Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 11th, '12

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002



































"When international accords, like ACTA, are conceived and constructed under a cloak of secrecy, it is hard to argue that they represent the broad interests of the general public. The controversy over ACTA should surprise no one." – U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Oregon


"Early Circuit law in California held that obscene works did not promote the progress of science and the useful arts, and thus cannot be protected by copyright." – Liuxia Wong


"Four small hosting companies provide the infrastructure that accounts for more than 80% of all file sharing traffic globally." – Craig


"Stop ACTA!" – Protestors’ banner



































February 11th, 2012




Protests Erupt Across Europe Against Web Piracy Treaty
Erik Kirschbaum and Irina Ivanova

Tens of thousands of protesters took part in rallies across Europe on Saturday against an international anti-piracy agreement they fear will curb their freedom to download movies and music for free and encourage Internet surveillance.

More than 25,000 demonstrators braved freezing temperatures in German cities to march against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) while 4,000 Bulgarians in Sofia rallied against the agreement designed to strengthen the legal framework for intellectual property rights.

There were thousands more - mostly young - demonstrators at other high-spirited rallies despite snow and freezing temperatures in cities including Warsaw, Prague, Slovakia, Bucharest, Vilnius, Paris, Brussels and Dublin.

"We don't feel safe anymore. The Internet was one of the few places where we could act freely," said Monica Tepelus, a 26-year-old programmer protesting with about 300 people in Bucharest.

Opposition to ACTA in Eastern Europe is especially strong and spreading rapidly. Protesters have compared it to the Big Brother-style surveillance used by former Communist regimes. Downloading films and music is also a popular way for many young Eastern Europeans to obtain free entertainment.

"Stop ACTA!" read a banner carried by one of the 2,000 marchers in central Berlin, where temperatures were -10 Celsius.

"It's not acceptable to sacrifice the rights of freedom for copyrights," Thomas Pfeiffer, a leader of the Greens party in Munich where 16,000 people protested against ACTA, was quoted telling Focus magazine's online edition on Saturday.

Governments of eight nations including Japan and the United Stated signed an agreement in October aiming to cut copyright and trademark theft. The signing was hailed as a step toward bringing ACTA into effect.

Negotiations over ACTA have been taking place for several years. Some European countries have signed ACTA but it has not yet been signed or ratified in many countries. Germany's Foreign Ministry said on Friday it would hold off on signing.

In Sofia, most of 4,000 demonstrators on Saturday were youths. Some wore the grinning, moustachioed Guy Fawkes masks that have become a symbol of the hacker group Anonymous and other global protest movements.

ACTA aims to cut trademark theft and tackle other online piracy. But the accord has sparked concerns, especially in Eastern European countries as well as in Germany which is sensitive about its history with the Gestapo and Stasi secret police, over online censorship and increased surveillance.

"We want ACTA stopped," Yanko Petrov, who attended the rally in Sofia, told state broadcaster BNT. "We have our own laws, we don't need international acts."

Surveillance

The protesters are concerned that free downloading of movies and music might lead to prison sentences if the ACTA was ratified by parliaments. They also fear that exchanging material on the Internet may become a crime and say the accord will allow for massive online surveillance.

In Warsaw, some 500 protesters demonstrated, brandishing placards saying "No to ACTA," "Down with censorship" and "Free Internet." Several hundred turned out in the southwestern city of Wroclaw, the Baltic port of Szczecin and Poznan.

In Paris, about 1,000 people marched ACTA. "It's a demonstration without precedent because it's taking place in all of Europe at the same time," said Jeremie Zimmermann, spokesman for Internet freedom group Quadrature du Net.

In Prague, about 1,500 people marched against ACTA. Some waved black pirate flags with white skull and crossed bones, and others wore white masks of the Guy Fawkes character.

Some carried banners against the ACTA treaty such as "Freedom to the Internet" and "ACTA attacks Freedom," and chanted "Freedom, Freedom." Smaller gatherings took place in other Czech cities.

The Czech government has held off on ratification of the ACTA treaty, saying it needs to be analyzed.

Romanian state-news agency Agerpres said 2,000 people protested in the Transylvanian city of Cluj against ACTA, carrying banners that said: "Paws off the Internet."

In Croatia, protests were held in Zagreb, Split and Rijeka, with demonstrators, some masked, carrying banners reading "Stop internet censorship."

A group identifying itself as Anonymous hacked into the webpage of Croatian president Ivo Josipovic, who has defended copyright measures. It remained unavailable for several hours.

It also crashed the pages of ZAMP, a Croatian professional service that looks after the protection of composers' rights and copyright, and the Institute of Croatian Music.

In Bratislava, hundreds of young Slovaks rallied, many also wearing Guy Fawkes masks. About 1,000 people demonstrated in Budapest.

Local media reported about 600 people protested at the government building in Vilnius. Lithuania Justice Minister Remigijus Simasius said in his blog some of ACTA's provisions could pose a threat to Internet freedom.

"I don't know where it (ACTA) comes from and how it originated, but I don't like that this treaty was signed skillfully avoiding discussions in the European Union and Lithuania," Simasius wrote.

(Additional reporting by Gerard Bon in Paris, Jan Lopatka in Prague, Rob Strybel in Warsaw, Padraic Halpin in Dublin, Martin Santa in Bratislava and Ioana Patran in Bucharest, Nerijus Adomaitis in Vilnius, Zoran Radosavljevic in Zagreb, Krisztina Than in Budapest; Editing by Alison Williams)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...81A0I120120211





SOPA and PIPA Prompt Reddit, Mozilla, and 73 Others to Ask Congress to Halt Work on Intellectual Property Laws
T.C. Sottek

A coalition of 75 groups including Reddit, Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, Open Congress, and Human Rights Watch, have sent an open letter to Congress asking it to put the brakes on intellectual property lawmaking in the wake of the massive backlash against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect-IP Act (PIPA). While the letter may not have any tangible impact on the behavior of Congress, it highlights growing concern from opponents of SOPA and PIPA that the current moratorium is merely a delay tactic, and that legislators still have an interest in implementing similar measures. The letter says that "now is the time for Congress to take a breath, step back, and approach the issues from a fresh perspective," and that Congress should take into account the wide variety of concerns that have been expressed by a diversity of groups over IP law and the internet.

The letter accuses Congress of "focusing exclusively on areas where some rights holders believe the law is too weak" — more specifically, it's accused of privileging the concerns of select groups, like the MPAA and RIAA, that have worked diligently to peddle laws like SOPA and PIPA in Congress. While SOPA and PIPA haven't moved forward in recent weeks, it's evident that the war over the internet is much broader than these two bills.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/6/277...ress-sopa-pipa





Security Bills Bruised by Lingering Fight
Somini Sengupta

The ghosts of two doomed antipiracy bills hang over a new and unrelated issue on Capitol Hill: proposed legislation to help secure the nation’s nuclear plants, water systems and other essential infrastructure from hackers and terrorists.

In both houses of Congress, legislation is gaining steam that would authorize the federal government to regulate the security of privately owned critical infrastructure, much of which is controlled by Internet-connected systems and susceptible to being hacked. The legislation is already riven by competing interests and fears.

National security interests want the government to be able to collect and analyze information from private companies about how they protect themselves from attack. Those companies are skittish about government regulation generally. Civil liberties advocates warn against excessive information-gathering by the state in the name of computer security.

And members of Congress are wary of taking any steps that could infuriate the Internet lobby, which scored a surprise victory against would-be antipiracy laws last month.

Representative Dan Lungren, Republican of California, who recently introduced a computer security bill, acknowledged that Capitol Hill had learned some lessons about the new political muscle of technology companies and their users.

“One of the things we learned is that we have to raise the debate such that no one believes things are being done behind closed doors,” Mr. Lungren said in a phone interview.

A Congressional aide who did not want to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, put the lessons of the antipiracy efforts more bluntly. Some members, the aide said, “were kind of scarred by that experience and don’t want to go down any road where they are viewed as regulating the Internet.”

In fact, the latest network security bills do not regulate the Internet, and it is not clear whether they will gain popular traction, either for or against.

The Senate computer security bill is expected to be introduced as early as Friday by Joseph I. Lieberman, Susan M. Collins and John D. Rockefeller IV. It would give the Department of Homeland Security regulatory authority over those essential services companies where an attack could jeopardize human life or national security. It would compel critical infrastructure companies and government agencies to share information about threats and breaches, and would give the government power to impose sanctions on companies that run afoul of the law.

Details of the bill are still being negotiated. A hearing on it is scheduled for next week.

The House version of the bill, which Mr. Lungren proposed in December and is expected to come before a full committee in coming weeks, allows Homeland Security to lay out performance standards on security, but does not give it explicit powers to regulate.

Kevin Richards, vice president for government affairs at TechAmerica, a trade group that represents large government contractors like Lockheed Martin, said its members were wary of the government’s telling them what to do. “When it comes to the tech community and Capitol Hill, we look at two cardinal rules,” Mr. Richards said. “First is, ‘Do no harm.’ Second is, ‘Beware unintended consequences.’ ”

The government, he suggested, would do better to focus its energies on improving its own security. “It’s important for our community to remain flexible and nimble in how we respond to the evolving cyberthreat,” he said. “The government should lead by example when it comes to securing its network.”

Neither the private sector nor government agencies have been immune to attacks. Large government contractors like Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton have suffered from embarrassing intrusions in recent months, along with the security agency RSA and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Security researchers have repeatedly pointed to gaping holes in the way industrial systems are protected, including those that handle power grids and oil rigs. The vulnerabilities are all the more worrisome as more and more of these systems are connected to the Internet. Passwords can be weak. Data can be transmitted without encryption. Hackers can remotely turn machines on and off, or tweak critical processes by adjusting valves.

“Failure to properly control or restrict access to these elements can lead to catastrophic accidents,” Paul Ferguson, a researcher with TrendMicro, a security firm, concluded recently in a blog post on his company’s site.

The best-known computer attack on an industrial system used a computer worm called Stuxnet, and appears to have been aimed at Iran’s nuclear arms program. Some evidence indicates that it was a joint project of the United States and Israel.

James A. Lewis of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization, worried that industry lobbying would produce a watered-down law that would do little to deter attacks.

“The ideology of the market that dominates American politics, that government ‘is the problem,’ puts us at a disadvantage, because it’s certainly not true for defense,” Mr. Lewis said. “A weak bill guarantees a hit.”

The Obama administration has been nudging Congress to act on digital security, an issue that seems to garner rare bipartisan energy.

James R. Clapper, director of national intelligence, told a rare open hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee last week that “market incentives” had kept both the private and public sector from being able to keep up with increasingly sophisticated online attackers. “Cyberthreats pose a critical national and economic security concern,” he said in testimony.

One of the sticking points in any security legislation is likely to be who can look at the information that private industry reveals about its own vulnerabilities and breaches. The intelligence community is keen to have access to it. Others are keen to keep it out of their reach.

One civil liberties group in Washington warned that companies and their customers might become worked up if they discovered that intelligence agencies were trying to extract as much information as possible in the name of security.

“I think there is a risk in moving too fast to authorize sharing of so much information that it puts privacy at risk and upsets a lot of the same people who spoke out” against the antipiracy legislation, said Gregory T. Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, an advocacy group that is supported by the technology industry.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/t...acy-fight.html





Enough, Already: The SOPA Debate Ignores How Much Copyright Protection We Already Have
Margot Kaminski

When it comes to copyright enforcement, American content companies are already armed to the teeth, yet they persist in using secretly negotiated trade agreements to further their agenda.

In the past weeks, Americans have been realizing that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) might not have been the Great War, but a short battle in hostilities of grander proportions. This is not the first time copyright policy-making has lacked balance, lost its sense of proportion, or threatened civil liberties. It's just the first time the Internet has won.

Two things are missing from the current conversation. First, the recent debate all but ignores the broad arsenal of responses to copyright infringement already available to rights-holders, without SOPA. Second, the public has not been informed on how America's free trade negotiations have been used to circumvent the democratic process, accomplishing much of what SOPA was meant to do.

This administration, like its predecessors, negotiates free trade agreements without public input or transparency. These agreements quietly ratchet up the international scope of copyright protection and the harshness of penalties for infringement, without public discussion of how these changes impact companies or users at home. One of these agreements was just signed in the EU, where it is belatedly raising political havoc, and another was negotiated last week- in Hollywood.

The most frustrating part of the discussion around SOPA has been watching politicians and commentators fail to acknowledge the vast resources we already devote to protecting copyright in the United States. Over the past two decades, the United States has established one of the harshest systems of copyright enforcement in the world. Our domestic copyright law has become broader (it covers more topics), deeper (it lasts for a longer time), and more severe (the punishments for infringement have been getting worse). These standards were established through an alphabet soup of legislation: the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act of 1997, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, and the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO-IP) Act of 2008. And every few years, there's a call for more.

Many features of existing U.S. copyright law are harsh by international standards. The U.S. penalizes the attempt to access digital material against a rights-holder's wishes, even when the material itself is not protected by copyright. We guarantee large monetary awards against infringers, with no showing of actual harm. We effectively require websites to cooperate with rights-holders to take down material, without requiring proof that it's infringing in court. And our criminal copyright law has such a low threshold that it criminalizes the behavior of most people online, instead of targeting infringement on a true commercial scale.

Unlike past administrations that chose not to use government resources to protect private companies, this administration has built up the copyright enforcement infrastructure, and publishes a newsletter about its efforts with language that compares copyright infringement to terrorism. Last year, the current Copyright Czar secretly encouraged Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and rights-holders to establish a private agreement to enforce copyrights against Internet users, out of courts. And this administration has deputized the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to seize websites as if the Internet were a physical border, where protections for civil liberties are few.

Yes, it's bothersome to rights-holders that they can't just shut down foreign websites or block them. But think of what they already have: no such website can be created in the United States; U.S.-based users of the website can be sued for huge damages; Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will send Internet users warning letters and potentially cut them offline with no due process or government oversight; owners of infringing foreign websites can't come to the United States or hold assets here, for risk of seizure or arrest; and as evidenced by what's just happened to Megaupload, American prosecutors will even extradite people from other countries for copyright offenses.

There is another underexplored and compelling reason we don't need new legislation like SOPA, which would harm U.S. Internet users in the name of pursuing infringing foreign websites. We're already using free trade agreements to make other countries adopt the laws our content producers want.

In recent years, the United States has pursued free trade agreements with developed and developing countries that bundle copyright policy with promises of beneficial trade. We publish yearly reports on which countries meet America's strict copyright standards, and which don't, and instigate trade sanctions against those that don't. We don't need SOPA with respect to these countries, because we've transferred the enforcement requirements and costs directly to them, often without the balancing, user-protecting protections contained in U.S. law.

It's not intuitive that free trade discussions should include copyright policy. Copyright is not historically part of encouraging a flow of goods between countries, because it protects those countries exporting copyrighted goods at the expense of those countries that are net importers. Most media coverage has missed this part of our recent push for "free trade." But copyright is now a standard part of every free trade agreement we negotiate.

We're getting more efficient at the negotiating process. In the past few years, our trade policy has expanded to dealing with large groups of countries at a time. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), recently signed by the EU, was negotiated with more than thirty-five countries at once. ACTA significantly expands international law on criminal copyright enforcement, from one paragraph to more than ten. It also mandates digital enforcement procedures, now thankfully vague after public pushback against the idea of cutting off user Internet access through "graduated response." ACTA exports U.S. penalties for circumventing technological protection measures. It requires governments to encourage private arrangements between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and right holders to enforce copyright law. It strengthens the power of border officials. And it requires the establishment of enforcement infrastructure, and enforcement coordination between countries. It fails to include basic balancing measures, such as the usual mention of fair use or limitations and exceptions.

There are substantial problems with how ACTA was negotiated: in secret, without public input, outside of institutions such as the United Nations (UN) or World Trade Organization (WTO). And there are places where ACTA potentially departs significantly from U.S. law, such as in suggesting criminal liability for Internet intermediaries. As long as ACTA is not ratified, however, it doesn't officially change U.S. law. It just binds us to a high standard internationally, so we can't reform our own laws later without trade problems. But as long as ACTA has not been considered by the Senate, the executive branch may continue negotiating these kinds of agreements with impunity, because our trade representatives assume that nobody from the public needs to approve or review them. This is why a number of activists are now calling for consideration of ACTA by the Senate, even though the U.S. signed it months ago.

In the EU, the reaction has been much stronger, with the European Parliament's special rapporteur for ACTA quitting in protest, Poland suspending ratification of the agreement, and a Slovenian diplomat publicly disowning it.

ACTA is not the whole story, and may not even be the most pertinent at this point. American negotiators are hard at work on the smaller but potentially more draconian Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), negotiated between ten countries, again with no transparency and no public input. A leaked draft of the U.S. proposal from earlier this fall shows that that our trade representatives are again aiming at Internet intermediaries, without a number of user-protecting provisions from U.S. law.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative is refusing to let the public participate in the conversation. There are no public drafts of TPP being circulated for comment by the public interest groups that stopped SOPA, or the innovative companies whose interests the agreement might harm. When a group of public interest representatives from universities and civil liberties organizations tried to hold a briefing at the TPP negotiation venue last week, they were told by the hotel that they had been asked to cancel the reservation. But not all those who wanted input were rejected. All negotiators were later invited by the host-the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative-to a private tour of 20th Century Fox studios, led by a member of Fox's government relations staff.

I'd like to think that in the wake of SOPA, the practice of negotiating trade policy behind closed doors will change. I'd like to think that our trade representatives will become responsive to public opinion, and as protective of our new industries as they are of the old. But in the meantime, our trade representatives are creating an international standard that is in many ways more draconian than U.S. law. New legislation targeting foreign websites is not necessary, as long as copyright policy is part of our policy on "free trade."

The only argument for legislation like SOPA is that China, Russia, India, and Brazil-countries where a lot of copyright infringement occurs-have not yet signed free trade agreements such as ACTA. Our trade representatives deliberately chose not to include these countries in negotiations, for fear that they might push back against our policies. It does not mean that we will be incapable of negotiating more reasonable trade agreements with these countries in the future. In fact, Russia seems to be in the process of significantly bolstering its copyright enforcement infrastructure, using government pursuit of file sharing as justification for state control of the Internet.

If we want to go after foreign websites, the answer is international law, but not the way we're currently using it. We should listen to the standards presented by other countries, and take public input-rather than secretly break the Internet in an effort to rush to results desired by one sector of the economy. We certainly don't need more domestic legislation.

If the United States continues its dalliance with censorship as copyright enforcement, it will be the laughingstock of other countries, which see how disproportionate our enforcement of copyright has been, relative to our protection of other freedoms. As one Chinese man commented, "I've come up with a perfect solution: You can come to China to download all your pirated media, and we'll go to America to discuss politically sensitive subjects."
http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...y-have/252742/





New Tactic in Mass File-Sharing Lawsuit: Just Insult the EFF
Nate Anderson

An old legal aphorism says, "If the facts are on your side, pound on the facts. If the law is on your side, pound on the law. If neither is on your side, pound on the table." After reading the latest salvo in the P2P porn copyright wars, it's clear that some poor table has been abused horrifically.

The craziness comes from the most recent filing in a Hard Drive Productions case against nearly 1,500 "Doe" defendants accused of sharing one of the company's films online. The case, filed in DC, follows the familiar pattern: sue anonymous Internet users in some random federal court, use the case to obtain subpoenas, unearth the identity of the Internet users, and send them "settlement letters" offering to save them from litigation if they would just pay a few thousand dollars.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has contributed to many of these cases, arguing—sometimes successfully, sometimes, not—that such cases are an abuse of the judicial process. Yesterday, the EFF filed a brief in the Hard Drive case; by the end of the same day, the Chicago-based lawyer handling the case had responded in amazing fashion. Rather than address any substantive arguments made by the EFF, lawyer Paul Duffy decided simply to attack the group itself.

"The EFF is opposed to any effective enforcement and litigation of intellectual property law," says the filing before going on to brand it "a radical interest group" with a mission that is "radical, quasi-anarchist, and intrinsically opposed to any effective enforcement of intellectual property rights."

EFF has a history of "advocating lawlessness on the Internet," and its purpose is to "hinder and obstruct" the legal process. Giving the EFF liberty to speak to the court would be "wholly fatuous." Not only does the EFF apparently hate IP law in general; it also has a "deep disdain" for "the law generally, in any sphere in which the law might touch the Internet."

The "argument," such as it is, is bizarre on its face. EFF has submitted amicus briefs in many cases across the country, and is a widely known digital rights organization. In one notable example from Texas, a judge facing similar mass P2P lawsuits actually invited EFF counsel to participate until "Doe" defendants could be named and then represented by their own counsel. (In that case, the judge ended by sanctioning the lawyer who brought the case, fining him $10,000 and ordering him to pay another $22,000 to the lawyers from EFF and Public Citizen.)

The blog "Fight Copyright Trolls," which covers this sort of litigation, called the new filing "so amusingly detached from reality that I had to drink a couple of shots just to gain some kind of consciousness after reading this crap."

It's certainly a novel attempt to keep the EFF away from a case, even digging up EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow's deliciously over-the-top 1996 manifesto to paint the group as extremist.

In response, Barlow tweeted, "This is cool. Porn copyright troll John Steele [assumed to be behind the case] files a brief that consists solely of insults to EFF."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...-intervene.ars





Internet Giants Remove Content after India Court Warning
Arup Roychoudhury and Harichandan Arakali

Internet giants Google Inc and Facebook removed content from some Indian domain websites on Monday following a court directive warning them of a crackdown "like China" if they did not take steps to protect religious sensibilities.

The two are among 21 companies asked to develop a mechanism to block objectionable material after a private petitioner took them to court over images deemed offensive to Hindus, Muslims and Christians.

The case has stoked fears about censorship in the world's largest democracy.

"(Our) review team has looked at the content and disabled this content from the local domains of search, Youtube and Blogger," Google spokeswoman Paroma Roy Chowdhury said.

At the heart of the dispute is a law that India passed last year making companies responsible for user content posted on their web sites, and giving them 36 hours to take down content if there's a complaint.

Last month, the companies said it was not possible for them to block content. Google's Roy Chowdhury declined to comment on what had since been removed, and a Facebook representative said only that the company would release a statement later.

A lower court in New Delhi told the companies on Monday to put in writing the steps they had taken to block offensive content, and submit reports to the court within 15 days.

Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Microsoft have appealed in the Delhi High Court against a criminal case successfully brought by a Hindu petitioner. A civil case against them has been brought to a lower court by a Muslim petitioner.

"If the companies have actually removed some content, they should put in place a mechanism to do it regularly, instead of waiting for a court case every time," Vinay Rai, the Hindu petitioner, told Reuters.

"Microsoft has filed an application for rejection of the suit on the grounds that it disclosed no cause of action against Microsoft," a spokesperson for the company said. "The matter is sub judice and no further comments can be given."

Fewer than one in 10 of India's 1.2 billion population has access to the Internet, but that still makes it the third-biggest Internet market after China and the United States. The number of Internet users in India is expected to almost triple to 300 million over the next three years.

Despite the new rules to block offensive content, India's Internet access is still largely uncensored, in contrast to the tight controls in neighboring China.

While civil rights groups have opposed the new laws, politicians say posting offensive images in a socially conservative country, which has a history of violence between religious groups, presents a danger to the public.

(Additional reporting by Annie Banerji and Suchitra Mohanty in NEW DELHI; Editing by John Chalmers)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...8150M720120206





Brazil wants Twitter to Close Accounts that Warn of Traffic Controls
Anna Heim

The Brazilian Federal Attorney’s Office has filed a lawsuit against Twitter Inc., as the press agency O Globo reports. Filed with a motion for preliminary injunction, the lawsuit asks the Federal Justice of the state of Goias to suspend and block Twitter profiles that warn of traffic controllers.

Over the last couple of years, Brazil has reinforced legislation and taken concrete measures against driving under influence. As Twitter and social interaction are very popular in the country, this soon gave birth to a flurry of collaborative Twitter accounts such as @LeiSecaRJ (“Dry Law Rio de Janeiro”), which shared the location of radars and mobile road control points (known as ‘blitzes’).

Controversy soon ensued, as many wondered how moral it was to help people dodge a law that intended to dramatically reduce the high number of road casualties in the country. This led the debated Twitter accounts to diversify their focus and include other useful traffic information, such as incident reports.

Still, the controversy seems far from over, as it is now taking one more legal turn. This is not the first time these accounts have been involved in a lawsuit, and another Brazilian state ordered ISPs to suspend such Facebook and Twitter pages last month.
However, things look worse for Twitter this time: the American startup could soon have to answer for those accounts, since the public lawsuit calls for the micro-blogging platform and other defendants to pay a US$290,000 daily fine (R$500,000) if it doesn’t comply with the injunction.

According to the Brazilian authorities, these accounts violate several laws, starting with the Penal Code and the Brazilian Traffic Code. From a moral standpoint, lawyers also point out that they may facilitate a series of crimes and endanger lives – besides DUI, road controls also help track stolen vehicles and fight gun and drug traffic.

It remains to be seen how Twitter will react to the claim. While the company is very vocal on its support for freedom of expression, it also recently introduced measures that let it hide tweets in a specific country to answer legal demands. This will be an interesting test for Twitter’s new policy.

The lawsuit is not yet listed on Chilling Effects, which monitors cease and desist letters sent to Twitter, but we will update this post if Twitter issues a statement on the matter.
http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/0...ffic-controls/





MPAA Demands Hotfile Data From Google, Search Engine Refuses
enigmax

In yet another episode in Hollywood’s year-long legal battle with one of the world’s biggest cyberlocker services, the MPAA has now drawn Google into the dispute. The MPAA says that Google holds valuable information on Hotfile and should produce it, but the search giant is refusing without the file-hoster’s consent. Hotfile says ‘no’ on the basis that the deadline for discovery expired last year.

In February 2011, the MPAA announced that it would be suing Hotfile, one of the Internet’s most popular cyberlocker services.

“In less than two years, Hotfile has become one of the 100 most trafficked sites in the world. That is a direct result of the massive digital theft that Hotfile promotes,” the movie industry group said.

Since then there have been dozens of court filings and Hotfile even sued MPAA member Warner Bros. right back for allegedly abusing its copyright takedown tools.

The MPAA wants to prove that Hotfile had a business model centered around piracy and one in which the file-hoster encouraged users of its service to upload copyrighted motion pictures and TV shows to Hotfile servers and then link back to them using third-party sites.

In recent weeks, more and more court filings in the case have been marked restricted/sealed but this week an interesting one was made available. According to Disney, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Columbia and Warner, an urgent discovery hearing is required to cut through what is described by them as “a procedural morass that is prejudicing Plaintiffs’ ability to complete important discovery in this matter.”

The problem has its roots in August 2011 when Hotfile was ordered to hand the MPAA mountains of data including information it holds on the files it hosts, the company’s users and its many affiliates.

But the MPAA didn’t receive all of the data it was expecting. While Hotfile said it had no objection to producing any of the data it holds, it claimed that handing over everything requested was impossible since it did not carry some of the information.

Determined to obtain the data anyway, on December 6th 2011 the MPAA served a subpoena on Google to obtain access to Hotfile’s Google Analytics account which can show the sites driving traffic to Hotfile and the host’s most popular pages.

