Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 7th, '11

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"I think it’s quite a dangerous extension of our law to simply extend copyright liability to people who may not be actually responsible for the infringement." – Rick Shera


"The imprimatur of this court will not be used to advance a [file-sharer] 'fishing expedition by means of a perversion of the purpose and intent' of class actions." – Judge Harold Baker


"Uh oh, now I'm the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it." – Sohaib Athar



































May 7th, 2011




Canada Still in Copyright "Hall of Shame" According to the US
Nate Anderson

Sorry, Canada—negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) wasn't enough to show your commitment to "strong" intellectual property rights. If you want out of the American copyright "hall of shame," you're just going to have to pass a major copyright overhaul that makes US rightsholders happy.

The US Trade Representative yesterday released its annual "Special 301" report naming and shaming countries with IP policies the US doesn't like. The report contains a "Watch List" and a smaller "Priority Watch List"—and Canada is once again on the Priority Watch List along with China, Russia, and India.

Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Egypt, Bolivia, Brunei, Romania, Spain, even Mexico—Canada is worse then all of them. Why? Canada hasn't yet passed a major copyright overhaul that has already been introduced in several different versions over the last few years.

Unfortunately, Canadian efforts in 2010 to enact long-awaited copyright legislation were unsuccessful. The United States encourages Canada to make the enactment of copyright legislation that addresses the challenges of piracy over the Internet, including by fully implementing the WIPO Internet Treaties, a priority for its new government. The United States encourages Canada to provide for deterrent-level sentences to be imposed for IPR violations, as well as to strengthen enforcement efforts, including at the border. Canada should provide its Customs officials with ex officio authority to effectively stop the transit of counterfeit and pirated products through its territory.

But all is not lost. USTR announced a new program this year under which it "invites any trading partner appearing on the Special 301 Priority Watch List or Watch List to negotiate a mutually agreed action plan designed to lead to that trading partner’s removal from the relevant list."

The US wants a worldwide crackdown on things like "unauthorized retransmission of live sports telecasts over the Internet," "linking sites," and "piracy using mobile telephones, tablets, flash drives, and other mobile technologies." And it's happy to videoconference in US government lawyers to help write the laws that will get countries off the Special 301 list. Now that's service.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-to-the-us.ars





Wikileaks on New Zealand Copyright: US Funds IP Enforcement, Offers to Draft Legislation
Michael Geist

This week I published multiple posts Wikileaks cables revelations on the U.S. lobbying pressure on Canadian copyright including attempts to embarrass Canada, joint efforts with lobby groups such as CRIA, and secret information disclosures from PCO to U.S. embassy personnel (posts here, here, here, here, here, and here). Wikileaks has also just posted hundreds of cables from U.S. personnel in New Zealand that reveal much the same story including regular government lobbying, offers to draft New Zealand three-strikes and you're out legislation, and a recommendation to spend over NZ$500,000 to fund a recording industry-backed IP enforcement initiative. Interestingly, the cables regularly recommend against including New Zealand on the Special 301 list, despite the similarities to Canadian copyright law that always garner vocal criticism.

As New Zealand was working through its own round of copyright reform in 2008, the U.S. was actively lobbying several cabinet members. A February 2008 cable notes:

Post has presented the list of noted shortfalls in the draft legislation to Minister Tizard (Consumer Affairs), Minister Goff (Trade) and to officials within the Ministry of Economic Development, the agency primarily responsible for drafting legislation and monitoring IP enforcement. Post remains engaged with Bronwyn Turley, Senior MED Policy Advisor for IP issues to maintain a dialogue to address the needed technical corrections.

The copyright bill passed in April 2008 and took effect later that year. In a March 2009 cable, the U.S. embassy recommended that New Zealand not be included on the Special 301 list arguing it would be counterproductive. That recommendation is striking when compared to the regular placement of Canada on the list, despite very similar laws. In fact, New Zealand's digital lock rules are described in the cable as follows:

The provisions relating to technological protection measures (TPMs) remain largely unchanged in the bill. The Act as implemented reflects New Zealand's concern that TPMs should not be protected to the extent that they restrict acts which are seen as not protected by copyright law. The provisions of the Act have therefore been drafted to ensure that access to a work for non-infringing purposes, including the exercise of a permitted act, is retained.

This confirms that New Zealand's copyright law allows for circumvention for non-infringing purposes - much like many groups have called for under Bill C-32 - with no objections from the U.S. under the Special 301 system.

An earlier cable similarly recommends not including New Zealand on the Special 301 list despite the fact that NZ had not ratified the WIPO Internet treaties (Canada has been placed on the highest list for the same thing). The cable is notable for the objection to a proposed format shifting provision, similar to that found in Bill C-32 and under U.S. fair use. It argues:

these exceptions to copyright protection would send the wrong message to consumers and undermine efforts to curb unauthorized copying of CDs in New Zealand. They would cost the industry in revenue and profits and discourage innovation.

In other words, fair use works in the U.S., but not for other countries.

The U.S. involvement in New Zealand's ISP liability provisions, which included regulations for terminating subscriber access (three strikes) also comes out in the cables. In an April 2009 cable, the U.S. notes the decision to scrap the approach due to public opposition. The U.S. is anxious to bring the provisions back, proposing regular talks with government officials and offers to help drafting new provisions:

Throughout the final stages of the law's (near) implementation, the Embassy continued to met with IPR stakeholders and GNZ officials to ascertain progress and encourage resolution. To determine how a "workable" section 92A provision can be secured, Econoff met with Rory McLeod, Director at Ministry of Economic Development (MED) with responsibility for IPR within GNZ along with Paula Wilson, Deputy Director for Trade Negotiations at MFAT, and was given assurance that the government remains committed to redrafting Section 92A.

Embassy will continue to stress with GNZ officials the need for a shorter rather than protracted timeline for the redraft and will ascertain the details of a notice and comment period for public submissions once released by GNZ. During this hiatus we've proposed holding DVC(s) between NZ and U.S. interlocutors to possibly help with drafting and as a public diplomacy tool to dispel public misperceptions about proper role of IPR protection.

One month later, another cable notes the U.S. offer to assist with the redraft of three strikes.

Finally, an April 2005 cable reveals the U.S. willingness to pay over NZ$500,000 (US$386,000) to fund a recording industry enforcement initiative. The project was backed by the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand (RIANZ) and the Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society (AMCOS). Performance metrics include:

The project's performance will be judged by specific milestones, including increases in the number of enforcement operations and seizures, with percentages or numerical targets re-set annually. The unit also will be measured by the number of reports it submits to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) on its contributions to IP protection and enforcement methodology.

The proposed budget included four salaried positions, legal costs for investigation and prosecution, and training programs. The RIANZ still runs an anti-piracy site, but does not include disclosure about the source of funding. It certainly raises the question of whether New Zealand is aware that local enforcement initiatives have been funded by the U.S. government and whether the same thing is occurring in Canada.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5769/125/





NZ Students Angry Over Copyright Law

A small group of angry Canterbury University students have made their feelings known over new internet copyright laws.

The Government pushed the legislation targeting file-sharing through under urgency on the same day it rushed through Canterbury earthquake legislation.

Protestor Genna Scadden says the students feel the law is too harsh as it gives authorities the right to take away internet access

"By mere accusation alone is pretty wrong, it goes against our rights and 3 accusations to get your internet taken off you completely is not very good for us because we use it for everything."

Genna Scadden says the Government used the quake to slip the legislation through without people noticing.
http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/newsdeta...storyID=195757





13 Reasons Why the Infringing File Sharing Act is Bad for You
Christopher Wood

Many of you have been asking what the big deal is about the new copyright legislation (Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill 119-2). Isn't it a good measure for stopping illegal downloads? The answer is quite clear: No.

First, in case you missed the news: http://www.3news.co.nz/Govts-Skynet-...2/Default.aspx

There are so many problems with this law. I've listed thirteen here. There are others more fundamental especially relating to what the law should be expected to achieve, the polarised debate over the intention of copyrights and what should be protected under them, which is a natural consequence of the birth of the information society, but that's a big subject with a lot of history (that I hope to write about some other time).

Some reasons are legal, some ethical, and some technical but nonetheless crucial:

1. Presumed guilty on accusation

Despite the revision committee trying to fudge the issue, this law does work via the presumption of guilt. If the accused party has had their 3 warnings and goes to the Copyright Tribunal, they have to give reasons why the warnings were invalid. But if the accused party is innocent, what reasons can they have, apart from "I didn't do it"?

Presumption of guilt is rife for abuse, as has happened overseas under similar laws. In the digital realm evidence is often very temporary, complex, and easily fabricated, so providing evidence of your innocence could be very difficult, depending on how much is required. Providing evidence of your guilt is almost as difficult, but why should that mean an advantage should be given to accusers? New Zealand intellectual property lawyer Rick Shera says the law is grossly unfair, out of place and unnecessary in this analysis: http://lawgeeknz.posterous.com/nzs-c...ntil-you-prove

When a new law contradicts the Bill of Rights it better have an extremely good reason... and protecting the entertainment industry isn't one.

How to prove you're not in league with scurvy ne-er-do-wells like this?

2. Unsupported accusations

New Zealand Judge David Harvey has noted that 30 per cent of copyright litigation fails due to a failure to prove ownership of copyright, or due to the copyright in question not being governed by New Zealand law. Yet this law encourages more copyright infringement accusations, and puts the onus on the accused to prove themselves. There is no penalty for making spurious accusations.

3. Stifled creativity and innovation

People are often accused of infringing copyrights unreasonably, for instance quoting a section of a work to comment on it, or for sampling or making a parody of a copyrighted work. This is why US law has the concept of "fair use" (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fair_use) - in NZ it is called "fair dealing". The Creative Freedom Foundation, a charity representing thousands of Kiwi artists, has written a short explanation of copyright and how the new law will stifle creativity: http://creativefreedom.org.nz/copyright.html

Some copyright owners frequently make claims of infringement even when the use is fair because users are likely to forgo their use of the work rather than spend money defending themselves - see https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikiped..._participation.

Even without accusations, creativity is stifled by laws like this. YouTube continually removes videos that have no right being removed, simply at the request of a copyright owner.

4. Disproportionate penalties

Firstly, if found guilty you could potentially be fined $15,000 for downloading a single song - there's no clarity in the law about what a appropriate fine would be. The purported cost of copyright infringement is very arbitrary: Overseas, people have been ordered to pay millions of dollars for downloading a small number of songs, for instance this mother of four charged US$1.9m for downloading 24 songs: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikiped...itol_v._Thomas

5. Insufficient warning

The minimum time between the first accusation being made your last strike is 20 working days. It could be easy to miss both warnings, there's nothing in the law about making sure you actually receive the notices. You could even go on holiday for a month, come back and find you have to go to the Copyright Tribunal for alleged file-sharing from a week before you left.

6. The law is ill-defined

I've already mentioned how the law doesn't define the level of proof required to rebut the presumption of guilt, nor how to determine fines.

The technical definitions are particularly useless. For instance, it defines file-sharing as where:

(a) material is uploaded via, or downloaded from, the Internet using an application or network that enables the simultaneous sharing of material between multiple users; and

(b) uploading and downloading may, but need not, occur at the same time

Downloading from a network using a network? That's meaningless. Besides that, it is very loose, any internet activity could conceivably be covered by this. That's clearly not the intent. This kind of thing is very difficult to define - still, it needs to be better than this. There are other things such as the change from using the term ISP (Internet Service Provider) to IPAP (Internet Protocol Address Provider), a change which will become meaningless in the next few years as IPv6 makes everyone potentially an IPAP. So not only is it loosely defined, it's already outdated (this last would most likely would have been fixed if the law had gone through the proper process).

7. ISP costs

Compliance with this law is going to cost ISPs. Although accusers are required to pay ISPs a fee, there is no consideration for the capital expenditure required to setup the system. And they only have four months to get it up and running. This could be very significant for smaller ISPs.

So you can expect your internet connection to be more expensive than it would otherwise be.

8. Violated human rights

More importantly, your internet could be terminated. This law was passed just two days after Tim Berners-Lee (credited with the invention of the Internet) declared "access to the web is now a human right" (https://www.networkworld.com/news/20...ners-lee.html). The UN has proposed that internet access should be a human right, and it already is in France, Finland, Estonia and Greece.

Terminating internet in response to infringing copyright is worse than the post office stopping deliveries to your house because you sent photocopies to someone. The earlier law was revised due to protests over internet termination. The new bill disables that penalty for the moment, however it can be re-enabled with an order-in-council, not needing any public consultation or parliamentary vote.

Which leads on to the problems relating to how this law came to be:

9. Political precedence of law ambush

Urgency is supposed to be for urgent issues. National has passed 17 laws under urgency in the last two years, most of them completely unjustified (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ar...ctid=10719268). The passing of this law without proper process sets a particularly bad precedent.

