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Old 24-12-14, 09:40 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 27th, '14

Since 2002































"The fastest Internet in the world is going to be here in Minneapolis starting this afternoon." – Joe Caldwell, US Internet


"[The Interview]’s been gangbusters. Christmas Day is sold out across the chain." – Christian Parkes, Alamo Drafthouse


"We are working now to remove these relays from the network and we don't expect any anonymity or performance effects." – TOR spokesperson


"We will be taking legal action against Sony Pictures as well as DFSB, the agency that had been carrying out the discussion regarding the use of the track." – Feel Ghood Music






































December 27th, 2014




Hollywood’s Streaming Nemesis Popcorn Time Gets A VPN, But You’ll Have To Pay For It
Jon Russell

Christmas is a time for family, which by extension makes it a period for sitting back and watching a lot of movies and TV. Maybe that’s why Sony released “The Interview” on Christmas Day. That controversial flick will set you back $6 to rent or $12 to buy (unless you join the legions torrenting it), but the folks at Popcorn Time believe you should be able to watch what you like for free — and now they adding a VPN to the streaming service which is Hollywood’s worst nightmare.

Popcorn Time, for those who aren’t aware, is a service that lets you stream a tonne of top films and TV shows to your computer for free. It uses unlicensed torrents on the internet for content, which naturally raises a gamut of legal issues. The original service closed down earlier this year in response to those questions, but a number of anonymous groups resurrected the project, the most notable of which is probably Popcorntime.io, which added an optional VPN to its desktop service today.

VPNs, which essentially route a device’s internet through a different country, are seen as an important addition to Popcorn Time. Some users in Germany were fined for using Popcorn Time earlier this year, so a VPN could help movie fans avoid repercussions for their borderline-legal viewing activity — which we at TechCrunch do not condone, by the way.

We’ve seen VPNs in Popcorn Time before — another group added a free one to its service in June — but Popcorntime.io’s promises to be more robust since it is run by VPN.ht.

Mega caveat though, users will have to pay for it.

VPN.ht is priced at $4.99 per month, but Popcorntime.io users can get it for $1 for the first month after which they can cancel. Alternatively they can pay $3.99 per month on a yearly deal.

Currently in ‘Alpha’, the addition is all well and good, but we can’t help thinking that there are some issues. The cost of free is a primary appeal of Popcorn Time, thus it is unclear whether many users will pony up $30-plus for a VPN service, even though it may be beneficial to them.

Those likely to use VPNs have probably already bought them. Anecdotally, folks shopping for a VPN tend to take their time and weigh up their options from the crowded field. Integrating with Popcorn Time may well give VPN.ht an initial sales boost, but I’m not sure it will make a sizable difference to the service or Popcorn Time’s userbase in the long-term.

A freemium option — offering a free first month of use or a limited monthly service like Tunnelbear — would have been a more impacting addition for both sides.

VPN.ht does support Bitcoin and a range of payment options, but the fact remains that asking people to get their credit cards out — even just for a few dollars — is enough of barrier to deter many.

Beyond the VPN, Popcorntime.io is also promising to revamp its existing Android app with “all kinds of amazing features” soon. You’ll want to keep an eye on the project if that sets your Christmas bells aringing.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/25/popcorn-time-vpn/





Tor Warns of Possible Disruption of Network Through Server Seizures
John Ribeiro

The Tor project said it could face attempts to incapacitate its network in the next few days through the seizure of specialized servers.

The project did not name the group or agency that may try to seize its directory authorities, which guide Tor users on the list of distributed relays on the network that bounce communications around.

“We are taking steps now to ensure the safety of our users, and our system is already built to be redundant so that users maintain anonymity even if the network is attacked. Tor remains safe to use,” wrote “arma” in a post Friday on the Tor project blog. The “arma” developer handle is generally associated with project leader Roger Dingledine.

Rather than take a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network, designed to mask people’s Internet use, take a random path through several relays that cover user tracks.

Unless an adversary can control a majority of the directory authorities, he can’t trick the Tor client into using other Tor relays, according to the Tor project website. There are nine directory authorities spread across the U.S. and Europe, according to arma.

There were no reports of a seizure by late Sunday. The project promised to update the blog and its Twitter account with new information.

Users who live under repressive regimes look to Tor as a way to escape surveillance and censorship. But the network has also been used by illegal websites including online sellers of drugs, like the underground drug market Silk Road. A second version of the market, Silk Road 2.0, was launched a few weeks after the first was seized by law enforcement in October 2013, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Millions use the Tor network at their local Internet cafe to stay safe for ordinary Web browsing, as also banks, diplomatic officials, members of law enforcement, bloggers and others, according to the Tor project.

“Attempts to disable the Tor network would interfere with all of these users, not just ones disliked by the attacker,” it added.

An exit node cluster operator for the Tor network reported unusual network activity late Sunday. But that was not seen as an indication of the expected attack. “No, this is an exit relay operator, not a directory authority operator,” wrote arma in a comment.
http://www.itworld.com/article/28621...-seizures.html





Lizard Squad Hacking Gang Moves from PlayStation, Xbox Live to Tor

Floods network with 3,000 relays, project devs shrug
Chris Williams

The developers of Tor, the software that tries to mask netizens' identities on the internet, have downplayed the arrival of 3,000 new relays – which are courtesy of a gang of hackers.

Tor Project members say the flood of nodes will largely be ignored by the network.

The relays were seemingly introduced by Lizard Squad – which earlier claimed to have ruined Christmas Day for gamers by knocking Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network offline. On Friday, the squad turned its attention to Tor: it insinuated on Twitter that it had added at least 3,000 relays, which bounce connections around the world to hide users' public IP addresses, to the network.

And with that, a few thousand "LizardNSA" relays appeared, with IP addresses assigned to Google's cloud engine; this suggested someone went a bit nuts with a $500 coupon, or stole some credit cards, and spun up a shedload of tiny virtual machines running Tor, or similar.

This is what the Tor network looks like right now. pic.twitter.com/0QQAGVTRRI
— Nadim Kobeissi (@kaepora) December 26, 2014


It was feared the influx of relays, controlled by a single group, could be used to trace users' connections through the network and de-anonymize them. However, as per the Tor specification, the new nodes are given little weight by the systems governing the network – meaning netizens are highly unlikely to encounter them, we're told. And, in any case, the new relays are now being blacklisted, so clients won't use them.

3000 relays, 0.2743% of the Tor network. I can't even be bothered to dredge up the golf clap gif for LizardTeam.
— Eva (@evacide) December 27, 2014


In a statement in the past few minutes, the Tor Project tweeted:

This looks like a regular attempt at a Sybil attack: the attackers have signed up many new relays in hopes of becoming a large fraction of the network.

But even though they are running thousands of new relays, their relays currently make up less than 1 per cent of the Tor network by capacity. We are working now to remove these relays from the network before they become a threat, and we don't expect any anonymity or performance effects based on what we've seen so far.


Earlier, Lizard Squad had claimed it was testing out an alleged zero-day vulnerability in the Tor service, and then later said it was null-routing traffic reaching its relays. Each of the nodes is capable of carrying little bandwidth, though, further driving down their weighting in the network.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12..._sybil_attack/





Send Anywhere Tackles File Sharing Security
VentureBeat Staff

Following the recent spate of high profile security hacks online, confidence in being able to safely share private or confidential files via computer or mobile device seems at an all-time low.

Regrettably enough, that’s not even the sole concern or frustration with file transfers today. In a recent study by the Ponemon Institute, 68% of IT professionals reported it is difficult or very difficult to share documents or files with outside business partners. Almost half believe their company lacks clear visibility of staff-use file-sharing or file sync-and-share applications and the research also showed employees are routinely violating IT policy to get things done faster, creating security risks. If paid experts are still vexed by these problems, how much worse must it be for the average user?

But South Korea-based company Estmob may have an answer. Its mobile and web application Send Anywhere offers a unique blend of features that could put file sharing worries to rest.