But Google said that absent Hotfile’s consent, it would not supply the data to the MPAA. In turn, Hotfile refused to give consent or hand over the data now since the discovery date deadline, December 23rd 2011, has now passed.

The MPAA insists that the information could be made available via a simple “push of a button” and is now asking the court to order Hotfile to either produce it, or authorize Google to do so urgently. The MPAA are in a rush because at the end of next week they will file for summary judgment against Hotfile and to do that effectively they need the traffic data in advance.

According to court documents, a mediation meeting that took place January 11th 2012 between the studios and Hotfile’s owners ended without the parties reaching settlement.
https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-demand...efuses-120210/





You Can’t Copyright Porn, Harassed BitTorrent Defendant Insists
enigmax

A woman who says she was incorrectly accused of sharing copyrighted material on BitTorrent has filed a harassment lawsuit against a copyright troll. Porn outfit Hard Drive productions had demanded $3,400 to make their threatened lawsuit go away but their target not only says she’s innocent and harassed, but also that porn cannot be copyrighted. So, does filmed sex promote scientific progress or constitute useful art? A court may soon have to decide.

When confronted with an accusation that they have illegally shared unauthorized material online, Internet users quickly realize they are in a Catch 22 situation. Even if innocent, these accusations cost money to deflect, a cost which often exceeds the amount the claimant says it will accept in settlement.

Hard Drive Productions sent one such letter to Liuxia Wong last year, claiming that her IP address had been used to share “Amateur Allure Jen” on BitTorrent.

Wong was told by the porn outfit she could be sued for $150,000, but for ‘just’ $3,400 the whole thing could be made to go away. Many might have chosen to settle at this point, but this California resident bit back and went on the offensive.

As noted by FightCopyrightTrolls, Wong hired Steven Yuen, an experienced IP litigator from the EFF’s subpoena defense list, to go after Hard Drive Productions. It could turn out to be a fascinating case.

In a lawsuit filed at the end of January, Wong says that she did not download the work in question and goes on to attack Hard Drive on a number of fronts including harassment.

Hard Drive report the alleged infringement as taking place March 28th 2011, but Wong says the movie in question wasn’t officially registered until April 22nd 2011. The letters, therefore, “were designed to coerce her into settling the case despite the absence of any facts supporting liability against her.”

The lawsuit further claims that in their letter to Wong, Hard Drive insist that the California resident would be liable for infringement even if her router was unsecured and someone else carried out the act without her knowledge. Wong’s suit dismisses that assertion as “erroneous”.

But perhaps most interestingly, Wong is challenging the notion that Hard Drive can own the copyright to its own work – indeed, that porn can be copyrighted at all.

“Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause, empowers the United States Congress: ‘To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” the lawsuit details, adding:

“Early Circuit law in California held that obscene works did not promote the progress of science and the useful arts, and thus cannot be protected by copyright.”

The lawsuit goes on to state that Hard Drive’s work does not fulfill the above criteria and in fact depicts obscene and criminal acts.

Wong is asking the court to issue an order declaring that not only is she not liable to Hard Drive for infringement, but that the company’s movie is not copyrightable and is illegal due to Hard Drive engaging in “solicitation, conspiracy to commit prostitution, pimping and/or pandering,” during its production.

Finally, a couple of interesting BitTorrent-related points are also raised in the suit. The first is that Hard Drive did not mitigate alleged damages since the company failed to use the DMCA to have monitored torrents taken down. The second involves the company hired by Hard Drive to do the monitoring.

“….Hard Drive…authorized its work to be distributed by its non-California licensed private investigators, who are in violation of California Business and Professions Code…while they were distributing and participating in the distribution of the work, and/or that Hard Drive is guilty of unclean hands due to its and/or its agents’ operation and use of honeypots, and/or the use of a third-party’s services as honeypots,” the suit adds.

In a sea of carbon copy BitTorrent mass-lawsuits, this case shines out as one to watch.
https://torrentfreak.com/you-cant-co...nsists-120206/





Capitol Records Motion To Enjoin ReDigi Denied
NewYorkCountryLawyer

The motion by Capitol Records for a preliminary injunction against used digital music marketplace ReDigi has been denied. After hearing almost two hours of oral argument by attorneys for both sides, Judge Richard J. Sullivan ruled from the bench (PDF), holding that plaintiff had failed to show "irreparable harm."
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/02/...-redigi-denied





Sister Sledge Files Class Action Against Warner Music Over Digital Royalties (Exclusive)

Band members and actress-songwriter Ronee Blakley are lead plaintiffs in a suit alleging potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue from digital download sales
Matthew Belloni

The members of the musical group Sister Sledge have banded together with an Oscar-nominated actress and songwriter to file a major class action lawsuit against Warner Music Group alleging they have been cheated out of millions of dollars based on improper calculations of revenue from digital music sales.

Debra Sledge, Joan Sledge, Kathy Sledge Lightfoot, Kim Sledge Allen and Ronee Blakely filed suit in federal court in San Francisco on Thursday claiming that the music giant's method for calcluating digital music purchases as "sales" rather than "licenses" on songs such as the band's chart-topping "We Are Family" cheats artists out of money due to them under recording contracts, many of them signed decades before music was sold digitally via iTunes, Amazon, ringtones and other outlets.

"Rather than paying its recording artists and producers the percentage of net receipts it received--and continues to receive--from digital content providers for 'licenses,' Warner wrongfully treats each digital download as a 'sale' of a physical phonorecord...which are governed by much lower royalty provisions than 'licenses' in Warner's standard recording agreements."

If that claim sounds familiar, it's one of the most hotly-disputed issues in the music business. Songwriters typically make much less money when an album is "sold" than they do when their music is "licensed" (the rationale derives from the costs that used to be associated with the physical production of records). But record labels have taken the position that music sold via such digital stores as iTunes should be counted as "sales" rather than licenses.

The difference in revenue can be significant. The Sister Sledge members claim their record deal promises 25 percent of revenue from licenses but much less from sales. Blakely, who is an Oscar nominated actress (Nashville) as well as songwriter and performer, alleges that her deal with WMG grants her 50 percent of licenses, much more than the rate WMG is paying based on its calculation of sales.

Eminem's publisher brought a nearly identical claim against Universal Music Group and won a fairly important decision at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2010 (the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal). The 9th Circuit ruled that iTunes' contract unambiguously provided that the music was licensed. At the time, UMG downplayed the ruling as specific to Eminem's contract, but music lawyers believe more of these cases are going to be filed by legacy artists (newer contracts have specific language precluding such suits).

And now we have a full-fledged, 35-page class action lawsuit seeking to bring together many artists in one proceeding, calling Warner Music's actions "wide-spread and calculated." Hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue is at stake, the complaint alleges. It should be interesting to see which artists come forward.

Sister Sledge also claims WMG has improperly kept revenue from "reserves," which is money withheld to offset losses related to unsold records. The plaintiffs point out there's no such thing as unsold inventory in a digital universe.

The suit was filed by four firms: Pearson Simon Warshaw & Penny in San Francisco, Hausfeld in Washington DC, and Kiesel Boucher Larson and Johnson & Johnson in Beverly Hills.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr...-action-286903





Spotify Dollars Boost Warner Music, but Not as Much as iTunes
Peter Kafka

Music sales may have bounced back last year after a very, very long slide. But we won’t really know for some time. Meantime, a short-term marker: Warner Music says revenue didn’t increase last quarter. But it didn’t decrease, either: Sales stayed flat at $780 million.

If you are looking for a more positive story here, Warner is happy to provide one. Digital revenue jumped 17 percent, and now accounts for 28 percent of the company’s sales. (As always, the label cites guy-you’re-unlikely-to-complain-about Michael Buble as one of its biggest stars. Shudder to imagine a Buble-less quarter for Warner.)

Most interesting is Warner’s take on the kind of digital revenue it is seeing, which we can assume is a rough proxy for the rest of the business.

Downloads — primarily from iTunes, but also Amazon and other players — accounted for $205 million in music revenue last quarter, while payments from streaming services like Spotify and Deezer generated $15 million. But that streaming revenue is growing at a 36 percent clip, compared to 15 percent for downloads.

If people who used to buy albums from iTunes ditch the service for a $10 monthly subscription to Spotify, Rhapsody or the like, then the industry would see substantially more revenue, as paidContent notes. But not even the optimistic music folks think we’re heading there.

A much more realistic best-case scenario: Some people who weren’t buying any music at all start shelling out a monthly fee for subscription services, turning pirates into profit centers. That still won’t be enough to replace the dollars the industry has lost since its pre-Napster party days. But it is much, much better than nothing.
http://allthingsd.com/20120209/spoti...uch-as-itunes/





VEVO CEO Tries To Explain Their Hypocritical Act Of Piracy At Sundance
Jason Kincaid

Yesterday I reported on a bizarre incident I witnessed at Sundance last month: VEVO, the music portal owned by some of the biggest record labels in the US, had a pirated NFL playoff game playing on screens throughout its ‘PowerStation’ venue.

The incident was immensely hypocritical, given that VEVO is owned in part by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment (with EMI licensing its content to the service) — the same music labels that have made a habit of attacking consumers over alleged acts of piracy.

Now VEVO CEO Rio Caraeff has written a post to the VEVO blog, where he tries to explain what happened. In it, he writes that the game was accessed and streamed by a guest of the event without VEVO’s knowledge.

A guest of our lounge asked for an NFL game to be aired. We said no. There was a laptop hooked up to VEVO.com that fed into the large TV screens around the bar. Unfortunately, the laptop was easily accessible to the public. That was our mistake for not making sure the laptop was more secure. While VEVO staff was in other areas of the venue, the game was put on – via a website transmitting ESPN’s broadcast of the NFL game – without our permission or knowledge.

As soon as we realized the game was airing to the room, we removed it and went back to playing VEVO videos. The game was not aired in its entirety. Rest assured, we rectified this mistake as soon as we became aware what was going on.

What happened was unfortunate and we can’t take back what happened.

I don’t have any proof to indicate that what Caraeff writes is incorrect, but I’m raising my eyebrow at this explanation. The game was playing the entire time I was at the PowerStation — this wasn’t just a brief blip — and it was playing on several screens, so it was hard to miss, too. After all, one of the key aims of this event was to feature VEVO videos, it wasn’t as if these screens were hidden in a corner.

Likewise, this wasn’t a case of someone launching the stream and walking away — I saw the mouse cursor appear onscreen at least twice, and someone was pretty clearly doing their best to make sure it was watchable. That said, as you can see toward the end of the video below at around 1:39, the computer was potentially accessible to non-employees. But it was hardly inviting, and I have a hard time believing a random guest could just commandeer the computer without any employees noticing.

In any case, imagine what the music industry would say were it on the other side of this. Is there any doubt it would dismiss these explanations and, lawsuits in hand, cry foul over such an overt act of piracy?

Furthermore, this seems no different than an accused pirate explaining that they left their Wifi open, only to have it used by someone else to download content illegally. Which happens to be a defense the RIAA has previously fought vigilantly against, when it sought to make owners of ISP accounts liable for any infringing activity, even if the owner had no knowledge of it. Hypocrisy, indeed.

Below you’ll find Caraeff’s whole post.

You may know we had some fun at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah last month. Our VEVO Powerstation & Sorel Suite was a popular spot for celebrities to get warm, pick up some gifts from our friends at Sorel and Fresh and, most of all, to relax with a drink and play their favorite VEVO videos. We were excited that LMFAO, James Mardsen, Lil Jon, Tommy Lee, Isla Fisher, Josh Kelley and many others all came down to watch some music with us.

But with all the snowy fun we had, there has unfortunately been a report that something other than VEVO music videos was played at the Powerstation. We feel it important to explain exactly what happened so we hope you’ll take a minute to read further.

A guest of our lounge asked for an NFL game to be aired. We said no. There was a laptop hooked up to VEVO.com that fed into the large TV screens around the bar. Unfortunately, the laptop was easily accessible to the public. That was our mistake for not making sure the laptop was more secure. While VEVO staff was in other areas of the venue, the game was put on – via a website transmitting ESPN’s broadcast of the NFL game – without our permission or knowledge.

As soon as we realized the game was airing to the room, we removed it and went back to playing VEVO videos. The game was not aired in its entirety. Rest assured, we rectified this mistake as soon as we became aware what was going on.

What happened was unfortunate and we can’t take back what happened.

Let’s just make this clear. VEVO is not in the business of streaming illegal video content. We work really hard to give our fans access to the best HD music videos and original programming – legally. VEVO takes intellectual property and copyright issues very seriously. We have always supported our artists and content owners and have the same respect for all content creators in every industry and of every art form. So we are very sensitive to what happened at Sundance and the issues it has raised.

Thanks for reading.

Rio D. Caraeff

http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/10/vev...y-at-sundance/





It's Time for a Unified Ebook Format and the End of DRM

Proprietary ebook formats and rights restrictions are holding consumers back.
Joe Wikert

Imagine buying a car that locks you into one brand of fuel. A new BMW, for example, that only runs on BMW gas. There are plenty of BMW gas stations around, even a few in your neighborhood, so convenience isn't an issue. But if one of those other gas stations offers a discount, a membership program, or some other attractive marketing campaign, you can't participate. You're locked in with the BMW gas stations.

This could never happen, right? Consumers are too smart to buy into something like this. Or are they? After all, isn't that exactly what's happening in the ebook world? You buy a dedicated ebook reader like a Kindle or a NOOK and you're locked in to that company's content. Part of this problem has to do with ebook formats (e.g., EPUB or Mobipocket) while another part of it stems from publisher insistence on the use of digital rights management (DRM). Let's look at these issues individually.

Platform lock-in

I've often referred to it as Amazon's not-so-secret formula: Every time I buy another ebook for my Kindle, I'm building a library that makes me that much more loyal to Amazon's platform. If I've invested thousands or even hundreds of dollars in Kindle-formatted content, how could I possibly afford to switch to another reading platform?

It would be too inconvenient to have part of my library in Amazon's Mobipocket format and the rest in EPUB. Even though I could read both on a tablet (e.g., the iPad), I'd be forced to switch between two different apps. The user interface between any two reading apps is similar but not identical, and searching across your entire library becomes a two-step process since there's no way to access all of your content within one app.

This situation isn't unique to Amazon. The same issue exists for all the other dedicated ereader hardware platforms (e.g., Kobo, NOOK, etc.). Google Books initially seemed like a solution to this problem, but it still doesn't offer mobi formats for the Kindle, so it's selling content for every format under the sun — except the one with the largest market share.

EPUB would seem to be the answer. It's a popular format based on web standards, and it's developed and maintained by an organization that's focused on openness and broad industry adoption. It also happens to be the format used by seemingly every ebook vendor except the largest one: Amazon.

Even if we could get Amazon to adopt EPUB, though, we'd still have that other pesky issue to deal with: DRM.

The myth of DRM

I often blame Napster for the typical book publisher's fear of piracy. Publishers saw what happened in the music industry and figured the only way they'd make their book content available digitally was to tightly wrap it with DRM. The irony of this is that some of the most highly pirated books were never released as ebooks. Thanks to the magic of high-speed scanner technology, any print book can easily be converted to an ebook and distributed illegally.

Some publishers don't want to hear this, but the truth is that DRM can be hacked. It does not eliminate piracy. It not only fails as a piracy deterrent, but it also introduces restrictions that make ebooks less attractive than print books. We've all read a print book and passed it along to a friend. Good luck doing that with a DRM'd ebook! What publishers don't seem to understand is that DRM implies a lack of trust. All customers are considered thieves and must be treated accordingly.

The evil of DRM doesn't end there, though. Author Charlie Stross recently wrote a terrific blog post entitled "Cutting Their Own Throats." It's all about how publisher fear has enabled a big ebook player like Amazon to further reinforce its market position, often at the expense of publishers and authors. It's an unintended consequence of DRM that's impacting our entire industry.

Given all these issues, why not eliminate DRM and trust your customers? Even the music industry, the original casualty of the Napster phenomenon, has seen the light and moved on from DRM.

Several years ago, Steve Jobs posted a letter to the music industry pleading for them to abandon DRM. The letter no longer appears on Apple's website, but community commentary about it lives on. My favorite part of that letter is where Jobs asks why the music industry would allow DRM to go away. The answer is that, "DRMs haven't worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy." In fact, a study last year by Rice University and Duke University contends that removing DRM can actually decrease piracy. Yes, you read that right.

I recently had an experience with my digital music collection that drove this point home for me. I had just switched from an iPhone to an Android phone and wanted to get my music from the old device onto the new one. All I had to do was drag and drop the folder containing my music in iTunes to the SD card in my new phone. It worked perfectly because the music file formats are universal and there was no DRM involved.

Imagine trying to do that with your ebook collection. Try dragging your Kindle ebooks onto your new NOOK, for example. Incompatible file formats and DRM prevent that from happening ... today. At some point in the not-too-distant future, though, I'm optimistic the book publishing industry will get to the same stage as the music industry and offer a universal, DRM-free format for all ebooks. Then customers will be free to use whatever e-reader they prefer without fear of lock-in and incompatibilities.

The music industry made the transition, why can't we?
http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/02/uni...t-end-drm.html





File Sharing in the Post MegaUpload Era
Craig

On January 18, 2012 global file sharing traffic collapsed. In a series of coordinate raids, US and New Zealand authorities seized thousands of MegaUpload servers and arrested its founder (at his own birthday party, no less).

As the largest file sharing service on the Internet, MegaUpload downloads represented 30-40% of all file sharing. In the space of an hour, Internet traffic globally plummeted by an astounding 2-3%. Press releases heralded a major blow to the theft of intellectual property.

So what happened to Internet file sharing traffic after the MegaUpload arrests?

Today we’re publishing the results of three month research effort that provides some of the clues.

First, some definitions. As the New York Times observed, “file sharing sites” (particularly those focused on distribution of copyright infringing content) can be difficult to distinguish from the dozens of legitimate sites helping enterprises and consumers share internal documents, homework, and the like.

The web sites for copyright protected and legal file sharing look nearly identical with similar graphics, sales messaging, and perhaps ironically (or cynically), DMCA policies and warnings against illegal file sharing. The only exception was MegaUpload which made little effort to disguise its true business focus (in retrospect, possibly a mistake).

But if you spend a few minutes searching to download the latest Hollywood movie release (or movies not even released yet), patterns quickly emerge. File sharing search sites like FilesTube, RapidManiac, and Filesbay link to many dozens of file sharing providers, but generally not, say, DropBox nor Box.net. (In the above example, I searched for “Man on a Ledge” — which you should not download from FilesTube if for no other reason than it’s a terrible movie).

In our study, we were particularly interested in the infrastructure behind file sharing, i.e. the hosting / colo facilities, payment partners, etc. The conventional wisdom is that file sharing is distributed across huge swaths of the Internet — basically everywhere.

No.

In fact, though there are hundreds of file sharing sites, an extremely small number of colo-location providers (six of them) provide infrastructure to these sites that generate more than 80% of all Internet file sharing traffic. Like other niche industries, file sharing has evolved with a specialized ecosystem / cyber supply chain.

The below graph shows the Internet’s file sharing topology in the early hours of January 18, 2012. The links represent North America Internet file sharing traffic where the width of each link is proportional to the traffic volume. Green indicates traffic to the file sharing sites and red is traffic to the hosting or colo-location provider. Note that the different file sharing sites share much of the same Internet infrastructure and hosting companies (namely LeaseWeb, NForce, Carpathia, Choopa, and Softlayer).

On January 18, MegaVideo was clearly the king with 34% of all file sharing traffic. In turn, most MegaVideo servers leveraged US based servers in Carpathia Hosting with some traffic going to Leaseweb servers in the Netherlands and other European providers / facilities. According to the indictment, the gigantic MegaUpload sprawled over more than 1000 servers and 25 petabytes of data in Carpathia facilities (with another 700 MegaUpload servers in Leaseweb hosting centers).

The next graphic shows Internet file sharing traffic topology several hours later on January 19, 2012. Overall, a significant re-allocation of Internet file sharing traffic. MegaVideo is gone. Sites like PutLocker have gained significant marketshare.

The main impact of the MegaUpload takedown?

Well, file sharing has not gone away. It did not even decrease much in North America.

Mainly, file sharing became staggeringly less efficient. Instead of terabytes of North America MegaUpload traffic going to US servers, most file sharing traffic now comes from Europe over far more expensive transatlantic links.

- Craig
Posted in File Sharing, Research | Tagged file sharing | Leave a comment |
NANOG 54
Posted on January 16, 2012

We’ll be at NANOG 54 next month in San Diego.

I’m presenting data from a fun, side-project on the less well-publicized and understood side of Internet infrastructure. The working title: The Other Internet Infrastructure: File Sharing, P2P and Adult Traffic.

A bit from the abstract:

In previous work, we looked at the rapidly evolving “Hyper-Giants”, or the 150 large content and hosting networks (e.g. Facebook, Google, etc.) that now contribute an amazing 50% of all Internet traffic globally.

This talk looks at the other 50% of traffic.

Specifically, FileSharing, P2P and adult traffic represent a massive and growing portion of Internet traffic globally (as well as a sizable economic activity). Conventional wisdom holds that this set of “other” traffic permeates the Internet — tens of thousands of companies with servers in country, nook and cranny of the network.

But for the most part, we show this is not true. Instead, we find a couple hundred small companies quietly manage these thousands of domain names and an even smaller number of specialized hosting, CDN, analytics and advertisement companies provide the infrastructure. In the case of file sharing, we show that four small hosting companies provide the infrastructure that accounts for more than 80% of all file sharing traffic globally.
http://blog.deepfield.net/2012/02/07...egaupload-era/





Elite Anti-Terror Police Went After Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom
enigmax

While last month’s shutdown of Megaupload has been well documented, the finer details of the raid on Kim Dotcom’s mansion have only just been revealed. A new and astonishing report features a house tour and in-depth discussion with Dotcom’s bodyguard. He was confronted by dozens of armed police, some from New Zealand’s elite anti-terrorist force, who also demanded of a nanny: “Do you have any bombs?!”

Even after taking in the details of today’s 3Newz report several times, it is harder than ever to comprehend what happened at the Dotcom mansion last month.

We knew that dozens of police swooped on the location in helicopters and we knew they were armed. But what is even more unbelievable is that some of them were from the Special Tactics Group, New Zealand’s elite counter-terrorist force.

STG, nicknamed “Super Tough Guys”, train with the country’s Special Air Force and are sent in to deal with the most violent of offenders. Yet no one in the Dotcom household had any record of violence. Indeed, their main target was a man suspected of online copyright infringement – a computer related offense.

Wayne Tempero, Dotcom’s bodyguard, told 3Newz that the police were armed with assault rifles and sidearms – STG are known to use M4A3 carbines and Glock pistols. Tempero explained that two firearms were held in Dotcom mansion – two shotguns, both his, legal, fully licensed and locked away in safes.

At 06:45 Tempero was woken by a “horrendous noise” and after dressing and running outside he was confronted by a huge cloud of dust being kicked up a helicopter hovering just above the ground.

Tempero, wearing just a t-shirt and track pants with his hands held up, and was ordered by a flak jacket wearing armed officer to lie on the floor. Tempero said that the noise of the helicopter and doors being smashed elsewhere on the property was so loud that if the police did identify themselves, he didn’t hear them.

The armed police went into the indoor play area which had 3 kids inside – one aged 3, one 4 and another 15 months, together with their Filipino nannies. From there they proceeded to one of the nannies’ rooms, kicked the door down and demanded to know if she had any firearms – or bombs.

Tempero said he asked the nanny twice if she was sure they asked if she had bombs – she said she was. “Maybe that’s the kind of thing that Filipino nannies do,” Tempero said.

Outside people were being handcuffed and put on the floor. Two security guards, Tempero himself and the Filipino staff, were placed next to a van containing barking dogs.

Meanwhile the police had gone upstairs and were trying to smash down the door to Kim Dotcom’s quarters. Tempero said Dotcom’s wife tried to give them the security code but they weren’t interested and told her to go downstairs.

Police smashed down three doors to get to Kim and when Tempero was allowed back upstairs, six officers with sledgehammers and a circular saw were trying to smash into what they thought was Dotcom’s hiding place. It was in fact a broken service elevator/dumb waiter.

Dotcom had actually followed a prearranged plan formulated by his bodyguard which involved him hiding in the “Red Room” to ensure his safety. Tempero was asked what would have happened if a couple of police had simply turned up and asked for Dotcom to come down.

“He would have complied with everything, we would have sat at the large table, he would’ve probably offered them breakfast and he would have complied with everything,” Tempero said.

“Would he have done anything to destroy the hard drive, to take down Megaupload?” 3Newz asked. “Certainly not, why would he? He would be destroying his defense,” Tempero responded.

Despite the massive police and apparent counter-terrorist operation against him, Dotcom was in the Red Room alone for more than half an hour.

“If Kim had a Doomsday setup where he could delete his harddrive or takedown Megaupload, would there have been sufficient time for him to do that had that been his intention?” questioned 3Newz.

“He could’ve done that within seconds,” said Tempero.

There can be little doubt that Kim Dotcom and the other operators of Megaupload are accused of serious crimes and ultimately a court will decide if they are innocent or guilty. But whatever the scale of the alleged offenses, these are ‘white collar’ issues – computer matters – and whatever he may or may not have done, Kim Dotcom is not a terrorist and has never been accused of being one.

Here’s the excellent 3Newz video report. It’s over 10 minutes long but worth the time.

Judging by the 3Newz reporter’s tone, he’s struggling to see the connection between the alleged offenses and the response by the authorities. And he isn’t the only one.
https://torrentfreak.com/elite-anti-...dotcom-120207/





Busted By The FBI: The Life Of An Elite Teen BitTorrent Uploader
enigmax

Releasers and torrent racers are the select few counted on by millions to bring the latest movies, music and video games to the wider Internet in record time. One such person, a 15-year-old school kid, eventually gained access to elite piracy sites and went on to become the top uploader on one of the world’s most famous BitTorrent trackers. But how did the buzz of the elite compare to being hunted down by a Patriot Act-empowered FBI?

In the early part of the last decade when they were still the innocent side of 15-years-old, one schoolfriend showed another an Iomega ZIP drive (right) full of ‘warez’ – games and software with a big fat zero written on their price tag.

Having never seen anything like it before, James (as we shall call him for now) became hooked, and quickly began to display a trait inherent in many addicted file-sharers.

“I simply couldn’t get enough,” he told TorrentFreak. “It was more fun downloading and sharing the stuff with all my friends then actually using it or playing the actual games.”

Having become inspired by these simple beginnings, James began chatting with other like-minded people on warez sites and ICQ, going on to share warez via PUBS, FTP-enabled servers conveniently left open by companies with more bandwidth than security sense.

Sharing files wasn’t a simple process back then and James took exception when Napster began dumbing down the process.

“We hated it, simply despised it because it made a mockery of the hard work we put in to obtain all these different warez,” he recalls.

But despite these early bad feelings towards Napster, the future would eventually see James become a facilitator of even easier ways of downloading. Not for just his friends, but for more than a hundred thousand people.

After working his way up to become one of the top members on the GraveyardFXP warez board, James says he became a moderator of DelusionalFXP. It was there, on their IRC channel, that he would meet people whose new project would suck him in and change his life forever. At some point along the line, ‘James’ became better known to his peers as StonyVision, and he was invited to join a new project being set up by, among others, a fellow pirate known as Sk0t.

