projects have applied for subsidies of approximately one million dollars to expand the 911 service in Ciudad del Este and set up a remote video surveillance system in and around Asunción, Duarte added.

But the way the fund has been functioning has drawn suspicion. CONATEL was searched early this month by a prosecutor from the economic crimes unit to verify whether any of the companies that have received subsidies used them improperly.

A businessman in the telecoms industry who preferred not to give his name told IPS that there were some problems with the companies admitted to the subsidy programme by CONATEL, "which simply turned a blind eye." He also maintained that a majority of the public tenders to grant subsidies "were rigged."

"I don't know if there was corruption," said Daniel Gadea, the only computer technician in Paraguay currently certified by U.S. computer-maker Apple. "The only thing I can say is that the quality of our telecommunications and Internet services is pitiful," he told IPS.

Although the law does not specify that Internet services are a state monopoly, CONATEL regulations prohibit private companies from connecting to the transoceanic fiber optic network through the Network Access Point (NAP) of the Americas in Miami, Florida.

"As long as CONATEL defends the interests of COPACO, no technology-related initiatives will prosper in this country," complained the computer technician.

It was not until this year that private Internet service providers and COPACO reached an agreement for the state-run telephone company to provide wholesale broadband access to the companies, which will offer the service to their customers.

"This way, the extremely high prices paid (for local service) will never come down," protested Gadea.

"The government isn't doing a thing to develop any kind of technology," complained the president of the Paraguayan Federation of Chambers of Information and Communications Technologies, Rodrigo Campos Cervera.

The businessman commented to IPS that the cost of access to the worldwide web would drop significantly if the Internet providers were allowed to obtain their own broadband fiber optic connection.

But to the contrary of what the private sector was hoping for, COPACO is getting ready to enter the retail market for Internet services, and plans to offer connection through Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) transmission technology, which allows high speed data transmission over normal telephone lines without the need to install a second line, for a fixed monthly fee.

Alfredo Moreira, the manager of COPACO's broadband unit, told IPS that the system would be up and running by early next year.

In Gadea's view, the new competition will prompt private companies to lower their rates.

But the Paraguayan Federation of Chambers of ICTs complains that it will amount to unfair competition.

COPACO will also join the mobile telephony business as a fifth operator in the market, and has begun to set up a system of services for rural areas, named Ruralcel.

Emilio Contrera, however, knows nothing about the telecoms market. "The only thing I want is to be able to talk on the telephone more often with my daughter, my granddaughter and my great-granddaughter. And for them to be able to call me sometimes too," he says with resignation.
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=31087





Google’s Free Phone Manager Could Threaten a Variety of Services
Miguel Helft

Google stepped up its attack on the telecommunications industry on Thursday with a free service called Google Voice that, if successful, could chip away at the revenue of companies big and small, like eBay, which owns Skype, telephone companies and a string of technology start-up firms.

Google Voice is an expanded version of a service previously known as GrandCentral, a start-up that Google acquired 20 months ago. It is intended to simplify the way people handle phone calls, voice mail and text messages. The service will initially be made available only to existing GrandCentral subscribers; Google says the general public will be able to use it in the coming weeks.

Google Voice allows users to route all their calls through a single number that can ring their home, work and mobile phones simultaneously. It also gives users a single and easy-to-manage voice mail system for multiple phone lines. And it lets users make calls, routed via the Internet, free in the United States and for a small fee internationally.

Analysts singled out the Internet calling features as the aspect of the service that is potentially most disruptive to established companies. While inexpensive Internet calls have become commonplace, Google’s potential to reach a mass audience could make a difference, some analysts said.

“I would consider Google to have the potential to change the rules of the game because of their ability to bring all kinds of people into their new tools from their existing tools,” said Phil Wolff, the editor of Skype Journal.

But in Skype, the dominant player in Internet calling, Google will find a formidable competitor. The service, which is free when people call other Skype users and carries slight fees for calls to regular phones, has 400 million registered users and is adding 350,000 users a day, eBay said. The company is focused on enhancing the service’s video and videoconferencing capabilities.

“Skype is light years ahead in terms of video, simultaneous chat and voice, and the installed base is huge,” said Ross Sandler, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. “I don’t think they have anything to worry about.”

In a presentation to investors on Wednesday, Josh Silverman, Skype’s president, said that “chat and voice will become table stakes” in Internet telephony. “People will make their choice of communication software based on who makes the richest video experience.”

EBay has acknowledged that Skype does not have synergies with other parts of eBay, signaling that it may try to sell the service in the months ahead.

Internet calls work differently on Google Voice than on Skype. Rather than starting a call from a computer, a specialized phone or an application on a mobile device, Google Voice users call into their voice mail service from any phone. Once there, they can push a button to get a dial tone and call a different number. As such, the service is not set up to handle video calls, though Google offers simple video-chatting capabilities through Google Talk, its instant-messaging service.

For international calls to landlines in a handful of major countries, Google Voice is marginally cheaper than Skype, while Google Voice calls to international mobile phones are as much as a third cheaper than Skype’s.

Vincent Paquet, a co-founder of GrandCentral and now a senior product manager at Google, said that fees from Internet calls would probably play an important role in subsidizing the free service, which for now will not carry advertisements.

“We can generate enough revenue from international calling to support the service,” he said, noting that Google Voice was now running on Google’s servers and could operate at very low cost.

Analysts said it was not clear how much domestic or international calling business Google Voice could take from telephone companies. Google, which makes software for cellphones, is already at odds with several telecommunications companies over policy issues and over who will control the quickly growing revenue generated by mobile Internet services and advertising.

Some of Google Voice’s other features, like voice mail transcription services, are offered for a fee by start-ups like Spinvox and PhoneTag. And conferencing capabilities are sold by some telecommunications providers, but they are also available free through some online services.

Google Voice may raise more hackles with privacy advocates, and perhaps regulators, than it does with competitors. The service would allow Google, which already collects vast amounts of data about the behavior of Internet users, to gather information on their calling habits.

“It raises two distinct problems,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “In the privacy world, it is increased profiling and tracking of users without safeguards. But the other problem is the growing consolidation of Internet-based services around one dominant company.”

Brad Stone contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/te.../12google.html





Advertisers Get a Trove of Clues in Smartphones
Stephanie Clifford

The millions of people who use their cellphones daily to play games, download applications and browse the Web may not realize that they have an unseen companion: advertisers that can track their interests, their habits and even their location.

Smartphones, like the iPhone and BlackBerry Curve, are the latest and potentially most extensive way for advertisers to aim ads at certain consumers. Advertisers already tailor ads for small groups of consumers on the Web based on personal information. But cellphones have a much higher potential for personalized advertising, especially when they use applications like Yelp or Urbanspoon with GPS to identify a person’s location, right down to the street corner where they are standing.

Advertisers will pay high rates for the ability to show, for example, ads for a nearby restaurant to someone leaving a Broadway show, especially when coupled with information about the gender, age, finances and interests of the consumer.

Eswar Priyadarshan, the chief technology officer of Quattro Wireless, which places advertising for clients like Sony on mobile sites, says he typically has 20 pieces of information about a customer who has visited a site or played with an application in his network. “The basic idea is, you go through all these channels, and you get as much data as possible,” he said.

The capability for collecting information has alarmed privacy advocates.

“It’s potentially a portable, personal spy,” said Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, who will appear before Federal Trade Commission staff members this month to brief them on privacy and mobile marketing. He is particularly concerned about data breaches, advertisers’ access to sensitive health or financial information, and a lack of transparency about how advertisers are collecting data. “Users are going to be inclined to say, sure, what’s harmful about a click, not realizing that they’ve consented to give up their information.”

For now, advertisers are using a wide lens to survey people’s behavior on phones, aiming at people by city rather than by specific neighborhood or street.

And while they collect specifics about how someone behaves on the mobile Web — for instance, that someone bought a “Hot N Cold” ring tone after seeing an ad for it, then watched a Miley Cyrus video on TMZ.com — they use that information to categorize that person as a pop-culture fan, and then show a movie ad.

Advertisers are eager to use the information for much more specific targeting, however. An advertising system could know, for instance, that someone is 27 years old, male, a New England Patriots fan (which NFL.com can track), plays Blackjack, travels frequently between Boston and New York on weekdays (which applications using GPS can track) and uses a 3G iPhone. That would make him attractive to a host of advertisers, like the Delta Shuttle or a Las Vegas hotel, whose ads would appear while the consumer was browsing the Web on his phone.

“Everyone’s in an arms race to find out more and more about their users,” said Eric Bader, the managing partner of the mobile advertising firm Brand in Hand. Even application developers are handing over information about their customers to marketers. Dockers San Francisco, a brand of Levi Strauss, for instance, is beginning a campaign this week that will run on applications like iBasketball and iGolf. It will show a model wearing khakis, and the iPhone customer can shake the phone to see the model dance.

Dockers will start by tracking how long people shake the ad, and then “if it does make sense to do follow-up with these consumers, we’ll do that,” said Jonathan Haber, the United States director of Ignition Factory at OMD, the media agency directing the campaign. “We dig in, specifically, with these application developers and owners to get information about usage behavior.”

It’s not just behavior, but also data about income, or even whether you have children, that mobile advertisers consider. A company called Acuity Mobile, whose clients include the MGM Mirage and Harrah’s Entertainment, lets clients use consumer data, including, potentially, income, to determine what kind of offers clients should see.

“Someone who does not spend a lot of money with your brand might get a lower-value offer, like a free dessert in Vegas, versus a free buffet” for a high roller, said Alan R. Sultan, the president and founder of Acuity Mobile.

Applications that use GPS can offer even more specificity, including Loopt, Yelp, Urbanspoon, Where and almost any iPhone application that shows the pop-up box saying it “would like to use your current location.” Several firms are experimenting with a program called AisleCaster that can offer specials based on a person’s exact location in a supermarket aisle or mall.

Advertising systems can track not only the location of the phone, but also that person’s travel pattern: uptown New York to Nob Hill in San Francisco, for instance.

For now, systems like Quattro are using broad city-level categories while trying to sell to advertisers like Amtrak. “You don’t want to necessarily go down to location-level stuff like specific street corners, because it wanders over into really creeping out the user privacy-wise,” Mr. Priyadarshan said.

For now, there are not enough people using smartphones to make it worthwhile for advertisers to use highly specific criteria. But as more people switch to smartphones, that will happen more frequently. The smartphone market in North America increased 69 percent in 2008, according to the research firm Gartner. Google, Palm and BlackBerry are all introducing their own application stores. Despite the amount of data in the market, as long as advertisers don’t use personally identifiable information, there is no current regulation or law that governs how closely advertisers and application developers can track mobile phone users. Opting out of mobile targeted advertising is difficult, and that’s assuming consumers are even aware how closely they are being tracked.

“I didn’t know they were doing that, although I’m not surprised to hear it,” said Jordan Penn, 32, an affordable-housing developer in San Diego who has downloaded about 12 apps to his iPhone. “It doesn’t really concern me any more than all of the other tracking that goes on when you access the Internet.” Paul M. Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an information privacy law expert, said tracking by advertisers was problematic. “People should be allowed to trade most kinds of information for value as long as the terms are fair,” he said. “They’re not fair now.”

Mike Wehrs, the chief executive of the Mobile Marketing Association, said the trade group was updating some of its self-regulatory principles, for example, suggesting that applications e-mail their privacy policies to subscribers rather than asking them to read a policy on the small mobile screen. “I agree there’s more that can be done,” he said. “One thing about mobile, it’s an amazingly fast-moving industry.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/bu.../11target.html





Android Sales to Outstrip iPhone by '12?
Natasha Lomas

The iPhone's lead over smartphone upstart Android may be short-lived, according to an industry watcher's predictions.

Android smartphone sales will outstrip iPhone sales by 2012, market researcher Informa Telecoms & Media has predicted in a new report.

Last month, Telefonica Europe said that sales of the iPhone topped 1 million in the U.K. Although T-Mobile UK--the exclusive carrier of the first Android device, the G1--wouldn't say exactly how many of the devices had been sold, it did say the handset now accounts for 20 percent of its contract sales.

Web behemoth Google released the first beta developers kit for its Android open OS platform in August, with the first handset--the G1 smartphone--launching the following month. A second handset, the Magic, is expected to arrive next month.

Apple's iPhone has a slightly longer heritage--with the first device arriving in the U.S. in June 2007. However, the iPhone 3G hit stores last July, giving it only a few months' head start on its Google rival.

Both Android and OS X are eating into the market share of the best-selling smartphone OS maker, Symbian. Last year, just under half of smartphones sold were based on Symbian--a drop of 16 percentage points from the year before when it had 65 percent market share. BlackBerry OS, Linux, and Windows Mobile are also gaining popularity and eating some of Symbian's share, according to Informa.

However, London-based Informa believes Symbian's switch to open source will help the Symbian Foundation maintain its leadership over Android, Linux, and Microsoft over the next few years.

Nearly 162 million smartphones were sold last year, surpassing laptop sales for the first time, according to Informa. The market researcher forecasts that smartphone penetration will reach 13.5 percent of new handsets sold this year and that the figure will reach 38 percent by 2013.

Informa also suggests smartphone sales will be immune to the global economic downturn, maintaining a prediction of "robust growth" of 35.3 percent year over year.

Total handset sales, by contrast, won't be as resilient and are set to fall 10.1 per cent year over year, Informa predicts.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10191525-94.html





Vodafone to Offer Restriction-Free Music Service

Vodafone, the world's largest mobile phone group by revenue, is to sell music without any anti-piracy protection in a deal that will allow users to listen to songs on any digital device.

The mobile group said it had signed deals with the world's largest record companies including Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and EMI Music to offer their tracks without anti-piracy software called digital rights management.

Music companies are desperate to sign new digital deals as online piracy eats into traditional revenues, while mobile groups are also looking to diversify and increase customer loyalty through new services.

New research by the music business resource TheView said digital recorded music in South East Asia was compensating for declining physical sales for the first time, with the mobile phone the device of choice by consumers.

Vodafone said customers would have over a million tracks to download, from such acts as Coldplay, Duffy and Lily Allen. Pricing will depend on each market.

Vodafone, which is also in talks with music major Warner Music Group, said the deal would enable DRM-free music to be sent to mobile phones and computers, and could then be played on any type of device.

The device, such as an iPod, has to be registered to the Vodafone customer.

The music industry had relied on digital rights management (DRM) as the cornerstone in its fight against illegal downloading but the labels are now offering tracks without the restrictive protection in a bid to drive digital sales.

(Reporting by Kate Holton; editing by Elaine Hardcastle)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...031101658.html





Apple Adds Still More DRM to iPod Shuffle
Fred von Lohmann

Even as it attacks DRM on music, Apple is continuing to add more DRM to its own hardware (we recently documented all of Apple's various hardware DRM restrictions). The latest example is the new iPod Shuffle. According to the careful reviewers at iLounge, third-party headphone makers will have to use yet-another Apple "authentication chip" if they want to interoperate with the new Shuffle.

Normally, of course, independent headphone makers could simply reverse engineer the interface. The "authentication chip" is there so that Apple's lawyers can invoke the DMCA to block those efforts. So this shows us, yet again, what DRM is for -- not stopping piracy, but rather impeding competition and innovation.

iLounge sums up what this means for consumers:

This is, in short, a nightmare scenario for long-time iPod fans: are we entering a world in which Apple controls and taxes literally every piece of the iPod purchase from headphones to chargers, jacking up their prices, forcing customers to re-purchase things they already own, while making only marginal improvements in their functionality? It’s a shame, and one that consumers should feel empowered to fight.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

One final thought: why have so many of the reviews of iPods failed to notice the proliferation of these Apple "authentication chips"? If it were Microsoft demanding that computer peripherals all include Microsoft "authentication chips" in order to work with Windows (or Toyota or Ford doing the same for replacement parts), I'd think reviewers would be screaming about it.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/03...m-ipod-shuffle





Is Shopping Site Selling Pirated iTunes Gift Cards?
Julie Rivera

According to Outdustry, iTunes gift cards have been pirated, and China's biggest C2C online shopping site, Taobao, is the platform used to sell the cards.

Chinese hackers have figured out a way to generate iTunes gift card keycode numbers and help themselves to songs from Apple's music store. The hackers have been selling pirated $200 iTunes gift cards on Taobao for as little as 17.9 RMB, or just $2.60--a savings of almost 99 percent!

Taobao's shop owner told Outdustry, "the gift card codes are created using key generators" and that he "paid money to use the hackers' service." All the seller actually sells is the gift voucher code, which is sent to you directly through Taobao's IM software. You can then redeem the card in your iTunes account.

He continues on to say, "Half a year ago, when they started the business, the price was around 320 RMB for $200 card; then more people went into this business and the price went all the way down to 18 RMB per card, but we make more money, as the amount of customers is growing rapidly."

Unfortunately, that means for every illicit iTunes card sold, a legitimate iTunes gift card potentially becomes invalid.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10193922-1.html





iPods and Young People Have Utterly Destroyed Music
Matt Buchanan

You know how most people are perfectly happy with Apple standard-issue earbuds, white plastic molded around a crappy audio experience? A Stanford professor's informal annual study shows that youngins like the "sizzle sounds" of MP3s.

Each year, Stanford Professor of Music Jonathan Berger does an informal test of his students by playing a bunch of different music in a bunch of different formats. Over email, here's how he told me performs the informal study:
Students were asked to judge the quality of a variety of compression methods randomly mixed with uncompressed 44.1 KHz audio. The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at 128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC). To my surprise, in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 - particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass hits, etc) rising over time.

In other words, younger people haven't just grown more tolerant of thin, soulless MP3 renditions of their favorite music, they actually like them. Shitty MP3s, even. O'Relly Radar quotes Professor Berger as saying that it's the "sizzle sounds" that people are loving because it's what they're comfortable with. So, yes Virginia, iPods really have killed music. People aren't just ignorant of high quality audio, they actually hate it. Gee, thanks for contributing to the downfall of civilization, Apple. Music is dead, everyone, carry on.
http://i.gizmodo.com/5166649/ipods-a...estroyed-music





What’s a Melody For?
Suzanne Vega

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime.
Didn’t you?
People’d call, say “Beware doll,
You’re bound to fall,” you thought they were all
Kidding you.

Remember that song? I’ll bet you do. What’s the melody? Pretty much one note from the beginning to the end of the phrase, with a lift at the end. Is it a cool song? Yes, very. It’s Bob Dylan — “Like A Rolling Stone.” A classic. As classic as “My Way” by Frank Sinatra or anything by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

How about this one?

Holly came from Miami Fla
Hitch-hiked her way across the USA
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
She says, hey babe
Take a walk on the wild side
Said hey honey
Take a walk on the wild side.

That’s Lou Reed, “Walk on the Wild Side.” It’s another classic. What’s the melody? A couple of notes here and there in close proximity to each other.

Imagine either of those songs with wide intervals and sweeping melody lines. I don’t think so. Both are served up the way they are meant to be. And they are great songs. So a great song does not need a well-crafted, “memorable” melody to work. There are a million examples of this — blues songs, folk songs, three-chord rock songs, rock poetry, rap music.

