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08-12-10, 07:33 AM
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Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 11th, '10
Since 2002
  "22 scientists are working full time in the P2P research team I’m coordinating at Delft University of Technology. A lot of the algorithms and Open Source code we write ends up in Tribler. Roughly 6 other universities or organisations contribute code regularly to Tribler. It’s by far the largest science-driven P2P effort around." – Johan Pouwelse "The amount of resources it would take to investigate people’s online activity to the extent that you get judicial proof of the download is economically inefficient. It’s not going to work." – Nicole Kobie "I oppose DDoS attacks regardless of their target. They're the poison gas of cyberspace." – John Perry Barlow "If I lose there won't BE an Internet in Canada." – Jon Newton December 11th, 2010  White House to Continue Copyright Crackdown Tony Romm The Obama administration is ramping up its mission to shut down websites that illegally share copyrighted content, such as movies and music. White House intellectual property czar Victoria Espinel said Monday that the Internet community should “expect more” pre-emptive action as the administration combats online copyright infringement — especially the illegal copying and sale of pharmaceutical drugs. “We are going after the piraters and counterfeiters,” Espinel said at a Brookings Institution conference on Internet policy, adding that intellectual property infringement poses a “direct threat” to consumers and costs jobs. Espinel’s remarks come just after the Justice Department shuttered more than 80 websites believed to be facilitating the sale of counterfeit goods and the sharing of illegally obtained movies, music and TV shows. That effort, timed for “Cyber Monday,” was the second leg of the agency’s Operation In Our Sites II campaign. The Justice Department’s announcement won praise from the entertainment industry and renewed interest on Capitol Hill for legislation that would grant the administration additional power to close down suspected rogue websites. “The innovative use of the tools currently available to law enforcement to seize these domain names is similar to the remedy that would be specifically authorized under the bipartisan Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act for websites that are registered in the United States,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who sponsored the legislation. “We can no longer sit on the sidelines while American intellectual property is stolen and sold online using our own infrastructure,” he said in a statement. Espinel hinted that the administration’s copyright protection push could extend to target counterfeit drugs sold on the Web. Espinel said she and others had held a “series of meetings with Google, GoDaddy, American Express, Microsoft and others to see what we can do about online pharmacies.” She said an announcement would come in “the weeks ahead.” http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46003.html  US Praised Swedes' Work in File Sharing Fight The United States and Sweden have worked closely with one another to combat illegal file sharing, documents released by WikiLeaks reveal. A report from the US embassy in Stockholm explains how US diplomats presented six points to Swedish authorities about file sharing and copyright infringement, Sveriges Television (SVT) reports. One year later, the United States felt that Sweden had addressed five of the six points, including measures that would allow police and prosecutors dealing with copyright infringement to gain access to IP-numbers, as well as public awareness campaigns in Swedish schools about copyright laws and contacts with internet service providers. In its cables, the American embassy reported that file sharing is a sensitive issue in Sweden, but that there had been good cooperation behind the scenes. But according to Swedish justice minister Beatrice Ask, Sweden hasn’t simply followed US demands on the issue. “We didn’t carry out changes after pressure from some other country. We address issues based on our own grounds,” Ask told SVT. She added that the measures implemented by Sweden reflect those which have been discussed internationally. “It’s quite possible that you check off what you think different countries have done,” said Ask. The leaked US diplomatic cable also hints at a conflict between the justice and enterprise ministries about how to deal with the question of file sharing. The document also reveals that the US embassy was against placing Sweden on a ‘black list’ of countries that sanction internet piracy maintained by the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), arguing that doing so would only boost support for the pro-file sharing Pirate Party. Following the SVT report, Pirate Party deputy party leader Anna Troberg issued a statement criticizing the Swedish government’s “weakness” in the face of “American special interests”. “It’s naturally fun to see that the Pirate Party’s hard work didn’t escape the eye of the United States, but it would have been even nicer if the Swedish government had chosen to play with an open hand,” she said. http://www.thelocal.se/30686/20101208/ Wikileaks Cables Reveal that the US Wrote Spain's Proposed Copyright Law Cory Doctorow Spain's Congress is about to vote on a new and extremely harsh copyright/Internet law. It's an open secret that the law was essentially drafted by American industry groups working with the US trade representative. But it gets gets more interesting: 115 of the Wikileaks cables intercepted from the US embassy in Madrid were tagged with "KIPR" -- that is, relating to "intellectual property," The big question has been: will El Pais, the Spanish newspaper that has the complete trove of Wikileaks cables, release them in time to affect the vote on the new law? Well, now they've started. The first 35 of the 115 cables have been released, and they confirm the widespread suspicion: the Spanish government and the opposition party were led around by the nose by the US representatives who are the real legislative authority in Spain. So here's the new question: when the Spanish Congress votes on America's copyright law this month, will they vote for their sovereignty, or act like a US puppet state? Quote:
MPAA Reminding Universities They Need To Crack Down On File Sharing -- Leaves Out How It Lied To Get The Law Passed Mike Masnick Back in 2008, we wrote about how the MPAA convinced Congress to pass legislation to make colleges and universities responsible for reducing copyright infringement on campus or lose federal funding. The law was really a trial run of sorts -- an attempt to see how this could work for making ISPs responsible. Of course, in order to get the law passed, the MPAA flat out lied. It made up numbers, saying that 44% of "losses" from file sharing came from college campuses. This number was so ridiculously wrong that the MPAA later claimed "human error" before saying the number was really 15%. But even that was dubious -- and when the GAO asked the MPAA to support these numbers, the MPAA refused to provide the data. Pretty telling. So, the entire law was passed under totally false pretenses. If Congress had any sense of what's right, it would repeal the law. But, instead, the law went into effect recently, and now the MPAA is sending out letters reminding universities that they need to start acting like copyright cops. Of course, they leave out the fact that they got the law put in place by lying to Congress. Funny how they would omit that. So, kids, the lesson of the day is: it's okay to lie to Congress to force colleges to spend money to protect your obsolete business model, but sharing a movie you really liked with a friend is evil. Makes sense. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...w-passed.shtml Single Software Licence Shared 774,651 Times Nicole Kobie A single licence for Avast security software has been used by 774,651 people after it went viral on a file-sharing site, according to the company. Avast noticed that a license for its paid-for security software, sold to a 14-user firm in Arizona, was being distributed online. Rather than shut down the piracy, the company decided to see how far the software would spread. The Avast Pro licence showed up on file-sharing sites, and a year and a half later it had topped three-quarters of a million active users. “We found our licence code at a number of warez sites around the globe,” said Vince Steckler, chief executive of Avast Software. “There is a paradox in computer users looking for ‘free’ antivirus programs at locations with a known reputation for spreading malware.” The licence is being used in 200 countries – and has even been installed on two computers in the Vatican City, Avast added. “It was quite interesting how fast it went, but at some time the party has to end,” Avast spokesman Lyle Frink told PC Pro. The company is turning the piracy into a marketing opportunity, looking to flip users of the pirated version to genuine software by popping up a notice on machines with the illegally-shared edition offering a link to the free or paid-for versions. While Frink had no data about exactly how many pirates had chosen to go legitimate, he said there had already been “some conversions”. He added: “It’s going according to plan.” Steckler told PC Pro that the Arizona firm has had their license replaced. "We also reminded them to keep their licenses secure." http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/security...-774-651-times Google to Buy Anti-Piracy Software Firm Widevine Google Inc has agreed to buy Seattle-based anti-piracy software firm Widevine in a bid to boost its online video services, the world's dominant Internet search company said on its official blog. No price was disclosed, but the software firm has raised more than $65 million from investors including Cisco Systems, the Seattle Times reported on Friday. Widevine's digital-rights management software is used by 250 million Web-connected TVs and other Web-connected devices to protect video content from unauthorized use, the Seattle Times said. "We're excited to welcome the Widevine team to Google, and together we'll work to improve access to great video content across the web," Google vice president Mario Queiroz said on the company's official blog. Mountain View, Calif.-based Google's purchase of Widevine comes amid reports that Chicago-based Internet company Groupon Inc rejected Google's $5 billion to $6 billion takeover bid. Groupon owners Eric Lefkofsky and Andrew Mason want to keep the fast-growing company independent and possibly pursue an initial public offering instead, the Chicago Tribune reported, citing two sources with direct knowledge of the situation. Groupon, one of Chicago's fastest-growing companies, offers daily Internet deals from local businesses on everything from lobsters to massages. Google sought to buy the company to expand into local search advertising. (Reporting by Ann Saphir, editing by Philip Barbara) http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6B31M620101204 Q&A: Why Money Doesn't Motivate File-Sharers Nicole Kobie Piracy is so difficult to battle because file-sharers are motivated by altruism and not financial gain, according to one academic. Joe Cox, an economist at the Portsmouth Business School, believes file-sharers who post content online see themselves as the "Robin Hoods of the digital age," according to a study he's published in the journal Information Economics and Policy. Such insight could help drive policy and find ways to prevent illegal downloads, he claims. We spoke to him to find out more. Q. Why did you decide to look at file-sharing? A. A lot of the academic effort which has focused on file-sharing has been on lost revenues, to say how much the record industry and the film industry has lost as a result of people illegally downloading content. I was more interested in the behavioural motivations. To me it seems pretty obvious why you might want to illegally download a music track or a film or a video game, but what I was really interested in is the people who make the content available in the first place, because there doesn’t seem to be much to be gained for them, at least not materially. They presumably already bought the material to make it available in the first place. I called them seeders – it’s a pretty standard term for people who make the material available – distinguishing them from leechers, who just take material from others but don’t give any back. I’ve never seen anything published which looks at those two groups to look at their different motivations. Q. What was the motivation for seeders? A. For the leechers, pretty obviously, the major motivation was financial. They wanted to acquire music or films without paying for it because it was cheaper than going out to buy it. What was interesting was the difference with the seeders, and it was quite apparent that financial motivations were nowhere near as prevelant; it was a kind of altruism. Their main motivation was that they were seeking notoriety, peer recognition, peer esteem, some sort of feeling of getting one over on the system. It was a much richer tapestry of different things contributing to the decision to go ahead and make the content available. Q. With that in mind, how should illegal sharing be prevented? A. The survey data suggested there was a deep-seated belief that this type of activity shouldn’t be illegal, that there was no criminal act involved. That makes it very hard to deter with advertising to suggest that you’re funding (#) piracy, that you’re a cheap knock-off merchant, because they believe what they’re doing is morally right. And it’s these guys that record labels and movie studios are most interested in getting to. They're the source. Q. You've said the Digital Economy Act won't work, so what do you suggest? A. Technology has developed to such a point now that you can’t turn back the clock and you can’t change the digital revolution – it’s a bit like King Canute trying to halt the advance of the tides. I think there needs to be a more radical rethink in how the arts and the creative industries are funded. The phenomena of the record label and the movie studio pretty much come into their own in the 20th century and I think they are a 20th century phenomena. Before that opera, ballet, and music were funded on a system of patronage. I think we need to consider potential funding from the public sector. Coming at this from an economics perspective – I’m an economist – we have a particular type of common good that we look at, called a public good. I would argue that these days music and movies are public goods: you can’t really exclude people from using them The characteristics of this are you can’t exclude people from enjoying the benefits of it if they don’t pay for it, and if any one person consumes the good it doesn’t affect anyone else’s ability to consume it too. Classic examples are things like street lighting or national defence. I would argue that these days music and movies are public goods. You can’t really exclude people from using them. The internet is giving them the availability to share this material at will and it’s virtually impossible to stop that. And with the digital nature of material, you can make perfect reproductions and share it to others. What economists say will happen if you have a public good and look to the free market, the market won’t provide any output because everyone will just look to free-ride, and not pay themselves. But if no-one pays the good doesn’t get produced. Q. And public funding is the way to get around that? A. With street lighting or national defence, these are things that government funds through taxation. It would probably be a bit radical to say the government should fund the creative industries through taxation, but there are creative ways knocking around at the moment. For example, you could try introducing non-commercial use levies on iPods or DVD players. It’s a lump sum you would pay over and above the purchase price when you buy the device, with the understand that you’re going to use it to access digital content. If that money was collected into a pot, it could be distributed to record labels and movie studios to give proper compensation to rights owners. And then there could be a relaxation on how people access the material. You could keep track of downloads to make sure the most popular artists get the most money. Find out more File-sharing: the facts ( http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/3543...ring-the-facts ) Virgin was thinking of introducing a service where you pay a flat fee and you can access all the content, the music and movies, you want. I think that’s the direction we need to look towards, because trying to prevent people from file-sharing is foolishness. The amount of resources it would take to investigate people’s online activity to the extent that you get judicial proof of the download is economically inefficient. It’s not going to work. http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/intervie...e-file-sharers File Sharing, The Ultimate Social Media Activity Rachets Up With Michael Jackson Release Ron Callari From the days of Napster to Peter Sunde most recently facing millions in damages and an actual prison sentence for his illegal music and video sharing on The Pirate Bay, torrent files are prompting the government to intervene. And with the release of Michael Jackson's posthumous album "Michael" being leaked via file-sharing sites this week, Big Brother may enact more forceful censorship laws. Due out next week, the much anticipated Michael Jackson album has already been leaked on the Internet. Based on a TMZ post, it was reported that all 10 of the disc's tracks are being distributed by file-sharing sites. And "unless Sony Music authorized it -- this is a clear case of illegal piracy," notes the report. However according to Mashable, Sony declined to comment. Three cuts from the album have already circulated the Web, including "Much Too Soon" on the social network Ping last week and "Hold My Hand" debuted in late November on Jackson's official Web site. "Breaking News" which many suspect was sung by an impersonator was found on the Internet as early as November 8. Mashable reported that album and movie leaks are very common on the Web. Most recently, Kanye West's "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" leaked before it was officially released for sale and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, Part 1 was also available before the movie debuted. So how is the government reacting to these "blurred lines" of file-sharing. In late November, the US government seized and shuttered Torrent-Finder.com due to intellectual property concerns including copyright infringement and trafficking in counterfeit goods. According to the founders of the site, they told bloggers that the seizure was conducted "without any previous complaint or notice from any court." The Web watchdog group Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that more serious measures are in the government's pipeline. The "Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act" (COICA) is an Internet censorship bill which is rapidly moving through the Senate. Although "it is ostensibly focused on copyright infringement, an enormous amount of non-infringing content, including political and other speech, could disappear off the Web if this bill passes," the report states. While music and video are intellectual property owned by private entities, many of these file-sharing sites have been used for legitimate purposes. For instance, if anyone is familiar with Dropbox, this site is an excellent tool for sending large files that are too sizable to be send by emails. I, personally sent a file of a document that came in at 200 megs. Dropbox was ideal for building a Web link and sending the link to the recipient of the file. The entire process took less than 5 minutes and avoided sending a DVD by snail mail. However, if this bill passes, the list of targeted sites could include Dropbox, in addition to MediaFire, Rapidshare and others. According to EFF, "indeed, had this bill been passed five or ten years ago, YouTube might not exist today - in other words, the collateral damage from this legislation would be enormous." http://inventorspot.com/articles/fil...michael_ jack Piracy Charges Dropped Against Russian Group Clifford J. Levy The authorities have dismissed software piracy charges against one of Russia’s most well-known environmental groups after Microsoft indicated that it would no longer support the case. The police in the Siberian city of Irkutsk raided the offices of the group, Baikal Environmental Wave, in January and confiscated 12 computers, all but paralyzing its operations. Investigators said they believed that Baikal Wave had unlicensed Microsoft software on its computers, but the environmentalists said the motivation was entirely political. The authorities dropped the charges after The New York Times published an extensive account of the case on Sept. 12 that prompted Microsoft to overhaul its policies in Russia. The article described how in Irkutsk and across the country, prosecutors and the police had regularly used the pretext of software piracy investigations to undermine advocacy groups and opposition media outlets. Private lawyers retained by Microsoft had often assisted in these investigations, referring to the company as a victim and asking that criminal charges be brought. The company had rebuffed appeals from those being investigated, saying that it was only following the law. Baikal Wave did not learn that the software piracy case had been closed until recently. After repeatedly asking the Irkutsk police for information, the group said it finally received a terse letter from police officials explaining that they had ended the inquiry on Sept. 22 because of the “absence of a criminal act.” Baikal Wave had from the start maintained that all its software was legal, but the police had continued to pursue the case, and for months, the group had faced the prospect of criminal sanctions, including possible jail time for its leaders. It appears that the authorities could not move forward in part because Microsoft would no longer help them. The day after the article was published in The Times, Microsoft apologized for its role in these cases and indicated it would no longer have any involvement in them. The decision would seem to have made it very difficult for the authorities to deploy what had been an increasingly common law-enforcement tactic against government critics. Microsoft also contacted police officials in Irkutsk and urged them to drop the Baikal Wave case, according to Marina Levina, a spokeswoman for Microsoft in Moscow. “With the benefit of hindsight, we realize we perhaps could have done more” to help Baikal Wave, Ms. Levina said. Galina Kulebyakina, a co-chairwoman of Baikal Wave, said Microsoft’s turnabout had damaged the credibility of the Irkutsk police’s case. “They had no choice but to dismiss the charges,” Ms. Kulebyakina said. She said the authorities have not formally announced their decision because they were embarrassed at how the case had turned out. Baikal Wave has long contended that the police carried out the raid to prevent the group from organizing a demonstration against a decision by Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin to reopen a paper factory that has polluted nearby Lake Baikal for decades. The lake by some estimates holds 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. The police in Irkutsk did not respond to requests for comment. In earlier statements, police officials had said the Baikal Wave inquiry had nothing to do with the group’s activities. In addition to changing its policies in Russia, Microsoft announced a major plan to help the nonprofit sector and to prevent political crackdowns from being carried out by the authorities under the guise of software piracy inquiries. The company said it would provide free automatic software licenses to more than 500,000 advocacy groups, independent media outlets and other nonprofit organizations in 12 countries with tightly controlled governments, including Russia and China. Last month, Microsoft flew several leaders of Russian nonprofit groups, including Ms. Kulebyakina, to New York City for consultations on the free software licenses. The meeting was organized in part by Human Rights First, an American group that has worked closely with Russian advocacy groups, including those subjected to software piracy investigations. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/wo.../06russia.html Thousands of Far Cry File Sharing Defendants Get a Reprieve wconeybeer The United States Copyright Group (USCG) had been ordered by Judge Rosemary Collyer to limit their Far Cry file sharing case to only those defendants over which the District Court of Washington DC had jurisdiction. On Monday the USCG followed through on that request, dropping the number of defendants down to only the 140 who reside in the District of Columbia, from the original 4,577. While it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the legal saga for the 4,437 John Doe defendants who reside outside of Washington DC, it does mean at least a brief reprieve while the USCG regroups before attempts to sue the alleged file sharers in their home jurisdictions. “This is certainly a reassuring decision for file sharing defendants in parallel cases around the country although they remain vulnerable to file sharing suits brought in their home states,“ Doe defense attorney Stewart Kellar told TorrentFreak. The USCG lawyers now have quite a task ahead of them if they want to continue to pursue the rest of the defendants, who reside across dozens of states. Not only will the workload be much more immense, but the expenses associated with filing the cases among several district courts are going to quickly add up to a point where it may no longer be viable to pursue the cases. This isn’t just good news for those involved in the Far Cry case, but it may also spur the same decision for the tens of thousands of other defendants currently facing charges in the Hurt Locker case, as well as in the several porn file sharing cases currently underway. Hopefully we’re seeing the beginning of the end in these mass antipiracy lawsuits. In addition to their newly increased workload, the USCG still has to deal with the class action lawsuit recently filed against them on behalf of the Far Cry defendants. That 96-page long complaint alleges that the USCG is guilty of 25 counts including fraudulent omissions, mail fraud, wire fraud, computer fraud and abuse, racketeering court, fraud on the Copyright Office, and consumer protection violations. Maybe the courts are finally realizing that the USCG is not as righteous as they claim, and are beginning to treat them as such. http://www.myce.com/news/thousands-o...eprieve-37433/ ACS:Law Take Alleged File-Sharers To Court – But Fail On a Grand Scale enigmax Andrew Crossley, owner of the now infamous anti-piracy lawfirm ACS:Law, has always insisted that he has no fear of taking contested file-sharing cases to court. Now it has emerged that he recently tried to get a court to issue default judgments against individuals who offered no defense, but the hearing failed on so many levels its difficult to know where to start. Nevertheless, we’ll have a go. The Patents County Court in the UK has slammed a messy attempt by law firm ACS:Law to get default judgments against 8 internet connection owners who it is claimed infringed or allowed others to infringe copyrights. The case between Media C.A.T Limited and 8 unnamed and unrepresented defendants was heard before Judge Birss QC. ACS:Law must’ve thought they were going to shoot fish in a barrel. What they didn’t expect was that they and Media C.A.T turned out to be the fish and it was the judge, not them, holding the gun. “This judgment deals with a series of Requests for Judgment made by the claimant in eight parallel actions. The claimant is the same but the defendant is a different individual in each case. The cases are separate but they raise issues in common and the requests for judgment were received by the Court at the same time. It is convenient to deal with them together,” began Judge Birss in his ruling. The claimant in the case was Media C.A.T, a company which “represents various owners or exclusive licensees of copyrighted works (“Rights Owners”) to monitor and protect their copyrighted works from acts of infringement.” For those unfamiliar with Media C.A.T, it is a kind of ‘front company’ for rightsholders being represented in the UK’s well known ‘speculative invoicing’ schemes which target illicit file-sharers. It neither produces nor owns any media of its own. Each defendant in the case was described by ACS:Law as either the infringer or “someone authorised by him to use his internet connection, or someone who gained access to the defendant’s internet connection due to the router to that connection having no adequate security..[..]” Monitoring of alleged infringements was carried out by NG3 Systems Limited (a company referred to heavily in the ACS:Law leaked emails). It was noted that the company logged infringements between 30 May 2009 and the end of November 2009. The Particulars of Claim in the case state: “By reason of the infringement(s) the claimant has suffered loss and damages and by this claim seeks compensation for the loss and damages suffered together with an injunction against the defendant to prevent repetition of the infringement and/or an injunction to compel the defendant to take adequate measures to effectively secure their internet connection.” Judge Birss somewhat politely described the cases presented as having “a number of unusual features.” 1. The claimant, Media C.A.T, is not the rights holder of the works in question. A copyright case can only be brought by the owner of a copyright or an exclusive licensee. Indeed, the Judge later noted that: “There is no plea that the works qualify for copyright protection at all.” 2. “The Particulars of Claim include allegations about unsecured internet connections. I am aware of no published decision in this country which deals with this issue in the context of copyright infringement,” wrote Judge Birss. 3. “The plea that ‘allowing’ others to infringe is itself an act restricted by s16 (1)(a) and 17 of the 1988 Act is simply wrong,” noted Judge Birss. “The term used by those sections of the Act is ‘authorising’ and the difference may be very important if the allegation is about unauthorised use of an internet router by third parties.” Judge Birss later noted: “A key part of the plea of infringement rests on an assertion [by ACS:Law] that ‘allowing’ others to infringe is itself an infringing act, when it is not.” 4. “The injunction claimed in the prayer is unusual too,” he continued. “There is no claim for an injunction to restrain copyright infringement, as one would ordinarily expect to see in a copyright claim. The injunction claimed relates to ‘safeguarding’ the defendant’s internet connection. This relates to the previous points.” Judge Birss then goes on to explain that the Particulars of Claim presented by ACS:Law “are defective on a number of somewhat technical but important grounds”, including non-compliance with at least four Civil Procedure Rules. ACS:Law took these cases to court on November 30 where they asked for default judgments, stating: The defendant has not filed an admission or defence to my claim, or an application to contest the court’s jurisdiction and the time for doing so has expired. I request that judgment be entered for an amount including costs, to be decided by the court. In respect of two defendants, the Judge decided that they had failed to respond to court papers, which meant that they were, in principle, in default. However, in three other cases, defendants had actually responded to the court papers with their defense. “There is no conceivable basis for default judgment in these two cases,” wrote Judge Birss. “The requests for judgment should never have been filed.” The Judge offered his summary as follows: “In two cases it appears the defendant is in default, in three others there is simply no evidence proceedings have been served and I refuse to find that they have been and in the final three cases the defendant has responded to the claim, filed a defence and is not in default at all.” The end result was that ACS:Law were denied default judgments in each and every case. “I should end by recording that I am not sorry to have reached the conclusion I have in refusing all the requests for default judgment,” noted Judge Birss, later adding: “In all these circumstances, a default judgment arrived at without notice by means of an essentially administrative procedure, even one restricted to a financial claim, seems to me to be capable of working real injustice.” So, rather than living up to his word that he would bring proper, full and properly defended cases to court, ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley has again taken what will be viewed by many as the coward’s way out. Those same observers will be absolutely delighted that these bullying tactics have failed in such epic fashion. http://torrentfreak.com/acslaw-take-...-scale-101209/ Indie Filmmakers to Refile Piracy Suits Greg Sandoval There appears to be plenty of fight left in Thomas Dunlap, the lawyer who has filed lawsuits against thousands suspected of illegal file sharing this year on behalf of independent film studios, including the makers of the Oscar-winning film "The Hurt Locker." Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver (DGW) set out in February to force people accused of pirating films made by his clients to compensate them for their losses. That goal has lately appeared to be in peril. Yesterday, DGW dropped more than 4,400 defendants from a lawsuit filed earlier this year in federal court on behalf of the makers of the film "Far Cry." Only 140 people remain on the complaint. Rosemary Collyer, the judge in the case, was eager to rule on whether a federal district court in Washington, D.C., was the proper place to hear a case involving thousands of people who resided outside the court's jurisdiction. To decide that issue, the judge needed DGW to provide all the names of the defendants, but the firm sought an unusually long extension before doing that: five years. The judge flatly denied the request. Now, DGW says it will refile the complaints in courts around the country by Thursday. "We have local law firms in most jurisdictions taking the cases directly," Dunlap said in a e-mail exchange with CNET. "So, while we will pursue people ourselves in the D.C. area (Virginia, Maryland), we have a number of other law firms that already have a list of defendants in hand." Some of DGW's legal opponents are skeptical that the firm can afford to pursue these cases in all of the country's 94 federal districts. Carey Lening, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney representing several people accused by DGW, said she has seen signs that indicate people accused by DGW can be found throughout the country. "DGW will have to work and consult with other counsel in order to bring these suits," Lening said. "I don't think they can do it, not unless they want to throw a lot of money away. The music industry filed these cases and it was a loss for them. What we learned was that, sure, you can sue, but then you have to recover the money." And this is only for the movie "Far Cry." Lening said that they will ask judges overseeing DGW's other copyright complaints to follow Collyer's lead. And what about the porn industry's legal efforts? A dozen or more makers of adult films have filed copyright suits very similar to those brought by indie film studios. Could the judges in these cases be influenced by Collyer's decisions? Other important legal issues also confront DGW. Opposing lawyers still argue that it's improper to name hundreds or thousands of people in a single complaint. And some opposing counsel have told CNET that they have clients who refuse to settle and are prepared to challenge the allegations brought by the indie filmmakers in court. DGW has said it will litigate these cases but has yet to make much happen. The entire film industry says piracy takes money out of the pockets of not just movie moguls but those of actors, sound engineers, cameramen, set designers, Teamsters, and anyone involved in filmmaking. Indie studios say they are particularly vulnerable to online file sharing because their profit margins are typically much slimmer and they are without an organized body to help fight them piracy in the way that the six largest studios can lean on their trade group, the Motion Picture Association of America. Lening, who says that she and other copyright attorneys understand the plight of creators, argues that this litigation campaign brought by DGW and indie film studios was the wrong approach. She called the strategy of naming thousands in a single complaint in one court an "abuse of process." Yesterday, Lening and some colleagues were preparing to celebrate DGW's decision to drop the 4,400 defendants. "This is a victory for our side," Lening said. "At a minimum, it gets the action out of Washington, D.C." http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20024868-261.html Jammie Thomas-Rasset Appeals Damages Award in File-Sharing Case A Brainerd mother of four found responsible last month for $1.5 million in damages to the Recording Industry Association of America has filed a motion to remove any award of damages, or at least reduce them. Mark Stodghill A Brainerd mother of four found responsible last month for $1.5 million in damages to the Recording Industry Association of America has filed a motion to remove any award of damages, or at least reduce them. In two earlier trials, Jammie Thomas-Rasset was found liable for distributing 24 songs on the KaZaA peer-to-peer file sharing network. A federal jury in Minneapolis was charged with determining how much money she owed the record companies. After hearing two days of testimony, jurors decided Thomas-Rasset should pay $62,500 for each of the 24 songs she illegally distributed. In her motion filed this week, Thomas-Rasset argues that the recording industry was unable to present evidence of any harm she personally caused the plaintiffs and that any damages permitted under the Copyright Act would be unconstitutional. The recording industry also filed a motion this week seeking that the court amend the judgment to include an injunction prohibiting Thomas-Rasset from further infringing the plaintiffs’ copyrights and ordering her to destroy all copies of sound recordings made in violation of the recording industry’s exclusive rights. Damages in this case have been reduced before. In a June 2009 trial in Minneapolis, a jury found that Thomas-Rasset was liable for $1.92 million in damages, but U.S. District Judge Michael Davis reduced that award to $54,000. The court gave the recording industry the option of accepting the reduced damages or scheduling a separate trial on the issue of damages. That trial was held in November. In the first trial against Thomas-Rasset — the nation’s first music downloading case to go to trial — jurors in Duluth in 2007 found Thomas-Rasset liable for $222,000 in damages. But Davis ruled that he had given jurors an erroneous instruction of law and granted a new trial. Testimony at the trials indicated that more than 1,700 songs were found on Thomas-Rasset’s shared folder, which she was actively distributing to more than 2 million people on the peer-to-peer network KaZaA, but the music companies chose to sue on only 24 of those songs. http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/eve...cle/id/186052/ The 5 Best Torrent Clients For Linux Tim Brookes best torrent clientBitTorrent is a fast, reliable and fairly straightforward way to download files large and small. We’ve got a guide right here. Whether you’re regularly downloading meaty Linux distributions or simply prefer to try-before-you-buy, you’ll be needing a decent torrent client to keep your downloads in check. Windows users have the luxury of uTorrent, which (in my opinion, at least) is pretty much unbeatable if you’re using Bill’s operating system. Unfortunately there’s no uTorrent for Linux, but there are a few decent alternatives. Here is MakeUseOf’s round-up of the five best Torrent clients for the Linux operating system. qBitTorrent As I’ve already mentioned there’s no official uTorrent client for Linux, but qBitTorrent attempts to fill the gap. The goal of the volunteer-led project is to provide a uTorrent-like client on the Linux platform. Written in C++, qBitTorrent provides a familiar and speedy interface complete with an in-built search engine for those hard to find downloads. There’s a whole host of usual features including support for encryption, uPnP, IPv6 and RSS. You can also remotely control qBitTorrent with the web UI. For anyone searching for that replacement for uTorrent on the Linux platform – look no further. Transmission (GNOME) For anyone using the Ubuntu distribution, Transmission will be a familiar client. This is the default bundled client, and for good reason too. Transmission (which is also written in C++) is a basic-yet-functional torrent solution that has a number of powerful features. The client can be configured to watch certain directories, useful in conjunction with Dropbox. Encryption is supported as well as the blacklisting of known “bad” IP addresses. The lack of RSS support and a slightly cumbersome UI are the only real drawbacks to this more than capable torrent client, which is built for simplicity. Vuze Formerly Azureus, Vuze is the only client in this list written in Java. Unfortunately, Java applications are notoriously resource-intensive and Vuze probably isn’t ideal for those of you using older computers. If you’ve got the resources to spare, then Vuze makes for a feature-loaded client declaring itself “the most powerful BitTorrent app on earth”. The team have literally covered everything, with full web UI, encryption, RSS support, IPv6, a fantastic search engine, HD-video playback and more. Vuze is more than a BitTorrent client, with support for transferring to mobile devices including support for Android, iOS and Blackberry devices as well as Xbox 360, PS3, TiVO and Apple TV. Popular amongst Mac users, Deluge is a cross-platform torrent client that’s also compatible with Linux and Windows. It provides a lightweight interface written in Python and C++ for the GTK+ window manager that is reminiscent of Windows client uTorrent. Using libtorrent for its backend, and a choice of frontend interfaces including the GUI, web UI and console, Deluge is another client that packs in the features. There’s full support for encryption, magnet links, uPnP, IPv6 and support for plugins. We’ve raved about it before, and that’s because Deluge is a powerful, clean and attractive choice for your download needs. KTorrent (KDE) Written for the KDE interface, KTorrent is the client of choice for Kubuntu and many other KDE-based distributions. Generally considered the most feature-rich KDE torrent solution, KTorrent has the usual bells and whistles that make for a top torrent client. There’s encryption, RSS support, search, magnet links, uPnP, and remote torrent control via the usual web UI. If you like the look of Deluge, but prefer KDE to GNOME then KTorrent is probably the answer. Provided with Kubuntu, to install on Ubuntu type the following into Terminal: Other Clients These clients didn’t quite make the list, but if you’re still searching then maybe you could try: rTorrent A console-based BitTorrent client for Linux, useful if you spend much of your time slaving over a hot command line. BitStorm Lite A lightweight BitTorrent client that lacks many of the features mentioned in this article. Reminiscent of the original classic BitTorrent client, written for GNOME. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-best-...clients-linux/ Truly Decentralized BitTorrent Downloading Has Finally Arrived Ernesto BitTorrent is a great technology to share files both quickly and efficiently, but like all other P2P-technologies it has an Achilles’ heel. The download process relies in part on central servers that can crash or go offline for a variety of reasons. To address this vulnerability the first truly decentralized BitTorrent/P2P client has been developed, meaning that no central trackers, or even BitTorrent search engines are required to download movies, software and music. BitTorrent is branded as a peer-to-peer technology, but despite this label the downloading process still relies heavily on central servers. In the first place there are the BitTorrent search engines and indexes such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. These are needed to search for content and to grab the .torrent file one needs to download a file. Besides these torrent sites, most BitTorrent downloads are still managed by so-called trackers. These servers coordinate the download process and make sure that people can find others who are sharing the files they want to download. To a certain degree, trackers are no longer needed with ‘trackerless’ technology such as DHT, but even DHT often uses a central server to get a torrent started. Finally central servers are used by moderators to help hunt spam and malware. All file sharing programs without such central checking have become practically useless over time. In the last years these ‘central server’ vulnerabilities have caused a number of minor inconveniences for torrent users. When trackers go offline, downloads usually slow down or may stop entirely, and when a torrent search engine such as The Pirate Bay has technical issues, users have to search for alternatives. To address these issues, ideally BitTorrent downloads should no longer require a central server. P2P technology should not only facilitate the downloading and sharing process, but also the searching and storage of torrent files. This may sound like a technology that might only become available in the distant future, but in reality it already exists. The latest version of the Tribler BitTorrent client (Win, Mac and Linux), released only a few minutes ago, is capable of all the above and many more things that could be described as quite revolutionary. The client combines a ‘zero-server’ approach with features such as instant video streaming, advanced spam control and personalized content channels, all bundled into a single application. The Tribler team has come a long way to reach the point they’re at now. We first reported on the ‘tax-payer-funded’ BitTorrent client in 2006, and in the years that followed tens of millions of dollars have been spent on the client’s development resulting in the latest 5.3 release. Despite the fact that only a few thousand people are using Tribler on a monthly basis, in technological terms it is one of the most advanced clients. People who install the client will notice that there’s a search box at the top of the application, similar to that offered by other clients. However, when one does a search the results don’t come from a central index. Instead, they come from other peers. In fact, Tribler’s search functionality even has an auto-suggest function which is also built to work based on P2P data instead of a central server. Remarkably enough the response times for the searches and the auto suggest are both pretty fast, under a second in 99% of cases. As for the downloads themselves, if one clicks on a ‘torrent’ in the search result, the meta-data is pulled in from another peer and the download starts immediately. Tribler is based on the standard BitTorrent protocol and uses regular BitTorrent trackers to communicate with other peers. But, it can also continue downloading when a central tracker goes down. Tribler users can choose if they want to play the downloading file directly (if it’s video) with the built in VLC player, or wait for it to finish first. In addition to searching for files, users can also create their own channels or subscribe to those of others. Again, this is all based on technology that doesn’t require a central server. Other new features are subtitle integration, support for magnet links and advanced spam controls. Tribler Channels Spam control in a P2P program that actually works is something not seen before. The Tribler spam mechanism revolves around user generated “channels”, which may contain several thousands of torrents. When people like a channel they can indicate this with “mark as favorite”. When more people like a channel, the associated torrents get a boost in the search results. The idea is that spam and malware will automatically be pushed down to non-existence in search results and the majority of users will favor the channels they love. In scientific terms, this is a classic case of survival of the fittest and group selection at work. Again, this is done without central servers. With the combination of P2P-based search, torrent downloads and moderation, BitTorrent sites have been almost rendered obsolete. Although we don’t see torrent sites going away any time soon it’s ‘assuring’ to see that there are alternatives. Tribler’s cutting edge technology allows users to search for torrents and download files without the need for any central server. A revolution, not only for BitTorrent but for P2P in general. As mentioned before, the Tribler project is funded by tax payers money, most of which comes from EU grants. However, according to Dr. Johan Pouwelse, leader of the Tribler project at Delft University of Technology, those who complain that spending all this money on the development of a BitTorrent client is a waste, are wrong. “Tax payer money is going into Internet research, which happens to use a very powerful technology called BitTorrent. That’s different. On a wider scale a few hundred million euros of research money is being spent on making computer networks more robust and improving video streaming. I think that is money well spent,” Pouwelse told TorrentFreak. Eventually, Pouwelse and his team hope to shape the future of Internet-based video delivery, and this won’t just be limited to PCs either. “Our architecture has unbounded scalability and in principle can work on all TVs, phones and other devices in the world simultaneously,” he said. “22 scientists are working full time in the P2P research team i’m coordinating at Delft University of Technology. A lot of the algorithms and Open Source code we write ends up in Tribler. Roughly 6 other universities or organisations contribute code regularly to Tribler. It’s by far the largest science-driven P2P effort around,” Pouwelse added. Aside from the fact that the technology itself is both exciting and fully operational in the real world, there are some issues that have to be overcome. Due to the low userbase of Tribler, the total number of torrents that are findable is relatively low. About 20,000, which is quite low compared to the millions of torrents most BitTorrent sites index. This means that most of the popular content is available but that obscure files will be harder to find. The only way to really change this is when more people start to use the client, which might take a few more domain seizures than we’ve seen thus far. http://torrentfreak.com/truly-decent...orrentfreak%29 ISPs Free To Continue Deleting Evidence Against File-Sharers enigmax Sweden’s highest court has rejected an application by an anti-piracy group which would force an ISP to hand over the identity of a file-sharing site operator. Antipiratbyrån wants TeliaSonera to reveal who is behind the SweTorrents BitTorrent tracker but the ISP has refused and taken its case all the way to the Supreme Court. That Court has now decided that the final decision lies with the European Court. In 2009, four movie studios represented by anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån applied to the Södertörn District Court in a move designed to force ISP TeliaSonera to hand over the identity of a BitTorrent site operator. Later that year the Court announced its decision in favor of the anti-piracy group and ordered TeliaSonera to hand over the personal details of the person alleged to be behind the SweTorrents tracker. TeliaSonera launched an appeal against the decision but in May 2010 the Court of Appeal upheld the District Court’s ruling. Failure to comply with this decision would result in a 750,000 kronor ($109,000) fine. Nevertheless, TeliaSonera were not prepared to accept the decision and immediately appealed and took the case to the highest court in the land. Sweden’s Supreme Court has now ruled that the final decision in the case lies with the European Court in Luxembourg, a decision that might take several years to arrive. The root of the complexity in this case lies with Sweden’s IPRED legislation. Both Antipiratbyrån and the lower courts believe that ISPs have an obligation to hand over to rightsholders identities of customers implicated in copyright infringement cases. On the other hand, TeliaSonera insists that all ISPs have a long-standing and fundamental obligation to protect customer privacy which precedes the introduction of IPRED, while noting conflicts between IPRED and the EU data retention directive which has not yet been implemented in Swedish law. The introduction of IPRED was expected to make it easier to track down file-sharers, but thus far the opposite is true at some ISPs. Since there is nothing in the country’s Electronic Communications Law that instructs ISPs to store information about the IP addresses they allocate to their customers, some ISPs have stopped storing this data to protect the privacy of their customers. The decision by the European Court in the SweTorrents case is likely to be some time coming, and in the meantime ISPs will be free to continue deleting data, at least until the data-retention directive ‘loophole’ is closed. http://torrentfreak.com/isps-free-to...harers-101207/ Eircom Launches Music Service and Recommits to Three-Strikes cmumusicnews 9 The Irish internet service provider which has voluntarily (well, as the result of an out of court settlement in a legal dispute) introduced a three-strikes style system for combating file-sharing, Eircom, yesterday announced the launch of its own streaming music service, the carrot to accompany the three-strikes stick. Eircom's MusicHub offers free Spotify-style streaming, but without the ads, to all of the net firm's existing customers. As you'd expect, playlisting functionality is also included. As well as the streaming music, the MusicHub will also offer a range of bundled download packages where the unit price for each track downloaded could be as low as 32 cents. The latter service will also be available to non-Eircom customers. Although restricted to Ireland, the Eircom digital music platform is interesting beyond the country's borders because it is an example of an ISP collaborating with the record industry to create an engaging competitively priced music service in return for committing to crack down on file-sharers. Many people, on all sides of the three-strikes debate, have long argued that if the record industry worked with ISPs to create compelling music services - giving the net firms a commercial incentive to crack down on file-sharing - then the music business would find internet companies much more willing to help on piracy issues. In the UK there have been few such collaborations. The record companies would probably blame the ISPs for expecting too much for too little, while the net firms would probably argue the label's price point expectations are too high. The closest we've got to a high profile record industry/net company collaboration was Virgin Media's partnership with Universal Music, though their ambitions - unlimited MP3 downloads for a monthly subscription fee - were too grand to get enough of the record industry on board. Launching the new service yesterday, Eircom's Stephen Beynon told CMU: "MusicHub is a major development for Eircom in the online content space. We are the first and only internet provider in Ireland to offer online streaming as part of a music service. Customers will not find a greater selection of music across all genres anywhere else in Ireland from their broadband provider". In a separate statement issued yesterday, Eircom reconfirmed its commitment to operate a three-strikes - or "graduated response" to use their words - system for combating piracy. Warning letters will be sent to customers who content owners believe are illegally file-sharing. Those who fail to heed warnings will have their net connections suspended or ultimately disconnected. Eircom's statement stressed net suspensions was a "measure of last resort". The net firm said that since trialling the three-strikes system in June they have been receiving approximately 1000 complaints a week from content owners about file-sharing customers. Of course, with only Eircom currently operating this system in Ireland, any file-sharers who are threatened with disconnection could take their business elsewhere. The Irish record industry is trying to both persuade and force other net firms to introduce a similar system, but so far without success. Meanwhile, Eircom will be hoping that a portion of those file-sharing are still doing so in ignorance of the law and can be educated to stop. Another portion may be sufficiently impressed with the MusicHub to stop file-sharing so they can stick with Eircom. Any more committed file-sharers may be lost to rivals until any wider three-strikes system can be enforced (although more committed file-sharers are probably now using technology that hides their file-sharing from content owners anyway, so there's a high chance they'll not even be targeted under the three-strikes system). Justifying its involvement in the three-strikes party, while insisting it would not breach its customers' rights in the process, Eircom added: "This company believes that it has a duty to ensure that the rights of artists and the laws of the state, including copyright law, are upheld, and to take action when illegal activity is brought to our attention. Our obligations to our customers remain paramount, and the primacy of their rights, in particular their rights to privacy, are reflected in the phased structure of the [three-strikes] protocol, and in the Eircom MusicHub service launched today. Eircom is of the view that these obligations are part of a role that all responsible companies must serve". http://newsblog.thecmuwebsite.com/po...e-strikes.aspx Government Reveals Super-Fast Broadband Plans BBC Every community in the UK will gain access to super-fast broadband by 2015 under plans outlined today. The private sector is to deliver broadband to two thirds of the UK. Other, mainly rural, areas will receive public funds to build a "digital hub" with a fibre optic internet connection. Ministers say they aim for the UK to have Europe's best broadband network. "The reason we want to do this is very simple -- it's about jobs," says Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt. Speaking to the Today Programme he said the government had a key role in "catalysing investment by the private sector" in broadband. Mr Hunt cited the example of South Korea which has high speed broadband throughout the nation and which was "90%" paid for by private firms. The government has earmarked £830m for the scheme, with some of this money coming from funds given to the BBC to pay for the switch to digital TV. Mr Hunt said the strategy would give the country Europe's best broadband network by 2015 and will be central to economic growth and the delivery of future public services, dependent on quick, reliable access to the internet. Explaining why the government had abandoned the plans of the former administration that promised 2 megabits per second broadband for all by 2012, he said: "It's silly to hang your hat on a speed like two meg when the game is changing the whole time. He added: "What we've said is that just giving people two meg is not enough, what people use the internet for is changing the whole time." A recent study by the regulator Ofcom revealed that fewer than 1% of UK homes have a super-fast broadband connection, considered to be at least 24Mbps. However, the government does not define the minimum speed it hopes super-fast services will achieve. "In order to determine what constitutes 'the best' network in Europe, we will adopt a scorecard which will focus on four headline indicators: speed, coverage, price and choice," the strategy says. "These will be made up of a number of composite measures rather than a single factor such as headline download speed." Difficult-to-reach areas Much of the detail of the government's broadband strategy has previously been announced, including how it will be funded and the coalition's desire to see everyone able to access broadband with speeds of at least 2Mbps by 2015. Labour promised the same minimum speed for everyone by 2012. But the coalition says that it will now roll together its drive for universal access with its strategy to deliver super-fast broadband. At the heart of this is a plan to create a "digital hub" in every community by 2015. "Our goal today is very simple: to deliver a fibre point in every community in the UK by the end of this parliament," Mr Hunt is expected to say when he delivers a speech outlining the strategy at the London headquarters of computer giant Microsoft. Communities and local operators would then be expected to take on the responsibility for extending the network to individual homes. The coalition has earmarked £50m of the £830m to pay for trials - particularly in difficult-to-reach areas - to see how it can ensure that super-fast fibre optic broadband reaches these communities in the timescale. These new trials will run alongside projects in North Yorkshire, Herefordshire, Cumbria and the Highlands and Islands, announced earlier this year. "We will be inviting local bodies and devolved administrations right across the UK to propose new testing projects in April of next year, with a view to making a final selection in May," Mr Hunt will say. In his speech, Mr Hunt will also confirm that the government will sell off parts of the spectrum in 2011 that could be used for mobile broadband services. Back aches The strategy was welcomed by the Independent Networks Cooperative Association (Inca), a group of community broadband schemes. "It is great that the government has taken up the 'digital village pump' idea that has been put forward by a number of broadband champions," said Malcolm Corbett, CEO of Inca. "This could go a long way to tackling one of the big problems with all rural broadband services - the costs of backhaul - the connection from the community to the internet. "However, more needs to be done and the strategy misses some obvious opportunities, not least the way that business rates are levied on fibre." The current regime of levies on fibre installations has been a major bone of contention, with smaller firms claiming they are discriminated against compared to giants BT and Virgin Media. Inca's view was echoed by Trefor Davies, CTO of communications firm Timico. "The problem with this is that it is effectively handing the cash to BT because the fibre tax system will make BT the only company able to offer a competitive backhaul," he said. Both called on government to address the levies and also to ensure that smaller firms had "viable" access to existing infrastructure - such as BT's ducts and poles - that would be used to carry their services. Without this, they said, small firms would be at "a competitive disadvantage" compared to BT when bidding to provide services. Mr Hunt said that BT had signaled that it will match the government's £830m of funding if it is awarded the contract to provide the infrastructure for the community hubs. The firm said that if it was to "win funds on that scale" it would be able to provide fibre to 90% of the UK. Under current plans, its fibre will extend to 66% of the UK, although only a quarter of this would be the faster Fibre-To-The-Home (FTTH) technology. The rest is the slower Fibre-To-The-Cabinet (FTTC), similar to the government's "digital hub" plans, which does not guarantee a super-fast fibre connection all the way to a person's home. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11922424 FCC Member Questions Easy Net Rules for Wireless Jasmin Melvin A plan to give wireless networks more flexibility than their landline counterparts in proposed Internet rules is being questioned by Federal Communications Commission member Mignon Clyburn. In remarks prepared for a conference on Thursday, Clyburn said it was essential that wireless networks "grow in an open way just as our wired ones have." FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski last week laid out what he called "rules of the road" for preserving an open Internet for consumers while giving broadband providers flexibility to manage their networks. His proposal would ban the blocking of lawful traffic while allowing Internet providers to manage network congestion and charge consumers based on Internet usage. Genachowski said the rules should be more flexible for wireless broadband, reflecting that wireless is at an earlier stage of development than terrestrial Internet service. But Clyburn told a telecommunications conference that she had concerns about the wireless aspects of the measure, worried that "two kinds of Internet worlds" could be created by giving concessions to wireless carriers. Any toughening of the approach to wireless Internet could attract opposition from carriers like Verizon Communications Inc and AT&T Inc. It is also unclear whether Genachowski's approach will be sufficient to win over a majority of the five-member FCC at its December 21 meeting. The two Republican commissioners have opposed the rules, saying the Internet is best able to thrive in the absence of regulation. And Genachowski's two fellow Democrats on the panel could withhold support from any measure they view as too weak. Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Commerce subcommittee on communications, technology and the Internet, urged Clyburn and Michael Copps, both Democrats, to support the chairman's open Internet rules. Kerry said in a letter on Thursday that it would be shortsighted to "vote against the good" in favor of "the perfect." Some analysts have said usage-based pricing could benefit landline Internet providers like Comcast Corp and Time Warner Cable Inc, with them charging more for data-intensive activities like the downloading of movies. Clyburn said concluding the open Internet proceeding was on her Christmas wish list. "I, like many of you, am weary of the stand-offs, pontificating, greed wars, and tough guy posturing," she said at the Practising Law Institute's annual telecommunications policy conference. Companies and public interest groups have until December 14 to lobby the commissioners before the FCC's "sunshine" rule kicks in, prohibiting stakeholders from meeting with commissioners in the week before a scheduled meeting. Clyburn said supporting progress and innovation was not mutually exclusive of protecting consumers, pointing to the agency's 2005 policy statement on consumers' right to access lawful Internet content, services and devices. "The predictions of doom and gloom did not come to pass. In fact, what did occur was more innovation and investment," she said. (Reporting by Jasmin Melvin; Editing by Tim Dobbyn) http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6B907920101210 F.C.C. to Hold Forum on Teenagers and Technology Matt Richtel Parents, researchers and educators have been asking whether the spread of mobile devices and Internet access, for all their benefits, can have negative side effects for young people, interfering with homework or leading to cyberbullying. Now the government is asking the same question. The Federal Communications Commission announced this week that it plans to hold a forum on Tuesday at a high school in Washington to address risks associated with heavy technology use among young people. The forum will include panels and conversations with experts about how parents can help young people find balance in their digital diets. The commission noted research showing that mobile phone ownership among children had increased 68 percent in the last five years, and that a typical teenager texts every 10 minutes during waking hours. “It’s the beginning of a process to help inform parents and spark a discussion about a range of issues that parents are concerned about,” Julius Genachowski, the commission’s chairman, said in an interview. He said those issues included how to balance the time young people were spending online and with digital devices, the type of content they were seeing, and social issues, like cyberbullying and inappropriate texting. Mr. Genachowski said he continued to be a strong advocate for the spread of broadband and computer use in general, including in the schools, as a tool for economic growth. And he said the forum was “not about considering regulation.” But he said that “it is natural, as we focus on the opportunities of broadband, to ask about the dangers or risks, particularly with respect to kids.” The forum, called “Generation Mobile,” will also address ways in which companies and entrepreneurs can develop ways to help parents limit children’s use of technology or steer them to more educational content, Mr. Genachowski said. Part of the agenda for the forum was inspired by a series of articles in The New York Times about how heavy technology use affects the way people think and behave, an F.C.C. spokeswoman said. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/1...and-technology As Bullies Go Digital, Parents Play Catch-Up Jan Hoffman Ninth grade was supposed to be a fresh start for Marie’s son: new school, new children. Yet by last October, he had become withdrawn. Marie prodded. And prodded again. Finally, he told her. “The kids say I’m saying all these nasty things about them on Facebook,” he said. “They don’t believe me when I tell them I’m not on Facebook.” But apparently, he was. Marie, a medical technologist and single mother who lives in Newburyport, Mass., searched Facebook. There she found what seemed to be her son’s page: his name, a photo of him grinning while running — and, on his public wall, sneering comments about teenagers he scarcely knew. Someone had forged his identity online and was bullying others in his name. Students began to shun him. Furious and frightened, Marie contacted school officials. After expressing their concern, they told her they could do nothing. It was an off-campus matter. But Marie was determined to find out who was making her son miserable and to get them to stop. In choosing that course, she would become a target herself. When she and her son learned who was behind the scheme, they would both feel the sharp sting of betrayal. Undeterred, she would insist that the culprits be punished. It is difficult enough to support one’s child through a siege of schoolyard bullying. But the lawlessness of the Internet, its potential for casual, breathtaking cruelty, and its capacity to cloak a bully’s identity all present slippery new challenges to this transitional generation of analog parents. Desperate to protect their children, parents are floundering even as they scramble to catch up with the technological sophistication of the next generation. Like Marie, many parents turn to schools, only to be rebuffed because officials think they do not have the authority to intercede. Others may call the police, who set high bars to investigate. Contacting Web site administrators or Internet service providers can be a daunting, protracted process. When parents know the aggressor, some may contact that child’s parent, stumbling through an evolving etiquette in the landscape of social awkwardness. Going forward, they struggle with when and how to supervise their adolescents’ forays on the Internet. Marie, who asked that her middle name and her own nickname for her son, D.C., be used to protect his identity, finally went to the police. The force’s cybercrimes specialist, Inspector Brian Brunault, asked if she really wanted to pursue the matter. “He said that once it was in the court system,” Marie said, “they would have to prosecute. It could probably be someone we knew, like a friend of D.C.’s or a neighbor. Was I prepared for that?” Marie’s son urged her not to go ahead. But Marie was adamant. “I said yes.” Parental Fears One afternoon last spring, Parry Aftab, a lawyer and expert on cyberbullying, addressed seventh graders at George Washington Middle School in Ridgewood, N.J. “How many of you have ever been cyberbullied?” she asked. The hands crept up, first a scattering, then a thicket. Of 150 students, 68 raised their hands. They came forward to offer rough tales from social networking sites, instant messaging and texting. Ms. Aftab stopped them at the 20th example. Then she asked: How many of your parents know how to help you? A scant three or four hands went up. Cyberbullying is often legally defined as repeated harassment online, although in popular use, it can describe even a sharp-elbowed, gratuitous swipe. Cyberbullies themselves resist easy categorization: the anonymity of the Internet gives cover not only to schoolyard-bully types but to victims themselves, who feel they can retaliate without getting caught. But online bullying can be more psychologically savage than schoolyard bullying. The Internet erases inhibitions, with adolescents often going further with slights online than in person. “It’s not the swear words,” Inspector Brunault said. “They all swear. It’s how they gang up on one individual at a time. ‘Go cut yourself.’ Or ‘you are sooo ugly’ — but with 10 u’s, 10 g’s, 10 l’s, like they’re all screaming it at someone.” The cavalier meanness can be chilling. On a California teenage boy’s Facebook wall, someone writes that his 9-year-old sister is “a fat bitch.” About the proud Facebook photos posted by a 13-year-old New York girl, another girl comments: “hideous” and “this pic makes me throwup a lil.” If she had to choose between the life of an animal and that of the girl in the photos, she continues, she would choose the animal’s, because “yeah, at least they’re worth something.” This is a dark, vicious side of adolescence, enabled and magnified by technology. Yet because so many horrified parents are bewildered by the technology, they think they are helpless to address the problems it engenders. “I’m not seeing signs that parents are getting more savvy with technology,” said Russell A. Sabella, former president of the American School Counselor Association. “They’re not taking the time and effort to educate themselves, and as a result, they’ve made it another responsibility for schools. But schools didn’t give the kids their cellphones.” As bullying, or at least conflict, becomes more prevalent in the digital world, parents are beginning to turn out for community lectures, offered by psychologists, technology experts and the police. One weekday night this fall, Meghan Quigley, a mother from Duxbury, Mass., was among the 100 or so parents who attended a panel featuring Elizabeth Englander, a psychologist who consulted on the new Massachusetts bullying law. “I absolutely have to be much more techno savvy than I want to be,” said Mrs. Quigley, who does not know how to text, although two of her children use cellphones just to text their friends. “But it is overwhelming to me.” These lectures typically combine technology primers so elementary that elementary-school children might snicker, with advanced course work in 21st-century child-rearing. Dr. Englander reminded parents that while children may be nimble with technology, they lack the maturity to understand its consequences. Then she demonstrated how to adjust Facebook privacy settings. Many parents peered at her slides, taking notes. Don’t set too much stock in those settings, she said: “ ‘Privacy’ is just a marketing term.” A child’s Facebook friend, she noted, could easily forward the “private” information. In a study last year of 312 freshmen at Bridgewater State University, Dr. Englander found that 75 percent reported that during a typical high school day they had used their cellphones for voice communication 30 percent of the time or less, preferring to use them for texting, sending photos and videos, and surfing the Internet. This is not a “phone,” Dr. Englander told the parents who looked, collectively, shellshocked. What you’ve given your child “is a mobile computer.” If their children get caught in a crisis, she said, parents should preserve the evidence, by taking a screenshot of the offending material. A mother timidly raised her hand. “How do I make a screenshot?” The Bully Next Door Throughout the fall, the Facebook profile set up in D.C.’s name taunted students: “At least I don’t take pics of myself in the mirror like a homosexual midget,” wrote “D.C.” Also, “you smell weird.” And “ur such a petaphile.” At school, students would belligerently ask D.C. why he was picking fights on Facebook. He would eat lunch alone, and skipped some school, insisting that he was ill. “I would always ask him, ‘Are you having a good day?’ ” Marie said. “So he stopped talking to me about anything at school. He was afraid I would make more trouble for him. But the real victim was being ostracized more than the kids who were being bullied on his Facebook page.” She would call Inspector Brunault weekly. Last fall, the detective had to subpoena Facebook for the address of the computer linked to the forged profile. Then he had to subpoena Comcast, the Internet service provider, for the home address of the computer’s owner. Facebook has since made it simpler to report malicious activity. Although Facebook declined to make its head of security available for an interview, a spokesman replied by e-mail that if Facebook determines that a report of an impostor profile is legitimate, “We will provide a limited amount of data that helps the person take steps to repair his or her identity.” Finally, in January, Inspector Brunault told Marie he was getting close. He visited the home address supplied by Comcast. When he left, he had two more names and addresses. A few weeks later, he called Marie. Just before dinner, Marie broke the news to D.C. Two culprits were 14; one was 13. After learning the first two names, D.C. said: “Those guys have never liked me. I don’t know why.” But the third boy had been a friend since preschool. His father was a sports coach of D.C.’s. D.C. was silent. Then he teared up. Finally, he said, “Do you mean to tell me, Mom, that they hate me so much that they would take the time to do this?” Inspector Brunault asked the boys why they had done it. That summer, they replied, they had been reading Facebook profiles of people’s dogs, which they found hilarious. They decided to make up a profile. They picked D.C. “because he was a loner and a follower.” Although the police did not release the boys’ names because they are juveniles, word seeped through town. In the middle of the night, Marie received anonymous calls. “They told me my son should just suck it up,” she recalled. “They said he would be a mama’s boy. They would rant and then they would hang up.” Contacting the Other Parent After Marie learned the identities of her son’s cyberbullies, she did not call their parents. She was so incensed that she communicated only through official go-betweens, like the police and prosecutors. But some parents prefer to resolve the issue privately, by contacting the bully’s family. Psychologists do not recommend that approach with schoolyard bullying, because it can devolve into conflicting narratives. With cyberbullying, a parent’s proof of baldly searing digital exchanges can reframe that difficult conversation. Parents who present the other parents with a printout of their child’s most repugnant moments should be prepared for minimization, even denial. Maj. Glenn Woodson’s daughter, Sierra, has a shortened leg because of a congenital condition. One night, when she was in sixth grade, she received a text message showing a stick figure of her lying prostrate, eyes crossed out, another girl holding a bloody blade over the body. It had been sent by three girls in Sierra’s grade. Major Woodson, who lives on an Army base in Monterey, Calif., contacted the military police. They had a stern sit-down with the families of the three girls. Teachers held a workshop on cyberbullying. Two families apologized to the Woodsons. Finally, the mother of the third girl, the instigator, called. “ ‘It isn’t her fault,’ she said to my wife,” Major Woodson said. “The mom said: ‘I think this is way overblown. My daughter is being punished and she’s not the only one who did it.’ ” The mother did not apologize. What may be offensive in one household may be just a shoulder shrug in another. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Christine, who, like many parents interviewed for this article asked that her last name not be used to protect her child’s identity, selected a school for her daughter largely because it eschewed technology. But when her daughter was in sixth grade, a classmate e-mailed her links to pornography sites. Christine called the boy’s mother. “I asked her to get her son to stop,” Christine said. “She apologized, and her son wrote us a letter of apology. ” But the boy’s father disagreed. “He refused to put limits on the kid,” said Christine, who works in marketing. “ ‘Oh, no, he needs total freedom and he can use his best judgment.’ ” When well-intentioned observers intervene, they can find themselves scorned. Jill Brown, a Westfield, N.J., mother who lectures on cyberbullying through her company, Generation Text, saw something online that disturbed her: a Facebook group sniping at a young girl titled “I Stalk (name deleted) And Her Junior Boyfriend.” The group had some 500 “friends.” The mother of a group founder was a friend of Ms. Brown’s. Ms. Brown suggested her friend look at the site. She asked her not to let her daughter know who blew the whistle. Her friend was polite but distant. By the next day, “The girl had defriended me on Facebook,” Ms. Brown said. “I texted her mother seven times. She ignored me.” Three weeks later, the friend stopped by Ms. Brown’s house for a trunk show. When Ms. Brown asked what had happened to the Facebook group, the woman airily dismissed it as an adolescent joke. Parent-to-parent confrontations can also backfire against the child. In a small Western resort town, Gerrie’s daughter, Michaela, 14, received an obscene, threatening text from a boy who was the star of her ski team. He accused Michaela of having told his girlfriend that he was secretly dating someone else and vowed to ruin Michaela’s life. Michaela stared at the cellphone, tears rolling down her face. She had not informed on him. Gerrie’s husband called the boy’s mother. After seeing the corrosive text, the mother took away her son’s cellphone for a week. The boy made good on his threat. He spread a false rumor that his mother wouldn’t allow him to race, and that Michaela’s snitching was to blame. The news erupted on Facebook. Ski team members ostracized Michaela. She rode the lifts by herself. Before team practices, she would quake and vomit. “I did what I thought was right to help my daughter,” said Gerrie, an art teacher, “and I only ended up making it worse. But when your kid gets a text like that, what are you supposed to do?” Dr. Sabella, the former president of the American School Counselor Association, says that parents should meet in public places, like the library or a guidance counselor’s office, rather than addressing the conflict by e-mail. And the reporting parents should be willing to acknowledge that their child may have played a role in the dispute. To ease tension, suggests Dr. Englander, an expert on aggression reduction, offer the cyberbully’s parent a face-saving explanation. Her model script? “I need to show you what your son typed to my daughter online. He may have meant it as a joke. But my daughter was really devastated. A lot of kids type things online that they would never dream of saying in person. And it can all be easily misinterpreted.” When that conversation is handled deftly, parents can achieve a reasonable outcome. The 14-year-old daughter of Rolin, a Nashville musician, began a relationship with a boy in her church group. But soon his texts and Facebook comments turned sexually graphic and coercive. When she backed away, he tried to isolate her. At a church retreat, he surreptitiously sent texts from her phone to three of her friends, all boys, saying she didn’t want to see them again. She had no idea what he had done: he had deleted the text messages. Those texts stunned her friends. Rolin pieced together what happened and blocked the boy’s number on his daughter’s phone. The boy simply borrowed his friends’ phones. Rolin called the boy’s parents, who agreed to sit down with both teenagers. “It would have been easier to send an e-mail,” Rolin said. “And yes, it was sure awkward to be talking to this 14-year-old kid in front of his parents about what he wrote to my daughter. But we had the proof. “My goal wasn’t to polish my shotgun. It’s not about a show of force but a show of presence. I said, ‘If you want to be friends with her, you can’t text her and you can’t use another boy’s phone.’ ” The boy’s father said Rolin had been easier on his son than the father would have been, had the roles been reversed. Eventually, the relationship cooled on its own. “But I still have his number blocked on her phone,” Rolin said. When the Bully Is Your Child After the police arrested the boys who usurped D.C.’s identity, the parents wrote Marie awkward apology letters. Only one mother phoned, in tears. No matter how parents see their children, learning of the cruelties they may perpetrate is jarring and can feel like an indictment of their child-rearing. One afternoon two years ago, Judy, a recent widow in Palm Beach County, Fla., who had been finishing her college degree, helping a professor research cyberbullying, and working in an office, got a call from the middle school. “Your daughter is involved in a cyberbullying incident,” the assistant principal said. “Come down immediately.” Her daughter and two others had made a MySpace page about another middle-schooler, saying she was a “whore,” with a finger pointing to her private parts. The young teenagers printed out copies and flung them at students. Judy rushed to school. Her daughter, a sweet, straight-A student, was waiting in the guidance counselor’s office, her arms crossed defiantly. “I said to her, ‘This is a human being,’ ” Judy recalled. “ ‘This girl will be destroyed for the rest of her life!’ And my daughter just said: ‘I don’t care. It’s all true.’ And I bawled while she just sat there.” The school suspended Judy’s daughter for three days. “I did not call the target, I’m ashamed to say,” Judy recalled. “I didn’t know how to get hold of her. The school wouldn’t give me her name, and my daughter wouldn’t talk to me.” Once Judy got over her shock, she said, “I had to accept that my daughter had really done this and it was so ugly.” Judy took away her daughter’s computer, television and cellphone for months. She tried talking with her. Nothing. There were weeks of screaming and slammed doors. Meanwhile, the girl’s grades dropped. She was caught with marijuana. Judy realized that her daughter had long been bottling up many family stressors: illness and death, financial worries, her mother’s exhausting schedule. In reaction, the girl had been misbehaving, including doing the very thing her mother found so abhorrent: cyberbullying. In time, as Judy took long walks with her daughter, the girl began to resemble the child Judy thought she had known. When her daughter’s grades improved, Judy bought her a puppy. “A lot of people will disagree with me,” Judy said, “but I thought, this is a way for her to be responsible for something other than herself, something that would be dependent on her for all its needs.” The girl doted on the puppy. One day, Judy asked: “ ‘Would you want anyone to be mean to your dog? Throw rocks at Foxy?’ ” Her daughter recoiled. Judy continued: “ ‘How do you think other parents feel when something mean happens to their children?’ Then she broke down crying. That’s when I think she finally understood what she had done.” Supervisor or Spy? Should teenagers have the same expectation of privacy from parents in their online accounts that an earlier generation had with their little red diaries and keys? Software programs that speak to parental fears are manifold. Parents can block Web sites, getting alerts when the child searches for them. They can also monitor cellphones: a program called Mobile Spy promises to let parents see all text messages, track G.P.S. locations and record phone activity without the child knowing. Parents who never believed they would resort to such tactics find themselves doing so. Christine, the Bay Area mother whose daughter was sent links to pornography, struggled with how to supervise her daughter online. The challenge was compounded because students in the girl’s grade were playing sexualized Truth or Dare games. Her daughter had a leading role. Christine cut off her daughter’s Internet access for months, mandating that she write schoolwork by hand. Over time, the girl earned back computer privileges. Christine also moved her to a parochial school. Then her daughter went on Facebook. “We didn’t know much about Facebook,” said Christine, “but we set up serious monitoring.” One program limited computer time; another blocked certain sites. Christine even had her daughter’s Facebook password, so she could read the girl’s private messages. That was how Christine discovered 82 exchanges between her daughter, a freshman, and a popular senior boy at the school. Her daughter offered him oral sex if he promised not to tell friends. The boy wrote back, “Would it be O.K. if I tell friends but not the ones at school?” Christine’s daughter now sees a therapist. Christine herself uses a keystroke logger, software that records everything her two daughters write and see on their home computer. “It’s uncomfortable,” Christine said. “But my older daughter has demonstrated less than zero common sense. The level of trust between us is much lower than I’d like it to be. But I also think she was relieved that we caught her. “My younger daughter calls me a stalker. She says we mistrust her because of what her sister did. That’s true. But my eyes are open, and I won’t go back.” Studies show that children tend to side with Christine’s younger daughter. Last April in an omnibus review of studies addressing youth, privacy and reputation, a report by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard noted that parents who checked their children’s online communications were seen as “controlling, invasive and ‘clueless.’ ” Young people, one study noted, had a notion of an online public viewership “that excludes the family.” Conversely, studies show that more parents are heading in Christine’s direction. A recent study of teenagers and phones by the Pew Research Center Internet and American Life Project said that parents regard their children’s phones as a “parenting tool.” About two-thirds said they checked the content of their children’s phones (whether teenagers pre-emptively delete texts is a different matter). Two-thirds of the parents said they took away phones as punishment. Almost half said they used phones to check on their child’s whereabouts. Anne Collier, editor of NetFamilyNews.org, a parenting and technology news blog, noted that stealth monitoring may be warranted in rare cases, when a parent suspects a child is at serious risk, such as being contacted by an unknown adult. But generally, she said, spying can have terrible repercussions: “If you’re monitoring your child secretly,” Ms. Collier said, “what do you say to the kid when you find something untoward? Then the conversation turns into ‘you invaded my privacy,’ which is not what you intended to talk about.” Experts do not agree on guidelines about monitoring. But most concur on one principle: “There is no one technology that will keep your kids safe,” said Dr. Larry D. Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills, who writes about raising a tech savvy generation. “The kids are smart enough to get around any technology you might use.” Dr. Englander installed keystroke logger software on her family computer. She uses it less as a monitoring device than as a means to teach her sons about digital safety. The Post-it on the family’s computer reads: “Don’t Forget That Mom Sees Everything You Do Online.” She does not, in fact, check frequently. She just wants her boys to think before they hit the “send” button, so they understand that there is no privacy online, from her, or anyone. Last spring, the Essex County, Mass., district attorney’s office sent the three boys who forged D.C.’s Facebook identity to a juvenile diversion program for first-time nonviolent offenders. If the boys adhere to conditions for a year, they will not be prosecuted. According to a spokesman, those conditions include: a five-page paper on cyberbullying; letters of apology to D.C. and everyone they insulted in his name on Facebook; attending two Internet safety presentations; community service; no access to the Internet except to complete schoolwork. Their computers must be in a public family space, not the bedroom. Marie, who reports that D.C. has a new circle of friends and good grades, is reasonably satisfied with the sentencing conditions. But compliance is another matter. She believes that at least one boy is already back on Facebook. Overburdened school administrators and, increasingly, police officers who unravel juvenile cybercrimes, say it is almost impossible for them to monitor regulations imposed on teenagers. As with the boys who impersonated D.C. online, a district attorney’s spokeswoman said, “That monitoring is up to the parents.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/us/05bully.html Can You Defame Someone with a Hyperlink? Nate Anderson "If I lose there won't BE an Internet in Canada," Jon Newton wrote me this morning as he prepared to step aboard a Vancouver Island seaplane. "Just a shadow." Newton is on his way across Canada this morning to Ottawa, where Canada's Supreme Court will tomorrow consider a key question for the Internet age: can a mere hyperlink be defamation? "Gang of Crookes" Newton is the publisher of p2pnet, a site which has for years chronicled the online file-sharing world. Back in 2006, Newton wrote a piece about local Vancouver businessman Wayne Crookes, the owner of West Coast Title Search Ltd. Crookes had just sued a man named Mike Pilling for writing allegedly defamatory articles about Crookes and publishing them on the Internet (Crookes had previously fired Pilling from Canada's Green Party, in which Crookes volunteers). Pilling's articles relied on the obvious pun here, using titles like "Friends of Crookes" and "Gang of Crookes." In covering the free speech aspects of the case, Newton linked to the articles in question. Crookes demanded Newton remove those links, saying that Newton himself could be liable for defamation. Newton refused; Crookes sued. Newton's piece was read by less than 2,000 people, but the lawsuit spawned by that article has now progressed to Canada's highest court, where the judges will rule for the first time on the liability that Internet users have for the hyperlinks they create. Who cares? Everyone who uses the Internet. Imagine Twitter and Facebook—two sites that are rife with user-created hyperlinks—in a world where users could be held liable for everything at a linked location. Or imagine a search engine like Google, one which specializes in providing hyperlinks to a huge array of content, legal and otherwise. Liability, made too broad, could be nothing less than an Internet-killer (at least in Canada). Crookes says that, by linking to defamatory articles, Newton became a "publisher" of that material. It's an argument that raises questions about the nature of the hyperlink. Does it "incorporate" all the linked material into the original post? Is it a suggestion to go read the linked piece? Is it merely a bibliographic footnote? The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), which has intervened on Newton's behalf, draws an analogy: "If two friends are walking past a sign with defamatory statements on it, and one friend, points it out the other, the law should not make the friend who points to the sign liable as a publisher of defamatory statements on that sign. This is all the more so with hyperlinks." CIPPIC argues that a hyperlink "merely 'identifies' the location of the source of the information found at a different and independent location form the primary article." It's not an "invitation" to read it. Besides, a hyperlinked piece can be hundreds of pages long; should linkers really be considered responsible for every statement made at a link? What if they are linking to something they disagree with? Complications But the issue isn't simple. Even CIPPIC notes that links could be defamatory if "the hyperlinker knowingly endorsed and adopted the defamatory statements found in the linked second article." As one of the appellate judges in the case noted, saying something like "the truth about Crookes can be found here" and linking "here" might be a very different thing from a mere bibliographic link. Indeed, the Honourable Madam Justice Prowse of the Court of Appeal for British Columbia lays out a host of factors that are relevant: the prominence of the link, words of "invitation of recommendation" to read it, suggestions about what might be found at the link, etc. As for Crookes himself, he wants to go even further and proposes a truly extraordinary understanding of hyperlinks. "The characterization of a hyperlink as being comparable to a footnote for a reader of written material, or a card index in a library is not an apt analogy," he tells the Supreme Court: Quote:
Will the Supreme Court agree? As CIPPIC puts it, if Newton loses, the ruling could "chill hyperlinking which in turn undermines the communicative force of the Internet and deters innovation of new, expression-enhancing platforms that may not develop due to fear of defamation actions." "But I won't lose," Newton tells me. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-hyperlink.ars WikiLeaks Site's Swiss Host Dismisses Pressure to Take it Offline Swiss host Switch says there is 'no reason' why WikiLeaks should be forced off internet, despite French and US demands Josh Halliday WikiLeaks under the magnifying glass WikiLeaks has been fighting to stay online since releasing a cache of sensitive diplomatic cables to five international media organisations. Photograph: WikiLeaks WikiLeaks received a boost tonight when Switzerland rejected growing international calls to force the site off the internet. The whistleblowers site, which has been publishing leaked US embassy cables, was forced to switch domain names to WikiLeaks.ch yesterday after the US host of its main website, WikiLeaks.org, pulled the plug following mounting political pressure. The site's new Swiss host, Switch, today said there was "no reason" why it should be forced offline, despite demands from France and the US. Switch is a non-profit registrar set up by the Swiss government for all 1.5 million Swiss .ch domain names. The reassurances come just hours after eBay-owned PayPal, the primary donation channel to WikiLeaks, terminated its links with the site, citing "illegal activity". France yesterday added to US calls for all companies and organisations to terminate their relationship with WikiLeaks following the release of 250,000 secret US diplomatic cables. The Swiss Pirate Party, which registered the WikiLeaks.ch domain name earlier this year on behalf of the site, said Switch had reassured the party that it would not block the site. An email sent by Denis Simonet, president of the Swiss Pirate Party, to international members of the liberal political group said: "Some minutes ago I got good news: Switch, the registrar for .ch domains, told us that there is no reason to block wikileaks.ch." Laurence Kaye, leader of the UK-based Pirate Party, tonight told the Guardian: "International Pirate Parties now have an integral role in allowing access to WikiLeaks. I wish some of our other politicians had the same guts. "We support the WikiLeaks project as access to information is the prerequisite for an informed and engaged democracy." WikiLeaks has been fighting to stay online since releasing a cache of sensitive diplomatic cables to the Guardian and four other international media organisations. Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, dropped the site from its servers on Thursday after being contacted by staff of Joe Lieberman, chairman of the US Senate's homeland security committee. Everydns.net, the site's US hosting provider, yesterday forced the site offline for the third time in under a week. A series of "distributed denial of attacks" by unknown online activists still bring the site intermittently to its knees. WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, described the decision as "privatisation of state censorship" in the US. Everydns.net said the attacks – which have been going on all week – threatened "the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites". http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010...ss-host-switch WikiLeaks Server Goes Down, Swiss Say John Heilprin WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange turned increasingly to Switzerland on Sunday, dodging a barrage of threats online and in the real world to keep access to a trove of U.S. State Department cables under a Swiss Web address. [A screen shot of a web browser shows the error message on the wikiLeaks.com domain in Lavigny December 4, 2010. WikiLeaks moved its website address from http://wikileaks.org to the Swiss http://wikileaks.ch on Friday after two U.S. Internet providers ditched it and Paris tried to ban French servers from hosting its database of leaked information. (REUTERS/Valentin Flauraud)]The elusive founder of the website WikiLeaks said he faced "hundreds of death threats." The site hinged on the Swiss Pirate Party's wikileaks.ch Web address, though the main server in France went offline, leaving the site reachable through a Swedish server. That site showed Assange had begun seeking donations to an account under his name through the Swiss postal system in Berne, the Swiss capital. He lost a major source of revenue when the online payment service provider PayPal cut off the WikiLeaks account over the weekend. PayPal, a subsidiary of U.S.-based online marketplace operator EBay Inc., said the WikiLeaks website, which specializes in disclosing confidential documents, was engaged in illegal activity. A spokesman for the financial services arm of Swiss Post told the respected Swiss weekly NZZ am Sonntag that it was reviewing its "relationship" with Assange, whose stated reason for opening the account was to have a residence in Geneva. French web hosting company OVH, which owns the server, didn't immediately respond to calls Sunday. France's Industry Minister Eric Besson had warned Friday that it was unacceptable to host a site that "violates the secret of diplomatic relations." The company said earlier that it had been hosting WikiLeaks since early Thursday, after a client asked for a "dedicated server with ... protection against attacks." The president of the Swiss Pirate Party, which controls the wikileaks.ch Web address, said he was in the process of pointing that domain name to a different server, apparently based in Sweden. The site also was still reachable through the numerical address of its Swedish server. And the party said it noticed an increasing number of supporters creating "mirrors" of the WikiLeaks site on their own servers, meaning that copies of the site would remain up and running even if WikiLeaks were somehow to lose its own site. "Even if you take down the server in Sweden, it's too late," Swiss Pirate Party Vice President Pascal Gloor told The Associated Press on Sunday. "There are hundreds of mirrors of WikiLeaks now," he said. "It's a test for Internet censorship. Can governments take something off the net? I think not. There are copies of the website everywhere." In a high-tech media building in Bienne, Switzerland, the party convened an impromptu news conference late Friday to say it had no special knowledge of Assange's whereabouts or ability to contact him, but had spoken with him weeks ago to help seek asylum in Switzerland. That was during Assange's visit to Geneva last month when he spoke to reporters at the United Nations. Starting Friday, the Swiss Web address wikileaks.ch became the site's main access point after EveryDNS, a company based in Manchester, New Hampshire, stopped accepting traffic to the site's principal address - wikileaks.org - saying cyber attacks threatened the rest of its network. Amazon stopped hosting WikiLeaks' Web site and governments and hackers were continuing to go after the organization. News media reports were filled with stories about the hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, which is coming under intense legal pressure in several countries, including the United States. In an online chat with El Pais in Spain, Assange said the hunt for him was tough. He remains free while his website spews daily embarrassment and potential diplomatic damage to the U.S. "We have hundreds of specific death threats from U.S. military militants. That is not unusual, and we have become practiced from past experiences at ignoring such threats from Islamic extremists, African kleptocrats and so on," he said. "Recently the situation has changed with these threats now extending out to our lawyers and my children," he added. "However, it is the specific calls from the elites of U.S. society for our assassination, kidnapping and execution that is more concerning." Assange, who is now in Britain, according to his British lawyer, is wanted in Sweden to face allegations of sexual offenses against two women, charges he denies, but the United States has not lodged any charges against him. Nor has Britain. In the Swedish case, Assange is the target of a European extradition process which normally takes months to produce an arrest. Frank Jordans contributed from Geneva. http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/12/05-3 Respected Media Outlets Collaborate with WikiLeaks AP The diplomatic records exposed on the WikiLeaks website this week reveal not only secret government communications, but also an extraordinary collaboration between some of the world's most respected media outlets and the WikiLeaks organization. Unlike earlier disclosures by WikiLeaks of tens of thousands of secret government military records, the group is releasing only a trickle of documents at a time from a trove of a quarter-million, and only after considering advice from five news organizations with which it chose to share all of the material. "They are releasing the documents we selected," Le Monde's managing editor, Sylvie Kauffmann, said in an interview at the newspaper's Paris headquarters. WikiLeaks turned over all of the classified U.S. State Department cables it obtained to Le Monde, El Pais in Spain, The Guardian in Britain and Der Spiegel in Germany. The Guardian shared the material with The New York Times, and the five news organizations have been working together to plan the timing of their reports. They also have been advising WikiLeaks on which documents to release publicly and what redactions to make to those documents, Kauffmann and others involved in the arrangement said. "The cables we have release correspond to stories released by our main stream media partners and ourselves. They have been redacted by the journalists working on the stories, as these people must know the material well in order to write about it," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in a question-and-answer session on The Guardian's website Friday. "The redactions are then reviewed by at least one other journalist or editor, and we review samples supplied by the other organisations to make sure the process is working." Each publication suggested a way to remove names and details considered too sensitive, and "I suppose WikiLeaks chooses the one it likes," El Pais Editor in Chief Javier Moreno said in a telephone interview from his Madrid office. As stories are published, WikiLeaks uses its website to release the related cables. For example, The Guardian published an article Thursday based on diplomatic cables discussing the assassination of former Russian security officer Alexander Litvinenko by radiation poisoning, and WikiLeaks quickly posted three cables on the same subject. The close arrangement is unusual because it ties the media outlets more closely to WikiLeaks, and reveals an unusual collaboration with a group facing a U.S. criminal investigation. "In this case, what you have is news organizations partnering with an organization that very clearly has a different set of values," said Kelly McBride, a journalism ethics professor at The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. But McBride notes that the unique collaboration also forces some degree of journalistic standards on WikiLeaks, which in the past has released documents without removing information considered sensitive. New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller told readers in an online exchange that the newspaper has suggested to its media partners and to WikiLeaks what information it believes should be withheld. "We agree wholeheartedly that transparency is not an absolute good," Keller wrote. "Freedom of the press includes freedom not to publish, and that is a freedom we exercise with some regularity." Days before releasing any of the latest documents, Assange appealed to the U.S. ambassador in London, asking the U.S. government to confidentially help him determine what needed to be redacted from the cables before they were publicly released. The ambassador refused, telling Assange to hand over stolen property. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley called Assange's offer "a half-hearted gesture to have some sort of conversation." U.S. officials submitted suggestions to The Times, which asked government officials to weigh in on some of the documents the newspaper and its partners wanted to publish. "The other news organizations supported these redactions," Keller wrote. "WikiLeaks has indicated that it intends to do likewise. And as a matter of news interest, we will watch their website to see what they do." While Keller has emphasized to readers that the Times is "not a 'media partner'" of WikiLeaks and that it did not receive the State Department documents from WikiLeaks, his public comments describe a working relationship with the group on the release of the material and decisions to withhold certain information. Keller told the AP in an e-mail Thursday that advising WikiLeaks about removing names and other sensitive details is the responsible thing to do. "We have no way of knowing what WikiLeaks will do, no clear idea what they make of our redactions, but if this to any degree prevents WikiLeaks from carelessly getting someone killed, I'm happy to do it," he said. "I'd be interested to hear the arguments in favor of having WikiLeaks post its material unredacted." U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said this week there is "an active, ongoing, criminal investigation" into WikiLeaks' release of the material. He said it jeopardized national security, diplomatic efforts and U.S. relationships around the world. He declined to equate WikiLeaks to traditional news organizations that enjoy certain free-speech protections. "I think one can compare the way in which the various news organizations that have been involved in this have acted, as opposed to the way in which WikiLeaks has," Holder said. He did not elaborate on the distinction he sees between WikiLeaks and the publications. Although WikiLeaks has said it will ultimately post its trove online, The Times said it intends to publish only about 100 or so of the records. And the other news organizations that have the material said they likely will release only a fraction. "We are releasing only what is interesting," Le Monde's Kauffmann said. "I couldn't tell you the proportion, but the vast majority of these documents are of no journalistic interest." She said there was "no written contract" among the organizations and WikiLeaks on the use of the material. "The conditions were that we could ourselves — that's to say our journalists and those at the other newspapers — do our own selection, our own triage," and select which documents to withhold from public view, Kauffmann said. The media outlets agreed to work together, with about 120 journalists in total working on the project, at times debating which names of people cited in the documents could be published. "With this, I really think we have taken all the possible precautions," Kauffmann said. "At times, it comes up that we'll discuss it between us, with the other papers, on some points. One of us struck too much out and another said 'Come on, it's about a high official, we can leave his/her name in. There won't be any reprisals.'" Le Monde and El Pais came into the media partnership late, about a month ago. The Times, Guardian and Spiegel had already done quite a bit of work on the documents and shared it, El Pais' Moreno said. Kauffmann declined to say how or when WikiLeaks contacted the publications about the documents. They began sorting through the material after WikiLeaks obtained it. Some news organizations, including AP and The Washington Post, also have sought access to the documents, but they were denied because of the arrangement between the five media partners. The Post reported this week that WikiLeaks approached CNN and the Wall Street Journal about receiving the documents and asked them to sign confidentiality agreements that would have entitled WikiLeaks to a payment of around $100,000 if the partner broke the embargo. The two news organizations declined. Kauffmann of Le Monde said there was no financial agreement with WikiLeaks. "Never has anyone asked to pay anything, and if they had, we probably — certainly — would not have done so, because we never pay for news." Blackledge reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Niko Price contributed to this story from London. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/... 1280dace2e456 Latest Updates on Leak of U.S. Cables, Day 9 Robert Mackey On Monday, The Lede continues to update readers on the leak of American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowers’ Web site. (For an overview of the revelations and reactions so far, see our previous live-blog posts.) WikiLeaks, Facebook and the Perils of Oversharing My colleague Noam Cohen, who has been writing about WikiLeaks since 2008, when the site posted the names of 13,000 members of the racist, far-right British National Party, writes about "WikiLeaks, Facebook and the Perils of Oversharing" in Monday's New York Times. He observes: Quote:
"The whole thing seems a little Facebooky," said Lisa Lynch, a journalism professor at Concordia University in Montreal, who has written about WikiLeaks. She said she was surprised no one had displayed the information in the cables as Facebook status updates: "You know, Sarkozy is no longer in a relationship with the United States." Lawyer for Assange Calls Swedish Case 'Bonkers' Mark Stephens, a British lawyer working for Julian Assange, said over the weekend that the prosecutor in Sweden who issued an arrest warrant for the WikiLeraks founder had acted unreasonably. He also told the Guardian that he and another lawyer defending Mr. Assange are apparently under surveillance by British authorities. In a television interview with the BBC, Mr. Stephens said that the Swedish case against his client "does seem to be a political stunt." He added: Quote:
On its Twitter feed, WikiLeaks reports that there are now 355 Web sites mirroring its content. A partial list of those sites is available on the whistle-blowers' Swiss site, WikiLeaks.ch. The organization also notes that some of its servers in Sweden are "non-responsive." The Associated Press explains that those servers "may have come under attack Monday," according to the head of the Swedish Internet service provider PRQ. The A.P. adds: PRQ's owner Mikael Viborg told The Associated Press that his servers had become non-responsive. While it wasn't immediately clear why, he said it was probably due to a distributed denial of service attack -- a technique in which remote computers hijacked by rogue programs jam a website with massive amounts of data. WikiLeaks' current Web site, Wikileaks.ch, didn't seem to be affected by the suspected attack. The Web site has several backups, including some at undisclosed locations outside of Sweden, so even a successful attack on the PRQ might not necessarily slow or shut it down. Indian Students Encouraged to Read Leaked Cables As Matt Weaver points out on the Guardian's live blog on the leaked cables, while prospective American diplomats have been encouraged to ignore the cables, India's ministry of external affairs has reportedly asked students to study and emulate "the crisp and to-the-point style of U.S. telegram writing," the Indian Express reports. According to the Indian newspaper, the country's ministry of external affairs is so impressed by the way the American cables were written that it has asked students at the Foreign Services Institute "to read them and get a hang of the brevity with which thoughts and facts have been expressed." The ministry has reportedly been frustrated that "Indian diplomats often digress from the issue at hand in their "long-winded" cables. The newspaper adds: Quote:
In an essay on the leaked cables for the French newspaper Libération, translated by the Web site Presseurop, the Italian scholar and novelist Umberto Eco suggests that what matters more than their contents is the fact that the release has demonstrated that citizens can now spy on the governments that are spying on them. Mr Eco writes: Quote:
Australia Blames U.S. for Leaked Cables Rob Taylor and Keith Weir Australia blamed the United States on Wednesday for the release by WikiLeaks of U.S. diplomatic cables and said its Australian founder Julian Assange should not be held responsible. Assange spent the night in a British jail after a judge in London on Tuesday refused to grant bail to the 39-year-old. Assange was detained after Sweden issued a European Arrest Warrant for him over alleged sexual offences. He has spent time in Sweden and was accused this year of sexual misconduct by two female Swedish WikiLeaks volunteers. The pair's lawyer said their claims were not a politically motivated plot against Assange. "It has nothing to do with WikiLeaks or the CIA," lawyer Claes Borgstrom said. Assange has angered U.S. authorities and triggered headlines worldwide by publishing the secret cables. Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said the people who originally leaked the documents, not Assange, were legally liable and the leaks raised questions over the "adequacy" of U.S. security. "Mr Assange is not himself responsible for the unauthorized release of 250,000 documents from the U.S. diplomatic communications network," Rudd told Reuters in an interview. "The Americans are responsible for that," said Rudd, who had been described in one leaked U.S. cable as a "control freak." Carry On WikiLeaks vowed it would continue making public details of the confidential U.S. cables. Only a fraction of them have been published so far. The latest cables, reported in Britain's Guardian newspaper, said Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi made threats to cut trade with Britain and warned of "enormous repercussions" if the Libyan convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie airline bombing died in a Scottish jail. He was freed in August 2009. WikiLeaks also released cables on Wednesday that showed Saudi Arabia proposed an "Arab army" be deployed in Lebanon, with U.S. air and naval cover, to stop Shi'ite Hezbollah militia after it seized control of parts of Beirut in 2008. Like many of the cables, the disclosures give an insight into diplomacy which is normally screened from public view. Assange has become the public face of WikiLeaks, hailed by supporters including campaigning Australian journalist John Pilger and British film maker Ken Loach as a defender of free speech, but he is now battling to clear his name. Lawyer Borgstrom told a news conference the accounts provided by the two Swedish women were credible and that he saw a good chance that Sweden would eventually press charges. "More than 50/50," he said, when asked what the likelihood was of such a development. The original source of the leaked cables is not known, though a U.S. army private, Bradley Manning, who worked as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, has been charged by military authorities with unauthorized downloading of more than 150,000 State Department cables. U.S. officials have declined to say whether those cables are the same ones now being released by WikiLeaks. Assange defended his Internet publishing site in a newspaper commentary on Wednesday, saying it was crucial to spreading democracy and likening himself to global media baron Rupert Murdoch in the quest to publish the truth. Suspected attacks by hackers sympathetic to Assange and against censorship brought down the websites of the prosecution Swedish authority and of Borgstrom's law office. The prosecution authority, whose www.aklgare.se website was down for most of Tuesday evening and some of Wednesday, said in a statement it had filed a complaint with the police after what it called an "overload attack." (Additional reporting by Michel Rose in London and Patrick Lannin in Stockholm; editing by Andrew Marshall and Matthew Jones) http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL3E6N80HH20101208 Analysis: WikiLeaks Battle: a New Amateur Face of Cyber War? Peter Apps, Political Risk Correspondent The website attacks launched by supporters of WikiLeaks show 21st-century cyber warfare evolving into a more amateur and anarchic affair than many predicted. While most countries have plowed much more attention and resources into cyber security in recent years, most of the debate has focused on the threat from militant groups such as al Qaeda or mainstream state on state conflict. But attempts to silence WikiLeaks after the leaking of some 250,000 classified State Department cables seem to have produced something rather different -- something of a popular rebellion amongst hundreds or thousands of tech-savvy activists. "The first serious infowar is now engaged," former Grateful Dead lyricist, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation John Perry Barlow told his followers on Twitter last week. "The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops." Some of the more militant elements on the Internet clearly took him at his word. A group calling itself Anonymous put the quote at the top of a webpage entitled "Operation Avenge Assange," referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Online collective Anonymous appears to be using social networking site Twitter to coordinate attacks on websites belonging to entities it views as trying to silence WikiLeaks. Targets have included MasterCard, Visa and a Swiss bank. All blocked payments to Wikileaks on apparent U.S. pressure. Swedish prosecutors behind Assange's arrest in London for extradition and questioning over sex charges were also hit. Some Wikileaks supporters view the charges are politically motivated. It looks to have surprised even Barlow, whose "declaration of independence for cyberspace" has been increasingly shared over Twitter by Anonymous supporters. He says he himself opposes distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks aimed at knocking down sites, viewing them as anti-free-speech. "I support freedom of expression, no matter whose, so I oppose DDoS attacks regardless of their target," he told Reuters in an email. "They're the poison gas of cyberspace.... All that said, I suspect the attacks may continue until Assange is free and WikiLeaks is not under continuous assault." The exchange suggests cyber warfare could also become the preserve of small groups attacking each other as state actors. "Poison Gas Of Cyberspace" Alongside possible financial losses from sites being taken down, the potential reputational damage to firms is massive. MasterCard has been mocked widely across the net as users lampooned its distinctive advertising slogans: "Freedom of speech: priceless. For everything else, there's MasterCard." "This proves without question the power at people's fingertips --that there is high risk and vulnerability on the Internet," said John Walker, chief technology officer at cyber security company Secure Bastion. "If an organization like MasterCard with big computing power can have its site taken down then what about smaller organizations and ordinary people?" While most denial of service attacks use "botnets" to hijack other computers to overload websites, cyber security experts said Wednesday's attacks were different. Attackers were using their own computers, downloading software from Anonymous. By midway through Wednesday afternoon, that software had already been downloaded some 6,000 times. "This whole... episode is causing a snowball effect," said Noa Bar Yosef, senior security strategist from Imperva. "The more attention it is receiving, the more people who are joining the voluntary botnet to cause the DDoS." WikiLeaks itself has also complained it has been under similar cyber attacks since shortly before it released the documents last week. While it has largely pointed to the United States and other governments, some say those attacks too may have been carried out by third parties. Russian officials have long said that high profile cyber attacks against Estonia in 2007 and Georgia during its conflict with Russia in 2008 were in fact carried out by independent "patriotic hackers" rather than the government itself. "I think an interesting development is what we might term the 'Thomas a Becket' syndrome -- hackers deciding to act in ways they think benefit the country without being instructed to by a higher authority," said Nikolas Gvosdev, professor of national security at the US Naval War College. Becket was the 12th century Archbishop of Canterbury murdered by four knights who reportedly overheard Henry II's complaints over him and took them as a royal wish he be killed -- an alarming historical example of unintended consequences. (Additional reporting by William Maclean and Georgina Prodhan; Editing by Maria Golovnina) http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6B81K520101209 Attacks by "Anonymous" WikiLeaks Proponents Not Anonymous For a number of days the websites of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and others are attacked by a group of WikiLeaks supporters (hacktivist). Although the group calls itself "Anonymous", researchers at the DACS group of the University of Twente (UT), the Netherlands, discovered that these hacktivists are easy traceable, and therefore anything but anonymous. The LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) software, which is used by the hacktivists, was analyzed by UT researchers, who concluded that the attacks generated by this tool are relatively simple and unveil the identity of the attacker. If hacktivists use this tool directly from their own machines, instead of via anonymization networks such as Tor, the Internet address of the attacker is included in every Internet message being transmitted. In the tools no sophisticated techniques are used, such as IP-spoofing, in which the source address of others is used, or reflected attacks, in which attacks go via third party systems. The current attack technique can therefore be compared to overwhelming someone with letters, but putting your address at the back of the envelop. In addition, hacktivists may not be aware that international data retention laws require that commercial Internet providers store data regarding Internet usage for at least 6 months. This means that hacktivists can still be traced easily after the attacks are over. A complete report about that can be downloaded from this link. http://www.utwente.nl/ewi/dacs/news/...doc/index.html What It's Like to Participate in Anonymous' Actions Anonymous, who have been on a week long sprint/spree to paralyze website sites like Mastercard and Paypal, are often described in the news as a "group" with "members." This is usually followed by a series of prolonged qualifications and caveats because many characteristics we usually associate with groups don't seem to apply comfortably with Anonymous: there are no leaders, anyone can seemingly join, and participants are spread across the globe, although many of them can be found on any number of Internet Relay Chat Channels where they discuss strategy, plan attacks, crack jokes, and often pose critical commentary on the unfolding events they have just engendered. Earlier this week, The Economist listened in on the IRC channels, opening a fascinating window into the order behind the seeming chaos of Anonymous and providing a sense of how the Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks are coordinated by a trusted group of Ops who leverage the labor of thousands of other contributors. But there is a lot more to how Anonymous, at least in this operation, deliberate about their mission, make decisions, and produce collective statements, such as Manifestos. Here I want to give a fuller picture of what it looks like to participate in Anonymous, how they arrive at some consensus, how they change tactics, and how they use technology to produce collaboratively. Although this is quite an incomplete picture, it will perhaps give a more human face to an operation that otherwise seems faceless. As mentioned already, IRC is where many participants congregate. They do so in very large numbers to coordinate attacks, debate, and simply watch. In the constant streams of chatter (and they are often multiple channels), there is always a strange mix of pragmatic imperatives with more philosophical or critical takes on the events: Quote:
And yet there are other statements made by Anonymous that do give a clear sense that some fight for "something" and that this is part of a larger political plan, even if surely not everyone participates in Anonymous for noble causes. Along with IRC, Anonymous have also made ample use of collaborative writing software, in this case Pirate Pad (which rose from the ashes of Etherpad) and do so to coordinate actions, pick targets, and write manifestos. If IRC is where the cacophonous side of Anonymous is most clearly manifest, then the documents and conversation on Pirate Pad reflect a calmer, more deliberate and deliberative side of Anonymous, where participants offer arguments that are picked apart or supported through reasoned debate. Take for instance a snapshot from a document written by 31 anons, 16 writing simultaneously: Here they get into a few more details as to who and why they attack: From at least this vantage point Anonymous starts to look more like a group of seasoned politics activists, debating the merits and demerits of actions and targets, warning for example, not to attack the media. Even if these documents cannot be taken as the totality of Anonymous, they reveal that some of the participants do engage in strategic and political thinking. These documents are not, however, the only place where participants deliberate or announce tactics. IRC, as I noted, is where so much of the action and the coordination occurs. As I was writing this up, a number of participants were calling for a change of tactics: Quote:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/...actions/67860/ Anonymous’ Operation Payback IRC Operator Arrested Ernesto A teenager was arrested yesterday on suspicion of being involved with the Anonymous’ Operation Payback. The operation orchestrated DDoS attacks on anti-piracy targets in the last months, and more recently against those who obstructed Wikileaks’ work. Sources have informed TorrentFreak that the arrestee is one of the IRC-operators of Anonymous, known under the nickname Jeroenz0r. Starting mid-September, dozens of anti-piracy groups, copyright lawyers and pro-copyright outfits have been targeted by a group of Anonymous Internet ‘vigilantes’ under the flag of Operation Payback. The operation started initially as ‘payback’ against outfits that tried to stop the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay, and DDoS attacks were organized to strike back. A few days ago, the operation changed course and instead began to go after organizations that displayed opposition towards Wikileaks. Over the last days several high profile companies and institutions were taken offline temporarily by DDoS attacks including Mastercard, Visa and Paypal. Conversely, Operation Payback’s operation was also obstructed with the deletion of their Twitter and Facebook accounts after the news hit the mainstream media. Yesterday, this was followed by the arrest (Dutch) of an alleged ‘member’ of Operation Payback in The Netherlands. The local police announced that a 16 year old boy was arrested, suspected of being involved in the DDoS attacks on Wikileaks related targets. The boy, whose identity was not released, will be heard in court today and has reportedly confessed to his involvement. According to several sources the arrestee is known online under the nickname Jeroenz0r. The authorities have not yet confirmed this, but the person using this nickname has been ‘missing’ online for the past 24 hours, and has been involved with Operation Payback for quite a while. Jeroenz0r was also an IRC operator at thefailship.net, where one of the former IRC channels of Operation Payback was hosted. “Jeroenz0r and his server became delinked Thursday night at around midnight UTC time,” a source told TorrentFreak, confirming that the teenager lives in The Hague, where the arrest was made. “Some of his friends tried calling him yesterday but the phone lead to voicemail. When calling his home number, his dad refused to comment on the situation. Furthermore, his local town newspaper also reported that a local 16 year old boy was arrested.” Another source, who acts as an Operation Payback spokesman, confirmed that Jeroenz0r has been unreachable since the time of the arrest. How the police became aware of Jeroenz0r is unknown, but we were told that he didn’t cover his tracks too well. “Others on the network who know him a bit better knew that he was sloppy and often left traces from his actions online. Also, the Google results on him are quite impressive and indicate that he has been quite active in the torrent scene.” In a possible response to the arrest, the Dutch Prosecution Office now seems to be under a DDoS attack. Previously the Dutch police stated that they will not go after people who ‘make their computers available” for these attacks, but that they will target people who are more heavily involved. Update: The Failship IRC team released the following message. Quote:
Gov't Crackdown Spurs Initiatives to Route Around DNS Keith Dawson Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the principal investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), led an alphabet soup of government agencies in seizing the domain names of 82 Web sites (PDF) that ICE said were "engaged in the illegal sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and copyrighted works" (See: Operation In Our Sites v. 2.0). The seizures were accomplished by getting the VeriSign registry, owner of the .com and .net top-level domains, to change the authoritative domain-name servers for the seized domains to servers controlled by DHS. Regardless of the supposed criminal intent of the affected systems, the seizure without notice of these domain names by US authorities sent shock-waves around the Internet world. It got people's attention in a much stronger way than version 1 of this enforcement operation had — the first iteration late last June seized the names of nine sites selling pirated first-run movies. Many people woke up to the reality of how vulnerable the DNS is to government meddling. (More recently, the uproar caused by the WikiLeaks publication of US diplomatic cables — and subsequent attempts to censor the site and/or to hound it off the Internet — have resulted in what developer Dave Winer calls "a human DNS" implemented "in a weird sneaker-net sort of way," via Twitter and ad hoc bulletin-board sites.) Within days of the ICE/DHS seizures, at least three separate initiatives to work around the DNS had been announced, and several existing alternatives were highlighted in the ensuing discussion. Let's take a look at some of these proposals — two to route around and one to supplant the DNS — and some of the obstacles they face. 1. 4LW: 4 Little Words This new alt-DNS project got a quick boost from the developer communities at Hacker News and Reddit. The idea is to map each of the four numbers in an IPv4 address to one of 256 "little words," in the Mad Libs-inspired pattern adjective noun verb noun. For example, using an online 4LW generator, 208.101.51.56 (the IP address of the seized domain name torrent-finder.com) becomes simple hair climbs cup. Reddit user armooo created an open source DNS server that returns "A" records using the 4LW protocol. For the example above, visiting http://simple.#hair.#climbs.#cup.#4lw.org takes you straight to the site formerly pointed to by the seized domain name. This scheme should continue to work unless 4lw.org itself is compromised, in which case others could copy the source code and put up their own servers; meta-servers could emerge to distribute requests among known 4LW servers; and so on. 2. P2P DNS: Peering Around It This project has gotten the lion's share of press attention, because it was initially suggested by Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay. The idea is to create a peer-to-peer alternative to the DNS, and beyond that nothing has been announced. Sunde's blog post has garnered over 100 comments, most pledging help and some offering concrete suggestions or pointing out similar efforts across the Net. There are active brainstorms in various media and a code repository, which is currently empty. Sunde has promised a press release soon. 3. Project IDONS: Internet Distributed Open Name System This proposal is by Lauren Weinstein, one of the early developers of what became the Internet and the long-time moderator of the PRIVACY forum (which predates even the widespread existence of email). Weinstein's vision is of "an alternative Internet name to address mapping system — fully distributed, open source, fault-tolerant, secure, flexible, and not subject to centralized constraints, meddling, and censorship." Other high-level goals include "no central registries, no registrars, no fees nor charges necessary for any name or address operations across IDONS." Weinstein adds in his introduction to IDONS: "Ad hoc attempts to bypass the existing system (such as those newly proposed by Pirate Bay) are likely to create fragmentation and confusion, and therefore ironically tend to further entrench the existing system… ad hoc won't fly for this." In an interview, Weinstein told me he has had a "couple of thousand" responses to the IDONS proposal, ranging from substantive technical suggestions to "Yes I'd like to help." Weinstein said, "The point is not just to replace the DNS with another DNS. It's to get out from under a completely limiting condition. Technology is full of these kinds of situations in which we have to get out from under bad early decisions. In the case of DNS, the mistake was centralization. That enables not only censorship, but also the whole gigantic mess that has grown up around domain registrations" — what Weinstein has taken to calling the "domain industrial complex." He continued, "This is not just a technical project, it's an attempt to change the underlying mechanisms we use for names on the Internet. It involves policy and politics as well as technology." And it's likely to be a 10-year effort or longer. At this point the project does not have a website or a mailing list. Interested parties can contact Weinstein via his blog. Operation In Our Sites v. 2.0 Mere weeks ago, rights activists and users concerned about Internet censorship were mounting opposition to the proposed Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act — a law that would give the Justice Department the power to seize domain names from sites around the globe that are "dedicated to infringing activities." That bill is now sidelined in the Senate. Now, with "Operation In Our Sites v. 2.0," the DoJ is asserting that it already has the authority, under the 2008 PRO-IP law (PDF), to turn off DNS service for sites that rely on US-resident domain-name registries, even if the sites are based outside the US. (The court orders for seizure were served on VeriSign, the Virginia company that runs the .com and .net registries.) While most of the seized sites sold counterfeit goods such as sports equipment, shoes and handbags, at least one sold nothing and did not even store pointers to contraband. Torrent-finder.com is a meta-search engine that returns results from other search engines, in response to user queries, and according to TorrentFreak.com "is not encouraging or even facilitating copyright infringement any more than other search engines such as Google." There has been no official comment on this apparent anomaly. The EFF and the CDT have raised questions about the "nuke-the-whole-website approach," and the EFF has vowed to fight the actions. The operation that was torrent-finder.com has reopened at torrent-finder.info; its owner, who lives in Egypt, has also vowed to fight the seizure. Drawbacks to trying to route around the DNS Any alternative to or replacement for the DNS must begin by acknowledging the existing system's strengths: it is ubiquitous, it is built in to many aspects of the way the Internet functions, it is distributed and scaleable (and in fact has scaled by 5 or 6 orders of magnitude since its introduction in the 1980s), and it establishes a hierarchy of trust so that you have some assurance (not 100%) that you're visiting the site you think you are. A major concern for any DNS alternative — especially one that stands beside the existing DNS — must be "breaking the Internet" into Balkanized islands, unreachable one from the other. In practice this means that any alt-DNS must somehow allow access to all Internet resources. Past attempts at establishing an alternate DNS root, such as AlterNIC.net (begun in 1995), required tweaking configuration files in domain name servers — clearly a non-starter for widespread adoption. AlterNIC faded away after its founder was convicted in the US of wire fraud, and the Internet Architecture Board spoke out strongly against alternate roots in RFC 2826. Nonetheless, other attempts at setting up an alternate root have sprung up. These depend on a Web browser to decide which name resolver to use: for example, Unified Root provides its own browser, called Sundial and based on Firefox; and DASHWORLDS offers a browser plug-in for Internet Explorer on Windows. A drawback to routing-around proposals such as 4LW is the assumption of one domain name per IP address. Such one-to-one mapping is by no means universal, and may be getting less common as IPv4 addresses dwindle to exhaustion. I run a server in the cloud with a dozen or more sites on each of several IP addresses. The server is set up to provide the correct content to the visitor based on which domain name was requested — Apache configuration files for that purpose are generated by the (Plesk) site management software. A visitor who types in one of my server's IP addresses, or goes there via e.g. the 4LW protocol, will get a default Apache page. Presumably some deep juju could be developed for the Apache server's rewrite engine, but it would have to be custom-made for each alt-DNS scheme. It would have to be added by hand to each site's Apache configuration file, as the site management software (such as Plesk or cPanel) won't know about it — and therefore will tend to overwrite it. And ditto for sites running Microsoft's IIS or any of numerous other Web servers. Another issue that alt-DNS schemes will face is that websites use non-relative internal links, hard-coded with fully qualified domain names. Any such links will work as long as the official DNS points to where the site expects it to, but break in case of domain-name compromise. Perhaps the biggest obstacle any aspiring DNS workaround or replacement faces is getting to critical mass. I spoke to one alt-DNS developer, Chris Brainerd, who is working on a concept called FreeLayer. In his opinion, "Most people won't switch if what they are using is working. Plus you have tight integration with browsers and search engines and code. So in a way the only people who are really interested in this are those who wish to have more privacy, have an interest in the technology, want domains for free, or are doing something illegal." Lauren Weinstein acknowledges that the scope of the IDONS project "may perhaps be reasonably compared with the scale of IPv6 deployment" — in other words, massive. http://www.itworld.com/print/129947 “A New WikiLeaks” Revolts Against Assange Translated by Majsan Boström The pressure on WikiLeaks is increasing. DN.se reveals that several key figures behind the website that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational or religious documents have resigned in protest against the controversial leader Julian Assange only to launch a new service for the so-called whistleblowers. The goal: to leak sensitive information to the public. The new project, “Openleaks,” has been under way for some time and will be launched Monday. DN.se has spoken to individuals behind the new site and the message is clear. “Our long term goal is to build a strong, transparent platform to support whistleblowers--both in terms of technology and politics--while at the same time encouraging others to start similar projects,” says a colleague wishing to remain anonymous. Annons: ”As a short-term goal, this is about completing the technical infrastructure and ensuring that the organization continues to be democratically governed by all its members, rather than limited to one group or individual.” The news comes in turbulent times for WikiLeaks. Thousands of documents infuriating global leaders and policy-makers have been unveiled to the public via Cablegate. Meanwhile, Julian Assange has been arrested in Great Britain on suspected rape charges based in Sweden. News about WikiLeaks has been over-shadowed by Assange's personal problems. Earlier this year, WikiLeaks experienced accessibility issues. According to information revealed to DN.se, the problem was not linked to outsiders trying to sabotage, but came from the inside as a signal to Julian Assange to step down. The colleagues were dissatisfied with the operation's association with Assange's personal problems and how he used the organization in his explanation of the criminal charges. It is the top-down management style which is under critique. On the other hand, the DN.se source emphasizes the fact that the new website is supportive of WikiLeaks purpose and goal. “The two organizations are similar in that aspect that both are focusing on providing means for whistleblowers to anonymously provide the public with information,” one insider says. Unlike WikiLeaks, Openleaks will not receive and publish information directly for the public eye. Instead, other organizations will access the Openleaks system and in turn, present their audience with the material. Documents will be processed and published by various collaborating organizations. “We intend to split the work in a way where we handle only the anonymity and receiving end of the information,” says another colleague. According to the internal documents shared with DN.se, Openleaks intends to establish itself as a neutral intermediary ”without a political agenda except from the dissemination of information to the media, the public, non-profit organizations, trade- and union organizations and other participating groups.” “All editorial control and responsibility rests with the publishing organization. We will, as far as possible, take the role of the messenger between the whistleblower and the organization the whistleblower is trying to cooperate with,” says one anonymous informant. Another intended consequence is to avoid the pressure from world leaders that WikiLeaks has experienced. “As a result of our intention not to publish any document directly and in our own name, we do not expect to experience the kind of political pressure which WikiLeaks is under at this time. In that aspect, it is quite interesting to see how little of politicians' anger seems directed at the newspapers using WikiLeaks sources.” http://www.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/a-n...ange-1.1224764 Vast Hacking by a China Fearful of the Web James Glanz and John Markoff As China ratcheted up the pressure on Google to censor its Internet searches last year, the American Embassy sent a secret cable to Washington detailing one reason top Chinese leaders had become so obsessed with the Internet search company: they were Googling themselves. The May 18, 2009, cable, titled “Google China Paying Price for Resisting Censorship,” quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li Changchun, a member of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee, and the country’s senior propaganda official, was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s main international Web site. When Mr. Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com, he found “results critical of him.” That cable from American diplomats was one of many made public by WikiLeaks that portray China’s leadership as nearly obsessed with the threat posed by the Internet to their grip on power — and, the reverse, by the opportunities it offered them, through hacking, to obtain secrets stored in computers of its rivals, especially the United States. Extensive hacking operations suspected of originating in China, including one leveled at Google, are a central theme in the cables. The operations began earlier and were aimed at a wider array of American government and military data than generally known, including on the computers of United States diplomats involved in climate change talks with China. One cable, dated early this year, quoted a Chinese person with family connections to the elite as saying that Mr. Li himself directed an attack on Google’s servers in the United States, though that claim has been called into question. In an interview with The New York Times, the person cited in the cable said that Mr. Li personally oversaw a campaign against Google’s operations in China but the person did not know who directed the hacking attack. The cables catalog the heavy pressure that was placed on Google to comply with local censorship laws, as well as Google’s willingness to comply — up to a point. That coercion began building years before the company finally decided to pull its search engine out of China last spring in the wake of the successful hacking attack on its home servers, which yielded Chinese dissidents’ e-mail accounts as well as Google’s proprietary source code. The demands on Google went well beyond removing material on subjects like the Dalai Lama or the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Chinese officials also put pressure on the United States government to censor the Google Earth satellite imaging service by lowering the resolution of images of Chinese government facilities, warning that Washington could be held responsible if terrorists used that information to attack government or military facilities, the cables show. An American diplomat replied that Google was a private company and that he would report the request to Washington but that he had no sense about how the government would act. Yet despite the hints of paranoia that appear in some cables, there are also clear signs that Chinese leaders do not consider the Internet an unstoppable force for openness and democracy, as some Americans believe. In fact, this spring, around the time of the Google pullout, China’s State Council Information Office delivered a triumphant report to the leadership on its work to regulate traffic online, according to a crucial Chinese contact cited by the State Department in a cable in early 2010, when contacted directly by The Times. The message delivered by the office, the person said, was that “in the past, a lot of officials worried that the Web could not be controlled.” “But through the Google incident and other increased controls and surveillance, like real-name registration, they reached a conclusion: the Web is fundamentally controllable,” the person said. That confidence may also reflect what the cables show are repeated and often successful hacking attacks from China on the United States government, private enterprises and Western allies that began by 2002, several years before such intrusions were widely reported in the United States. At least one previously unreported attack in 2008, code-named Byzantine Candor by American investigators, yielded more than 50 megabytes of e-mails and a complete list of user names and passwords from an American government agency, a Nov. 3, 2008, cable revealed for the first time. Precisely how these hacking attacks are coordinated is not clear. Many appear to rely on Chinese freelancers and an irregular army of “patriotic hackers” who operate with the support of civilian or military authorities, but not directly under their day-to-day control, the cables and interviews suggest. But the cables also appear to contain some suppositions by Chinese and Americans passed along by diplomats. For example, the cable dated earlier this year referring to the hacking attack on Google said: “A well-placed contact claims that the Chinese government coordinated the recent intrusions of Google systems. According to our contact, the closely held operations were directed at the Politburo Standing Committee level.” The cable goes on to quote this person as saying that the hacking of Google “had been coordinated out of the State Council Information Office with the oversight” of Mr. Li and another Politburo member, Zhou Yongkang.” Mr. Zhou is China’s top security official. But the person cited in the cable gave a divergent account. He detailed a campaign to press Google coordinated by the Propaganda Department’s director, Liu Yunshan. Mr. Li and Mr. Zhou issued approvals in several instances, he said, but he had no direct knowledge linking them to the hacking attack aimed at securing commercial secrets or dissidents’ e-mail accounts — considered the purview of security officials. Still, the cables provide a patchwork of detail about cyberattacks that American officials believe originated in China with either the assistance or knowledge of the Chinese military. For example, in 2008 Chinese intruders based in Shanghai and linked to the People’s Liberation Army used a computer document labeled “salary increase — survey and forecast” as bait as part of the sophisticated intrusion scheme that yielded more than 50 megabytes of e-mails and a complete list of user names and passwords from a United States government agency that was not identified. The cables indicate that the American government has been fighting a pitched battle with intruders who have been clearly identified as using Chinese-language keyboards and physically located in China. In most cases the intruders took great pains to conceal their identities, but occasionally they let their guard down. In one case described in the documents, investigators tracked one of the intruders who was surfing the Web in Taiwan “for personal use.” In June 2009 during climate change talks between the United States and China, the secretary of state’s office sent a secret cable warning about e-mail “spear phishing” attacks directed at five State Department employees in the Division of Ocean Affairs of the Office of the Special Envoy for Climate Change. The messages, which purport to come from a National Journal columnist, had the subject line “China and Climate Change.” The e-mail contained a PDF file that was intended to install a malicious software program known as Poison Ivy, which was meant to give an intruder complete control of the victim’s computer. That attack failed. The cables also reveal that a surveillance system dubbed Ghostnet that stole information from the computers used by the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and South Asian governments and was uncovered in 2009 was linked to a second broad series of break-ins into American government computers code-named Byzantine Hades. Government investigators were able to make a “tenuous connection” between those break-ins and the People’s Liberation Army. The documents also reveal that in 2008 German intelligence briefed American officials on similar attacks beginning in 2006 against the German government, including military, economic, science and technology, commercial, diplomatic, and research and development targets. The Germans described the attacks as preceding events like the German government’s meetings with the Chinese government. Even as such attacks were occurring, Google made a corporate decision in 2006, controversial even within the company, to establish a domestic Chinese version of its search engine, called google.cn. In doing so, it agreed to comply with China’s censorship laws. But despite that concession, Chinese officials were never comfortable with Google, the cables and interviews show. The Chinese claimed that Google Earth, the company’s satellite mapping software, offered detailed “images of China’s military, nuclear, space, energy and other sensitive government agency installations” that would be an asset to terrorists. A cable sent on Nov. 7, 2006, reported that Liu Jieyi, an assistant minister of foreign affairs, warned the American Embassy in Beijing that there would be “grave consequences” if terrorists exploited the imagery. A year later, another cable pointed out that Google searches for politically delicate terms would sometimes be automatically redirected to Baidu, the Chinese company that was Google’s main competitor in China. Baidu is known for scrubbing its own search engine of results that might be unwelcome to government censors. Google conducted numerous negotiations with officials in the State Council Information Office and other departments involved in censorship, propaganda and media licensing, the cables show. The May 18, 2009, cable that revealed pressure on the company by Mr. Li, the propaganda chief, said Google had taken some measures “to try and placate the government.” The cable also noted that Google had asked the American government to intervene with China on its behalf. But Chinese officials became alarmed that Google still did less than its Chinese rivals to remove material Chinese officials considered offensive. Such material included information about Chinese dissidents and human rights issues, but also about central and provincial Chinese leaders and their children — considered an especially taboo topic, interviews with people quoted in the cables reveal. Mr. Li, after apparently searching for information online on himself and his children, was reported to have stepped up pressure on Google. He also took steps to punish Google commercially, according to the May 18 cable. The propaganda chief ordered three big state-owned Chinese telecommunications companies to stop doing business with Google. Mr. Li also demanded that Google executives remove any link between its sanitized Chinese Web site and its main international one, which he deemed “an illegal site,” the cable said. Google ultimately stopped complying with repeated censorship requests. It stopped offering a censored version of its search engine in China earlier this year, citing both the hacking attacks and its unwillingness to continue obeying censorship orders. James Glanz reported from New York, and John Markoff from San Francisco. Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/wo...aks-china.html Study Finds Popular Sites Guilty of Hi-Jacking Browser History Brian Donohue A recent study launched by the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science to determine the scope of privacy-violating information flows at popular websites shows that popular Web 2.0 applications such as mashups, aggregators, and sophisticated ad targeting are teeming with various kinds of privacy-violating flows. Ultimately the researchers determined that such attacks are not being adequately defended against. This study comes as a result of the increasing complexity of JavaScript web applications propagating privacy-violating information flows. ‘Privacy-violating information flows’ is a general term which can be subcategorized into four areas of nefarious activity: cookie stealing, location hijacking, history sniffing, and behavior tracking. Their goal was to draw attention to the prevalence of history sniffing at high traffic sites. Websites use these exploits to gather browsing information about patrons. They then use the information to target ads and determine whether or not patrons are visiting competing sites. The researchers designed a customized information flow policy language that allowed them to detect privacy-violating flows in JavaScript code and used a modified Chrome browser to conduct their study over the Alexa global top 50,000 websites (Alexa is a company which rates websites based on traffic.) Specifically, the study confirmed that out of 50,000 sites, 485 are capable of inferring browser history data. Of these 485 sites, 63 are transferring browser history data to their network. And 46 of those were actively participating in history sniffing. They also discovered a number of sites exhibiting suspicious behavior, but using their current methods they were unable to determine with certainty whether these sites were participating in history sniffing. Among the 46 sites employing this technique, adult sites were most common. There were also examples of news, movie, sports, music and finance sites as well. The highest ranking and the only site in the Alexa top 100 found guilty of history sniffing was the adult pornography site, Youporn. http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/st...history-120610 Slowloris HTTP DoS Welcome to Slowloris - the low bandwidth, yet greedy and poisonous HTTP client! Written by RSnake with help from John Kinsella, and a dash of inspiration from Robert E Lee. UPDATE 2: Video presentation of Slowloris at DefCon (the middle section of the presentation) can be seen here: Hijacking Web 2.0 Sites with SSLstrip and SlowLoris -- Sam Bowne and RSnake at Defcon 17. UPDATE: Amit Klein pointed me to a post written by Adrian Ilarion Ciobanu written in early 2007 that perfectly describes this denial of service attack. It was also described in 2005 in the "Programming Model Attacks" section of Apache Security. So although there was no tool released at that time these two still technically deserves all the credit for this. I apologize for having missed these. In considering the ramifications of a slow denial of service attack against particular services, rather than flooding networks, a concept emerged that would allow a single machine to take down another machine's web server with minimal bandwidth and side effects on unrelated services and ports. The ideal situation for many denial of service attacks is where all other services remain intact but the webserver itself is completely inaccessible. Slowloris was born from this concept, and is therefore relatively very stealthy compared to most flooding tools. Slowloris holds connections open by sending partial HTTP requests. It continues to send subsequent headers at regular intervals to keep the sockets from closing. In this way webservers can be quickly tied up. In particular, servers that have threading will tend to be vulnerable, by virtue of the fact that they attempt to limit the amount of threading they'll allow. Slowloris must wait for all the sockets to become available before it's successful at consuming them, so if it's a high traffic website, it may take a while for the site to free up it's sockets. So while you may be unable to see the website from your vantage point, others may still be able to see it until all sockets are freed by them and consumed by Slowloris. This is because other users of the system must finish their requests before the sockets become available for Slowloris to consume. If others re-initiate their connections in that brief time-period they'll still be able to see the site. So it's a bit of a race condition, but one that Slowloris will eventually always win - and sooner than later. Slowloris also has a few stealth features built into it. Firstly, it can be changed to send different host headers, if your target is a virtual host and logs are stored seperately per virtual host. But most importantly, while the attack is underway, the log file won't be written until the request is completed. So you can keep a server down for minutes at a time without a single log file entry showing up to warn someone who might watching in that instant. Of course once your attack stops or once the session gets shut down there will be several hundred 400 errors in the web server logs. That's unavoidable as Slowloris sits today, although it may be possible to turn them into 200 OK messages instead by completing a valid request, but Slowloris doesn't yet do that. HTTPReady quickly came up as a possible solution to a Slowloris attack, because it won't cause the HTTP server to launch until a full request is recieved. This is true only for GET and HEAD requests. As long as you give Slowloris the switch to modify it's method to POST, HTTPReady turns out to be a worthless defense against this type of attack. This is NOT a TCP DoS, because it is actually making a full TCP connection, not a partial one, however it is making partial HTTP requests. It's the equivalent of a SYN flood but over HTTP. One example of the difference is that if there are two web-servers running on the same machine one server can be DoSed without affecting the other webserver instance. Slowloris would also theoretically work over other protocols like UDP, if the program was modified slightly and the webserver supported it. Slowloris is also NOT a GET request flooder. Slowloris requires only a few hundred requests at long term and regular intervals, as opposed to tens of thousands on an ongoing basis. Interestingly enough, in testing this has been shown in at least one instance to lock up database connections and force other strange issues and errors to arise that can allow for fingerprinting and other odd things to become obvious once the DoS is complete and the server attempts to clean itself up. I would guess that this issue arises when the webserver is allowed to open more connections than the database is, causing the database to fail first and for longer than the webserver. Slowloris lets the webserver return to normal almost instantly (usually within 5 seconds or so). That makes it ideal for certain attacks that may just require a brief down-time. As described in this blog post, DoS is actually very useful for certain types of attacks where timing is key, or as a diversionary tactic, etc.... This affects a number of webservers that use threaded processes and ironically attempt to limit that to prevent memory exhaustion - fixing one problem created another. This includes but is not necessarily limited to the following: * Apache 1.x * Apache 2.x * dhttpd * GoAhead WebServer * WebSense "block pages" (unconfirmed) * Trapeze Wireless Web Portal (unconfirmed) * Verizon's MI424-WR FIOS Cable modem (unconfirmed) * Verizon's Motorola Set-Top Box (port 8082 and requires auth - unconfirmed) * BeeWare WAF (unconfirmed) * Deny All WAF (unconfirmed) There are a number of webservers that this doesn't affect as well, in my testing: * IIS6.0 * IIS7.0 * lighttpd * Squid * nginx * Cherokee (verified by user community) * Netscaler * Cisco CSS (verified by user community) This is obviously not a complete list, and there may be a number of variations on these web-servers that are or are not vulnerable. I didn't test every configuration or variant, so your mileage may vary. This also may not work if there is an upstream device that somehow limits/buffers/proxies HTTP requests. Please note though that Slowloris only represents one variant of this attack and other variants may have different impacts on other webservers and upstream devices. This command should work on most systems, but please be sure to check the options as well: perl slowloris.pl -dns example.com Requirements: This is a Perl program requiring the Perl interpreter with the modules IO::Socket::INET, IO::Socket::SSL, and GetOpt::Long. Slowloris works MUCH better and faster if you have threading, so I highly encourage you to also install threads and threads::shared if you don't have those modules already. You can install modules using CPAN: perl -MCPAN -e 'install IO::Socket::INET' perl -MCPAN -e 'install IO::Socket::SSL' Windows users: You probably will not be able to successfuly execute a Slowloris denial of service from Windows even if you use