Under Sk0t’s leadership, a torrent site called Elite Torrents was taking shape and preparing itself for an eventual membership of some 130,000 active users. It would also become the only US-based BitTorrent tracker ever to be busted by the FBI and ICE.

After he’d installed BitComet and began sharing content in February 2004, staff on Elite noticed something very appealing about StonyVision – his impressive upload capability. StonyVision told us he’d “followed instructions” on how to use two instead of the regular one modem his cable connection usually allowed, which gave him business-standard upload speeds. When you’re delivering content on BitTorrent, upload bandwidth is king, and Elite wanted some of Stony’s.

But as file-sharers are often heard to complain, you can never have enough bandwidth, so Stony acquired a 100mbit server at The Planet in Texas and began seeding his files from there. Once around 150 of Elite’s users had grabbed his latest release he’d begin releasing his next torrent, usually the very latest movies. His performance eventually meant that he became a member of staff, later going on to organize other Elite Torrents uploaders.

Of course, StonyVision needed content to share and he wasted no time in getting it directly from source – The Scene. He’d gained access to this elite network through his contacts at DelusionalFXP and ended up adding his own server to something called T.O.P. or “Tower of Power” – 53 dedicated 100mbit servers acting as a single giant RAID FTP piracy site. But still Stony needed more.

“At that point I was on four or five top sites, and my main interest was always movies. I loved movies and still do,” Stony explained. “Since my server was tied up I ended up renting two more, one to race with and another for seeding content on Elite Torrents.”

In common with his more old-school peers, Stony saw himself as something of a Robin Hood, “taking from the rich and giving to Average Joe”, and reveled in the positive feedback left by up to 130,000 Elite Torrents users.

But the environment in the United States had become increasingly unfriendly towards The Scene. The FBI and DoJ’s Operation Fastlink was underway and there was a growing fear that torrent sites would be targeted next. Stony sensed the tension and stepped down from the site’s staff around April 2005. He was 19-years-old – and too late.

Elite Torrents and its operators were already being watched and no amount of IP-address obfuscation would prove effective in hiding Stony or his fellow staffers on the site.

“Truth be told I did hide my IP and was the hardest one to find but [the FBI] used the Patriot Act and came up with an asinine amount of money lost to these companies and the movie industry and labeled me as a possible domestic terrorist who was conspiring to commit copyright infringement,” Stony explains.

“I woke up to banging on the door over and over, the dogs started barking. I got up thinking who’s the asshole banging on my door at 6am? Next thing I know there’s 10+ FBI agents in my house. I started laughing at first – I thought it was a joke – until the reality sunk in.”

It was 25th May 2005 and Operation D-Elite, which was to claim several admins and staff members at Elite Torrents, was underway.

“That was the day of days, I was in total and utter dismay and couldn’t even wrap my head around what had happened. I had no clue what was happening to the others. I lawyered up immediately which in itself is a funny story. I opened up the Yellow Pages, looked under ‘lawyer’ and there it was – an ad with a firm that had dealt with computer crime.

“I think I need a lawyer,” Stony told the gentleman on the other end who inquired “Why?”

“Well, the FBI had just raided my house along with a group they called ICE,” Stony responded.

A few awkward seconds of silence was followed by: “How fast can you get here?”

What came next was mountains of litigation and Stony being told to expect the worst – 5 years in prison. The pressure proved too much and Stony went off the rails, turning to alcohol.

In December 2006 he would learn his fate for the uploading of 53 movies, 6 pieces of software and 10 video games. The government demanded a prison sentence in order to deter others from infringement. To Stony’s huge relief, they didn’t get their way.

“Luckily for me I had the most liberal federal judge there was at the time. I was given a fine of $3,500, 6 months house arrest, community service and 3 years probation in which I was not allowed to touch a computer. I had somehow escaped doing time and the U.S attorney was furious.”

But despite avoiding prison, Stony says that he’s still paid a price.

“It’s been the bane of my existence and yet made me who I am. I continued on a self destructive path for quite some time doing crazy things, still working out, getting in bar fights. Truth be told I’ve been to hell and back, stared the devil in the face with its trillions of dollars of influence (RIAA, MPAA) and laughed and walked away.”

Stony says that confessing to a double felony on job applications hinders him, but the support of a new woman in his life has helped tremendously. So how are things today?

“I of course no longer pirate anything anymore as I’m sure I’m still on numerous watch lists. Its simply fun to look every now and again,” says Stony.

“My story isn’t one of inspiration but one of caution. It could happen to anyone out there. I know people are thinking ‘nah, not me’, but that’s what I thought too and now here we are.”

Stony told us that he recently got back online again with his own computer and was inspired by the huge anti-SOPA and PIPA campaigns.

“Thanks to everyone who spoke out on Internet blackout day. It really did give me goosebumps to see people finally stand up and be heard,” he concludes.

Sk0t’s story and those of his fellow operators and uploaders can be found here and here.
https://torrentfreak.com/busted-by-t...loader-120204/





btjunkie
2005 - 2012

This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we've decided to voluntarily shut down. We've been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it's time to move on. It's been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!
https://btjunkie.org/goodbye.html





The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde: It’s Evolution, Stupid
Peter Sunde

When I was 9 years old I got my first computer, an Amiga 500. It was the best computer ever built, with great graphics, amazing sound and seven times faster than the Commodore 64. One of my friends said that the Amiga was useless since you needed to boot it from floppies. On the C64 you could program without even a cassette.

Of course the C64 died while the Amiga flourished. The Amiga later died when even better technology came along. We all know how evolution works, except one industry that refuses to evolve: the entertainment industry.

Instead of looking at evolution as something inevitable, the industry has made it their business to refuse and/or sue change, by any necessary means.

In the case of The Pirate Bay, it’s been particularly obvious. My fellow co-founders — Fredrik Neij, Carl Lundström, Gottfrid Svartholm — and I were convicted in 2009 of contributory copyright infringement. Last week the Supreme Court of Sweden refused to hear our appeal. We each face between four months and one year in prison. My sentence was eight months.

Of course I would have preferred to win in the Supreme Court as personal vindication and to vacate my sentence. But beyond that, the Court has squandered a golden opportunity to define how to interpret the European Union directives for digital information. That decision not to decide has prompted many legal experts in Sweden to question the motives of denying the appeal. But the questionable decisions started long before that.

The Swedish prosecutor sent out a memo in 2006 saying that TPB wasn’t guilty of “main” crimes — at best it aids and abets (he also mentioned that the people running TPB were very clever). But Hollywood was not happy with this and forced the Swedish Minister of Justice to visit the White House and talk about it. The United States told Sweden that if they didn’t get rid of the site, they would not be allowed to trade with the U.S.!

The minister (illegally) told the prosecutor what had happened which forced him to raid TPB — only a few weeks after sending out that memo about how legal it was.

Evidently, Warner Brothers felt that the investigation was taking too long. The studio contacted the police officer in charge of the investigation (one person that worked mostly by himself) and before I had even been questioned by him, he interviewed for a job with Warner Brothers.

When we found out he’d been hired (by him changing his employer from “Polisen” to “Warner Bros” on Facebook) the reply we got was that it was proof that Swedish IT police are of such high caliber that even the big U.S. companies would hire them.

I got promoted from “witness” to “suspect” a week after the job was promised.

During the trial it turned out that the judge was the chairman for the Swedish pro-copyright society, one lay judge ran a record company, another one was formerly the chairman for the songwriter lobby organization. I could go on.

The problem here is that we’re allowing this dying industry to dictate the terms of our democracy. We allow them to dictate new laws (ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, IPRED, IPRED2, TPP, TRIPS, to name a few recent ones) that forbid evolution. If you don’t give up before you’re sued, they corrupt the legal system.

As I wrote immediately after the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear our appeal: “Today I urge everyone to make sure that the entertainment industry does not profit from them anymore. Stop seeing their movies. Stop listening to their music. Make sure that you find alternative ways to culture.

“Spread and participate in culture. Remix, reuse, use, abuse. Make sure no one controls your mind. Create new systems and technology that circumvent the corruption. Start a religion. Start your own nation, or buy one. Buy a bus. Crush it to pieces.”

The internet is being controlled by a corrupt industry. We need to stop it.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/peter-sunde/





Tribler Makes BitTorrent Impossible to Shut Down
Ernesto

While the file-sharing ecosystem is currently filled with uncertainty and doubt, researchers at Delft University of Technology continue to work on their decentralized BitTorrent network. Their Tribler client doesn’t require torrent sites to find or download content, as it is based on pure peer-to-peer communication. “The only way to take it down is to take the Internet down,” the lead researcher says.

The Tribler BitTorrent client is no newcomer to the BitTorrent scene. It has been in development for more than 5 years and has delivered many innovative features, which have mostly been ignored by the masses.

Today, however, Tribler is more relevant than ever before.

Developed by a team of researchers at Delft University of Technology, the main goal is to come up with a robust implementation of BitTorrent that doesn’t rely on central servers. Instead, Tribler is designed to keep BitTorrent alive, even when all torrent search engines, indexes and trackers are pulled offline.

“Our key scientific quest is facilitating unbounded information sharing,” Tribler leader Dr. Pouwelse tells TorrentFreak.

“We simply don’t like unreliable servers. With Tribler we have achieved zero-seconds downtime over the past six years, all because we don’t rely on shaky foundations such as DNS, web servers or search portals.”

So how does it work?

Like many other BitTorrent clients, Tribler has a search box at the top of the application. However, the search results that appear when users type in a keyword don’t come from a central index. Instead, they come directly from other peers.

Downloading a torrent is also totally decentralized. When a user clicks on one of the search results, the meta-data is pulled in from another peer and the download starts immediately. Tribler is based on the standard BitTorrent protocol and uses regular BitTorrent trackers to communicate with other peers. But, it can also continue downloading when a central tracker goes down.

The same is true for spam control. Where most torrent sites have a team of moderators to delete viruses, malware and fake files, Tribler uses crowd-sourcing to keep the network clean. Content is verified by user generated “channels”, which can be “liked” by others. When more people like a channel, the associated torrents get a boost in the search results.

The latest addition to Tribler is a Wikipedia-style editing system dubbed “Open2Edit,” where users have the option to edit names and descriptions of torrents in public channels. All without a central server, totally decentralized.

According to Dr. Pouwelse, Tribler is fully capable of resisting any pressure from outside, and it will still work when all torrent sites and trackers are gone. It simply can’t be shutdown, blocked or censored, whatever laws politicians may come up with.

“The only way to take it down is to take The Internet down.” Pouwelse told us.

One thing that could theoretically cause issues, is the capability for starting users to find new peers. To be on the safe side the Tribler team is still looking for people who want to act as so called bootstraptribler peers. These users will act as superpeers, who distribute lists of active downloaders.

“Together with software bugs and a code cleanup, that is now our last known weakness,” says Pouwelse.

While the Tribler client only has a few thousand users at the moment, for avid file-sharers it must be a relief to know that it’s out there. No matter what crazy laws may pass in the future, people will always be able to share.

Those who want to give it a spin are welcome download Tribler here. It’s completely Open Source and with a version for Windows, Mac and Linux.
https://torrentfreak.com/tribler-mak...t-down-120208/





BitTorrent Piracy Doesn’t Affect US Box Office Returns, Study Finds
Ernesto

A new academic paper by researchers from the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College has examined the link between BitTorrent downloads and box office returns. Contrary to what’s often claimed by the movie industry, the researchers conclude that there is no evidence that BitTorrent piracy hurts US box office returns. Internationally, there is a link between downloads and revenues, which the researchers attribute to long release windows.

With their unconditional support for SOPA, PIPA and ACTA, Hollywood is pressing hard for new legislation to curb piracy. The studios want ‘rogue’ websites to be censored and are calling on Google and Internet providers to take responsibility.

However, a new study reveals that movie industry itself has the key to decreasing piracy, without passing any news laws.

In a paper titled ‘Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales’ researchers from the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College examine the link between BitTorrent piracy and box office returns. As hypothesized, they find that international movie piracy losses are directly linked to the delay between US and foreign premieres.

In other words, the longer it takes before a movie is released internationally, the more box office revenues are impacted through piracy.

“We find that longer release windows are associated with decreased box office returns, even after controlling for film and country fixed effects. This relationship is much stronger in contexts where piracy is more prevalent: after BitTorrent’s adoption and in heavily pirated genres,” they write.

“Our findings indicate that, as a lower bound, international box office returns in our sample were at least 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy.”

Aside from their conclusion that a lack of availability is fueling piracy, the researchers report a perhaps even more interesting result. Contrary to what the MPAA and other lobby groups claim, the study doesn’t find a negative effect of BitTorrent piracy on US box office revenues.

“We do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy,” the researchers write.

The above means that movie pirates in the US wouldn’t have bought a ticket at the box office if file-sharing was nonexistent. Only international box office sales see a piracy related decline in revenue, which is attributed to long release windows, something the industry itself can address.

Yet, the movie industry lobbyists keep hammering on about eliminating pirate sites, while ignoring the fact that the industry itself can make important steps to decrease international piracy as well. Governments around the world are not blind to this double standard, as both the Netherlands and Switzerland chose to keep unauthorized movie downloading legal until the industry improves the availability of legitimate content.

Of course the study is far from perfect as there are many more factors that influence box office returns. However, the findings clearly suggest that the movie industry itself can take the biggest step towards eliminating piracy “losses,” not lawmakers.
https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-...-finds-120210/





The Truth-O-Meter Says:

Lamar Smith: "Illegal counterfeiting and piracy costs the U.S. economy $100 billion... every year."

Lamar Smith says online piracy and counterfeiting costs the U.S. economy $100 billion a year

U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, declared in an opinion column on CNN.com: "The growing number of foreign websites that offer counterfeit or stolen goods continues to threaten American technology, products and jobs."

His Jan. 20, 2012, post continues: "Illegal counterfeiting and piracy costs the U.S. economy $100 billion and thousands of jobs every year. Congress cannot stand by and do nothing while some of America's most profitable and productive industries are under attack."

Say what costs that much? A reader asked.

Smith’s $100 billion statement has weaknesses, we learned, partly because estimates of the impact of online vending of counterfeit or pirated (as in stolen) software, movies, recordings and other rip-off products ranging from handbags to shoes are hard to corral.

We’ll dip into Smith’s backup after some background.

Smith is a chief sponsor of the stalled Stop Online Piracy Act, which he described in a November 2011 Austin American-Statesman oped column as an attempt to rein in "a vast virtual market online run by criminals who steal and sell America's intellectual property and keep the profits for themselves."

"Movies and music are not the only stolen products that are offered by rogue sites," Smith’s column says. "Counterfeit medicine, automotive parts and even baby food are a big part of the counterfeiting business and pose a serious threat to the health of American consumers."

Smith’s November column says too that the act is intended to target such illegal activity by permitting the attorney general to seek an injunction against a foreign website dedicated to it.

Congressional action on Smith’s proposal, and a Senate approach pitched as protecting intellectual property, stalled out in the wake of a public outcry in January.

Now let’s get back to Smith’s claim that counterfeiting and piracy costs the U.S. economy $100 billion a year.

His spokeswoman, Sally-Shannon Birkel, told us Smith’s figure originated in a February 2011 report commissioned by the France-based Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy, an initiative of the International Chamber of Commerce, whose declared mission is to promote trade and investment, open markets and the free flow of capital.

The report says: "We find that the U.S. consumption-based share of counterfeit and pirated goods is between $66 billion and $100 billion (based on 2008 data)." So that’s the origin of Smith’s $100 billion figure. It’s the high-end part of this finding.

Globally, the same report says, such goods had a 2008 value of up to $650 billion.

But Smith’s statement refers to how much counterfeiting and online piracy costs the U.S. economy. Is the country’s "consumption-based share" of such goods -- which the report calls relevant to U.S. businesses -- the same as their cost to the economy?

It’s unlikely. A portion of the report pointed out to us by Sanjay Jain, a Texas A&M University professor of marketing, states that the "study has not attempted to estimate business losses associated with counterfeiting and piracy. This is primarily because the likely variations and other difficulties associated with estimating substitution effects across substantially different countries and industries introduces an additional level/degree of variables which could undermine our aim to as accurately as possible characterize the magnitude of counterfeiting and piracy."

After presenting the $66 billion to $100 billion range, the report says this represents "international trade in counterfeit and pirated goods, domestically produced and consumed goods and digitally pirated products." Broken down, the report says, this includes consumption of $45 billion to $60 billion of internationally traded counterfeit and pirated products, $12 billion to $14 billion in domestically produced counterfeit products and between $9 billion and $25 billion in digitally pirated products.

Jain and Julian Sanchez, a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute who has urged skepticism about cost estimates for online piracy, each pointed out to us that the presented range questionably assumes that any pirated product would otherwise be purchased at its retail price by the person who obtained it. That’s not always or even often so, they said.

Broadly speaking, Jain said, he has seen no convincing studies on the costs of piracy and counterfeiting to the American economy — unsurprisingly so, he said, because it’s not an easy problem. "I don’t know the right number," he said.

Sanchez, who told us he considers Smith’s proposal a "bad bill," raised another issue, saying by email that most of the pirated and counterfeited products included in the its $66 billion to $100 billion range have nothing to do with online piracy targeted by Smith’s act.

"People were manufacturing fake Nikes long before the Internet became a mass medium," Sanchez wrote, "so while it might be an interesting factoid to know the size of that market, it’s a red herring if we’re talking about a ‘Stop Online Piracy Act.’"

This "whole debate," Sanchez said, "has tended to lump together ‘counterfeiting’ (trademark infringement, usually involving physical goods) and ‘piracy’ (copyright infringement, encompassing both physical media sales and online digital transfers). From a policy perspective, this is misleading, if not outright deceptive. Whatever amount is spent globally on fake Nikes imported in bulk by retailers, it has very little to do with the debate over policy aimed at shutting down cyberlockers to reduce illicit downloads by individual consumers. You might as well cite an estimate of the total economic cost of ‘crime.’ "

The debate aside, we asked Jeffrey Hardy, director of the international chamber’s initiative, if its report’s $66 billion to $100 billion estimate for the United States’ "consumption-based share" for counterfeit and pirated goods is the same as the economic impact of such activities on the country’s economy.

It’s not, Hardy said, though he said the cost to the economy would be a percentage of the $66 billion to $100 billion "share." He also stressed that the report’s figures reflected the situation in 2008 and costs have increased since then. His speculation: "We may already be to $166 billion" for the U.S. share of consumed counterfeit and pirated goods, which could even turn out to be the current annual cost to the economy.

Hardy also confirmed that the range presented in the report is tied to the retail value of goods though, he agreed, it’s incorrect to assume that in all cases someone who purchases a pirated or counterfeit good would otherwise buy the product at market cost.

All told, Hardy acknowledged, there was no way to pinpoint costs to the economy. The main point was to show that counterfeiting and digital piracy are big problems. "There is a balance between overhyping or overcooking the pie … and trying to present the fact that the magnitudes are enormous and getting bigger, especially on the digital side of things," Hardy said. "It’s a very complicated process when there’s not a lot of information and (there is) a lot of educated guesses. That’s what economists do." Hardy said the international chamber has taken no position on SOPA.

Separately, Sanchez said he agrees with an April 2010 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which states that while counterfeiting and online piracy may pose sizeable negative economic effects, they are hard to quantify.

A GAO summary of the report, "Intellectual Property, Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods," says: "Generally, the illicit nature of counterfeiting and piracy makes estimating the economic impact of (intellectual property) infringements extremely difficult, so assumptions must be used to offset the lack of data. Efforts to estimate losses involve assumptions such as the rate at which consumers would substitute counterfeit for legitimate products, which can have enormous impacts on the resulting estimates. Because of the significant differences in types of counterfeited and pirated goods and industries involved, no single method can be used to develop estimates. Each method has limitations, and most experts observed that it is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts."

After we summarized much of this research, Smith objected to Sanchez as an expert, saying in an email that because Sanchez is opposed to the anti-online-piracy act, he "cannot provide an objective or unbiased analysis." He stood by his CNN.com statement, telling us: "Since the U.S. is the largest producer of (intellectual property) that is consumed around the world, one can surmise that a significant amount of that total value is taken from the U.S. economy."

Our ruling

Smith’s statement draws on a high-end estimate also based on flawed assumptions for the U.S. "consumption-based share of counterfeit and pirated goods" in 2008. The cited $100 billion figure doesn’t reflect the costs to the economy, contrary to Smith’s claim; the 2011 study did not assess such costs, which are understandably slippery.

Maybe there is no solid estimate of the cost to the economy. Smith’s CNN.com statement rates False.
http://www.politifact.com/texas/stat...unterfeiting-/





Pirate File-Sharing Goes 3D
Jacob Aron

LAST week saw the launch of a new category on The Pirate Bay, the controversial file-sharing site known for making copyright material freely available. Alongside music, films and e-books, the site offers "physibles" - digital objects that assume a physical form thanks to a 3D printer.

At the moment such printers are the domain of hobbyists, spitting out small plastic trinkets, but improvements in the technology mean more complex materials and shapes will soon be possible. Could The Pirate Bay's move open the door for a new wave of piracy as people scan objects using a 3D scanner and share them online?

The prospect may seem unlikely, but remember that MP3 players were a niche market until free music from the likes of Napster fuelled demand for the iPod. So perhaps file-sharing could do the same for 3D printers, bringing them into people's homes.

The music industry responded to illegal file-sharing with digital rights management (DRM) techniques that prevented a song from playing on an unauthorised device. Could companies that sell physical products do the same?

One option is placing a marker on objects that a 3D scanner could detect and which would stop it operating. In 2002 University of Cambridge computer scientist Markus Kuhn discovered this technique is already used to prevent banknotes from being photocopied, but he says it would not work for 3D scanners as pirates could simply cover the marker with tape.

He suggests borrowing an alternative method from music DRM. Some companies watermark their audio files by encoding copyright information in frequencies outside the range of human hearing, which are normally discarded by compression algorithms. Kuhn says the equivalent in physical objects is the mechanical tolerances used in manufacturing - one side of an object might be specified as 300 ± 1 millimetres, for example. A marking algorithm could etch a tiny pattern in the unused section that a scanner would detect.

Tony Rodriguez, who works for Oregon-based digital watermarking firm Digimarc says that valid 3D files could be marked by subtly altering the 3D design without changing the printed object. This would let a 3D printer distinguish between a manufacturer's file, which contains the alteration, and one made by scanning an object, which does not.

Perhaps such techniques will not be relevant. Michael Weinberg, staff attorney for Washington-based intellectual property (IP) advocacy group Public Knowledge, says that while text, music and video are automatically copyrighted, "the vast majority of physical objects aren't protected by any sort of IP right". Copying inventions protected by patents is illegal, as is replicating a trademarked logo, but measuring a desk and building a replica is not.

Panicking companies may push for stronger IP laws if 3D printing becomes more widespread, but Weinberg says this would be a mistake. He suggests companies learn from the media industry's mistakes and embrace the new opportunities it affords, perhaps by encouraging the legal downloading of object files. "If everyone has access to a 3D printer I can go online, pick an object that I want, customise it and print it out," he says. "That's an incredible opportunity for companies."

They will not want to miss the boat again.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...g-goes-3d.html





In Piracy Debate, Deciding if the Sky Is Falling
Jenna Wortham and Amy Chozick

When Fred Wilson, a prominent New York venture capitalist who has backed Twitter and Zynga, wanted to watch the Knicks game last month, he got an unpleasant surprise. Time Warner Cable was not showing the game because of a contract dispute.

Frustrated, he turned to the Internet for help. Within minutes he was streaming the game illegally on his big-screen TV.

“It’s not that we don’t want to pay for our sports entertainment,” Mr. Wilson wrote on his blog after the fact. “But last night we were turned into ‘pirates,’ as the entertainment industry likes to call us.”

Plenty of Knicks fans can sympathize with Mr. Wilson’s plight. And his rationale makes perfect sense to people in tech circles, who increasingly expect to have most everything available on demand, and resent it when media companies stand in their way.

That is not how media companies and the entertainment industry see it. From their perspective, tapping into pirate streams and file-sharing sites is no different from shoplifting in the supermarket.

“Copyright violations are a serious business and we don’t condone that in any way,” said Alexander Dudley, a Time Warner Cable spokesman, when asked about Mr. Wilson’s desperate measures.

The recent highly publicized fight over two bills aimed at cracking down on online piracy threw a spotlight on this same disconnect between the Internet industry and the media giants of Hollywood and New York. Despite full-court lobbying by big players like the Motion Picture Association of America, lawmakers abandoned the bills after tech companies and groups, along with ordinary Internet users, mounted a frenzy of protests, saying the bills would hurt Internet freedom and innovation.

Now the challenge is for the two sides to find common ground on how to combat the piracy problem — though they can’t even come to terms on how big a problem it is.

“The fundamental issue is whether or not the sky is falling and the entertainment industry is being decimated by technology,” said James Burger, a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property and entertainment content licensing.

Seeking out an illicit stream of a game that you should be able to watch legitimately is one thing. But media companies say they are facing a relentless barrage of far less defensible thefts involving movies, television shows and music.

In a letter in December announcing its support for stronger antipiracy legislation, the motion picture association said that “$58 billion is lost to the U.S. economy annually due to content theft, including more than 373,000 lost American jobs, $16 billion in lost employees’ earnings, plus $3 billion in badly needed federal, state and local governments’ tax revenue.” A spokesman for the association, Howard Gantman, said the $58 billion figure came from an economic model that estimated piracy’s impact on a range of tangentially related industries — florists, restaurants, trucking companies and so on.

Many outside the industry are skeptical of its analysis. “The movie business is fond of throwing out numbers about how many millions of dollars are at risk and how many thousands of jobs are lost,” said Art Brodsky, who works for Public Knowledge, a digital rights group. “We don’t think it correlates to the state of the industry.”

In one of the most public steps forward since last month’s fight, Mr. Brodsky’s group pulled together a coalition of more than 70 tech companies and advocacy groups, including Amnesty International, Consumers Union, Reddit and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that sent a letter to Congress on Monday calling for lawmakers to rethink their approach.

“Now is the time for Congress to take a breath, step back, and approach the issues from a fresh perspective,” the letter says. It urges Congress to quantify the extent of piracy and its economic effects “from accurate and unbiased sources, and weigh them against the economic and social costs of new copyright legislation.”

Some in the Internet world, including Tim O’Reilly, a noted investor and chief executive of the tech-books publisher O’Reilly Media, go so far as to question whether illegitimate downloading and sharing is such a bad thing. In fact, some say that it could even be a boon to artists and other creators.

“The losses due to piracy are far outweighed by the benefits of the free flow of information, which makes the world richer, and develops new markets for legitimate content,” he wrote in a blog post. “Most of the people who are downloading unauthorized copies of O’Reilly books would never have paid us for them anyway.”

That free flow of information, media companies worry, is making consumers accustomed to getting something for nothing. Privately, several senior media executives said technology companies wanted to devalue copyrighted media content because it ultimately benefited the technology companies’ business.

“If intellectual property developed by creative people and covered by copyright was as respected as intellectual property developed by engineers and protected by patents, this problem would greatly improve,” said a Viacom executive who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Viacom is currently appealing a copyright infringement case against YouTube. In 2010 a federal judge ruled in favor of YouTube’s owner, Google, which Viacom accused of seeking to profit from thousands of copyrighted clips from shows like “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” that users had posted on YouTube.