This law has made headlines throughout the tech world, along with comments on the sucker-punch nature of its passing, and how equivalent laws overseas have been pushing through in a similar way (eg. UK's Digital Economy Act 2010):

Groups like Creative Freedom NZ, which helped lead protests against the initial bill, were taken by surprise. "The item has been due to go through the house for a while now, but has been fairly low on the list," said the group. "We are surprised to find out that it is being rushed through under urgency, and we're not alone; MPs who have been involved in the process are surprised as well."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...h-p2p-bill.ars

Using the Canterbury earthquake as an excuse to push through a law in response to the entertainment oligopoly complaining about supposed lost profits, is shameful.

10. Lawmakers who don't understand the law, let alone basic technical facts

Next, it was blatantly obvious that most of the voting MPs didn't understand what they were talking about. In what the National Business Review called "a debate that often sunk to almost surreal levels of technical ignorance", MPs made fools of themselves saying things like:

"It is really important to remember that file sharing is an illegal activity."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJdPkrpFXBM

Katrina Shanks took the prize for worst speech. Jonathan Young made a joke:

"Do you remember the movie "The Terminator"? I'm sure that you do. And the computer system... yes... the computer system called Skynet that ruled the world. It's like the Internet today."

http://www.3news.co.nz/VIDEO-MP-Jona...4/Default.aspx

Oh the perfect irony of analogizing the internet-enabled masses as evil robot overlords, and the government and corporates trying to control the internet as underdog freedom-fighters...

Topping the irony charts was Melissa Lee. Her speech (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IIyk1y9o_8) actually had an interesting point about how the multi-billion dollar Korean movie industry was made possible through blatant copyright infringement by the Chinese. Yet she then went on to talk about the damage done by lesser forms of piracy like file-sharing and how infringing copyrights is always an intentional illegal act. The kicker is, just hours before making her speech, she tweeted about a music compilation a friend copied for her! (https://twitter.com/melissaleemp/sta...64856488669184) When confronted about it, she replied that the songs were legally downloaded and paid for - proving that either she's a hypocrite, or worse, she doesn't know what the current copyright law is, despite voting on the law, and holding herself up as an example of an unintentional pirate.

Then there are the technical issues with copyright enforcement:

11. Trojaned machines

There are millions of computers infected with viruses which hackers use to do whatever they want - for instance, sending spam, hacking more computers, or sharing copyrighted files via file-sharing networks. (Yet another reason to make sure you install your updates and don't visit dodgy websites or install untrusted applications - not that this is proof against hackers, it just makes exploits less likely.) You should not be held liable for what a hacker does with your computer without your permission. But how can you prove you were hacked? Viruses can remove themselves after acting. And if being hacked is a reasonable defence, pirates can use it as a defence too, just by claiming it or perhaps purposefully allowing themselves to be hacked. (Now there's an interesting new reason for hackers to make viruses: a viral file-sharing network, where some people would be users without their permission - thus giving plausible deniability to all users.)

12. Shared connections

How can copyright holders identify people who infringe? One way is through file-sharing programs where users have accounts. It may be possible to track these to a person in New Zealand. But most piracy isn't done through any account except an internet account. Most internet connections are shared between many people. So how would copyright holders know which person to accuse? They can't. Your ISP can only trace web traffic to your router (often only with a lot of work) - they can't see where traffic goes after that. So the copyright holder can only accuse the account holder. So if your flatmate infringes, you might be the one having to prove your innocence. Likewise companies have to take responsibility for all their employees - an excellent encouragement for companies to enact draconian firewalls against their employees. When an employee is accused, it may take a great deal of effort to track down which employee it was - if it is even possible. Similarly with any company providing a connection, like hotels, caf?s and airlines.

Expect company-provided internet access to be more restrictive and better monitored.

13. Real pirates don't get caught

The most problematic pirates - the ones who upload unreleased movies or sell pirated copies - are very unlikely to be caught. They use anonymizing techniques and encryption to make their downloading untraceable. The same goes for hackers or anyone with the technical know-how. Or anyone connecting via an internet hotspot or public wi-fi. Or those who just download without using peer-to-peer software. So those caught are much more likely to be accidental and small-scale infringers, not those the law is primarily intended to stop.

The Copyright Tribunal will have only 5 people, so it can hardly handle a large number of cases. A small number of unlucky people will be made an example of, which will dissuade the most casual pirates - i.e. the kind of people whose piracy probably earns creative industries more in advertising than they lose in profits (but that last part is an argument I don't have space to explain here).

That's 13 reasons why this new law is bad and why law-abiding citizens will be worse off under it.

What you can do

There's a list of ways you can protest the law at: https://www.facebook.com/notes/oppos...41454075923884

I'm tempted to change my name on Facebook to "John Connor"... but I've settled for merely changing my profile pics...
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha/7615





Kiwi Pirates Gaining Support

The New Zealand Pirate Party has signed up 64 members so far, and hopes to get the 500 it needs to register to contest this year's general election.

The party, affiliated with other Pirate parties overseas, is fighting the Government's controversial new copyright filesharing laws and hopes to emulate the success of its European counterparts.

In 2009 Sweden's Pirate Party got 7.1 percent of the popular vote and won two seats at the European Parliament.

Getting the necessary 5 percent to get into Parliament here will be a challenge, as will just registering, but president Tommy Fergusson believes they will be ready.

"We think we have got a good chance of being registered for the election," he told businessday.co.nz.

"If we can get acknowledged as having a certain level support, as the German Pirate Party and some others have, it might send enough of a message that other people might start taking an interest and acting on our concerns. It also means any submissions we make to select committees will have a greater weight."

The German Pirate Party holds 43 council seats in that country.

The Pirate Party here wants copyright slashed to 10 years, and the cost of sending out filesharing warnings at the higher end of the scale.

"We want a law that is more in favour of consumers, but we wouldn't abolish copyright," says Mr Fergusson.
http://www.3news.co.nz/Kiwi-pirates-...4/Default.aspx





NZ's New Internet Laws Still 'Dangerously' Inadequate
Chris Whitworth

A leading copyright lawyer says a recent US file sharing court case highlights the dangers of New Zealand’s proposed internet laws, which he says could see innocent users wrongly accused.

An Illinois District Judge ruled last week that an IP address – the unique number assigned to all computers – does not equal a person and cannot be used to hold someone liable for online copyright infringement. (Read more about the case.)

The case should give peace of mind to internet users but Lowndes Jordan partner Rick Shera, who specialises in online copyright law, says New Zealand’s new laws directly counter the ruling.

“Our law has gone completely the opposite way, and said, well, we don’t care, we will just stop at the IP address and say it doesn’t matter whether you know or don’t know who is using the IP address, the account holder is going to be liable anyway,” he says.

The US example comes only months after a UK case where a pornography company dropped its complaint against several defendants accused of illegally sharing the company’s intellectual property. (Read more about the case.)

The judge in the case had questioned whether IP addresses were proof of individual infringement, before the company pulled out of proceedings.

In the US, Judge Harold Baker said the person whose IP address is used for the infringement may not be the culprit, or even aware of the offending.

“The infringer might be the subscriber, someone in the subscriber’s household, a visitor with her laptop, a neighbour, or someone parked on the street at any given moment,” he writes.

Under New Zealand's new laws, any person whose IP address is suspected of illegal filesharing will be sent up to three warnings over a three-month period before facing fines of up to $15,000 and possible internet account termination.

Mr Shera says existing copyright law in New Zealand is more aligned with the US ruling, and requires that a plaintiff prove that an actual person infringed copyright.

But come September 1, the new file sharing laws will supersede existing copyright legislation in cases of online piracy.

“I think it’s quite a dangerous extension of our law to simply extend copyright liability to people who may not be actually responsible for the infringement,” says Mr Shera.

It is not just household users who should be concerned - Mr Shera says retailers, schools and universities could all be liable for copyright infringements carried out on their WiFi connections.

Schools and universities are said to be safe under the recently revised law, as previously they could have been fined as an ISP (Internet Service Provider), but Mr Shera says the catch is they are still liable as account holders.

Even if they believe everything possible has been done to discourage illegal peer-to-peer sharing, they could still face hefty fines.

“What it will mean is that people who provide free WiFi are going to be looking very carefully at whether it’s worth it.”

This could see schools, unis and coffee shops around the country cancelling free WiFi services.

Mr Shera says the US and UK examples are positive signs that the legal system is adjusting to new online realities.

“I think what you’ve seen in those two cases…is the courts are getting a bit more technology savvy and not just taking it for granted that an IP address means a person and means that the person who controls that IP address had any responsibility for the infringement.”

He says unless New Zealand’s internet laws are further changed they will remain dangerously behind the times.
http://www.3news.co.nz/NZs-new-inter...5/Default.aspx





After Botched Child Porn Raid, Judge Sees the Light on IP Addresses
Nate Anderson

Several recent government raids on computer users suspected of sharing child porn online hit the wrong targets. Instead of getting the perpetrators, some of the raids nabbed a neighbor with an open WiFi network instead. One obvious takeaway: letting total strangers use your Internet connection for any purpose comes with some risk. But there's another lesson: IP addresses simply don't identify the people behind the computers.

One federal judge in Illinois has already taken the lesson to heart and applied it to the P2P file-sharing case before him. John Steele, the main lawyer in Illinois who has brought such cases, recently came up before judge Harold Baker and tried his standard tactic: requesting expedited discovery so that he could turn his list of allegedly infringing IP addresses into names. (Steele has also attempted to lodge the case as a "reverse class action" in which unknown copyright infringers of a pornographic film are named as a "class" to avoid problems of jurisdiction.)

Judge Baker was having none of it, rejecting Steele's request on two occasions. Steele then sought leave to take the matter to an appeals court; Baker last week rebuffed him once more, saying it was totally improper to do expedited discovery against anonymous individuals with no representation of their own before the court.

"Could expedited discovery be used to wrest quick settlement, even from people who have done nothing wrong?" asked Baker. "The embarrassment of public exposure might be too great, the legal system too daunting and expensive, for some to ask whether [plaintiff porn company] VPR has competent evidence to prove its case."

Baker then went on to cite a recent mistaken child porn raid, where an IP address was turned into a name—but the named person hadn't committed the crime. "The list of IP addresses attached to VPR's complaint suggests, in at least some instances, a similar disconnect between IP subscriber and copyright infringer… The infringer might be the subscriber, someone in the subscriber's household, a visitor with her laptop, a neighbor, or someone parked on the street at any given moment."

Steele's request was denied until he can name at least one specific person in the case over whom the court has personal jurisdiction—though it's not clear he can do this at all without going to the ISPs for help. But the judge doesn't care about Steele's problems.

"The imprimatur of this court will not be used to advance a 'fishing expedition by means of a perversion of the purpose and intent' of class actions," Judge Baker concluded.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-addresses.ars





CBS, CNET Sued for Copyright Infringement Over LimeWire Distribution
Chloe Albanesius

A coalition of artists, led by the founder of FilmOn.com, have sued CBS Interactive and CNET over what they consider to be the facilitation of massive copyright infringement.

LimeWire has been downloaded more than 220 million times via CBS properties like Download.com, according to the lawsuit. That accounts for about 95 percent of LimeWire downloads until it was shut down by court order last year, the suit claims.

"Illegal file sharing through LimeWire has caused enormous damage to everyone who is trying to make a living in the entertainment community," according to FilmOn founder Alki David. "My ultimate hope is that this lawsuit will ensure that huge corporations like CBS Interactive and CNET do not profit from these wrongful activities at the expense of hard-working artists."

Artists who have joined David's lawsuit include Detron Bendross of 2 Live Crew, Rome, Diamond Blue of Pretty Ricky, Trisco Smith from Force MDs, and Coldhard representing Crucial Conflict.

CBS "received massive amounts of revenue from P2P providers on a 'pay per download' basis and also from advertising revenue generated by advertisements placed on the download screen for P2P software," according to the lawsuit, which was filed in California district court. "The CBS defendants' business model has been so dependent upon P2P and file-sharing applications that entire pages of Download.com are designed specifically to list and categorize these software offerings."

CBS was well-aware that these sites were used for copyright infringement, but ignored that fact "in exchange for a steady stream of income," according to the suit.

The lawsuit also targets articles and podcasts that discuss P2P software and offer videos, articles, and other media that instruct people "how to use P2P software to locate pirated copies of copyrighted works and remove electronic protections placed on digital music files in order to prevent infringement."

This is not the first time David has tangled with CBS. In November, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against FilmOn.com, which had been streaming content from the major U.S. television networks, including CBS, on the site. The networks said FilmOn, as well as Ivi, violated U.S. copyright law, according to the LA Times.

In a statement, CBS said "this latest move by Mr. David is a desperate attempt to distract copyright holders like us from continuing our rightful claims. His lawsuit against CBS affiliates is riddled with inaccuracies, and we are confident that we will prevail, just as we did in the injunction hearing involving his company."

In October, Lime Wire announced that it had blocked its LimeWire service from the Gnutella peer-to-peer network. Lime Wire was orderd by a court to disable the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality of LimeWire's P2P file-sharing software. A pirated version of the software showed up on the Web, but Limewire said it had nothing to do with it and was complying with the court's order. The company closed up shop completely in early 2011.
With Limewire shut down, the percentage of U.S. Internet users who access P2P file-sharing services dropped about 7 percent from it all-time high in 2007, according to March data from NPD Group.