Cygwin. I have not had any luck getting Slowloris to successfuly deny service from within Windows, because Slowloris requires more than a few hundred sockets to work (sometimes a thousand or more), and Windows limits sockets to around 130, from what I've seen. I highly suggest you use a *NIX operating system to execute Slowloris from for the best results, and not from within a virtual machine, as that could have unexpected results based on the parent operating system. Version: Slowloris is currently at version 0.7 - 06/17/2009 Download: slowloris.pl Getting started: perldoc slowloris.pl Issues: For a complete list of issues look at the Perl documentation, which explains all of the things to think about when running this denial of service attack. Thanks: Thank you to John Kinsella for the help with threading and id and greyhat for help with testing. http://ha.ckers.org/slowloris/ Service Members Face New Threat: Identity Theft Matt Richtel The government warns Americans to closely guard their Social Security numbers. But it has done a poor job of protecting those same numbers for millions of people: the nation’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. At bases and outposts at home and around the world, military personnel continue to use their Social Security numbers as personal identifiers in dozens of everyday settings, from filling out health forms to checking out basketballs at the gym. Thousands of soldiers in Iraq even stencil the last four digits onto their laundry bags. All of this is putting members of the military at heightened risk for identity theft. That is the conclusion of a scathing new report written by an Army intelligence officer turned West Point professor, Lt. Col. Gregory Conti. The report concludes that the military needs to rid itself of a practice that has been widespread since the 1960s. “Service members and their families are burdened with a work environment that shows little regard for their personal information,” the report says, adding that the service members, “their units, military preparedness and combat effectiveness all will pay a price for decades to come.” Representatives for the military say they are aware of the problem and are taking steps to fix it, with the Navy and Marines making efforts in the last few months. The Defense Department said in 2008 that it was moving to limit the use of Social Security numbers, and in a statement last week it said the numbers would no longer appear on new military ID cards as of May. But Colonel Conti said in an interview that the situation had not really changed: “The farther you get away from the flagpole at headquarters, those policies get overturned by operational realities.” Social Security numbers are valuable to thieves because they often serve as a crucial identifier when dealing with banks and credit card companies. In the wrong hands they can lead to a cascade of problems, like ruined credit and, in turn, challenges for military personnel in getting security clearances or promotions. In 2009, Social Security numbers were used in 32 percent of identity thefts in which the victims knew how their information was compromised, according to Javelin Strategy and Research, which tracks identity theft. Javelin last looked at identity theft in the military in 2006, finding that 3.3 percent of active military personnel had been victims of such fraud that year, slightly below the 3.7 percent in the public at large. Over all, identity theft is on the rise; in 2009, the nationwide rate crept up to 4.8 percent, with each person losing $373 on average, Javelin estimated. Most of those incidents affect individuals or households and do not make headlines. But in June, the Richmond County district attorney in Staten Island announced the indictment of a gang of identity thieves who victimized, among others, 20 soldiers at Ford Hood, Tex. According to the district attorney’s office, the soldiers’ Social Security numbers were stolen from the base by a former Army member who moved to New York, and the thieves then made 2,515 attempts to abuse the soldiers’ identities, obtaining checkbooks or credit cards in their names. Officials said some of the soldiers had been singled out because they were stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan where they would be slow to catch on to the fraud. That is precisely the fear of military officials concerning the vulnerability of soldiers. “If you’re operational and you’re out there, you can’t do anything about the harm being done in the United States,” said Steve Muck, the Navy’s chief information officer in charge of privacy policy for Marine and naval personnel. “It’s a significant issue.” In a major first step toward protecting Social Security numbers, the Department of the Navy expects to get the results this month from a broad review in which each department had to justify the use of the numbers on paperwork or remove them. Mr. Muck expects that 50 percent of the uses will be found to have been unjustified. He cites practices already being dismantled that he says defy common sense, like using a Social Security number to check out a racquet or towel at the gym, get a flu shot or buy a pair of pants at a ship commissary. Children of military personnel as young as 10 carry ID cards with Social Security numbers, as do their parents. Six months ago, the Department of the Navy introduced a campaign to alert personnel based overseas to the threat. One poster circulating in the Persian Gulf shows a Marine sitting in a Humvee, clad in camouflage and manning a machine gun, above the words “Who’s Using My Credit Card?” The poster goes on to say that “an operational deployment is not the time to be worried about your identity being stolen,” and offers tips on detecting fraud. Mr. Muck also has a more ambitious plan: he wants to replace the Social Security number internally with a 10-digit number that is already assigned to most service members as a computer login. He said he was waiting for approval from the Defense Department to begin carrying out this change, a process that could start early next year. Even if and when the change comes, he said, it would not affect some current uses of Social Security numbers, like on health care forms. And it would not affect much paperwork that is governed not by the individual branches but by the Defense Department. The new report by Colonel Conti, titled “The Military’s Cultural Disregard for Personal Information,” was published Monday on the Web site of Small Wars Journal, which tracks military affairs. Gary Tallman, a spokesman for the Army, said Colonel Conti’s report, was “absolutely factual,” adding that the use of Social Security numbers was “second nature to us.” But he also said the onus falls in large part on the Defense Department to lead the changes, because it uses the numbers “for so many things.” The Defense Department is carrying out its own review, saying in its statement that it planned to tell its staff that they would need to justify every use of the numbers and eliminate unnecessary ones. But it added that it was “exceedingly difficult” to determine the extent to which use of the numbers within the agency had led to identity theft. For his part, Colonel Conti said he was particularly troubled by something he saw while he was deployed in Iraq. “For heaven’s sake, I stenciled portions of my Social Security number on my laundry bag in Iraq, where it was memorized by foreign-national laundry workers trying to enhance their customer service,” he said. “I’d walk in and they’d say, ‘Number 1234, here’s your laundry,’ and they were very proud of that fact.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/te...7identity.html U.S. Arrests Online Seller Who Scared Customers David Segal  Federal law enforcement agents on Monday arrested a Brooklyn Internet merchant who mistreated customers because he thought their online complaints raised the profile of his business in Google searches. The merchant, Vitaly Borker, 34, who operates a Web site called decormyeyes.com, was charged with one count each of mail fraud, wire fraud, making interstate threats and cyberstalking. The mail fraud and wire fraud charges each carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The stalking and interstate threats charges carry a maximum sentence of five years. He was arrested early Monday by agents of the United States Postal Inspection Service. In an arraignment in the late afternoon in United States District Court in Lower Manhattan, Judge Michael H. Dolinger denied Mr. Borker’s request for bail, stating that the defendant was either “verging on psychotic” or had “an explosive personality.” Mr. Borker will be detained until a preliminary hearing, scheduled for Dec. 20. The arrest came eight days after The New York Times published a lengthy account of Mr. Borker’s campaign of intimidation against a woman named Clarabelle Rodriguez who had bought a pair of glasses from DecorMyEyes over the summer. When she tried to return the glasses, which she believed were fakes, he threatened to sexually assault her and later sent her a photograph of the front of her apartment building. He also sent menacing e-mails, one of which stated that she had put her “hand in fire. Now it’s time to get burned.” In an interview with a reporter from The New York Times in October, Mr. Borker maintained that scaring Ms. Rodriguez — and dozens of other customers in the last three years — enhanced the standing of DecorMyEyes in Internet searches on Google. That was because Google’s algorithm, he claimed, was unable to distinguish between praise and complaints. All of the negative postings translated into buzz, he said, which helped push DecorMyEyes higher in search results and increased his sales. It is unclear if Mr. Borker was right about the cause of DecorMyEyes’ surprisingly strong showing in online searches. But last week, Google published a post on its official blog stating that it had changed its search formula so that companies were penalized if they provided customers with what it called “an extremely poor user experience.” For months, Ms. Rodriguez was unable to get much traction with any of the law enforcement entities she had called as she coped with Mr. Borker’s verbal and written attacks. Now, there seems to be a competition to punish him. He has already been charged with aggravated harassment and stalking by local authorities and is scheduled to be arraigned on those charges on Dec. 22. The state attorney general’s office is conducting its own investigation and could bring additional state charges. But federal law enforcement seemed eager to partake as well. In a statement released Monday, Preet Bharara, United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said, “Vitaly Borker, an alleged cyberbully and fraudster, cheated his customers, and when they complained, tried to intimidate them with obscenity and threats of serious violence.” At the arraignment, an assistant United States attorney, E. Danya Perry, argued against bail by claiming that Mr. Borker was both a flight risk and a risk to the community. She said that postal inspectors had carted off boxes of apparently counterfeit eyeglasses after searching Mr. Borker’s home and had also found a handful of guns, including a semiautomatic machine gun. Mr. Borker’s lawyer, Bruce Kaye, said the weapons were stage props capable of firing only blanks, not live ammunition. Mr. Kaye argued that Mr. Borker should be released on bail because no one had ever accused him of committing any violent acts. He added that Mr. Borker was family man — he has a wife and a 2-year-old child — and was willing to surrender his passport and post a bond worth $500,000. Judge Dolinger said that even if Mr. Borker had not physically harmed anyone, he could still be a threat to society given his habit of terrifying his customers. The complaint against Mr. Borker describes the accusations in detail. A DecorMyEyes customer identified as Victim 4 stated that Mr. Borker’s threats included a phone call in which he said, “I can hurt you,” and, “I know where you work.” Mr. Borker apparently sent e-mail to the company where Victim 4 worked, stating that the customer sold drugs and was gay. Another customer, identified as Victim 3, said that Mr. Borker had sent her an e-mail that included this warning: “PS: don’t forget that I know where you live as well,” after she mentioned her intent to contact the New York Department of Consumer Affairs. He reportedly later called Victim 3 at all hours of the night, threatening sexual assault. A far more subdued version of Mr. Borker appeared in court on Monday afternoon. Dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, he said little. When he was led away by court officers, he turned to look at his wife, who was sitting in the courtroom. He appeared grief stricken and on the verge of tears. “Sorry,” he whispered to her, as he was escorted through a side door. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/bu.../07borker.html Revealed: Assange ‘Rape’ Accuser Linked to Notorious CIA Operative David Edwards  One of the women that is accusing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of sex crimes appears to have worked with a group that has connections to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). James D. Catlin, a lawyer who recently represented Assange, said the sex assault investigation into the WikiLeaks founder is based on claims he didn't use condoms during sex with two Swedish women. Swedish prosecutors told AOL News last week that Assange was not wanted for rape as has been reported, but for something called "sex by surprise" or "unexpected sex." One accuser, Anna Ardin, may have "ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups," according to Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett, writing for CounterPunch. While in Cuba, Ardin worked with the Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White), a feminist anti-Castro group. Professor Michael Seltzer pointed out that the group is led by Carlos Alberto Montaner who is reportedly connected to the CIA. Shamir and Bennett also describe Ardin as a "leftist" who "published her anti-Castro diatribes in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba." Shamir and Bennett noted that Las damas de blanco is partially funded by the US government and also counts Luis Posada Carriles as a supporter. A declassified 1976 document (.pdf) revealed Posada to be a CIA agent. He has been convicted of terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of people. Ardin is "a gender equity officer at Uppsula University – who chose to associate with a US funded group openly supported by a convicted terrorist and mass murderer," FireDogLake's Kirk James Murphy observed. In August, Assange told Al-Jazeera that the accusations were "clearly a smear campaign." "We have been warned that, for example, the Pentagon is planning on using dirty tricks to destroy our work," Assange told the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet. The WikiLeaks founder said he was told to be careful of "sex traps." Had Assange fallen for one of those traps? "Maybe. Maybe not," he said. Catlin observed that both Ardin and Sofia Wilén, the second accuser, sent SMS messages and tweets boasting of their conquests following the alleged "rapes." "In the case of Ardin it is clear that she has thrown a party in Assange's honour at her flat after the 'crime' and tweeted to her followers that she is with the 'the world’s coolest smartest people, it’s amazing!'" he wrote. "The exact content of Wilén’s mobile phone texts is not yet known but their bragging and exculpatory character has been confirmed by Swedish prosecutors. Niether Wilén’s nor Ardin’s texts complain of rape," Catlin said. Ardin has also published a seven step guide on how to get revenge on cheating boyfriends. When the charges were first leveled in August, Gawker raised doubts that Ardin was working for the CIA. "If anything, Ardin's outing tends to undercut Assange's conspiracy theory that one of his accusers is a major figure on Sweden's left fringe, freewheelingly indiscreet on her personal blog and, until her charges, an enthusiastic promoter of Assange's visit to the country," Gawker wrote. After Interpol issued a digital "wanted" poster for Assange on Monday morning, an unnamed Scotland Yard source reportedly told Press Association it had been given the documents needed for the arrest. Police would not comment on the report publicly. Several British news outlets speculated that Assange could be arrested as early as Tuesday. On Monday evening, Mark Stephens, Assange's London lawyer, was negotiating with British authorities over an arrest warrant they'd received from their Swedish counterparts. Assange has vowed to fight extradition. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/a...user-cia-ties/ Video Barbie in FBI Cross Hairs Kim Zetter A Barbie doll tricked out with a video camera concealed in her necklace could be used by predators to create child pornography, warns the FBI in a recent cybercrime alert. In the alert, mistakenly released to the press, the FBI expressed concern that the toy’s camera, which can capture 30 minutes of video and rivals a Canon 7D in quality (see above), could be used to lure children and surreptitiously film child pornography. Barbie and other dolls have been used in the past by sexual predators to attract victims. According to ABC News, which obtained a copy of the memo, the FBI appears to have opened an investigation into the doll. Mattel, the maker of Barbie Video Girl, noted in a statement that the FBI didn’t say it knew of any cases where the Barbie camera had been used for such nefarious purposes. But a sheriff’s spokesman told ABC News that the FBI alert will be helpful for drawing attention to investigators collecting evidence at a crime scene. “When we’re doing a search warrant looking for media that a child pornographer may have used, we’re gonna have to put Barbie on the list just like any other cameras [and] computers,” said Sgt. John Urquhart from the King County Sheriff’s Department in Washington state. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...fbi-crosshairs Porn Site Gave Federal Agents Free Rein Probers secretly monitored Free6.com for 16 months The operators of a notorious pornography web site granted federal agents administrative access to the site, giving investigators the ability to monitor traffic and public and private chats in an effort to identify users trading “a significant amount of child pornography,” records show. Beginning in October 2008, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents secretly monitored activity on Free6.com from inside the porn site, which launched in 1998. That covert operation ended earlier this year when Los Angeles-based ICE agents discovered that the web site “had been removed from the Internet by the company responsible for hosting the website.” To determine what happened to the site, agents assigned to the Child Exploitation Investigations Group (CEIG) subsequently contacted a Free6.com administrator with whom they had previously worked. It was then that they learned the man was “incarcerated in the Philippines and facing charges for running an adult pornography business contrary to Filipino law.” The government’s Free6.com contact is not identified in a recent ICE affidavit, excerpted here, that discloses the agency’s 16-month run as a shadow administrator of the porn site. It is unknown how many criminal cases have been made as a result of ICE’s monitoring of Free6.com, though TSG has identified two men who have been charged this year with trading child porn in its chat rooms. According to the ICE affidavit, agents began investigating Free6.com since visitors had been misusing the site’s chat function to traffic illicit images (probers noted that the site “appears to be a legal website featuring adult pornography”). When Agent Neil Burdick contacted the site seeking help in obtaining IP addresses of individuals posting child porn, “cooperative” Free6.com administrators volunteered to assist ICE investigators. In October 2008, ICE was given an administrative password that gave agents “the ability to review all traffic taking place in the Free6 chat rooms, both public and private chats.” With the password, law enforcement officials “were able to view all logged chats/posts made from the same screen name, or the same IP address.” This administrative access gave agents a remarkable opportunity to monitor--in real-time or after-the-fact--the violation of child porn laws. While Free6.com included a notice warning that the posting of “child pornography or other illegal material” would be reported to “local authorities,” Burdick had site administrators add a line noting that, “Free6.com may disclose these communications to the authorities at its discretion.” Though some bloggers have speculated about whether law enforcement officials have secretly been given administrative access to sites where users have been known to post child pornography (like 4chan), the Free6.com arrangement is apparently the first such compact to be disclosed by investigators. http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documen...ents-free-rein Garry Gross Is Dead at 73; Photographer of Clothes and Their Absence Dennis Hevesi Garry Gross, a fashion photographer for 30 years who was best known for controversial photos of an unclothed 10-year-old Brooke Shields, died on Nov. 30 at his home in Manhattan. Mr. Gross, who in recent years had focused his cameras on dogs, was 73. He died of natural causes, his sister, Linda Gross, said. In 1975, before Ms. Shields became known as a child actress, her mother, Teri, signed a contract allowing Mr. Gross to take a series of photos of Brooke, in thick makeup and bejeweled, sitting and standing in a steaming, opulently decorated bathtub. Mother and daughter received a total of $450 for the shoot. Within a few years Ms. Shields had become a star with her equally controversial appearance as a pre-teenage prostitute in the 1978 film “Pretty Baby.” And when she was 17, she tried to block any further sale of the photos, contending that they were an invasion of her privacy and caused her embarrassment. But after a protracted legal fight, New York State’s highest court ruled that she could not break the contract. In its 4-to-3 decision, the Court of Appeals said that Mr. Gross could continue to market the photos as long as he did not sell them to pornographic publications. In the minority opinion, Judge Matthew J. Jasen wrote, “I see no reason why the child must continue to bear the burden imposed by her mother’s bad judgment.” By then Mr. Gross was already a figure in the New York fashion scene. His work had been featured in magazines like GQ, Cosmopolitan and New York. He also shot portraits for the record industry, including a well-known cover of Lou Reed holding up a hand mirror, but not bothering to look into it, for his 1979 album, “The Bells.” Garry Donald Gross was born in the Bronx on Nov. 6, 1937, to Albert and Sylvia Gross. His father was a furrier. After graduating from City College in 1958, he became an apprentice to noted photographers, first Francesco Scavullo and then James Moore. He also studied with Lisette Model and Richard Avedon. In addition to his sister, Mr. Gross is survived by a brother, Steve. A lifelong animal lover, Mr. Gross had worked as a teenager at the stables in Van Cortland Park, near his home in the Bronx. With photo assignments fading after the Brooke Shields controversy, he decided to become a dog trainer. And in 2001, with Victoria Stilwell, who is now host of the television show “It’s Me or the Dog” on Animal Planet, he opened a dog training school in Manhattan. He soon combined his passions, creating large-format studio portraits of dogs, lighting them the way he would fashion models and usually focusing on their eyes. “He wanted to look into a dog’s soul, especially with senior dogs, to show how much life they’d lived,” Ms. Stilwell said on Monday. And because he was a dog handler, she added, “he was able to train the dogs so they weren’t freaked out by the flash.” In a curious twist on the Shields case, Richard Prince, a pioneer of what is known as appropriation art — photographing other people’s photographs and enlarging them for exhibition — appropriated the most revealing of Mr. Gross’s bathtub shots of Ms. Shields. Like other unwittingly appropriated artists, Mr. Gross objected and reportedly received a small payment from Mr. Prince in an out-of-court settlement. The photo was shown at an exhibition of Mr. Prince’s work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2007, but two years later the Tate Modern in London removed it from an exhibit after Scotland Yard warned that it could violate obscenity laws. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/ar...n/07gross.html Lusty Tales and Hot Sales: Romance E-Books Thrive Julie Bosman Sarah Wendell, blogger and co-author of “Beyond Heaving Bosoms,” is passionate about romance novels. Except for the covers, with their images of sinewy limbs, flowing, Fabio-esque locks or, as she put it, “the mullets and the man chests.” “They are not always something that you are comfortable holding in your hand in public,” Ms. Wendell said. So she began reading e-books, escaping the glances and the imagined snickers from strangers on the subway, and joining the many readers who have traded the racy covers of romance novels for the discretion of digital books. If the e-reader is the digital equivalent of the brown-paper wrapper, the romance reader is a little like the Asian carp: insatiable and unstoppable. Together, it turns out, they are a perfect couple. Romance is now the fastest-growing segment of the e-reading market, ahead of general fiction, mystery and science fiction, according to data from Bowker, a research organization for the publishing industry. Publishers and retailers, spying an opportunity, have begun pursuing in earnest those enthusiastic romance readers who have abandoned print for digital. “Romance,” said Matthew Shear, the executive vice president and publisher of St. Martin’s Press, which releases 40 to 50 romance novels each year, is “becoming as popular in e-books as it is in the print editions.” When “Maybe This Time,” a lighthearted ghost romance by the best-selling author Jennifer Crusie, went on sale in August, it sold as many e-books as hardcover books in its first week, Mr. Shear said, a phenomenon that he began noticing this summer with other romance titles. At All Romance, an online retailer that sells only e-books, sales have more than doubled this year, and the most sought-after titles are usually the raciest. “It’s easier to check out some naughty little title online than in a brick-and-mortar store where your pastor could step up in line behind you,” said Barb Perfetti, the chief financial officer of All Romance. “We’ve had lots of customers write to us and say, ‘Now I don’t always have to show my husband what I’m reading.’ ” Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest bookstore chain, is courting romance readers more aggressively than ever. William Lynch, the chief executive, said in an interview that until recently Barnes & Noble was a nonplayer in the huge romance category, but that it now has captured more than 25 percent of the market in romance e-books. Sometime next year, he said, he expects the company’s e-book sales in romance to surpass its print sales. “This is a new business for us,” Mr. Lynch said. “Romance buyers are buying, on average, three books a month. That buyer is really, really valuable.” Dominique Raccah, the publisher and chief executive of Sourcebooks, an independent publisher in Naperville, Ill., said her romance e-book sales had grown exponentially this year, outpacing any other category. In the first quarter 8 percent of total romance sales at Sourcebooks were from e-book sales. By the third quarter that number had gone up to 27 percent. (Major trade publishers say e-books now make up about 9 to 10 percent of overall sales.) “You’re seeing the real development of a market,” Ms. Raccah said. Romance is a natural leader here. The genre took off in the 1980s, when it expanded from the typical dreamy or bodice-ripping historical novels to include contemporary, plot-driven stories with characters drawn from real life. (Happy endings, though, are still required.) In 2009, when more than 9,000 titles were published, romance fiction generated $1.36 billion in sales, giving it the largest share of the overall trade-book market, according to the Romance Writers of America, which compiles statistics on romance books. Nearly 75 million people read at least one romance novel in 2008, the group said. (Ms. Wendell and her co-author, Candy Tan, wrote in “Beyond Heaving Bosoms” that romance novels are “easily the most-hidden literary habit in America.”) Romance readers tend to be women ages 31 to 49 who are — contrary to the popular image of Miss Lonelyhearts living vicariously through fictional tales of seduction — in a romantic relationship, according to the writers group. They frequently fly through a book or more a week, and from the beginning they have jumped at the chance to store hundreds of titles on a single device — where the next happy ending is a download away. Print sales of romance novels are still strong at retailers like Wal-Mart and Target. But Mr. Lynch of Barnes & Noble predicted that chain drugstores like CVS and Duane Reade would eventually decrease the shelf space devoted to print books. It is difficult to predict what expanding e-book sales will do to print sales in the long term. Kelly Gallagher, the vice president for publishing services for Bowker, said that e-book sales were “definitely cannibalizing print,” a prospect that worries publishers. But some, like Random House, are rushing to convert their backlist books into digital form to the delight of romance readers, who tend to be fiercely loyal to authors. Harlequin Enterprises has digitized nearly 10,000 titles, dating back to 2002. “Once a romance reader acquires an author they love, they will often go in and buy all the backlist,” said Allison Kelley, executive director of the Romance Writers of America. “When books were out of stock or out of print, they were hard to find. But e-books have changed all that.” Kathryn Popoff, vice president for trade book merchandising for Borders, said backlist titles were especially popular with romance readers because the print books had such a short shelf life in stores — usually only a month. “If you missed it, you have an opportunity to go back to the Borders site and download that book,” she said. To pursue these readers Barnes & Noble has started a “romance store” for its Nook Color, a new dedicated e-reader that the company is marketing heavily to women. Some publishers have tried to hook readers by selling the first book in a series for as little as $2.99 — a discount from the more typical $5 or $8 for the most popular romance e-books on BN.com, for example. (The price for a mass-market paperback is often about the same as its digital version.) Small-press publishers that specialize in romance e-books have popped up in recent years, along with Web sites that exclusively sell digital books, like All Romance. Last summer Harlequin created Carina Press, an imprint that specializes in digital romance books. “We want to make it super convenient for readers to access that material however they choose to do it,” said Donna Hayes, the chief executive of Harlequin. Even if, lately, many of the e-book versions of romances arrive without a cover. Jane Litte, the pseudonym of an Iowa lawyer who writes the popular romance blog Dear Author (dearauthor.com), said she had noticed that about half of the romance novels she downloaded had their covers missing. “It’s an irritant,” she said, blaming publishers for not securing the digital rights for cover art. “I don’t love the covers, but I’d rather have them than not have them.