Media executives have a particular beef with Google. Some claim it initiated the online fervor over the antipiracy legislation in part to advance its own business interests. Michael O’Leary, a senior executive vice president at the motion picture association, put it this way: “I’d ask Google, ‘How many jobs do we have to lose before they start taking this seriously?’ ”

A Google spokeswoman, Samantha Smith, said the company was “heavily invested in the fight against piracy,” noting that last year it took down five million infringing Web pages and spent more than $60 million to root out “bad ads,” including those for illegal or pirated goods.

Google also says it has developed ways to address the piracy problem on its own sites, pointing to Content ID, a system put in place after the Viacom suit was filed that helps copyright holders identify material they own on YouTube and decide whether to remove it or leave it up and share in the ad revenue.

Media companies have no plans to immediately revisit the antipiracy legislation. Instead, several entertainment executives said they planned to reorganize and talked to labor unions, pharmaceutical companies and other backers of the legislation about a unified message so the antipiracy and anticounterfeiting movement was not just associated with Hollywood. These executives, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the issue is so heated, also said they wanted to look at how they could better harness the Web to educate the public about piracy, something they admitted they failed to do last month.

Of course, as consumers embrace online video and music in both legal and illegal forms, media companies have also been learning new tricks. Warner Brothers, for example, now offers a digital locker, part of an industrywide push to Internet-based movie storage that allows customers who buy a DVD or Blu-ray disc to access the same movie on many different devices.

“We’re trying to create a compelling option for consumers, but at the end of the day, unlike the pirates, we’re charging them,” said Kevin Tsujihara, the president of home entertainment for Warner Brothers.

The digital locker is the latest effort to stem the decline in home entertainment revenue, driven largely by Netflix and Redbox rentals, but also by piracy. The research firm SNL Kagan estimates that industry revenue from video rentals and sales fell 10.5 percent to $18.5 billion in 2010 from the year before.

Piracy has put the impetus on media companies to more quickly strike deals to make television and movies available on the Web legitimately. In 2007, Erik Flannigan, now the executive vice president of digital media at Viacom Entertainment Group, pulled up the Google search page on a giant screen at Viacom’s Times Square headquarters. He typed in “South Park” and took senior executives on a tour of Web sites offering pirated episodes.

Today, Comedy Central makes every episode of “South Park,” “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” available free online. The efforts, Mr. Flannigan said, put a big dent in piracy. As for the television industry as a whole, Mr. Flannigan said: “You might not like the windows, or that shows go up and come down, but it’s a far cry from where we were.”

Still, Comedy Central shows do not make billions in syndication or in DVD sales like some TV series. The industry has been reluctant to make available shows like CBS’s “The Big Bang Theory,” which sold for $2 million an episode to Time Warner’s TBS and Fox. That makes piracy a tempting option.

“If they don’t make content available where consumers are, they’re just shooting themselves in the foot,” said Ron Conway, a Silicon Valley investor and the head of the SV Angel investment fund.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/t...s-falling.html





Boxee Stands With The CEA Against Cable Companies, Courts The FCC Chairman To Stop Proposed Ruling
Matt Burns

Anti-consumer legislation SOPA and PIPA might be all but dead, but there isn’t time to rest. There is a seemingly never-ending flow of proposed legislation, statutes and bills queued up, ready to bust down doors and storm living rooms. One of the latest involves the forced transition from analog to digital cable — something I wrote about back in 2008. If the FCC caves to massive lobbying from the cable companies, the days of unencrypted cable stations in the US will be numbered. Cable subscribers would be required to have a cable box (which will likely cost money) or CableCard-compatible box to receive even local network stations.

Boxee just recently started taking an active role in this fight. The Boxee Box has always been uniquely positioned as a legitimate cable alternative, but it wasn’t until Boxee Live TV launched last month that the company has gone against cable companies face-to-face. But if this proposal passes, it will stifle products not only from Boxee, but also products from El Gato, Silicon Dust and others — and let’s not forget about the likely millions of cable TVs currently enjoying living a box-less life.

Right now most cable providers are required by a 1996 FCC rule to provide a basic set of unencrypted stations. These are most often just local broadcast stations also available through an OTA tuner (think ABC, PBS, and a random religious station). Under the current rules, cable companies are not allowed to encrypt these stations, therefore allowing them to work with any TV, tuner, or as the FCC calls them, navigation devices like the Boxee Live TV. As cable providers started transitioning to a more efficient digital signal, these channels remained, able to work with older TVs most often found in guest bedrooms, garages and the like. But soon even those stations might go dark.

This process started several years back when Cablevision became the first provider to petition the FCC for a waiver allowing the provider to completely ditch analog channels in some markets. The FCC granted the request, which caused several other providers to file similar petitions.

But this isn’t as nefarious as it sounds. Analog cable systems are notoriously inefficient. Cablevision went on to launch the US’s first residential 100mbps service way back in 2009. This was partly possible because the company freed space by using an all-digital TV transmission. At the time Verizon’s FiOS topped out at 50mbps, and as former TechCrunch writer Nicholas Deleon found out, the service lived up to its expectations. Plus it was only $100 a month. In 2009.

Comcast pointed out in 2009 that the provider can fit 10-15 digital stations or 2-3 HD stations onto a single analog transmission. Per AllVid’s press release citing Comcast’s Comments on the FCC’s docket number 11-169, Comcast went on to respond to the FCC in November 2011 that the digital transition goal set by Congress was achieved. So if the leak was fixed, why completely shut off the water now?

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association argues it’s time to move forward. Digital boxes allows cable companies to remotely troubleshoot problems therefore reducing the amount of trucks needed to respond to service calls. You know, it’s better for the Earth. Each time a cable truck is saved from rolling out to a subscriber’s house, Al Gore plants a tree — or something like that.

The NCTA goes on to state in its comments to the FCC that 77% of cable subscribers are already on a digital service, more on the larger providers: it’s 90% for Comcast, 95% for Cablevision, and 74% for TWC. The trade association insists that it’s time for the FCC to drop outdated rules and allow for a level playing field. Netflix has more subscribers than any cable provider, it states. As “the marketplace is robustly competitive and video services are being delivered over a range of different platforms to a wide array of different devices” a level playing field is warranted. Yes, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association says cable providers need the FCC’s to help stop people from cutting the cord.

Comcast started implementing a mostly digital line-up in my area in 2008. I was furious. I was going to lose service on several TVs. Now, my TV in my garage and office sit unused (first world problem, I know) because I’m not going to pay the $3 a month for additional boxes. The march to 100% digital will raise rates and alienate millions, I said. Now, Comcast and others are marching up the FCC stairs again, fueled by nearly endless lobbying money.

Boxee points out in their blog post that cable companies spent more the $50 million on lobbying. That’s $50 million, that rather than improving their service, was spent on courting the FCC and legislators into redefining consumer friendly statutes. Boxee doesn’t have that kind of cash. They instead received an audience with the FCC Chairman and staff and presented their argument that modifying the existing rules will slow innovation, harm start-ups and hurt consumers by raising rates. But moreover, the move to an all-digital service can be achieved in different means.

The CEA agrees. The Consumer Electronic Association indicated that the proposed ruling should not be enacted by itself. There are other, more pressing matters that the FCC must address alongside this issue. Granting cable providers a sweeping ruling does not solve the underlining issues of lack of competition, “downloadable security”, and allowing the private sector to enact their solutions (AllVid). “If [the FCC] is going to continue with fixes that are only “interim,” it should proceed, as well, with a true solution,” says the CEA at the end of its comments on the matter.

The AllVid Tech Company Alliance, a group of industry leaders founded to advance the FCC’s proposed AllVid standard, also oppose the ruling. The alliance states that the FCC should continue issuing waivers on a case-by-case basis. Anything less would stifle competition and force more consumers to rely on “proprietary leased devices.”

Boxee is winning. Consumers are winning. Cable companies are starting to feel the heat from people tired of paying for hundreds of stations but only watching a few. Cable companies need to do what ever they can to lock consumers in, but they’re driving them away at a faster rate. Prices constantly rise without any noticeable improvement in service.

Consumers deserve choices. Sure, they have a choice whether to subscribe to a given cable company, but they should also have a choice to use 3rd party hardware and boxes. In 1996 Congress entrusted the FCC with the task to adopt regulations that would ensure commercial availability of navigation devices such as set top boxes. As Boxee, the CEA, and AllVid point out in their FCC comments, caving to the cable companies would be in direct violation of these instructions.The FCC is supposed to look out for the lowly consumer, not the mighty cable company. Hopefully they’ll keep this in mind as Comcast and others wine and dine Washington DC.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/08/box...oposed-ruling/





Verizon, Coinstar's Redbox form Video Venture

Verizon Communications Inc and Coinstar's Redbox unit are forming a joint venture that will compete directly against video rental firm Netflix.

The companies said the venture, 65 percent owned by Verizon and 35 percent by Redbox, would introduce products in the second half of 2012.

(Reporting by Sinead Carew; editing by John Wallace)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...81510M20120206





Rogers, BCE Vying for a Bite of Apple’s iTV
Rita Trichur, Grant Robertson, Boyd Erman and Steve Ladurantaye

Canada’s largest telecommunications companies are squaring off in a fight about the future of television.

Rogers Communications Inc. RCI.B-T and BCE Inc. BCE-T are in talks with Apple Inc. AAPL-Q to become Canadian launch partners for its much-hyped Apple iTV, a product that has the potential to revolutionize TV viewing by turning conventional televisions into gigantic iPads.

While the iTV product remains cloaked in secrecy, sources say Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple has approached Rogers and Bell as it actively pursues partnerships with Canadian carriers.

“They’re not closed to doing it with one [company] or doing it with two,” said one source who is familiar with the talks. “They’re looking for a partner. They’re looking for someone with wireless and broadband capabilities.”

Another source, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Rogers and Bell already have the product in their labs.

All three companies declined comment.

Last month, Apple reported stunning financial results for the quarter ended Dec. 31 – $46.3-billion (U.S.) in revenue and profit of $13.1-billion on the strength of huge sales of the iPhone and iPad. But television remains an area of technology it has yet to conquer, and rumours about Apple’s next big thing centre largely on the concept of a big-screen television that would essentially put a large-screen iPad in living rooms around the world.

The product reportedly integrates Siri, Apple’s voice-recognition software that acts as a personal assistant on the latest iPhone, into television sets to help viewers make programming choices.

Viewers can then control the TV by voice or hand gestures, all from the comfort of a couch. An on-screen keyboard, meanwhile, can also be activated in a similar manner, allowing viewers to surf the web, conduct video chats and use social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook – all without any physical interface.

Jeffries analyst Peter Misek said an analysis of Apple’s patents suggests its iTV product will likely be interoperable with mobile devices, while also functioning as a gaming platform.

He notes Apple is in a good position to “leverage” potential partnerships with carriers to gain access to a wide array of content. “We believe it is likely to be offered by AT&T T-N and Verizon VZ-N in the U.S. and Bell and Rogers in Canada,” he wrote in a research note on Monday.

At first blush, Apple’s initial talks with Rogers and Bell appear to put rival Telus Corp. T-T at a competitive disadvantage.

However, sources say Telus is on the brink of unveiling new technology that would give its customers the ability to control its Optik TV product through voice commands and hand gestures. Those new features could be facilitated by existing Xbox 360 hardware and would position Telus to be first out of the gate with such an offering.

Additionally, other imminent enhancements would extend its Optik TV service to computers and tablets over a home WIFI connection and to smartphones on its wireless network.

Broadcasters, meanwhile, are keen to avoid the fate of record labels, which saw their sales drop dramatically when Apple turned its gaze toward the recording industry. By experimenting with Apple’s products now, the content owners can try to position themselves to benefit from the partnership.

Consumers are already moving away from conventional programming to watch shows on their own terms. TiVo released a survey in January that showed 38 per cent of viewers don’t actually watch shows “live,” choosing to record their favourite shows. If you include on-demand services such as Netflix, that drops to 27 per cent.

But both Rogers and Bell are major content holders, which means even if they lose subscribers, they will be able to generate revenue through licensing agreements.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/glob...rticle2328772/





Youths Are Watching, but Less Often on TV
Brian Stelter

Television is America’s No. 1 pastime, with an average of four hours and 39 minutes consumed by every person every day.

But more and more young people are tuning in elsewhere.

Americans ages 12 to 34 are spending less time in front of TV sets, even as those 35 and older are spending more, according to research that will be released on Thursday by Nielsen, a company that tracks media use.

The divide along a demographic line reveals the effect of Internet videos, social networks, mobile phones and video games — in short, all the alternatives to the television set that are taking up growing slices of the American attention span. Young people are still watching the same shows, but they are streaming them on computers and phones to a greater degree than their parents or grandparents do.

It has long been predicted that these new media would challenge traditional television viewing, but this is the first significant evidence to emerge in research data. If the trends hold, the long-term implications for the media industry are huge, possibly causing billions of dollars in annual advertising spending to shift away from old-fashioned TV.

Gary Carr, a senior vice president for TargetCast TCM, which buys ad time for companies, said that while the dip was “not cause for panic,” it merited concern and careful monitoring. “Young people are always the first group to be doing other things, trying other things,” Mr. Carr said.

Echoing those sentiments, executives at several major media companies said their proprietary research affirmed that there had been a dip in overall youth viewership in recent months, though they said it had not yet led to a meaningful effect on the ratings for individual channels.

The television industry has been expecting — and dreading the day — that TV viewing peaks, and then either plateaus or slowly declines in the face of encroaching Internet and phone use. According to data that Nielsen will release on Thursday, television viewing as a whole is steady, in part because older Americans — particularly those over the age of 65 — are watching more than ever before. Digital video recorders deserve some of the credit for the uptick, since they let people stockpile shows.

But for three straight quarters, there have been declines in viewing among Americans under 35, even when DVR viewership is factored in, according to Nielsen data analyzed by The New York Times.

Adults ages 25 to 34, for instance, watched about four and a half fewer hours of television in the third quarter of 2011 than at the same time in 2010 — the equivalent of about nine minutes a day. Viewers ages 12 to 17 also watched about nine fewer minutes a day. The demographic in between, those ages 18 to 24, watched about six fewer minutes a day.

Pat McDonough, a senior vice president at Nielsen, said this week that the company was watching youth viewing behavior “very closely,” and acknowledged in an interview that she had seen “a little bit” of a drop-off in youth viewership. She cautioned, however, that there had been fluctuations in the past, and noted that traditional television viewership in 2010 was very high. (This is possibly a reflection of economic circumstances, since television viewing tends to grow when the American economy does not.) The shorter National Football League preseason in 2011 may have also influenced year-over-year comparisons, she said.

As behaviors shift, there is likely to be a scramble to identify winners and losers. Viacom, the owner of Nickelodeon, criticized Nielsen last fall after ratings showed that the channel suffered from a sudden drop in children’s viewing.

According to data for the first nine months of 2011, children spent as much time in front of the television set as they did in 2010, and in some cases spent more. But the proportion of live viewing is shrinking while time-shifted viewing is expanding.

Zach Dulli, a director of operations for the National Council for Geographic Education in Washington, has noticed that his children, Max and Huck, like the TV set, but they like laptops and cellphones more. Now that Huck has mastered the finger swipe to turn on an iPad, Mr. Dulli and his wife, Stephanie, prepare “Baby Einstein” for him to watch on the device. Huck is eight months old.

“To us, TV is separate from the other media we use,” Mr. Dulli said. “To my sons, it’s not.”

To a child, television shows on the iPad are still television, but to Nielsen, it’s not: the company counts computer and mobile streams of shows separately, making it difficult for the television industry to get a handle on changing habits.

On Sunday, for the first time, the Super Bowl was broadcast online as well as on television, but the ads were sold separately and the ratings were reported separately. About 2.1 million unique users watched the live stream at some point during the game, while about 111.3 million people watched on television at any given time during the game. NBC says there was some overlap, but that it was hard to know how much. But the network has said that the game was the “most-watched single-game sports event ever online.”

Accordingly, there is a growing sense of urgency within the industry to make online and mobile viewing as measurable as traditional couch-bound viewing. Ad-buying agencies are gradually moving some client money to the Web to reach the 20- and 30-somethings who are becoming harder to reach with traditional television.

“Television still reaches young audiences in a major, major way,” said Billie Gold, the director of programming research for Carat USA, an ad-buying agency.

That said, just before a phone interview on Wednesday, Ms. Gold ran the preliminary numbers for the first few weeks of 2012, and she saw a dip in youth viewing compared with the same period last year. “This is why we’re incorporating more digital and online video” into our advertising plans, she said. “We know it’s a place to replace some of the young audience that is leaving television.”

Just ask Jay Rishel, a system administrator in York, Pa., whose son Cory, 4, has become accustomed to watching television via Roku, a small box that streams shows through the Internet. On Tuesday night, Cory asked his dad if he had watched television via Roku growing up. When his dad said no, Cory then asked, “So you could only watch DVDs?”

“Since it was bedtime, I didn’t try to explain we had four channels available when I was growing up,” Mr. Rishel, 31, said. “I don’t think he knows what a channel even is.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/b...ten-on-tv.html





Viewpoint: V for Vendetta and the Rise of Anonymous
Alan Moore

On Saturday protests are planned across the world against Acta - the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The treaty has become the focus of activists associated with the Anonymous hacking network because of concerns that it could undermine internet privacy and aid censorship.

First published in 1982, the comic series V for Vendetta charted a masked vigilante's attempt to bring down a fascist British government and its complicit media. Many of the demonstrators are expected to wear masks based on the book's central character.

Ahead of the protests, the BBC asked V for Vendetta's writer, Alan Moore, for his thoughts on how his creation had become an inspiration and identity to Anonymous.

Preoccupations

Without wishing to overstate my case, everything in the observable universe definitely has its origins in Northamptonshire, and the adoption of the V for Vendetta mask as a multipurpose icon by the emerging global protest movements is no exception.

Back at the crack of the 17th century, Rushton Triangular Lodge was a strange architectural folly constructed to represent the Holy Trinity by an increasingly eccentric Sir Thomas Tresham while he endured decades of house-arrest for his outspoken Catholicism.

It was also one of the two locations, both owned by Tresham and both in Northamptonshire, at which the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was formulated by a group of dissident Catholics that included Tresham's son Francis.

It would seem likely that the treatment afforded to the elder Tresham played some part in the general mix of grievances from which the reckless scheme ignited.

Mastermind

By the early sixteen-hundreds, the bonfires traditionally lit around the start of November had been co-opted as trappings for a sort of national anti-Catholic day at which effigies of the Pope would be incinerated.

As mastermind behind the terrorist outrage du jour, however, the plot's nominal leader Guido Fawkes rapidly replaced the pontiff as hate-mascot of choice on these occasions.

Jump forward 300 years, though, to the battered post-war England of the 1950s, and the saturnine insurrectionary had taken on more ambiguous connotations.

When parents explained to their offspring about Guy Fawkes and his attempt to blow up Parliament, there always seemed to be an undertone of admiration in their voices, or at least there did in Northampton.

While that era's children perhaps didn't see Fawkes as a hero, they certainly didn't see him as the villainous scapegoat he'd originally been intended as.

Revolutionary

At the start of the 1980s when the ideas that would coalesce into V for Vendetta were springing up from a summer of anti-Thatcher riots across the UK coupled with a worrying surge from the far-right National Front, Guy Fawkes' status as a potential revolutionary hero seemed to be oddly confirmed by circumstances surrounding the comic strip's creation: it was the strip's artist, David Lloyd, who had initially suggested using the Guy Fawkes mask as an emblem for our one-man-against-a-fascist-state lead character.

When this notion was enthusiastically received, he decided to buy one of the commonplace cardboard Guy Fawkes masks that were always readily available from mid-autumn, just to use as convenient reference.

To our great surprise, it turned out that this was the year (perhaps understandably after such an incendiary summer) when the Guy Fawkes mask was to be phased out in favour of green plastic Frankenstein monsters geared to the incoming celebration of an American Halloween.

It was also the year in which the term "Guy Fawkes Night" seemingly disappeared from common usage, to be replaced by the less provocative 'bonfire night'.

At the time, we both remarked upon how interesting it was that we should have taken up the image right at the point where it was apparently being purged from the annals of English iconography. It seemed that you couldn't keep a good symbol down.

If there truly was government unease about the mask and its associations back in the 1980s, these concerns had evidently evaporated by the first decade of the 21st century, when the movie industry apparently decided to re-imagine the original narrative as some sort of parable about the post-9/11 rise of American neo-conservatives, in which the words "fascism" or "anarchy" were nowhere mentioned.

Anarchy and romance

When the film was made during the peak period of anti-terrorist legislation the golden touch of Hollywood was, it seemed, sufficiently persuasive for the authorities to permit a massed horde of extras dressed as the nation's most famous terrorist to cavort riotously in Parliament Square.

I don't think one need subscribe to any quasi-mystical theories about how the conceptual world of ideas can affect the substantial world of everyday existence in order to agree that, in retrospect, this could be seen as practically begging for it.

After that, it wasn't long before the character's enigmatic Time-Warner trademarked leer appeared masking the faces of Anonymous protesters barracking Scientologists halfway down Tottenham Court Road.

Shortly thereafter it began manifesting at anti-globalisation demonstrations, anti-capitalist protests, concerted hacker-attacks upon those perceived as enabling state oppression, and finally on the front steps of St Paul's.

It would seem that the various tectonic collapses deep in the structure of our economic and political systems have triggered waves of kinetic energy which are rolling through human populations rather than through their usual medium of seawater.

It also seems that our character's charismatic grin has provided a ready-made identity for these highly motivated protesters, one embodying resonances of anarchy, romance, and theatre that are clearly well-suited to contemporary activism, from Madrid's Indignados to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Neglect

Our present financial ethos no longer even resembles conventional capitalism, which at least implies a brutal Darwinian free-for-all, however one-sided and unfair. Instead, we have a situation where the banks seem to be an untouchable monarchy beyond the reach of governmental restraint, much like the profligate court of Charles I.

Then, a depraved neglect of the poor and the "squeezed middle" led inexorably to an unanticipated reaction in the horrific form of Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil War which, as it happens, was bloodily concluded in Northamptonshire.

Today's response to similar oppressions seems to be one that is intelligent, constantly evolving and considerably more humane, and yet our character's borrowed Catholic revolutionary visage and his incongruously Puritan apparel are perhaps a reminder that unjust institutions may always be haunted by volatile 17th century spectres, even if today's uprisings are fuelled more by social networks than by gunpowder.

Some ghosts never go away.

As for the ideas tentatively proposed in that dystopian fantasy thirty years ago, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that whatever usefulness they afford modern radicalism is very satisfying.

In terms of a wildly uninformed guess at our political future, it feels something like V for validation.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16968689





A New Question of Internet Freedom
David Jolly


In January, lawmakers in Poland held up masks to protest the ratifying of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement


European activists who participated in American Internet protests last month learned that there was political power to be harnessed on the Web. Now they are putting that knowledge to use in an effort to defeat new global rules for intellectual property.

In the U.S. protests , Web sites including Wikipedia went dark Jan. 18, and more than seven million people signed Google’s online petition opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act. Ultimately, even the bills’ sponsors in the U.S. Congress backed down under the onslaught of public criticism.

The European activists are hoping to use similar pressure to stop the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, which is meant to clamp down on illegal commerce in copyrighted and trademarked goods. Opponents say that it will erode Internet freedom and stifle innovation. About 1.5 million people have signed a Web petition calling for the European Parliament to reject ACTA, which some say is merely SOPA and PIPA on an international level. Thousands of people have turned out for demonstrations across Europe, with more scheduled for next Saturday.

After more than three years of talks, which critics say were conducted without sufficient public input , the United States signed on to ACTA last October in Tokyo, along with Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand and South Korea. (The agreement is to come into force when six of those countries have ratified it.)

But the issue moved into the mainstream in Europe after the European Union and representatives of 22 of 27 E.U. members — all except Cyprus, Estonia, Germany, the Netherlands and Slovakia — signed Jan. 26.

On the same day, Kader Arif, a French Socialist member of the European Parliament, quit as the body’s special rapporteur for ACTA. He said the European Parliament and civil society organizations had been excluded from the negotiations, and he denounced the entire process as a “masquerade.” The issue, which had gotten little traction in the news media previously, began to move into the headlines, with calls for national legislatures and the European Parliament to reject the treaty.

The pressure on politicians has been unrelenting. Helena Drnovsek-Zorko, the Slovenian diplomat who signed the treaty on behalf of her country, has publicly disowned it and called for her fellow citizens to demonstrate against it. Ms. Drnovsek-Zorko said that she had signed “out of civic carelessness” and that it was her conviction that ACTA “limits and withholds the freedom of engagement on the largest and most significant network in human history.”

Poland, the home of some of the most vocal protests to date, “suspended” ratification, said the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, after politicians wearing the Guy Fawkes masks favored by the online vigilante group Anonymous protested in the Polish Parliament.

ACTA seeks to provide a common framework of civil and criminal procedures to stop illegal trade in goods and properties — like Louis Vuitton bags, Hollywood films and recorded music — providing holders of intellectual property rights with the means to work through the courts outside their national borders to shut down counterfeiters and pirates. And though two piracy heavyweights, Russia and China, have not signed, ACTA’s drafters say they hope those countries will come to see the benefits of joining.

Mr. Arif, the opponent to the measure in the European Parliament, said that ACTA was “wrong in both form and substance.”

He said European officials, who began negotiating the agreement in 2007, kept legislators in the dark for years and ignored their concerns, finally presenting them with a finished deal for ratification with no option of modifying it.

“Voilà, that’s the masquerade that I denounce,” he said. Mr. Arif said a number of issues in the agreement troubled him, particularly a provision that could make Internet service providers liable for copyright infringement by users, something that would be in conflict with existing E.U. law.

Another provision, he said, appeared to roll back protections for generic drugs by lumping them in with counterfeit drugs.

Further, he said, the law leaves to the discretion of each country the definition of what constitutes a “commercial” level of piracy, so some countries might choose to search travelers’ laptop computers and digital music players in search of illegal downloads. ACTA supporters reject the criticism and say action is essential when legitimate owners of intellectual property are losing tens of billions of dollars annually to counterfeiting and illegal sharing. They accuse some opponents of deliberately exaggerating ACTA’s provisions to fan fears.

“ACTA is about enforcing existing intellectual property rights and about acting against large-scale infringements often pursued by criminal organizations, and not about pursuing individual citizens,” said John Clancy, the E.U. trade spokesman.

The goal of the treaty, he said, was to raise standards around the world to European standards, not to crack down in Europe. “It’s simply misleading to suggest that ACTA would limit the freedom of the Internet,” Mr. Clancy added. “ACTA is not about checking private laptops or smartphones at borders. It will not cut access to the Internet or censor any Web sites.”

Ron Kirk, the U.S. trade representative, said in October that protecting intellectual property was “essential to American jobs in innovative and creative industries” and that the treaty “provides a platform for the Obama administration to work cooperatively with other governments to advance the fight against counterfeiting and piracy.”

The United States and the European Union dismiss the charge that the talks were not transparent, with U.S. trade officials arguing that the negotiating partners released the ACTA draft agreement in April 2010 and that the final version has been public for more than a year.