So what is a melody for? I used to think of a melody as a kind of serving tray for the lyrics and the story within the song. However, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been moved by a gorgeous melody.

I still remember hearing “Changes” by Phil Ochs for the first time. I was at sleep-away camp and one of my counselors was singing it in her room. Suddenly I was filled with a deep sorrow, the reasons for which I couldn’t pinpoint or place. I began to cry. My counselor looked at me through the door, and asked if I was homesick.

“No!” I said.

“Did somebody say something mean to you?”

“No!” I said.

Eventually we figured out. “Is it the song? We can sing another one!” She did, and the mood lifted and sailed away within minutes. The melody was like a code of emotion, that worked directly on my — what? brain? heart? soul? A combination of all three. But later on, as a songwriter, I still thought of a melody as a serving tray of sorts, or a bed that the words lie down on.

The first songs I wrote that really felt original had almost no melody. “Cracking” is a song I wrote when I was 20. In school we had been studying the opera “Wozzeck” by Alban Berg, and talking about the use of sprechstimme (spoken-voice) in the works by Bertolt Brecht. Melody? What was it for? To express big sweeping emotions like love. But it felt more modern, if you were writing songs to express shock or stress or madness, to just do away with it. Later in life, around the time of my first marriage and the birth of my daughter, I felt the desire to explore melody again. Bigger emotions demand wider expression.

Some of my favorite melodies are: “You Took Advantage of Me” (Rodgers and Hart); “Birdhouse in Your Soul” (They Might Be Giants); “Almost Blue” (Elvis Costello); “The Art Teacher” (Rufus Wainwright); Mozart’s 40th Symphony; many songs by Laura Nyro. Sting’s melodies like “Roxanne” and “King of Pain” are elegant jewels. The Jason Mraz song “I’m Yours” is a good melody. “Isn’t She Lovely” by Stevie Wonder still fills me with joy.

Melody is its own idea, like sculpture. You don’t look at a piece of sculpture to see what is resting on top of it. A great melody has its own design, a beautiful combination of intervals and rhythms usually expressing the emotion of the song. Somehow a melody is connected, like the sense of smell, to memory, so when you hear a song it connects you in a flood of emotions to the time and place of that song. I am sure there are reasons in the brain for this, but as a songwriter I don’t need to know how the brain does it, only that it does. Here, for example, is one article that puts it succinctly. There are so many articles and books about what music does to the brain that I can’t list them all here.

One thing I noticed after the birth of my daughter, Ruby, was that melody engaged her attention in a way that lyrics did not. I suppose this should have been obvious, but it hadn’t occurred to me that she was preverbal, and so a 7-minute song with complex lyrics would make her attention wander (unless it was a song containing farm animals), whereas a clear melody would make her turn her head towards me and would hold her attention completely. Much of our early time together was spent in my holding her in the rocking chair, inventing little melodies for hours, with nonsense lyrics and made-up phrases, anything to soothe her colicky belly and stop her shrieking.

Now Ruby is a vocal major in high school. Recently, she sang a song she was practicing for a test in school, a vocal line of an Italian art song from the late 1800’s. I didn’t need to know the story or what the words meant to feel the impact immediately — hearing her sing the melody line moved me to tears. (At which point she clapped her hands delightedly! Wicked thing.)

Speaking of what a melody can be used for: Last month I attended a hearing in Albany to protest the $7 million that was cut from the New York State Council on the Arts budget. I found it to be a fascinating process. I am on the advocacy committee of National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences (NARAS) and write letters or go to Albany from time to time to lobby for or protest against various bills. This was a joint hearing held by Senator Jose Serrano and assemblyman Steve Engelbright. Men and woman in groups of three came forward and addressed the dais — a stage on which a few state senators and assemblymen were, well, assembled, in a hearing room at the Legislative Office Building.

Each person testified about how the cuts would affect them and their businesses personally (Sen. José M. Serrano, for instance).

This got me to thinking about the word “advocate” (invoke, vocalize) — in other words, “speak forth” to an audience that “hears” you. After all, it’s called a hearing. Some of the speeches were impassioned, some dry; some long-winded, some to-the-point. All of them were moving, and frequently the assemblymen and state senators were sympathetic. (In spite of this sympathy we learned at the end of the day that the money was cut.) The hearing went on for a couple of hours, so when Tom Chapin presented his testimony in the form of a song he had written for the occasion, it was a welcome moment, and a relief from what had gone before.

You can see his performance on YouTube.

The song’s impact in this moment was thunderous — it had a simple melody, and yet to hear all the issues of the morning put succinctly into song moved everyone in the room to a standing ovation. Not to mention it was a welcome break from the hours of testimony — a little levity and entertainment. For that one moment, Tom Chapin might have been Bruce Springsteen, and Hearing Room A (2nd floor) Madison Square Garden.

His song is called “You Can’t Spell Smart Without Art” and it makes the point eloquently. The right combination of words and, yes, melody at the right moment can have a powerful effect. The latest news is that $50 million has been allocated to the N.E.A. as part of the recovery package, in part because of the organized lobbying efforts of arts advocates across the country.

Just think of a world without art, without song — how would we celebrate? What would we dream of? What would set our imaginations free? How could we express our emotions for our husbands and wives and children? Celebrate a birthday? A melody is for expressing emotions: delight, passion, sadness. It reminds us of what we have felt and experienced before, in our own personal code of emotion and history. Priceless!
http://measureformeasure.blogs.nytim...melody-for/?hp





Phish Returns to Feed Its Hungry Fans
Seth Schiesel

Every crowd makes its own tune. Massed sports fans burst to celebration and shrink to groans in a rhythm punctuated by a certain detachment. Political rallies mix earnest approval with dutiful laughs inspired by jibes and cynical self-deprecation.

And then there was the noise, the great rising roar that swelled from 13,800 throats here at 7:59 Friday evening: the unfettered, triumphant cascade of joy heard only at a major rock concert. As the house lights dimmed at the Hampton Coliseum, the four members of Phish took the stage for the first time since August 2004. And as the opening passage of the anthem “Fluffhead” enveloped the room, the eruption of exultation was not merely for the band itself but also for the millions in the Phish diaspora who make up perhaps the most fervent fandom in pop music.

“It’s like our family hasn’t been able to be together for four and a half years,” Lauren Knyper, 33, a teacher from Babylon, N.Y., said before Friday’s show near the front of the admission line that snaked hundreds of yards behind her. Ms. Knyper wore a black T-shirt that read “This is my 100th show,” then pointed to her pregnant midsection, “and his first.” Ms. Knyper’s husband, who declined to give his name “because I’m not supposed to be here,” said it was his 217th Phish concert.

“We’re here with at least 20 some-odd friends,” Ms. Knyper said. “For the last four years we’ve been missing that connection because this really is a family and this is our community. It’s been years since we could be together so it just has this incredible emotional meaning. My mother died just last month and this is like my music therapy. ”

When Phish announced in September that it would reunite and play three concerts here, the news instantly rekindled the Internet-fueled Phish fan network. Within days of the announcement, even before tickets went on sale, every hotel within at least 20 miles was booked solid. Local officials estimated that as many as 75,000 people may have descended on the area for the shows, according to The Associated Press. In the parking lots were license plates from just about every state east of the Mississippi and quite a few west of it. At Kelly’s Tavern just down the street, Nora Brendel, 59, a waitress, heralded the bumper business on Saturday afternoon. “Last night they told us, ‘Get on your roller skates, girls. Better get some good sleep tonight.’ ”

It appeared that almost no one at the shows over the weekend paid the face price of $49.50 for each night’s tickets and that most fans had ended up paying at least several hundred dollars each. In the parking lot, amid the more whimsical offers of snowboards and mud from the band’s 2004 “farewell” festival in Coventry, Vt., cash offers of $500 for one night’s ticket were being routinely ignored by sellers on Friday. By Saturday, the going rate seemed to be around $1,000.

“You could offer me $20,000 and I wouldn’t walk away from these shows,” Olen Green, a 38-year-old truck driver from Pittsburgh, said as he sat in the first row of the balcony on Friday night. Mr. Green said he had paid $1,265 for his three nights’ tickets. “People say, ‘Oh, why are you going to all three shows?’ But it’s really just like one event.”

And those prices weren’t for luxury box seats. No such thing here. In an era of high-tech stadiums and fancy amenities, Hampton Coliseum is among the great old-school rock arenas. One of the few halls of its size to still offer full general-admission seating with an open floor, Hampton is known to rock fans as crowded, sweaty, stinky, smoky, loud and in every respect intense. Leave your seat without a friend to watch it? It’s gone.

Next to Mr. Green, Dave Yanaitis, 32, manager of a service station down the road in Virginia Beach, Va., was jostling for position at the front edge of the balcony.

“Hey this is Hampton,” Mr. Yanaitis said. “There is no way this crowd can be stopped. I wouldn’t call it violent or rough, but it is very energetic, especially with the rush tonight of being the first shows back. It can be a little aggressive just because the energy is so high. People aren’t going to just take your space, but if you’re not here to hold it...” He shrugged, grinned and gestured at the teeming crowd stretching out before him. “Look at this sea of people.”

During its shows, the band engages in almost none of the between-song banter common to other acts. As the musicians progress through intricately scripted passages and wide-ranging improvisations, the audience generally maintains an intense, attentive, swaying silence.

The sound quality at Hampton is renowned, and the room has long inspired major rock bands to some of their finest concerts. By opening its comeback with “Fluffhead,” a beloved song that the band had not played since 2000, Phish inspired comparisons among the cognoscenti to a legendary Hampton performance by the Grateful Dead on October 9, 1989, when that band performed “Dark Star” for the first time in five years.

With its devoted fans and improvisational ambition, Phish has long been bound in the popular imagination with the Grateful Dead, and there is no question that the two bands and their fans share a musical and cultural lineage. Yet Phish fans are generally of a distinctly younger generation. Though there were very few people who appeared to be over 40 years old at the shows here, there was a huge bubble of fans in their late 30s, which makes perfect sense given that Phish (formed at the University of Vermont) first came to prominence on the college and prep school campuses of the Northeast in the late 1980s.

“I would go to Dead shows and there would be all these 50-year-olds there, which was fine but I was like 17, 18 at the time,” said Brett Fairbrother, 37, a fan who works at the Portsmouth Brewery in Kittery, Me. “Then I saw Phish and it was all of these people my own age, so that was where I was meant to be.”

There also weren’t many fans under 25, probably because of the cost, but there were a few young fans lucky enough to make the Hampton shows their first.

“I was 5 years old when Jerry Garcia died and 13 when Coventry happened so I’ve been waiting all my life to come to a show like this,” Ben Cooper, 18, a high school senior from Knoxville, Tenn., said on Saturday night. Mr. Cooper said his family had pooled $900 to buy him tickets as a combined graduation and birthday present.

Among the fans, the Hampton shows won rave reviews with the near-universal opinion that Phish now is far tighter and more energetic than the band that toured five or six years ago. The band played for about 3.5 hours each night and all of the sets are available as free downloads at livephish.com.

An hour after the last concert ended early Monday morning with the final notes of “Tweezer Reprise,” hundreds of fans lingered in the atrium bar of a nearby hotel, holding onto the weekend as if it were the last night of camp when no one wants to go home.
“They exceeded my expectations from the very first song of the very first show,” said Erik Rankin, 27, an ad salesman from Great Neck, N.Y. “The first night was like a recital. The second night was more ambient, darker. And then tonight they just brought the funk. Phish is back.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/ar...0phish.html?hp





U2 Album Sales Near 500,000 in U.S.: Manager

The new U2 album is on track to exceed industry forecasts by selling almost half a million copies during its first week on sale in the United States, the band's manager said on Monday.

"No Line on the Horizon," the first superstar release of the year, went on sale last Tuesday in the United States and a day earlier everywhere else.

"The first week, we think it'll be very close to half a million, a little under," Paul McGuinness told Reuters, following a U2 radio broadcast at a Hollywood record label.

Preliminary data issued last week indicated that the album's first-week tally in the United States could reach between 400,000 and 450,000 copies -- a far cry from the 840,000-unit start for the band's previous album, "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb," in November 2004.

But McGuinness, who has steered U2 for almost 31 years, said the sales decline was "a sign of the times" amid the recording industry's decadelong decline.

"And what people in this country don't realize is that the American industry is collapsing at a far quicker rate than in the rest of the world. In Europe, sales of physical material are holding up far better. They're in decline, but not as rapidly as in America."

Already this year, total U.S. album sales are off 12 percent from the year-ago period, according to tracking firm Nielsen SoundScan.

He expected "No Line on the Horizon" would debut at No. 1 in 40 countries, becoming U2's seventh chart-topper in the United States. Official U.S. sales data will be released on Wednesday. The band is signed to Universal Music Group, which is controlled by Vivendi SA.

As for other major recent rock releases in the United States, AC/DC's "Black Ice" opened with 784,000 copies in October, and Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" with 722,000 copies in June.

The strong start for "How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb" was arguably an anomaly. The U2 album before that, "All That You Can't Leave Behind," debuted at No. 3 in 2000 with 428,000 copies, which at that point was a record for the band.

Despite being one of the biggest groups in the world, U2 has left no stone unturned promoting the album. In the past month, the band has performed at the Grammys in Los Angeles, atop a roof at the BBC in London, and most recently in New York on CBS' "Late Show with David Letterman" for an unprecedented five nights and on ABC's "Good Morning America."

Monday's event was the first stop on a radio-interview tour that will take them to Chicago on Tuesday and to Boston on Wednesday, when they will perform a show at a small theater.

"Every time we release a record, you have to make the band again," McGuinness said of U2's ubiquity. "That's the same as it ever was. We find a new audience with each record. That's really important. It's deliberate. That's the ambition."

U2 announced earlier on Monday that it would begin a world stadium tour in Barcelona on June 30. U2 singer Bono told Reuters during a break in the radio broadcast that there might be "sporadic" shows before then, but McGuinness said there would be no further gigs because the band would be busy rehearsing.

(Editing by Jackie Frank)
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...5285AY20090310





Corgan Advocates Performance Rights Act
FMQB

Another hearing is being held today by the House Judiciary Committee on the Performance Rights Act, which would require radio stations to pay royalties for the music they play. Smashing Pumpkins’ founder Billy Corgan is scheduled to testify in favor of the bill, as will RIAA chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol. Other artists such as will.i.am, Sheryl Crow, Herbie Hancock and Emmylou Harris have previously joined the musicFIRST Coalition on Capitol Hill to lobby in favor of the Performance Rights Act.

A resolution that opposes the Performance Right Act - called the Local Radio Freedom Act - has now been signed by nine more lawmakers, bringing the total bipartisan support to 144 House members. Reps. Corrine Brown (FL), Ander Crenshaw (FL), Artur Davis (AL), Jo Ann Emerson (MO), Jack Kingston (GA), Solomon Ortiz (TX), Bill Posey (FL), Tim Ryan (OH) and Rob Wittman (VA) have all added their support.

Meanwhile, Jacobs Media has launched a radio industry campaign to send a message to Congress and musicFIRST that radio generates money for the music industry and should not be charged a fee for playing music. Jacobs Media is asking all music stations to take digital photos of every gold and platinum single and album that labels have awarded them, and e-mail them to gold@jacobsmedia.com. This photographic collection of thank-you's from the record industry, underscoring radio's support and contributions, will be posted at jacobsmedia.com/goingforthegold and will be sent to the NAB for delivery to Congress.

"The NAB is on board for this all-industry campaign," comments President Fred Jacobs. "This coming week, we’re asking all music stations to take 30 minutes to send a message to Congress and musicFIRST about the absurdity of this performance fee/tax issue. It is a contradiction for the music industry to suggest that radio has been cheating artists out of royalties and fees, while they have consistently thanked radio for its contributions."
http://fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1205846





Former Eminem Producers Lose Royalty Decision
Greg Sandoval

The case brought by rapper Eminem's former production company against Universal Music Group could have handed music artists a larger share of digital sales.

But a federal jury voted unanimously in favor of Universal Music and other defendants in the case, including rapper-producer Dr. Dre's record label, Aftermath Records, according to an Associated Press report.

Richard Busch, lawyer for plaintiff F.B.T. Productions told the AP that his clients--brothers Mark and Jeff Bass--were disappointed and were considering an appeal.

At the core of the case was F.B.T.'s argument that digital albums were different than physical sales. Artists are compensated on a royalty structure for traditional CD sales. When a CD is sold at a retail store, say at a Wal-Mart Stores outlet, the artist receives about 16 cents. The music publisher gets 9.1 cents.

Things like breakage are deducted from the artist's cut. As other bands, such as Cheap Trick and The Allman Brothers have argued, there isn't any breakage in digital music and such charges are unfair.

Some musicians want compensation for downloads to be structured like licensing fees they receive when their music is used for movies, TV shows, ringtones or commercials. In those cases, artists and labels split equally what's left after publishers takes their 9.1 cents.

Universal lawyers successfully argued that digital sales should be handled the same way as physical sales and that the royalty rate was fair.

Universal Music representative Peter Lofrumento told CNET News that the label "was pleased with the jury's verdict."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10191129-93.html





Detainee Says C.I.A. Blasted Him With Eminem Raps
Robert Mackey

In an interview with the British newspaper The Mail on Sunday, Binyam Mohamed, who was recently released from the United States detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, discussed his treatment while in American custody and renewed his claim that he was tortured.

In the interview, Mr. Mohamed described in detail some of the treatment he says he endured while being held and interrogated in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan before being sent to Guantánamo Bay.

According to Mr. Mohamed, the worst part of his seven years in captivity was not being slashed with a scalpel in Morocco, but the time he spent at “a secret C.I.A. prison in Afghanistan” in 2004, where, he said, he was kept in total darkness 24 hours a day, while being forced to listen to a single rap album played over and over again at high volume:

There were loudspeakers in the cell, pumping out what felt like about 160 watts, a deafening volume, non-stop, 24 hours a day. They played the same CD for a month, “The Eminem Show.” It’s got about 20 songs on it, and when it was finished, it went back to the beginning and started again.

While that was happening, a lot of the time, for hour after hour, they had me shackled. Sometimes it was in a standing position, with my wrists chained to the top of the door frame. Sometimes they were chained in the middle, at waist level, and sometimes they were chained at the bottom, on the floor.

The longest was when they chained me for eight days on end, in a position that meant I couldn’t stand straight nor sit. I couldn’t sleep. I had no idea whether it was day or night.

Mr. Mohamed also told The Mail’s interviewer, David Rose: “In Kabul I lost my head. It felt like it was never going to end and that I had ceased to exist.” It was, he added, “a miracle my brain is still intact.”

While there is no obvious answer to the question, why Eminem?, the blogger Daniel Radosh pointed out in another context that “The Eminem Show” does contain references to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In the song “My Dad’s Gone Crazy,” for instance, Eminem raps about flying planes and attacking high towers, before claiming that there is “more pain inside of my brain/ than the eyes of a little girl inside of a plane/ aimed at the World Trade.”

The use of loud music by the U.S. military has been reported before.

In 1989, when U.S. forces in Panama were trying to force Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega to leave his sanctuary in the Vatican’s diplomatic mission in Panama City and surrender, they blasted loud rock music from speakers outside the Nunciature. The New York Times’s Robert Suro reported at the time that Vatican officials “said the apparent effort at psychological warfare was ‘ludicrous’ and ‘childish.’”