In a somewhat rambling 20-minute video posted on filmon.com/cbsyousuck/, David said CNET employees are "essentially manipulating the minds of the youth, teaching them that it's OK to steal. I'm not an angel, believe me, but this is truly diabolical."
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384913,00.asp





Weblog: How Piracy Equals Creativity
Darien Graham-Smith

In this month’s Weblog, Darien Graham-Smith thinks it’s the pirates who are at the forefront of our “creative” industry

Recently I found myself discussing illegal file-sharing opposite a spokesman for anti-piracy lobbying group FACT, the UK equivalent to Australia’s own AFACT. The discussion was civil enough, but I think it’s fair to say we didn’t exactly reach a cordial agreement. Indeed, I don’t believe that organisation and I will ever see eye to eye.

It isn’t that I don’t sympathise with FACT’s position. Legally speaking, the media companies it represents are on the receiving end of an unprecedented global larceny. You can hardly expect them to lie down and take it.

However, my sympathy evaporates when copyright lobbyists misrepresent the situation, as with the notorious “you wouldn’t steal a car” adverts. A child could tell you that, whatever the negative effects of file-sharing may be, there’s a difference between hot-wiring a car and LimeWiring Cars. It’s an insult to the intelligence, just like the name of the organisation – the Federation Against Copyright Theft – which non-sensically crashes together two unrelated legal terms.

In reality, file-sharing is a much more interesting issue than straightforward theft. When a file is shared, nothing tangible is taken away from anyone. The loss, rather, is of potential future revenues. That isn’t the interesting bit: even FACT and AFACT acknowledges this. The interesting bit comes next. Historically, those potential revenues have depended on copyright. After all, you wouldn’t make much money from your latest album if a store could buy one copy then legally sell duplicates for the price of a blank CD.

But unlike regular property laws, copyright isn’t a necessary foundation of society – it’s simply a tool for encouraging creators to produce content, not as a good in itself, but for the benefit of the general public. That’s made explicit in the original statutes in some countries: in the USA, the law enshrines copyright in order “to promote the progress of science and useful arts”.

Once we recognise that the principal purpose of copyright is to benefit the public at large – rather than to service some sort of ethical debt to artists – the whole complexion of the problem changes. It becomes possible to acknowledge that having the greatest media library in history freely available at the press of a button isn’t a social disaster, but a wondrous thing – arguably, the crowning cultural achievement of technology. To be sure, it conflicts with our existing ideas of copyright – but the law is our servant, not our master. If we don’t adapt and rebalance it to make the best of changing circumstances then we’re cheating ourselves.

The debate is academic anyway. Regardless of what the law says, mass file-sharing is the reality. Legal sanction clearly hasn’t slowed it down, and although technical measures could perhaps put the brakes on, hackers are always finding new ways to encrypt and tunnel data. Short of a major shake-up in the way we use the internet, file-sharing is simply something the industry must learn to live with. And why shouldn’t it? Creatives have benefited enormously from technological advances in the past few decades. Audio, video and print production can now be carried out in a fraction of the time they once took, and at a fraction of the cost. Music and film publishers haven’t done too badly at getting us to buy the same content over and over again in different formats. Let them take the rough with the smooth.

Indeed, it’s in their interests to grasp the nettle sooner rather than later. If you think downloading movies challenges established business models, wait until so-called 3D printers take off and it becomes possible to download blueprints and “pirate” physical objects; the genie will really be out of the bottle then. One way or another, media producers must learn to survive without the certainty of statutory copyright. Belatedly, that is what they’re doing. Services such as iTunes and catch up TV don’t compete with the “everything at your fingertips” appeal of file-sharing, but embrace it. They make much illegal file-sharing redundant and they’re popular because they’re built on proven technologies and proven delivery models – proven, that is, by file-sharers.

That brings me to my real problem with organisations like FACT: they’re stuck in the past. Their response to the challenges of new technology seems to be for people to carry on buying CDs and cinema tickets as if nothing has changed. Yet, even the content providers they represent recognise that it’s the file-sharers who are leading the way. If you listen to them, you might believe that piracy is killing creativity, but when it comes to realising the cultural potential of the internet, so far it’s the pirates who have been the creative ones.
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/2...reativity.aspx





How P2P Will Reshape the Enterprise
Darrell Etherington

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies and business models are changing they way people find, purchase and sell consumer goods and services. Gone are the days when P2P was more or less synonymous with file sharing. Now you can share your car, raise loan funds, trade clothes and movies, and offer up just about anything you can think of for sale, rent or trade directly to interested individuals. But the P2P model could also reshape how business operates, not just how we buy.

Distributed teams are prime test candidates for P2P enterprise initiatives, because using a P2P model for workflow control and task assignment stands the best chance of succeeding among employees who already enjoy a high degree of autonomy. P2P workflow could eliminate middle management control mechanisms that do little beyond assigning tasks, and instead leave priority management and task claiming to team members themselves is a great way to get things done more efficiently and effectively. It could be achieved by coming up with a proprietary internal tool that allows management to post “job” advertisements, each defining a specific task, or breaking down a larger project into component parks. Team members could then assess, evaluate and take on tasks according to their strengths. Peers could recommend jobs for one another, also, which should help make sure that all assignments are covered. Once someone takes a job, they could also opt to sub-contract or connect with other peers if they find the task isn’t quite what they expected, or if they think someone else in the pool has better insight.

P2P could significantly alter the enterprise in other ways, too. Small, nimble companies can use P2P to cut employee travel expenses, for example. Businesses could set up programs by which they share or pay each other for things like the use of office space, the use of company cars and even the use of accommodations for traveling employees. Payment could be non-monetary compensation: information sharing, trading of services, or repayment in kind, for example.

Many of the services that offer P2P models for services like car sharing and equipment rental that are currently consumer-focused can also be leveraged by forward-thinking companies to outfit employees, especially those with large remote workforces where inflexible, centralized models don’t make sense. Use of these services may be spearheaded from the ground up, like the bring-your-own-device and bring-your-own-app movements have been, but I also think smart enterprises will embrace and encourage P2P solutions where they make sense, because when it comes to managing remote resources, trusting them to arrive at smarter solutions with less guidance is the way to go.
http://gigaom.com/collaboration/how-...the-enteprise/





Opponents: Kill AT&T Bid for T-Mobile, Qualcomm Licenses at Same Time
Matthew Lasar

The Federal Communications Commission has launched the pleading cycle for the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile. The union would make AT&T the nation's largest wireless carrier, with over 41 percent of wireless subscriber market share. Whether you love or hate the idea—get your feedback to the FCC soon. Petitions to deny are due through May 31 (docket #11-65). Oppositions to those petitions are expected by June 10. The last chance for push back is June 20.

But five media reform groups say that the FCC should broaden the scope of its inquiry. The Commission should also add AT&T's proposed acquisition of Qualcomm licenses to the T-Mobile evaluation, then reject both bids—the sooner, the better.

These Qualcomm license transfers, if approved, "would further empower an already dominant wireless carrier to leverage its control over devices, backhaul, and consumers in ways that stifle competition," warn Free Press, Public Knowledge, the New America Foundation, the Media Access Project, and the Consumers Union. "As with other mergers, the competitive impact of the two transactions in combination may be even greater than the impact of each separately."

And so if the FCC doesn't quickly deny the Qualcomm deal "as requested by numerous parties," both proceedings "should be combined to enable a full and complete competitive analysis," the quintet of reform groups urge.

What Qualcomm has

AT&T wants Qualcomm's Lower 700MHz D and E block licenses in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. These high quality "beachfront broadband" licenses reach over 70 million people. Additional Qualcomm spectrum covers another 230 million consumers across the rest of the country.

"Preliminary review of the application indicates that in various license areas, post-transaction AT&T would hold between 6 and 80 megahertz of spectrum below 1 GHz," the telco's spectrum assignment application notes.

80MHz in one market area is a whole lot of MHz. The plan is to couple Qualcomm's "underutilized spectrum" (AT&T's phrase) with paired spectrum that AT&T already possesses, so that smartphone users can uplink on one frequency and downlink on another.

"Once compatible handsets and network equipment are developed, this will, according to the Applicants, allow AT&T to provide a more robust wireless broadband service over its new LTE network," AT&T says. The proposed AT&T/Qualcomm deal was in day 78 of FCC consideration as of Thursday.
The case against both mergers

The argument against the AT&T/T-Mobile merger boils down to AT&T possessing an unacceptably large chunk of wireless broadband market share. But that's the case with the AT&T/Qualcomm acquisition as well, the reform groups charge.

Licenses for this beachfront spectrum below the 1GHz mark are "disproportionately held by two companies, AT&T and Verizon Wireless," they note "The proposed Qualcomm license transfer would only further this competitive disparity." So it makes no sense for the FCC to consider one merger/transfer proposal in isolation from the other:

Applicants attempt to argue simultaneously that AT&T faces substantial competition from a large number of wireless carriers, and that AT&T needs additional spectrum licenses to continue to operate its business. Neither of these arguments is true—and certainly, both cannot be true at the same time, as most of AT&T's supposed competitors possess far smaller and far less valuable spectrum license holdings. Furthermore, AT&T and Qualcomm did not acknowledge the proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile in their filings in the Qualcomm docket, including in the opposition filed after the T-Mobile merger was officially announced, even though such a transaction is clearly relevant to the determinations that the Commission must make in reviewing the 700MHz license transfer application.

"The proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile would reshape the entire American wireless industry in a single stroke," the groups conclude. Bottom line: if the FCC doesn't reject the Qualcomm deal outright. It should consolidate both applications into one package, "so that the full scale of AT&T's increasing market dominance can be evaluated."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-same-time.ars





Investigate AT&T Broadband Caps, Interest Groups Tell FCC
Ryan Singel

Two public interest groups asked federal regulators Friday to take a close look at AT&T’s new limits on their broadband customer’s internet usage, saying the caps could undermine the national broadband plan.

AT&T’s caps, which went into effect Monday, limit DSL customers to 150 GB of usage a month, while customers of the more robust U-Verse service (a mixture of fiber and phone lines) are capped at 250 GB a month. Users who go past those caps face overage fees of $10 for every 50 GB.

Online video, backup and gaming services are increasingly popular and particularly bandwidth-intensive. An hour of Netflix can range from 0.3 GB to 2 GB, depending on the quality.

The letter from Public Knowledge and the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative calls the caps “particularly aggressive” and notes that with AT&T’s adoption of the cap, more than half of the broadband subscribers in the United States are now using a capped service.

“While broadband caps are not inherently problematic, they carry the omnipresent temptation to act in anticompetitive and monopolistic ways,” the group told the FCC. “Unless they are clearly and transparently justified to address legitimate network-capacity concerns, caps can work directly against the promise of broadband access.”

Comcast imposed a 250-GB cap on its cable broadband customers in 2008, after it was censured by the FCC for secretly throttling peer-to-peer services. The company does not charge overage fees. Instead it warns customers and eventually cuts them off.

ISPs that install the caps say they are necessary to keep some users from overwhelming their network at the expense of other users. The problem for ISPs isn’t usually the connection to the internet’s backbone, where rates continue to fall.

Instead, ISPs are facing pressure to increase the capacity of their local connections, and are using caps as a rough attempt to keep usage down. (See these analyses for how a system that tries to reduce usage at times of congestion would be a better solution.)

The groups want the FCC to investigate whether ISPs are counting the data that customers use for the ISPs’ own services, such as Video-on-Demand and internet calling, against the cap. The rationale is that if they are not, the ISPs have an unfair advantage over so-called over-the-top services such as Skype and Netflix.

The groups also suggest the FCC should require quarterly reports from AT&T, and possibly other ISPs, detailing how the caps are working and which ISP-offered services are excluded from the cap. This should include reporting on services, such as voice telephony and video programming, that compete with internet-delivered non–ISP-controlled offerings.

Specifically the groups suggest the FCC find out how often the cap is enforced, what steps are taken to warn customers, what the average penalty incurred by customers is, when and how often a penalty is waived, and what the relationship of enforcement is to times of network congestion.

AT&T did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/...roadband-caps/





The Cloud Has Us All In A Fog
Jon Evans

Ever heard of Dropship? It’s an open-source project that “enables arbitrary, anonymous transfers of files between Dropbox accounts.” Dropbox hopes you haven’t; they tried to squelch it this week, and even accidentally reported that it was subject to a DMCA takedown notice, with predictably futile results. I’m mostly sympathetic: I’m a huge fan of their service, Dropship was a clear violation of their terms, and for obvious reasons they don’t want to turn into an anonymous peer-to-peer file-sharing service. Unfortunately, they accidentally built a system which enabled just that.

How about Sony’s PlayStation Network? Of course you have. It was so thoroughly hacked this week that Sony had to shut it down indefinitely. Did you also know that Sony’s PS3 firmware is effectively wide open, because they made a hilariously stupid security mistake? Did you know that that’s probably how PSN got hacked, and that it raised the spectre of the hacker(s) taking over every connected PlayStation 3 in the world and turning them into by far the biggest botnet in history? That probably wasn’t what Sony had in mind, but they accidentally built a system which enabled just that.