In the United States, too, ACTA has attracted criticism, but probably because its provisions are aimed at piracy overseas, there has been less controversy than for SOPA and PIPA. The NetCoalition, the alliance of technology companies including Google and eBay that fought SOPA and PIPA, has been critical of ACTA, as well.

And about 75 law professors signed an open letter to President Barack Obama, in which they criticized what they said was the “intense but needless secrecy” under which the negotiations were carried out, as well as the White House’s argument that Mr. Obama had the authority to endorse ACTA not as a treaty, which would require the advice and consent of the Senate, but rather as “a sole executive agreement.”

That has not gone over well in the U.S. Congress. “There are questions of constitutional authority surrounding whether the administration can enter into this agreement without Congress’s approval,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon.

“Either way, when international accords, like ACTA, are conceived and constructed under a cloak of secrecy,” Mr. Wyden said, “it is hard to argue that they represent the broad interests of the general public. The controversy over ACTA should surprise no one.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/t...ht-acta06.html





Cable Reveals Extent Of Lapdoggery From Swedish Govt On Copyright Monopoly
Rick Falkvinge

Among the treasure troves of recently released WikiLeaks cables, we find one whose significance has bypassed Swedish media. In short: every law proposal, every ordinance, and every governmental report hostile to the net, youth, and civil liberties here in Sweden in recent years have been commissioned by the US government and industry interests.

I can understand that the significance has been missed, because it takes a whole lot of knowledge in this domain to recognize the topics discussed. When you do, however, you realize that the cable lists orders for the Swedish Government to implement a series of measures that significantly weakens Sweden’s competitive advantage in the IT field against the US. We had concluded this was the case, but had believed things had come from a large number of different sources. That was wrong. It was all coordinated, and the Swedish Government had received a checklist to tick off. The Government is described in the cables as “fully on board”.

Since 2006, the Pirate Party has claimed that traffic data retention (trafikdatalagring), the expansion of police powers (polismetodutredningen), the law proposal that attempted to introduce Three Strikes (Renforsutredningen), the political trial against and persecution of The Pirate Bay, the new rights for the copyright industry to get subscriber data from ISPs (Ipred) — a power that even the Police don’t have — and the general wiretapping law (FRA-lagen) all have been part of a greater whole, a whole controlled by American interests. It has sounded quite a bit like Conspiracies?’R’?Us. Nutjobby. We have said that the American government is pushing for a systematic dismantlement of civil liberties in Europe and elsewhere to not risk the dominance of American industry interests, in particular in the area of copyright and patent monopolies.

But all of a sudden, there it was, in black on white. It takes the description so far that the civil servants in the Justice Department, people I have named and criticized, have been on the American Embassy and received instructions.

This will become sort of a longish article, as I intend to outline all the hard evidence in detail, but for those who want the executive summary, it is this: The Pirate Party was right on every detail. The hunt for ordinary Joes who share music and movies with one another has been behind the largest dismantlement of civil liberties in modern history, and American interests have been behind every part of it.

At the middle of this, we find the US cable Stockholm 09-141, recommending Sweden to not be blacklisted by the US on the so-called Special 301 list, and outlines why. The Special 301 is a list that the United States compiles every year that names and shames countries that haven’t been friendly enough to American industries. A majority of the world’s population is on the list, Canada and Spain among them. It’s quite nice company to be in, actually.

Since the 1980s, the US has aggressively threatened trade sanctions against countries who don’t give American companies sufficiently large competitive advantages — this is described in detail in the book Information Feudalism about the origins of the TRIPs agreement and WTO, for those interested in gory details. In practice, it works like this: industry associations in the US go to the Trade Representatives, who go to the myriad offices dealing with Foreign Policy, who go to the embassies, who talk to national governments (including the Swedish one) and demand changes to national law to benefit American corporations.

This sounds like fiction, right? But here are the documents. This document comes from the copyright industry’s trade association IIPA, mainly consisting of record and movie companies. They have listed six demands on the Swedish Government, which stand to find in the linked document:

1. Adopt the copyright law amendments on injunctive relief against ISPs and a “right of information” to permit rights holders to obtain the identity of suspected infringers from ISPs in civil cases

2. Prosecute to the fullest extent the owners of ThePirateBay [sic]

3. Increase the prosecutorial and police manpower devoted to criminal Internet piracy enforcement

4. Commence a national criminal enforcement campaign to target source piracy and large scale Internet pirates

5. Ensure that rights holders may pursue the new civil remedies easily and quickly

6. Take an active role fostering ISP-rights holder discussions to effectively prevent protected content from being distributed without authorization over the Internet

Now, these steps are written in copyright industry legalese. Some key words that sound harmless are cause for alarm once you recognize their meaning. Translated into ordinary language, this says:

1. Adopt “Three Strikes” making it possible to disconnect prople from the internet without a trial (“injunctive relief“), and implement the IPRED directive in a way that the copyright industry can get internet subscriber identities behind IP addresses (which was not mandatory, my note).

2. Prosecute to the fullest extent the owners of The Pirate Bay. (This doesn’t really need translation, except that it’s very noteworthy that the executive branch is ordered to interfere with the work of the judicial one, which is illegal in Sweden too.)
3. Transfer scarce police resources from investigating real crimes and devote them to safeguarding American monopolistic interests against ordinary citizens.

4. Take large-scale initiatives against people sharing music, movies and porn.

5. Make it possible for the copyright industry to sue people (“pursue new civil remedies“) with a minimum of hassle.

6. Abolish the messenger immunity, making Internet Service Providers liable for copyright monopoly infractions happening in their wires, and force them to interfere with the traffic.

All this seems eerily familiar. With one exception, it looks like a checklist followed to the letter by the Swedish Government. The American Embassy confirms that it is, and even explains that exception.

The cable Stockholm 09-141 reads, along with my comments:

1. (SBU) Summary. Embassy Stockholm recommends that Sweden
continues to be placed in the Special 301 Initiative, and not be on
the Watch List for 2009. We are aware of the differing
recommendations of the International Intellectual Property Alliance
(IIPA) and PhRMA. Post recommendation is based on:

-- The progress made by the Government of Sweden (GOS) in five out
of the six items identified in the Special 301 Initiative Action
plan we communicated to the GOS last year; and

Here, the Embassy (“Post“) writes straight out that the Swedish government has been given a checklist.

-- The sensitive domestic politics that the GOS needs to manage in
order to step up internet piracy enforcement in Sweden. The GOS
struggles, with good intentions, against a very negative media
climate and against a vocal youth movement. For example, we want to
highlight the risk that negative media attention on the file sharing
issue gives the Pirate Party a boost in the EU Parliamentary
elections in June 2009.

Apparently, it is a “vocal youth movement” that fights for basic civil liberties. Also, it is interesting that the Embassy expresses preferences on which parties should be elected by the Swedish people.

2. (SBU) This cable reviews the progress Sweden has made on the
Special 301 Initiative Action plan which we presented to the GOS at
the conclusion of the Special 301 review 2008 (Ref B). Post
continues to engage very constructively with the GOS, and has good
access and a good working relationship with key senior and working
level GOS officials. The actions taken since last year's review
strengthen the legislative framework and provide better enforcement
tools for combating piracy. The Pirate Bay trial is currently being
heard in the district court in Stockholm. The last day of the trial
is March 4, and the verdict can be expected on or about March 25.

The Embassy notes specifically that they have good access to civil servants. In other cables, these are named; among others, the Embassy has contact with Stefan Johansson, the civil servant in the Justice Department who drafted the IPRED legislation giving the copyright industry access to internet subscriber identities.

3. [...] The Justice Ministry, with primary responsibility for this issue, is
fully on board and well aware of what is at stake. It is currently
battling with the Ministry of Enterprise, Energy, and Communication
about the next appropriate steps to curb internet piracy. Now that
the Enforcement Directive implementation will finally enter into
force on April 1, and there will soon be a first District court
decision in the Pirate Bay case -- the Justice Ministry will turn
its attention to other key issues, primarily the ISP liability issue
and extra resources to investigative capabilities. [...]

Here, we see in cleartext that the Justice Department is working to abolish the messenger immunity and make ISPs liable for the traffic in their networks, so that we will have a serious amount of unaccountable extrajudicial censorship. This is one of the most serious threats to the basic civil liberties and to the foundatory principles of the net today. Also, note the expression that the Justice Department are essentially American lapdogs in this area.

4. [...] Post conveyed a Special 301 Action plan to the GOS,
covering six items where the [US Govt] hoped to see progress during 2008.

5. (U) The Special 301 Initiative Action plan 2008 contained
recommendations in six specific areas. The GOS has acted, in
various degrees, in five of those areas. A review of progress in
the six areas follows in paras 6-11:

The Embassy says that it will go through these steps one by one and explain how the Swedish Government has done as asked.
Step-by-step walkthrough of lapdoggery

(At this point, I shuffle the cable paragraphs a bit to match the checklist from the American copyright industry’s organization IIPA, and bring its points in for reference. The numbers before the paragraphs are thus intact from the cable, and show the referenced paragraph. The IIPA checklist is quoted from the top down.)

IIPA checklist says:

1. Adopt “Three Strikes” making it possible to disconnect prople from the internet without a trial (“injunctive relief“), and…

Embassy says:

7. (U) Injunctive relief: The one item without any progress is
Action plan item 2, Injunctive relief. The GOS maintains that there
are adequate provisions currently on the books in Sweden, and does
not intend to introduce new legislation. (Note that industry claims
to the contrary were supported by the recommendations of the Renfors
Commission, a government study commissioned to look into the file
sharing issue. The GOS has declared that it will not further
implement Renfors' recommendations. End note.)

Comments: The Embassy says in cleartext that Three Strikes (“injunctive relief” in legalese) is the only point Sweden hasn’t fulfilled. The referenced Renfors Commission produced the law proposal that explicitly wanted to disconnect people from the net without trial — the infamous Three Strikes. Its secretary, Johan Axhamn, is now lobbying hard within the copyright industry’s lobby organization Netopia to introduce extrajudicial censorship through another one of IIPA’s six points. The Renfors Commission acted very lopsidedly in its directives and execution from the get-go, and now we know why.

IIPA checklist says:

…and implement the IPRED directive in a way that the copyright industry can get internet subscriber identities behind IP addresses.

Embassy says:

8. (U) Implementation of the Enforcement Directive: The bill was
approved by Parliament on February 25, and the new provisions will
enter into force on April 1, 2009. The political sensitivities made
the final handling of the Bill very delicate for the Alliance
government. Much of the debate and negotiations have been done in
public, and there has been tremendous pressure put on individual
MPs. The passage of the implementing legislation is therefore a
much greater victory for the GOS than it might appear. Major
changes, compared to the original proposal, are:

-- the law will not be retroactive. [...]

-- The court will make a proportionality assessment, i. e. weigh the
need of the rights-holder to get access to the personal identity
against integrity aspects of the person behind the IP number. The
law now stipulates that a certain scale of infringement will be
needed for the court to decide that the information should be handed
out. Normally, that would be the case when the infringement
consists of up-loading a single film or musical piece [...]

-- The law includes provisions that the GOS intends to observe and
assess how the law is used [...]

Comments: This was fulfilled to the letter. But we note three things in this cable: First, it is clear that the United States were behind the controversial parts of the IPRED implementation that have become synonymous with the entire law in Swedish language — the parts giving the copyright industry access to subscriber identities behind IP addresses. This part is entirely voluntary in the directive.

Second, we should be careful whenever the government discusses “large-scale file sharing”, because it says here in cleartext what that means: uploading one single movie or music track, something that 250 million Europeans do pretty much on a daily basis.

Third, note the tone of significant disappointment over the law not being made retroactive.

IIPA Checklist says:

2. Prosecute to the fullest extent the owners of The Pirate Bay.

Embassy says:

12. (U) After the raid on Pirate Bay on May 31, 2006, the issue of
internet piracy was fiercely debated in Sweden. Press coverage was
largely, and still is, unfavorable to the positions taken by
rights-holders and the USG [US Govt]. The Pirate Bay raid was portrayed
as the GOS [Govt of SE] caving to USG pressure. The delicate situation made it
difficult, if not counter-productive, for the Embassy to play a
public role on IPR issues. Behind the scenes, the Embassy has
worked well with all stakeholders. After 18 months of
investigation, the prosecutor filed indictments against four
individuals for contribution to copyright infringement because of
their activities administrating the Pirate Bay bit torrent webpage.
The case is currently being heard in the district court in
Stockholm, and the trial is scheduled to be completed on March 4.
The sentence is expected on or about March 25, i.e. before the
conclusion of the Special 301 review process. However, we fully
expect that any outcome will be appealed to a higher court, which
means that the final verdict will not be known for several years.

Comments: At the time of the raid against The Pirate Bay, May 31, 2006, there were clear indications of the Swedish authorities cowing to US pressure. It could only be indicated, not proven in a court of law. Here, it’s in black and white on a checklist handed to the Swedish Government, along with the notes that the Justice Department is “fully on board”.

The Embassy also notes that they have worked behind the scenes with “all stakeholders”, meaning the stakeholders in a negative outcome for The Pirate Bay and Sweden’s competitive IT industry. Some of these are named in other cables, specifically the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the Pirate Bay trial.

IIPA checklist says:

3. Transfer scarce police resources from investigating real crimes and devote them to safeguarding American monopolistic interests against ordinary citizens.

Embassy says:

10. (SBU) Police and prosecutors: There are now two full-time
prosecutors dedicated to IPR/copyright issues. Police officers
have been trained, but we understand that they are not allowed to
devote attention to IPR/copyright issues. They are back in their
regular line of duty in their districts, where there are conflicting
priorities. We have understood that the prosecutors have alerted
that this is a problem for their work - they are "stuck" with a
backlog of old errands and without the support of investigative
officers. The prosecutors ask for investigative officers that are
exclusively devoted to IPR issues, today there are no such
investigative capacities. The Justice Ministry has repeatedly asked
the Head of the Swedish Police for information about how he plans to
come to terms with the investigation deficiencies. Although the [Govt]
recognizes the needs, the budget bill for next year will likely not
contain significant increases for law enforcement, given the harsh
economic conditions. This is an area where post can work with the
[Govt of SE] and [the copyright] industry to highlight the significant
impact additional resources in this area might have.

Comments: Chalk another one up. News just today (September 5, 2011) announced a new national super-unit in the Swedish Police aimed only at people sharing movies, music and porn. News in Swedish here, translated here.

IIPA checklist says:

4. Take large-scale initiatives against people sharing and downloading music, movies and porn.

Embassy says:

11. (SBU) Public education: In the fall of 2008, the GOS released a
new information material, primarily aimed for youth, which will be
broadly distributed in Swedish schools. Justice Minister Ask's
staffers are currently considering the pros and cons of engaging
Cabinet members in the public debate. Given all the negative
attention around the Enforcement directive and the Pirate Bay trial,
the determination thus far has been to keep a low profile. The [Govt]
recognizes that there is a real risk that the window of opportunity
was lost already several years ago -- when leading [politicians]
didn't take the debate. How to engage at this point is a delicate
matter.

Comments: The Justice department embarked on “public education” against sharing, aimed at youth. We criticized this material heavily as it was published (rough translation). The Justice Department sent “educational material” with lopsided copyright monopoly propaganda to high schools and junior highs as education material! This had never happened before, and I criticized the material on point after point for being politically biased, only tell half the story, or be directly and factually wrong. Now, we know that this action was commissioned by the United States.

IIPA checklist says:

5. Make it possible for the copyright industry to sue people (“pursue new civil remedies“) with a minimum of hassle.

Embassy says:

9. (U) Granting police and prosecutors the right to identities
behind IP numbers of individuals potentially implicated in copyright
crimes of lower dignity, i.e. fines rather than prison sentences:
The Justice Ministry has also worked towards the goal of changing
legislation so that police and prosecutors can get access to
information about identities behind IP numbers in cases where the
crime could lead to a fine (rather than a prison sentence). The
usual Swedish term for this type of crime (punishable by fine, not
prison) is "crime of lower dignity." At present, law enforcement
officials are only allowed to get such information if the
infringement could lead to a prison sentence. The [Govt] has agreed to
change the legislation, and it was made part of a study commissioned
to propose the steps needed to implement such a change. The
proposed changes were recently separated out from the rest of the
study, and were reported in advance to Justice Minister Ask late
January 2009. Although the slow legislative process is
disappointing, the GOS has already agreed on the necessary changes
that will strengthen the investigative tools of enforcement
officials.

Comments: The Embassy’s text describes a lengthy process on how this mechanism for the copyright industry was moved from bill to bill. It surfaced again this winter, when Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask announced “step 2? of traffic data retention, when its usage would expand from just combating organized heavy crime to also include combating petty-fine crimes like (specifically) file sharing. Thus, this cable is not stale by far; the government is still ticking off its checklist.

It is interesting that the Embassy notes that “the Government has agreed to change the legislation”: changing laws is Parliament’s job, not the cabinet’s. At least Parliament has the puzzle piece now that this is American-made mail-order legislation.

IIPA checklist says:

6. Abolish the messenger immunity, making Internet Service Providers liable for copyright monopoly infractions happening in their wires, and force them to interfere with the traffic.

Embassy says:

6. (SBU) Industry consultations/ISP liability: The GOS [SE Govt] held a
series of industry consultations in the summer/fall of 2008, with
the explicit aim to discuss a voluntary industry agreement involving
ISPs and right-holders organizations. Industry contacts reported
that the ISP's were not willing (they claim they are not able) to
take on any action on a voluntary basis. The first round of
consultations was concluded without results during the fall of 2008.
The Justice Ministry is currently working internally in the GOS to
get acceptance for a second round with a clear incentive for
progress, i.e. threatening with legislation in the absence of a
voluntary agreement. There is some resistance in the Center party
led Ministry of Enterprise, Energy, and Communications, and
negotiations are on-going at senior GOS-levels.

Comments: Maybe not a full mission accomplished on the checklist, except a George Bush carrier-style one, but ordering participants to talks under a threat of legislation is at least a very good effort. This is one of the ugliest imaginable way of destroying the Net as we know it. It’s as if the Postal Service would be made responsible for the contents in a letter — for the words on the paper! — or if telecom companies would be held responsible for aiding and abetting crimes planned over the phone. If this were to come, they would only be able to allow certain predetermined, approved and harmless things to be communicated. “Press 1 to say bye.” Otherwise, they would be liable for everything said.

Needless to say, this is the American copyright industry’s dream.

The concept is completely foreign. The only thing helping somewhat against file sharing would be to kill the entire net, and this would be such an action.

The copyright industry’s lobby association Netopia is working intensely to push for exactly this, trying to spin it as “intermediary responsibility”.
Conclusion

So there it is. All in black and white, in excruciating and incriminating detail.

All the attacks on civil liberties and dismantlements of rights in Sweden, rights that have been and should be taken for granted, have been a demand from American trade interests. And these attacks continue to this date.

This takes some time to digest, as MEP Christian Engström writes (translated: “Tinfoil Hats Off for Sweden’s Puppet Government“). But now, we know that the politicians lied, all the time. Everything was mail-order legislation, violating Swedish citizens to benefit American industry. Just as we have claimed since 2006, but haven’t had the clear proof to show for it until now.
http://falkvinge.net/2011/09/05/cabl...ight-monopoly/





European Commission Slip Reveals Censorship In ACTA

In an inadvertent slip, the European Commission reveals that ACTA will indeed bring censorship to the Internet. As usual, they say this in the calmest soothing tone of voice.

The European Commission, which is sort of the Administration in the EU, published a rebuttal to “rumors on the net about ACTA” and tries to set the record straight. Note the two first points: “ACTA ensures people everywhere can continue to share non-pirated material and information on the web. ACTA does not restrict freedom of the internet. ACTA will not censor or shut down websites.”

There is one word on their web page that stands out and reveals so much more about the nature of ACTA:

“Non-pirated”. Everybody will be free to share “non-pirated” material. All of a sudden, there is a qualifier to what information we are able to share on the net; this qualifier has never been there before. We have always been able to send whatever we like, and possibly answer for it afterwards.

This is very, very serious. For what it says here is that the net will only be usable for government-approved communications; the government takes itself the right to determine what the net is usable for and what it isn’t usable for. To 250 million Europeans who share culture and don’t see anything wrong with defying an immoral monopoly, this is an arrogant slap in the face, but it’s more than that and worse than that. Any qualifier to what can be communicated — “non-pirated” in this case — always means “government-approved”, that only governmentally approved communications may take place.

And this is serious for the deepest of democratic reasons: Any communications technology must be compatible with dissent.

At the same time as the government takes itself the right to determine what can be communicated and what cannot, a communications technology stops being compatible with dissent.

Now, the prudent question here would be if it isn’t true that some information has never been free to share, and that you can get prosecuted for doing so? This would be a very relevant observation.

There are many things you’re not allowed to share in terms of information. Military secrets, medical journals, libel/slander, ongoing criminal investigations, just to name a few. All of these have always been possible to share on the net, but if caught doing so, you can be hauled off to court for it. After the fact. The postal service has always still been usable to share this information.

And yet, the one single thing listed as impossible to share over the net is violations of the copyright monopoly. If the Commission really was referring to things that you were legally unable to share, you’d expect military secrets to come first, followed by governmental hush-hushy documents. But no.

This is an obvious slip trying to calm people into saying that everything will be as before, but the forced factual correctness of it reveals that we are indeed talking about censorship.

Another objection here would be that the language requiring ISPs to police the net was taken out of ACTA. That is… not quite so. The specific phrase requiring that was taken out in one revision, yes. But in the same revision, the same thing was re-inserted in another place. Specifically, this text was inserted:

Desiring to promote cooperation between service providers and rights holders to address relevant infringements in the digital environment;

It looks fairly innocent, like most legal text where you don’t have the full context. To fully appreciate the impact of this text, one needs to know the background leading up to it and the negotiations. Hax writes a bit about it here (in Swedish). The gist of it is that it’s enforcement of extrajudicial censorship, plain and simple, through threats of third-party liability.

UPDATE – seeing that this story is climbing on Reddit, and now hitting frontpage, I’m inserting the fuller explanation from the summary of today’s anti-ACTA rallies:

…there was a very clear recurring theme among the Members of European Parliament speaking, MEPs from three different parties. They all told the story of how software patents had been defeated in Europe, followed by the crucial “amendment 138? in the Telecoms Package, which aimed to shut people off en masse from the Net. Well, thanks to diligent activists and people on the inside, we managed to get as strong safeguards in place as possible against shutting people off. But the monopoly lobbyists never quit. Now they’re at it again, this time saying that if authorities can’t shut people off en masse due to that “amendment 138?, maybe they can get private corporations – the ISPs – to do it instead through third-party liability forcing certain terms of service and wiretapping, shutting people off outside due process of law at the copyright industry’s fingerpointing as well as trying for live, realtime censorship. Hence, ACTA.

ACTA will bring censorship. Extrajudicial censorship. At the request of a bloody entertainment industry. That is shameful.
http://falkvinge.net/2012/02/03/euro...rship-in-acta/





We Need Copyright Reform, Not ACTA!
Marietje Schaake

As a Member of the European Parliament, I very much welcome the increased attention the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has received in the past weeks. It has taken a while for massive outcry to emerge, but we are seeing protest voices getting louder and louder.

The internet is a great tool to alert politicians to all the dangers of this treaty, just as the internet was a tool to mobilize people against the SOPA and PIPA bills in the US. For any lobby to be effective, however, it must be fact based. Misinformed criticism helps those supporting ACTA.

The dangers and threats of the ACTA treaty are shared by free-speech advocates and access to medicine groups alike. ACTA is seeking to deal with a number of widely differing issues, and hence does not do a good job at any of them. Additionally, there are serious concerns about the collateral damage that ACTA would cause.

Regrettably, concerns by businesses, NGO’s and politicians have not led to a better result. This is partly due to the intransparant way in which ACTA has been established and negotiated. As a democratically elected representative, I believe it is not the role of government to protect outdated business models, and I do believe it is our job to ensure democratic oversight.

Besides zooming in on the details of what ACTA will and will not do, taking a step back and looking at the broader picture is also important. As someone who advocates copyright reform, notably the harmonization of copyright laws in Europe, I do not believe stricter enforcement of outdated systems is helpful or relevant. Enforcement is not even possible in many cases, and not without violating people’s fundamental rights.

Yet there is a big push towards enforcing outdated legal structures of copyright by the entertainment industry. ACTA will lock any signatory country into a system of copyright enforcement, leaving the democratic process disadvantaged to enact necessary reform of our laws to suit the digital age.

The fast development of the information society and all the innovations we have seen in the last 15 or so years have changed the way we live. People can enforce their fundamental rights of access to information, and free speech with the help of the internet. Human rights violations are documented and shared across the world, and the way we access and share information and culture such as news, music and films has changed forever. Most copyright rules were developed for the printing press and codified internationally before radio had even been invented.

Some of the most important EU laws regulating the internet were established before social media and peer-to-peer sharing took off. The E-commerce Directive of 2000 and the Copyright Directive of 2001 were enacted without foresight of the new services which were developed over the last 10 years. Time and time again, it has been proven that the Directives and their national implementations do not suit the digital age that followed directly afterwards. The fragmentation of European copyright puts the EU, which is widely known for its wealth in culture, at a competitive disadvantage in comparison to the United States.

Copyright and E-Commerce need to suit the needs of the advanced information society we now live in. To enable a flourishing Digital Single Market in Europe, we need to analyse case-law of the last 12 years regarding the internet, hear from creators, innovators and consumers. If we want to serve consumers, artists and businesses well, we need to find a new balance in copyright. Every aspect of copyright needs to be discussed: the exclusive rights, limitations and exceptions, collective management, enforcement, etc. Only then should we discuss how to enforce the new found balance on the international arena, such as with ACTA.

ACTA must not be passed. Let’s focus on reform to allow for the opportunities of the internet to bloom, instead of allowing outdated business models to limit the free market, and to criminalize audiences. Additionally, health threats as a result of counterfeit medicine deserve a better solution than ACTA. Join me in voicing your concern with this treaty, so we can establish flexible copyright rules which are fit for the 21st century.
https://torrentfreak.com/we-need-cop...t-acta-120204/





ACTA: Germany Delays Signing Anti-Piracy Agreement
BBC

Germany has halted signing a controversial anti-piracy accord, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta), after the justice ministry voiced concerns.

A foreign ministry spokesperson told AFP that the delay was to "give us time to carry out further discussions".

Latvia put off ratification on Friday. Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have already delayed the process.

International protests against the agreement are expected on Saturday.

The Associated Press reports Germany's that Justice ministry believes the legislation is unnecessary in Germany and that the European Parliament should vote on Acta before the country considers it for ratification.

Anti-Acta websites currently list more than 50 protests scheduled to take place across Germany on Saturday.

Last week about 2,000 people marched in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana against Acta.

In Janurary thousands of protestors took to the streets in Poland.

Measures within Acta to tackle online piracy have proven particularly controversial.

Previously "Hacktivists" claiming to act on behalf of Anonymous have attacked official websites supporting the international agreement.

Supporters of the treaty argue that the measures are necessary to clamp down on growing levels of piracy.