Send Anywhere takes file storage out of the equation, letting users send data peer-to-peer or through direct relay. By sharing resources directly without the use of an administrative system go-between, there’s nothing left stored on either a central server or remote cloud to be compromised.

No ID required: anonymity reigns

What’s more, no personal information is collected to identify the user. No email, Facebook credentials, or even name. The service is completely anonymous, allowing transfer using a six-digit or QR code that expires after ten minutes.

“We require no logon or signup,” says Estmob CSO Suhyuk Kang. “We cannot tell who you are, what you are sending, or even the size of the file. Whatever you send is under a secure veil of darkness.”

Send Anywhere is also platform agnostic, allowing users to easily transfer across multiple devices. “We have apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and PC, Mac, a web browser,” Kang notes, “and are in the final stages of development for a Linux version.”

A few opt-in exceptions do exist to these rules, says Kang, to meet user’s specific needs. If you must upload a file, Send Anywhere lets you store it for up to 24 hours. Similarly, by signing up for the recently-launched ‘My Devices’ feature, you can remotely manage any registered device. “Still avoiding the cloud,” Kang adds.

Impressive success to date

The response to the application to date appears rather staggering, both in terms of assessment and scope.

“We have nearly sixteen thousand reviews on the Google Play store with a 4.43 star average,” Kang says. “[And] over 1.5 million downloads spanning more than 120 countries. We currently have over 540,000 monthly unique devices with this number increasing by 17% a month.”

The company attributes Send Anywhere’s success to user’s ability to share date safely, quickly, and anonymously – which may all stem from the fact that it was originally designed to ease its creator’s frustration.

“Yoonsik Oh, the founder and CEO,” Kang explains, “worked as a software engineer at his former company ESTsoft for twelve years, testing many devices with the software he was working on.

“Every time he tried to transfer the updated files to each device, he thought that all possible solutions were stupid and annoying, so he came up with the idea of pairing two devices in a simple way to send files directly.”

In the end, Send Anywhere may prove that not only is necessity the father of invention, but exasperation inspires ease of use.
http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/22/se...ring-security/





Romanian Version of EU Cybersecurity Directive Allows Warrantless Access to Data
Lucian Constantin

More than a dozen Romanian non-governmental organizations are protesting new cybersecurity legislation passed by the parliament last week that would force businesses to provide the country’s national intelligence agencies with access to their data without a court warrant.

The law could also impact businesses from Europe and beyond, as Romania is a hub for IT outsourcing and software development. Many multinational corporations including Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe Systems, Siemens and Intel have research and development centers in the country.

The law, which only lacks the president’s signature to come into effect, is based on the European Union’s upcoming Network and Information Security (NIS) Directive, a legislative framework that aims to strengthen cybersecurity across the E.U., particularly in key areas like critical infrastructure.

An amended version of the proposed NIS Directive was approved by the European Parliament in March. It requires member states to develop national cybersecurity strategies and appoint central authorities in charge of coordinating the response to cyberthreats and incidents.

It also creates new requirements for operators of critical infrastructure, like those in the energy, transport, banking, financial market or health sectors, to assess the risks they face and to adopt appropriate measures to ensure the security of their networks and information. They will also have to report incidents to the national cybersecurity authorities.

Critics of the new Romanian law claim that it is overly broad, likely unconstitutional and ignores the E.U. recommendation that the authority responsible for national cybersecurity should be a civilian body not linked to law enforcement, intelligence or national defense.

Unlike the NIS Directive, which focuses on operators of critical infrastructure, the Romanian bill applies to all organizations, public or private, that own, administer, operate or use cyberinfrastructures. Cyberinfrastructure is defined in the law as “infrastructure in the field of information technology and communications, consisting of information systems, related applications, networks and electronic communication services.”

This means the law would apply to all public institutions, private companies and other legally established organizations that operate computers and networks.

“One company with one computer cannot represent a national cybersecurity problem,” the Romanian Association for Technology and Internet (ApTI) said in a blog post. The law must apply only to public and private entities that are identified as operators of critical infrastructure of national importance and they should be clearly listed in the law, the organization said.

ApTI is a member of European Digital Rights (EDRi), a pan-European association of digital rights organizations.

Another problem is that the law requires companies to provide the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI)—the Romanian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency—and a half-dozen other government agencies with assistance and access to their data based only on a “motivated request,” not a court order.

The agencies that could request data in this manner, according to art. 17 of the law, are the Romanian Intelligence Service, the Ministry of National Defence, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the National Registry Office for Classified Information, the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Special Telecommunications Service, the Protection and Guard Service, CERT-RO and the National Authority for Management and Regulation in Communications (ANCOM).

ApTI and other civil society organizations believe this would violate the constitutional rights of citizens, since many companies and organizations process and store data about or generated by private individuals.

“Who decides if these requests are sufficiently motivated and which data are relevant?” ApTI said. “Why not a judge, as currently stipulated in the code of criminal procedure?”

The third issue with the current form of the law is that it designates SRI as the national authority in charge of cybersecurity. This appears to contradict the EU NIS Directive, which says that: “The competent authorities and the single points of contact should be civilian bodies, subject to full democratic oversight and should not fulfil any tasks in the field of intelligence, law enforcement or defence or be organisationally linked in any form to bodies active in those fields.”

Thirteen non-governmental organizations, including ApTI, sent a letter Monday to Romania’s new president, Klaus Iohannis, as well as the Romanian Parliament, the Romanian High Court of Cassation and Justice and the People’s Advocate, urging them to officially ask the Constitutional Court to review the law. This is a required procedure before the Constitutional Court can rule whether a law violates basic constitutional rights.

Another option would be for the president not to promulgate the law and return it to the Parliament for reexamination.

“Since his first day in office, the President is faced with a situation where he can prove his commitment for the respect of human rights in Romania,” the letter said.
http://www.itworld.com/article/28636...s-to-data.html





U.S. Spy Agency Reports Improper Surveillance of Americans
David Lerman

The National Security Agency today released reports on intelligence collection that may have violated the law or U.S. policy over more than a decade, including unauthorized surveillance of Americans’ overseas communications.

The NSA, responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union, released a series of required quarterly and annual reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board that cover the period from the fourth quarter of 2001 to the second quarter of 2013.

The heavily-redacted reports include examples of data on Americans being e-mailed to unauthorized recipients, stored in unsecured computers and retained after it was supposed to be destroyed, according to the documents. They were posted on the NSA’s website at around 1:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

In a 2012 case, for example, an NSA analyst “searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting,” according to one report. The analyst “has been advised to cease her activities,” it said.

Other unauthorized cases were a matter of human error, not intentional misconduct.

Last year, an analyst “mistakenly requested” surveillance “of his own personal identifier instead of the selector associated with a foreign intelligence target,” according to another report.

Unauthorized Surveillance

In 2012, an analyst conducted surveillance “on a U.S. organization in a raw traffic database without formal authorization because the analyst incorrectly believed that he was authorized to query due to a potential threat,” according to the fourth-quarter report from 2012. The surveillance yielded nothing.

The NSA’s intensified communications surveillance programs initiated after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington unleashed an international uproar after they were disclosed in classified documents leaked by fugitive former contractor Edward Snowden last year.

No New Legislation

Congress has considered but not passed new legislation to curb the NSA’s collection of bulk telephone calling and other electronic data.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created by lawmakers under post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism laws, issued a 238-page report in January urging the abolition of the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. The five-member board said the program has provided only “minimal” help in thwarting terrorist attacks.

The ACLU, which filed a lawsuit to access the reports, said the documents shed light on how the surveillance policies of NSA impact Americans and how information has sometimes been misused.

“The government conducts sweeping surveillance under this authority -— surveillance that increasingly puts Americans’ data in the hands of the NSA,” Patrick C. Toomey, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, said in an e-mail.

No Oversight

“Despite that fact, this spying is conducted almost entirely in secret and without legislative or judicial oversight,” he said.