How about the new Google Docs Android app? Came out this week, and it’s pretty great. Among its many features is the ability to take a picture of an image with text and have that text automatically OCRed and turned into a document. Can’t wait ’til they integrate Google Translate into that, too, and recapitulate last year’s hot app World Lens. But I bet book publishers are pretty unhappy. Not long ago, if you wanted to scan a book you had to actually build a scanner, or buy a copy and turn every page. Now would-be book pirates can just crowdsource 10 people to go to bookstores and take 20 pictures each, et voila: 400 scanned pages in Google Docs. Easier book piracy probably isn’t what Google had in mind, but they accidentally built a system which enables just that.

This was also the week that people who keep remotely controllable Internet-enabled camera/microphone/GPSes on them at all times expressed outraged surprise when they learned their privacy is at risk. The panopticon probably isn’t what the mobile industry had in mind, but they accidentally built a system which enables just that.

What do these all have in common? The unexpected results of connecting client devices to the cloud. (Yeah, I don’t really like the term either, but it’s better than the alternatives.) People talk about “moving to the cloud,” as if we haven’t already. The heavy lifting may happen on the server farms (when they’re up) but every connected computer, phone, and game console already serves as a computing cloud’s eye, ear, and tentacle.

Emergent properties. Unintended consequences. Get used to ‘em. My favourite Douglas Adams books are the Dirk Gently novels, in which the protagonist makes use of “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things” to solve crimes in hilariously unexpected ways. Now we’re literally building that interconnectedness into (nearly) all things. So we shouldn’t be too surprised to find ourselves moving into a Dirk Gently future, in which off-kilter left-field ricochet consequences happen at an ever-increasing rate. You can bet that those cited above are just the beginning — and that there’s a lot of money to be made in seeing them before they happen.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/30/the...-all-in-a-fog/





Quality Time, Redefined
Alex Williams

IT was a vision of family togetherness out of a Norman Rockwell painting, if Rockwell had worked in the era of WiFi. After a taco dinner one Wednesday in March, Dianne Vavra and her family retreated to the living room of their Cape Cod-style house in Huntington, N.Y., where they curled up on the spacious beige sofa amid hand-stitched quilts as an icy rain pelted the windows.

Ms. Vavra, a cosmetics industry executive in Manhattan, looked up from her iPad, where she was catching up on the latest spring looks at Refinery29.com, and noticed that her husband, Michael Combs, was transfixed, streaming the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament on his laptop. Their son, Tom, 8, was absorbed by the Wii game Mario Kart on the widescreen television. Their daughter, Eve, 10, was fiddling with a game app called the Love Calculator on an iPod Touch. “The family was in the same room, but not together,” Ms. Vavra recalled.

One family. One room. Four screens. Four realities, basically. While it may look like some domestic version of “The Matrix” — families sharing a common space, but plugged into entirely separate planes of existence through technology — a scene like this has become an increasingly familiar evening ritual. As a result, the American living room in 2011 can often seem less like an oasis for shared activity, even if that just means watching television together, than an entangled intersection of data traffic — everyone huddled in a cyber-cocoon.

Call it what you will, it is a wholly different form of quality time.

The culture of home-based iDistraction has already become a pop-culture trope, and no wonder: Never has there been so much to consume, on so many devices. On a recent episode of ABC’s “Modern Family,” the character Claire Dunphy explodes when she tries to serve the family breakfast, only to be ignored by a husband adjusting his fantasy baseball roster on his iPad, a son playing video games on his PSP and two daughters e-mailing each other from across the table. “O.K., now that’s it, everybody, gadgets down, now!” she declares. “You’re all so involved in your little gizmos, nobody is even talking. Families are supposed to talk!”

Haley, the eldest daughter, writes to her sister, Alex, “Mom’s insane,” as everyone returns to their screens.

Billy Crystal, in an interview with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show,” joked that couples these days have no qualms about texting someone else during sex — “Oh, is that you!” “Yes!” “LOL!”

CERTAINLY, people have been hyper-wired as long as there have been laptops, and the tendency became more pronounced with the advent of wireless Internet. Nearly 60 percent of American families with children own two or more computers, and more than 60 percent of those have either a wired or wireless network to connect to the Internet, according to studies by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. A third of all Americans log on from home multiple times a day, nearly twice the number that did so in 2004.

On top of that, iPads have inundated homes since they were introduced a year ago, as have fast-downloading smartphones. Media companies are jumping on board to make sure their content is available at any time, on any device. In the last six months, Netflix has added thousands of movies available for instant streaming, via its Watch Instantly option. In March, Time Warner Cable made selected channels available on an iPad app. Subscribers to MLB.TV can stream major league baseball games any day of the week through a $14.99 iPhone app. And Amazon recently announced a plan to make e-books from 11,000 public libraries available on its Kindle this year.

That amounts to more screen time in homes where everyone already seems glued to their BlackBerrys or sucked in by Facebook, Twitter, blogs — or work.

It’s a profound shift, and one that is not lost on cultural theorists who study the online habits of Americans.

“The transformation of the American living room into a multiscreen communication and entertainment hub” promises to “change our domestic sphere,” said Lutz Koepnick, a media professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies digital culture. “Individual family members might find themselves contently connected to parallel worlds almost all the time.”

Indeed, Brad Kahn, an environmental consultant in Seattle, said he often communicates with his wife, Erin, by e-mail even when they are seated a few feet apart on the sofa with their laptops. He will cut her off if she starts instructing him orally about what he calls his “honey-do” list of weekend chores, he said, and ask her to send it electronically.

To Mr. Kahn, 40, it’s simply more efficient. “If I misunderstood any directions, having a written record can be very useful in maintaining marital bliss,” he said.

Such behavior is not limited to the sofa. Evan Gotlib, who runs advertising sales at blip.tv, an Internet company in Manhattan, recalled sitting in bed recently with his wife, Lindsey Pollak, as both were using iPads. He was playing an online version of Scrabble against his sister, Val, remotely, and at one point said, “Val just got a 46-point word!”

“Ugh,” his wife said, “she just hit a 32-pointer against me.” At that moment, Mr. Gotlib realized his wife was also playing her own game against his sister.

Typically, at their home in Manhattan, Polly Blitzer Wolkstein and her husband, Mark Wolkstein, settle into the sofa around 7 p.m., perch their respective laptops on opposite armrests, place their BlackBerrys between them and surrender to their multiplicity of screens, often until midnight.

If they’re not catching up on work — he is a partner at financial research firm, she runs the Beauty Blitz Web site — Mr. Wolkstein, 38, might be half-watching one show on Hulu on his laptop, another movie on Netflix on his iPad and carrying on a game of Angry Birds. Ms. Blitzer Wolkstein, 35, will be right there beside him, tapping out texts on her BlackBerry while she chases down bonus footage of reality shows on the network Web sites.

Even efforts to have a date night, when they watch the same movie at the same time, go nowhere.

“We gradually migrate to polar ends of the couch, where we balance our laptops and iPads on the arm of the couch, then cyber-indulge during the entire movie, and have to rinse-and-repeat the next night because we missed the entire thing,” Ms. Blitzer Wolkstein said in an e-mail. “We’ve been meaning to watch a documentary about ventriloquists called ‘Dumbstruck,’ and tonight is supposed to be our 4th attempt.”

Sometimes they hold hands while looking at their screens. But failing that, the couple has developed a form of physical shorthand, an “ ‘I’m still here’ signal” in which “one of us will tap the other one a couple of times with an index finger.”

It’s not hard to interpret such moments as evidence that technology has become an alien, and alienating, force in the contemporary home. That view has no shortage of proponents.

Prominent among them is Sherry Turkle, a professor of social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.” The book argues that people’s reliance on technology to establish emotional intimacy — whether by “friending” strangers on Facebook or nuzzling robotic Furby pets — can actually increase our sense of feeling inundated and empty. “The new technologies allow us to ‘dial down’ human contact, to titrate its nature and extent,” she writes.

It’s a concern shared by Ben Schippers, who runs a software development company in Brooklyn and spends many evenings with his wife, immersed in virtual worlds of their own.

Such evenings, he admits, are rare these days. His wife, Hedda Burnett, is attending veterinary school at Iowa State University, so they manage to see each other in person only every few weeks and otherwise keep in touch over Skype. Mr. Schippers finds evenings oddly similar, whether his wife is in Ames, Iowa, or in New York beside him. Either way, “She’s on her LCD, I’m on my LCD,” he said.

He wondered about a cost in emotional intimacy in American homes, as more households adopt a similar evening ritual. “What does a television in the bedroom do to someone’s sex life?” he asked. Now screens are popping up between people throughout the house.

James Gleick, the author of the new book “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood,” said he has been known to spend evenings at home with his wife, each tapped into their own iPad, white cords dangling from their ears. In the near future, he said jokingly, “A new skill that will be taught by relationship counselors will be knowing when and how to interrupt one’s loved ones: Is a particular joke you’ve just read on Twitter worth her yanking out her earbuds?”

Joanne Cantor, a professor emerita and a director of the Center for Communication Research at the University of Wisconsin, suggests it’s almost as if adults and older children are reverting to a form of “parallel play,” the developmental stage when toddlers sit beside each other in silence, playing with toys of their own. Even in the very recent past, when family members would be watching TV together, she said, “We all had conversations during the commercials, even if it was just to say, ‘Wasn’t that stupid?’ ”

THEN again, this is not the first time that the appearance of home media has caused an outcry — perhaps needlessly, in hindsight.

“If you go back 200 years, there were similar complaints about technological devices, but it was books at that time,” Dr. Koepnick said. “The family room filled with different people reading books created a lot of concerns and anxiety, particularly regarding women, because all of a sudden they were on their own, their minds were drifting into areas that could no longer be controlled.”

Likewise, the emergence of television led to decades of hand-wringing over the specter of American families transformed into sitcom-addicted zombies. Dr. Koepnick also points out that those evenings of family television usually involved a struggle over the channel knob, or later, the remote.

In that light, iPads and laptops can be a tool of democratization, if not détente. Now, he said, “everyone has their own device, streams their own films, their own media, so there’s no longer a struggle or challenge within the family over what is it we want to see.”

Even before iPads, there was evidence that Web-centric home life might not, in fact, be eating away at family unity. Barry Wellman, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto who studies the effect of technology on social communities, said that his research supports the findings of studies like a 2009 survey of 4,000 people by a Canadian market research company indicating that people believe technology is bringing the family together, not pulling it apart, by a substantial margin.

This might be even truer in households nowadays, when the proliferation of devices and media options makes it easier for family members to pursue their interests online while seated in the same room, Dr. Wellman said.

Behavior inside a cyber-cocoon can be surprisingly interactive. “There’s a lot of, ‘Hey, look at this!’ ‘Let’s plan our trip to Vegas!’ ” he said. “People get up from their laptops, come together on one screen: ‘Hey, look what I just found, isn’t this weird?’ It isn’t the image of one person huddled in isolation with their screen.”

Robert Rosenthal, who runs a marketing company in Manhattan, also recalls his youth, when his mother had to call around to friends’ houses in the evening to find him. “When everyone is doing their digital thing out in the open,” he said, “the total death of privacy is a parental advantage.” Now, he usually just needs to check the far corners of his living room. There’s Ariana, 15, doing her homework online or poking friends on Facebook. There’s Veronica, 11, iChatting with friends, next to his wife, Carolyn Kremins, who might be shoe shopping on Gilt.com on her MacBook, while Mr. Rosenthal, himself, catches up on work e-mail.

Mr. Gotlib, of Manhattan, said that new online hardware and media options allow him and his wife to “to experience new levels of closeness.” In recent weeks, they sat next to each other in the evening; he was wearing headphones and watching an entire season of “The Wire” that he’d downloaded off iTunes on his iPad, while she read “The Art of Immersion” by Frank Rose on hers.

“Three or four years ago, I would have been downstairs watching TV, and she would have been upstairs reading,” Mr. Gotlib said. “I guarantee that we spend 80 percent more time together because of the iPad.”

Rather than a sign of a dysfunctional relationship, such behavior can actually be interpreted as the sign of health, said Ronald Levant, a professor of psychology at the University of Akron. “People who think every minute we’re together we have to connect are going to drive each other crazy, because we all need some alone time, no matter how compatible a couple might be,” Dr. Levant said. “At a certain point in your relationship,” he added, “your task to keeping the relationship vital and refreshed is managed togetherness and separateness. Technology could be used as a tool to assist that.”

In the end, that was the conclusion that Ms. Vavra, the cosmetics executive, reached after a series of nights like the one after taco night. Even though she and her husband were moved to declare “tech-free Sundays” so they could pursue outdoor activities, far from the clutter of devices, she has learned to appreciate the interchange that comes from nights when everyone is peering up from screens of their own.

“There’s a lot of crossover,” she said. “My daughter will be doing something on the iTouch, and say ‘Mommy, look at this!’ I’ll be doing something on my iPad, and she’s interested in what I’m doing. And my son is excited because he ‘un-locked’ something on Mario Kart. I don’t know exactly what that means, but we’re all there to witness the unlocking.”