The treaty has yet to be ratified by the European Parliament.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16980451





Patent Troll Claims Ownership of Interactive Web – And Might Win
Joe Mullin

The mother of all patent troll trials unfolds in Texas where Google, Amazon and Adobe are fighting a patent claiming ownership over online video, image rotation and search auto-complete. We explain and start a series.

The city of Tyler, Texas, is better known as the nation’s “rose capital” than as a hotspot of the technology industry. It’s a quiet, conservative city of about 100,000, full of wide streets and big trucks.

This week, though, Tyler is the site of a remarkable battle over the history of the World Wide Web — a trial that could affect the future of e-commerce. The federal courthouse downtown is packed to the brim with dozens of lawyers, representing the world’s biggest internet companies, including Yahoo, Amazon, Google and YouTube.

A succession of pioneers of the early web — including the web’s father, Tim Berners-Lee himself — have flown in from around the world to denounce two software patents they believe threaten the future of web innovation. East Texas has transformed itself into something of a haven for patent suits over the past several years, but by any standard, the trial now underway is an extraordinary circus of dark suits.

How did all the trouble start?

Michael Doyle, a low-profile Chicago biologist, claims that it was actually he and two co-inventors who invented — and patented — the “interactive web” before anyone else, while they were employed by the University of California back in 1993. Doyle argues that a program he created at the UC’s San Francisco campus, which allowed doctors to view embryos over the nascent World Wide Web, was the first program that allowed users to interact with images inside of a web browser window. The defendants hotly contest that, saying that it was programs like Pei-Yuan Wei’s pioneering Viola that first offered this functionality.

Today, Doyle and his lawyers say he’s owed royalty payments for the use of a stunning array of modern web technologies. Watching online video, having a “search suggestion” pop up in a search bar, or even rotating an image of a sweater you might want to buy on an online shopping site — all are said to infringe on the idea-space of Doyle and his company, Eolas Technologies.

To those who follow high-profile tech litigation, the name Eolas may sound familiar. The company sued Microsoft back in 1999, winning a $521 million jury verdict in 2003 that shook the tech world. While that verdict was overturned on appeal, Microsoft ultimately settled rather than re-try the case. The full settlement amount wasn’t disclosed, but the University of California revealed that its cut was $30.4 million; since an Eolas lawyer at one point described UC’s take as 25 percent, minus expenses, it suggests the company got well over $100 million from that case.

The Microsoft verdict got the attention of tech community in a big way. Eolas was denounced in some quarters as a “patent troll” — the company has never launched its own web browser, or any commercially successful technology that’s well known, for that matter.

Groups that felt the impact of the patent started to take action. The W3C, the global web standards group, contacted the patent office directly, sending a letter signed by Berners-Lee warning that unless the Eolas patent was invalidated it would cause the “disruption of global web standards” and cause “substantial economic and technical damage to the operation of the World Wide Web.”

But while the PTO initially rejected the Eolas patent claims in reexams, Doyle and his lawyers were dogged in insisting they had the right to some kind of patent claim. The office ultimately reversed course — a fact now being trumpeted to an East Texas jury by Eolas’ lawyers.

Eolas’ lawyers have actually used the struggle against the patent to bolster their claim that it’s an important invention. Mike McKool, the lead lawyer for Eolas, told the jury during opening statements that tech companies have been attacking the patent ever since 1995 — when it was still three years away from issuing.

Eolas Becomes Texan to Pursue a New Suit

By the time Eolas settled its case against Microsoft in 2007, the business of “patent trolling” had begun to coalesce around a few popular venues, most notably the small towns of East Texas.

While the Microsoft suit was underway, the company applied for a second patent, which it received on Oct. 6, 2009. The same day, Eolas filed suit — in East Texas — against more than 20 big companies, including Apple, Playboy, Perot Systems, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, and Frito-Lay — all for using the “interactive web.”

Most of those companies settled; eight remain as defendants. In addition to the internet companies mentioned above, GoDaddy, JC Penney, Staples, and CDW Corp are in the case. In documents filed last month, Eolas lawyers said they will seek damages of more than $600 million against those eight companies, with more than half of it coming from Google and Yahoo.

By 2009, although Doyle continued to live in Chicago, Eolas had transformed itself into a Texan company, at least on paper. It incorporated in the state, and moved its headquarters — just two rooms in a small office building — to Tyler. The company moved one full-time employee, its licensing officer, to Tyler as well, and hired some part-time nursing students at the University of Texas’ Tyler campus to work on a product it was beta-testing.

The tech companies in the case asked to transfer the case to California, but Judge Leonard Davis, who is overseeing the case, refused to allow it. After all, Davis reasoned, Eolas picked six defendant companies that were based in Texas, including four — Perot Systems, Frito-Lay, JC Penney, and Rent-A-Center — that were headquartered in Plano, a Dallas suburb which is within the Eastern District of Texas. Davis also declined to let the case be divided up, saying it wouldn’t promote “judicial economy.”

And that’s how Berners-Lee ended up testifying to an eight-person jury in East Texas on Tuesday morning, restating to some degree an argument he made in Scientific American in 2010 — that patents could be a serious threat to the future of the Web. In the Eolas case, it looks like Berners-Lee’s nightmare may be about to come true.

The new Eolas suit has also put the University of California in an unprecedented and awkward situation, as a not-so-silent partner to Eolas’ increasingly widespread, and controversial, business. While the UC could reap many millions from an Eolas win, it is suing the world’s biggest internet companies — the same companies that recruit its students, and are enmeshed with the UC in many other ways. The plaintiff’s lawyers have been referring to the patents as the “university patents” and make reference to the innovative history of the UC to make their case to the jury.

What Happens Next

The Eolas trial is actually scheduled to be four back-to-back trials in Tyler. In the first, a jury will determine whether the patents are valid or not; if Eolas survives that stage, it will get to go on to sue the eight remaining defendants in three successive infringement and damages trials. The jury may get the first case by Thursday, and could have a decision before the weekend.

And if Eolas and the UC are successful, the companies gathered in Tyler this week will likely be just the beginning of a long list of targets who will end up paying Eolas millions of dollars to use the web.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...t-troll-trial/





Tim Berners-Lee Takes the Stand to Keep the Web Free
Joe Mullin

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, testified in a courtroom Tuesday for the first time in his life. The web pioneer flew down from Boston, near where he teaches at MIT, to an eastern Texas federal court to speak to a jury of two men and six women about the early days of the web.

His trip is part of an effort by a group of internet companies and retailers trying to defeat two patents — patents that a patent-licensing company called Eolas and the University of California are saying entitle them to royalty payments from just about anyone running a website with “interactive” features, like rotating pictures or streaming video.

The defendants, including Google, Amazon, and Yahoo, are hoping that Berners-Lee’s testimony—combined with that of other web pioneers like Netscape co-founder Eric Bina, Viola browser inventor Pei-Yuan Wei, and Dave Raggett (who invented the HTML “embed” tag) — will convince the jury that the inventions of Eolas and its founder, Michael Doyle, aren’t worth much. The stakes couldn’t be higher — if Berners-Lee and the defendants don’t succeed, Eolas and Doyle could insist on a payout from almost every modern website.

Berners-Lee, a slight 56-year-old man, spoke quickly and quietly; at one point, Judge Leonard Davis asked him to speak up. “We have a language situation with your accent that makes it doubly
difficult,” he told the scientist. Berners-Lee shifted position and looked about the room as he spoke, and seemed uncomfortable at times.

Jennifer Doan, a Texarkana lawyer representing Yahoo and Amazon, led the questioning.

“Mr. Berners-Lee, why are you here?” asked Doan.

“I am here because I want to help get some clarity over what was obvious, and what was the feeling of computing [in the early 1990s]…. The tools I had in my knapsack, so to speak,” he said.

After describing how Berners-Lee worked at CERN in Switzerland back in the 1980s, Doan moved on to the web. When Berners-Lee invented the web, did he apply for a patent on it, Doan asked.

“No,” said Berners-Lee.

“Why not?” asked Doan.

“The internet was already around. I was taking hypertext, and it was around a long time too. I was taking stuff we knew how to do…. All I was doing was putting together bits that had been around for years in a particular combination to meet the needs that I have.”

Doan: “And who owns the web?”

Berners-Lee: “We do.”

Doan: “The web we all own, is it ‘interactive’?”

“It is pretty interactive, yeah,” said Berners-Lee, smiling.

Then Doan moved on to the heart of Berners-Lee’s testimony: to establish the importance of the Viola browser, created by Pei Wei, who was at that time a computer science student at UC Berkeley. The Viola browser is a key piece of “prior art” that the defendant companies hope will invalidate the UC/Eolas patent.

Berners-Lee described Viola as “an important part of the development of the web.”

The jury was shown an e-mail from Pei Wei to Berners-Lee dated December 1991 — almost two years before Doyle’s invention — which read in part: “One thing I’d like to do soon, if I have time, is to teach the parser about Viola object descriptions and basically embed Viola objects (GUIs and programmability) into HTML files.”

Later Tuesday, Wei would testify that he had demonstrated interactive elements working in the Viola browser to Sun Microsystems in May 1993 — several months before Doyle claims to have come up with his invention.

Finally, Doan turned to Berners-Lee’s book, in which he described Wei as “a very inventive student at UC Berkeley.” Berners-Lee described how the web community at that time wasn’t focused on patents or even money — Wei simply put his invention online for free.

“It was ahead of its time,” said Berners-Lee. “The things Pei was doing would later be done in Java.” Java was heavily used in the late 1990s to add interactivity to web pages, later to be supplanted by Flash, Javascript and now HTML5.

His own act, creating the World Wide Web, was more a matter of personalities and persuasion than it was a matter of hammering out code, he explained.

“[My book] is the story of those times — inventing it, and not so much inventing but the social process of trying to get everyone to use the same standards. The reason the Web took off is not because it was a magic idea, but because I persuaded everyone to use HTML and HTTP.”

In cross-examination, lead Eolas attorney Mike McKool grilled Berners-Lee about his views on software patents.

“There’s been a debate, in Europe, about whether to allow the patenting of software,” McKool began.

“There have been debates, in general, for many years [about software patents],” replied Berners-Lee.

“They don’t allow patenting of software over there, do they?”

The scientist on the witness seemed to start an answer, then reconsidered, saying only: “I’m not a patent attorney.”

“You do understand that under United States law — in this country — our country can and does grant patents on software?” asked McKool.

“Yes.”

Then McKool brought up a 2004 article in the International Herald-Tribune, in which Berners-Lee was quoted being critical of software patents.

“[Don't you want] complete abolition of software patents?” asked McKool.

On the stand, Berners-Lee hesitated to condemn software patents in general, but made clear he was concerned about the Eolas patents.

“I clearly — I had concerns about the software patent system in the U.S., and this particular patent is key in raising those concerns,” said Berners-Lee, looking increasingly worn down.

McKool pulled up a slide from a talk Berners-Lee gave in 2004, when he accepted an award in Finland. The bullet points noted that in the U.S., software patents created “fear, uncertainty and doubt” and an “incentive for obfuscation.” The bar for what constitutes a novel invention is “set ridiculously low” by the U.S. Patent Office, the slide stated.

“What you say,” said McKool, raising his voice and slowing down as he reached the most nationalistic part of his cross-exam, “is that Europe should stay clear of the mess the U.S.A. is in.”

Berners-Lee quietly concurred. Those looked like his slides; his points.

It’s hard to tell what kind of impact Berners-Lee had on the case. His celebrity status in the tech world is probably unknown to the jurors, and he was tough to follow at times. At best, he might lend some gravitas to the defendants’ plan: rolling out a series of web pioneers associated with early technologies—like the MOSAIC and Viola browsers — to show that Doyle and his company weren’t first.

After his testimony, several lawyers from the audience approached the “father of the web,” hoping to meet him and shake his hand. I also approached, handing him a card and telling him I was a journalist here to cover the trial.

“There are a lot of people who want to understand what this trial is about, and why it’s here,” I said. “People want to know why it’s so important that you came to Tyler.”

“Oh…. I can’t, I just can’t,” said Berners-Lee, still looking shaken.

He saw that my card was from the journalism school at UC Berkeley, where I have a reporting fellowship.

“University of California,” he said. “So, do you teach journalism?” He seemed more interested in the idea that I might be a professor than anything else.

“Not really,” I said. “I’m just a reporter. There’s one class I help out with; that’s it.”

“That’s important, journalism,” he said, seeming distracted but also heartfelt. “Keep up the good work. It’s about getting the truth out to the world, I suppose.”

But he wouldn’t be able to help me with that. Not today, in this room in Tyler, in a room full of dark-suited lawyers. More than 20 years after the quiet English scientist had set the web in motion, he seemed to sense that in Texas, his invention was confronting something new and threatening.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...rs-lee-patent/





Texas Jury Strikes Down Patent Troll’s Claim to Own the Interactive Web
Joe Mullin

After threatening web companies for more than a decade, Michael Doyle and his patent-holding company Eolas Technologies — named after the Irish word for knowledge — may be finished.

An eight-member federal jury in East Texas deliberated Thursday for just a few hours before concluding that all of Eolas’ asserted claims of ownership to technology allowing access to the interactive web were invalid. That means the three upcoming trials that were scheduled to rule on infringement and damages, for Google, Yahoo and other companies, have been canceled. The eight defendant companies who resisted the lawsuits won’t pay anything to Eolas or its partner, the University of California, for using the web.

Eolas maintained its patents entitled the company to royalty payments from just about anyone running a website with “interactive” features, like rotating pictures or streaming video. The chief issue in the case was whether the first computer program that allowed access to an “interactive web” was created by the little-known Chicago biologist Doyle, who runs Eolas out of Chicago. Or was it one of the web pioneers put on the stand by the defendant companies — such as Pei-Yuan Wei and his Viola browser, or Dave Raggett and his <embed> tag?

The dueling teams of lawyers have spent millions creating elaborate presentations, trying for the last three days to convince a jury of average folks in a federal district court in eastern Texas that their side was right.

If the jury had upheld the patents, there would have been a potentially brutal damages phase in which Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Amazon, JC Penney, CDW Corp. and Staples would have been sued for infringement and been asked for more than $600 million in damages, with the majority of that coming from Google, Amazon and Yahoo.

The Eolas patents were denounced for years before this week’s landmark trial, but managed to survive repeated re-exams at the United States Patent and Trade Office.

However, Thursday’s verdict is likely a setback Eolas can’t overcome. It may well be appealed, but that will be a long process, and in the meantime Eolas won’t be able to go after new targets.

After the trial, Judge Leonard Davis visited with the jurors a while, as is his custom. They were awed, I’m told—as they often are—why such an important web case ended up in Tyler.

Apparently they were a little star-struck by Tim Berners-Lee, although you certainly couldn’t tell during trial.

At “Rick’s on the Square” opposite the courthouse, defense lawyers were celebrating. There was a giddy atmosphere; these folks truly felt like they saved the Web today.

As for the winner’s reactions: Yahoo spokeswoman Dana Lengkeek said: “Yahoo is pleased with the outcome of the case and the jury’s decision, and we thank the jury for their time and commitment to this case. Yahoo respects intellectual property and will continue to protect its freedom to operate by defending itself against meritless claims.”

Kate Coultas, a spokeswoman for JCPenney – the only primarily bricks-and-mortar retailer who continued fighting the patent, added: “JCPenney is very pleased about the jury’s decision and thank all of them for their service. We also want to thank the true inventors who traveled from all over the world to testify in this matter and tell the real story about who invented the technology.”

Google spokesman Jim Prosser was less effusive. “We are pleased that the court found the patents invalid, as it affirms our assertion that the claims are without merit,” Prosser said.

Despite winning, Amazon declined to comment.

Lead Eolas attorney Mike McKool did not return a call seeking comment.

However, Douglas Cawley of McKool Smith in Dallas, a lawyer for Eolas did tell Bloomberg, “We’re disappointed, but we respect the jury’s decision. We will evaluate our options.”

As for the many companies that settled with Eolas, they might be regretting that pragmatic decision in light of the verdict.

Those companies include: Apple, Argosy Publishing, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, JP Morgan Chase, New Frontier Media, Office Depot, Perot Systems, Playboy Enterprises International, Rent-A-Center, Sun Microsystems (bought by Oracle while this litigation was underway), and Texas Instruments.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ve-web-patent/





Bradley Manning: 2012 Nobel Peace Prize Nomination

February 1 2012 the entire parliamentary group of The Movement of the Icelandic Parliament nominated Private Bradley Manning for the Nobel Peace Prize. Following is the reasoning we sent to the committee explaining why we felt compelled to nominate Private Bradley Manning for this important recognition of an individual effort to have an impact for peace in our world.

Our letter to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee:

We have the great honor of nominating Private First Class Bradley Manning for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. Manning is a soldier in the United States army who stands accused of releasing hundreds of thousands of documents to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. The leaked documents pointed to a long history of corruption, war crimes, and imperialism by the United States government in international dealings. These revelations have fueled democratic uprising around the world, including a democratic revolution in Tunisia. According to journalists, his alleged actions helped motivate the democratic Arab Spring movements, shed light on secret corporate influence on our foreign policies, and most recently contributed to the Obama Administration agreeing to withdraw all U.S.troops from the occupation in Iraq.

Bradley Manning has been incarcerated for well over a year by the U.S. government without a trial. He spent over ten months of that time period in solitary confinement, conditions which experts worldwide have criticized as torturous. Juan Mendez, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, has repeatedly requested and been denied a private meeting with Manning to assess his conditions.

The documents made public by WikiLeaks should never have been kept from public scrutiny. The revelations – including video documentation of an incident in which American soldiers gunned down Reuters journalists in Iraq – have helped to fuel a worldwide discussion about America’s overseas engagements, civilian casualties of war, imperialistic manipulations, and rules of engagement. Citizens worldwide owe a great debt to the WikiLeaks whistleblower for shedding light on these issues, and so I urge the Committee to award this prestigious prize to accused whistleblower Bradley Manning.

Sincerely,
Birgitta Jónsdóttir
Margrét Tryggvadóttir
Þór Saari

Members of the Icelandic Parliament for The Movement
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...t=va&aid=29077





Rick Santorum Calls For Regulating the Internet and Believes Freedom Should be Limited
Ken Bingham

GOP Presidential candidate Rick Santorum has a freedom problem. He says there is too much freedom on the Internet and it should be regulated. He was the only candidate that did not take a strong stand against SOPA and PIPA and called for regulating the Internet and said freedom should be limited. He called those that want limited government “radical individualism”. Rick Santorum is no conservative. Don’t be fooled by this authoritarian masquerading as a conservative.

“They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues.

That is not how traditional conservatives view the world. There is no such society that I’m aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.”

- Rick Santorum

http://oneutah.org/conservatives/con...ld-be-limited/





As Iran Cracks Down Online, Tor Tests Undetectable Encrypted Connections
Andy Greenberg

Keeping secrets on the web in a country as digitally repressive as Iran isn’t easy. But as Iran tightens the screws on its Web censorship, the hackers at the anti-censorship Tor project are working on something harder: Keeping secret the act of keeping secrets.

Ahead of the anniversary of Iran’s revolution Saturday, the country’s government has locked down its already-censored Internet, blocking access to many services and in some cases cutting off all encrypted traffic on the Web of the kind used by secure email, social networking and banking sites.

In response, the information-freedom-focused Tor Project is testing a new idea: Encrypted connections that don’t look encrypted. To skirt the so called “deep packet inspection” filters Iran’s government has deployed to block all Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Layer Security (SSL and TLS) encryption that protesters might use to communicate privately, Tor is trying a new kind of bridge to the Web, one the group is calling “obfsproxy,” or obfuscated proxy.

Tor executive director Andrew Lewman says the idea is to “make your Ferrari look like a Toyota by putting an actual Toyota shell over the Ferrari,” where the Toyota is normal communications and the Ferrari underneath is the encrypted communications. “Basically, say you want to look like an XMPP chat instead of SSL,” he writes to me, referring to a protocol for instant messaging as the decoy for the encrypted SSL communications. “Obfsproxy should start up, you choose XMPP, and obfsproxy should emulate XMPP to the point where even a sophisticated [deep packet inspection] device cannot find anything suspicious.”

Lewman warns that obfsproxy is in a “super alpha” stage of development, and in its current form might only last a short time before Iran finds a way to detect the obscured encrypted communications. The tool currently only obscures SSL and TLS as the SOCKS protocol used by proxy servers, but in the future, he hopes it will be able to impersonate any sort of traffic, including HTTP or instant messages.

In addition to its crackdown on encryption, sources inside Iran are reporting that the country is blocking access to sites including Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! using its traditional IP blocking technology. Tor typically circumvents that censorship technique by routing Internet traffic through a series of volunteers’ computers around the world, and in recent years using a collection of more secret encrypted “bridge” connections that relay users’ traffic to that network. Between 50,000 and 60,000 users in the country use Tor daily.

But the country’s efforts to block all SSL and TLS traffic put that strategy at risk. Hence the group’s efforts to prevent the government’s censors from distinguishing its encrypted traffic from normal traffic with the new obfsproxy tool.

Lewman says that despite a few bugs, the early users of obfsproxy report that it’s “working well in-country.”

In the mean time, Tor is looking for technically-skilled users to run obfsproxy bridges to give Iranians a path to the uncensored web. “This kind of help is not for the technically faint of heart but it’s absolutely needed for people in Iran, right now,” wrote Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum in an email to the Tor Talk mail list.

Read Appelbaum’s full message asking for obfsproxy volunteers here, and read a full technical desription of how obfsproxy works here.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygree...d-connections/





Anonymous Takes Down DHS Website in Hacking Spree

Last Friday the hacktivist group known as Anonymous momentarily took down DHS’s homepage along with several other high-profile attacks in a coordinated campaign

Hackers temporarily brought down the site shortly after 4 PM EST, but within minutes DHS restored its homepage.

The latest attack comes on the same day the group released an audio recording of a call between FBI agents and Scotland Yard that Anonymous had intercepted. The recording stems from a January conference call between the two law enforcement agencies, and the FBI has confirmed the authenticity of the recording.

“The information was intended for law enforcement officers only and was illegally obtained. A criminal investigation is under way to identify and hold accountable those responsible,” the agency said in a statement.

Continuing their Friday hacking spree, Anonymous then infiltrated the website of the attorneys representing Sergeant Frank Wuterich, a U.S. Marine who was recently tried for the 2005 massacre of Iraqi civilians, and released sensitive documents relating to the case. Wuterich was sentenced to no time in jail, despite openly admitting that he had orchestrated the raid on two civilian homes in Iraq and instructed troops to “shoot first, ask later.”

In a statement released along with 3 GB of private email messages, transcripts, testimony and trial evidence from the law firm, Anonymous said, “When justice cannot be found within the confines of their crooked court systems, we must seek revenge on the streets and on the Internet – and dealing out swift retaliation is something we are particularly good at. Worry not comrades, it’s time to deliver some epic ownage.”

The group also replaced the homepage of the Boston Police Department with a message warning of future attacks in retaliation for the department’s crack down of the city’s Occupy movement.

Finally the group took down the Greek Ministry of Justice’s website.

Speaking to a Gizmodo reporter, an unnamed source within the hacker collective, confirmedthat all of Friday’s attacks were part of a coordinated effort.

“Each attack has its particular motivations. For example, Boston Police have been in our crosshairs ever since they started harassing the occupation movement there,” the source said.
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire....-hacking-spree





Bill Would Allow DHS to Impose Cybersecurity Standards

A bill before Congress would significantly increase the power of DHS to monitor the cybersecurity practices of industries and services which are part of the U.S. critical infrastructure

A bill before Congress would significantly increase the power of DHS to monitor the cybersecurity practices of industries and services which are part of the U.S. critical infrastructure. Even though not all the details of the bill have been disclosed, industry sources already criticize it is too reaching.

Those portions of the bill which were made public define which companies are part of the U.S. critical infrastructure sector by referring to companies with systems “whose disruption could result in the interruption of life-sustaining services, catastrophic economic damage or severe degradation of national security capabilities.”

The Washington Post reports that the purpose of the bill is to allow DHS to examine whether or not the computer systems and networks of industries which are part of the U.S. critical infrastructure are sufficiently secure against hackers and malware. If DHS determines these cyber systems are not secure enough, then the agency will be allowed to require upgrades and improvements to security.

The bill was written largely by the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and the Senate homeland panel, and observers note that there one thing notably missing from the bill: a “kill switch” – that is, a provision which would give the president authority to shut down Internet traffic to compromised Web sites during a national emergency.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and tech companies oppose the bill, preferring voluntary industry self-regulation and consultation with the government instead of a new set of cybersecurity laws.

Stewart Baker, a former assistant secretary at DHS, is not impressed with complaints by the industry and says the government must get involved to force companies to take cybersecurity more seriously. He said that concerns about federal involvement are ingenuous in light of the fact that computer breaches over the past several years offer evidence that hackers and other governments, such as China and Russia, are already inside many industry networks.

“[Critical infrastructure companies] already have governments in their business, just not the U.S.,” Baker said. “For them to say they don’t want this suggests they don’t really understand how bad this problem is.”
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire....rity-standards





The Senate’s SOPA Counterattack?: Cybersecurity the Undoing of Privacy
Jim Harper

The Daily Caller reports that Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) is planning another effort at Internet regulation—right on the heels of the SOPA/PIPA debacle. The article seems calculated to insinuate that a follow-on to SOPA/PIPA might slip into cybersecurity legislation the Senate plans to take up. Whether that’s in the works or not, I’ll detail here the privacy threats in cybersecurity language being circulated on the Hill.

A Senate draft currently making the rounds is called the “Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2012.” It sets up “cybersecurity exchanges” at which government and corporate entities would share threat information and solutions.

Sharing of information does not require federal approval or planning, of course. Information sharing happens all the time according to market processes. But “information sharing” is the solution Congress has seized upon, so federal information sharing programs we will have. Think of all this as a “see something, say something” campaign for corporate computer security people. Or perhaps “e-fusion centers.”

Reading over the draft, I was struck by sweeping language purporting to create “affirmative authority to monitor and defend against cybersecurity threats.” To understand the strangeness of these words, we must start at the beginning:

We live in a free country where all that is not forbidden is allowed. There is no need in such a country for “affirmative” authority to act. So what does this section do as it in purports to permit private and governmental entities to monitor their information systems, operate active defenses, and such? It sweeps aside nearly all other laws controlling them.

“Consistent with the Constitution of the United States and notwithstanding and other provision of law,” it says (emphasis added), entities may act to preserve the security of their systems. This means that the only law controlling their actions would be the Constitution.

It’s nice that the Constitution would apply</sarcasm>, but the obligations in the Privacy Act of 1974 would not. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act would be void. Even the requirements of the E-Government Act of 2002, such as privacy impact assessments, would be swept aside.

The Constitution doesn’t constrain private actors, of course. This language would immunize them from liability under any and all regulation and under state or common law. Private actors would not be subject to suit for breaching contractual promises of confidentiality. They would not be liable for violating the privacy torts. Anything goes so long as one can make a claim to defending “information systems,” a term that refers to anything having to do with computers.

Elsewhere, the bill creates an equally sweeping immunity against law-breaking so long as the law-breaking provides information to a “cybersecurity exchange.” This is a breath-taking exemption from the civil and criminal laws that protect privacy, among other things.