The reports show greater oversight by all three branches of government is needed, Toomey added.

The ACLU filed suit to turn a spotlight on an executive order governing intelligence activities that was first issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and has been modified many times since then.

The order allows the NSA to conduct surveillance outside the U.S. While the NSA by law can’t deliberately intercept messages from Americans, it can collect messages that get vacuumed up inadvertently as part of its surveillance of foreigners overseas.

Masking Identities

After foreign intelligence is acquired, “it must be analyzed to remove or mask certain protected categories of information, including U.S. person information, unless specific exceptions apply,” the NSA said in a statement before posting the documents.

The extent of that collection has never been clear.

The agency said today it has multiple layers of checks in place to prevent further errors in intelligence gathering and retention.

“The vast majority of compliance incidents involve unintentional technical or human error,” NSA said in its executive summary. “NSA goes to great lengths to ensure compliance with the Constitution, laws and regulations.”

Report Violations

The intelligence community is required to report potential violations to the oversight board, as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In some cases, surveillance of foreign targets continued even when those targets were in the U.S., although such “non-compliant data” were later purged, according to the reports released today.

Some analysts sent intelligence information to other analysts who weren’t authorized to receive it, according to the documents. That information was deleted from recipients’ files when discovered.

Because of the extensive redactions, the publicly available documents don’t make clear how many violations occurred and how many were unlawful. While the reports contain no names or details of specific cases, they show how intelligence analysts sometimes have violated policy to conduct unauthorized surveillance work.

‘Intentional Misuse’

The NSA’s inspector general last year detailed 12 cases of “intentional misuse” of intelligence authorities from 2003 to 2013 in a letter to Senator Charles Grassley, of Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Those cases included a member of a U.S. military intelligence unit who violated policy by obtaining the communications of his wife, who was stationed in another country. After a military proceeding, the violator was punished by a reduction in rank, 45 days of extra duty and forfeiture of half of his pay for two months, according to the letter.

In a 2003 case, a civilian employee ordered intelligence collection “of the telephone number of his foreign-national girlfriend without an authorized purpose for approximately one month” to determine whether she was being faithful to him, according to the letter. The employee retired before an investigation could be completed.

Ignoring Restrictions

The NSA acknowledged last year that some of its analysts deliberately ignored restrictions on their authority to spy on Americans multiple times in the past decade.

“Over the past decade, very rare instances of willful violations of NSA’s authorities have been found,” the agency said in a statement to Bloomberg News in August 2013. “NSA takes very seriously allegations of misconduct, and cooperates fully with any investigations -- responding as appropriate.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-1...ce-errors.html





U.S. Police Struggle to Uncover Threats On Social Media
Edwin Chan and Alex Dobuzinskis

U.S. law enforcement agencies are a long way from being able to effectively track threats of the kind a gunman posted on Instagram before his execution-style murder of two New York City policemen last weekend.

Police need more data analytics and mining software to monitor social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as trained personnel to make sense of what could be a deluge of data, say law enforcement officials and security experts.

"You can buy all the technology you want, but if you want to figure out clever stuff, you better have smart people able to use it," said Christopher Ahlberg, co-founder of Recorded Future Inc, which helps clients analyse social media feeds. The company is partly backed by In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm that serves U.S. intelligence agencies.

According to the New York Police Department, Ismaaiyl Brinsley posted anti-cop slurs on the Instagram photo-sharing site hours before walking up to two officers in a parked squad car in Brooklyn and shooting them dead on Saturday.

Baltimore police said they discovered the Instagram posts after Brinsley shot and wounded his girlfriend earlier that day. But the NYPD did not learn of the posts - which included a photograph of a silver handgun and the message "I'm Putting Wings On Pigs Today. They Take 1 Of Ours...Let's Take 2 of Theirs" - until it was too late.

Monitoring social media for out-of-the-blue threats may be beyond the capabilities of most police forces including even the New York Police Department, which has a relatively extensive and aggressive intelligence operation, experts say.

Analysts at the New York and Los Angeles police departments routinely crawl through social media to keep tabs on individuals on their radar, such as gang members, or to prepare for high-profile events. But in an era of shrinking or stagnant budgets, buying high-end software and hiring trained data analysts can be costly.

Many police departments utilise fairly rudimentary tools. The NYPD uses common search engines, experts say. It is possible to programme an algorithm to pick up threatening messages, but the sheer volume of data and the potential number of "false positives" would impede its effectiveness.

"It is like trying to take a sip from a fire hydrant," the non-profit Police Executive Research Forum said in a 2013 report.

TOO MUCH INFORMATION

In monitoring social media, most local police forces lag U.S. intelligence agencies, which despite their vast surveillance networks still struggle to prevent attacks such as the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.

The National Security Agency had raw intercepts pointing to a person matching the 2009 "underwear bomber's" description, but failed to stop him from boarding a plane.

The Department of Homeland Security monitors about 100 social media sites, but there are restrictions that keep their agents from sharing all the information that they collect directly with local law enforcement.

Social media monitoring by police tends to be reactive: analysts hit the Internet when someone phones in a tip. Investigators use social networking sites to identify victims, look for witnesses and perpetrators, generate leads or search for evidence in the aftermath of a crime.

"Most of the stuff, honestly, we get is when people send it to us," said Los Angeles Police Department spokesman, Commander Andrew Smith.

That's not to say there have not been some successes. The LAPD, which employs around 40 people to monitor social media manually, uses software from a startup called PredPol Inc, which stands for predictive policing. The software analyzes LAPD and other internal police databases to identify crime-ridden areas and determine the best times to patrol.

PredPol marketing manager Benjamin Hoehn said crime dropped around 20 percent within 10 months of deploying the system in Modesto, California, in January.

The LAPD is also exploring the use of Geofeedia Inc, which incorporates user-location data as it crawls through sites from Twitter and Facebook to Google Inc's YouTube and Yahoo Inc's Flickr.

PRIVACY CONCERNS

Sophisticated services provided by the likes of Palantir Technologies Inc, which aids intelligence agencies in counter-terrorism, can track a person's movements, identify anonymous messages from writing patterns, or establish an individual's daily routines based on social media activity, experts said.

Ahlberg said Recorded Future can predict areas where social unrest will erupt with a high degree of accuracy, based on online commentary and other data, offering a glimpse of what may be possible.

Rights organizations have criticized the increasing use of social media crawling by law enforcement as a potential violation of privacy. Others argue anything posted on social media is fair game.

"You can call it infringing on their Frist Amendment rights but these are the 21st century tools available," said ex-FBI agent Kenneth Springer, who runs investigations outfit Corporate Solutions Inc.

(Reporting by Edwin Chan; Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball and Julia Edwards; Editing by Tiffany Wu)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/1...0K40MB20141226





Iran Expands 'Smart' Internet Censorship
Michelle Moghtader

Iran is to expand what it calls "smart filtering" of the Internet, a policy of censoring undesirable content on websites without banning them completely, as it used to, the government said on Friday.

The Islamic Republic has some of the strictest controls on Internet access in the world, but its blocks on U.S.-based social media such as Facebook (FB.O), Twitter (TWTR.N) and YouTube (GOOGL.O) are routinely bypassed by tech-savvy Iranians using virtual private networks (VPNs).

Under the new scheme, Tehran could lift its blanket ban on those sites and, instead, filter their content.

The policy appears to follow President Hassan Rouhani's push to loosen some social restrictions, but it was not clear if it would mean more or less Internet freedom. Iranians on Twitter expressed concern that, as part of the new policy, the government would try to block VPN access to such sites.

"Presently, the smart filtering plan is implemented only on one social network in its pilot study phase and this process will continue gradually until the plan is implemented on all networks," Communications Minister Mahmoud Vaezi said, according to official news agency IRNA.

He appeared to be referring to Instagram, the photo-sharing site owned by Facebook, which is already being filtered, but not blocked.