Arguably, she said, an evening like that can bring more closeness than a night spent huddling over a board game back in the days of analog.

“ ‘Together time’ in the past was sometimes an effort, and a forced moment, where we would schedule it — ‘O.K., after dinner every night at 7 we’re going to watch this or play this,’ and the kids would say, ‘But Mom, I wanted to do this,’ ” Ms. Vavra recalled. “Now, it’s not forced at all. It just organically happens. Everyone gets to do their own thing, rather than, ‘Do we have to play Clue again?’ ”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/f.../01FAMILY.html





Village Voice Admits To Spamming Reddit, Begs Forgiveness
Ben Popper

The power of a social news site comes principally from its community, so when users feel like their service is being manipulated, they take it very personally.

Two weeks ago a rag tag team of anonymous Redditors discovered a group of SEO consultants and viral marketers submitting content on behalf of Village Voice Media.

As they wrote at the time,

“It matters because Reddit isn’t a dumping ground to be gamed for profit. If these companies want their sites featured, they can buy an ad, they can appeal to the community the way other users do, but scamming the system, trying to brute-force Reddit using coordinated voting schemes and networks not only goes against reddiquette but isalso in violation of the Reddit User Agreement.

The rapid rise in popularity of Reddit has been a boon to people looking for a community that doesn’t revolve around spam, garbage, re-hashed content, and that is worth protecting.

I don’t know of any other online community that has meetups, that has secret santa exchanges, that so openly helps the community as Reddit.”

Well today Village Voice media admitted they had been caught and begged to be let back into the good graces, and traffic funnel, of Reddit.

Like any journalistic endeavor, we want want as many eyeballs as possible on the stories our award-winning scribespublish. To that end, we hire folks (“social media experts,” we hate that term too) to get eyeballs on our stories so we can focus on telling the stories that matter to our readers.

Then we noticed this was happening.

To say we almost went off the rails is putting it lightly. Like Steven Seagal in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, we rushed to correct those problems in an effort to stay engaged with the reddit community in an honest way.

We talked with new reddit GM Erik Martin on the phone yesterday to try to patch up our relationship with the best community online.

Alexis Ohanian, who was recently brought back on as an advisor at Reddit, tweeted out, “How valuable is @reddit hivemind? @VillageVoice Sr WebEditor apologies (well, he doesn’t actually apologize) 4 cheating”
http://www.betabeat.com/2011/04/29/v...ues-mea-culpa/





"Fast Five" and "Thor" Top Box Office Attractions

"Fast Five," the fifth entry in the "Fast and the Furious" street-racing franchise, raced to the biggest opening of the year at the North American box office, while "Thor" was the top choice overseas.

According to studio estimates issued on Sunday, "Fast Five" earned about $83.6 million during its first three days of release across the United States and Canada, proving the appeal of car chases in exotic locales for young male moviegoers.

Industry prognosticators had expected the film to edge past the $71 million start for the previous film, "Fast and Furious" in 2009. The opening also boosted the flagging fortunes of both its distributor, Universal Pictures, and the overall industry.

"Thor" pulled in $83 million from 56 foreign markets, a week before the Marvel comic book adaptation opens in North America. Top-ranked openings included Britain ($9 million), France ($8.1 million) and South Korea ($5.7 million). Its foreign total stands at $93 million after the Paramount Pictures release got an early start in Australia last weekend.

"Fast Five" earned $45.3 million internationally after expanding to 14 markets from four last weekend. It opened at No. 1 in each of the 10 new markets, including Russia ($11.5 million), Germany ($10.2 million) and Spain ($6.3 million). Its foreign total stands at $81.4 million.

The strong performances of the two action films suggest a strong summer for the Hollywood studios, which have suffered a dismal year so far. Ticket sales in North America are off 17 percent and attendance is down 18 percent from 2010. Universal, newly controlled by Comcast Corp, had the smallest market share of the six major studios last year. It has enjoyed a decent 2011 because it distributed the hit cartoon "Hop."

Brazil In Spotlight

Boasting a price tag of about $125 million, "Fast Five" reunites franchise stars Vin Diesel and Paul Walker in a high-octane series of car chases set in the slums of Rio De Janeiro. It easily crushed the old mark for the best opening of the year -- $39.2 million -- set two weekends ago by "Rio," a cartoon also set in the Brazilian city. "Fast Five" is actually the strongest new release since "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I" opened to $125 million last November.

Universal said "Fast Five" set a new company record, surpassing the $72.1 million bow of "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" in 1997. Figures are not adjusted for inflation.

The franchise originated in 2001 as "The Fast and the Furious," and hit top gear with the 2009 installment, which earned $353 million worldwide.

Two other new releases crashed in North America during the weekend. The Walt Disney Co teen comedy "Prom" came in at No. 5 with $5 million, and Weinstein Co's animated sequel "Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil" at No. 6 with $4.1 million. They had been expected to open in the $7 million to $9 million range.

"Prom" marks the first film given the green light by Walt Disney Studios Chairman Rich Ross after he was given the job during a restructuring in October 2009. It cost about $8 million to make. Disney hopes to do better when its fourth "Pirates of the Caribbean" film opens on May 20.

Weinstein, the closely held studio behind best picture Oscar winner "The King's Speech," said it was disappointed by the opening for its Hansel and Gretel story, but it had limited financial exposure. The company received a distribution fee from the film's producer, a firm run by vodka mogul Maurice Kanbar. The Hollywood Reporter described "Hoodwinked" as "one of the most obnoxious and least necessary animated films of the century thus far."

After two weeks at No. 1, "Rio" fell to No. 2 with $14.4 million; the total for the Fox cartoon rose to $103.6 million. Fox is a unit of News Corp.

(Reporting by Dean Goodman; Editing by Paul Simao)
http://www.courant.com/entertainment...,3254776.story





Warner Music to Sell Itself to Access for $3.3 Billion
Michael J. De La Merced and Ben Sisario

The Warner Music Group agreed on Friday to sell itself to the investment vehicle of the Russian-born billionaire Len Blavatnik for about $3.3 billion, including the assumption of debt, ending a sales process that lasted months for the music record company.

Under the terms of the deal, Mr. Blavatnik’s Access Industries will pay $8.25 a share for Warner Music. That is a 4.4 percent premium to the company’s Thursday closing price of $7.90, and about 34 percent higher than Warner Music’s average share price over the last six months.

Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music’s chairman and chief executive, and the private equity firms THL Partners and Bain Capital, which together own 56 percent of Warner Music’s stock, have agreed to support the deal.

“We are delighted that Access will be the new steward of this outstanding business,” Mr. Bronfman said in a statement. “They are supportive of the company’s vision, growth strategy and artists, while bringing a fresh entrepreneurial perspective and expertise in technology and media.”

Shares in Warner Music have jumped 40 percent this year as investors eagerly anticipated a sale of the company.

The sale may eventually lead to more consolidation in the music industry.

Many analysts believe that Warner’s new owner will likely also bid on EMI, the fourth-largest music company, which is expected to go on the market soon.

EMI was seized by Citibank earlier this year after its owner, the British private equity firm Terra Firma, defaulted on a $5 billion loan. Combining Warner and EMI, analysts say, could eliminate hundreds of
millions of dollars in redundancies, making the investment profitable.

“The next step is that I would expect Access to look at buying part or all of EMI and making a larger record company, to consolidate the industry into three competitors rather than four,” said Laura Martin, an entertainment and media analyst with Needham & Company. “That helps pricing power, and also helps business-model innovation go faster.”

Since putting itself up for sale in January, Warner Music had attracted dozens of potential buyers, from other music companies to billionaires seeking a trophy acquisition.

By this week, three suitors had emerged with strong prospects: Mr. Blavatnik; Tom and Alec Gores, brothers who run their own private equity shops; and Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which had been working with the billionaire Ronald O. Perelman and the investment firm Guggenheim Partners. The Gores brothers’ bid was $7.50 a share.

Of the bidders, Mr. Blavatnik had long been seen as the most likely winner. A former Warner Music board member, he has retained both close ties to top company officials like Mr. Bronfman and an equity stake.

“I am excited to extend my longstanding involvement with Warner Music,” Mr. Blavatnik said in a statement. “It is a great company with a strong heritage and home to many exceptional artists.”

Since immigrating to the United States in 1978, Mr. Blavatnik has become one of the world’s richest men through his varied investments, primarily in the industrial sector. Access owns stakes in companies including Warner Music; TNK-BNP, the Russian oil giant; and LyondellBasell, a chemical company that has rebounded from bankruptcy. (Mr. Blavatnik is fending off a lawsuit by that company’s creditors, who allege that his takeover of the chemical maker larded it with an unsustainable amount of debt.)

Other potential bidders complained during the sales process that they felt that the end result already seemed oriented toward a win by Mr. Blavatnik, people briefed on the matter said previously.

Yet Mr. Blavatnik will still have a challenge on his hands, as the recorded music industry continues its battle to stem declining sales. Digital music downloads have been rising, but not nearly enough to replace the revenue lost from falling CD sales.

He will also have to contend with Warner Music’s strained financials, including the company’s roughly $2 billion of debt.

The deal with Mr. Blavatnik is expected to close in the third quarter. He is expected to finance the purchase with cash on hand, as well as with financing provided by Credit Suisse and UBS.

Warner Music was advised by Goldman Sachs; AGM Partners, the advisory firm run by Alan Mnuchin; and the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Access was advised by Credit Suisse, UBS and the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton.

Andrew Ross Sorkin contributed reporting.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/05/...r-3-3-billion/





IT Consultant Inadvertently Livetweets Attack On Osama Bin Laden's Compound

Living just 250m from the location where head of Al-Qa'ida was killed in attack by US forces, Sohaib Athar noticed helicopters overhead at 1am local time as attack started

Sohaib Athar, an IT consultant living in Abbottabad, discovered on Monday morning that he had live-tweeted the fatal raid on Osama bin Laden's compound by acccident.

Athar, who lives near the Jalal Baba Auditorium - about 250m from bin Laden's compound - put out his first tweet relating to the attack at about 9pm on Sunday BST, or 1am local time, when he noticed a helicopter hovering overhead: "a rare event", he commented.

That was followed by "A huge window-shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope it's not the start of something nasty."

But he mused that something odd must be going on: "Since taliban (probably) don't have helicpoters, and since they're saying it was not "ours", so must be a complicated situation," he pondered.

The downed helicopter also puzzled him: "people are saying it was not a technical fault and it was shot down. I heard it CIRCLE 3-4 times above, sounded purposeful." He added "it was too noisy to be a spy craft, or, a very poor spy craft."

The Pakistan army put out suggestions that the helicopter crash was "accidental" and not an "attack".

But the misdirection didn't fool many. Reports that the army had cordoned off the crash site arrived from a taxi driver, and then that it was conducting a door-to-door search suggested the crash was no accident. Soon another rumour surfaced: that two helicopters that followed the crashed one were "foreign" (ie not Pakistani).

He awoke to discover "interesting rumours" about the events - and then realised, from reading Twitter, that "the helicopter crash in Abbottabad, Pakistan and the President Obama breaking news address [which at that stage was had not announced bin Laden's death] are connected."

The realisation hit him at about 6am UK BST (10am Pakistan time): "Uh oh, now I'm the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...k-inadvertenet





FBI Warns That Fake Bin Laden Video Is a Virus
Robert McMillan

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation warned computer users Tuesday that messages claiming to include photos and videos of Osama bin Laden's death actually contain a virus that could steal personal information.

The warning comes as security companies said that they've spotted the first samples of malicious software disguised as photos of the dead Al Qaeda leader.

Security vendor F-Secure said Tuesday that criminals are e-mailing a password-stealing Trojan horse program called Banload to victims, and Symantec said it's seen criminals spamming victims with links to fake "Osama dead" news articles that launch Web-based attacks on visitors.

U.S. authorities do have photos of bin Laden, who was shot in the head during an early morning raid Monday in Pakistan. But these photos have not been released publicly.

Scammers have also used a technique called search engine poisoning to try to trick search engines into listing hacked Web pages that are loaded with malware in their search results. "It's unlikely you'll find pictures or videos of Bin Laden's death online -- but searching for one will certainly take you to sites with malware," wrote F-Secure chief research officer Mikko Hyponnen in a blog post.

The FBI warned Internet users to watch out for fake messages on social network sites and to never download software in order to view a video. "Read e-mails you receive carefully. Fraudulent messages often feature misspellings, poor grammar, and non-standard English," the FBI warning stated.

As a major international news event, bin Laden's death has shown the amazing way information can spread online. Many learned of the terrorist leader's death through Twitter, where the story first broke, or Facebook. But it also underscores how the unfiltered media can quickly spread bad information worldwide.

In the two days since the early morning raid, the bin Laden story has generated fake photographs, fake quotes, and plenty of scams.

Security experts said that shady marketers and so-called rogue antivirus vendors have also jumped on the bin Laden bandwagon. The rogue antivirus software bombards victims with pop-up messages telling them they have a computer problem. Its aim: to nag them into paying for bogus software.