(1) IN GENERAL.—No civil or criminal cause of action shall lie or be maintained in any Federal or State court against any non-Federal governmental or private entity, or any officer, employee, or agent of such an entity, and any such action shall be dismissed promptly, for the disclosure of a cybersecurity threat indicator to—
(A) a cybersecurity exchange under subsection (a)(1); or
(B) a private entity under subsection, (b)(1), provided the cybersecurity threat indicator is promptly shared with a cybersecurity exchange.

In addition to this immunity from suit, the bill creates an equally sweeping “good faith” defense:

Where a civil or criminal cause of action is not barred under paragraph (1), a good faith reliance by any person on a legislative authorization, a statutory authorization, or a good faith determination that this Act permitted the conduct complained of, is a complete defense against any civil or criminal action brought under this Act or any other law.

Good faith is a question of fact, and a corporate security official could argue successfully that she acted in good faith if a government official told her to turn over private data. This language allows the corporate sector to abandon its responsibility to follow the law in favor of following government edicts. We’ve seen attacks on the rule of law like this before.

A House Homeland Security subcommittee marked up a counterpart to this bill last week. It does not have similar language that I could find.

In 2009, I testified in the House Science Committee on cybersecurity, skeptical of the government’s ability to tackle cybersecurity but cognizant that the government must secure its own systems. “Cybersecurity exchanges” are a blind stab at addressing the many challenges in securing computers, networks, and data, and I think they are unnecessary at best. According to current plans, cybersecurity exchanges come at a devastating cost to our online privacy.

Congress seems poised once again to violate the rule from the SOPA/PIPA disaster: “First, do no harm to the Internet.”
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/the-s...ng-of-privacy/





FBI Seeks System to Monitor Social Networking Sites

The FBI, seeking to monitor conversations on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, recently placed a request for information from technology companies to develop a system capable of automatically sifting through the torrents of “publicly available” data for keywords relating to terrorism, crime, and other matters of national security

The FBI is the latest in a long line of federal agencies seeking to monitor conversations on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

The bureau recently placed a request for information from technology companies to develop a system capable of automatically sifting through the torrents of “publicly available” data for keywords relating to terrorism, crime, and other matters of national security.

The agency’s goal is to create an early-warning system that can provide real-time open source intelligence that will improve “the FBI’s overall situational awareness.” According to the bureau’s request for information, the proposed system must “have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats.”

Other federal agencies like DARPA, the Defense Department’s advanced research arm have also sought to develop social media monitoring capabilities, but unlike DOD and the CIA, which focus on foreign threats, the FBI’s attention is primarily on domestic surveillance.

In an effort to mollify concerns over privacy, the FBI was careful to note that it only seeks to analyze publicly available data – information that is already being used by marketers and advertisers.

Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney of the Electronic Freedom Frontier, is worried, despite the agency’s assurances.

Most people who use social media expect that only their friends and followers are reading their posts, which Lynch said, give them “the sense of freedom to say what they want without worrying too much about recourse, but these tools that mine open source data and presumably store it for a very long time, do away with that kind of privacy. I worry about the effect of that on free speech in the U.S.”
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire....tworking-sites





Defendant Ordered to Decrypt Laptop May Have Forgotten Password
David Kravets

A Colorado woman ordered to decrypt her laptop so prosecutors may use the files against her in a criminal case might have forgotten the password, the defendant’s attorney said Monday.

The authorities seized the Toshiba laptop from defendant Ramona Fricosu in 2010 with a court warrant while investigating alleged mortgage fraud. Ruling that the woman’s Fifth Amendment rights against compelled self-incrimination would not be breached, U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn ordered the woman in January to decrypt the laptop.

“It’s very possible to forget passwords,” the woman’s attorney, Philip Dubois, said in a telephone interview. “It’s not clear to me she was the one who set up the encryption on this drive. I don’t know if she will be able to decrypt it.”

The decryption case is a complicated one, even if solely analyzed on the underlying Fifth Amendment issue. Such decryption orders are rare, and they have never squarely been addressed by the Supreme Court.

One case involved a child pornography prosecution that ended with a Vermont federal judge ordering the defendant to decrypt the hard drive of his laptop.

While that case never reached the Supreme Court, it differed from the Fricosu matter because U.S. border agents already knew there was child porn on the computer because they saw it while the computer was running during a 2006 routine stop along the Canadian border. The authorities’ belief that Fricosu’s hard drive might contain evidence against her was the result of a recorded jailhouse conversation between her and a co-defendant.

And now the case is even more complicated and raises the question of what might happen if the woman does not comply with the judge’s order.

If she does not decrypt the drive by month’s end, as ordered, she could be held in contempt and jailed until she complies. If the case gets to that point, Judge Blackburn would have to make a judgement call and determine whether the woman had forgotten the code or was refusing to comply.

“The government will probably say you need to put her in jail until she breaks down and does what she is ordered to do,” Dubois said. “That will create a question of fact for the judge to resolve. If she’s unable to decrypt the disc, the court cannot hold her in contempt.”

Prosecutor Patricia Davies said in a telephone interview that the defendant has not said in any court document that she might have forgotten the password.

“She has not taken that position in court,” Davis said. “When she does, we’ll figure it out.”

Davies had urged Judge Blackburn to order Fricosu to decrypt the hard drive, writing “that encrypting all inculpatory digital evidence will serve to defeat the efforts of law enforcement officers to obtain such evidence through judicially authorized search warrants, and thus make their prosecution impossible.”

The judge refused Friday to suspend his order to allow time for an appeal to the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Dubois, Fricosu’s attorney, said Monday he would petition the appeals court anyway in hopes that it agrees with his position that Judge Blackburn’s order breaches Fricosu’s Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...tten-password/





The Cost of Bolstering U.S. Infrastructure Cyber-Protection

To achieve security capable of stopping 95 percent of cyber attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure – 100 percent protection is not attainable – experts said the industries involved would have to boost spending to a group total of $46.6 billion from the current $5.3 billion

Cyber attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure could plunge millions into darkness, severely disrupt financial markets and financial transactions, cause major floods as dams holding reservoir water open their gates, kill scores of patients in hospitals, and much more.

What would it take to prevent such catastrophes? A new study on the issue, conducted by the Michigan-based Ponemon Institute and Bloomberg Government, was released last week in Washington.

“The consequences of a successful attack against critical infrastructure makes these cost increases look like chump change,” Lawrence Ponemon, head of the Ponemon Institute, reports the Fort Wayne, Indiana, Journal Gazette in an interview. “It would put people into the Dark Ages.”

The Journal Gazette quotes the report to say that companies, including utilities, banks, and phone carriers would have to spend almost nine times more on cybersecurity to prevent a digital Pearl Harbor.

To achieve security capable of stopping 95 percent of attacks — the Ponemon Institute considers this to be the highest attainable level – the experts surveyed for the study said they would have to boost spending to a group total of $46.6 billion from the current $5.3 billion.
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire....yberprotection





Drones Over U.S. Get OK by Congress
Shaun Waterman

Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s … a drone, and it’s watching you. That’s what privacy advocates fear from a bill Congress passed this week to make it easier for the government to fly unmanned spy planes in U.S. airspace.

The FAA Reauthorization Act, which President Obama is expected to sign, also orders the Federal Aviation Administration to develop regulations for the testing and licensing of commercial drones by 2015.

Privacy advocates say the measure will lead to widespread use of drones for electronic surveillance by police agencies across the country and eventually by private companies as well.

“There are serious policy questions on the horizon about privacy and surveillance, by both government agencies and commercial entities,” said Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation also is “concerned about the implications for surveillance by government agencies,” said attorney Jennifer Lynch.

The provision in the legislation is the fruit of “a huge push by lawmakers and the defense sector to expand the use of drones” in American airspace, she added.

According to some estimates, the commercial drone market in the United States could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars once the FAA clears their use.

The agency projects that 30,000 drones could be in the nation’s skies by 2020.

The highest-profile use of drones by the United States has been in the CIA’s armed Predator-drone program, which targets al Qaeda terrorist leaders. But the vast majority of U.S. drone missions, even in war zones, are flown for surveillance. Some drones are as small as model aircraft, while others have the wingspan of a full-size jet.

In Afghanistan, the U.S. use of drone surveillance has grown so rapidly that it has created a glut of video material to be analyzed.

The legislation would order the FAA, before the end of the year, to expedite the process through which it authorizes the use of drones by federal, state and local police and other agencies. The FAA currently issues certificates, which can cover multiple flights by more than one aircraft in a particular area, on a case-by-case basis.

The Department of Homeland Security is the only federal agency to discuss openly its use of drones in domestic airspace.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an agency within the department, operates nine drones, variants of the CIA’s feared Predator. The aircraft, which are flown remotely by a team of 80 fully qualified pilots, are used principally for border and counternarcotics surveillance under four long-term FAA certificates.

Officials say they can be used on a short-term basis for a variety of other public-safety and emergency-management missions if a separate certificate is issued for that mission.

“It’s not all about surveillance,” Mr. Aftergood said.

Homeland Security has deployed drones to support disaster relief operations. Unmanned aircraft also could be useful for fighting fires or finding missing climbers or hikers, he added.

The FAA has issued hundreds of certificates to police and other government agencies, and a handful to research institutions to allow them to fly drones of various kinds over the United States for particular missions.

The agency said it issued 313 certificates in 2011 and 295 of them were still active at the end of the year, but the FAA refuses to disclose which agencies have the certificates and what their purposes are.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the FAA to obtain records of the certifications.

“We need a list so we can ask [each agency], ‘What are your policies on drone use? How do you protect privacy? How do you ensure compliance with the Fourth Amendment?’ ” Ms. Lynch said.

“Currently, the only barrier to the routine use of drones for persistent surveillance are the procedural requirements imposed by the FAA for the issuance of certificates,” said Amie Stepanovich, national security counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research center in Washington.

The Department of Transportation, the parent agency of the FAA, has announced plans to streamline the certification process for government drone flights this year, she said.

“We are looking at our options” to oppose that, she added.

Section 332 of the new FAA legislation also orders the agency to develop a system for licensing commercial drone flights as part of the nation’s air traffic control system by 2015.

The agency must establish six flight ranges across the country where drones can be test-flown to determine whether they are safe for travel in congested skies.

Representatives of the fast-growing unmanned aircraft systems industry say they worked hard to get the provisions into law.

“It sets deadlines for the integration of [the drones] into the national airspace,” said Gretchen West, executive vice president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, an industry group.

She said drone technology is new to the FAA.

The legislation, which provides several deadlines for the FAA to report progress to Congress, “will move the [drones] issue up their list of priorities,” Ms. West said.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...-sky-near-you/





Wired Opinion: The Perpetual, Invisible Window Into Your Gmail Inbox
Andy Baio

The other day, I tried out Unroll.me, a clever new service that reads your inbox to let you unsubscribe from mailing lists and other unwanted e-mail flotsam with a single click.

As I was about to connect my Gmail account, my finger hovered over the “Grant access” button.

Wait a second. Who am I giving access to my Gmail account, anyway? There was no identifying information on their site — no company address, no team page listing the names of its team members, and broken links to their privacy policy or terms of service.

For all I knew, it could be run by unscrupulous spammers or an Anonymous troll looking for lulz. And I was about to give them unfettered access to eight years of my e-mail history and, with password resets, the ability to access any of my online accounts?

I had to dig around online to find out who’s behind it, and fortunately, Unroll.me is a totally legit NYC-based startup providing a useful service. I spoke to Perri Blake Gorman, Unroll.me’s cofounder and CMO, who assured me they’ll add all the company information as they roll out their public beta.

But since Gmail added OAuth support in March 2010, an increasing number of startups are asking for a perpetual, silent window into your inbox.

I’m concerned OAuth, while hugely convenient for both developers and users, may be paving the way for an inevitable privacy meltdown.

The Road to OAuth

For most of the last decade, alpha geeks railed against “the password anti-pattern,” the common practice for web apps to prompt for your password to a third-party, usually to scrape your e-mail address book to find friends on a social network. It was insecure and dangerous, effectively training users how to be phished.

The solution was OAuth, an open standard that lets you grant permission for one service to connect to another without ever exposing your username or password. Instead of passwords getting passed around, services are issued a token they can use to connect on your behalf.

If you’ve ever granted permission for a service to use your Twitter, Facebook, or Google account, you’ve used OAuth.

This was a radical improvement. It’s easier for users, taking a couple of clicks to authorize accounts, and passwords are never sent insecurely or stored by services who shouldn’t have them. And developers never have to worry about storing or transmitting private passwords.

But this convenience creates a new risk. It’s training people not to care.

It’s so simple and pervasive that even savvy users have no issue letting dozens of new services access their various accounts.

I’m as guilty as anyone, with 49 apps connected to my Google account, 80 to Twitter, and over 120 connected to Facebook. Others are more extreme. Samuel Cole, a developer at Kickstarter, authorized 148 apps to use his Twitter account. NYC entrepreneur Anil Dash counted 88 apps using his Google account, with nine granted access to Gmail.

For Twitter, the consequences are unlikely to be serious since almost all activity is public. For Facebook, a mass leak of private Facebook photos could certainly be embarrassing.

But for Gmail, I’m very concerned that it opens a major security flaw that’s begging to be exploited.

The Privacy Danger

A long list of services, large and small, request indefinite access to your Gmail account.

I asked on Twitter and Google+ for people to check their Google app permissions to see who they’ve granted Gmail access to. The list includes a range of inbox organizers, backup services, email utilities, and productivity apps: TripIt, Greplin, Rapportive, Xobni, Gist, OtherInbox, Unsubscribe, Backupify, Blippy, Threadsy, Nuevasync, How’s My Email, ToutApp, ifttt, Email Game, Boomerang, Kwaga, Mozilla F1, 0boxer, Taskforce, and Cloudmagic.

Once granted, all of these services are issued a token that gives unlimited access to your complete Gmail history. And that’s where the danger lies.

You may trust Google to keep your email safe, but do you trust a three-month-old Y Combinator-funded startup created by three college kids? Or a side project from an engineer working in his 20 percent time? How about a disgruntled or curious employee of one of these third-party services?

Any of these services becomes the weakest link to access the e-mail for thousands of users. If one’s hacked or the list of tokens leaked, everyone who ever used that service risks exposing his complete Gmail archive.

The scariest thing? If the third-party service doesn’t discover the hack or chooses not to invalidate its tokens, you may never know you’re exposed.

In the past, Gmail’s issued security warnings to accounts being accessed from multiple IP addresses. I spoke to OtherInbox founder Joshua Baer, and he said that Google’s eased up on the warnings because of the prevalence of third-party services.

It’s entirely possible for someone with a stolen token to read, search, and download all your mail to their server for months, and you’d never find out unless they exposed themselves, or you were diligently auditing your “Last account activity” history.

Stay Safe

Clearly, we’re not going to stop using awesome new utilities just because there’s a privacy risk. But there are best practices you can follow to stay safe.

• Clean up your app permissions. The best thing you could do, right now, is to log into each service you care about and revoke access to the apps you no longer use or care about, especially those that have access to Gmail. Finding the permissions pages can be tricky, but the nice folks at MyPermissions.org made a handy dashboard linking to every one.
• Think before you authorize. Before authorizing an account, find out who you’re granting access to. Look for a staff page, contact address, and take a look at the privacy policy to make sure they’re not sharing or selling your info with third parties. Bonus points if they outline their security policies and offer a way to disconnect service from within the app. If anything seems off, don’t do it.
• When in doubt, change your password. Have a feeling that someone might be reading your mail, but not sure which app is to blame? Changing your password instantly invalidates all your Google and Facebook OAuth tokens, though Twitter tokens persist after password changes.

Google could improve, as well. Their permissions page is too hard to find, even for experienced users, and it’s impossible to see which apps have accessed your account recently.

Facebook does an excellent job with this, but Google only shows you the IP address and the protocol it used to connect. Surfacing this information, as a periodic e-mail or on-site notification, would go a long way to averting a potential disaster.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/...ow-into-gmail/





It's 2012 and Your Kids Have an iPhone - Do You Know Where They Are? I Do.
Scott Hanselman

Google Map Pin tells me your locationThe strangest thing just happened. I'm sitting here in a hotel in New Zealand and my phone pops up an alert from a push-to-talk voice chat application I recently installed called Voxer. It's a voicemail from a tween (a child perhaps not quite 13 - in-between) teasing me about my name. "Scott Hanselman - Who would name their kid Scott HanselAndGretal man. *giggle*" Harmless stuff, of course, but weird and random. No idea who this is.

The name wasn't familiar but there was a little icon next to the voicemail in the Voxer app. Perhaps you've seen it before. It was a little red pin.

I clicked, and the young person's exact location popped up. They were sitting in a public library, likely after school. Because the application is an iPhone app and tied into their identity, the app shows their full name, not an alias. Literally a light 20 seconds (not minutes, mind you) of Googling and I find their Google Plus profile and Twitter. Google Plus promotes even more "information leakage" with it's "Places Lived" feature. This showed the last three cities the young person lived in. One of them was Portland. Since I live in Portland that seemed too coincidental. I searched for people I know on Facebook with the same last name who lived in Portland. Turns out I'm Facebook-friends with this young person's dad, although both have long since moved out of town. I messaged him and he was appreciative, relived it was me and not a stranger, and is dealing with his child.

What's the moral here friends? Let me break it down for you:

More apps leak your exact location than you realize.
• These apps often ask you once, and then broadcast your location multiple times a day. I'm looking at you Facebook, Twitter, GroupMe, Voxer and Foursquare. I doubt anyone, including this young person, would ever guess that this little voice chat program would give up his address. If adults don't noticed this stuff, how is a teenager (or younger) supposed to?
• Folks at Voxer - You need to make location services OFF by default.
• Your kids have no idea. Yet.

They may be social this and savvy that, but honestly, they don't realize how much info they are leaking. Take a moment today and talk to them about it.

You've had the Drugs Talk, the Sex Talk, now have the Location Services Talk.
• You can turn off Location Services on a per apps basis, and you can also turn on Restrictions on your phone so that only some apps (Find my Friends, for example) can access the GPS while others (Twitter, Voxer, etc) can't.
• Have a Location Services policy for your family
• As stupid as teens often are, they are smart when armed with information. Explain the situation, show them the control they have and apply your family policy.

Hope this helps your kids. Spread the word.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Its201...heyAreIDo.aspx





Hacking Cases Focus on Memo to a Murdoch
Sarah Lyall and Ravi Somaiya

As dozens of investigators and high-powered lawyers converge on Rupert Murdoch’s News International in the phone hacking scandal, attention has focused on the printout of an e-mail excavated three months ago from a sealed carton left behind in an empty company office.

Addressed to Mr. Murdoch’s son James, it contained explosive information about the scale of phone hacking at The News of the World tabloid — information James Murdoch says he failed to take in because he did not read the whole e-mail chain.

The e-mail returned to cause trouble for News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of News Corporation, several weeks ago when the company said that it had been deleted from Mr. Murdoch’s computer. Even as people familiar with the investigations said the e-mail and its convoluted history will form a crucial part of the inquiry into allegations of a cover-up, the scandal appeared to be widening on Saturday, as senior journalists at News Corporation’s Sun tabloid were arrested.

Tracing the story of the e-mail, which was found in November and first became publicly known in December, also sheds light on the intrigue surrounding Mr. Murdoch, the company’s heir apparent, and on efforts to protect him from the scandal.

Embroiled in three separate police operations, a parliamentary investigation, a judicial inquiry and a flurry of civil suits with potentially hundreds more waiting in the wings, News Corporation has begun to provide information that suggests a broader sweep of hacking activity at News International than was suspected even recently and more widespread knowledge within the company of past efforts to cover it up.

This new level of cooperation includes the release of damaging material from an internal investigation that is being overseen by executives who, observers say, are using it to consolidate their power within the company, a move that could come at James Murdoch’s expense.

“There’s no good way out of it,” a former News International executive said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigations. “If you put up your hand and say, ‘I’m going to investigate myself and here’s what I found’ and you’re not very open and full about it, then it looks like just another cover-up.”

A Stunning Find

When The News of the World was closed in disgrace last summer, its newsroom was locked down by security guards. In mid-November, News International says, investigators searching the seized materials found a storage crate that, judging from a sticker on top, had come from the office of Colin Myler, the paper’s last editor. It contained a hard copy of an e-mail sent from Mr. Myler to James Murdoch on June 7, 2008 — in reality a chain of e-mails that included correspondence with Tom Crone, then an in-house lawyer.

“Unfortunately, it is as bad as we feared,” Mr. Myler wrote, speaking of an impending lawsuit that threatened to reveal that voice-mail hacking at the paper was endemic.

Last summer, senior News International officials said that in that crucial period in 2008, Mr. Murdoch had neither been told about nor shown documentation of the extent of the illegality at The News of the World. The discovery of the e-mail, said one former official with knowledge of the situation, was completely unexpected.

Why did it take so long to come to light? Linklaters, a law firm working for News International, said that a junior employee found it in November, but that senior officials at the firm did not know about it until December.

In addition, Linklaters told the Commons Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, Mr. Myler’s electronic copy had been lost “in a hardware failure” on March 18, 2010,” while Mr. Murdoch’s electronic copy had been deleted on Jan. 15, 2011 during an “e-mail stabilization and modernization program.”

Big corporations routinely delete old e-mails. Between April 2010 and July 2011, News International discussed e-mail deletion with HCL Technologies, which manages its e-mail system, on nine occasions, according to a letter HCL wrote to Parliament last summer.

Most of the reasons were mundane. But in January 2011, HCL said, News International asked whether HCL was capable of helping “truncate” — meaning delete — “a particular database” in the e-mail system. The question came shortly after disclosures in a civil suit brought by the actress Sienna Miller raised fears that material about widespread phone hacking at The News of the World might become public.

News International did not explain why it wanted the deletion. HCL said it could not help and told the company to look elsewhere.

It is not clear whether the “stabilization and modernization program” that deleted the Murdoch e-mail was linked to News International’s request to “truncate” data. But it is clear that on Jan. 15, when the deletion took place, the company knew it was facing civil and potentially criminal inquiries. A month earlier, reacting to new information from the Miller and other cases, it had suspended the News of the World’s news editor, Ian Edmondson, on suspicion of phone hacking, and handed some material to the police.

Questions of Timing

“They were aware that it was highly likely the police were going to reopen the investigation,” said a person with knowledge of the police operation. Indeed, the police formally began Operation Weeting, their new phone hacking investigation, 11 days later.
At every step of the inquiry, the company has said it is cooperating fully and producing relevant documents. A News International spokeswoman declined to comment for this article.

A lawmaker involved in the investigations of News International said the company’s primary objective from the beginning was to protect James Murdoch, and everything else was secondary to that.

News International has given a variety of explanations for where its e-mails are and whether the ones it says it cannot find were deleted, lost in computer malfunctions or simply mislaid. In December 2010, a News of the World editor told a court in Scotland that “many e-mails had been lost when they were being moved to an archive in India.” That same month, a company lawyer said that News International could not retrieve e-mails written more than six months earlier. Neither of those statements was true, the company admitted later.

Last month, the High Court judge presiding over the civil lawsuits brought by hacking victims castigated News International for what he called its “startling approach” to e-mail. Even after the company received a formal request for documents, said the judge, Geoffrey Vos, “a previously conceived plan to delete e-mails was put in place by senior management.”

Speaking of News Group Newspapers, a division of News International, Justice Vos said that “they are to be treated as deliberate destroyers of evidence.”

At every step of the way, News International has declared that it is doing its utmost to investigate wrongdoing. In 2007, for example, the company told Parliament that it had conducted an investigation by asking an outside law firm, Harbottle & Lewis, to examine 2,500 e-mails, and that the investigation had cleared senior editors of wrongdoing.

Many of those supposedly cleared were later arrested on suspicion of phone hacking and other charges. And Harbottle & Lewis said later that the investigation had, in fact, been requested by News International to answer allegations in an unfair dismissal claim brought by a former employee involved in phone hacking — not to look for more phone hacking at the paper.

News International has pledged to police itself better. Under the aegis of its four-person Management and Standards Committee, it says it will comb through and make available every piece of potentially pertinent material.

Dozens of people — lawyers, forensic accountants, forensic computer technicians and, sometimes, police officers — gather daily at a site in Thomas More Square here, where News International is based, searching through 300 million e-mails and other documents stretching back a decade.

“Pooling data together is a complex matter,” said a person with knowledge of the standards committee. “What is recoverable is a very technical operation.”

Mr. Murdoch, who is News Corporation’s deputy chief operating officer and chairman and chief executive of its international division, relocated to New York recently as part of a long-planned move meant to help ease him into place to eventually take over News Corporation from his father. But the younger Mr. Murdoch’s position seems much more precarious than it did a year ago. Last month, he resigned from the board of GlaxoSmithKline, Britain’s biggest drug company, and last summer his dream of helping News Corporation take over all of British Sky Broadcasting shattered to pieces in the wake of the hacking scandal.

People in New York say that Mr. Murdoch is confident he will survive the storm back in London. But questions still abound about what he knew, and when.

When he got the 2008 e-mail, News International was facing a major potential disaster: a lawsuit brought by Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, who said that his phone had been hacked and that he had proof.

That is what the e-mail told Mr. Murdoch. Farther down in a short message chain, there was mention of a “nightmare scenario” of legal repercussions, and an acknowledgment that The News of the World “knew of and made use of the voice mail information” it illegally acquired from Mr. Taylor’s cellphone.

Mr. Myler’s e-mail was sent on a Saturday afternoon. Mr. Murdoch replied minutes later, agreeing to a meeting that Tuesday and telling Mr. Myler he would be home “if you want to talk before.”

Soon afterward, Mr. Murdoch approved a settlement of more than $1.4 million to Mr. Taylor, an unprecedented amount for such a case.

In December, he said he had not read the whole e-mail. “I am confident that I did not review the full e-mail chain at this time or afterwards,” he said in a letter to the Commons culture committee. “I would also like to take this opportunity to reaffirm my past testimony that I was not aware of evidence that either pointed to widespread wrongdoing or indicated that further investigation was necessary.”

Contradicting Mr. Murdoch’s testimony, Mr. Myler and Mr. Crone told Parliament they had informed him about the damaging aspects of the Taylor lawsuit. Mr. Murdoch has consistently denied this, declaring that he approved the settlement because of his lawyers’ advice, not because he knew the underlying details.

Jo Becker contributed reporting from New York.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/w...g-scandal.html





The Age of Big Data
Steve Lohr

GOOD with numbers? Fascinated by data? The sound you hear is opportunity knocking.

Mo Zhou was snapped up by I.B.M. last summer, as a freshly minted Yale M.B.A., to join the technology company’s fast-growing ranks of data consultants. They help businesses make sense of an explosion of data — Web traffic and social network comments, as well as software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers — to guide decisions, trim costs and lift sales. “I’ve always had a love of numbers,” says Ms. Zhou, whose job as a data analyst suits her skills.

To exploit the data flood, America will need many more like her. A report last year by the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, projected that the United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired.

The impact of data abundance extends well beyond business. Justin Grimmer, for example, is one of the new breed of political scientists. A 28-year-old assistant professor at Stanford, he combined math with political science in his undergraduate and graduate studies, seeing “an opportunity because the discipline is becoming increasingly data-intensive.” His research involves the computer-automated analysis of blog postings, Congressional speeches and press releases, and news articles, looking for insights into how political ideas spread.