Instagram was initially available uncensored in Iran but some user accounts were subsequently blocked, notably @RichkidsofTehran, a page full of photos of young, rich Iranians flaunting their wealth.

In a cat-and-mouse game, another account dedicated to the same pursuits quickly appeared under the name @RichkidsofTeh.

"Implementing the smart filtering plan, we are trying to block the criminal and unethical contents of the Internet sites, while the public will be able to use the general contents of those sites," Vaezi told a news conference.

The policy would be fully in place by June 2015, he said.

Iranian authorities are not only concerned about what might be considered morally dubious content, which in Iran could be anything from pornography to realtively innocuous images of women not wearing the mandatory Islamic dress, but also material that might be politically damaging.

Social media were widely used in the anti-government protests of 2009 to organise and spread news about a movement that was eventually crushed by security forces.

Under former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Tehran floated the idea of replacing the Internet with a national intranet that would not be connected to the worldwide web and would be controlled by Iranian authorities, a plan than appears to have fizzled out.

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/1...0K40SC20141226





Hotel Group Asks FCC for Permission to Block Some Outside Wi-Fi
Grant Gross

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will soon decide whether to lay down rules regarding hotels’ ability to block personal Wi-Fi hotspots inside their buildings, a practice that recently earned Marriott International a US $600,000 fine.

Back in August, Marriott, business partner Ryman Hospitality Properties and trade group the American Hotel and Lodging Association asked the FCC to clarify when hotels can block outside Wi-Fi hotspots in order to protect their internal Wi-Fi services.

In that petition, the hotel group asked the agency to “declare that the operator of a Wi-Fi network does not violate [U.S. law] by using FCC-authorized equipment to monitor and mitigate threats to the security and reliability of its network,” even when taking action causes interference to mobile devices.

The comment period for the petition ended Friday, so now it’s up to the FCC to either agree to Marriott’s petition or disregard it.

However, the FCC did act in October, slapping Marriott with the fine after customers complained about the practice. In their complaint, customers alleged that employees of Marriott’s Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville used signal-blocking features of a Wi-Fi monitoring system to prevent customers from connecting to the Internet through their personal Wi-Fi hotspots. The hotel charged customers and exhibitors $250 to $1,000 per device to access Marriott’s Wi-Fi network.

During the comment period, several groups called for the agency to deny the hotel group’s petition.

The FCC made clear in October that blocking outside Wi-Fi hotspots is illegal, Google’s lawyers wrote in a comment. “While Google recognizes the importance of leaving operators flexibility to manage their own networks, this does not include intentionally blocking access to other commission-authorized networks, particularly where the purpose or effect of that interference is to drive traffic to the interfering operator’s own network,” they wrote.

Microsoft and mobile trade group CTIA, among others, also urged the commission to reject the hotel petition.

Marriott argued some hotspot blocking may be justified, as long as the hotel isn’t using illegal signal jammers. Unlicensed Wi-Fi hotspots shouldn’t be able to interfere with hotels’ Wi-Fi networks, the hotel group said in its petition.

Mobile hotspots can be used to “launch an attack against [a hotel] operator’s network or threaten its guests’ privacy” by gaining access to credit card numbers or other personal data, the hotel group said in its petition. Multiple outside Wi-Fi hotspots operating in a meeting room or convention center can hurt the performance of a hotel’s Wi-Fi network, the group said.

The hotel group found support from Cisco Systems. “Unlicensed spectrum generally should be open and available to all who wish to make use of it, but access to unlicensed spectrum resources can and should be balanced against the need to protect networks, data and devices from security threats and potentially other limited network management concerns,” Mary Brown, Cisco’s director of government affairs, wrote.

While personal hotspots should be allowed in public places, the “balance shifts in enterprise locations, where many entities use their Wi-Fi networks to convey company confidential information [and] trade secrets,” she added.
http://www.networkworld.com/article/...side-wifi.html





Congress Wants to Legislate Net Neutrality. Here’s What That Might Look Like.
Brian Fung

Republicans in Congress appear likely to introduce legislation next month aimed at preventing Internet providers from speeding up some Web sites over others, in hopes of changing the tone of a critical debate over the future of the Web, according to industry officials familiar with the plans.

The industry-backed proposal would preempt efforts by the Federal Communications Commission to draw up new rules for Internet providers. While key details of the proposed bill are still being hammered out, the legislation would attempt to end a debate over the FCC's power to regulate net neutrality, or the idea that broadband companies should treat all Internet traffic equally, said the people familiar with the plan who declined to be named because the talks were private.

The industry officials said they are discussing details of the proposal with several Republican lawmakers, whom they declined to name. The officials also said the proposal is being backed by several large telecommunications companies, which they also declined to name.

One important piece of the proposed legislation would establish a new way for the FCC to regulate broadband providers by creating a separate provision of the Communications Act known as "Title X," the people said. Title X would enshrine elements of the tough net neutrality principles called for by President Obama last month. For example, it would give FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler the authority to prevent broadband companies from blocking or slowing traffic to Web sites, or charging content companies such as Netflix for faster access to their subscribers — a tactic known as "paid prioritization."

But those new powers would come with a trade-off, the people said. In exchange for Title X, the FCC would refrain from regulating net neutrality using Title II of the Communications Act — a step favored by many advocates of aggressive regulation, including the president, they said.

FCC officials declined to comment for this story.

Broadband providers have strongly opposed aggressive net neutrality rules, arguing it would stymie the industry's growth. But in recent months some industry officials have said they were open to the same net neutrality principles advocated by Obama, highlighting a sliver of potential common ground between Internet providers and net neutrality advocates. In a blog post last month, Comcast said it opposed blocking or slowing traffic to Web sites, along with paid prioritization. AT&T made similar arguments in June.

"We oppose the concept of fast lanes and slow lanes on the Internet," wrote Jim Cicconi, an AT&T policy executive, in a blog post.

The Internet service providers' statements offer a potential opening for a legislative compromise, one that seeks to clarify the FCC's authority to preserve net neutrality while avoiding a showdown over Title II.

"Consensus on this issue is really not that far apart," said an industry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were ongoing. "There's common understanding that rules are needed to protect consumers."

While Republican aides to both the Senate and House commerce committees declined to comment on the industry's proposal, the timing of the push is consistent with statements by top GOP lawmakers on the issue. Earlier this month, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, said he was "very interested" in drafting legislation to address net neutrality. Congress would need to act "fairly soon next year" if it wants to find a legislative fix, according to a Thune spokeswoman. Any such legislation would have to move through Thune's committee.

The FCC is widely expected to unveil its net neutrality proposal in February or March, leaving little time for lawmakers to introduce a bill. By unveiling their legislation before Wheeler's draft rules, Republicans could draw momentum away from the agency, where pressure has been mounting lately for stronger action, the industry officials said.

If Wheeler struck first with proposed rules with aggressive net neutrality rules, many Democrats would likely find it harder to support a Republican alternative. On Thursday, Democrats led by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) sent a bicameral letter to Wheeler demanding that he act more swiftly to adopt new rules.

"We urge you to act without delay to finalize rules that keep the Internet free and open for business," the letter read.

Other Democrats signaled this week that any legislation on net neutrality would have to satisfy several key requirements. For example, the bill could not curtail the FCC's existing powers under the Communications Act, said David Grossman, Eshoo's senior tech policy adviser, at a Washington conference Tuesday. In addition to incorporating Obama's principles about blocking or slowing traffic, the legislation would also have to apply to wireless carriers, Grossman added. Aside from a few provisions, wireless carriers have been largely exempted from the FCC's previous net neutrality rules.

Republicans may find it difficult to attract enough conservative support for a net neutrality bill that updates the FCC's powers. Many of the most outspoken critics of the agency, such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) or Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), ardently oppose any new regulations on Internet providers.