Shady marketers are spreading messages on Facebook that try to lure victims into spreading the message to friends and visiting marketing Web sites, by claiming they have a censored video.

"Osama is dead, watch this exclusive CNN video which was censored by Obama Administration due to level of violence, a must watch," is a typical lure used in the scam. Users are encouraged to cut and paste malicious JavaScript code into their browser, which then sends the message to all of their Facebook friends. Security experts say never to cut and paste scripts into the browser.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/22703...#tk.rss_n ews





Wikileaks Founder: Facebook is the Most Appalling Spy Machine that has Ever Been Invented

Despite awaiting extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is still the subject of much media interest.

Russia Today (RT) interviewed Assange, getting his viewpoint on political unrest in Egypt and Libya, particularly probing what the Wikileaks founder makes of social media’s roles in the recent revolutions in both countries. In his interview, Assange focuses particularly on Facebook calling it the “most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented”.

Explaining in more detail, Assange affirms:

Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, and their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US Intelligence.”

According to Assange, it doesn’t stop with Facebook. He believes the social network is joined by Google, Yahoo and other major US organisations that have “built in interfaces for US Intelligence”:

It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena, they have an interface they have developed for US Intelligence to use. Now, is the case that Facebook is run by US Intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that US Intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure to them.

It’s costly for them to hand out individual records, one by one, so they have automated the process.

The Wikileaks founder then warns Facebook users, stating that if a user adds their friend to Facebook, they are “doing free work for US Intelligence agencies, in building this electronic database for them”.

The full video has been embedded below, Assange’s thoughts on Facebook, Google and Yahoo begin around the two minute mark:

Assange says his website’s revelations are “just the tip of the iceberg”, adding that it’s only a matter of time before more damaging information becomes known.
http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2011/...been-invented/





Assange Right to Slam Swedish Courts: Lawyers

Nearly one third of lawyers in Sweden, including best-selling author and lawyer Jens Lapidus, believe that criticism directed at the country's legal system by WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange is warranted, according to a new survey.

"He is partially right about the Swedish legal system," writes Lapidus, a defence attorney and author of the best selling 2006 crime novel "Snabba Cash" ('Easy Money'), along with prominent defence lawyer Johan Åkermark, in an article published on Thursday in the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper.

The authors reference a study published in Legally Yours, a trade publication for the legal profession in Sweden, which surveyed 9,000 lawyers.

The survey, known as the Juristbarometern, revealed that 31.9 percent of lawyers answered yes when asked if they agreed with Assange's criticism of the Swedish legal system.

According to Lapidus and Åkermark, both of whom are partners in the same law firm as Assange's Swedish attorney Björn Hurtig, the WikiLeaks' founder is justified in taking issue with several aspects of the Swedish criminal justice system.

Writing in DN, the two lawyers explain that Assange is warranted in questioning Sweden's rules on remanding suspects in custody, which often prevent defence attorneys from having a chance to review material used as the basis for remand decisions until minutes before prosecutors present the evidence to a judge.

"We're of the opinion that remand in Sweden is used in a way that many other states governed by the rule of law would find unfamiliar," they write.

Speaking to Legally Yours, Hurtig said the statistics cited by Lapidus and Åkermark show that "mistrust of our legal system is greater than many believe".

"The system is built up so that, in principal, the suspect doesn't have any insight into the preliminary investigation," he said.

In addition, Lapidus and Åkermark share Assange's concerns about having lay judges, many of whom are retired politicians rather than trained legal professionals, preside over trials in Swedish courtrooms.

Also problematic for Assange is the possibility that, were he ever to face trial in Sweden, it would likely be held behind closed doors, a common practices when it comes to sex crime cases in Sweden.

While Lapidus and Åkermark admitted they didn't have any statistics on closed-door trials, "our impression is that proceedings are held behind closed doors more often in Sweden in many other states governed by the rule of law".

The authors are quick to point out, however that "Sweden has is a well functioning state based on the rule of law and in many respects is a model internationally".

Lapidus and Åkermark emphasise that, while they "don't care specifically about Julian Assange" or the question of his innocence or guilt, they feel a responsibility to "remove the stains that exist in our system" which Assange's criticism has highlighted.
In February, a London court ruled that Assange could be extradited to Sweden to face questioning over sex crimes allegations stemming an August 2010 visit to Sweden by the WikiLeaks founder.

Assange's lawyers appealed the ruling in early March and his appeal is scheduled to be heard on July 12th.
http://www.thelocal.se/33604/20110505/





Your Location 'Extremely Valuable' to Google

Google recently wrote off concerns about its mobile devices sending precise user location data back to its servers, but recently uncovered emails illustrate that user location is instrumental in its strategy.

While the company said there was no need for alarm, a memo uncovered by the Mercury News in San Jose shows just how core user location is to its strategy.

Andy Rubin, Senior Vice President of Mobile at Google wrote to Larry Page, founder and now CEO, explaining that location data from mobile phones was "extremely valuable to Google," especially given the privacy blow-up concerning its Street View cars at the time.

Google is suspected to have gathered personal information of portal users from October to May through the Wi-Fi networks while setting up its controversial Street View program last Summer.

The revelation led to investigations in the US, Germany Australia and Korea, and forced the company to resort to other ways to get WiFi data.

Then, just weeks ago Los Angeles-based researcher Samy Kamkar illustrated that Google Android based smartphones were sending precise GPS location and other data back to Google "several times an hour."

"I cannot stress enough how important Google's wifi location database is to our Android and mobile product strategy," Google location manager Steve Lee told founder Page in the memo. "We absolutely do care about this because we need wifi data collection in order to maintain and improve our wifi location service."

The company is using this information to create a digital databases that include the physical location of hundreds of millions of Wi-Fi access points. Smartphones use those databases as a kind of electronic map to chart their own location.

Moreover, beyond improving services like maps for end-users, it also positions the company in front a fast-growing location-based advertising market,.

Revenue derived from so-called location-based services are expected to swell to $8.3 billion by 2014, up from $2.6 billion in 2010, according to research firm, Gartner.

The problem, however, is if the data fall into the wrong hands, or if the data is compromised.

The data is precise enough that Kamkar says Google can correlate timing and frequency of phone usage to pinpoint an Android owner's home address.

"If your phone is at the same location during night hours, they know where you live," says Kamkar. "If your phone location is on the move, they can guess that you're in a car and even calculate how fast your car is moving."

Last September David Barksdale, a now former Google engineer, used his position at Google to access user accounts and learn private information about at least four teens.

Both Google and Apple are expected to testify on May 10 to Congress about its data collecting practices.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/1399...-to-google.htm





Pa. Lawsuit: Rental Firm Spies on Users
Joe Mandak

A major furniture rental chain has software on its computers that lets it track the keystrokes, screenshots and even webcam images of customers while they use the devices at home, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a Wyoming couple who said they learned about the PC Rental Agent "device and/or software" inside the computer they rented last year when an Aaron's Inc. store manager in Casper came to their home on Dec. 22.

The manager tried to repossess the computer because he mistakenly believed the couple hadn't finished paying for it, the couple said. Brian Byrd, 26, said the manager showed him a picture of Byrd using the computer — taken by the computer's webcam. The image was shot with the help of spying software, which the lawsuit contends is made by North East, Pa.-based Designerware LLC and is installed on all Aaron's rental computers.

"It feels like we were pretty much invaded, like somebody else was in our house," Byrd told The Associated Press in an exclusive telephone interview, the day before the suit was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Erie. "It's a weird feeling, I can't really describe it. I had to sit down for a minute after he showed me that picture."

The lawsuit says the store manager told the Byrds "that he was not supposed to disclose that Aaron's had the photograph." Byrd said he believes the store manager "was just trying to throw his weight around and get an easy repossession."

"They never explained why they were" taking the webcam photos, Byrd said. "The just walked in trying to be big shots."

David Katz, an attorney at Atlanta-based Aaron's, said he was not familiar with the lawsuit, but was hoping to issue a response after reviewing a copy. The company's website says it has more than 1,500 stores in the United States and Canada

Tim Kelly, who said he is one of the owners of Designerware, said he wasn't aware of the suit and declined to comment.

Byrd and his 24-year-old wife, Crystal, said they paid two monthly installments of $156 for the laptop computer before deciding it made financial sense to make a final $900 payment to own the computer outright. That was in October.

The couple had a signed receipt but later learned an employee who took their final cash payment was suspected of stealing customer payments, which is why the store manager believed they hadn't paid for the computer and came to repossess it.

The couple had their own desktop computer but rented the laptop because Crystal Byrd needed it to study radiography at Casper College, they said. That's why Brian Bird says they called police rather than give the computer back.

"I feel violated," Crystal Byrd said. "It's scary that people can come into your home and you not know that they're watching you."

PC Rental Agent includes components soldered into the computer's motherboard or otherwise physically attached to the PC's electronics, the lawsuit said. It therefore cannot be uninstalled and can only be deactivated using a wand, the suit said.

The couple's attorney, John Robinson, of Casper, said Aaron's officials have told police they install the device on all their rental computers.

"The allegations concerning the policy were given to us on information released from the police, that's what they told us," said Robinson, who does not believe any criminal charges have resulted.

The computer is currently in police evidence, Robinson said. Michael Blonigen, the district attorney in Natrona County, Wyo., did not immediately return a call about the progress of that investigation.

The Byrds want the court to declare their case a class-action, and are seeking unspecified damages and attorneys' fees under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The privacy act allows for a penalty of $10,000 or $100 per day per violation, plus punitive damages and other costs, the lawsuit said.

"Crystal gets online before she gets a shower and checks her grades," Brian Bird said. "Who knows? They could print that stuff off there and take it home with them."

He added: "I've got a 5-year-old boy who runs around all day and sometimes he gets out of the tub running around for 20, 30 seconds while we're on the computer. What if they took a picture of that? I wouldn't want that kind of garbage floating around out there."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110503/...mputer_spyware





Sony Says 25 Million More Users at Risk in Second Data Hack
Isabel Reynolds and Liana B. Baker Reuters

Sony's Internet security crisis deepened on Monday with the company revealing hackers had stolen data of another 25 million users of its PC games system in a second massive breach for the consumer electronics giant.

Sony's latest revelation comes just a day after Sony No. 2 Kazuo Hirai announced measures had been put in place to avert another cyberattack like that which hit its PlayStation Network, hoping to repair its tarnished image and reassure customers who might be pondering a shift to Microsoft's Xbox.

The attack that Sony disclosed on Monday took place a day before a massive break-in of a separate video game network that led to the theft of 77 million users accounts. Sony revealed the initial attack last week.

The Japanese electronics company said it discovered the break-in of its Sony Online Entertainment PC games network on May 2. The breach also led to the theft of 10,700 direct debit records from customers in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain and 12,700 non-U.S. credit or debit card numbers, it said.

The PlayStation network lets video game console owners download games and play against friends. The Sony Online Entertainment network, the victim of the latest break-in, hosts games played over the Internet on PCs.

Sony said late on Monday that the names, addresses, emails, birth dates phone numbers and other information from 24.6 million PC games customers was stolen from its servers as well as an "outdated database" from 2007.

A spokesman for the online games unit based in San Diego said the service was taken down at 1:30 am Pacific time on Monday.

Sony spokeswoman Sue Tanaka, asked about the risk other data could be at risk, listed the precautions that the company has taken such as firewalls,

"They are hackers. We don't know where they're going to attack next," Tokyo-based Tanaka said.

The PlayStation Network incident has sparked legal action and investigations by authorities in North America and Europe, home to almost 90 percent of the users of the network, which enables gamers to download software and compete with other members.

On Monday, Sony declined to testify in person in front of a U.S. congressional hearing, but agreed to respond to questions on how consumer private data is protected by businesses in a letter on Tuesday, said a spokesman for Rep. Mary Bono Mack, a Republican Congresswoman from California, who is leading the hearing.

Sony Facebook Games Down

The incident that Sony disclosed on Monday also forced it to suspend its Sony Online Entertainment games on Facebook.

Sony posted a message on Facebook saying it had to take down the games during the night.

A Sony spokesman said the Facebook games make money from microtransactions and the sale of virtual goods like costumes and weapons.

It was not immediately clear if the data theft included data from players of Sony games including "PoxNora," "Dungeon Overlord," "Wildlife Refuge" on Facebook.

Facebook could not immediately be reached for comment.

Sony Online Entertainment is a division of Sony Corp, the global electronics company that operates online games such as "EverQuest" and is separate from the PlayStation video game console division.

The servers for both the Online Entertainment unit and the PlayStation Network are based in San Diego but are completely separate, said Sony's Tanaka.

Sony denied on its official PlayStation blog on Monday that hackers had tried to sell it a list of millions of credit card numbers.

The news comes less than a week after Sony alerted customers that a hacker broke into Sony's PlayStation video game network and stole names, addresses, passwords and possibly credit card numbers of its 77 million customers.

Sony alerted customers a week after discovering the break-in.

Sony executives apologized on Sunday and said it would gradually restart the PlayStation Network with increased security and would offer some free content to users.