In 2003, Adam Piore of Newsweek, while traveling with soldiers from the United States military’s Psychological Operations Command (known as Psyops) in Iraq, witnessed American soldiers blasting Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” into shipping containers where detainees were held. In the May 19, 2003 issue of Newsweek, Mr. Piore wrote that a member of the Psyops unit described the tactic as part of an effort to “break down” the detainees:

The idea, explains Sgt. Mark Hadsell, is to break down a subject’s resistance through sleep deprivation and annoyance with music that is as culturally offensive and terrifying as possible. Hadsell’s personal favorites include “Bodies” from the “XXX” soundtrack and Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” “These people haven’t heard heavy metal before,” he explained. “They can’t take it. If you play it for 24 hours, your brain and body functions start to slide, your train of thought slows down and your will is broken. That’s when we come in and talk to them.”

The kind of stress Mr. Mohamed says he endured in no laughing matter, and the military clearly takes the treatment seriously enough that it has been reportedly been used at Guantánamo Bay, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But since the idea that being forced to listen to a certain song or record can be described as “torture” often strikes people hearing about it as funny, reports of the tactic are often cast in a comic light.

Mr. Piore later told the British writer Jon Ronson that when he called his editor at Newsweek from Iraq to describe the use of loud music on detainees, “I was told to write it as a humorous thing.” After Mr. Piore filed his report, Newsweek stressed the fact that one of the songs blared at detainees in Iraq was the theme from the children’s television show “Barney” and added a comic kicker to his the story:

The sledgehammer riffs of Metallica, that’s understandable. But can children’s songs really break a strong mind? (Two current favorites are the “Sesame Street” theme song and the crooning purple dinosaur Barney — for 24 hours straight.) In search of comment from Barney’s people, Hit Entertainment, Newsweek endured five minutes of Barney while on hold. Yes, it broke us, too.

In Jon Ronson’s book on the American military’s development and use of psychological operations, “The Men Who Stare at Goats” (soon to be a major motion picture, starring George Clooney, Kevin Spacey and Ewan McGregor), he writes that while loud music was used on detainees in Guantánamo, other sorts or sounds were deployed as well, often in puzzling ways.

Jamal al-Harith, another British man who was released from Guantánamo, told Mr. Ronson that recordings of loud screeches and bangs, “jumbled noises,” were played by his interrogators — and also that at one stage during his interrogation, he was asked to listen to songs played at normal volume for no apparent reason. According to Mr. Harith, an interrogator baffled him by playing CDs including one by a Fleetwood Mac cover band, another with a selection of Kris Kristofferson’s greatest hits, and an album by Matchbox Twenty. As Mr. Ronson notes in his book, Matchbox Twenty was one of the bands Mr. Piore found listed on the PsyOps playlist in Iraq.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/200...-detainees/?hp





Terror-War Fallout Lingers Over Bush Lawyers
Charlie Savage and Scott Shane

When John C. Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer, was selected by President George W. Bush in May 2004 to join a government board charged with releasing historical Nazi and Japanese war crimes records, trouble quickly followed.

The Abu Ghraib torture scandal was exploding, and fellow panelists learned that Mr. Yoo had written secret legal opinions saying presidents have sweeping wartime power to circumvent the Geneva Conventions. They protested that it was absurd to name Mr. Yoo, who they believed might have sanctioned war crimes, to a war crimes commission.

White House officials canceled the appointment, though it had already been announced in a news release, and kept the episode quiet. “We saved them from incredible embarrassment,” said Thomas H. Baer, one of the dissenting panelists.

But for Mr. Yoo, a Berkeley law professor, the swift exit from the war crimes board was only the beginning of his troubles. For more than four years, the Justice Department ethics office has been investigating his work and that of a few of his colleagues. A convicted terrorist has filed a lawsuit blaming Mr. Yoo for abuses he says he endured. Law students have led protests and the Berkeley City Council even passed a resolution in December calling for Mr. Yoo’s prosecution for war crimes.

The Obama administration last week began releasing more secret memorandums written by Mr. Yoo and others that made such wide-ranging claims about presidential power that Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, called them “shocking.”

The notoriety that follows Mr. Yoo — and to varying degrees half a dozen other Bush administration lawyers — raises difficult questions: What is a government lawyer’s responsibility if legal advice he gives turns out to be, in the view of many authorities, grievously flawed? Can he be blamed for damaging, and arguably illegal, acts carried out with his imprimatur? Should he suffer any punishment?

“I think the legal profession in the United States has been seriously hurt by their conduct,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University. He called the disputed legal opinions “sloppy, one-sided and incompetent” and added, “There has to be accountability.”

What, if anything, should happen to these lawyers — damage to their professional reputations, punishment by state bar associations, perhaps even prosecution at home or abroad — is now the subject of a lively debate in the legal world and beyond.

The calls to begin a criminal investigation of Bush legal team members have so far been ignored by the new attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr. But the demands reflect a widely shared view that the Bush administration lawyers played an outsize role in the disputed counterterrorism policies.

Mr. Yoo and other top lawyers met as a “war council” to consider how far Mr. Bush could go. In addition to asserting that he could bypass the Geneva Conventions — war crimes treaties protecting detainees — the lawyers said the president’s wartime powers trumped many other legal limits. Their secret memorandums cleared the way for aggressive policies — like waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques — all but ensuring that neither policy makers nor operatives could face criminal prosecution for actions blessed as legal.

But John C. Eastman, the dean of the Chapman University law school and a friend of Mr. Yoo who invited him to teach there this semester, argued that it was deeply unfair to single out the Bush lawyers for the advice they gave under intense pressure after the 2001 terrorist attacks. “It’s unfortunate, and quite frankly it’s dangerous,” because it could make officials risk averse, Mr. Eastman said, blaming partisan politics.

Mr. Yoo declined to comment. But in a March 7 opinion column in The Wall Street Journal, he defended his recently disclosed work and warned that the Obama administration risked harming national security if it punished lawyers like himself.

“If the administration chooses to seriously pursue those officials who were charged with preparing for the unthinkable, today’s intelligence and military officials will no doubt hesitate to fully prepare for those contingencies in the future,” Mr. Yoo wrote.

Mr. Yoo’s harshest critics — including lawyers for Jose Padilla, the convicted Qaeda operative who is suing Mr. Yoo for $1 and a judicial declaration that he authorized illegal detention and interrogation practices — note that Nazi lawyers and judges were tried for war crimes at Nuremberg. Others point to mob lawyers charged in organized crime conspiracies.

But scholars say there is little precedent for punishing government lawyers who blessed conduct that most mainstream legal scholars contend was, in fact, illegal. The Nuremberg cases involved a different scenario: The lawyers were carrying out Nazi-era laws against a backdrop of mass murder. And while corporate lawyers may face malpractice lawsuits by clients for bad advice, in practice it has been “incredibly rare” for lawyers to be punished, said Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia University law professor.

For some of Mr. Bush’s lawyers, the most likely consequence may be wariness from potential employers. The former White House counsel and attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales, for example, has not found a job since resigning in 2007 amid accusations that he misled Congress about surveillance without warrants and the firing of United States attorneys.

He recently told The Wall Street Journal that the controversy surrounding him had made law firms “skittish” about hiring him, calling himself “one of the many casualties of the war on terror.” Mr. Gonzales’s lawyer, George J. Terwilliger III, said in a statement that “Judge Gonzales looks forward to the day when reason prevails over partisan politics and he can get on with his professional life.”

David S. Addington, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney who was a forceful voice in internal legal debates, is also said to still be looking for work. The former Pentagon general counsel William Haynes II had been nominated by Mr. Bush for an appeals court judgeship, but was blocked because of his role in detention policies.

He then searched for a job for about a year, according to Pentagon officials, before landing a position at Chevron in 2008.

Other key figures who left the administration before the details of their work came to light — a process that began with the disclosure of interrogation memorandums after the 2004 Abu Ghraib torture scandal — were luckier. Jay S. Bybee, Mr. Yoo’s former boss at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had been confirmed to a life-tenured appeals court seat in 2003. That same year, Mr. Yoo had returned to his tenured professorship at Berkeley, and Timothy E. Flanigan, the former deputy White House counsel, took a private-sector legal job. (The other former Bush administration lawyers all declined to comment or could not be reached.)

Even if they escape punishment at home, however, the lawyers could find themselves pursued in European countries that have laws allowing them to prosecute torture no matter where it occurred.

“I think people like Yoo will be taking their chances if they want to go to Europe for a very long time,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has asked a German prosecutor to indict several Bush legal team members along with policy makers. The prosecutor declined, but the case is on appeal.

Mr. Ratner and others are eagerly awaiting the findings of the ethics investigation into the interrogation memorandums drafted by Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee in 2002, as well as others written in 2005 by Steven G. Bradbury. Critical findings could include referrals to state bar associations, which have the power to reprimand or disbar their members. Any bar action against Mr. Yoo could in turn reignite a faculty effort to get Berkeley to strip him of tenure so he could be fired.

But Mr. Richman, of Columbia, said any punishment against Bush lawyers is unlikely unless e-mail messages or early drafts turn up proving that they blatantly altered their legal conclusions to fit a policy agenda. Mr. Richman said that would be unlikely for Mr. Yoo, who had pushed an aggressive theory of presidential power long before the administration recruited him.

“The selection of Yoo was putting in place someone where you sort of had an idea what he would say,” Mr. Richman said. “Most academics are in the center of most things, but there are some outliers. And he was an outlier.”

John Schwartz contributed reporting from San Francisco.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/wa...09lawyers.html





Report Slams "Crude" Effort to Fight Web Militants
Michael Holden

Western governments have overstated the role the Internet plays in the recruitment of militants, and measures to block extremist material are "crude, expensive and counterproductive," a report said on Tuesday.

Any attempts to filter or restrict access to sites grooming potential suicide bombers would be impractical and ineffective, said the study by the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence (ICSR) in London.

In fact there was little politicians could do, said the report, which brought together government, industry and experts to look at the issue.

"Self-radicalization and self-recruitment via the Internet with little or no relation to the outside world rarely happens, and there is no reason to suppose that this situation will change in the near future," it said. "Indeed it is largely ineffective at drawing in new recruits."

For years, governments and security agencies have warned that the Web was allowing extremists, particularly Islamist militants, to recruit and radicalize people to their causes.

Former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff once said recruits no longer needed to travel to al Qaeda camps overseas, and the European Commission has suggested trying to block online searches for material such as bomb-making recipes.

Last week a report found extremist groups in Southeast Asia were increasingly using the Web to radicalize youths.

Fears Misplaced

However, the study suggested fears about the radicalizing power of the Internet appeared misplaced. Peter Neumann, head of the ICSR, said there had been only four or five reported cases across Europe where the process had taken place wholly online.

He told Reuters that Internet Service Providers could do more to deal with users' complaints about extremist material, and governments would regulate if the ISPs failed to bring in a system to better police content.

But it was a fallacy that "there is some sort of switch that can be pressed and you can eliminate all extremist radicalizing content from the Internet."

Officials have argued that it should be possible to filter militant material in the same way authorities crack down on child pornography.

But the report said this analogy was flawed: issues surrounding militant content are less clear cut, and it is politically hard to decide what is illegal and what is merely offensive.

Removed websites can soon crop up again using a different Internet Service Provider (ISP); filtering methods are either too crude (because they block legitimate sites), too expensive (as they need constant updating), or they impede Internet traffic.

Meanwhile almost nothing can be done to target chat rooms, and networking sites, the report said,

While most of the focus has been on al Qaeda-inspired Islamist militants, far-right white supremacist sites are equally as popular, the report found.

(Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
http://www.reuters.com/article/techn...5292R820090310





Kremlin-Backed Group Behind Estonia Cyber Blitz
Marge Tubalkain-Trell

Members of a Kremlin-backed youth movement have claimed responsibility for May 2007 cyber attacks that crippled Estonia's internet in the midst of a diplomatic argument with Russia, Financial Times reports.

It is believed to have been the first attack of its kind, directed against virtually the entire informational infra-structure of a Nato country.

Estonian officials said the attacks originated in Russia. They began after April 27, when Estonia removed a second world war Soviet memorial from its capital, Tallinn, provoking a storm of protest from Moscow. They continued to mid May.

Russia has consistently denied any involvement. Yesterday, however, Konstantin Goloskokov, a "commissar" in the youth group Nashe, which works for the Kremlin, told the Financial Times that he and some associates had launched the attack, which appears to be the first time anyone has claimed responsibility.

"I wouldn't have called it a cyber attack; it was cyber defence," he said.

"We taught the Estonian regime the lesson that if they act illegally, we will respond in an adequate way."

The attack, according to computer experts, was a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack, which is when hundreds or thousands of "zombie" computers are enlisted to overwhelm the target network.

"We were attacked by 178 countries," quipped Katrin Pargmae, a spokeswoman for the Estonian Informatics Centre, which administer's the state's information systems, including the internet.

Internet security experts said that the attacks on Estonia were actually tiny compared with the largest recorded attacks.

Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks, an internet security company, is an expert on the Estonian attacks and said they measured about 100MB per second of traffic, compared with the largest recorded attacks of 40GB per second.

He said that generating such an attack was quite simple, requiring "just a lot of people getting together and running the same tools on their home computers".

Mr Goloskokov said: "We did not do anything illegal. We just visited the various internet sites, over and over, and they stopped working.

"We didn't block them: they were blocked by themselves because of their own technical limitations in handling the traffic they encountered."

He denied that he and his associates were acting on the orders of the Russian government. "We did everything based on our own initiative," he said.

Nashe is a privately financed youth movement and the brainchild of the Kremlin's chief ideologist Vladislav Surkov.

Sergei Markov, a parliamentarian and Mr Goloskokov's boss, volunteered the information that one of his assistants had planned and implemented the attack at a conference earlier this month.

"As far as I know this is the first time anyone has claimed responsibility," said Pargmae, who added that the matter was being handled by the Estonian police. Nazario said that Nato had created a cyber defence centre in Estonia last year.
http://balticbusinessnews.com/Defaul...f-85b183cc3478





Romanians Find Cure for Conficker

Removal tool may spell the end for the notorious Windows worm
Darren Pauli

BitDefender has released what it claims is the first vaccination tool to remove the notorious Conficker virus that infected some 9 million Windows machines in about three months.

The worm, also known as Downadup, exploits a bug in the Windows Server service used by Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008. It spreads primarily through a buffer overflow vulnerability in Windows Server Service where it disables the operating system update service, security center, including Windows Defender, and error reporting.

Security experts claim the worm is the worst infection to date, second to the SQL slammer worm that devastated the Internet in 2003.

The Romanian security vendor said its removal tool, available here, will delete all versions of Downadup and will not be detected by the virus.

Senior malware analyst Vlad Valceanu said the worm is difficult to remove because it contains an in-built update service.

“BitDefender Labs has been seeing an increase in worms, like Downadup, that have a built-in mathematical algorithm, generating strings based on the current date,” Valceanu said in a written statement.

“The worms then produce a fixed number of domain names on a daily basis and check them for updates.

“This makes it easy for malware writers to upgrade a worm or give it a new payload, as they only have to register one of the domains and then upload the files.”
http://www.computerworld.com.au/arti...cure_conficker





More Charges Filed in Palin E-Mail Hacking Case
Duncan Mansfield

Three more federal charges have been filed against a University of Tennessee student charged with hacking into the personal e-mail account of Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor and former Republican vice presidential nominee.

David Kernell, the son of a Democratic Tennessee legislator, pleaded not guilty to all charges Monday, and a magistrate agreed to push back his trial from May to October.

Kernell allegedly gained access to Palin's account in September by correctly answering a series of personal security questions.

The new counts are fraud, unlawful electronic transmission of material outside Tennessee and attempts to conceal records to impede an FBI investigation.

An earlier indictment against Kernell was unsealed in October. He pleaded not guilty and was released on several conditions, including staying away from his computer except for school work.

The October indictment said Kernell tapped into the Alaska governor's widely publicized Yahoo! e-mail account, reset the password and was able to read the contents, make screenshots and post his exploits on the Web using the nickname "rubico." The indictment said at least one other person followed a similar path into Palin's account.

Kernell is the son of longtime state Rep. Mike Kernell of Memphis, chairman of Tennessee's House Government Operations Committee.
http://www.newstimes.com/national/ci_11871572





Pirate Party Politician Fired for His Political Views
Ernesto

The Pirate Party has gathered a huge following in Sweden. More than half of all men under 30 are considering voting for the party in the upcoming European Parliament elections. However, being affiliated with the party is not without risks - even in a democracy.

For several years the media in Sweden has reported that interest in politics among the youth is decreasing at an alarming rate. In 2006, more than 40% of young Swedes who had been elected for a public seat in the previous elections had quit their assignments.

Jonas Bergling is one of the young politicians who believes in being politically active for the public benefit. His story, however, may shed some light on why the young voices are effectively silenced in the daily grind of politics.

Last Monday, Jonas Bergling took part in a chat session with the local newspaper Nerikes Allehanda (NA) in the city of Örebro, Sweden. He was there in his spare-time position as head of the constituency for the Pirate Party in Örebro. Readers of the newspaper were invited to ask him questions regarding topics such as anti-piracy efforts, the Pirate Bay trial and the politics of the Pirate Party.

Since Sweden’s Pirate Party is running for seats in the upcoming elections for the European Parliament, there was a lot of interest in what he had to say. For Bergling, maybe it turned out to be too much interest.

When not pursuing his political interests in his spare time, Jonas’ day job used to be as an IT consultant for EDB Business Partner. It used to be, because the chat with the newspaper didn’t go unnoticed by the company’s Chief of Security, who wasn’t amused. Three days later the aspiring politician was fired because of the political opinions he’d aired in the chat.

“When I left work on Thursday, I got a call from my boss who told me I couldn’t come in on Friday morning and that I had to hand in the keys and security card. It doesn’t feel good to be treated this way. This isn’t how it should be in a democracy,” Jonas said to NA.

According to Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge’s blog, the decision to fire Jonas came from the head office in Stockholm, where the management group made its decision despite protests from Jonas’ local bosses in Örebro.

“It came from the highest ranks within EDB and that makes this a dead serious matter,” writes Falkvinge. “To me, it doesn’t matter if the harassment stems from someone being a pirate, socialist, capitalist or feminist - to harass someone in this way is completely and fundamentally unacceptable.“

“I’ve always been careful not to mix my political views with my work,” Jonas told NA, and he said his supervisor knew of his involvement with the Pirate Party when he was given the job.

As he was a consultant and not a hired employee, EDB did not break Swedish work legislation when they canceled his contract, even though the termination was explicitly due to his political views.

This isn’t the first time that someone has lost his job for taking a ‘pro-piracy’ stance. Back in 2005, Alexander Hanff, the ex-admin of the now defunct DVDR-Core tracker, appeared on the BBC’s Newsnight show to discuss the Grokster decision. His computer training company employer gave him the time off to appear on the show - then promptly fired him.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party...-views-090309/





YouTube Stands by UK Video Block
Darren Waters

YouTube will not reverse its decision to block music videos to UK users despite a plea from the Performing Rights Society to change its mind.