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/books/09romance.html Waning Support for College Radio Sets Off a Debate John Vorwald Like many college radio stations across the country, Rice University’s KTRU and Vanderbilt University’s WRVU play a broad swath of music — from undiscovered indie bands and obscure blues acts to ’60s garage rock and ’80s postpunk. It’s a mix largely absent from commercial broadcasts, and students active in radio say their stations add distinct voices to their cities’ broadcast landscape. But as colleges across the country look for ways to tighten budgets amid recession-induced shortfalls, some administrators — most recently in the South — have focused on college radio, leading even well-endowed universities to sell off their FM stations. That trend was felt this summer at Rice and Vanderbilt, among the most prominent of Southern universities, stirring debate about the viability of broadcast radio, the reach of online broadcasting and the value of student broadcast programming. “We play music that you won’t find on any other Houston radio station” said Joey Yang, a junior at Rice and station manager for KTRU. “KTRU’s mission is to broadcast exactly what you can’t find elsewhere on the dial.” Scott Cardone, a sophomore disk jockey at WRVU with a two-hour electric blues show, pointed to the potential void in Nashville if Vanderbilt’s FM signal were to be sold. “The community will lose what probably is the last radio station playing anything other than country, Christian or Top 40 in the whole city,” he said. “You can’t hear the music that we play anywhere else.” At the center of public discussion are “student habits” — or whether students are actually tuning in to the universities’ FM signals. In September, Vanderbilt Student Communications, the corporate body that oversees Vanderbilt University media, released a statement announcing it would explore the migration of its student-run radio station to exclusively online programming. The exploration, which was voted on by a board of five at-large students and three faculty members, was a response to “changing student habits and evolving economic challenges,” according to a statement by the group. In August, Rice announced the decision to sell student-founded station KTRU — its 50,000-watt FM frequency, broadcast tower and F.C.C. license — to the University of Houston, for $9.5 million. In a statement, David W. Leebron, the president of Rice, called the station a “vastly underutilized resource.” The announcements at Rice and Vanderbilt highlight a stream of college radio station closings in recent years, including KTXT at Texas Tech University in 2008 and Augustana College’s KAUR in South Dakota in 2009. While officials at both Rice and Vanderbilt emphasize that the stations will continue to broadcast online, Mr. Yang believes the loss of a terrestrial signal will effectively delegitimize KTRU. “As a 50,000-watt station that can be heard all across Houston, there’s a sense of responsibility to the community,” he said. “When you lose a terrestrial footprint in Houston — anyone can put out a signal that’s on the Internet — it takes away the legitimacy of what we’re trying to do.” Despite obvious parallels between KTRU and WRVU, Chris Carroll, director of student media at Vanderbilt Student Communications, draws a stark contrast between the situations at the two universities. At Vanderbilt, he said, “what’s happening, really, is a big public discussion about is this a good idea or not, and there’s no conclusion to that yet.” Rice, he said, made the decision to sell KTRU behind closed doors — without student input. Mr. Carroll, who does not vote on the organization’s board, contends that students just don’t listen to terrestrial radio anymore. “We will pull a random sample of Vanderbilt undergrads — of 500 or so at a time. And what we’ve found is that these students aren’t listening to radio at all. It’s not just WRVU,” he said. Instead, students are listening on mobile devices like smartphones and laptops, both of which are more readily serviced by the Internet, he said. Mr. Cardone acknowledges that WRVU’s audience may be thinner on campus than off, but he believes the station justifies its value as one of the only relevant connections between the students and the city. According to Arbitron, a media and marketing research firm that measures local radio audiences, the station reaches just over 30,000 people each week in greater Nashville. After a tumultuous summer, groups focused on saving the stations have mobilized at both campuses. Both have Web sites — savektru.org and savewrvu.org — and Facebook pages to gather comments and provide updates. Friends of KTRU, a group opposed to selling the station, retained the Paul Hastings firm to represent it, and on Friday, the group filed a petition to deny with the F.C.C., claiming the sale was not in the public interest. At Vanderbilt, Mr. Carroll says the WRVU page on vandymedia.org, an umbrella site for the campus student media, has garnered more than 700 comments. He says he will sort them into common themes before the board reviews them early next year. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/bu...6stations.html Media Audit Study Compares Radio Formats To Other Media FMQB The Media Audit has released a new study, analyzing the most popular radio formats in relation to how their listeners consume other media. The study found that listeners to different formats do indeed have different levels of exposure to TV, the Internet, newspaper and outdoor advertising. For example, Dance-CHR fans spend an average of 4.5 hours online every day, more than any other format in the study. Breaking this listenership down further, 48 percent of Dance-CHR fans are 18-24 years old, and among this portion of the audience, Internet usage is at a daily average of 5.75 hours. On the other hand, Spanish-language radio listeners spend the least amount of time online, with just three hours per day on average. However, Spanish radio listeners spend more time with radio, averaging 2 hours and 45 minutes daily Urban AC listeners were found to be the largest consumers of TV, while Public Radio fans spend the least amount of time in front of their TVs. Urban AC listeners spend an average of 4.5 hours daily watching TV, while Public Radio listeners spend an average of two hours and 40 minutes daily with their TV. The Media Audit also found that when looking at Public Radio listeners' media habits by age group, as listeners get older, they spend more time listening to radio, "a trend not often seen among radio listeners." http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=2040197 Rabbit Ears Perk Up for Free HDTV Matt Richtel and Jenna Wortham Julie and Anthony Bayerl of St. Paul, Minn., love watching prime-time shows on the sleek 50-inch television in their bedroom. They also love that they pay nothing for the programming. The only thing they do not love is how a low-flying plane, heavy rain or just a little too much movement in the room can wipe out the picture. “If someone is changing in there, it messes up your reception,” said Ms. Bayerl, a legislative assistant. “We try to stay very still when we watch television.” The Bayerls are using an old technology that some people are giving a second chance. They pull free TV signals out of the air with the modern equivalent of the classic rabbit-ear antenna. Some viewers who have decided that they are no longer willing or able to pay for cable or satellite service, including younger ones, are buying antennas and tuning in to a surprising number of free broadcast channels. These often become part of a video diet that includes the fast-growing menu of options available online. The antenna reception has also led many of these converts to discover — or rediscover — the frustration of weak and spotty signals. But its fans argue that it is tough to beat the price. “My husband’s best friend thinks we’re big dorks for having rabbit ears and not cable,” Ms. Bayerl said. But when their introductory price for cable TV and Internet access expired this year and the bill soared to $150, the couple halved it by cutting TV. “It wasn’t something we were willing to pay for,” she said. Many pay TV customers are making the same decision. From April to September, cable and satellite companies had a net loss of about 330,000 customers. Craig Moffett, a longtime cable analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein, said the consensus of the industry executives he had talked to was that most of these so-called cord-cutters were turning to over-the-air TV. “It looks like they’re leaving for the antenna,” he said. Neil Smit, president of Comcast Cable, acknowledged in a recent call with investors that some customers had dropped cable for free signals. Company executives also said they expected business to rebound with the economy. Last month, Time Warner Cable fought back with a lower-cost package that it said might appeal to people who are feeling the economic squeeze. For $40 in New York, or $30 in Ohio, customers can get a slimmed-down set of channels. To be sure, around 90 percent of American households still pay for cable or satellite television — a figure that in recent years has been slowly and steadily rising. But American’s relationship with television has recently been in flux, in part because of the switch last June to digital broadcast signals. That initially gave pay TV providers a group of new subscribers who had worried that their old sets would not pick up the new signals. But analysts say some of those subscribers have since gone back to free signals. Another big change is the rise of Internet video, which can ease the pain of losing favorite cable channels. Bradley Lautenback, 28, who recently moved to Los Angeles to work at Disney, found enough alternatives to allow him to turn back the technological clock on his TV. “I’ve always had cable. It’s the thing you do when you move to a new place: call the company and set it up,” he said. Not this time. Instead, he got an antenna and now watches over-the-air news and sports, complemented by episodes of shows like “Entourage” that he buys from iTunes. “I don’t miss cable at all,” he said. Industrywide figures on antenna sales are hard to come by, so it is difficult to tell how widely they are being adopted. Antennas Direct, a maker of TV antennas in St. Louis, expects to sell 500,000 this year, up from 385,000 in 2009, according to its president, Richard Schneider. The company’s digital TV antennas, like others on the market, are a far cry from the wire-hanger versions of old. The sleek circles encased in plastic look more like mouse ears than anything belonging to a bunny. Mr. Schneider said that based on customer support calls and feedback from retailers, his customers were 20-somethings who pair over-the-air and Internet programming, people forced to make choices by a tough economy and others who, he argues, have long been eager to sever ties with their pay-TV provider. “Over-the-air is the new basic cable,” he said, arguing that free TV and Internet alternatives “are giving people the rationale they’ve been looking for to end a bad relationship.” Broadcasters, far from being troubled by the trend, believe it benefits them, according to Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters. He said broadcasters did not mind the move to over-the-air programming because those viewers were also potential audience members for the ads that support programming. Modern antennas, which cost $25 to $150, pick up high-definition signals that can actually be crisper than the cable or satellite version of the same program, because the pay TV companies compress the video data. But compared with analog broadcasts, which occasionally showed static, digital signals are less forgiving of interference and more likely to blank out altogether. At a World Cup viewing party in a Brooklyn apartment last summer, the hosts encouraged guests to limit trips to the kitchen and the bathroom to avoid too many interruptions of the signal. The new antennas do pull in more programs than your grandfather’s rabbit ears, because of new channels that broadcasters added during the transition to digital signals. The broadcasters can fit multiple digital channels into the same frequencies that used to carry one analog channel. In St. Paul, for example, where Ms. Bayerl lives, there are extra channels from ABC and NBC with local news and weather, four public television channels and a music video channel. Big markets like Los Angeles have 40 or more channels, according to Nielsen. Given the new options, Chris Foster, 29, a graduate student at the University of Virginia, and his wife decided to forgo a $35 fee for basic cable. They watch movies and older shows through Netflix on the Internet and use their antenna for sitcoms and the news. Mr. Forster concedes he misses cable news stations, but over all, he is satisfied. “It feels more like a step forward than a step back,” he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/bu...abbitears.html Netflix in Streaming Deal for Some ABC Shows Netflix Inc reached a deal with ABC Television Group to add past episodes of popular shows "Grey's Anatomy," "Desperate Housewives" and "Brothers & Sisters" to its online streaming service, the two sides announced on Wednesday. ABC, a division of Walt Disney Co, will also make available to Netflix every episode of "Lost" and "Ugly Betty," two shows that are no longer on the air. The deal also includes a number of programs from the Disney Channel, including "Phineas and Ferb" and "Good Luck Charlie." Netflix will not be allowed to stream current shows earlier than 15 days after initial telecast, under the terms of the agreement. Financial details were not disclosed. Netflix, whose stock has jumped around ninefold over the past two years, is a leader in U.S. DVD rentals, with its service that sends movies and TV shows through the mail. But the company is increasingly pushing its streaming service, which has grown quickly and now accounts for one-fifth of U.S. Web traffic in peak hours [ID:nN01176614]. Shares of Netflix were down 1.9 percent at $186.25 in trading before the market opened. (Reporting by Paul Thomasch; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn) http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6B72ZE20101208 Hollywood Studios Could Ban DVD Screeners Due to File Sharing Randomus The process of sharing post-production screeners with awards judges, critics and others is now being criticized due to piracy concerns, with pressure mounting that could put an end to the system. If not restructuring how the movies are shared, a call for better information and knowledge sharing is taking place amongst studios, supposedly to help reduce piracy. However, screeners are still a major cause for concern among some in the film industry, while they look for new options. “It’s something we have to get away from,” said Kaye Cooper Mead, Summit distribution services executive VP, during a recent meeting. “Those screeners are a source of leaks, and when they leak, it’s a very serious leak because it’s a much better copy than the pirated ones.” DVD screeners have been widely pirated for years — and were especially popular before broadband — but can still be easily found online. Screeners aimed for Academy and Oscar voters often are popular tools used to spread illegal copies. In recent years, the use of watermarking each DVD screener has helped prevent a large number of movies from being leaked online, as individuals don’t want the file sharing leak traced back to themselves. Summit is the independent movie studio behind The Hurt Locker movie, a film that remains widely pirated — even with Voltage Pictures filing lawsuits. The saga has been an interesting story to watch, as USF law professor Robert Talbot volunteered to represent those sued for sharing The Hurt Locker. The film studio also recently sued a file-sharing defense attorney. It’s interesting to see a company still engaged in an aggressive anti-piracy campaign now interested in reducing the use of DVD screeners. It’s doubtful DVD screeners will abruptly stop, but alternative solutions must be considered. There is the possibility of streaming the DRM-protected movie directly to judges & critics, which would remove the need to physically share media that can easily be ripped and shared online. http://www.myce.com/news/hollywood-s...y-fears-37572/ Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks Noah Shachtman It’s too late to stop WikiLeaks from publishing thousands more classified documents, nabbed from the Pentagon’s secret network. But the U.S. military is telling its troops to stop using CDs, DVDs, thumb drives and every other form of removable media — or risk a court martial. Maj. Gen. Richard Webber, commander of Air Force Network Operations, issued the Dec. 3 “Cyber Control Order” — obtained by Danger Room — which directs airmen to “immediately cease use of removable media on all systems, servers, and stand alone machines residing on SIPRNET,” the Defense Department’s secret network. Similar directives have gone out to the military’s other branches. “Unauthorized data transfers routinely occur on classified networks using removable media and are a method the insider threat uses to exploit classified information. To mitigate the activity, all Air Force organizations must immediately suspend all SIPRNET data transfer activities on removable media,” the order adds. It’s one of a number of moves the Defense Department is making to prevent further disclosures of secret information in the wake of the WikiLeaks document dumps. Pfc. Bradley Manning says he downloaded hundreds of thousands of files from SIPRNET to a CD marked “Lady Gaga” before giving the files to WikiLeaks. To stop that from happening again, an August internal review suggested that the Pentagon disable all classified computers’ ability to write to removable media. About 60 percent of military machines are now connected to a Host Based Security System, which looks for anomalous behavior. And now there’s this disk-banning order. One military source who works on these networks says it will make the job harder; classified computers are often disconnected from the network, or are in low-bandwidth areas. A DVD or a thumb drive is often the easiest way to get information from one machine to the next. “They were asking us to build homes before,” the source says. “Now they’re taking away our hammers.” The order acknowledges that the ban will make life trickier for some troops. “Users will experience difficulty with transferring data for operational needs which could impede timeliness on mission execution,” the document admits. But “military personnel who do not comply … may be punished under Article 92 of the Uniformed Code of Military Justice.” Article 92 is the armed forces’ regulation covering failure to obey orders and dereliction of duty, and it stipulates that violators “shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.” But to several Defense Department insiders, the steps taken so far to prevent another big secret data dump have been surprisingly small. “After all the churn…. The general perception is business as usual. I’m not kidding,” one of those insiders says. “We haven’t turned a brain cell on it.” Tape and disk backups, as well as hard drive removals, will continue as normal in the military’s Secure Compartmented Information Facilities, where top-secret information is discussed and handled. And removable drives have been banned on SIPRNET before. Two years ago, the Pentagon forbade the media’s use after the drives and disks helped spread a relatively unsophisticated worm onto hundreds of thousands of computers. The ban was lifted this February, after the worm cleanup effort, dubbed “Operational Buckshot Yankee,” was finally completed. Shortly thereafter, Manning says he started passing information to WikiLeaks. Specialists at the National Security Agency are looking for additional technical ways to limit, disable or audit military users’ actions. Darpa, the Pentagon’s leading-edge research arm, has launched an effort to “greatly increase the accuracy, rate and speed with which insider threats are detected … within government and military interest networks.” But, like all Darpa projects, this one won’t be ready to deploy for years — if ever. For now, the Pentagon is stuck with more conventional methods to WikiLeak-proof its networks. http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010...top-new-leaks/ Opera for Android to get HTML5 Video, Flash Stephen Shankland Two significant features are coming to Opera Mobile for Android, the Oslo company's higher-end smartphone browser: playing HTML5 video and accommodating Adobe Systems' Flash Player plug-in. "New Web technologies aim to replace it, but Flash will be around for some time. If you have Flash player installed on your phone, Opera will support it," said mobile team member Pavel Studen? in a blog post on Saturday. HTML5 video, one of those technologies that encroaches on Flash's turf, lets developers embed video directly into a Web page, as happens with images. It's also en route Studen? said. He didn't say when the two features will arrive. Opera Mobile for Android is in beta testing. It competes most directly with the built-in browser that comes with Android, but also with a mobile version of Firefox that's also in beta testing (a third beta of which should arrive soon) and a handful of other browsers. Google permits other browsers to be installed on Android; Apple only permits alternative browser user interfaces that use iOS's browser engine under the hood. Opera Mobile is written in the C++ programming language, not the Java variant that most Android applications use. That's possible because of a feature called the Java Native Interface (JNI) that enables a hybrid programming approach. Studen? said: Luckily, Java allows class methods to be loaded from external libraries through a special interface, JNI. The external libraries can be written in any language. That's how we do it. We keep all the browser code in such external libraries and use a tiny Java code that loads them. This works very well, although debugging in multiple programming languages isn't that easy. Opera also offers a lighter-weight mobile browser called Opera Mini for Android, iOS, and several other operating systems. Opera Mobile has a built-in browser engine, but Mini requires an Opera server to browse the Web page, boil it down to a smaller size, and send it to the Mini browser for viewing. This brings the browser to lower-end phones and is adapted for worse network connections, but it detracts from some browsing experiences such as running interactive Web applications. http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20024664-264.html Men are From Android; Women are From iPhone Tracey E. Schelmetic It's true: women prefer iPhone and men prefer Android (News - Alert). But let's get to the other smartphone demographic news first, courtesy of The Nielsen Company. According to October 2010 data from studies conducted by Nielsen, 29.7 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers now own smartphones that run full operating systems. As one might expect, the most popular smartphones are the Apple (News - Alert) iPhone and BlackBerry devices from RIM: the two are in a near statistical dead heat with 27 percent of smartphone market share in the U.S. (Actually, iPhone (News - Alert) has a slight lead at 27.9 percent compared to BlackBerry's 27. 4 percent). But also as expected, Android is rising fast and has now captured the heart of over 22 percent of smartphone owners. Apple's iPhone appears to be the top choice of individuals who indicate they have plans to get a new smartphone to replace an older one: current smartphone owners planning to replace an existing phone showed a preference for the Apple iPhone (35 percent), while 28 percent of both smartphone and featurephone planned smartphone upgraders indicated they wanted a device with an Android operating system as their next mobile phone, according to Nielsen. Among those who are in the market for a smartphone but have never owned one before, choices and preferences were less certain. One quarter, 25 percent, of people upgrading from featurephones to smart phones were “not sure” what their next desired OS might be compared to only 13 percent of smartphone owners. Phone (News - Alert) shoppers over age 55 were markedly less certain than younger mobile users, with 27.8 saying they weren’t sure what kind of device they wanted next, compared to 12.2 percent of those 18 to 24. One surprising statistic, however, occurs when the stats are organized by sex. Slightly more women than men (30.9 percent versus 28.6, respectively) expressed Apple's iPhone as a first choice...not much of a difference. However, when it comes to phones running Android, a significant number of men versus women (32.6 percent versus 22.8 percent) would choose the Google (News - Alert) mobile platform. So where is the extra appeal of Android to men coming from? More male-targeted commercials that emphasize cool gadgetry versus usability? More techno-macho phone brand names like “Droid”? Extra advertising on the Spike channel by phone makers using the Android platform? Guess we'll never know. http://fixed-mobile-convergence.tmcn...rom-iphone.htm In Historic Shift, Smartphones, Tablets to Overtake PCs Perils ahead for vendors who can't adapt to market shift, IDC says Patrick Thibodeau Shipments of smartphones, tablets and other app-enabled devices will overtake PC shipments in the next 18 months, an event that may signify the end of the PC-centric era, market research firm IDC said. It may be seen as a historic shift, but it is one that tells more about the development of a new market, mobile and tablet computing, than the decline of an older one, the PC. Shipments of personal computers will continue to increase even as they are surpassed by other devices. IDC said worldwide shipments this year of app-enabled devices, which include smartphones and media tablets such as the iPad, will reach 284 million. In 2011, makers will ship 377 million of these devices, and in 2012, the number will reach 462 million shipments, exceeding PC shipments. One shipment equals one device. For PCs, IDC is forecasting 356 million PC shipments this year and 402 million in 2011. In 2012, there will be 448 million PC shipments. Non-PC devices are "not replacing the PC -- that's a key point -- but [they are] expanding the market," said Frank Gens, chief analyst at IDC. Gens sees similarities between the start of the PC market and what's going on today with smartphones and media tablets. The IBM personal computer arrived in 1981, but it wasn't until 1986 that vendors stopped debating the future of the PC and rushed toward it, Gens said. A major turning point for the PC was the 1986 initial public offering of Microsoft, a company quickly embraced by Wall Street. The PC era resulted in the emergence of new companies and the loss of older ones that didn't adapt to the market change. Today, through acquisitions and other moves, vendors are positioning themselves for the new smartphone and tablet market. "The psychology is, 'We can't blow it this time,' " Gens said. IDC's forecast is also built on worldwide IT spending that is expected to grow overall by 5.7% in 2011 to $1.6 trillion. But Gens said the forecast could change if, for instance, Europe's economic problems worsen and the U.S. does not reduce unemployment or see some recovery in the housing market. Cloud computing will also expand. Public cloud services will grow by 30% in 2011, rising to $28.7 billion worldwide. IDC has also started to forecast private cloud services, which were estimated at $13 billion in 2011, an increase of 33%. Private cloud services are those delivered from companies such as Accenture and IBM Global Services. http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...o_overtake_PCs Google Android Phones Biggest Network Hogs: Study Tarmo Virki Users of Google's Android phones, such as Samsung's Galaxy S, use more data services than those with other smartphones, threatening to choke wireless network capacity, an industry study showed. The growing popularity of Android-operated phones -- made by companies including Asian vendors HTC Corp and Samsung Electronics -- comes as handsets look set to overtake computers as the most used device for browsing the Web. Wireless operators are keen on raising revenue from Internet browsing and the social networking boom as revenue from traditional voice calls decline, but they are facing increasingly congested networks. Fearful of losing customers, only a few operators have publicly admitted to the problem of keeping pace with data traffic, but the majority is experiencing difficulties. The study by telecom network technology firm Arieso showed that customers with Android phones are creating more data traffic mostly due to better cameras and video recorders, and software for editing the footage. "When more could be done, more tends to be done," said Arieso's Chief Technology Officer Michael Flanagan. "Smartphone subscriptions are rising and so too is subscriber appetite for mobile data. It's a trend that's set to continue." Android software, offered free to cellphone vendors, has grown strongly since coming to market two years ago. Globally Android usage ranked second in the last quarter, beating Apple's iPhone and Research In Motion, but still trailing Nokia's Symbian. Analysts expect it to become the leading operating system next year. Mobile data usage has rocketed since the introduction of Apple Inc's iPhone in 2007, with usage of data networks seen roughly doubling each year. "What operators are really suffering from is the fact that popularity of smartphones came too quickly," said Lance Hiley, VP of market strategy at telecoms network technology provider Cambridge Broadband Networks. Telecoms gear makers Ericsson, Nokia Siemens and Alcatel-Lucent, which have struggled in recent years in the face of aggressive pricing by Asian rivals, expect rising data traffic to lead to new orders. (Editing by Louise Heavens) http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6B721X20101208 Nexus S Review Joshua Topolsky It can be difficult to review a phone like Google's Nexus S in a world already populated by so many outstanding Android devices. Not only does the manufacturer of this phone make a series of handsets that are all essentially the same (the Galaxy S line), but countless other OEMs are cranking away on hardware for the platform. Of course, the Nexus S is a decidedly different phone altogether. Picking up where the company's Nexus One left off, the S continues Google's legacy of creating standalone, "pure Android" phone experiences, seemingly aimed less at the mainstream and more towards developers. Unlike the failed experiment of the Nexus One, Google appears to be taking a more realistic approach to the S; the phone will be sold through Best Buy (and Carphone Warehouse across the pond), which suggests that the company has bigger plans for this device. And what a device it is -- the Nexus S boasts a 1GHz Hummingbird CPU, 512MB of RAM, a 4-inch, 800 x 480 curved Super AMOLED display (dubbed the Contour Display), 16GB of storage, a 5 megapixel rear and VGA front-facing camera, and near field communication capabilities. But hardware is only half the story here -- the big news is that the Nexus S showcases the next major evolution of the Android OS, namely, Gingerbread (or version 2.3). The update comes with a slew of new features alongside some UI improvements that show Google isn't slowing down when it comes to pushing its mobile operating system forward. So is the Nexus S a real standout in the Android world, or is it more of the "me too" tech we've seen lately? Read on after the break for the full Engadget review to find out! Nexus S review Hardware As you can tell by the photos in the gallery, the Nexus S isn't a plain-Jane slab. Sure, it's got similar design leanings as the other devices in the Galaxy S line, but it's also slightly... freaky. For starters, the shape of the ultra-gloss, stipple-graphic black plastic housing curves and pops in all kinds of unusual ways, with a kind of reverse "chin" sprouting out of the lower half, and a very slight curvature to the front of the phone. You've probably heard the fuss over this, but yes, the screen and front glass of the device have a minor, concave curve which sits nicely when nuzzled against your face. It's not a dramatic difference, but it gives the phone a fairly unique look. In general, however, the design doesn't feel wildly different from other Galaxy S phones -- particularly when it comes to materials. Samsung seems focused on using light (and somewhat cheap feeling) plastic for its housings, though they deviated on the Captivate, which we felt was an improvement. The front of the device is obviously all screen, save for the earpiece. You can see the proximity and light sensors peeking out from behind the glass, as well as that VGA camera. On the left side of the phone you've got a volume rocker, on the right is the power / sleep button, and along the the bottom is the Micro USB and headphone jack. The latter has been the cause of some concern amongst potential buyers, but we actually like having the headphone jack access down below. Overall, the design of the phone is sleek and frankly odd enough to make it stand out amongst contemporaries, but we wish that Samsung had utilized more inspiring materials on this model. Internals As we mentioned, the Nexus S packs in a formidable amount of tech into its small frame (2.48 inches by 4.87 inches, and 0.42 inches thick, in case you were wondering). Any device loaded up with a 1GHz Hummingbird CPU is sure to get our attention, and the performance we've been seeing with the S is nothing short of awesome. On a Neocore benchmark, we scored a terrific 55.6fps, and general use of the OS is lightning fast with nary a hiccup in sight. We also haven't run into any memory issues, and though having 16GB of storage onboard is nice, we would have liked to see a microSD option here as well. Still, the method which Gingerbread utilizes the installed flash memory is excellent, and for those of you who can live with a finite amount of space, this won't be an issue. Besides the storage and CPU, the device sports a Super AMOLED display at 800 x 480 (235 ppi) which looks gorgeous (if slightly yellowish) to our eyes. The device also has it's fair share of wireless radios, including tri-band HSPA (900, 2100, and 1700MHz), and quad-band GSM / EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900MHz), WiFi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, A-GPS, and that NFC chip you've been hearing all about. There's also a gyroscope, accelerometer, and digital compass inside. We were a little disappointed to discover that Samsung didn't include a notification light on the device -- we like the reassuring blip telling us we've got an email waiting. As far as that NFC chip is concerned (pictured above), right now there's not a lot to test it with, though Google is hoping that devs will find all kinds of uses for it. Right now it's read only, so you can't write to the device from a target -- that's a security measure right now. When we spoke to reps, they told us that there were three methods of using NFC: read, write, and exchange. Exchange sounds interesting, because it would (in theory) allow you to simply swipe your phone against or near another NFC device and swap contacts (or other info). We did see some strange issues with the display -- while it does look handsome in most settings, we noticed some troubling inconsistencies in the panel against certain colors or tones. It was particularly pronounced on solid gray backgrounds (as you can see above). We're not sure the cause of the problem (or if it was simply an issue with the device we had), but it was somewhat troubling. One other thing of note -- we noticed a few missed or latent presses on the