(Additional reporting by Edwin Chan in Los Angeles and Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco; Editing by Andre Grenon, Richard Chang and Lincoln Feast)
http://www.courant.com/business/sns-...,4633507.story





Anonymous Denies Involvement in Playstation Network Credit Card Theft Scandal
Matthew Lynley

Hacktivism group Anonymous, which routinely attacks major corporations and takes up political causes, said it is not responsible for the theft of sensitive information and credit card data from Sony’s Playstation Network (PSN) online gaming network in an announcement today.

Sony laid indirect blame for the intrusion and PSN outage on Anonymous yesterday, saying that its defenses were down while it fended off a denial of service attack — which left the doors open for the hackers to come in and steal sensitive information. Anonymous took on Sony after the company went after hacker George Hotz, who reverse engineered the PlayStation 3 to run unauthorized programs.

“If a legitimate and honest investigation into credit card theft is conducted, Anonymous will not be found liable,” the group stated in a press release.

In a letter to Congress earlier today, Sony said that it found a file labeled “anonymous” with a fragment of the hacktivism group’s slogan — “we are legion.” That prompted the company to label Anonymous at least partially responsible for an attack that brought down its online gaming network and resulted in hackers stealing sensitive information about 100 million PSN and Station.com users.

“While we are a distributed and decentralized group, our ‘leadership’ does not condone credit card theft,” the group stated in a press release. “We are concerned with the erosion of privacy and fair use, the spread of corporate feudalism, the abuse of power and the justifications of executives and leaders who believe themselves immune personally and financially for the actions the undertake in the name of corporations and public office.”

It’s true that the theft does not fit the modus operandi of Anonymous, which is usually concerned with disrupting companies that get in the way of free speech and political causes. But it’s important to note that Anonymous does not directly deny involvement in the attack on the PSN in the announcement — it only denies involvement in the credit card and information theft. While the group might not possess the same public relations prowess that some of the top companies in the world have, it’s unusual that the group hasn’t made this announcement airtight and outright denied involvement entirely for the intrusion.

Hackers attacked the PSN on April 19, forcing the Japanese company to bring down the network, which has more than 77 million registered users. The nightmare then continued after hackers broke into the company’s Station.com site, which serves as a host for its PC games like Everquest. Hackers were able to steal information from as many as 24.6 million accounts on that site, according to Sony. In all, more than 100 million accounts might have been compromised. The PlayStation Network is a critical service that competes with Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service — as well as other online gaming services. There are also 948 games now available in the PlayStation Network store, as well as 4,000 pieces of add-on content for games.

You can find a timeline for the Playstation Network outage and credit card information theft scandal here, courtesy of VentureBeat’s gaming guru Dean Takahashi. You can also find a full copy of the press release below.
http://venturebeat.com/2011/05/05/an...es-psn-outage/





Exclusive: Third Attack Against Sony Planned
Erica Ogg

A group of hackers says it is planning another wave of cyberattacks against Sony in retaliation for its handling of the PlayStation Network breach.

An observer of the Internet Relay Chat channel used by the hackers told CNET today that a third major attack is planned this weekend against Sony's Web site. The people involved plan to publicize all or some of the information they are able to copy from Sony's servers, which could include customer names, credit card numbers, and addresses, according to the source. The hackers claim they currently have access to some of Sony's servers.

Should the planned attack succeed, it would be the latest blow in a series of devastating security breaches of Sony's servers over the past month. The failure of Sony's server security has ignited investigations by the FBI, the Department of Justice, Congress, and the New York State Attorney General, a well as data security and privacy authorities in the U.K., Canada, and Taiwan.

Several weeks ago the hacker group known as Anonymous targeted several Sony Web sites, including Sony.com and SonyStyle.com, with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in retaliation for what its members saw as Sony's unfair legal action against hacker George Hotz. Two weeks ago Sony's PlayStation Network, along with its Qriocity service and Sony Online, were the target of an attack that exposed the personal information of more than 100 million Sony customers. Sony was forced to shut down PSN, Qriocity, and Sony Online, and is currently working to bring them back online after rebuilding the security of its servers.

Sony says it doesn't know who orchestrated what it's calling a "highly sophisticated, planned" attack, but it has dropped hints that the group Anonymous is involved. Kazuo Hirai, chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment, told a Congressional subcommittee in a letter yesterday that the intruders on its servers planted a file named "Anonymous" containing the statement "We are Legion," part of the group's tagline.

Anonymous issued a statement yesterday denying it was involved in the PSN breach. "While we are a distributed and decentralized group, our 'leadership' does not condone credit card theft," the statement said.

Now it seems the same group of hackers that was able to infiltrate the PSN servers is planning to hit back against Sony.

Sony did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31021_3-20060227-260.html





Security Expert: Sony Knew Its Software Was Obsolete Months Before PSN Breach
Marc Perton

In congressional testimony this morning, Dr. Gene Spafford of Purdue University said that Sony was using outdated software on its servers — and knew about it months in advance of the recent security breaches that allowed hackers to get private information from over 100 million user accounts.

According to Spafford, security experts monitoring open Internet forums learned months ago that Sony was using outdated versions of the Apache Web server software, which "was unpatched and had no firewall installed." The issue was "reported in an open forum monitored by Sony employees" two to three months prior to the recent security breaches, said Spafford.

Spafford made his comments in a hearing convened by the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade. Sony was invited to participate in the hearing, but declined to attend. In a letter to the committee, Sony said it has added automated software monitoring and enhanced data security and encryption to its systems in the wake of the recent security breaches.

"If Dr. Spafford's assessment is accurate, it's inexcusable that Sony not only ran obsolete software on servers containing confidential data, but also that the company continued to do so after this information was publicly disclosed," said Jeff Fox, Consumer Reports Technology Editor.
http://consumerist.com/2011/05/secur...sn-breach.html





Skype for Mac Has Unpatched Security Flaw
Christina Warren

Mac users may want to be extra careful when using Skype, thanks to a nasty zero-day vulnerability in the Mac OS X version of the client.

Security researcher Gordon Maddern from the firm Pure Hacking discovered a flaw in Skype that allows a skilled individual to gain remote access to another’s machine simply by sending a Skype message.

UPDATE: Skype has issued a patch for the vulnerability but hasn’t pushed it out to users. To get the updated, patched software, download Skype 5.1.0.992.

Maddern says the discovered the hole by accident but put together a proof of concept showing how potentially dangerous it could be. By simply sending a message, Maddern was able to take control of a user’s computer and execute a shell instance. Scary stuff.

The researcher contacted Skype more than a month ago, but despite assurances from Skype that a fix was on the way, the program has remained unpatched.

In fact, it appears that it was only after Maddern blogged about the issue — and others like ZDNet UK championed the cause — that Skype felt the need to see the issue as a major problem.

In a statement to ZDNet UK, Skype said, “We are aware of this and will release a fix early next week to resolve the issue. We take our users privacy very seriously and are working quickly to protect Skype users from this vulnerability.”

Mac OS X user are unlikely to be completely satisfied with this response. In Waiting more than a month before applying a hot fix, Skype has shown that it might not truly be “taking our users privacy very seriously.”

The Windows and Linux versions of Skype aren’t vulnerable to this zero-day vulnerability. In addition to this new “feature,” Mac users are also dealing with a new UI in Skype 5 that makes everything harder to use.

Realistically speaking, most users are probably not in any potential danger when using Skype — provided they don’t accept messages or calls from strangers. Still, we know we’ll be taking a Skype for Mac break until this thing is fixed.
http://mashable.com/2011/05/06/skype-mac-security-fail/





China Creates New Agency for Patrolling the Internet
Michael Wines

A powerful arm of China’s government said Wednesday that it had created a new central agency to regulate every corner of the nation’s vast Internet community, a move that appeared to complement a continuing crackdown on political dissidents and other social critics.

But the vaguely worded announcement left unclear whether the new agency, the State Internet Information Office, would in fact supersede a welter of ministries and other government offices that already claim jurisdiction over parts of cyberspace.

China’s State Council Information Office said it was transferring its own staff of Internet regulators to the new agency, which would operate under its jurisdiction. Among many other duties, the agency will direct “online content management;” supervise online gaming, video and publications; promote major news Web sites; and oversee online government propaganda. The agency will also have authority to investigate and punish violators of online content rules, and it will oversee the huge telecommunications companies that provide access for Internet users and content providers alike.

The State Council is a cabinetlike agency that effectively manages the government’s day-to-day operations. Two former officials at its Information Office will run the new agency, and executives from two central ministries — public security and information technology — will also serve in senior positions, the announcement stated.

The mushrooming growth of China’s Internet business has spawned a sort of land rush for regulatory turf by government agencies that see in it a chance to gain more authority or more money, or both. At least 14 government units, from the culture and information technology ministries to offices that oversee films and books, have some hand in what appears on China’s Internet. Others have interests in Internet-related ventures like the sale of censorship software that could prove to be lucrative sources of income.

Wednesday’s announcement indicated that the new office would work with other government units that regulate parts of the Internet, which could dilute internal opposition. But the sweeping nature of the announcement left some experts unconvinced.

“My guess is that it’s going to be quite a fight for these existing regulators to give up power, because it’s such a big and lucrative endeavor,” Bill Bishop, a Beijing-based independent analyst of the Internet industry, said an interview. “It’s not clear from this announcement, either in English or Chinese, whether the new agency is going to oversee them or coordinate with them.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/w...a/05china.html





Mozilla Tells DHS: We Won't Help You Censor the Internet
Cory Doctorow

The US Department of Homeland Security has asked the Mozilla Foundation to take down the "Mafiaa Fire" plugin, which automatically redirects browsers to the new URLs for sites that have had their .com and .net addresses seized in the latest round of the copyright wars. The Mozilla Foundation has firmly refused.

However, where ICE might have expected a swift take down from Mozilla, the legal and business affairs department of the tech company was not planning to honor the request so easily.

"Our approach is to comply with valid court orders, warrants, and legal mandates, but in this case there was no such court order," Anderson explains.

According to Anderson complying with the request without any additional information would threaten open Internet principles. So, instead of taking the add-on offline they replied to ICE with a set of 11 well-crafted questions.

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/05/05...ls-dhs-we.html





FBI Chastised by Court for Lying About Existence of Surveillance Records
Jennifer Lynch

An order last week from the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California has revealed the FBI lied to the court about the existence of records requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), taking the position that FOIA allows it to withhold information from the court whenever it thinks this is in the interest of national security. Using the strongest possible language, the court disagreed: “The Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court.” Islamic Shura Council of S. Cal. v. FBI (“Shura Council I”), No. 07-1088, 3 (C.D. Cal. April 27, 2011) (emphasis added).

This case may prove relevant in EFF’s ongoing FOIA litigation against the FBI. As discussed further below, one of the issues in Shura Council was the FBI’s extensive and improper use of “outside the scope” redactions. The agency has also used these heavily in at least one of our current cases — in areas where it is highly unlikely the material blocked out is actually outside the scope of our FOIA request. (see example to the left from our case seeking records on the government’s push to expand federal surveillance laws). We’ll be writing more about that case in the coming weeks and posting the documents we received on this site soon.

Shura Council started five years ago in May 2006, after widespread reporting on the FBI’s programs targeting Muslims after September 11, 2001. At that time, several Muslim citizens and organizations in Southern California, including the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), submitted a broad joint FOIA request to the FBI seeking “[a]ny records relating or referring” to themselves, “including . . . records that document any collection of information about monitoring, surveillance, observation, questioning, interrogation, investigation and/or infiltration[.]” Shura Council I at 4.

In 2008, after the FBI produced only minimal records, the requesters filed a federal lawsuit. The FBI then searched for and located additional records for nine of the plaintiffs, but these records were heavily redacted, with much of the information withheld as “outside the scope” of the plaintiffs’ FOIA request. The FBI attested, in documents and declarations it submitted under oath to the court, that these were all the records that existed about the plaintiffs and that the materials labeled “outside the scope” were “not responsive” to the plaintiffs’ FOIA request.

After court ordered the FBI to submit full versions of the records in camera, along with a new declaration about the agency’s search, the FBI revealed for the first time that it had materially and fundamentally mislead the court in its earlier filings. The unaltered versions of the documents showed that the information the agency had withheld as “outside the scope” was actually well within the scope of the plaintiffs’ FOIA request. The government also admitted it had a large number of additional responsive documents that it hadn’t told the plaintiffs or the court about. Id. at 7-8.

If these revelations weren’t bad enough, the FBI also argued FOIA allows it to mislead the court where it believes revealing information would “compromise national security.” Id. at 9. The FBI also argued, that “its initial representations to the Court were not technically false” because although the information might have been “factually” responsive to the plaintiffs’ FOIA request, it was “legally nonresponsive.” Id. at 9, n. 4 (emphasis added).