It is removing all premium music videos to UK users after failing to reach a new licensing agreement with the PRS.

Patrick Walker, YouTube's director of video partnerships said it remained committed to agreeing terms.

But such agreement needed to be done "at a rate which is sustainable to all", he told the BBC.

Thousands of videos were made unavailable to YouTube users from late on 9 March.

Patrick Walker, YouTube's director of video partnerships, told BBC News that the move was "regrettable" but that it continued to talk to the PRS.

"The more music videos YouTube streams, and the more popular those music videos are, the more money YouTube will generate to share with the PRS and its song writers. It's a win-win arrangement.

YouTube, however, cannot be expected to engage in a business in which it loses money every time a music video is played - that is simply not a sustainable business model." he said.

Steve Porter, head of the PRS, said he was "outraged... shocked and disappointed" by YouTube's decision.

In a statement, Mr Porter said the move "punishes British consumers and the songwriters whose interests we protect and represent".

The PRS has asked YouTube to reconsider its decision as a "matter of urgency".

The body, which represents music publishers, added: "Google has told us they are taking this step because they wish to pay significantly less than at present to the writers of the music on which their service relies, despite the massive increase in YouTube viewing.

"This action has been taken without any consultation with PRS for Music and in the middle of negotiations between the two parties."

The Music Publishers Association (MPA) joined with the PRS is urging Google to rethink.

"Music publishers are in the business of getting their music heard by as wide an audience as possible, and websites such as YouTube rely on this music to attract traffic. It is difficult to see how anyone's interests are served by denying the YouTube community the content they most enjoy," said MPA chief executive Stephen Navin.

Lord Carter, the UK's Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting, has also waded into the debate.

Giving evidence before the Business Select Committee the minister said he suspected a degree of "commercial posturing on the part of both parties" but said the row was indicative of a wider issue.

"It is an example of the question of how do you price and fund content in the digital world?" he said.

"We have had decades of content being funded in one way - via the license fee and advertising - and that model is changing at a rapid speed," he told MPs.

Mr Walker told BBC News the PRS was seeking a rise in fees "many, many factors" higher than the previous agreement.

He said: "We feel we are so far apart that we have to remove content while we continue to negotiate with the PRS."

"We are making the message public because it will be noticeable to users on the site."

The majority of videos will be made inaccessible over the next two days.

YouTube pays a licence to the PRS which covers the streaming of music videos from three of the four major music labels and many independent labels.

Stream online

While deals with individual record labels cover the use of the visual element and sound recording in a music video, firms that want to stream online also have to have a separate deal with music publishers which covers the music and lyrics.

In the UK, the PRS acts as a collecting society on behalf of member publishers for licensing fees relating to use of music.

YouTube stressed that it continued to have "strong partnerships" with three of the four largest record labels in the world.

Mr Walker said the PRS was asking for a "prohibitive" rise in the cost of a new licence.

While not specifying the rate the PRS was seeking, he said: "It has to be a rate that can drive a business model. We are in the business for the long run and we want to drive the use of online video.

"The rate they are applying would mean we would lose significant amounts of money on every stream of a music video. It is not a reasonable rate to ask."

New deal

YouTube has also complained of a lack of transparency by the PRS, saying the organisation would not specify exactly which artists would be covered by any new deal.

"That's like asking a consumer to buy a blank CD without knowing what musicians are on it," a statement from YouTube UK says on its official blog.

YouTube is the world's most popular online video site but has been under increased pressure to generate more revenue since its purchase by Google for $1.65bn in 2006.

"We are not willing to do this [new licensing deal] at any cost," said Mr Walker.

He said the issue was an industry-wide one and not just related to YouTube.

"By setting rates that don't allow new business models to flourish, nobody wins."

Services such as Pandora.com, MySpace UK and Imeem have also had issues securing licence deals in the UK in the past 12 months.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7933565.stm





Last.FM Joins Google's Rights Row
Jane Wakefield

Online music service Last.fm has waded into the row between YouTube and the Performing Right Society.

Founder Martin Stiksel said he hoped a resolution could be found to avoid illegal services from taking over.

He urged both parties to find a "workable solution, which he hoped would include cheaper and "less complicated" licences.

YouTube is removing all premium music videos to UK users after failing to reach agreement with the PRS.

Thousands of videos were made unavailable to YouTube users from late on 9 March.

Mr Stiksel told the BBC: "It has been a bold decision for Google but we are all working in a very competitive environment and the fees need to reflect that.

"It is a fundamental problem that we have been facing in that online music licensing is getting more complicated and more expensive," he said.

He wants to see online payment for music rights reflecting the model used by terrestial radio.

"We pay each time one users listens to a song or watches a clip and, while that is more accurate because it makes sure the more popular songs get paid more, it is also very expensive," he said.

"Terrestial radio pays a fixed minimum and that works out a lot cheaper," he added.

"We have to find commercially workable rates otherwise illegal services will win and take over," he said.

Pricing content

The row between PRS and YouTube has attracted high profile attention.

Lord Carter, the UK's Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting, has also commented on the row.

Giving evidence before the Business Select Committee the minister said he suspected a degree of "commercial posturing on the part of both parties" but said the row was indicative of a wider issue.

"It is an example of the question of how do you price and fund content in the digital world," he said.

"We have had decades of content being funded in one way - via the licence fee and advertising - and that model is changing at a rapid speed," he told MPs.

YouTube's director of video partnerships Patrick Walker told BBC News the PRS was seeking a rise in fees "many, many factors" higher than the previous agreement.

He said: "We feel we are so far apart that we have to remove content while we continue to negotiate with the PRS."

"We are making the message public because it will be noticeable to users on the site."

YouTube pays a licence fee to the PRS which covers the streaming of music videos from three of the four major music labels and many independent labels.

Stream online

While deals with individual record labels cover the use of the visual element and sound recording in a music video, firms that want to stream online also have to have a separate deal with music publishers which covers the music and lyrics.

In the UK, the PRS acts as a collecting society on behalf of member publishers for licensing fees relating to use of music.

It said of the decision:"This action has been taken without any consultation with PRS for music and in the middle of negotiations."

"Google has told us they are taking this step because they wish to pay significantly less than at present to the writers of the music on which their services relies, despite the massive increase in YouTube viewing."

YouTube is the world's most popular online video site but has been under increased pressure to generate more revenue since its purchase by Google for $1.65bn in 2006.

Services such as Pandora.com, MySpace UK and Imeem have also had issues securing licence deals in the UK in the past 12 months.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/7935833.stm





Baby Swinging Video Case Warning
Asher Moses

The lawyer representing an Australian charged for republishing, on a video-sharing site, a video of a man swinging a baby around like a rag doll says that if the case proceeds every Australian who surfs the net could be vulnerable to police prosecution.

Chelsea Emery, of Ryan and Bosscher Lawyers in Maroochydore, represents Chris Illingworth, who was charged with accessing and uploading child abuse material.

Illingworth, 61, published the three-minute clip on Liveleak, a site similar to YouTube but focused on news and current events.

Illingworth has uploaded hundreds of videos to the website. The one he was charged over, thought to have been created by a Russian circus performer, had already been published widely across the internet and shown on US TV news shows.

The clip can still be found online and has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Emery said the case was a unique test of Australia's laws regarding internet use and the implications of the charges were enormous for every user of the internet.

Illingworth faces a maximum penalty of 10 years' imprisonment for each charge.

Queensland Police's brief of evidence, handed to the defence last month and seen by this website, centres on a witness statement from Susan Cadzow, specialist pediatrician at Royal Brisbane Children's Hospital.

The footage, viewed by Cadzow, shows an adult male vigorously swinging a baby by the arms but at the end of the clip the baby is shown laughing and smiling. Cadzow thought it represented child abuse.

"The child's demeanour at the end of the video would seemingly suggest that no significant injury has occurred. However, it does not exclude the presence of a [hidden] injury," Cadzow said in her statement.

Illingworth, a father of four, had no involvement in the creation of the video. He says he has been admitted to hospital several times since being charged and claims the stress of the case has exacerbated his health problems.

"This charge could impact on every Australian who surfs the net, downloads a file and shares it with others," Emery said.

"In theory this could extend to people who just pass on amusing emails and email images which seem to criss-cross work computers every day.

"Some of these emails contain images which poke fun or belittle certain people. Does this mean any depicting children, even in a humorous way, could be deemed abuse?"

The arresting officer, Detective Senior Constable Richard Libke, said in his witness statement that a forensic search of Illingworth's home and work computers found no items or images of interest.

Illingworth has no criminal or traffic history. He is next scheduled to appear in Maroochydore Magistrates Court on March 19.

He said he posted a disclaimer under the clip on Liveleak warning people of potential injuries resulting from copying the behaviour depicted and asked anyone with information on the origins of the video to contact Liveleak.

Illingworth, an administrator of Liveleak, said information he had given to overseas police relating to other videos on the site had resulted in arrests, such as the case of US teens who published a video showing them abusing a cat.

Emery questioned the prosecution policies of Queensland Police's Task Force Argos, which investigates online predators and child abusers.

"Who made the decision to prosecute a man with child abuse-related charges for sharing a file he did not create, of images not filmed in Australia, taken from a foreign website?"

Queensland Police said it was a crime "to participate in the exploitation and abuse of children by seeking to view, possess, make or distribute child-abuse or child exploitation material".

It provided a definition of "child-abuse material", which was any material that shows a person under the age of 18 who "is, or appears to be, a victim of torture, cruelty or physical abuse".
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/...447185321.html





One-Eyed Filmmaker Conceals Camera in Prosthetic
AP

A one-eyed documentary filmmaker is preparing to work with a video camera concealed inside a prosthetic eye, hoping to secretly record people for a project commenting on the global spread of surveillance cameras.

Canadian Rob Spence's eye was damaged in a childhood shooting accident and it was removed three years ago. Now, he is in the final stages of developing a camera to turn the handicap into an advantage.

A fan of the 1970s televsion series ''The Six Million Dollar Man,'' Spence said he had an epiphany when looking at his cell phone camera and realizing something that small could fit into his empty eye socket.

With the camera tucked inside a prosthetic eye, he hopes to be able to record the same things he sees with his working eye, his muscles moving the camera eye just like his real one.

Spence said he plans to become a ''human surveillance machine'' to explore privacy issues and whether people are ''sleepwalking into an Orwellian society.''

He said his subjects won't know he's filming until afterward but he will have to receive permission from them before including them in his film.

His special equipment will consist of a camera, originally designed for colonoscopies, a battery and a wireless transmitter. It's a challenge to get everything to fit inside the prosthetic eye, but Spence has had help from top engineers, including Steve Mann, who co-founded the wearable computers research group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The camera was provided by Santa Clara, California-based OmniVision Inc., a company that specializes in the miniature cameras found in cell phones, laptops and endoscopes.

Zafer Zamboglu, staff technical product manager at OmniVision, said he thinks that success with the eye camera will accelerate research into using the technology to restore vision to blind people.

''We believe there's a good future in the prosthetic eye,'' he said.

The team expects to get the camera to work in the next month. Spence, who jokingly calls himself ''Eyeborg,'' told reporters at a media conference in Brussels that the camera hidden in a prosthetic eye -- the same pale hazel color as his real one -- would also let him capture more natural conversations than he would with a bulky regular camera.

''As a documentary maker, you're trying to make a connection with a person,'' he says, ''and the best way to make a connection is through eye contact.''

But Spence also acknowledged privacy concerns.

''The closer I get to putting this camera eye in, the more freaked out people are about me,'' he said, adding people aren't sure they want to hang around someone who might be filming them at any time.''
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009...ye-Camera.html





Inexpensive Scanners Can 'Fingerprint' Paper, Researchers Say
Robert McMillan

Think two blank sheets of paper are the same? Look closer.

Researchers at Princeton University and University College London say they can identify unique information, essentially like a fingerprint, from any sheet of paper using any reasonably good scanner. The technique could be used to crack down on counterfeiting or even keep track of confidential documents. The researchers' paper on the finding is set to be presented at an IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) security conference in Oakland, California, next May.

"We've found a way to identify documents even when there was nothing additional printed on them," said Alex Halderman, now an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, who was part of the Princeton team. "This is like an invisible serial number printed on every piece of paper ever made."

Two blank pieces of paper may look identical, but if you hold them to a light, you can see that in fact they're unique mashups of fibers. The researchers say that they can measure this unique texture using a standard 1200 DPI (dots per inch) scanner and some custom software they've written.
Related Content

By turning the page by 90 degrees and scanning it again and again, the researchers can pluck out subtle distinctions in the paper's texture and create a unique digital map of its surface. "You scan it four times and then the software is able -- from these four scans -- to figure out what the surface texture of the document looks like," said William Clarkson, a Princeton graduate student. "Then it can extract essentially a fingerprint of the document."

This isn't the first time these researchers have found interesting data in unlikely places. Four of the paper's six co-authors, including Clarkson and Halderman, helped develop what's known as the cold-boot attack, which showed how to get information out of a computer's memory, even after it has been turned off. This technique could be used to skirt some hard-drive encryption systems.

With a well-preserved sheet of paper, the researchers say that their fingerprints are pretty close to 100 percent accurate. If the paper is soaked or marked up, things become trickier, but with error-correction software it's still easy to make a definitive ID, Clarkson said. "You have to significantly modify the document to make it become unidentifiable."

The researchers believe their technique could be used to identify counterfeit money, tickets and even packaging containers. A drug company like Pfizer, for example, could take fingerprints of their labels when they are shipped, and this data could be verified later by a government or company representative in order to spot fakes. Using public key encryption, companies could even create "self-authenticating" packages that could be checked by special scanners.

Art dealers could use the technique to fingerprint original works of art, they say.

More troubling, however, the technique could be used to track anonymous surveys or to monitor voting done on paper ballots. Ballot tracking wouldn't be easy. Someone would have to scan the ballots before Election Day and then have a way of tracking the order in which these ballots were given out.

Vote tracking is "the possibility that is most troubling to us," said Halderman, who has done extensive research into the security of computerized voting systems. This work shows some new problems with paper ballots too. "There are limitations and need for precautions that we might not have been aware of before," he said.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...ngerprint.html





Researchers Find Ways to Sniff Keystrokes from Thin Air
Robert McMillan

That PC keyboard you're using may be giving away your passwords. Researchers say they've discovered new ways to read what you're typing by aiming special wireless or laser equipment at the keyboard or by simply plugging into a nearby electrical socket.

Two separate research teams, from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and security consultancy Inverse Path have taken a close look at the electromagnetic radiation that is generated every time a computer keyboard is tapped. It turns out that this keystroke radiation is actually pretty easy to capture and decode -- if you're a computer hacker-type, that is.

The Ecole Polytechnique team did its work over the air. Using an oscilloscope and an inexpensive wireless antenna, the team was able to pick up keystrokes from virtually any keyboard, including laptops. "We discovered four different ways to recover the keystroke of a keyboard," said Matin Vuagnoux, a Ph.D. student at the university. With the keyboard's cabling and nearby power wires acting as antennas for these electromagnetic signals, the researchers were able to read keystrokes with 95 percent accuracy over a distance of up to 20 meters (22 yards), in ideal conditions.

Laptops were the hardest to read, because the cable between the keyboard and the PC is so short, making for a tiny antenna. The researchers found a way to sniff USB keyboards, but older PS/2 keyboards, which have ground wires that connect right into the electric grid, were the best.

Even encrypted wireless keyboards are not safe from this attack. That's because they use a special algorithm to check which key is pressed, and when that algorithm is run, the keyboard gives off a distinctive electromagnetic signal, which can be picked up via wireless.

Vuagnoux and co-researcher Sylvain Pasini were able to pick up the signals using an antenna, an oscilloscope, an analog-digital converter and a PC, running some custom code they've created. Total cost: about US$5,000.

Spies have long known about the risk of data leaking via electromagnetic radiation for about 50 years now. After the U.S. National Security Agency found strange surveillance equipment in a U.S. Department of State communications room in 1962, the agency began looking into ways that radiation from communications equipment could be tapped. Some of this research, known as Tempest, has now been declassified, but public work in this area didn't kick off until the mid-1980s.

The idea of someone sniffing out keystrokes with a wireless antenna may seem ripped from the pages of a spy thriller, but criminals have already used sneaky techniques such as wireless video cameras placed near automated teller machines and Wi-Fi sniffers to steal credit-card numbers and passwords.

"If you are a company using highly confidential data, you have to know that the keyboard is a problem," Vuagnoux said.

If pulling keystrokes out of thin air isn't bad enough, another team has found a way to get the same kind of information out of a power socket. Using similar techniques, Inverse Path researchers Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco say they get accurate results, picking out keyboard signals from keyboard ground cables.

Their work only applies to older, PS/2 keyboards, but the data they get is "pretty good," they say. On these keyboards, "the data cable is so close to the ground cable, the emanations from the data cable leak onto the ground cable, which acts as an antenna," Barisani said.

That ground wire passes through the PC and into the building's power wires, where the researchers can pick up the signals using a computer, an oscilloscope and about $500 worth of other equipment. They believe they could pick up signals from a distance of up to 50 meters by simply plugging a keystroke-sniffing device into the power grid somewhere close to the PC they want to snoop on.

Because PS/2 keyboards emanate radiation at a standard, very specific frequency, the researchers can pick up a keyboard's signal even on a crowded power grid. They tried out their experiment at a local university's physics department, and even with particle detectors, oscilloscopes and other computers on the network were still able to get good data.

Barisani and Bianco will present their findings at the CanSecWest hacking conference next week in Vancouver. They will also show how they've been able to read keystrokes by pointing a laser microphone at reflective surfaces on a laptop, such as the screen. Using the laser's very precise measurements of the vibrations on the screen's surface caused by typing, they can figure out what is being typed.

Previously researchers had shown how the sound of keystrokes could be analyzed to figure out what is being typed, but using the laser microphone to pick up mechanical vibrations rather than sound makes this technique much more effective, Barisani said. "We extend the range because with the laser microphone, you can be hundreds of meters away," he said.

The Ecole Polytechnique team has submitted their research for peer review and hopes to publish it very soon.
http://www.itworld.com/security/6419...rokes-thin-air





Lawmaker Wants Google Maps to Blur Certain Buildings
Elinor Mills

Imagine if all the hospitals, schools, churches, and government buildings that appear on online maps were nothing but blurs.

That would not only reduce the usefulness of things like Google Maps and Google Earth, but it would be a huge undertaking for Google and would probably violate the First Amendment.

But that's exactly what California Assemblyman Joel Anderson, a Republican from El Cajon, is proposing in a measure dubbed "AB-255."

The measure would apply to Web site operators and online services that make "a virtual globe browser available to members of the public" and fails to define what that is. It also specifies that a violation would constitute a criminal offense with fines of up to $250,000 per day.

So, all the government agencies that use Google Earth and want the public to be able to find their buildings could conceivably be in violation as well.

As justification for the proposed censorship, Anderson is citing terrorism.