But with enough bipartisan support, Republicans could quickly move a bill to Obama's desk. Whether the president signs it could hinge on whether he could claim it as a political victory, policy analysts say. If the bill is seen as not aggressive enough, Obama will likely veto the legislation, observers said. Cast as a compromise giving the FCC wide latitude over net neutrality, the bill could pass — particularly if industry officials offer not to sue the FCC over its proposed rules, analysts have said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...ght-look-like/





Comcast's Lobbying Team Handed Out "Priority Assistance" Cards for Faster Customer Service
Andrew Prokop

The Washingtonian's Luke Mullins has an extremely thorough, deeply-reported piece on how David Gregory was ousted as host of NBC's Meet the Press. Though low ratings appear to have been Gregory's main problem, Mullins reports some fascinating information about how the network's corporate parent Comcast tries to win over influential people in Washington, DC (as Chris Needham flagged on Twitter):

Comcast also had an even more personal way of sucking up to Washington. Its government-affairs team carried around "We'll make it right" cards stamped with "priority assistance" codes for fast-tracking help and handed them out to congressional staffers, journalists, and other influential Washingtonians who complained about their service.

A Comcast spokeswoman says this practice isn't exclusive to DC; every Comcast employee receives the cards, which they can distribute to any customer with cable or internet trouble. Nevertheless, efforts like this one have surely helped Comcast boost its standing inside the Beltway and improve its chances of winning regulatory approval for its next big conquest: merging with the second-largest cable provider in the country, Time Warner Cable.


The planned merger of Comcast and Time Warner has been criticized as potentially anti-competitive. It's currently being reviewed by the FCC and the Department of Justice. Head over to the Washingtonian to read Mullins' full excellent piece.
http://www.vox.com/2014/12/22/743397...bying-staffers





Comcast and Time Warner Are the Most Hated Companies in America
Polly Mosendz

The American Customer Satisfaction Index, put out quarterly by the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, is "considered the most comprehensive customer satisfaction survey in the United States." This quarter the closely watched and widely cited survey has determined that Time Warner and Comcast are the most terrible of all.

Time Warner was at the bottom of the barrel with a score of 56/100. This is actually the lowest score of all time. Congrats on being the best of the worst, Time Warner. Comcast received a 57/100. Verizon received a 71, and AT&T a 65.

The ACSI also broke down exactly Time Warner and Comcast are doing wrong:

High prices, poor reliability, and declining customer service are to blame for low customer satisfaction with pay TV services. The cost of subscription TV has been rising 6% per year on average—four times the rate of inflation. But now, dissatisfied pay TV customers have more alternatives than ever before. The rise of streaming video from companies like Netflix and Amazon, combined with pay TV’s deteriorating service quality and higher prices, has led to the first-ever net loss of television service subscribers for a full year in 2013.

The survey also says that every TV company saw a drop of 3-to-7 percent in satisfaction, and that cable companies do worse than fiber optic and satellite providers.

The cherry on top? The two most hated businesses are trying to merge right now.
http://www.thewire.com/technology/20...merica/371295/





Comcast-TWC Merger Delayed, FCC Says 7,000 Docs Wrongly Held Back
Jeff John Roberts

Comcast’s plans to swallow its largest rival Time Warner Cable has suffered another setback as the FCC announced Monday it would once again halt its “shot clock,” which is the 180-day time period during which the agency seeks to complete its review of proposed mergers.

In a letter published on Monday, the FCC said it had to impose the delay upon discovering that Time Warner Cable improperly classified more than 7,000 documents as attorney-client privileged.

The misclassification, which the FCC says it discovered in early December, meant that the agency has not been able to properly review aspects of the proposed merger, which has significant implications for consumers and for both the telecom and entertainment industries.

As the FCC explained, the delay has meant that the agency had to conduct portions of its review process anew:

The effect of these late disclosures has been to slow down the Commission’s review of the Comcast/TWC/Charter transaction, in particular because sections of the review that staff had thought were complete now must be reopened to take account of the additional documents that have been disclosed.

From the letter, it appears that Time Warner Cable held back the documents in the first place by designating them as attorney-client privileged, which companies can use to withhold documents in a legal or regulatory matter. The privilege can only be invoked in very specific circumstances (typically when a lawyer is providing advice to a client), however, and a company must still put the documents in questions on a list it shows to the other side.

While the process of designating documents as attorney-client privileged can give rise to disputes, it is unusual for such a large number of documents to be misclassified.

The mistake has drawn what appears to be a rebuke by the FCC in its letter (emphasis mine):

While the Commission can understand and accept that minor errors can occur when preparing both documents for production and privilege logs; it expects applicants to promptly correct errors, without prompting, when they occur. Here, however, the magnitude of the errors, with respect to both the document production and the privilege log, is material and the delays in rectifying them were substantial so that the tardy productions have interfered with the Commission’s ability to conduct a prompt and thorough review of the pending applications

The upshot is that the merger review process will be delayed by another three weeks until January 12, 2015, according to the letter.

This delay comes after the FCC stopped the shot clock in November after content companies, including Disney and Viacom, went to court to prevent disclosing sensitive contracts as part of the merger review process.

When Comcast announced the proposed merger in February, executives predicted that the deal would go through by the end of the year. The latest delays do not necessarily mean the deal is in trouble, though anti-trust experts generally agree that the longer a merger review draws on, the less likely it is to go through.

Meanwhile, the FCC also said the shot-clock delay does not affect a Tuesday deadline by which parties interested in the merger must submit reply comments.
https://gigaom.com/2014/12/22/comcas...gly-held-back/





Verizon to FCC: You Can’t Stop Netflix-Like Interconnection Payments

Even reclassifying broadband providers as utilities won't help, Verizon claims.
Jon Brodkin

Verizon told the Federal Communications Commission yesterday that it has no right to regulate paid interconnection deals like the ones Netflix struck with Verizon and other Internet providers.

Even reclassifying broadband service as a utility or common carrier service will not give the FCC that power, Verizon VP and Associate General Counsel William H. Johnson wrote in a filing in the FCC's net neutrality proceeding.

"The Commission cannot under any circumstances lawfully impose Title II common-carriage requirements on interconnection, as some regulatory proponents propose. Such requirements apply only to 'common carriers,' that is, to telecommunications service providers already 'engaged as a common carrier for hire," Johnson wrote, citing US communications law and court precedents. "As the DC Circuit has explained, when a provider is not operating as a common carrier, the Commission cannot 'relegate' that provider 'to common carrier status' by imposing common-carriage regulation. The Commission does not have 'unfettered discretion... to confer or not confer common-carrier status on a given entity depending upon the regulatory goals it seeks to achieve.'"

For the past few months, Netflix has been paying Verizon, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, and AT&T for interconnection that allows it to bypass other, more congested paths into the providers' networks. Despite paying the ISPs, Netflix has asked the FCC to mandate "settlement-free interconnection," in which the providers would have to offer interconnection without payment. The FCC has been examining these deals but hasn't taken any action.

Before the disputes between Netflix and ISPs were resolved, Netflix subscribers suffered from poor video streaming performance for months because Netflix traffic was being held up at congested interconnection points where traffic from many online services was transferred from third-party transit providers to ISPs. Netflix accounts for a third of all North American Internet downstream traffic during peak viewing hours. The deals Netflix struck with ISPs improved performance for Netflix itself and for online services that relied on the third-party transit providers to gain entry into ISPs' networks.

Verizon argued that Netflix and Cogent were to blame. "Internet players such as Netflix and Cogent have called for the Commission to reach beyond the last mile and regulate interconnection points or the terms of interconnection, on the ground that congestion at those points can affect the speeds that end users experience when accessing content," Verizon wrote.

But Netflix, Cogent, and numerous other Internet players make decisions on their own networks that affect the speeds or performance that end users experience. Cogent, for example, has at times discriminated between wholesale traffic and retail traffic by dropping and then resending wholesalers’ packets. And Netflix, through its Open Connect program, has set up its own proprietary content delivery networks ("CDNs") that speed the delivery of Netflix traffic to the last-mile networks of certain broadband providers. Any argument to regulate interconnection arrangements therefore would apply equally to those arrangements, but Netflix and Cogent presumably would object to doing so because those decisions—like Internet interconnection—raise issues that are distinct from the delivery of traffic in the last mile. By conflating last-mile regulation with interconnection issues, these entities are baldly pursuing regulatory rents that would reduce the costs of their business models by shifting them onto broadband subscribers.