touchscreen which occasionally led to stuttery behavior or an opened item that we didn't mean to tap. It's hard to say if this was a software or hardware issue (and we know that sometimes Android devices can be particularly finicky when syncing). It wasn't a deal-breaker by any means, but we saw the issue rear its head a handful of times, and felt it was worth mentioning. Speakerphone / earpiece / call quality / network The sound quality on the Nexus S is right up there with some of the best phones we've tested. Speakerphone calls and music came through loud and clear over the external speaker, and we were downright wowed with how loud and clear the earpiece sounded. Even when we were having a conversation in a crowded room, the Nexus S pumped out audio that was crystalline to our ears. Coupled with excellent service on T-Mobile's network, we were not only able to make calls where our iPhone failed, but the clarity and volume of those calls were superb. Connections on T-Mobile's network were excellent in most places, allowing us to make calls where AT&T's network couldn't, though we did see EDGE data crop up on the Nexus S more than our AT&T devices -- and there's no HSPA+ to be found here (unlike T-Mobile's other flagship Android phones), just in case you were wondering. Still, speed certainly wasn't a major issue, and network throughput was decently strong (though not mind-blowing) when we were on T-Mobile's 3G. We averaged about 1.5 Mbps down and up on T-Mobile, and a slightly higher 2 Mbps down and 1.5 up on AT&T in the wilds of Brooklyn. Camera We're impressed by the shooter on the Nexus S, but there is something in the quality of its photos that still feel very phone-like to us. In particular, we felt that images looked washed out and grainy even in well lit situations. It could be a fault of the auto white balance or ISO settings, but we certainly were able to produce better results with other phones in this class. On the bright side, the Nexus S camera seems to excel at low-light images, pulling impressive detail in situations where we expected much less. In fact, we can't say that we've seen a smartphone recently with better low light performance. We're not sure what this is attributable to, but we're certainly happy about it. Unfortunately for video, the Nexus S is still a slouch -- we're guessing this doesn't have to be the case, but there's no true HD option here. The highest quality video you can shoot is 720 x 480. Kind of a bummer. As far as the front-facing camera goes, it's pretty standard VGA fare, which mean low-res, grainy, and artifacted. Maybe we're spoiled by all these high resolution shooters, but no matter how you slice it, 640 x 480 is tough to take. We really wish Google would include native video chat feature with its phones -- we're all for third-party apps, but a dedicated, codified piece of software from the mothership would go a long way to making the presence of this camera more useful. Also, remember how you guys make Google Talk with video chat? It's pretty cool. Obviously this is coming in Honeycomb (Andy Rubin kind of let it slip during his Dive Into Mobile chat), but it would be great to have right now. Battery life The Nexus S' 1500mAh battery showed impressive signs of life in our short period of testing. In heavy use (though not tons of calling), we sustained about 20 hours of life before the phone was crying for its charger. We suspect that amount would be slightly lower if we'd spent a bit more time on calls, but it's still a solid showing considering the amount of downloading apps, screen testing, and general messing around we did with the device. You'll certainly be able to make it through a day with the Nexus S, but if you're a heavy talker or plan on doing a lot of gaming, you may want to consider a second battery. Software The big story with the Nexus S isn't really about the hardware. While there are some notable upgrades and changes on the front, what the phone really represents is a gateway to the next stage of Android, version 2.3 -- otherwise known as Gingerbread. For those expecting a sea change in the OS, we'll tell you up front that you'll be disappointed. When we say evolution, we mean it. This is kind of the Snow Leopard of Android updates -- a lot of motion behind the scenes, but not a load of cosmetic and navigational changes. There isn't a ton here that's dramatically different than Froyo, but there are some notable additions that worth taking a deeper look at. User interface Coming from Froyo, you won't see massive changes to the look and feel of Gingerbread, but there are nice tweaks and some cleanup that shows Google is moving in the right direction. For starters, the status bar icons, window shade, dialer, and some applications (and their icons) have gotten a fresh coat of paint. By the looks of things, Google is moving away from the colorful, almost cartoonish look of previous OSs, and dipping into a more somber a sophisticated palette, mostly featuring shaded grays and blacks with green highlights. The company has made some thoughtful choices in terms of user experience as well -- if you're synced with a Google account, your status bar icons go from white to green, and instead of obscuring menus on the camera app, there's now a row of contextual items at your disposal while shooting. Other little updates include a new orange burst of color which happens when you reach the end of a long list, and added transparency in menus, giving the OS a glassy feel. Additionally, the battery use and task manager have new views to graphically depict usage on the phone. Speaking of task managers, Google has now seen fit to add a proper menu option to the task manager right from the home screen menu. We're guessing the popularity of third-party killers was enough to convince the company that confronting the issue head on wasn't such a bad thing after all. It's a welcome addition here, and we found ourselves reaching for it fairly often (not due to performance issues... just because we're fastidious when it comes to application management). Google has also updated some of its live wallpapers (which look nice, but we're not that fond of). We will say that this time around, whether it's the new OS or that Hummingbird CPU, we didn't see the kind of performance issues when running the wallpapers that we saw on the Nexus One. Still, we prefer to use the phone with static backdrops. The biggest change you'll notice, however, comes in the form of the new keyboard. Not only has the company cleaned up and refined the look of the onscreen QWERTY, but it's added new functionality for word suggestions, copy, paste, and selection. Additionally, the keyboard finally exhibits more expected multitouch behavior, thanks in part to new threading that the company has added. Those changes allow you to do things like tap the punctuation key and then slide your finger to the character you want. We'd be gushing about what a great addition that is, except Google forgot one important thing -- when you lift your finger off of your selected character, the keyboard should then flip back to the ABCs. It does not. Instead, you're left stranded in the punctuation menu, meaning you've got to tap the toggle again to get back to your QWERTY. What kind of sense does that make? The whole point of being able to slide your finger to another character is to save clicks and time -- but having to click back out defeats the purpose. The intention is good, but the way Apple has it working on the iPhone is a much better, smoother method. Another gripe we have about the keyboard is that Google seems to have shrunk the height of the keys, making the keyboard on the Nexus S's 4-inch display feel cramped. We're not sure of this, but it definitely seems like the company has reduced the keys in size. On a slightly brighter note, there are big improvements in word suggestion and selection, including new markers which you can use to grab selections of text. Well, let's be clear -- Google still has major issues with text selection and editing on Android devices. The first striking problem is that there is not a consistent method of selecting text on the device. None. At all. In the browser, you long press on text to bring up your anchors, then drag and tap the center of your selection -- boom, copied text. In text editing fields, however, in order to select a word you must long press on the word, wait for a contextual menu to pop up, and then select "select word" -- a completely counterintuitive process. In the message app you can long press to select only the entire message, and in Google Reader? You can't select any text at all. Even worse, Gmail has a different method for selecting text from an email you're reading, and it's far more obnoxious than any of the others. There, selecting text goes from being mildly annoying to downright silly. Want to grab some text out of an email? Here's your process: hit the menu key, hit "more," hit "select text," and then finally drag your anchors out. Funnily enough, a little cursor appears when you start selecting -- a holdover from Linux? To have this many options and discrepancies over something as simple as copy and paste should be embarrassing to Google. What it mostly is, however, is a pain to the end user. And that's kind of the crux of our problem with Android in its current state. We don't question the power of the OS, but the fit, finish, and ease of use simply is still not there. There is something disconcerting about an operating system that changes its rules from app to app -- for a mobile interface to work well, it has to be approached holistically and organically. There is something cohesive in OSs like webOS and iOS -- a language that you can easily learn to speak and feel confident about using to get what you want -- that just seems to be missing here. New apps There aren't a ton of new pieces inside 2.3, but there are a few notable new additions to the app lineup. The first one is Tags, which is an NFC app which records all of the links you've gathered using the new tech in one easy to locate bag. You can star and delete these links much like Google Reader or Gmail. The second app which is notable is Downloads. This collects anything you've pulled down from the browser in one easy to reach spot. It certainly makes identifying where specific apps or files came from much easier, though it doesn't offer a ton of day-to-day utility. Under the hood Besides all the front-end stuff you can see, there's a lot that's less obvious happening in Gingerbread. Firstly, Google has added integrated support for VoIP / SIP calling, which means you can plug in your favorite service and access it through the native menus in the OS. This won't appeal to everyone, but there's definitely a certain segment of users that will be stoked to see this feature. What really gets our juices flowing, however, is the fact that Google seems to be going full tilt on making Android a gaming platform. The company has enriched the OS with a handful of new APIs and dev tools which improve native code support and set the stage for faster, better looking games (and other graphics-heavy applications as well). It will be exciting to finally see developers taking advantage of the formidable hardware inside a lot of these devices. We don't know if the Nexus S is already utilizing some of these new tools, but as we said before, the OS seems blazingly fast and silky smooth when it comes to animations and transitions. Wrap-up It seems like every couple of weeks we're saying something along the lines of "x is the best Android smartphone on the market right now." We'd like to tell you differently when it comes to the Nexus S, but the truth is, it really is the best Android device available right now. Sure, we'd prefer it was on Verizon, and yes, there are some issues with the phone and OS that detract from the good bits... but there are also a lot of good bits. We'd been longing for a Galaxy S device that wasn't burdened by Samsung's sometimes-clunky TouchWiz, and in joining forces with Google, the company has more than delivered. There's no shortage of great phones available right now, and there's no question that 2011 will usher in a flood of devices that make 2010's offerings seem forgettable. Like we said earlier, this isn't a perfect device, and in fact a lot of what's exciting about this phone is what's happening behind the scenes -- as if the stage is set for the arrival of Honeycomb and a slew of features. Still, when it comes to state of the art for Android right now, the buck stops here. http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/10/nexus-s-review/ Google Opens Doors to E-Bookstore Julie Bosman It’s official: the Google e-bookstore is open. After years of planning and months of delays, the search giant Google started its e-book venture on Monday, creating a potentially robust competitor in the digital book market to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple. Google executives described the e-bookstore as an “open ecosystem” that will offer more than three million books, including hundreds of thousands for sale and millions free. More than 4,000 publishers, including large trade book companies like Random House, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan, have made books available for sale through Google , many at prices that are identical to those of other e-bookstores. “We really think it’s important that the book business have this open diversity of retail points, just like it does in print,” Tom Turvey, the director of strategic partnerships at Google, said in an interview. “We want to make sure we maintain that and support that.” Customers can set up an account for buying books, store them in a central online, password-protected library and read them on personal computers, tablets, smartphones and e-readers. A Web connection will not be necessary to read a book, however; users can use a dedicated app that can be downloaded to an iPad, iPhone or Android phone. A typical user could begin reading an e-book on an iPad at home, continue reading the same book on an Android phone on the subway and then pick it up again on a Web browser at the office, with the book opening each time to the place where the user left off. The Google eBookstore could be a significant benefit to independent bookstores like Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., that have signed on to sell Google e-books on their Web sites through Google — the first significant entry for independents into the e-book business. “This levels the playing field,” said Oren Teicher, the chief executive of the American Booksellers Association. “If you want to buy e-books, you don’t just have to buy them from the big national outlets.” It is also an opportunity for independents to learn from past missteps. They were slow to build Web sites to sell books during the initial expansion of online retailing in the 1990s, a mistake that led their customers to turn to Amazon and its deeply discounted selection. “They were so overwhelmed with the competition that Amazon presented, they just didn’t know what they could do to be competitive in the digital arena,” said Peter Osnos, the founder and editor at large of PublicAffairs, an independent publisher. “Google’s giving them a real shot at doing that.” Publishers said they were elated that Amazon would have another serious e-book retailing force to contend with. Only last year, Amazon nearly had the e-book market to itself, leading publishers to worry that they were headed toward an Amazon monopoly. Since then, a vastly more diversified marketplace has emerged. Last fall, Barnes & Noble introduced an reader, the Nook, and more recently, an updated color version, the Nook Color. In April, Apple unveiled the iPad, which the company said in October had sold 7.5 million devices. And perhaps most important, five of the six largest publishers of trade books switched this year from a traditional wholesale model to what is known in the publishing industry as an agency model, under which the publishers set their own prices for e-books, and a retailer acts as an agent of the publishers, taking a 30 percent cut of each sale and leaving 70 percent for the publisher. A crop of e-readers introduced this year has given consumers more choices, at prices that are accessible, even less than $100. Google e-books will be readable on any open-format e-readers, including the Nook, a development that publishers said would give consumers greater freedom. “Consumers have been in a position where they had to claim some kind of loyalty,” said Maja Thomas, the senior vice president for Hachette Digital, part of the Hachette Book Group, which publishes authors including Stacy Schiff, James Patterson and Amy Sedaris. “Now they can buy books from their local bookstores online, or from Powell’s, or from Google.” E-books purchased through Google are not currently readable on Amazon’s Kindle, a Google spokeswoman said, although Kindle users will be able to read free e-books obtained through Google. Google executives said that the five large trade publishers using the agency model would operate under that model with Google, while many other publishers would use a traditional wholesale model. In addition to the dedicated Google site and independent bookstores’ sites, Alibris, an online retailer for new and used books, movies and music, will sell e-books. Google has also set up an affiliate program that would allow blogs and other Web sites to steer customers to buy books through Google, earning a marketing commission for traffic that they send to Google. The Google e-bookstore will go well beyond trade books, including scientific, technical, medical, scholarly and professional reference books that might more typically be read on a desktop or laptop computer. For some books, if the publisher allows it, customers will be able to cut and paste text, a feature that made some publishers balk. Some industry specialists said they were waiting to see if Google — which has far more experience in search than in sales — could create a site that is as simple to use for e-commerce as Amazon.com, and whether large numbers of consumers would shift their buying loyalties from well-known national book chains to Google or local bookstores. “Everything depends on execution,” said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “They don’t have a lot of experience in retail or merchandising.” It is difficult to say what Google’s addition to the market means for the wider penetration of e-books, said Tim McCall, the director of online sales and marketing for Penguin Group USA. “Obviously Google has a very broad reach, so I would say that at the very least, our books and our e-books should be more discoverable,” Mr. McCall said. “It’s interesting that the newest partners who are selling books are as much technology companies as they are traditional retailers.” David Steinberger, the chief executive of the Perseus Books Group, said that Google’s dominance in the search business could raise the profile of books in general. “They have the ability to bring book content up through search, and now they’ll have the ability to consummate a sale,” Mr. Steinberger said. “That feels like it will grow the market.” The Google e-bookstore is an outgrowth of the Google books project, an effort that began in 2004 to scan all 130 million books in the world, by Google’s estimate. Scott Dougall, Google’s director of product management, said the company had scanned about 15 million books so far. Google executives said they were trying to replicate the freedom with which consumers have bought printed books for centuries. As Abraham Murray, product manager for Google Books, explained in a blog post on Monday, “You can choose where to buy your e-books like you choose where to buy your print books, and keep them all on the same bookshelf regardless of where you got them.” E-books are a small but rapidly growing part of the book market, making up 9 to 10 percent of trade book sales for many major publishers. One bookseller, Darin Sennett, the director of strategic projects for Powell’s in Portland, said he did not see the deal as a sign that print books were dying. “People do love bookstores and they’re an important part of our culture,” Mr. Sennett said. “Print books are not dead. People will continue to want them and love them. But their desires and the way they want to read are evolving. I can see print and e-books living nicely together.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/bu...bookstore.html Pirates Love Movies & E-books, Shun MP3 Files Janko Roettgers MP3 file downloading has gone out of fashion, making way for movie and e-book downloads, according to new data from the media search engine Findthatfile.com shared exclusively with NewTeeVee. Findthatfile, which indexes files on Rapidshare, FTP sites, Usenet servers and P2P networks, found that MP3s are still widely available, but the demand for free digital music files has clearly waned. Most popular amongst downloaders are movies and other video files with the extension AVI, followed by e-books in the form of PDF files, .RAR archives and .TTF font files. MP3s, on the other hand, are just slightly more popular than .DLL Windows library files. The picture looks a little different when it comes to the availability of files. PDFs are still by far the most available file type, but MP3s rank second, followed by various types of file archives. Most requested files on Findthatfile.com 1. AVI (video) 6. MPEG (video) 2. PDF (e-book) 7. ASX (Windows media) 3. RAR (compressed) 8. MP3 (music) 4. TTF (fonts) 9. DLL (Windows library file) 5. ZIP (compressed) 10. TOR (BitTorrent) Does that mean people aren’t interested in downloading music at all anymore? Not necessarily. Single MP3 file downloads may have been partially replaced by downloads of full albums, distributed in the form of .ZIP or .RAR archives. But there are also a lot more choices for the casual listener to get their music fix. In fact, impulse-driven single song downloading may have been replaced by YouTube music video viewing. Eight of the ten most-viewed publishers on YouTube are now artists or record labels. These music videos are increasingly a source of revenue for labels and their partners as well. Rhianna, Justin Bieber and Eminem all bring in over a million dollars per year through their YouTube videos alone, according to recent estimates. http://gigaom.com/video/pirates-love...hun-mp3-files/ In Online Privacy Plan, the Opt-Out Question Looms Tanzina Vega and Verne Kopytoff The Federal Trade Commission’s proposed privacy mechanism could cause a major shift in the online advertising industry, as companies that have relied on consumers’ browsing history try to make up for what could be billions in lost revenue. If the vast majority of online users chose not to have their Internet activity tracked, the proposed “do not track” system could have a severe effect on the industry, some experts say. It would cause major harm to the companies like online advertising networks, small and midsize publishers and technology companies like Yahoo that earn a large percentage of their revenue from advertising that is tailored to users based on the sites they have visited. Under a situation where many users opt out of being tracked, other companies, like Google, may take a much smaller hit because the vast majority of its revenue comes through search ads that would not be affected by a do-not-track mechanism. Microsoft, which also sells display advertising through its ad network, could also survive a hit to user data collection since it earns revenue from sources other than advertising, including software and gaming, experts say. The F.T.C. is seeking comment over the next two months on whether a do-not-track mechanism should allow consumers to control the types of advertisements they would like to see in addition to having the ability to completely opt out of having their data collected. During this period, the commission will seek comments on the possible unintended consequences of the proposal, including the likely effect if a large number of consumers opt out. “The do-not-track button holds far more complexities than the designers of the framework envision,” said John Montgomery, the chief operating officer for GroupM Interaction, the digital division of WPP. “If a number of consumers opt out, it might limit the ability for companies to monetize the Internet.” The F.T.C. advocated the use of a device that could be built into a browser and signal to a Web site that the user did not want to be tracked or receive tailored advertisements. Advertisers say they would prefer to build upon the current self-regulatory system, which uses icons next to ads that, when clicked on, take users to a page where they can opt out. “It’s the house already half-built. It’s just missing a window here and there,” said Xuhui Shao, chief technology officer for Turn, an ad software and services company. The commission’s proposed system would be harmful to publishers and ad networks, he said, because it would force them to adopt more contextual advertising, which is less effective and therefore less profitable. Users who opted out would still receive ads, but they would be generic or solely based on the content of the page a user is viewing. Steve Sullivan, the vice president for supply chain and revenue solutions at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, echoed the sentiments of the many technology companies that would be affected by the proposal, who say there are differences in data collected for things like analytics or creating user profiles. “One of the things that’s not clearly spelled out is what exactly do-not-track means,” he said. Advertisers employ different methods of singling out audiences online, including the use of technology that can remember a product that a customer showed interest in — a shoe, perhaps, on a particular Web site — and deliver ads for that same shoe on other Web sites that the user visits. Marketers who follow online patterns say the data can help them serve ads that are relevant to the user’s interests. And, those marketers are willing to pay more for ads that can be delivered directly to a target demographic. For example, Mr. Montgomery of GroupM Interaction said, with behavioral tracking, women will not get ads for Viagra and men will not see ads for feminine hygiene products. If the ability to collect information on users is curtailed, “the fear is that it creates a smaller available pool of consumers to learn from and to target,” he said. “If the ability to target and realize the return on investment and efficiencies we’re hoping to get through targeting get curtailed, it will attract fewer advertisers.” The Interactive Advertising Bureau, in an analysis of ad agency data, found that in 2009, 80 percent or more of digital advertising campaigns incorporated behavioral targeting in some way. According to figures compiled by the bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, online advertising revenue, including contextual and behavioral ads, was $12.1 billion for the first half of 2010, an 11.3 percent increase over the same period last year. Google representatives say they expect display ads to become a $50 billion market by 2015. The company has begun to move aggressively into the field as it seeks to expand its advertising product offerings. Publishers make money by selling ad space directly to marketers and also by working with advertising networks to fill any remaining inventory. Advertising networks, which often work with many publishers, share revenue from the ads they provide. If those ads are tailored, their value increases. For advertisers and their publishing partners, all of that advertising serves another function: free content on the Web. “Think about the number of times you access the Web and how many times you have to pay for the content you look at,” Mr. Montgomery said. “This is about a value exchange.” Opting out of tracking may actually harm consumers more than help them, said Dilip DaSilva, chief executive of Exponential Interactive, owner of the Tribal Fusion online advertising network. Much of the free content online today may be unavailable if the proposed rules become reality, he said. Ads that do not offer a way to measure success are of less value to marketers. Publishers would have little choice but to start charging for their content. “If you remove tracking, you remove advertisers,” Mr. DaSilva said. He added that the ability to track users, based on information collected from so-called cookies deposited on their computers, is “what helped the Internet grow so quickly.” For large publishers and content providers, the impact of losing tailored ads may not be as severe as it could be for smaller publishers, said George Pappachen, the chief privacy officer of the Kantar Group, the research and consultant unit of WPP. Many sites with premium advertising space use traditional sales methods to sell that space to marketers and leave the remaining space to be sold to ad networks, which can then single out users. Small publishers, however, rely heavily on ad networks and tailored advertising for revenue. “They gain a lot by being part of a bigger network because the prices they pay are based on the combined network value,” Mr. Pappachen said. “Of all of the parties involved, if there would be winners or losers, big publishers would be the least likely to lose.” Mr. DaSilva raised the possibility that publishers would offer consumers a choice. Visitors to Web sites could either accept being tracked to get free access to an article, for instance, or they could decline and be required to pay. “If we move too far one way, the people supplying the free content will get together and say we aren’t going to supply the content for free,” Mr. DaSilva said. “It’s not like the publishers will offer free content to people who visit their site but don’t want ads tracking them.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/bu...06privacy.html I Know What You Read Last Summer - E-Readers and Privacy Audrey Watters Since WikiLeaks released 250,000 secret U.S. government cables a little over a week ago, the world is suddenly terribly concerned about what we may or may not be reading. Some countries - and some U.S. government agencies - are blocking their people from accessing the Wikileaks site, for fear of reading. So the EFF's E-Book Buyer's Guide to E-Book Privacy comes at a good time - not just for holiday shopping, but for those of us that want to read that other famous trove of classified materials, The Pentagon Papers (or, okay, perhaps read other things too) with some assurance of privacy. EFF's guide provides a review of the privacy policies of various e-book providers - both hardware and software makers - from the Amazon Kindle, to Google Books, to the Internet Archive. The report is based on what the policies say themselves, not on how they're enforced in practice. Who Tracks Your Book Searches? Google Books logs all your search data with an IP address and will associate searches with your Google Account if logged in. Amazon also logs data about what you've viewed and searched for. The privacy policy for the Nook isn't clear, according to the EFF, but Barnes & Noble logs data on searches made and pages viewed on its website. Who Monitors What You're Reading? Google logs the books and pages viewed, and while Amazon does too, EFF says that the "exact parameters of information logged in unclear." It's not known if the Nook monitors your reading after purchase. But the other 5 e-readers in the guide - Sony Reader, FBReader, Internet Archive, the iPad, and the Adobe Content Server do not. Who Tracks What you Buy? Again, Google and Amazon track the purchases you make on their sites. The privacy policy is unclear for both the Nook and the Sony Reader. The iPad will keep track of purchases made on the iBookstore and via other Apple apps, but otherwise no. With Whom Can This Data Be Shared? The Internet Archive, FBReader, and the Adobe Content Server do not collect user-identifying information. For the other companies in EFF's guide, law enforcement and civil litigants may get access to data, as required by law. And Google, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple and Sony all share information within their own products. In order to share information outside the company, users must opt-in with Google. Users may opt-out of having their information shared by Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble for certain promotional and marketing purposes. Can You Delete Your Data? If you have purchased an e-book, in most cases deleting it or disassociating it from your account means - no surprise - you lose the ability to read the book. Google does allow you to remove book titles from your account and delete your search history. But other vendors do not allow you to access or delete parts of your search or purchase history. Does It Matter? The data that many of these e-readers gather does help them deliver a better experience in a lot of ways. iBooks needs to track the last page you've read, for example, if you expect it to be able to sync across devices. Amazon tracks what you search and purchase in order to make suggestions for items you might like. But one's reading habits, perhaps because reading has been such a private endeavor, have typically been closely guarded. We may want to disguise the fact we never finished Ulysses (I confess). We may want to disguise having read all the Twilight novels - twice - (I haven't, I swear) or having a penchant for really low brow science fiction (no comment). And of course, we may want to read books that are politically unpopular. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...ders_and_p.php Until next week, - js. Current Week In Review  Recent WiRs - December 4th, November 27th, November 20th, November 13th Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved. "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black |
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