"We heard from terrorists involved in the Mumbai attacks last year that they used Google Maps to select their targets and get knowledge about their targets. Hamas has said they were using Google Maps to target children's schools," Anderson told Computerworld. "What my bill does is limit the level of detail. It doesn't stop people from getting directions. We don't need to help bad people map their next target. What is the purpose of showing air ducts and elevator shafts? It does no good."

Google spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo told Computerworld that the company hopes to talk to Anderson about the proposed legislation.

Privacy complaints have led Google to blur images of official buildings in several instances. The U.S. military banned Google from taking street view images from inside military bases and in 2007 India asked that certain government and military buildings be blurred.

The company also began blurring peoples' faces in its Street View interface on Google Maps last year in response to privacy concerns.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10193171-93.html





India's Own Google Earth Causes Security Worries

India is launching its own version of Google Earth for urban planning, officials said, amid worries that it could be misused after the Mumbai attacks probe showed militants had studied Google images of targets.

India's version of Google Earth called Bhuvan, is a Web-based service developed by India's National Remote Sensing Center (NRSC).

The service is aimed at helping scientists, town planners and administrators in areas of disaster management as well, officials said.

It is expected to go one better than Google Earth, helping viewers gauge the soil type and ground water potential across the mainland with high resolution images and data from satellites.

"We are working with the government for a 2.5 meter (7 feet) resolution," NRSC director V. Jayaraman, told Reuters from the southern Indian city of Hyderabad.

"We'll be putting a lot of thematic information like land use, ground water potential and soil types, which are not available on Google Earth," another NRSC scientist said on conditions of anonymity, as he is not authorized to speak.

But there are security concerns that Bhuvan could be misused because usage would be free.

"Giving satellite images to everyone will obviously have some kind of a security impact," said Ajai Sahni of New Delhi's Institute for Conflict Management.

"There is a possibility of misuse of such technology," Sahni said.

The lone surviving gunman of the Mumbai attacks, Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, told interrogators that all 10 gunmen were shown Google images of the locations they attacked in the country's financial capital, during their training, officials said.

Nearly 170 people were killed in the three-day siege that revealed glaring loopholes in India's security system.

Security analyst Uday Bhaskar said there needs to be a global consensus on availability of such technology.

"There should be a global consensus on what is the kind of technology disseminated and what kind of firewall we need to erect for our own internal security," Bhaskar said.

NRSC officials said important buildings could be masked.

(Editing by Bappa Majumdar)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...031000753.html





Student Facing 20 Years in Hell
Jerome Starkey

Afghan court secretly sentences student whose cause was taken up by The Independent. His crime? To download article on women's rights

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the student journalist sentenced to death for blasphemy in Afghanistan, has been told he will spend the next 20 years in jail after the country's highest court ruled against him – without even hearing his defence.

The 23-year-old, brought to worldwide attention after an Independent campaign, was praying that Afghanistan's top judges would quash his conviction for lack of evidence, or because he was tried in secret and convicted without a defence lawyer. Instead, almost 18 months after he was arrested for allegedly circulating an article about women's rights, any hope of justice and due process evaporated amid gross irregularities, allegations of corruption and coercion at the Supreme Court. Justices issued their decision in secret, without letting Mr Kambaksh's lawyer submit so much as a word in his defence.

Afzal Nooristani, the legal campaigner representing Mr Kambaksh, accused the judges of behaving "no better than the Taliban". Hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into Afghanistan's legal system and 149 British soldiers have died there since 2001, but experts admit that state justice is still beyond the reach of most ordinary Afghans.

President Hamid Karzai promised last year that justice would be done "in the right way", after worldwide protests at how Mr Kambaksh was convicted. But Mr Nooristani claimed yesterday that there was "no respect for the law", even in the highest court in Afghanistan. "They have ignored the principle of crime and punishment, they have ignored the principle of innocent until proven guilty. They have got the same mindset as the Taliban."

The Supreme Court's decision means Mr Kambaksh's best hope is now a presidential pardon, which will force Mr Karzai to choose between fundamentalists in his government and the rule of law. It has also raised serious questions over the millions of dollars spent on Afghan justice reforms since 2001, which appear to have been wasted. Mr Nooristani said: "The whole system is corrupt. Even with more investment, the system won't work."

Mr Kambaksh was found guilty of blasphemy and sentenced to death last year for circulating an essay on women's rights which questioned verses in the Koran.

It later emerged he was convicted by three mullahs, in secret, without access to a lawyer. The sentence was commuted to 20 years on appeal. At that appeal, in October, the key prosecution witness withdrew his testimony, claiming he had been forced to lie on pain of death. The prosecution then appealed to the Supreme Court to reinstate the death sentence. The defence appealed to quash his conviction altogether.

Meanwhile, the student has been languishing in a Kabul jail, fearing for his life. Islamic fundamentalists have been baying for his blood while moderate groups have led marches countrywide demanding his release.

In February, the Supreme Court Judge Bahauddin Baha vowed the appeal would be held in "a very open court" but that promise has proved hollow. Mr Nooristani said he was told of the verdict when he arrived to submit his written defence. And Mr Nooristani has himself been threatened. Prosecutors have warned him they are gathering evidence against him for "defending infidels".

Western diplomats insist they have been lobbying hard to have the case reviewed. But critics say their softly-softly tactic hasn't worked. "The Afghans know the money just keeps coming no matter what they do," said an American lawyer in Kabul.

Even if Mr Kambaksh wins an 11th-hour pardon, there are thousands of people just like him, convicted illegally, with no recourse, support or international scrutiny.

Mr Kambaksh's case has been passed to the prosecutors' office for "execution of the sentence", which means he could be moved to Kabul's notorious Pul-e Charkhi prison, or north to Mazar-i-Sharif, where he was first found guilty. Both hold murderers, rapists and violent Taliban sympathisers. Conditions inside are grim and both are prone to deadly riots.

A spokesman for the Supreme Court claimed there had been no irregularities in the case. But a spokesman for the British embassy said: "We have serious concerns about the fairness of Mr Kambaksh's trial. We continue to call on the Afghan state to comply with the international human rights standards, to which it is a party – this includes the right to a fair trial."

Our Pervez campaign

Worldwide outrage over Pervez Kambaksh's death sentence was sparked after The Independent reported his plight in January 2008. Our campaign led to the Afghan President Hamid Karzai being inundated with appeals, while political figures including the former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice lent their support. The Government raised the matter directly with Afghanistan after more than 100,000 Independent readers signed the petition and in October 2008 a Kabul appeals court lifted the death sentence. The court ruled however that he should serve 20 years, which his lawyers contested on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...l-1643069.html





Staples Libel Ruling Concerns News Media Groups

Truth not failsafe as defense in case
Jonathan Saltzman

Journalists who believe truth is the ultimate defense against libel suits fear that a federal appeals court has created a dangerous exception that could chill news reporting.

The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston ruled recently that a former salesman at Staples can sue the company for libel after a vice president sent an e-mail to about 1,500 employees saying the salesman had been fired for violations of company procedures regarding expenses reimbursements.

Although the decision did not involve a news outlet, it has alarmed journalists, bloggers, and media law specialists, who worry that it could discourage news organizations from pursuing true stories that might cast subjects in a bad light.

On his blog Media Law, Robert J. Ambrogi, a lawyer and executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, called the ruling by a three-member panel "the most dangerous libel decision in decades."

"It puts a crack in the granite of what's been an assumption for a long time," he said in an interview yesterday.

Staples has asked the full appeals court to reconsider the ruling, and 51 news organizations have filed a friend-of-the-court brief saying that the decision, if allowed to stand, "will create a precedent that hinders the media's ability to rely on truthful publication to avoid defamation liability."

But Wendy Sibbison, the Greenfield appellate lawyer for the fired Staples employee, Alan S. Noonan, said the ruling applies only to lawsuits by private figures against private defendants, that is, defendants not involved in the news business, over purely private matters.

"No one is a bigger believer in the First Amendment than I am, and I genuinely cannot understand this outpouring of anxiety and catastrophizing," said Sibbison, whose late father was a journalist who covered Capitol Hill for the Associated Press. "There isn't a First Amendment right for a private company to broadcast the news of a private person's firing to its employees."

The dispute revolves around the firing of Noonan in January 2006 as regional sales director of Staples after an internal audit determined that he had overbilled the company in expense reports, failed to submit required receipts, and falsified expense reports, according to the appeals court's Feb. 13 ruling.

The day after the firing, Jay Baitler, executive vice president, e-mailed the approximately 1,500 people that make up the company's North American division.

"It is with sincere regret that I must inform you of the termination of Alan Noonan's employment with Staples," it began. "A thorough investigation determined that Alan was not in compliance with our [travel and expense] policies." The e-mail went on to stress the importance of following those policies.

Noonan filed a complaint that said Staples had defamed him and violated several employment agreements. US District Court Judge Morris E. Lasker dismissed the claim, writing that "truth is an absolute defense to a defamation action under Massachusetts law."

Noonan appealed to a three-member panel for the First Circuit, which initially upheld the ruling by Lasker. But last month it reversed itself on the libel claim, saying Noonan could pursue that part of his lawsuit because of a relatively obscure 1902 state law.

The law says truth is a defense against libel unless the plaintiff can show "actual malice" by the person publishing the statement.

In ordinary discussions of First Amendment law, "actual malice" refers to the standard established in the landmark 1964 US Supreme Court decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan.

In that context, it means a plaintiff who is a public figure can win a libel suit only after proving that a journalist knew a published statement was false or acted in reckless disregard for the truth.

But in the Massachusetts law cited by the appeals court, "actual malice" means "malevolent intent or ill will," said the panel. Noonan might be able to persuade a jury that the company demonstrated ill will; Baitler had never referred to a fired employee by name in a mass e-mail before, and jurors might conclude he "singled out Noonan in order to humiliate him," the court wrote.

Sibbison - who says her client, Noonan, was a "sloppy record keeper" but not a thief - said the ruling lets him sue a company that "violated its own policies on employee privacy" through the mass e-mail.

Robert A. Bertsche, the Boston lawyer who filed the news organizations' brief, dismissed Sibbison's assurances that the ruling applied only to private defendants.

He said that if a newspaper reported about the Staples e-mail, it could be sued for libel, and jurors would weigh whether ill will was a factor in the publication.

Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University, said the 1902 Massachusetts law struck him as "an anachronism from a more censorious age" when some states passed laws that sought to trump the First Amendment.

"There is every reason to be fearful that this kind of ruling could very well be damaging, because it puts a higher value on other things than it does on the truth," he said.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/mas..._media_groups/





Secure Deletion: a Single Overwrite Will Do It

The myth that to delete data really securely from a hard disk you have to overwrite it many times, using different patterns, has persisted for decades, despite the fact that even firms specialising in data recovery, openly admit that if a hard disk is overwritten with zeros just once, all of its data is irretrievably lost.

Craig Wright, a forensics expert, claims to have put this legend finally to rest. He and his colleagues ran a scientific study to take a close look at hard disks of various makes and different ages, overwriting their data under controlled conditions and then examining the magnetic surfaces with a magnetic-force microscope. They presented their paper at ICISS 2008 and it has been published by Springer AG in its Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (Craig Wright, Dave Kleiman, Shyaam Sundhar R. S.: Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy).

They concluded that, after a single overwrite of the data on a drive, whether it be an old 1-gigabyte disk or a current model (at the time of the study), the likelihood of still being able to reconstruct anything is practically zero. Well, OK, not quite: a single bit whose precise location is known can in fact be correctly reconstructed with 56 per cent probability (in one of the quoted examples). To recover a byte, however, correct head positioning would have to be precisely repeated eight times, and the probability of that is only 0.97 per cent. Recovering anything beyond a single byte is even less likely.

Nevertheless, that doesn't stop the vendors of data-wiping programs offering software that overwrites data up to 35 times, based on decades-old security standards that were developed for diskettes. Although this may give a data wiper the psychological satisfaction of having done a thorough job, it's a pure waste of time.

Something much more important, from a security point of view, is actually to overwrite all copies of the data that are to be deleted. If a sensitive document has been edited on a PC, overwriting the file is far from sufficient because, during editing, the data have been saved countless times to temporary files, back-ups, shadow copies, swap files ... and who knows where else? Really, to ensure that nothing more can be recovered from a hard disk, it has to be overwritten completely, sector by sector. Although this takes time, it costs nothing: the dd command in any Linux distribution will do the job perfectly.
http://www.h-online.com/news/Secure-...do-it--/112432





A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors
Michael Wines

Since its first unheralded appearance in January on a Chinese Web page, the grass-mud horse has become nothing less than a phenomenon.

A YouTube children’s song about the beast has drawn nearly 1.4 million viewers. A grass-mud horse cartoon has logged a quarter million more views. A nature documentary on its habits attracted 180,000 more. Stores are selling grass-mud horse dolls. Chinese intellectuals are writing treatises on the grass-mud horse’s social importance. The story of the grass-mud horse’s struggle against the evil river crab has spread far and wide across the Chinese online community.

Not bad for a mythical creature whose name, in Chinese, sounds very much like an especially vile obscenity. Which is precisely the point.

The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.

It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches, and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’s largest cyber-community.

Government computers scan Chinese cyberspace constantly, hunting for words and phrases that censors have dubbed inflammatory or seditious. When they find one, the offending blog or chat can be blocked within minutes.

Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who oversees a project that monitors Chinese Web sites, said in an e-mail message that the grass-mud horse “has become an icon of resistance to censorship.”

“The expression and cartoon videos may seem like a juvenile response to an unreasonable rule,” he wrote. “But the fact that the vast online population has joined the chorus, from serious scholars to usually politically apathetic urban white-collar workers, shows how strongly this expression resonates.”

Wang Xiaofeng, a journalist and blogger based in Beijing, said in an interview that the little animal neatly illustrates the futility of censorship. “When people have emotions or feelings they want to express, they need a space or channel,” he said. “It is like a water flow — if you block one direction, it flows to other directions, or overflows. There’s got to be an outlet.”

China’s online population has always endured censorship, but the oversight increased markedly in December, after a pro-democracy movement led by highly regarded intellectuals, Charter 08, released an online petition calling for an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.

Shortly afterward, government censors began a campaign, ostensibly against Internet pornography and other forms of deviance. By mid-February, the government effort had shut down more than 1,900 Web sites and 250 blogs — not only overtly pornographic sites, but also online discussion forums, instant-message groups and even cellphone text messages in which political and other sensitive issues were broached.

Among the most prominent Web sites that were closed down was bullog.com, a widely read forum whose liberal-minded bloggers had written in detail about Charter 08. China Digital Times, Mr. Xiao’s monitoring project at the University of California, called it “the most vicious crackdown in years.”

It was against this background that the grass-mud horse and several mythical companions appeared in early January on the Chinese Internet portal Baidu. The creatures’ names, as written in Chinese, were innocent enough. But much as “bear” and “bare” have different meanings in English, their spoken names were double entendres with inarguably dirty second meanings.

So while “grass-mud horse” sounds like a nasty curse in Chinese, its written Chinese characters are completely different, and its meaning —taken literally — is benign. Thus the beast not only has dodged censors’ computers, but has also eluded the government’s own ban on so-called offensive behavior.

As depicted online, the grass-mud horse seems innocent enough at the start.

An alpaca-like animal — in fact, the videos show alpacas — it lives in a desert whose name resembles yet another foul word. The horses are “courageous, tenacious and overcome the difficult environment,” a YouTube song about them says.

But they face a problem: invading “river crabs” that are devouring their grassland. In spoken Chinese, “river crab” sounds very much like “harmony,” which in China’s cyberspace has become a synonym for censorship. Censored bloggers often say their posts have been “harmonized” — a term directly derived from President Hu Jintao’s regular exhortations for Chinese citizens to create a harmonious society.

In the end, one song says, the horses are victorious: “They defeated the river crabs in order to protect their grassland; river crabs forever disappeared from the Ma Le Ge Bi,” the desert.

The online videos’ scenes of alpacas happily romping to the Disney-style sounds of a children’s chorus quickly turn shocking — then, to many Chinese, hilarious — as it becomes clear that the songs fairly burst with disgusting language.

To Chinese intellectuals, the songs’ message is clearly subversive, a lesson that citizens can flout authority even as they appear to follow the rules. “Its underlying tone is: I know you do not allow me to say certain things. See, I am completely cooperative, right?” the Beijing Film Academy professor and social critic Cui Weiping wrote in her own blog. “I am singing a cute children’s song — I am a grass-mud horse! Even though it is heard by the entire world, you can’t say I’ve broken the law.”

In an essay titled “I am a grass-mud horse,” Ms. Cui compared the anti-smut campaign to China’s 1983 “anti-spiritual pollution campaign,” another crusade against pornography whose broader aim was to crush Western-influenced critics of the ruling party.

Another noted blogger, the Tsinghua University sociologist Guo Yuhua, called the grass-mud horse allusions “weapons of the weak” — the title of a book by the Yale political scientist James Scott describing how powerless peasants resisted dictatorial regimes.

Of course, the government could decide to delete all Internet references to the phrase “grass-mud horse,” an easy task for its censorship software. But while China’s cybercitizens may be weak, they are also ingenious.

The Shanghai blogger Uln already has an idea. Blogging tongue in cheek — or perhaps not — he recently suggested that online democracy advocates stop referring to Charter 08 by its name, and instead choose a different moniker. “Wang,” perhaps. Wang is a ubiquitous surname, and weeding out the subversive Wangs from the harmless ones might melt circuits in even the censors’ most powerful computer.

Yang Xiyun and Zhang Jing contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/wo...2beast.html?hp





The World Wide Web Is 20 Years Old Today

The modern day internet, better known as the "World Wide Web", which has completely transformed the way we live, has entered into its twenties today as many will mark the anniversary.

Its inception dates back to 13 March 1989, when a computer scientist, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, popularly known as CERN Laboratory, presented a paper containing means and methods by which particles physics scientists could easily share and find out essential electronics documents.

At that time, the use of internet was limited to defence and academics domains only and communication was wholly text-based, banking on general newsgroups, along with remote Telnet chat to send messages.

The document, entitled "Information Management: A Proposal", heralded the worth of simplified iteration of Standard Generalised Markup Language, and it described what is now known as world wide web that has annealed into almost every sphere of our lifestyles.

The paper resulted into the creation of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), a coding language used to illustrate methods of presenting images and texts in the web format, and when this language get combined with Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Uniform Resource Locator (URL), it build an essential framework to support sharing of electronic documents in an electronic format.

In order to mark the twentieth birthday of the web, CERN will be hosting a couple of "short presentations from web veterans, in addition to a keynote speech from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, alongside a demonstration of the original browser".
http://www.itproportal.com/portal/ne...ars-old-today/





French Police: We Saved Millions of Euros by Adopting Ubuntu

A recent report has revealed that France's national police force has saved an estimated 50 million euros since 2004 by adopting open source software and migrating a portion of the organization's workstations to Ubuntu Linux. They plan to roll out the Linux distro to all 90,000 of their workstations by 2015.
Ryan Paul

France's Gendarmerie Nationale, the country's national police force, says it has saved millions of dollars by migrating its desktop software infrastructure away from Microsoft Windows and replacing it with the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

The Gendarmerie began its transition to open source software in 2005 when it replaced Microsoft Office with OpenOffice.org across the entire organization. It gradually adopted other open source software applications, including Firefox and Thunderbird. After the launch of Windows Vista in 2006, it decided to phase out Windows and incrementally migrate to Ubuntu.
Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users. Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy.