Netflix recently defended itself from similar accusations made by FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai.

Netflix's paid connections to ISPs are at the edge of the ISPs' networks and thus would not be regulated under most net neutrality proposals, which would ban or discourage paid prioritization agreements in which a content provider's traffic is sped up within an Internet service provider's network.

Despite Verizon's argument that the FCC cannot regulate interconnection, it has reason to fear that the FCC could do just that if it were to reclassify broadband as a common carrier service, as we explained in a story yesterday. An FCC intent on regulating interconnection deals wouldn't necessarily require that they occur without payment, but it could insist on reasonable rates and intervene in disputes between ISPs and companies like Netflix.

President Obama has urged the FCC to reclassify broadband as a utility in order to impose network neutrality rules, and to apply net neutrality rules to interconnection points "if necessary." In 2010, the FCC passed net neutrality rules that did not impose any restrictions on interconnection agreements. Those rules were successfully challenged in court by Verizon, forcing the FCC to consider whether it needs to use its common carrier powers to enforce net neutrality rules.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014...tion-payments/





US Internet to Offer Higher-Speed Connections in Minneapolis
Adam Belz

US Internet to roll out a faster, 10-gigabit fiber-optic service in Minneapolis

US Internet is rolling out ultrafast Internet service in parts of Minneapolis and planning to push eastward with its high-speed, low-cost fiber network in the summer.

The Minnetonka firm that offers fiber-optic service to about 30,000 households in southwest Minneapolis announced Tuesday that it will use that network to offer 10-gigabit-per-pecond Internet speed, which is among the fastest Internet service available today. That’s 400 times faster than the average download speed in Minnesota, 25 megabits per second, according to Ookla, an Internet diagnostic firm.

“The fastest Internet in the world is going to be here in Minneapolis starting this afternoon,” said Joe Caldwell, co-CEO of US Internet. “We’re talking about a game-changing speed.”

The service will cost $400 per month, Caldwell said. The company already offers 1-gigabit-per-second service for $65 per month to the same 30,000 households west of Interstate 35W, and plans to expand its network east of 35W, mostly to neighborhoods south of Lake Street.

“This coming summer, if you’re east of 35W, you will be able to get fiber from us,” Caldwell said. “Not everybody, but big parts of the city.”

By moving eastward with its fiber network’s high speeds and lower prices, the upstart US Internet hopes to take business away from Comcast. First it must bury fiber-optic cable next to sidewalks in dozens of neighborhoods around the city. The smaller firm recently dropped the price on its 1-gigabit service from $114 per month to $65 per month.

Matt Vogt, an IT professional who works from his home in Uptown, switched from Comcast to US Internet in May and has since convinced several neighbors to make the switch.

“I’m extremely happy with it,” he said.

US Internet won’t get the awareness from consumers that Comcast enjoys for a while, Vogt said, but its service is compelling.

“US Internet can’t beat Xfinity and Comcast’s advertising dollars,” he said. “It’ll be more word of mouth.”

Comcast charges $77 per month for 50-megabit-per-second service and $67 per month for 25-megabit-per-second service.

US Internet offers 100-megabit service, roughly the speed of the Internet at many people’s offices, for $45 per month, Caldwell said. That’s the most popular plan for the company. Only a “couple thousand” households in southwest Minneapolis pay for the 1-gigabit service, and the group willing to pay $400 per month for 10 gigs will be smaller still.

The firm has a little over 10,000 fiber network customers paying for various speeds, and all of them are west of Interstate 35W. After expanding east of 35W, Caldwell hopes to extend the service to the bulk of the metro area within I-494/694 by 2020.

Officials at Comcast are watching the latest move from US Internet closely.

“We compete in an aggressive marketplace every day. We’ve increased our speeds 13 times in 12 years, and we make our products available to the entire community, not just a few neighborhoods,” said Mary Beth Schubert, a spokeswoman for Comcast.

Caldwell was joined Tuesday for the announcement by Minneapolis Council Member Andrew Johnson and the city’s chief information officer, Otto Doll.

While 10-gigabit-per-second Internet may have applications in the future — particularly in telemedicine — it won’t be necessary for most customers, Doll said.

“A lot of folks really don’t need it,” he said.

But US Internet’s 1-gigabit and 100-megabit services have attracted customers, Doll said, and he expects the firm’s expansion across the southern tier of the city to move forward in 2015.

“In pretty wide swaths of the city, the business case is there,” he said.

US Internet is also in the wireless Internet business. The firm has wireless customers all over Minneapolis — about 21,000 — and is in the sixth year of a 10-year contract to provide wireless Internet to the city of Minneapolis through its subsidiary, USI Wireless.

Caldwell admits that customers have not been as happy with the wireless as they have with the fiber network. The two businesses, however, are separate.
http://www.startribune.com/business/286680241.html





BitLit Says Snap a 'Shelfie' to Get Free E-Books

The BitLit app will give you free or cheap e-book editions of the print books you already own. Well, maybe some of them.
Rick Broida

It's a modern conundrum: Someone gifted you a hard copy of a book, but you prefer to read on digital devices. Wouldn't it be great if you could get the e-book edition for free (or at least at a discount), seeing as you already own the print version?

That's the idea behind Kindle MatchBook, but that, of course, limits you to Amazon's ecosystem. BitLit works on the same principle, but delivers matched-up e-books to you in a format that's compatible with Kindle, Kobo and Nook -- regardless of where you purchased them.

It works like this: using your smartphone's camera, you snap a photo of a row of books on your bookshelf -- a "shelfie," in BitLit parlance. (Admit it: that's pretty good.)

The BitLit app, available for Android and iOS, uploads the photo and looks for matches between what's in your library and what's in BitLit's. When there's a match, you qualify for the e-book edition, either free or "at a huge discount."

Sounds pretty sweet, right? As you might expect from a startup in the e-book space, BitLit currently offers a very limited selection -- only about 75,000 books, so the likelihood of a match is pretty slim. Browsing the library, I recognized very few mainstream authors.

A bigger problem: The "shelfies" I snapped refused to upload, showing 0% progress long after I took them. So I wasn't really able to put the service to a proper test. BitLit says it's currently swamped with people trying the service.

The idea, though? Golden. It's crazy to me that in this day and age, print books don't come bundled with e-book editions. Here's hoping BitLit will work out its issues and catch the eyes of some bigger-name publishers.
http://www.cnet.com/news/bitlit-snap...-free-e-books/





After a Tumultuous Year at the Box Office, Hollywood Looks to 2015
Brooks Barnes

The delay of major movies from Pixar and Universal. The pirating of “The Expendables 3” and “Annie” before their release. Warner Bros. suffering one dud after another. Hackers forcing the cancellation of a big Sony comedy.

Hollywood does not want a sequel to 2014.

For the year, ticket sales at North American theaters will total roughly $10.5 billion, a 4 percent decline from a year earlier, according to projections by the box-office data firm Rentrak. Attendance will drop by about the same percentage.

Annual fluctuations of that size are not uncommon at the domestic box office, which rises and falls based on the strength of the movie lineup. Still, that total would give the movie business its lowest tally since 2000, after accounting for inflation.

Despite some major successes — “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “The Lego Movie,” “Godzilla,” “Divergent,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “The Maze Runner” all revived franchises or started new ones — box-office weakness stretched into nearly every genre and audience segment. There was no big-budget catastrophe like “The Lone Ranger,” but at least a dozen films underperformed in domestic theaters, suggesting structural weakness, analysts said.