The court noted, this “argument is indefensible,” id. at 9-10, and held, “the FOIA does not permit the government to withhold responsive information from the court.” (Id.)(upheld on appeal in Islamic Shura Council of S. Cal. v. FBI, __ F.3d __, No. 09-56035, at 4280-81 (9th Cir. Mar. 30, 2011) (“Shura Council II”).1 The court stated:

The Government argues that there are times when the interests of national security require the Government to mislead the Court. The Court strongly disagrees. The Government’s duty of honesty to the Court can never be excused, no matter what the circumstance. The Court is charged with the humbling task of defending the Constitution and ensuring that the Government does not falsely accuse people, needlessly invade their privacy or wrongfully deprive them of their liberty. The Court simply cannot perform this important task if the Government lies to it. Deception perverts justice. Truth always promotes it.

(Shura Council I at 17) (emphasis added). This is an important opinion for FOIA requesters because sometimes the only protection a FOIA requester has from the government's potentially arbitrary withholding of information is a court's in camera review of the full versions of documents. If the government were allowed to withhold information from the court, this protection would be meaningless and the role of judicial oversight in FOIA cases would be compromised.

Unfortunately for the plaintiffs in Shura Council, this seems to be a hollow victory. Although the court did not restrain itself from using the strongest possible language to criticize the government’s actions (calling the FBI’s arguments “untenable,” id. at 3, “indefensible,” id. at 10, and “not credible” id. at 17) it also held that “disclosing the number and nature of the documents the Government possesses could reasonably be expected to compromise national security.” Id. 18. Therefore it did not order the government to release the records to the plaintiffs or even to reveal how many records turned up in the second search. And on appeal, the Ninth Circuit held that neither the plaintiffs nor their attorneys had the right to see the original version of the district court’s order (filed under seal) because it contained information the FBI considered to be “national security and sensitive law enforcement information.” (Shura Council II at 4286).

It seems unlikely that, five years after the plaintiffs filed their FOIA request, the release of the information the FBI has on these individuals and organizations would truly threaten national security or an ongoing criminal investigation. None of the plaintiffs appears to have been arrested or retained in conjunction with a crime or foreign terrorist plot, so it seems more likely that this is yet another example of the government valuing secrecy over transparency.

The district court’s April 27, 2011 order after remand is here, and the Ninth Circuit opinion remanding the case is here.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/0...bout-existence





The Tor Project Plans a Firefox Fork

The Tor project has announced that it is to launch its own fork of Firefox that will include Tor integration. At present, users who want to use the decentralised Tor network to browse the internet anonymously install the Firefox extension Torbutton and additional Tor software. As developer Mike Perry has written on the project blog, the need to install additional software creates an unnecessary and complicating hurdle for many users. They also often find the toggle system for turning anonymity on and off confusing. Users would also often not remember in which mode certain tabs were opened, thereby putting anonymity and privacy at risk.

It has also proved difficult to maintain Torbutton as new features are introduced and bugs are fixed in Firefox, disrupting the functioning of Torbutton; avoiding this was not usually a high priority for the Firefox developers. For these reasons, the project has decided to maintain its own Firefox fork which will be developed under the name of the Tor Browser. In addition, the project also intends to remove the Torbutton Firefox extension from Mozilla's add-on repository (addons.mozilla.org) and only offer it for experienced users from the Tor project site; maintenance will be discontinued. The developers are currently discussing details on the mailing list.
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/it...k-1237745.html





Life Beyond HTTP 1.1: Google’s SPDY
Ilya Grigorik

Tim Berners-Lee rightfully deserves all the credit for his early work around URI, HTTP and HTML. His efforts ultimately led to the official HTTP 1.0 (RFC 1945) specification in 1996, the HTTP 1.1 proposal (RFC 2068) in 1997 and consequently the official HTTP 1.1 spec (RFC 2616) in 1999. The web as we know it wouldn't exist without these protocols.

However, more then a decade has passed, we now have billions of users online, our web apps have grown by orders of magnitude in both size and complexity, and the HTTP specification is starting to show its age. Google's Chrome browser dropped the "http://" prefix in their location bar about a year ago, and as it turns out, not just for aesthetic reasons: if you are using Chrome, and you are using Google web services today, chances are, you are not running over HTTP! Let that sink in for a minute. More likely, your browser is using SPDY - let's dig in.

Evolution HTTP and Latency

As we focus on making our web-apps being first class citizens in our everyday workflow, latency immediately surfaces as the primarily hurdle. Unfortunately, this is also the weak spot for HTTP. The original HTTP 1.0 spec mandated that the connection to the server should be closed after every single request/response cycle: no connection reuse, and an implicit TCP setup and teardown between each request - an expensive pattern.

Some of the major changes in HTTP 1.1 were to address exactly this issue: RFC 2616 defaulted to "keep alive" connections and introduced "pipelining". Keep-alive allows us to reuse the same underlying TCP connection between requests, and pipelining promised us to remove the strict "one at a time" requirement. Both sensible changes, but unfortunately, while keep-alive has found its way into most clients and servers, pipelining is disabled in all but one browser (Opera) to this day.

However, even if we manage to deploy pipelining support, there is still an unresolved issue: HTTP forces strict FIFO semantics for all the requests. Have a slow dynamic request at the front of the queue? Everyone else sharing that TCP channel will have to wait until it completes.

SPDY: Life beyond HTTP 1.1

SPDY (SPeeDY) is a Google research project and an application-level protocol for transporting web content. The primary goal of SPDY is to reduce latency, which is a promise on which it delivers: head to head tests against HTTP show SPDY with up to 64% reduction in page load times! Same pages, same TCP pipe, different protocol - nice win.

High level summary of SPDY changes and features: true request pipelining without FIFO restrictions, message framing mechanism to simplify client and server development, mandatory compression (including headers), priority scheduling, and even bi-directional communication! Let's dig into these a bit more.

Unlike HTTP, each request in SPDY is assigned a "stream ID", which allows us to use a single TCP channel to send data between the client and the server in parallel: we can serve multiple resources at the same time through the same channel by simply identifying which stream the data belongs to. To support this, SPDY defines a simple to parse binary protocol with two types of "frames": control, and data.

Turns out, while HTTP payloads can be compressed, the HTTP headers always currently travel as plain-text over the wire. SPDY compresses all header meta data with a predefined dictionary. Likewise, since SPDY now supports true pipelining, it also allows us to assign request priorities to each resource (ex: HTML first, JS second). Finally, why have the browser initiate all the requests? After all, if the server knows which page you are fetching, then it can "hint" to the client which images it may need before the client even parses that HTML - server push!

SPDY in the wild

Turns out, while the original work and tests around SPDY were done in the Chromium project, since then, the official Google Chrome client has shipped with built-in SPDY support, and not surprisingly, Google's servers are also SPDY enabled. In other words, if you use Chrome, and you're using Google services, then many of those pages are not arriving to you over HTTP - you are actually running over SPDY!

Curious to try SPDY in your own stack? Check out the available Apache plugin (mod-spdy), the Python server/client implementation, or the spdy ruby gem. The Ruby parser is a work in progress, but it does provide a way to parse the incoming data, and will also help you craft a server response for your SPDY client (see the hello world example):

require 'spdy'
 
s = SPDY::Parser.new
 
s.on_headers_complete { |stream_id, associated_stream, priority, headers| ... }
s.on_body             { |stream_id, data| ... }
s.on_message_complete { |stream_id| ... }
 
s << recieved_data

The road to HTTP 2.0, or beyond!

Given all the benefits that SPDY offers, it is surprising how little attention it has received since its release. Google has also been fairly quiet about it since the initial announcement - low latency web services are a big competitive advantage, perhaps they have a reason to be quiet? Regardless, it is an open protocol, and one worth investigating.
http://www.igvita.com/2011/04/07/lif...1-googles-spdy





US DVD Sales Plummet 20%

Hollywood studios feel impact of rapid shift to online film and TV viewing
Mark Sweney

DVD sales plunged 20% in the US in the first quarter of 2011, with Hollywood studios blaming the timing of Easter and a glut of blockbuster releases in the same period last year for the $500m (£303m) year-on-year revenue slump.

The sale of DVDs and Blu-ray discs fell from $2.58bn to just more than $2bn in the first three months of the year, according to a report by industry body the Digital Entertainment Group. The DEG study also found rentals of DVDs through outlets such as Blockbuster plunged 36% year on year to $440m.

However, consumer spending on streaming and subscription services such as Netflix rose 33% to $695m.

The increase is from a relatively low base and the growth in digital revenues failed to cover a 10% fall in US home entertainment spending in the first quarter to $4.18bn.

DEG's latest figures highlight how the Hollywood studios are feeling the impact of the rapid shift to digital consumption of film and TV content. The movie industry is struggling with the same issues faced by the music sector a decade ago, with digital revenues not yet enough to compensate for the decline in sales of traditional physical products.

"The industry has proven resilient, with modest gains posted in a number of key areas," the report said.

The report pointed out that there were four "tentpole" cinema releases in the first quarter last year, which accounted for $1bn in revenues, for which there was "no such equivalent" in the first three months of 2011.

"The second quarter is off to a strong start, with sell-through [sales of DVDs and Blu-ray discs] up 20% in the first few weeks alone," the report said.

Overall an "impressive array of blockbuster theatrical releases" later this year will "help to round out 2011, with consumer spend flat, or slightly up, and transactions up by the end of the year".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011...ales-online-tv





Ownership of TV Sets Falls in U.S.
Brian Stelter

For the first time in 20 years, the number of homes in the United States with television sets has dropped.

The Nielsen Company, which takes TV set ownership into account when it produces ratings, will tell television networks and advertisers on Tuesday that 96.7 percent of American households now own sets, down from 98.9 percent previously.

There are two reasons for the decline, according to Nielsen. One is poverty: some low-income households no longer own TV sets, most likely because they cannot afford new digital sets and antennas.

The other is technological wizardry: young people who have grown up with laptops in their hands instead of remote controls are opting not to buy TV sets when they graduate from college or enter the work force, at least not at first. Instead, they are subsisting on a diet of television shows and movies from the Internet.

That second reason is prompting Nielsen to think about a redefinition of the term “television household” to include Internet video viewers.

“We’ve been having conversations with clients,” said Pat McDonough, the senior vice president for insights and analysis at Nielsen. “That would be a big change for this industry, and we’d be doing it in consultation with clients if we do it.”

Nielsen’s household figures suggest that while the TV set is still firmly at the center of the average American’s media life, a small minority of Americans are finding ways to live without it. The “persistently rocky economy” is “the driving factor,” the company says in the report to be released Tuesday.

Similarly, the economy was the reason cited by Nielsen when the percentage of homes with sets declined in 1992. That decline, the company’s report says, “also followed a prolonged recession and was reversed during the economic upswing of the mid-1990s.” If the current decline persists, it will have profound implications for the networks, studios and distributors that are wedded, at least in part, to the current television ecosystem.

Nielsen’s estimates incorporate the results of the 2010 census as well as the behavior of the approximately 50,000 Americans in the national sample that the company relies upon to make ratings projections. “One thing we are seeing in the Nielsen sample are fewer people owning TVs,” Ms. McDonough said. It was first evident in the sample in late 2008, she said, during the worst of the financial crisis and the recession.

Nielsen’s research into these newly TV-less households indicates that they generally have incomes under $20,000. “They are people at the bottom of the economic spectrum for whom, if the TV breaks, if the antenna blows off the roof, they have to think long and hard about what to do,” Ms. McDonough said. Most of these households do not have Internet access either. Many live in rural areas.

The transition to digital broadcasting from analog in 2009 aggravated the hardship for some of these households. Some could not afford to upgrade, Nielsen surmised, though the government tried to provide subsidies in those situations.

And some in rural areas could not receive digital signals as effectively as analog signals for technical reasons. In those cases, “if you’re an affluent household — or most middle-class households — you’re going to get a satellite dish. If you’re a struggling household, likely you’re not going to be able to afford that option,” Ms. McDonough said.

Then there are the tech-savvy Americans who once lived in a household with a television, but no longer do. These are either cord-cutters — a term that refers to people who stop paying for cable television — or people who never signed on for cable. Ms. McDonough suggested that these were younger Americans who were moving into new residences and deciding not to buy a TV for themselves, especially if they “don’t have the financial means to get one immediately.”

Nielsen has not yet assessed what proportion of the decline can be attributed to this behavior. But the decline in the percentage of homes with sets is sure to kick off another round of speculation about cord-cutting.

Sensitive to its clients’ concerns, Nielsen explains the trend this way in the report: “While Nielsen data demonstrates that consumers are viewing more video content across all platforms — rather than replacing one medium with another — a small subset of younger, urban consumers seem to be going without paid TV subscriptions for the time being. The long-term effects of this are still unclear, as it is undetermined if this is also an economic issue that will see these individuals entering the TV marketplace once they have the means, or the beginning of a larger shift to online viewing.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/b...elevision.html





Day Against DRM - May 4th, 2011

The Day Against DRM is an opportunity to unite a wide range of projects, public interest organizations, web sites and individuals in an effort to raise public awareness to the danger of technology that requires users to give-up control of their computers or that restricts access to digital data and media. This year, we'll be helping individuals and groups work together to create local actions in their communities — actions will range from protesting an unfriendly hardware vendor to handing out informative fliers at local public libraries!
http://libreplanet.org/wiki?title=Gr...ainst_DRM_2011

















Until next week,

- js.



















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