At the current stage of the migration, it has adopted Ubuntu on 5,000 workstations. Based on the success of this pilot migration, it plans to move forward and switch a total of 15,000 workstations to Ubuntu by the end of the year. It aims to have the entire organization, and all 90,000 of its workstations, running the Linux distribution by 2015.

A report published by the European Commission's Open Source Observatory provides some details from a recent presentation given by Gendarmerie Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard, who says that the Gendarmerie has been able to reduced its annual IT budget by 70 percent without having to reduce its capabilities.

Since 2004, he says that the Gendarmerie has saved up to €50 million on licensing and maintenance costs as a result of the migration strategy. He believes that the move from Windows to Ubuntu posed fewer challenges than the organization would have faced if it had updated to Windows Vista.

"Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users," said Lt. Col. Guimard. "Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority."

Support for open standards is a key part of the Gendarmerie's emerging IT policy. Standards-based technologies give it more freedom to choose which vendors it adopts and also makes it easier for the Gendarmerie to interoperate with other government networks. It has found that open source software is better at handling open standards. Linux has also simplified remote maintenance tasks.

Linux has also been adopted by several other government agencies in France. The French National Assembly runs Ubuntu on over 1,000 workstations and the Ministry of Agriculture uses Mandriva Linux.

The success of the Gendarmerie Ubuntu migration reflects several emerging trends in IT. First, it represents the rising influence of community-driven distros which are largely supported internally by the organizations that adopt them. Analysts have noted a growing preference for this approach which can be cheaper than adopting a conventional enterprise distro like Red Hat with annual commercial support contracts.

The Gendarmerie migration also demonstrates the significant cost savings that governments can get from adopting open source software. As the global financial downturn continues to put pressure on budgets, governments are going to increasingly look to open source software as a way to cut IT costs. We have recently seen moves in this direction from Canada and the UK.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/n...ing-ubuntu.ars





Is Free Really the Future of Gaming?
Alec Meer

It's not just new developers going gratis, Sony and EA are too

There's no such thing as a free lunch. But how about a lunch during which you have to watch a couple of adverts, or pay 50p for extra ketchup? What if it's a plain meal you eat in the company of paying customers devouring lavish haute cuisine?

There are many possible futures for gaming, and the magic word 'free' orbits around a great many of them. It's the internet's fault, of course – this is a world that's become highly accustomed to getting what it wants whenever it wants, and without a pricetag.

On the PC especially, there are dual wars being fought against rampant piracy and punter-bewildering system specs. The answer, or at least an answer that's being toyed with of late, is free games – high on accessibility, low on technical requirements, and funded by a cocktail of advertising and micropayments for extra content.

Can free games pay?

It's a fallacy to think this is a new model. Kid/casual gamer-orientated free MMOs such as Puzzle Pirates, Neo Pets and Maple Story have amassed vast userbases and not insubstantial profits over the last couple of years. What's new is that the old guard of the gaming industry is sitting up and taking notice.

This year, we'll see the likes of EA with Battlefield Heroes, Sony with Free Realms and id Software with Quake Live all flex some free gaming muscle. Meantime, a new generation of independent developers are making a name for themselves with bold, inventive free titles – and the smaller teams (often just one or two people) means the potential to earn good cash is that much higher.

"I make most of my money from sponsors," says independent developer Edmund McMillen, co-creator of the award-winning Gish and currently working on Super Meat Boy for Wii and PC. These commercial outings are a rarity for him, however – mostly he designs experimental (and often controversial) free games.

That's not to say he doesn't make some money from them. "I could potentially make what some would call a living off of free games, but I'd still be stuck in this poverty line hole where I can't afford health insurance and a new car if my truck dies on me. I'm not the most business savvy person, but I usually find a sponsor I respect that's willing to drop a few K to basically put an ad for their site in the intro of the game as well as the title screen.

"Aside from the sponsorship, ad's do pay a little here and there, and there is always the prize money you get from NewGrounds and Kongregate [big free gaming portals]. I'm at a point where I feel like I have enough experience when it comes to game design to 'play with the big boys' when it comes to making downloadable console games."

Then there's Flashbang Studios, who've been delighting gamers recently with high-concept, high-polish games like Velociraptor Safari and Minotaur China Shop (must-plays for anyone with a sense of humour and a love of gaming).

Their reasoning for free gaming is a little different, as their designer Steve Swink explains: "Flashbang as a company has three faces: technology contractor, casual game affiliate and game developer. Arguably, game developer is the main face and is definitely the emotional glue holding the company together.

"We're all here because we love making games first and foremost. Unfortunately, that face has never been substantially lucrative. It is because of our contract work and our involvement in affiliate programs that we have financial stability. We can continue to survive making free games as we have been, provided we keep our other revenue streams open."

"As it turns out, keeping these revenue streams open crushes our fragile creative souls, so there are definitely plans in motion to monetize our games and position ourselves to focus solely on them. The plan is to set up a subscription service where players can pay a small amount to get extra features on our portal and within our games.

"The games themselves will remain free to play for the wild webs, but subscribers will get access to the maximum awesome."

It's that model that's behind Battlefield Heroes, EA's rethink of its best-selling team shooter series as a browser-based, casual gamer friendly cartoonish war. It'll be free to create an account and play whenever you want, but that way your character will look pretty bland and have only basic abilities. To change that, you pay. "Maybe you want the gold helmet and a huge moustache, or something like that", suggests DICE's developer Ben Cousins.

Alternatively, you can improve your character: "Let's imagine that the two of us are playing the game, and you're playing the game every night for four hours, you're levelling up your guy really fast, but I only play the game a couple of evenings a week. So maybe I'll buy an item which gives me double the experience points for a couple of days."

The trick is finding a balance between something that makes the folk who pay for it feel sufficiently special and also ensuring the folk who don't want to pay don't feel like they're on a back foot. They may not be paying, but there absolutely has to be a big, happy, word-spreading community in order to attract new players who might pay.

Sony's attempting a similar thing with upcoming MMO Free Realms, currently in closed beta. It's a colourful fantasy world aimed at children and casual gamers – while it might have the levelling and stat-boosting of something like World of Warcraft, it largely constitutes a series of mini-games, such as fighting, racing and match-3 puzzles.

It's a massive playground full of distractions, essentially, and its high polish, high customisation appearance could pull in a huge crowd. To fund itself, it's trying every trick in the book – adverts on loading screens, free bonus items sponsored by brands such as Best Buy, a paid subscription to unlock extra content, a real-world collectable card game and comic and, of course, micropayment items, notably character customisation stuff like haircuts, clothing and pets.

Is add-on content the only way forward?

Sony promise the free game will be high-quality and full-featured, but the sheer number of ways it'll be prompting people (kids, specifically) to spend money brings up a fundamental concern about free gaming in general.

Do free games have to noticeably badger its players to buy extra content in order to survive and, if so, at what point do they become annoyed or uncomfortable about it? On the other side of the coin is Quake Live, id Software's free, browser-based relaunch of its classic multiplayer shooter Quake III.

For now, it has in-game billboards and that's it. That's the sort of thing you see in paid games, so it's hard to balk at them. There are more plans in the offing, reportedly – paid-for character models and your favourite level maps from days gone by are the most likely bets. The question there is at what point a player thinks, "well, I can buy Quake III for a fiver and then download the other bits for free".

This is a very young form of gaming, and no doubt we're in for several years of trial and error before the perfect balance is found. Until then, traditional paid games aren't going anywhere - there's still something to be said for knowing your £30 buys you a complete experience. Then again, we're increasingly seeing 360 and PS3 games offering additional, and often very desirable, content for a few quid - so getting the initial game for free, even if it's a barebones experience, starts looking appealing again after all.

One additional hurdle for free gaming is the name, and the negative connotations thereof. "Our hope - and the basket we're putting our eggs in - is that 'free' will soon be disassociated with 'shallow' and 'cruddy'," says Flashbang's Steve Swink." For Edmund McMillen, 'free' is very much a positive concept:

"True creative freedom is the biggest appeal about doing freeware games. When you step into console dev, no matter how much you want to think you're totally indie, you're not. You're still at the whim of your publisher, they have the final say and if they don't like something you're going to have to change it to get it published."

So even if publishers turn free gaming into a distasteful minefield of paid bonus content and advertising barrages, there'll still be developers embracing the absolute freedom it offers. Free gaming, one way or another, is here to stay.
http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming...gaming--582868





15 Free Downloads to Pep Up Your Old PC

Can't afford a new PC? These free tools for Windows will help breathe new life into your old machine.
Preston Gralla

Got an aging Windows laptop or desktop computer, but money's too tight to buy a new one? Fret not. There's plenty of life in your old PC. It may seem sluggish and on the point of expiring, and its hard disk may be nearly full to bursting, but there's plenty you can do to clean it up, speed it up and give it new life.

And here's the good news: You can do it all without spending a dime, with these 15 free downloads we've rounded up for you. They'll get you more hard disk space, give your PC an overall tuneup, monitor your hardware for potential problems and more.

Just give your PC this dose of virtual Geritol and it'll soon be as peppy as new. It'll last long enough until the good times roll again and you're in the mood to fork out for new hardware.

Do a quick-and-dirty system tuneup

An easy way to get your PC in better shape is by giving it a one-step system tuneup. The following two programs do everything from stopping unnecessary programs from running at start-up, to fixing Windows Registry problems, to cleaning up the hard disk and more.

Later in the story we'll offer plenty of downloads that each perform one or two system tuneup tasks in depth, but if you want the easiest path to a peppier PC, try one of the all-in-one programs below.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9129351





For Papers, a Downsizing Trickle Becomes a Flood
Richard Pérez-Peña

The history of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer stretches back more than two decades before Washington became a state, but after 146 years of publishing, the paper is expected to print its last issue next week, perhaps surviving only in a much smaller online version.

And it is not alone. The Rocky Mountain News shut down two weeks ago, and The Tucson Citizen is expected to fold next week.

At least Denver, Seattle and Tucson still have daily papers. But now, some economists and newspaper executives say it is only a matter of time — and probably not much time at that — before some major American city is left with no prominent local newspaper at all.

“In 2009 and 2010, all the two-newspaper markets will become one-newspaper markets, and you will start to see one-newspaper markets become no-newspaper markets,” said Mike Simonton, a senior director at Fitch Ratings, who analyzes the industry.

Many critics and competitors of newspapers — including online start-ups that have been hailed as the future of journalism — say that no one should welcome their demise.

“It would be a terrible thing for any city for the dominant paper to go under, because that’s who does the bulk of the serious reporting,” said Joel Kramer, former editor and publisher of The Star Tribune and now the editor and chief executive of MinnPost .com, an online news organization in Minneapolis.

“Places like us would spring up,” he said, “but they wouldn’t be nearly as big. We can tweak the papers and compete with them, but we can’t replace them.”

No one knows which will be the first big city without a large paper, but there are candidates all across the country. The Hearst Corporation, which owns The Post-Intelligencer, has also threatened to close The San Francisco Chronicle, which lost more than $1 million a week last year, unless it can wring significant savings from the operation.

In a tentative deal reached Tuesday night, the California Media Workers Guild agreed to less vacation time, longer workweeks and more flexibility for The Chronicle to make layoffs without regard to seniority. Union officials say they have been told to expect the elimination of at least 150 guild jobs, almost one-third of the total, and management is still trying to negotiate concessions from the Teamsters union.

Advance Publications said last fall that it might shut down The Star-Ledger, the dominant paper in New Jersey, but a set of cutbacks and union concessions kept the paper alive in much-downsized form.

The top papers in many markets, like The Star Tribune in Minneapolis, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New Haven Register, belong to companies that have gone into bankruptcy in the last three months.

The owners insist they have no intention of closing publications, but the management making those assurances may not be in charge when the companies emerge from reorganization.

Other publishers, like the Seattle Times Company and MediaNews Group, owner of The Denver Post, The San Jose Mercury News and The Detroit News, are seen as being at risk of bankruptcy. Many newspapers — from The Miami Herald to The Chicago Sun-Times — have been put up for sale, with no buyers on the horizon.

Ad revenue, the industry’s lifeblood, has dropped about 25 percent in the last two years (by comparison, automotive revenue for Detroit’s Big Three fell about 15 percent during the same period, although it has accelerated recently), and that slide, accelerated by the recession, shows no sign of leveling off in 2009.

Web sites like Craigslist have been to classified ads what the internal combustion engine was to horse-drawn buggies. The stock prices of most newspaper publishers have dropped more than 90 percent from their peaks.

And magnifying the problem, for many chains, is a heavy burden of debt that they took on, mostly in a spree of buying other newspapers from 2005 to 2007, just before the bottom dropped out of the business.

The Tribune Company, for instance, owner of The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and other papers, filed for bankruptcy in December, largely because of its debt load. The reality is that even though the economic climate is hard for newspapers, without their debt payments the publishers in bankruptcy would still make money, as do most newspapers around the country.

But profits are shrinking fast; taken together, major chains had an operating profit margin of about 10 percent in 2008, down from more than 20 percent as recently as 2004, according to research by John Morton, an independent analyst.

The recent closures and threatened closures point to an ominous new trend. For The Chronicle, The Rocky, The Star-Ledger, The Citizen and others, debt was never the problem and they belonged to solvent companies, but still they have been losing money.

Analysts say that many other major papers have also slid into red ink recently, including The Washington Post and The Boston Globe (which is owned by The New York Times Company).

The steady trickle of downsizing that sapped American papers for almost a decade has become a flood in the last few years. The Los Angeles Times still has one of the largest news staffs in the country, about 600 people, but it was twice as big in the late 1990s. The Washington Post had a newsroom of more than 900 six years ago, and has fewer than 700 now. The Gannett Company, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, eliminated more than 8,300 jobs in 2007 and 2008, or 22 percent of the total.

On Wednesday, The Miami Herald, once the celebrated flagship of the Knight Ridder chain, said on Wednesday it would trim an additional 19 percent of its already diminished staff.

Nearly every large paper in the country prints fewer pages and fewer articles, and many have eliminated entire sections. Bureaus in foreign capitals and even Washington have closed, and papers have jettisoned film criticism, book reviews and coverage of local news outside their tightly proscribed home markets.

Many papers are sharing coverage with former competitors in an effort to save money. (The New York Times has also suffered from declining revenue, but has been able to avoid serious newsroom cuts so far.)

For more than two centuries, newspapers have been the indispensable source of public information and a check on the abuses of government and other powerful interests. And they still reach a vast and growing audience. Daily print circulation has dropped from a peak of 62 million two decades ago to around 49 million, and online readership has risen faster, to almost 75 million Americans and 3.7 billion page views in January, according to Nielsen Online.

But no one yet has unlocked the puzzle of supporting a large newsroom purely on digital revenue, a fact that may presage an era of news organizations that are smaller, weaker and less able to fulfill their traditional function as the nation’s watchdog.

“I can’t imagine what civil society would be like,” said Buzz Woolley, a wealthy San Diego businessman who has been a vocal critic of the paper there, The Union-Tribune, and the primary backer of an Internet news site, VoiceofSanDiego.org. “I don’t want to imagine it. A huge amount of information would just never get out.”

Not everyone agrees. The death of a newspaper should result in an explosion of much smaller news sources online, producing at least as much coverage as the paper did, says Jeff Jarvis, director of interactive journalism at the City University of New York’s graduate journalism school. Those sources might be less polished, Mr. Jarvis said, but they would be competitive, ending the monopolies many newspapers have long enjoyed.

A number of money-losing papers should “have the guts to shut down print and go online,” he said. “It will have to be a much smaller product, but that’s where we’re headed anyway.”

Industry executives who once scoffed at the idea of an Internet-only product now concede that they are probably headed in that direction, but the consensus is that newspapers going all digital would become drastically smaller news sources for the foreseeable future.

Until then, papers have turned to measures that would have been unthinkable just a year or two ago, including many that are weighing whether to begin charging readers for online access, as The Wall Street Journal does.

Starting March 30, the major Detroit papers, The Free Press and The News, will deliver to subscribers only three days a week, to save money on printing and trucking. The Christian Science Monitor will print its last daily edition on March 27, becoming primarily an online operation, with a printed weekly paper.

“It’s not so much that everyone has a great plan,” said John Yemma, editor of The Monitor. Rather, he said, “everybody is so desperate, they’re looking at every possibility.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/bu.../12papers.html





Pope Admits Online News Can Provide Infallible Aid
Rachel Donadio

The letter released Thursday in which Pope Benedict XVI admitted that the Vatican had made “mistakes” in handling the case of a Holocaust-denying bishop was unprecedented in its directness, its humanity and its acknowledgment of papal fallibility.

But it also contained two sentences unique in the annals of church history.

“I have been told that consulting the information available on the Internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on,” Benedict wrote. “I have learned the lesson that in the future in the Holy See we will have to pay greater attention to that source of news.”

In other words: “Note to the Roman Curia: try Google.”

The Vatican, a 2,000-year-old monarchy built on the ruins of the Roman Empire and run by octogenarians, has officially recognized the demands of the 24-hour news cycle, not a 24-century one.

In his disarmingly human letter, Benedict acknowledged the “avalanche of protests” elicited after he revoked the excommunication of four schismatic bishops in January, including Richard Williamson, who in a television interview broadcast a few days earlier — and widely available online — had denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers.

In the ensuing weeks, the pope said he had not been aware of Bishop Williamson’s views at the time he revoked the excommunication, and he repeatedly condemned anti-Semitism.

But the criticism did not stop, as Catholics and Jews alike questioned the pope’s moral authority.

The pope said in the letter that he was “saddened” that even Catholics “thought they had to attack me with open hostility,” and he thanked “our Jewish friends, who quickly helped to clear up the misunderstanding and to restore the atmosphere of friendship and trust.”

Benedict met with a delegation of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel at the Vatican on Thursday and is expected to make his first papal visit to the Holy Land in May.

Speaking to reporters at the Vatican on Thursday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Benedict had taken the criticism to heart. “He demonstrates that he was touched and that he listened to what was said, even on the Internet,” Father Lombardi said.

In a column last week, John L. Allen Jr. of The National Catholic Reporter noted that Benedict, a master at the question-and-answer format, recently responded to a question about whether clerics needed more real-world experience by saying, “We don’t live on the moon.”

In his letter, the pope also defended his decision to revoke the excommunications of the bishops, who belong to the ultraconservative Society of St. Pius X, founded in opposition to the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council of the mid-1960s.
They had been excommunicated by Pope John Paul II in 1988 after being consecrated without a papal mandate.

“That the quiet gesture of extending a hand gave rise to a huge uproar, and thus became exactly the opposite of a gesture of reconciliation, is a fact which we must accept,” Benedict wrote.

“But I ask now: Was it, and is it, truly wrong in this case to meet halfway the brother who ‘has something against you’ and to seek reconciliation?” he added, citing Scripture.

He also said that the group must accept the teachings of Vatican II. “The church’s teaching authority cannot be frozen in the year 1962 — this must be quite clear to the Society,” he wrote.