Expensive films like “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” and “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1” missed their box-office mark. So did midbudget comedies, including “Muppets Most Wanted,” “A Million Ways to Die in the West,” “Sex Tape” and “Horrible Bosses 2.” Once-reliable animated films hit a rough patch in 2014, as releases like “Penguins of Madagascar” and “Planes: Fire and Rescue” disappointed.

No arty drama was poised to match the kind of breakout status reached in recent years by “Black Swan” or “Lincoln.”

Hollywood’s primary worry is that moviegoing in North America is changing along generational lines. In particular, young ticket buyers traditionally turned out weekend after weekend — with the quality of the films mattering less than the opportunity to fraternize. But this group is staying home more often. Reasons include video games, YouTube, smartphone preoccupation and ever-increasing on-demand film alternatives.

The Nielsen Company said this month that the moviegoing of Americans age 12 to 24 dropped 15 percent in the first nine months of 2014, compared with the same period a year earlier.

Female ticket buyers added financial sizzle to movies like “Maleficent,” “The Fault in Our Stars” and “Lucy.” But studios as a whole remain laser-focused on testosterone-fueled action extravaganzas because those pictures are the ones being gobbled in growing overseas markets.

Paul Dergarabedian, a senior Rentrak analyst, said it was a series of unfortunate events that cumulatively resulted in an off year for the industry.

“Studios and theater owners just couldn’t catch a break, with lots of little things adding up,” Mr. Dergarabedian said.

And some big things: Christmas is typically one of the busiest times of the year for Hollywood, but movie executives are worried that some consumers will stay home because of a recent terror threat to theaters.

Last week, hackers threatened violence against any theater showing “The Interview,” a $44 million Sony comedy about the assassination of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. When the vast majority of the country’s theaters backed out of playing the movie, Sony canceled all release plans, at least for now.

Weekend ticket sales at North American theaters gave studios mixed messages about consumer confidence.

“The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies” from Warner and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer took in $56.2 million over the weekend, for a strong total since opening on Wednesday of $90.6 million — slightly better than the five-day total for last year’s “Hobbit” installment.

But “Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb” and “Annie” both opened to so-so results, and total weekend ticket sales dropped nearly 6 percent compared to the same three days last year.

“It’s been a rather sluggish market since Thanksgiving,” said Chris Aronson, president of domestic distribution for 20th Century Fox.

Fox had a better year than its competitors. Powered by hits like “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” and “Gone Girl,” Fox will end 2014 as Hollywood’s No. 1 studio based on domestic box-office market share, according to the data company Box Office Mojo.

For the year, the No. 1 movie in the United States and Canada was Disney-Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy,” which took in $332.6 million, for a global total of $772.2 million. The second-biggest draw was “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1,” a Lionsgate film that has so far generated $289.2 million ($639.7 million globally).

Disney-Marvel’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” was third, taking in $259.8 million ($714.1 million globally). The biggest film on a global scale was Paramount’s “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” with $1.1 billion in ticket sales.

On the opposite end of the scale, Sony’s year was difficult even before it was attacked by hackers, although its “22 Jump Street” and “Heaven Is for Real” were standouts. And Warner, until recently Hollywood’s strongest movie operation, slumped badly, with hits like “The Lego Movie” and “Annabelle” offset by a string of clunkers.

Studio executives and theater owners primarily attributed the overall decline in ticket sales to the delay of several would-be blockbusters. The seventh installment in Universal’s “Fast and Furious” series was pushed back after the death of one of its lead actors. Warner rescheduled “Jupiter Ascending.” Pixar, for the first time in nine years, did not release a movie, sending “The Good Dinosaur” back to the drawing board.

“We were missing a couple of big movies, and it hurt,” said Gerardo I. Lopez, the chief executive of AMC Theatres.

Whenever ticket sales take a tumble, Hollywood pulls the assertion of cyclicality out of its hip pocket: Just wait until next year — next year will be our best ever.

In the case of 2015, it might be true. Coming are expected box-office monsters like “Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens,” “Jurassic World,” “Furious 7,” “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the James Bond film “Spectre” and animated entries like “Minions” and Pixar’s “Inside Out.”

“North America should be able to break through the $11 billion barrier next year,” Mr. Lopez said. “That’s an easy green given what’s coming. We should be able to hit it, even though we’re a lot of yards out.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/bu...s-to-2015.html





Privacy Groups Upbraid MPAA For Trying To Bring SOPA Back At The State Level
Alex Wilhelm

The ongoing struggle between Google and the Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood has new players this week, as a number of privacy groups waded into the mix, dinging the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) for, in their words, a “coordinated campaign to shut down and block access to individual websites through backdoor methods resoundingly rejected by the public and federal lawmakers.”

They are talking about SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, which lost in Congress. Undeterred, the MPAA, one of the original bill’s advocates, is trying to exert its influence on smaller stages. (For more on the Google v. Hood struggle, a rough history is here. For Hood’s response to Google suing him, this is for you.)

The letter — signed by the EFF, Freedom Works and Demand Progress among others — is worth reading in its entirety. Here are the key excerpts [Bolding: TechCrunch. Letter via Politico.]:

Publications including the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and The Verge are reporting that the MPAA responded to the failure of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012 by quietly searching for alternate means to accomplish key provisions of the bill, such as website blocking and search filtering. It is our understanding that those efforts include developing legal theories and even drafting civil investigation demand letters for state attorneys general to facilitate actions against websites and search engines. The goal of these efforts mirrors the goal of SOPA: to create new legal tools that will compel online service providers to remove content from the Internet with little, if any, meaningful due process.

Despite these risks, you told the Huffington Post you agreed with the methods of the ill#fated SOPA legislation. We beg to differ, as do the engineers who created the Internet, the organizations and businesses that depend upon a secure and robust Internet infrastructure, and the legions of Internet users who spoke out against SOPA in 2011 and 2012. […] SOPA was a bad idea at the federal level, and any SOPA revival on a state level is an equally bad idea.


So here we are again.

Happily, Google, by making its displeasure public, has taken a private effort by the MPAA and made it part of the larger discussion about copyright law. We should expect the next Congress to take up that issue.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/23/pri...e-state-level/





Stephen Colbert, First Star of the Age of YouTube
Tim Carmody

When The Colbert Report premiered nine years ago, Comedy Central tried something different. It made the first week of episodes available to download and watch online. If you didn’t stay up to watch the show, or you didn’t have cable, you could still see Stephen Colbert try to turn his Daily Show character into a new kind of television show, one whose politics, format, and satirical tone were particularly suited to the mid-2000s internet.

It was a rare case of a network blessing the still-emerging practice of video sharing online. The Colbert Report had only an eight-week initial order: the combination of internet fans returning to watch the show live and the strong Daily Show lead-in helped win it a year.

It was the future. Of course, it couldn’t last.

Clips from The Colbert Report soon became a staple at YouTube, a startup that was making it easier for anyone and everyone to upload and watch home movies, video blogs, and technically-illicit-but-increasingly-vanilla clips of TV shows from the day before. And Colbert’s show was about to find itself at the center of a conflict between entertainment media and the web over online video that’s shaped the last decade. In fact, The Colbert Report has been defined as much by this back-and-forth between Hollywood and the web as by the cable news pundits it satirizes.

Colbert was perfect for 2005 YouTube, and both were perfect for the time. The lefty blogosphere was picking up steam, consoling itself for a second Bush term with grim jokes and dreams of restoration in 2008. It loved Colbert, especially after he skewered President Bush in person at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Stewart and Colbert distrusted the Bush administration, found the Democrats were laughably ineffective, and were dedicated to ridiculing the official news media. They fit with the college-educated, post-Dean left of that time like a hand into a glove.

I remember this moment very well. I was in graduate school, had begun writing my dissertation, and didn’t have cable. I found out about YouTube because of Colbert. It was the first show that I watched hacked into bite-sized, upload-limit friendly clips. It was not the last.

Increasingly, you could see a pattern. Colbert Report episodes were modular: you could break them down into bits and reassemble them. Here was “The Wørd,” here was “Better Know A District,” here was a guest interview. Any part could become an object for attention. What’s more, their modularity seemed less like a production tool or an imitation of news show buckets than something built for the internet.