The story is similar in fields as varied as science and sports, advertising and public health — a drift toward data-driven discovery and decision-making. “It’s a revolution,” says Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. “We’re really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched.”

Welcome to the Age of Big Data. The new megarich of Silicon Valley, first at Google and now Facebook, are masters at harnessing the data of the Web — online searches, posts and messages — with Internet advertising. At the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, Switzerland, Big Data was a marquee topic. A report by the forum, “Big Data, Big Impact,” declared data a new class of economic asset, like currency or gold.

Rick Smolan, creator of the “Day in the Life” photography series, is planning a project later this year, “The Human Face of Big Data,” documenting the collection and uses of data. Mr. Smolan is an enthusiast, saying that Big Data has the potential to be “humanity’s dashboard,” an intelligent tool that can help combat poverty, crime and pollution. Privacy advocates take a dim view, warning that Big Data is Big Brother, in corporate clothing.

What is Big Data? A meme and a marketing term, for sure, but also shorthand for advancing trends in technology that open the door to a new approach to understanding the world and making decisions. There is a lot more data, all the time, growing at 50 percent a year, or more than doubling every two years, estimates IDC, a technology research firm. It’s not just more streams of data, but entirely new ones. For example, there are now countless digital sensors worldwide in industrial equipment, automobiles, electrical meters and shipping crates. They can measure and communicate location, movement, vibration, temperature, humidity, even chemical changes in the air.

Link these communicating sensors to computing intelligence and you see the rise of what is called the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. Improved access to information is also fueling the Big Data trend. For example, government data — employment figures and other information — has been steadily migrating onto the Web. In 2009, Washington opened the data doors further by starting Data.gov, a Web site that makes all kinds of government data accessible to the public.

Data is not only becoming more available but also more understandable to computers. Most of the Big Data surge is data in the wild — unruly stuff like words, images and video on the Web and those streams of sensor data. It is called unstructured data and is not typically grist for traditional databases.

But the computer tools for gleaning knowledge and insights from the Internet era’s vast trove of unstructured data are fast gaining ground. At the forefront are the rapidly advancing techniques of artificial intelligence like natural-language processing, pattern recognition and machine learning.

Those artificial-intelligence technologies can be applied in many fields. For example, Google’s search and ad business and its experimental robot cars, which have navigated thousands of miles of California roads, both use a bundle of artificial-intelligence tricks. Both are daunting Big Data challenges, parsing vast quantities of data and making decisions instantaneously.

The wealth of new data, in turn, accelerates advances in computing — a virtuous circle of Big Data. Machine-learning algorithms, for example, learn on data, and the more data, the more the machines learn. Take Siri, the talking, question-answering application in iPhones, which Apple introduced last fall. Its origins go back to a Pentagon research project that was then spun off as a Silicon Valley start-up. Apple bought Siri in 2010, and kept feeding it more data. Now, with people supplying millions of questions, Siri is becoming an increasingly adept personal assistant, offering reminders, weather reports, restaurant suggestions and answers to an expanding universe of questions.

To grasp the potential impact of Big Data, look to the microscope, says Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. The microscope, invented four centuries ago, allowed people to see and measure things as never before — at the cellular level. It was a revolution in measurement.

Data measurement, Professor Brynjolfsson explains, is the modern equivalent of the microscope. Google searches, Facebook posts and Twitter messages, for example, make it possible to measure behavior and sentiment in fine detail and as it happens.

In business, economics and other fields, Professor Brynjolfsson says, decisions will increasingly be based on data and analysis rather than on experience and intuition. “We can start being a lot more scientific,” he observes.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of the payoff from data-first thinking. The best-known is still “Moneyball,” the 2003 book by Michael Lewis, chronicling how the low-budget Oakland A’s massaged data and arcane baseball statistics to spot undervalued players. Heavy data analysis had become standard not only in baseball but also in other sports, including English soccer, well before last year’s movie version of “Moneyball,” starring Brad Pitt.

Retailers, like Walmart and Kohl’s, analyze sales, pricing and economic, demographic and weather data to tailor product selections at particular stores and determine the timing of price markdowns. Shipping companies, like U.P.S., mine data on truck delivery times and traffic patterns to fine-tune routing.

Online dating services, like Match.com, constantly sift through their Web listings of personal characteristics, reactions and communications to improve the algorithms for matching men and women on dates. Police departments across the country, led by New York’s, use computerized mapping and analysis of variables like historical arrest patterns, paydays, sporting events, rainfall and holidays to try to predict likely crime “hot spots” and deploy officers there in advance.

Research by Professor Brynjolfsson and two other colleagues, published last year, suggests that data-guided management is spreading across corporate America and starting to pay off. They studied 179 large companies and found that those adopting “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity gains that were 5 percent to 6 percent higher than other factors could explain.

The predictive power of Big Data is being explored — and shows promise — in fields like public health, economic development and economic forecasting. Researchers have found a spike in Google search requests for terms like “flu symptoms” and “flu treatments” a couple of weeks before there is an increase in flu patients coming to hospital emergency rooms in a region (and emergency room reports usually lag behind visits by two weeks or so).

Global Pulse, a new initiative by the United Nations, wants to leverage Big Data for global development. The group will conduct so-called sentiment analysis of messages in social networks and text messages — using natural-language deciphering software — to help predict job losses, spending reductions or disease outbreaks in a given region. The goal is to use digital early-warning signals to guide assistance programs in advance to, for example, prevent a region from slipping back into poverty.

In economic forecasting, research has shown that trends in increasing or decreasing volumes of housing-related search queries in Google are a more accurate predictor of house sales in the next quarter than the forecasts of real estate economists. The Federal Reserve, among others, has taken notice. In July, the National Bureau of Economic Research is holding a workshop on “Opportunities in Big Data” and its implications for the economics profession.

Big Data is already transforming the study of how social networks function. In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram of Harvard used packages as his research medium in a famous experiment in social connections. He sent packages to volunteers in the Midwest, instructing them to get the packages to strangers in Boston, but not directly; participants could mail a package only to someone they knew. The average number of times a package changed hands was remarkably few, about six. It was a classic demonstration of the “small-world phenomenon,” captured in the popular phrase “six degrees of separation.”

Today, social-network research involves mining huge digital data sets of collective behavior online. Among the findings: people whom you know but don’t communicate with often — “weak ties,” in sociology — are the best sources of tips about job openings. They travel in slightly different social worlds than close friends, so they see opportunities you and your best friends do not.

Researchers can see patterns of influence and peaks in communication on a subject — by following trending hashtags on Twitter, for example. The online fishbowl is a window into the real-time behavior of huge numbers of people. “I look for hot spots in the data, an outbreak of activity that I need to understand,” says Jon Kleinberg, a professor at Cornell. “It’s something you can only do with Big Data.”

Big Data has its perils, to be sure. With huge data sets and fine-grained measurement, statisticians and computer scientists note, there is increased risk of “false discoveries.” The trouble with seeking a meaningful needle in massive haystacks of data, says Trevor Hastie, a statistics professor at Stanford, is that “many bits of straw look like needles.”

Big Data also supplies more raw material for statistical shenanigans and biased fact-finding excursions. It offers a high-tech twist on an old trick: I know the facts, now let’s find ’em. That is, says Rebecca Goldin, a mathematician at George Mason University, “one of the most pernicious uses of data.”

Data is tamed and understood using computer and mathematical models. These models, like metaphors in literature, are explanatory simplifications. They are useful for understanding, but they have their limits. A model might spot a correlation and draw a statistical inference that is unfair or discriminatory, based on online searches, affecting the products, bank loans and health insurance a person is offered, privacy advocates warn.

Despite the caveats, there seems to be no turning back. Data is in the driver’s seat. It’s there, it’s useful and it’s valuable, even hip.

Veteran data analysts tell of friends who were long bored by discussions of their work but now are suddenly curious. “Moneyball” helped, they say, but things have gone way beyond that. “The culture has changed,” says Andrew Gelman, a statistician and political scientist at Columbia University. “There is this idea that numbers and statistics are interesting and fun. It’s cool now.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/s...the-world.html





In Data Deluge, Multitaskers Go to Multiscreens
Matt Richtel

Workers in the digital era can feel at times as if they are playing a video game, battling the barrage of e-mails and instant messages, juggling documents, Web sites and online calendars. To cope, people have become swift with the mouse, toggling among dozens of overlapping windows on a single monitor.

But there is a growing new tactic for countering the data assault: the addition of a second computer screen. Or a third.

This proliferation of displays is the latest workplace upgrade, and it is responsible for the new look at companies and home offices — they are starting to resemble mission control.

For multiscreen multitaskers, a single monitor can seem as outdated as dial-up Internet. “You go back to one, and you feel slow,” said Jackie Cohen, 42, who uses three 17-inch monitors in her home office in San Francisco, where she edits a blog about Facebook.

Her center screen shows what she is writing or editing, along with e-mail and instant messages; the left and right monitors display news sites, blogs and Twitter feeds, and she keeps 3 to 10 tabs open on each. One monitor recently broke, and she felt hamstrung. “I don’t want to miss seeing something,” Ms. Cohen said.

Her computer seemed to work a bit faster with one monitor fewer, she said. But her brain was a different matter.

“I can handle it,” she added. “I’m sure there are people who can’t.”

Certainly more people are trying. Tech firms sold 179 million monitors worldwide last year and only 130 million desktop computers — meaning “more screens per desk,” said Rhoda Alexander, who heads monitor and tablet research at IHS iSuppli. Monitors are bigger, too. The average monitor sold worldwide is 21 inches, up from 18 inches five years ago, according to iSuppli.

NEC Display, a major supplier of monitors, said 30 to 40 percent of the employees of its corporate customers now used more than one monitor, up from 1 percent four years ago.

There are many reasons for the spike in sales: monitors are much cheaper ($200 to $300 for a 24-inch display today compared with $700 five years ago); they are slimmer, too, so desks can accommodate more of them; and there are more communication tools — instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook — that workers have to keep an eye on (or at least feel they should).

More and bigger screens can convey bragging rights, too. Tech companies use them as recruiting tools, said Chuck Rossi, 45, who uses three monitors (27-inch, 30-inch and a 17-inch laptop) to toggle among dozens of tabs for his engineering job at Facebook, where he checks hundreds of software updates to the site each day before they become public.

“Companies will pitch it” to job candidates, Mr. Rossi said. “They know real estate is important. It shows they are serious about their engineers.”

And the engineers do care about the screens, he said, noting that someone might tell a friend about a new job by adding, “They’re giving me a 30 right off the bat,” which is shorthand for a 30-inch monitor.

The main rationale for a multimonitor setup is that it increases productivity. But that notion is not simple to prove or measure, partly because it depends on the kind of work people do and whether they really need to be constantly looking at multiple data streams. Another theory holds that people have just grown so addicted to juggling that having more monitors simply creates a compulsion to check them.

One study, by the University of Utah, found that productivity among people working on editing tasks was higher with two monitors than with one. The study was financed with about $50,000 by NEC Display, which had hoped to find evidence that companies should buy more monitors to increase productivity. (Other tech companies also promote multiple displays — one Hewlett-Packard ad declares that “two is better than one.”)

The author of the study, James A. Anderson, a professor of communication, said he had not been influenced by NEC’s financing. He said he uses three monitors himself, but also said that it was hard to generalize about whether more monitors are better.

At the very least, Professor Anderson said, more monitors cut down on toggling time among windows on a single screen, which can save about 10 seconds for every five minutes of work. If you have more than one monitor, he said, “You don’t have to toggle back and forth. You can take in everything with the sweep of an eye.”

David E. Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan whose research has found that multitasking can take a serious toll on productivity, said he buys the logic about toggling. But he also warned that productivity can suffer when people keep interrupting their thoughts by scanning multiple screens rather than focusing on one task.

“There is ‘thought-killing’ going on,” Professor Meyer said. “Rome crashed and burned because it got too big. Go past that scale and you’re going to wind up like Rome.”

Matt Alfrey, 39, said he can handle not just two monitors, but six. He is a trader at Pacific Crest Securities in Portland, Ore., and his wall of monitors is a blur of messages, headlines, charts, graphs and stock tickers that he watches to help predict patterns in the market.

But there are downsides, Mr. Alfrey acknowledged, like the fact that even though he sits at a long table with other traders, he feels isolated by his monitors.

“You’re sitting behind a wall,” he said. On the other side of the table is a colleague who lives in Mr. Alfrey’s neighborhood and who is surrounded by monitors, too. “We joke that I’m more likely to see him in the neighborhood,” he said.

Ian Blaine, 42, chief executive of thePlatform, a video software company in Seattle, counts himself in the more-monitors-are-better camp. He uses two himself and buys two for employees who want them. They tend to use one for programming and the other for communications, and Mr. Blaine said the extra monitor can save time on toggling.

“It’s probably milliseconds, but if you’re in the groove, it throws you off your game,” Mr. Blaine said, then added with a laugh, “Maybe I’m making that up and I’ve been duped into buying monitors because they want to look at the Internet while they’re doing work.”

“But for now,” he said, “I’m buying it.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/t...fficiency.html





Hard Drive Breakthrough

New Magnetic Recording Technique Uses Heat to Process Information Much Faster Than Current Technology

An international team of scientists has demonstrated a revolutionary new way of magnetic recording which will allow information to be processed hundreds of times faster than by current hard drive technology.

The researchers found they could record information using only heat -- a previously unimaginable scenario. They believe this discovery will not only make future magnetic recording devices faster, but more energy-efficient too.

The results of the research, which was led by the University of York's Department of Physics, are reported in the February edition of Nature Communications.

York physicist Thomas Ostler said: "Instead of using a magnetic field to record information on a magnetic medium, we harnessed much stronger internal forces and recorded information using only heat. This revolutionary method allows the recording of Terabytes (thousands of Gigabytes) of information per second, hundreds of times faster than present hard drive technology. As there is no need for a magnetic field, there is also less energy consumption."

The multinational team of scientists included researchers from Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine, Russia, Japan and the Netherlands. Experimental work was carried out at the Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland, the Ioffe Physical Technical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands.

Dr Alexey Kimel, from the Institute of Molecules and Materials, Radboud University Nijmegen, said: "For centuries it has been believed that heat can only destroy the magnetic order. Now we have successfully demonstrated that it can, in fact, be a sufficient stimulus for recording information on a magnetic medium."

Modern magnetic recording technology employs the principle that the North pole of a magnet is attracted to the South pole of another and two like poles repulse. Until now it has been believed that in order to record one bit of information -- by inverting the poles of a magnet -- there was a need to apply an external magnetic field. The stronger the applied field, the faster the recording of a magnetic bit of information.

However, the team of scientists has demonstrated that the positions of both the North and South poles of a magnet can be inverted by an ultrashort heat pulse, harnessing the power of much stronger internal forces of magnetic media.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0207133506.htm





HDD Pricewatch: Three Months Into the Thai Floods
Jose Vilches

The hard disk drive supply chain was hit hard late last year when a series of floods struck Thailand. The Asian country accounts for about a quarter of the world's hard drive production, but thousands of factories had to close shop for weeks as facilities were under water, in what is considered the world's fourth costliest natural disaster according to World Bank estimates. That's on top of the human cost of over 800 lives.

Western Digital and Toshiba had factories in the flood zones whereas Seagate was mainly affected by the resulting supply constraints from business partners who were forced to halt production of related components. Among those was Nidec, which produces ~70% of the world's hard drive spindle motors.

All this resulted in hard drive prices shooting through the roof around the end of October as production became more expensive and limited. With the help of price tracking site Camelegg we've checked on a number of mobile and desktop HDDs to get a better overview of how the situation has developed in the last three months.

We observed the first uptick at the end of October, reaching its peak in the first week of November with price increases in the 80-190% range for desktop drives and 80-150% for mobile units. Although we're beginning to see price reductions across the board, on average drives are still about 60-90% more expensive than they were before the flooding.

Desktop hard drive prices

Before Peak Current Price Increase
% (before vs. current)
Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB $179.99 $429.99 $429.99 138.90%
Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB $129.99 $329.99 $239.99 84.62%
Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB $79.99 $229.99 $129.99 62.51%
Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB $139.99 $279.99 $249.99 78.58%
Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB $134.99 $299.99 $219.99 62.97%
Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB $78.99 $229.99 $129.99 64.57%
Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 3TB $179.99 $399.99 $329.99 83.34%
Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 2TB $109.99 $299.99 $219.99 100.01%

Some drives appear to have been more severely impacted than others. For example, the Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB is currently priced at $429.99, a 138% increase over its pre-flood price of $179.99. The Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 is selling for double the price at the beginning of October. Let's check out similar data for mobile oriented hard drives.

Notebook hard drive prices

Before Peak Current Price Increase
% (before vs. current)
Seagate Momentus XT 500GB $99.99 $159.99 $149.99 50.01%
Seagate Momentus XT 320GB $94.99 $149.99 $149.99 57.90%
Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1TB $134.99 $239.99 $199.99 48.15%
Western Digital Scorpio Black 750GB $89.99 $229.99 $229.99 155.57%
Western Digital Scorpio Black 500GB $69.99 $149.99 $139.99 100.01%
Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB $54.99 $129.99 $99.99 81.83%
Samsung Spinpoint M8 1TB $89.99 $219.99 $114.99 27.78%
Samsung Spinpoint M8 750GB $59.99 $114.99 $114.99 91.68%
Samsung Spinpoint M8 500GB $49.99 $129.99 $89.99 80.02%

On the mobile side of things the Western Digital Scorpio Black 75GB and 500GB are marked up as of today by 155% and 100%, respectively. While announcing its quarterly results earlier this week, Seagate acknowledged that hard drive shortages will most likely continue throughout the calendar year of 2012, with supply trailing demand by about 150 million units by the end of 2012. Western Digital seconded this while saying that manufacturing in their Thailand facilities will be running at full capacity in the September quarter.

Interestingly, while Western Digital saw its earnings fall nearly 36% to $145 million compared to the same period a year ago, Seagate actually grew net profits from $150 million to $563 million in the same time frame. The company says it has struck long-term agreements with several customers to lock down pricing, with some deals running multiple years to ensure continuity of HDD supply. This has worked wonderfully for them but unfortunately for end-users it's unlikely prices will return to pre-flood levels as long as the shortage is ongoing.
Effects felt across the tech industry

PC shipments in 2012 impacted by flooding in Thailand

• According to iSuppli, the shortfall in Q1 will be about 3.8 million PCs, while global PC shipments for the whole year are expected to expand by only 6.8% in 2012, down from the previous outlook of 9.5%.
• Nvidia and AMD blame hard drive shortages for poor GPU sales
• Both firms were indirectly affected by the hard drive shortages. Namely, due to decreased PC production, but also because some OEMs dropped discrete GPUs in their systems due to high HDD prices.
• Intel cuts Q4 sales outlook by $1 billion due to hard drive shortages
• Intel lowered its revenue forecast in December, anticipating a drop due to hard drive shortages caused by the flooding in Thailand. It was able to beat its own estimates but still saw a drop compared to Q3.
• Sony, Sharp, Panasonic announce substancial losses
• Even though it certainly wasn't the only factor affecting their business this year, TV manufacturers placed part of the blame for their poor sales performance on the impact the floods had in the supply chain.
• Gartner says the worst is yet to come
• The hard drive shortage had a limited impact on fourth quarter PC shipments and prices -- we checked a few random PCs on Newegg and didn't see any noticeable effects. However, Gartner warns that the major impact will be felt in the first half of this year and potentially continue through the year.

http://www.techspot.com/guides/494-h...h-thai-floods/





The iPhone is a Nightmare for Carriers
David Goldman

The iPhone is squeezing carriers, thanks to the large subsidies Apple demands for its smartphone.

The iPhone may be great for consumers, but takes a nasty toll on wireless carriers' bottom line.

The price of Apple's (AAPL, Fortune 500) iconic smartphone is heavily discounted by carriers. Those subsidies almost single-handedly devastate profit margins for Verizon, AT&T and Sprint.

Since Apple's iPhone debuted on Verizon's network in February 2011, Verizon's "EBITDA service margin" -- a closely watched metric that carriers use to measure their core profit as a percentage of their sales -- has tumbled.

Between 2009 and 2010, Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) averaged EBITDA service margin of 46.4% per quarter. In the first quarter that the iPhone went on sale, that fell to 43.7%. Last quarter, when Verizon sold a record 4.2 million iPhones, its margin plunged to 42.2%.

Verizon had just one "good" stretch this year: The third quarter, when its margin bounced back up to a record 47.8%. That's the same quarter in which iPhone sales stalled, as customers waited for Apple to unveil its heavily anticipated new model.

AT&T (T, Fortune 500) and Sprint suffered an even worse fate. AT&T posted a stunning 28.7% EBITDA service margin last quarter, compared with 37.6% a year earlier. One contributing factor: AT&T sold nearly twice as many iPhones as Verizon last quarter.

After selling nearly 2 million iPhones last quarter, Sprint's adjusted wireless margin fell to 9.5%, down from 16% a year ago. The company said Wednesday morning that its margin was significantly lower than it would have been without the iPhone subsidy.

Those swings are a big problem in an industry where tiny, fractional changes in margin can cause investors to either throw temper tantrums or ticker-tape parades.

"A logical conclusion is that the iPhone is not good for wireless carriers," says Mike McCormack, an analyst at Nomura Securities. "When we look at the direct and indirect economics that Apple has managed to extract from the carriers, the carrier-level value destruction is quite evident."

Other analysts agree. Kevin Smithen of Macquarie Securities said that he expects iPhone sales to continue to grow beyond Wall Street's expectations this year.

"We think the subsidies from these sales will continue to impede margins," Smithen said, who expects AT&T's EBITDA service margins to fall for the fourth straight year.

All smartphones weigh on carriers' margins, since wireless carriers pay a hefty subsidy up front to buy the phones from the handset manufacturers. They make up the difference over the life of a two-year contract.

But the subsidies on the iPhone -- roughly $450 per device -- are the highest in the industry. AT&T's subsidies are even more exacerbated because it gives away the iPhone 3GS for free.

Sprint (S, Fortune 500) revealed in October just how onerous those subsidies can be: The company said it has committed to paying Apple roughly $15.5 billion in up front costs over the next four years, and the carrier does not expect to make money on the deal until 2015.

The cost of adding an iPhone customer is about 40% higher than the cost for the average non-iPhone customer, according to Sprint.

CEO Dan Hesse said he expects that, eventually, the iPhone will be "our most-profitable device."

But Verizon and AT&T's results have shown how tricky that math is.

Carriers' financials were particularly bad last quarter, after Apple had its biggest product launch ever with the iPhone 4S.

So why do carriers insist on selling the iPhone? Verizon, AT&T and Sprint all declined to comment directly on that question for this article, but the companies have said in the past that having the iPhone is a major selling point for their brands.

In an interview with CNNMoney in October, just after Sprint announced it would begin selling the iPhone, Sprint CEO Hesse said the No. 1 reason why customers had left Sprint prior to October was because it had no iPhone.

"It comes down to, 'Do you want to be with them or bet against them?'" he said. "Apple is arguably the best global brand in the tech space."

Apple did not respond to requests for comment on the issue.

Nomura's McCormack said carriers feel the need to have the iPhone to maintain their market share. But to make money on the devices, he thinks they will have to raise rates or get tough with Apple on reducing the subsidy.

The latter is practically impossible. So carriers have been gradually hiking prices. Over the past year, Sprint increased its smartphone rates by $10 a month, Verizon ended its unlimited data offering and New Every Two deal, and AT&T ended its unlimited plan and raised its prices by $5 a month.

Apple isn't the only factor, of course. Carriers are also raising their rates to offset the cost of expanding their network capacity and upgrading to more efficient 4G technologies. But that, too, is tied up with the iPhone boom: Smartphones are data hogs, and they're one of the prime reasons carriers need to sink billions into improving their infrastructure.

It's a delicate balance, but carriers are betting that the iPhone will remain a must-have device -- even if the cost to customers is a cell phone bill that keeps going up.

"The iPhone in the long term will turn out be profitable for carriers once they raise their price points," said Samir Sakpal, analyst at Frost & Sullivan.

"People will be willing to pay if they feel like they're getting a good user experience," he added. "Apple is a brand that carriers and consumers want to have."
http://money.cnn.com/2012/02/08/tech...rrier_subsidy/





Protests Against iPhone Factory Conditions Planned Thursday for Apple Stores
Erica Ogg

Still unhappy with Apple’s response to the New York Times’ series on labor conditions in Chinese factories that make iPhones and iPads, two organizations are planning a globally coordinated protest on Thursday. Representatives from Change.org and SumOfUs.org will deliver petitions to Apple stores in several major cities with the names of 250,000 people who want the iPhone maker to develop “a worker protection strategy” covering the people who build its devices in China.

The groups say they will deliver the petitions in person in Washington, D.C., New York City, San Fransisco, London, Sydney and Bangalore and will carry signs and leaflets.

The SumOfUs petition has more than 56,000 electronic signatures so far. According to the grassroots group, more than 35,000 of those signatures belong to people who say they are current Apple customers — 20,000 of them are said to be iPhone owners. The number includes Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, SumOfUs’ executive director, who says she love her iPhone but doesn’t “love having to support sweatshops.”

In the press release she adds:

“Apple’s attention to detail is famous, and the only way they could fail to be aware of dozens of worker deaths, of child labor, of exposure to neurotoxins is through willful ignorance. That’s why our members are asking Apple to clean up its supply chains in time to make the iPhone 5 its first ethically produced product.”

Apple has said it cares about workers and says it’s doing all it can to improve conditions at factories like Foxconn’s. CEO Tim Cook wrote in an internal email to employees earlier this month, “We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern. Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us.”

But even if that is true, it doesn’t change the fact that some iPhone owners and other concerned citizens aren’t satisfied with the current status of those factories, how workers are treated and paid, and will do what they can to continue to make this an issue for Apple.
http://gigaom.com/apple/protests-aga...-apple-stores/





The Whole Pirate Bay Magnet Archive
allisfine

Somewhere on TorrentFreak, I found out a simple comment, that with the magnet links, the whole Pirate Bay fits on USB stick. So, I thought, why not test it out?

So, I went trough all the Pirate Bay torrents and downloaded as little necessary information as possible for the dump to be somehow useful.

And wow, ALL the pirate bay magnets are just 164 MB unzipped, 90 MB zipped. That is really, really small!

The format is simple. An example:

7015954|Ubuntu 11.10 Alternate 64-bit|707047424|2|5|5316391aed813d4283178dce2b95c8ad56c5be72

7015954 is the piratebay ID of the torrent
Ubuntu 11.10 Alternate 64-bit is the name (there CAN be "|" in the name)
707047424 is the size in bytes
2 is the number of seeders at the time of the snapshot
5 is the number of leechers
5316391aed813d4283178dce2b95c8ad56c5be72 is the magnet link hash

If you want the magnet link correctly, you have to write
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:5316391aed813d4283178dce2b95c8ad56c5be72

I did NOT download comments and/or descriptions, since that would be too big and I didn't want it to be as complete as possible, but as small as possible.

The only thing that's strange is that I found out only about 1.5 millions of torrents, while there is something about 4 millions of torrents in TPB footer. However, I think I am correct and TPB footer is not ;)

Enjoy.

http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/70163...magnet_archive















Until next week,

- js.



















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