On Thursday, the Society of St. Pius X said it was ready to begin the doctrinal debates necessary for its return to full communion with the church. It conveyed the news in an e-mail message, in Latin, which instructed recipients “Ite ed vide,” or go and look, at its Web site, of course.

Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Vatican City.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/wo...pe/13pope.html





You May Be Arrested Soon For Growing A Tomato
Spence Cooper

As our government hands over billions to Wall Street bankers, jobless Americans live in tent cities and collect food stamps in record numbers. Now when we need it the most, growing our own food may be against the law and punishable by a fine of up to $1,000,000. Think I’m joking? Meet Bill HR 875, The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, introduced by Rosa DeLauro whose husband Stanley Greenburg works for Monsanto. The insanity doesn’t stop there—fishing boats, hotdog stands, neighborhood vegetable booths and farmers’ markets will be federally regulated under the same draconian law. As always, the spin is designed to make you (the public) believe these new provisions are for your own good. Under the deceitful guise of protection, the goal of this bill is crystal clear: to prevent us from locally growing our own food so multinational agribusiness can completely control the production and distribution of our food supply. I refer you to the usual suspects—Monsanto, ADM, Sodexo, Tyson, and Smithfield.

This bill is designed to allow corporations, with the help of their hired government guns, to force small competitors (you and me) out of business. This is as evil as it gets, folks. Since the dawn of man we have hunted and farmed our own food——it’s second nature. To be stripped of the most fundamental act of survival is equivalent to the kind of mass enslavement you only read about in history books, like the kind under Pharaohs in ancient Egypt.

Lurking within the maze of technical lawyer-like jargon, the bill places wildly restrictive regulatory incumbrances on the average vegetable growing Joe-The-Plumber, small organic farmer, or anyone for that matter who may one day decide to grow a small garden. The bill would require anyone associated with growing, storing, transporting or processing food to be subject to inspections by federal agents of their property and all records related to food production; you would be required to conduct specials tests, maintain samples and records, and allow government officials to mandate the use of chemical pesticides, fertilizers, specific types of nutrients, packaging, and temperature controls. The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. Violation of any of these provisions would subject the offender to property seizure, imprisonment and fines up to $1,000,000. The implementation of these bogus regulations are designed to be so cost and time prohibitive, no one would bother to grow their own food or risk being jailed and fined for participating in a black market.

Linn Cohen-Cole with Oped News writes:

“The bill is monstrous on level after level - the power it would give to Monsanto, the criminalization of seed banking, the prison terms and confiscatory fines for farmers, the 24 hours GPS tracking of their animals, the easements on their property to allow for warrantless government entry, the stripping away of their property rights, the imposition by the filthy, greedy industrial side of anti-farming international ‘industrial’ standards to independent farms - the only part of our food system that still works, the planned elimination of farmers through all these means.

“The corporations want the land, they want more intensive industrialization, they want the end of normal animals so they can substitute patented genetically engineered ones they own, they want the end of normal seeds and thus of seed banking by farmers or individuals. They want control over all seeds, animals, water, and land.”

I urge you to read the bill here (http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h875/text), then call your representative and congressman.

Link





Economists Say Copyright and Patent Laws Are Killing Innovation; Hurting Economy

Abolishing patent and copyright law sounds radical, but two economists at Washington University in St. Louis say it's an idea whose time has come. Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine see innovation as a key to reviving the economy. They believe the current patent/copyright system discourages and prevents inventions from entering the marketplace. The two professors have published their views in a new book, Against Intellectual Monopoly, from Cambridge University Press.

"From a public policy view, we'd ideally like to eliminate patent and copyright laws altogether," says Levine, John H. Biggs Distinguished Professor of Economics. "There's plenty of protection for inventors and plenty of protection and opportunities to make money for creators. It's not that we see this as some sort of charitable act that people are going to invent and create things without earning money. Evidence shows very strongly there are lots of ways to make money without patents and copyright."

Levine and Boldrin point to students being sued for 'pirating' music on the internet and AIDS patients in Africa dying because they cannot afford expensive drugs produced by patent holders as examples of the failure of the current system. Boldrin, the Joseph Gibson Hoyt Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences and Chair of the economics department says, "Intellectual property is in fact an intellectual monopoly that hinders rather than helps the competitive free market regime that has delivered wealth and innovation to our doorsteps."

The authors argue that license fees, regulations and patents are now so misused that they drive up the cost of creation and slow down the rate of diffusion of new ideas. Levine explains, "Most patents are not acquired by innovators hoping to protect their innovations from competitors in order to get a short term edge over the rest of the market. Most patents are obtained by large corporations who have built portfolios of patents for defense purposes, to prevent other people from suing them over patent violations."

Boldrin and Levine promote a drastic reform of the patent system in their book. They propose the law should be restored to match the intent of the U.S. Constitution which states: Congress may "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writing and discoveries."

They call on Congress to reverse the burden of the proof on patent seekers by granting patents only to those capable of proving that:

• their invention has social value

• a patent is not likely to block even more valuable innovations

• the innovation would not be cost-effective absent a patent

The authors acknowledge that such drastic reform is unlikely and outline an incremental approach for Congress to gradually reduce the scope of patents, regulation and licensing.

Nevertheless, their call for changing the system is urgent. The economists compare intellectual monopoly (patents) to medieval trade monopolies which were proven to be economically detrimental. They write, "For centuries, the cause of economic progress has identified with that of free trade. In the decades to come, sustaining economic progress will depend, more and more, on our ability to progressively reduce and eventually eliminate intellectual monopoly."

Professors Boldrin and Levine maintain a blog on this topic: www.Againstmonopoly.org .
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/549822/?sc=dwhn





U.S. Battle Over Patent Reform Headed for Compromise?

High tech and pharmaceutical companies expressed unusual agreement on a patent reform bill on Tuesday, including on the most contentious issue: how to determine damages for infringement.

A patent revamp passed the U.S. House of Representatives last year but failed in the Senate largely because the tech and drug industries could not agree on whether damages for infringement should be reduced. Current law calls for damages to be the entire market value of the product, tripled in the case of willful infringement.

There appeared to be some agreement on Tuesday that the judge in a patent infringement trial should act as a gatekeeper, instructing juries on what factors to consider in determining damages.

A key issue in those instructions could be how critical the infringed patent was to the invention -- was it one of thousands of patents used in an electronic device or a drug that depended on just one patent?

"The simple concept that the inventor is due the value that he actually contributes to the value of the product is a good concept," said Steven Appleton, chairman of Micron Technology Inc <MU.N>.

"In the simplest form, where you don't have competing considerations, ... what you're looking at is the value contributed by the invention compared to its closest non-infringing substitute," agreed Philip Johnson, chief intellectual property counsel for Johnson & Johnson <JNJ.N>.

Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, urged witnesses at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee to reach agreement on language for the bill. "The critical factor, it seems to me, if we're going to succeed with the legislation is the damages," he said.

Both the Senate and House versions of the bill, which were introduced on March 3, call for damages for infringement to be limited to lost profits or to a "reasonable royalty," an issue that has sharply divided the high-tech and pharmaceutical industries.
Big high-tech companies such as Cisco Systems Inc <CSCO.O> and Hewlett-Packard Co <HPQ.N> began pushing for the legislation years ago to cut the number of patent infringement lawsuits and the amount of damages paid.

Major tech companies, which sell devices that can have many patented elements, want to reduce damage awards to deter people from filing what tech companies say are unwarranted lawsuits.

But the bill has stalled several times on fervent opposition from drug maker Eli Lilly & Co <LLY.N>, seed and herbicide company Monsanto Co <MON.N>, and smaller tech companies, which feared lower damages would leave them vulnerable to infringers.

The pharmaceutical industry, whose drugs often have just one or two patents, says it needs the threat of high damages to protect its intellectual property.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, also pushed the sides to come to agreement on damages, and other issues like how extensive a post-grant review should be. Other elements of the Senate bill would create a new process for public challenges to patents within 12 months of their issue.

"High tech seems to feel that they're going to get whatever they want out of this bill," she said, noting that she had universities and biotechnology firms in California. "I'm not going to vote for a bill unless there is reconciliation between the various interests."

(Reporting by Diane Bartz; editing by Richard Chang)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...031001797.html





Ultra-High-Power Lithium-Ion Batteries

New materials from MIT could power laser weapons or give hybrid cars jackrabbit acceleration.
Kevin Bullis

A lithium-ion battery electrode described this week in the journal Nature can deliver electricity several times faster than other such batteries. It could be particularly useful where rapid power bursts are needed, such as for laser weapons or hybrid race cars.

Test batteries based on the new electrode--developed by Gerbrand Ceder, a professor of materials science at MIT--can be discharged in 10 seconds. In comparison, the best high-power lithium-ion batteries today discharge in a minute and a half, and conventional lithium-ion batteries, such as those in laptops, can take hours to discharge. The new high rate, the researchers calculate, would allow a one-liter battery based on the material to deliver 25,000 watts, or enough power for about 20 vacuum cleaners.

This level of power output would put these batteries on par with ultracapacitors, gadgets that can rapidly discharge power but can't carry much energy for their size, says John Miller, a vice president for systems and applications at Maxwell Technologies, a manufacturer of ultracapacitors, who wasn't involved in the research. The new batteries would store nearly 10 times as much energy as an ultracapacitor of the same size. The combination of small size and extreme power could make the batteries particularly useful for race cars, he says. (Starting this year, new Formula One racing rules will allow race cars to store energy from braking to deliver very brief jolts of acceleration.)

To improve the batteries, the researchers modified an electrode material called lithium iron phosphate to allow electrons and ions to move in and out of it much more quickly. The advance is based on computer models that Ceder developed in 2004. The models suggested a way to improve conductivity by directing lithium ions toward particular faces of crystals within the material.

To exploit this, Ceder included extra lithium and phosphorus. This helps form a layer of lithium diphosphate, a material known for its high lithium-ion conductivity. He says that ions encountering the material are quickly shuttled to faces that can pull them in, allowing for very fast discharging.

The fast-discharging materials may also recharge quickly, raising the possibility of cell phones that charge in seconds, Ceder says, but this would require expensive chargers. Ric Fulop, vice president of business development at A123 Systems, a battery maker based in Watertown, MA, that has licensed Ceder's new material, says that it could be useful for hybrids or for delivering the power needed for laser weapons. (Fulop notes that A123 is not developing batteries for the latter application.)

Other researchers have already modified lithium iron phosphate to achieve power levels high enough for power tools and for most hybrid vehicles. Indeed, iron phosphate batteries are already being sold by more than one battery maker for such applications. Ultimately, the energy capacity of lithium iron phosphate is lower than that of other lithium-ion battery materials, making Ceder's advance of limited value, says Jeff Dahn, a professor of physics at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This battery is good for acceleration, but not as much for long range. "A real breakthrough . . . would be a new positive electrode material with quantum-leap performance specs" in energy storage, Dahn says.
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22280/





The Broadband Gap:

Why Is Theirs Faster?
Saul Hansell

Bits readers have a serious case of broadband envy. I’ve been writing about the debate about how the government might encourage more high-speed Internet use and you’ve complained loudly that people in other countries have faster, cheaper, more widely available broadband service. Even customer service representatives of Internet service providers overseas are nicer too.

I don’t know about manners, but it’s easy to find examples that American’s broadband is second-rate:

In Japan, broadband service running at 150 megabits per second (Mbps) costs $60 a month. The fastest service available now in the United States is 50 Mbps at a price of $90 to $150 a month.

In London, $9 a month buys 8 Mbps service. In New York, broadband starts at $20 per month, for 1 Mbps.

In Iceland, 83 percent of the households are connected to broadband. In the United States, the adoption rate is 59 percent.

There’s more than just envy at stake here. President Obama campaigned on a promise of fast broadband service for all. On the White House Web site, he writes “America should lead the world in broadband penetration and Internet access.” And the recent stimulus bill requires the Federal Communications Commission to create a national broadband plan in order to make high-speed Internet service both more available and more affordable.

I’ve spent the last week trolling through reports and talking to people who study broadband deployment around the world to see what explains the faster and cheaper service in many countries. We’ll start with where the United States isn’t doing quite so badly: the basic speed of broadband service.

If you take out the countries that have made significant investment in fiber optic networks — Japan, Korea and Sweden — the United States is in the middle of the pack when it comes to network speed.

The large European countries have average download speeds ranging from 3.2 Mbps in Italy to 6.4 Mbps in Germany, according to a study by the Saïd Business School at Oxford. The United States has an average speed of 5.2 Mbps. The study looked at speeds in May 2008, as measured by consumers checking their connections on a Web site called Speedtest.net.

Japan was the standout, with an average speed of 16.7 Mbps. Sweden was 8.8 Mbps. And Korea averaged 7.2 Mbps.

Urban density explains much of that disparity. In most of the world, by far the most common way to deliver broadband is DSL technology that sends data over copper phone lines. The shorter the length of the wire from the phone company office to your home, the faster the service can be delivered. The first generation of DSL could offer speeds of up to 7 megabits per second. The very latest generation offers up to 100 Mbps for very short distances.

The reason you see offers of DSL service in many European countries of 10 or 20 Mbps, sometimes more, is that in densely populated urban areas, the telephone companies have been able to wire homes using shorter connections and thus faster speeds.

Half the population of South Korea lives in very dense apartment complexes, mostly in or near Seoul. And most of its very fast broadband service has been delivered by fiber connections into the basements of these buildings, then delivered by fast DSL up to each apartment.

In the United States, phone companies could have offered a faster tier of DSL service to urban apartment dwellers. But instead they chose to offer slower speeds that they could also offer in the suburbs, where most of the more affluent customers live.

There’s another thing to keep in mind while comparing Internet speed: truth in advertising. Data from Ofcom, the British communications regulator, shows that advertising from Internet providers in the United States overstates the speed of their broadband connections less than providers in Japan and the major European countries. (See Figure 10 in this study.)

Even without any change in government policies, Internet speeds in the United States are getting faster. Verizon is wiring half its territory with its FiOS service, which strings fiber optic cable to people’s homes. FiOS now offers 50 Mbps service and has the capacity to offer much faster speeds. As of the end of 2008, 4.1 million homes in the United States had fiber service, which puts the United States right behind Japan, which has brought fiber directly to 8.2 million homes, according to the Fiber to the Home Council. Much of what is called fiber broadband in Korea, Sweden and until recently Japan, only brings the fiber to the basement of apartment buildings or street-corner switch boxes.

AT&T is building out that sort of network for its U-Verse service, running fiber to small switching stations in neighborhoods, so that it can offer much faster DSL with data speed of up to 25 Mbps and and Internet video as well. And cable systems, which cover more than 90 percent of the country, are starting to deploy the next generation of Internet technology called Docsis 3.0. It can offer speeds of 50 Mbps, and eventually much more, compared to a maximum offer of about 16 Mbps on today’s cable systems.
In the United States, high broadband speeds have brought even higher prices. The new 50 Mbps service costs between $90 and $140 a month. My next post will bring us to the question of why broadband costs so much more in the United States that in other countries. On prices, unlike speeds, those tantalizing reports from overseas are correct.

By the way, if you want to follow along, you can wallow in too much data comparing international broadband networks at these sites: The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Point-Topic, the Technology Policy Institute, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and DSL Prime.

There are a lot of places and a lot of policies, so I’ve condensed a lot of information. Many of you know much more than I do about the state of each foreign market. So please add your experiences in the comments. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/0...theirs-faster/

Why Is Theirs Cheaper?

Broadband is cheaper in many other countries than in the United States.

“You have a pretty uncompetitive market by European standards,” said Tim Johnson, the chief analyst at Point-Topic, a London consulting firm.

Other countries have lower costs for the same reasons their DSL service is faster. Dense urban areas reduce some of the cost of building networks. In addition, governments in some countries subsidized fiber networks.

But the big difference between the United States and most other countries is competition.

“Now hold on there,” you might say to me. Since I wrote that many countries don’t have cable systems and the bulk of broadband is run by way of DSL through existing phone wires, how can there be competition? Aren’t those owned by monopoly phone companies?

True enough. But most big countries have devised a system to create competition by forcing the phone companies to share their lines and facilities with rival Internet providers.

Not surprisingly, the phone companies hate this idea, often called unbundling, and tend to drag their feet when it is introduced. So it requires rather diligent regulators to force the telcos to play fair. And the effect of this scheme depends a lot on details of what equipment is shared and at what prices.

Britain has gone the furthest, forcing BT Group to split off a unit that operates the actual network and sells to various voice and Internet providers, including its own telephone service, on an equal basis.

The United States was early with this sort of approach, requiring telephone companies to allow rival Internet service providers to sell DSL service using their networks. The way these rules were written, however, meant the wholesale cost was so high that providers like AOL and Earthlink couldn’t offer a better deal than the telcos themselves.

And the plan was largely abandoned in 2003 by the Federal Communications Commission on the theory that the country is better served by encouraging competition for Internet service between cable companies and phone companies.

The commission has a point that there is something rather forced and artificial about creating competition to resell what is essentially the same service. It’s like a supermarket that sells six different brands of peanut butter, all made with the same recipe in the same factory. Sometimes broadband providers try to create unusual price bundles or nice add-on features, and in some countries they use different underlying networks. But Internet providers that share the same line to their customers’ home will very often be more the same than different.

Unbundling can be seen as a slightly disguised form of price regulation. Profits dropped. Many of the new entrants have found it difficult to build sustainable businesses, while margins for the incumbent phone companies have been squeezed as well.

It’s not exactly clear, however, that this approach is in the public’s long-term interest. Phone companies have less incentive to invest and upgrade their networks if they are going to be forced to share their networks.

Some argue that this is the main reason that there is little investment in bringing fiber to homes in Europe. “Investing in fiber is a huge risk,” Kalyan Dasgupta, a London-based consultant with LECG, wrote me in an e-mail, “and the prospect of taking that risk alone, but having to ’share’ the rewards with other players, is not a prospect that most rational businesses would consider.”

Britain, which has been the biggest proponent of line sharing, has decided to deregulate the wholesale price BT can charge for fiber, so long as it doesn’t favor its own brand of Internet service.

Japan faced a similar problem after several years where regulation forced NTT, the incumbent phone company, to sell access to its lines to rival Internet providers at low prices. In order to get NTT to invest in a faster network, the government set a much more attractive price for sharing access to its new fiber lines.

Restoring some form of line sharing is one of the biggest issues facing the F.C.C. Without it, or some other way to increase competition, the oligopolistic nature of the market in the United States may well keep broadband prices well above the rates for similar service in the rest of the world. At the same time, the commission is looking to expand broadband access to rural areas and speed the deployment of higher speeds, so it may not want to slash telco profits if it will also slow investment. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/0...theirs-faster/

Why Do They Have More Fiber?

In the paradises of broadband — Japan, South Korea and Sweden — nearly everyone can surf far faster and far cheaper than anyone in the United States. What is their secret sauce and how can we get some?

The short answer is that broadband deployment in those countries was spurred by a combination of heavy government involvement, subsidies and lower corporate profits that may be tough for the economic and political system in the United States to accept. Those countries have also tried to encourage demand for broadband by paying schools, hospitals and other institutions to use high-speed Internet services.

Sweden has built one of the fastest and most widely deployed broadband networks in Europe because its government granted tax breaks for infrastructure investments, directly subsidized rural deployment, and, perhaps most significantly, required state-owned municipal utilities to create local backbone networks, reducing the cost for the local telephone company to provide service.

Japan let telecommunications companies write down about one-third of their investment in broadband the first year, rather than the usual policy, which requires them to spread the deductions over 22 years. The Japanese government also subsidized low-cost loans for broadband construction and paid for part of the wiring of rural areas.

“The return to fiber takes time,” said Dave Burstein, the editor of the DSL Prime newsletter, in an e-mail message. “Governments can invest thinking 10 and 20 years, but few companies can. So putting the expensive part (ditch-digging) under the government in some form has good logic. Then you have the companies compete at an upper layer where the investment required is not so intimidating.”

In many countries, especially in Asia, government assistance has gone hand in hand with an expectation that private companies will accept lower profit margins in order to assist in achieving the national broadband goals.

“The South Korean government expects its private companies to drive the investment in broadband infrastructure with government support in the form of loans and tax subsidies as their incentive,” wrote the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in a report last year.

There are only a handful of major projects worldwide to build fiber lines to homes that don’t involve significant government aid of some sort, Mr. Burstein said, including Verizon’s FiOS and Iliad’s fiber network in some large French cities.

Don’t count out “national pride” as a partial explanation for the creation of high-speed networks in Asia, Mr. Burstein wrote me:

Japan then got serious about fiber because they couldn’t accept Korea being ahead, and similarly in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and now Malaysia. Singapore wants to pull ahead again, so they decided to go to 1 gigabit (shared) fiber with really intense regulation.

What lessons are there in all this for the United States, which historically has had an aversion to Asian-style industrial policy?

Finding a way to bring broadband to remote and rural locations where it is simply uneconomic for commercial companies to string wires is one clear option. Much of the $7 billion for broadband in the stimulus bill is allocated to this, but more will likely be needed to get the sort of universal coverage that Sweden and some other countries have.

The government also could help the people who don’t use the Internet because they don’t have the skills or even have a computer. The stimulus bill has some money for this. There are also some proposals to redirect some of the Universal Service Fund money now used to pay the operating costs of rural phone companies to rural broadband providers.

And of course if regulators can find a way to increase competition and lower the price of broadband, more people would no doubt sign up. Studies have shown that people in the United States with incomes under $50,000 are far less likely to have broadband service than those who earn more. Some argue that devoting more spectrum to wireless data services may also create more competition, but there is quite a debate about whether wireless service can match the speed and cost of cable or fiber.

But the biggest question is whether the country needs to actually provide subsidies or tax breaks to the telephone and cable companies to increase the speeds of their existing broadband service, other than in rural areas. Many people served by Verizon and Comcast are likely to have the option to get super-fast service very soon. But people whose cable and phone companies are in more financial trouble, such as Qwest Communications and Charter Communications, may well be in the slow lane to fast surfing. Still, it’s a good bet that all the cable companies will eventually get around to upgrading to the faster Docsis 3 standard and the phone companies will be forced to upgrade their networks to compete.

The lesson from the rest of the world is that if the Obama administration really wants to bring very-high-speed Internet access to most people faster than the leisurely pace of the market, it will most likely have to bring out the taxpayers’ checkbook. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/0...more-fiber/?hp





Google to Base Ads on Surfing Behaviour
David Meyer

Google is to start serving advertisements to its users based on their browsing habits, the web giant announced on Wednesday.

The company already offers advertising related to the site being surfed — so long as that site is a Google AdSense partner or YouTube. But the beta test of what Google calls "interest-based" advertising will take a wider view of the user's surfing habits to target served ads even more accurately. The service will launch on 8 April.

"These ads will associate categories of interest — say sports, gardening, cars, pets — with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view," Google's vice president of product management, Susan Wojcicki, wrote on the official Google blog. "We may then use those interest categories to show you more relevant text and display ads."

The new ad-serving system works by downloading a DoubleClick cookie to the user's browser to track their path through various AdSense-using sites. DoubleClick is an ad-serving company that was acquired by Google last year.

As with any other cookie, this tracking file can be cleared by the user at any time. By visiting , the user can opt out of having their surfing habits tracked, or input their own preferences for the subject matter of ads they would like to see.

However, as clearing the browser's cookies would effectively remove the opt-out cookie itself, Google has also released a that provides a permanent opt-out from the service.

Google is keen to stress the transparency of its approach. "We already clearly label most of the ads provided by Google on the AdSense partner network and on YouTube," Wojcicki wrote. "You can click on the labels to get more information about how we serve ads, and the information we use to show you ads. This year we will expand the range of ad formats and publishers that display labels that provide a way to learn more and make choices about Google's ad serving."

A spokesman for Google told ZDNet UK on Wednesday morning that the company had "gone beyond the industry standard" for privacy in contextual advertising. "We were never going to be comfortable doing it unless we could offer this choice for the users," the spokesman said.

Asked whether there were any comparison to be made with Phorm, the ad-serving company that drew protests when it conducted user-monitoring trials with BT without first informing the subjects, the spokesman said Google had "been open and transparent from the start".

At a protest against the trials of the ad-serving technology, peers, protesters and BT shareholders aired their grievances...

"The ads won't start being served across the network until 8 April," Google's spokesperson said. "Our AdSense partners are being given a month's notice. With all our AdSense partners, if they want to opt out of this sort of technology, they can. We hope that the more relevant ads are, the more advertisers would be prepared to pay for them at auction." He added that Google hopes publishers will be as positive about this technology as the advertisers themselves.

In a statement, Google also addressed the opt-out nature of the service, which means users need to make a conscious decision to stop being tracked.

"Offering an opt-in would go against the very economic model of the majority of content on the internet," Google's statement read. "Consumers prefer to see more relevant advertising, which in turn fuels many of the services on the internet. We don't want to go against a model that is giving consumers the benefits they need out of it. If certain users prefer not to receive interest-based ads, we believe that we give them clear information and tools to make that choice."

The Information Commissioner's Office also released a statement, in which it said it had spoken to Google about the service and was satisfied the company was giving users enough control over their data.

"Transparency and choice are important elements when addressing any consumer concerns about privacy and the monitoring of browser activity," the ICO's statement read. "In light of this, we are pleased that the preference manager feature allows users a high level of control over how their information is used, and that the method by which users can choose to opt out is saved permanently."
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,1...9625962,00.htm





Can Peer-to-Peer Coexist with Network Security?
Elinor Mills

Security experts have long cautioned about the risk posed by the use of peer-to-peer file sharing by individuals working in corporations, warning that the practice creates holes that let malware in and sensitive data out.

Their message may be having an impact in the P2P development community.

A trade group representing peer-to-peer file sharing providers next week will publish a report that finds P2P software companies are modifying their programs in an effort to make it harder for users to inadvertently share sensitive information.

For corporate IT administrators, that shift can't come soon enough. The problem was highlighted by the recent news that avionics blueprints of President Obama's helicopter had leaked through a peer-to-peer network used by a defense contractor to an IP (Internet Protocol) address in Iran.

This isn't the first time sensitive data has trickled out via popular file sharing networks. Last summer, personal information of some 1,000 former patients of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center was believed to have been leaked via a peer-to-peer network. Sensitive health care and financial data has also been found on file sharing networks, according to studies from Dartmouth College and P2P network monitoring service provider Tiversa, which also uncovered the leaked presidential helicopter data.

Peer-to-peer use at ABN Amro and Pfizer led to the exposure of personally identifiable information of more than 20,000 consumers in 2007. And then there was the symbolic slap in the face when politicians called P2P networks a potential "national security threat" at a congressional hearing that summer.

Employees: The weak link

The problem, experts say, is that employees are violating corporate policy by using P2P at work or on work laptops to download MP3 files, or they take the work laptop home and their children install file-sharing software on it.

Ninety-three percent of P2P disclosures in the enterprise are inadvertent, said Tiversa Brand Director Scott Harrer. "You can't really guard against human error," he said.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the employees also tend not to be savvy enough to configure the settings so as to protect files they don't want to share from being distributed.

"The default settings tend to err on the side of being more open than more closed," Mark Loveless, a research scientist at technology non-profit Mitre, said on Thursday. This mirrors the security-versus-usability trade-off that software and Web services providers, like Microsoft and Google, often find themselves making.

If the P2P user isn't careful in establishing a shared folder for other users of the file sharing network to access, sensitive files anywhere on the computer can be exposed. For instance, a user can inadvertently open up files in the "My Documents" folder or anywhere in the entire C: drive.

"There are methods to configure the software to only share from a particular directory," said Loveless. "But you're talking about someone who has problems, in many cases, using Microsoft Word or corporate e-mail, apps they've had training on. So I would not expect them to necessarily know how to go about that and correct it."

Beyond having default settings that err on the side of openness and not security, the software is also designed to circumvent firewalls and other attempts to block it, Loveless said.

"P2P programs will use encrypted and sophisticated protocols to be able to talk to the Internet and evade (network monitoring) tools," he said. "They'll use multiple ways to try to get out on the Internet, undetected."

Historically, P2P programs used one specific TCP/IP port for the traffic, but now they can pick a random port to use or they use Port 80, which is used for all kinds of Web traffic, thus thwarting administrator attempts to block P2P traffic by plugging the port, said Sam Hopkins, the co-founder and chief technology officer at Tiversa.

The software also has tricks to get access to files behind firewalls. If a user wants something that is on a computer that is located behind a firewall, the system can communicate behind the scenes to get a third computer to ask the firewall protected computer to send the file out to the seeking user, he said.

And some of the P2P programs can be buggy, particularly software written by young enthusiasts as opposed to paid professionals. Meanwhile, P2P files are being used to spread viruses and other malware to unsuspecting downloaders. For instance, a Trojan circulated on BitTorrent in January in pirated copies of iWorks 09.

There is also malware that can automatically scan a computer and when it finds a media file anywhere on the system it changes the P2P software configuration to share the entire drive the media file is in, Hopkins said.

Minimizing the risk

IT administrators need to have a written policy that specifies whether or not employees are allowed to use file sharing. And they need to use perimeter security software, including firewall and intrusion detection, "to lock down the ports used by P2P or to look for specific P2P network traffic," said Tony Bradley, director of security at Evangelyze Communications, a unified communications software and service provider.

Corporations also might consider encrypting sensitive information and using data loss prevention tools to block data leakage, experts said. And if they want to see if any of their data has found its way onto a P2P network, they can hire Tiversa to probe Gnutella, eDonkey and FastTrack file-sharing networks.

Tiversa probes the networks, searching for specific terms and lets customers know when it finds any data out there specific to that firm and helps pinpoint the source of the leak and stop it.

After lawmakers accused them of being part of the problem nearly two years ago, P2P providers and their trade group--the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA)--formed a working group to figure out ways to minimize the risk for P2P users and their networks. The DCIA prepared a report dated Thursday on the Inadvertent Sharing Protection Compliance that lists guidelines for better protecting P2P users and percentages of its members who are following them.

The latest version of popular file sharing software, released earlier this year, LimeWire 5, includes a number of the suggested changes and served as a "poster child for compliance," said Marty Lafferty, chief executive of the DCIA.

The report shows 100 percent compliance with the guideline that recommends that default settings prohibit the sharing of user-originated files, while 57 percent of the respondents said they were complying with the guideline to offer a simple way for the user to disable the file-sharing functionality.

Other guidelines, with compliance percentages ranging from 29 percent to 71 percent, included requiring users to select individual files within a folder to share rather than sharing the entire folder, requiring the user to take affirmative steps to share sensitive folders and preventing the sharing of a complete network or external drive or user-specific system folder, such as "Documents and Settings." Among the guidelines are requirements for warnings to the user when particular settings might jeopardize security.

"We were concerned about user error in earlier versions of file sharing software where it was easier for users to make those mistakes," Hopkins said. "But a lot has been done to close those loopholes for the new versions."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10190426-83.html





Fake aXXo Torrents Bombard BitTorrent
enigmax

Uploading fakes to BitTorrent is a growing phenomenon, as unscrupulous individuals try to abuse the networks for their own ends. Just lately, some people have even been offering users money to post suspect torrents and this morning, a flood of hundreds of fake aXXo torrents were uploaded to Mininova.

Uploading fake files to file-sharing networks is nothing new. Older networks such as KaZaA’s FastTrack and LimeWire’s Gnutella have long been a haven for junk and malicious files but as more and more people migrated to BitTorrent, it naturally became a target.

Uploading fakes to a BitTorrent network is relatively easy, but keeping the torrents active is a much more difficult task. The moderation teams on private trackers remove fakes as soon as they appear - if people are stupid enough to even try to upload them. Other directories such as The Pirate Bay and Mininova, however, are more difficult to police due to their open nature but these sites continually battle fakes too.

There are several forces driving this phenomenon. Of course, the likes of the MPAA and their partners like to upload fakes in order to waste downloader’s time and to monitor their activities. That said, there are others who are uploading fakes in order to make themselves money, with many of the fakes simply encouraging the use of malware such as Domplayer, or sending the user ostensibly to get passwords to view the video, but in reality directing them to spammy sites.

Unless you’ve been on Mars for a few years, you will be aware that aXXo is one of the strongest BitTorrent-related brands and as such, the aXXo name is ripe to be exploited with fake torrents and the schemes behind them. This morning, Mininova was bombarded with hundreds of fake aXXo torrents linking to various malware and spam schemes. Luckily the moderation staff at Mininova are very much on the ball, and their skills and experience allowed them to remove them very quickly. Indeed, the thousands of users at Mininova also help by informing the site that a torrent is not what it should be, but it’s an on-going battle.

When a fake is removed from the site, the IP address of the uploader is also banned, meaning that unless the uploader gets himself a new IP, he won’t be able to upload any more. However, the problem is a lot deeper than just the odd person here and there uploading a fake. Just recently malware and spam peddlers have been advertising online for people to work for them on a freelance basis, uploading fakes to torrent sites and getting paid for each one. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people have taken them up on their offers, getting paid around 20 cents for each successful upload. The scammers mitigate the effects of their worker’s IPs being banned by torrent sites by advertising for people with dynamically assigned IP addresses, while encouraging them to use proxies.

We spoke with Moe1210 at Mininova who told us that for them, although time consuming, the aXXo fakes are easiest to spot, and they are often removed from the site in a matter of minutes. However, due to these teams of hired individuals doing the uploading, the sheer number of fake torrents is significant. Even though the mod team are checking the site every 5 minutes, sometimes in that period 50 fakes could’ve been uploaded. On a regular day, the amount of fakes uploaded can reach 2,500.

In the ongoing battle the scammers are getting a little smarter, adjusting the way they operate as the challenge is met by Mininova. They became aware that at certain times of the day the fakes stayed on Mininova for longer periods before being removed, which was down to fluctuating staffing levels due to people having to sleep, rest and venture back into real-life every now and again. To counter this, Mininova now have a worldwide team which cover the major time zones.

Speaking of fake aXXo torrents, Moe1210 told TorrentFreak, “It’s a pretty pointless task uploading a torrent with aXXo in the title trying to trick people [on Mininova]. I’d say that 75% - 80% of our members know that if the torrent is not from aXXo’s account, its fake - meaning, if they check the ‘general’ tab and aXXo’s name is not in red letters, it’s fake! They [the scammers] have no way of spoofing this.”

Many fake torrents are using a tracker located at http://bt9.c7q.fast1010.info, which is hosted with Ecatel in The Netherlands. In order to trick users into believing the torrents it tracks are real, the tracker is faking the download statistics, as can be seen with this fake on TorrentPortal, which at the time of writing is reporting 76278 seeders and 82380 leechers.

The torrent contains an unusable video and a password.html file which claims to reveal a password to play the file, but instead leads the user into a quagmire of spammy sites.

Users looking to avoid these fakes should read our previous article entitled Stop Downloading Fakes and Junk From BitTorrent. In the meantime be aware that the same people behind the aXXo fakes are behind file names such as ‘Race to Witch Mountain 2009 DVDRIP XviD BangeR’, and ‘Watchmen 2009 DVDRIP SeedeRz’.

As a final thought, TorrentFreak asked Ecatel if they intend to do anything about the fakes tracker. They told us, “Ecatel does not allow any spam and malware in its network.” And then it became clear. The tracker hosted at Ecatel doesn’t host the content, the users do - like all trackers. Sometimes the law’s such an ass.
http://torrentfreak.com/fake-axxo-to...orrent-090313/





It's Not a Crime to Download, Say Musicians
Arifa Akbar

Musicians including Robbie Williams, Annie Lennox, Billy Bragg, Blur's David Rowntree and Radiohead's Ed O'Brien said last night that the public should not be prosecuted for downloading illegal music from the internet.

The Featured Artists Coalition, which consists of 140 of Britain's biggest rock and pop stars, said at its inaugural meeting that companies such as MySpace and YouTube should be required to remunerate the artists when they use their music for advertising.
Bragg told The Independent that most of the artists had voted against supporting any move towards criminally prosecuting ordinary members of the public for illegally downloaded music.

The musicians will express their views to Lord Carter, who suggested that individuals downloading music illegally should be brought to justice.

While Lennox was not able to attend the meeting, she sent a message of support, as did Peter Gabriel, while David Gray, Fran Healy from Travis, Pink Floyd's Nick Mason and Mick Jones from The Clash turned up in support.

Bragg was speaking as a key member of the coalition, which was set up to give a collective voice to artists who want to fight for their rights in the digital world. It is pushing for a fairer deal for musicians at a time when they can use the internet to forge direct links with their fans. "What I said at the meeting was that the record industry in Britain is still going down the road of criminalising our audience for downloading illegal MP3s," he said.

"If we follow the music industry down that road, we will be doing nothing more than being part of a protectionist effort. It's like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.

"Artists should own their own rights and they should decide when their music should be used for free, or when they should have payment."

The artists wanted to tell Lord Carter "that we want to side with the audience, the consumer".

O'Brien said it was a "defining time for the industry", adding: "A lot of the rights and revenue streams are being carved up, and we need a voice... I think all the major players want to hear what we have to say."
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...s-1643217.html





Math Whiz, Dead for 450 Years, Gets TV Bill

A German mathematician who died 450 years ago has been sent a letter demanding that he pay long-overdue television license fees, residents at his former address said on Wednesday.

Germany's GEZ broadcast fee collection office sent the bill to the last home address of Adam Ries, an algebra expert who bought the house in 1525. A club in his honor was set up at the property four centuries later.

"We received a letter saying 'To Mr Adam Ries' on it, with the request to pay his television and radio fees," said Annegret Muench, who now heads the club.

Muench returned the letter to the GEZ with a note explaining the request had come too late because Ries had died in 1559, centuries before the invention of television and radio. She nonetheless received a reminder a few weeks later.

This was not the first time the GEZ had sent a bill to those in the afterlife. Last year, a school named after poet Friedrich Schiller received a reminder asking him to declare all radios and televisions in his home and pay the corresponding fees.

(Reporting by Franziska Scheven; Editing by Katie Nguyen)
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddly...52B5L120090312


















Until next week,

- js.



















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