For lack of a better term, each bit of Colbert was blockquotable.

In 2005, Facebook was expanding beyond the Ivy league, and then to high schools, laying the groundwork for an official networked pass-along for internet media. College kids loved Stewart and Colbert too, increasingly saying they learned more about the day’s political events from the two Comedy Central shows than from newspapers or CNN.

Broadband internet was spreading across the nation, making web video a genuine proposition. We’d shared music on Napster and we’d shared photos on Flickr; video was obviously next. Viral media networks were leaving the shadows and becoming part of everyday life. It wasn’t about Pamela-and-Tommy-Lee porno any more; it was about television shows. There was an enormous audience there, with a proven business model: show popular entertainment, sell advertising against it.

A year after The Colbert Report premiere, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. Five months later, Viacom sued YouTube and Google for copyright infringement, asking for $1 billion in damages. The value of these videos and their audiences were clear. The Colbert Report and “Stephen Colbert” are mentioned three times in Viacom’s complaint against YouTube, as much or more than any other show or artist.

There was no stopping YouTube. The only open question was who was going to get paid, and how much. That’s what Viacom’s lawsuit was about.

By the time of the lawsuit, the market for online video had already gotten much more sophisticated. Comedy Central now offered YouTube-style clips of its shows on its own website. YouTube had begun partnering with copyright holders to share revenue from officially posted videos and use filtering technology to prevent users from uploading copyrighted video and to find and identify unauthorized uploads. Viacom’s claim wasn’t that YouTube was just turning a blind eye to users infringing copyright — it was that YouTube was offering filtering technology to its media partners that it wasn’t making available to companies who weren’t playing ball.

Revenue sharing, filtering tech, copyright lawsuits — all of this was part of a complex dance between two corporations who were trying to strike a deal. It wound up taking seven years — almost the entire life of The Colbert Report.

(That’s right: Viacom v. YouTube, which feels like ancient history in internet time, was only settled in March. After all the posturing, the decisions and counter-decisions, and billion-dollar claims, a source close to the two parties said that no money actually changed hands.)

To me, the most fascinating wrinkle of the Viacom lawsuit comes from a 2010 blog post by Zahavah Levine, YouTube’s chief counsel. Levine wrote that even as one part of Viacom was screaming about blatant infringement, other factions within the company were still working to promote its shows on YouTube, including The Colbert Report (emphasis added):

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.


It wasn’t the last time Colbert would be the subject of a digital media turf war: in 2010, Viacom pulled The Colbert Report and The Daily Show from Hulu, where the two shows had been among the most popular on the service, because the site wasn’t generating and sharing enough revenue. Hulu was created in no small part to address the market YouTube had helped create for online video.

2011's Stop Online Piracy Act was essentially the continuation of the Viacom lawsuit by other means. Really, what it let copyright owners do was herd all websites, regardless of their national origin, into the sphere of domesticated, remunerative media sharing it had created in Hulu and was bit by bit building with YouTube. Sure enough, Stephen Colbert was on the front lines, playing both sides against each other:

Comedy Central would eventually build enormous sites for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report alone, recognizing the value of their streaming videos. They offer clips, full episodes, archives, all supported by advertising. The shows are also on YouTube and Hulu. All of these services offer easy embeds so that blogs, news sites, and social media services can display these videos with these ads attached. Every embed has links to social media networks. (Obviously, almost none of this existed in 2005.)

Posts built around embeds of Colbert, Last Week Tonight, and The Daily Show have become a genre unto themselves. Music artists can premiere new songs, knowing that nothing can make it go viral faster than an embedded video from a beloved web-savvy television show. (Sure enough, rapper Kendrick Lamar stole the show by turning his appearance on one of the last episodes of Colbert into his own launch party.)

Everything is official, everything is paid for, everybody gets a slice.

YouTube can now even recognize bits of media used in fan videos and compensate rights-holders accordingly. Google and the entertainment companies have created an entire elaborate apparatus built to solve the problems posed by watching Stephen Colbert tell a joke on the internet.

Thursday’s finale of The Colbert Report is perhaps the apotheosis of this process. Every piece of it is modular, each part carefully engineered to go viral. You can write a blog post about any or all of it. (Many sites did.) The fake news show, built on aggregating and commenting on a universe of media, is itself the substrate for an entire layer of media news.

We live in a world of digital media, corporate convergence, and inseparable layers of attachment and detachment, irony and sincerity, that Stephen Colbert and YouTube have made.
https://medium.com/message/stephen-c...be-5f9ae243a3d





We Now Conclude Our Broadcast Day

Recalling the Imperfect Radio and TV Reception of the Past
Dana Jennings

Remember when you had to wait for the TV to warm up before you could watch it?

I miss the television snows of yesteryear. And I don’t mean easy nostalgia for the inevitable reruns of “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

I’m talking real television snow, a longing for static, ghost images and the picture endlessly rolling and flip-flopping. While we’re at it, I ache for well-used vinyl crackling like bacon sizzling in a skillet ... and the eerie whistles and wheezes from terrestrial radio.

This eccentric pining for the primitive electric hiss and sputter of my 1960s childhood is an honest reaction to our modern culture’s unhealthy addiction to (apparent) perfection. We want it all, we want it now, and we want it sublime.

We not only demand our television, radio and music in unblemished HD on whatever device we choose, but also our weddings, children, houses and bodies. And in our heedless embrace of digital cosmetic surgery, we’ve forgotten that it’s the flaw that makes a thing all the sweeter — like the bruise on a peach.

One of my sharpest memories — HD in recollection, if not in reality — is of my father scrambling on the roof of our house in southern New Hampshire during a snowstorm, wrestling with the TV antenna. He was trying to coax a better picture from our TV for a Bruins hockey game out of Boston on WSBK (Channel 38). Both his beer and the game tasted even better after that epic and elemental struggle.

In those pre-cable, pre-digital days, the question wasn’t “Where’s the remote(s)?” but “Where’s the picture?”

Answering that query often involved the laying on of hands. After turning on the TV and waiting — waiting!!! — for it to warm up came the physical offerings to the reception gods: massaging and wooing antenna and rabbit ears, twisting coat hangers into Calder-like shapes then draping them from the TV, waltzing the box around the living room or, finally, just delivering a smack upside the tube. The latter usually didn’t work, but it made all of us feel better.

My sister and I, huddled together on the couch, blissfully watched TV in all kinds of screen conditions: total whiteout, moderate snow, mere flurries, staticky crosshatch. And, unknowingly, we developed a proto-punk, low-fi aesthetic, agreeing that monster movies (“Them!,” “Rodan,” “The Blob”) and spooky TV shows like “The Twilight Zone,” “The Outer Limits” and “Night Gallery” were far more terrifying when glimpsed and then decoded through the snow: almost like scrutinizing horrifying images from some unimagined dimension or two.

Even watching the white dot vanish after the TV was clicked off gave us a pleasurable chill.

Our on-demand world also blunts the tingle of anticipation, which is maybe why vinyl and turntables have made their modest comeback in recent years. Savoring the spit, hiss and pop of needle on vinyl is like relishing the predatory rumble of a hot rod before it peels out and lays rubber.

One of the shrewd things the rock band Gaslight Anthem did on its 2008 album “The ’59 Sound” was pepper it with vintage rasp and buzz: a punk squall that defies tame audiophile decorum.

And, as with the TV, the phonograph required touch: the piling of slick 45s on the spindle, blowing dust off the needle, taping a penny to the tone arm to keep that needle from skittering and skipping.

My radio needed the human touch, too. As I listened to Boston Red Sox night games, I’d grip the radio like a vise, its hot, orange guts stinging my hand; my skin would lobster up, but I didn’t care, because I could hear the game better. (That radio, a yellowing white Sylvania, also hummed constantly, kind of like the ringing in your ears hours after a Metallica concert.)

Then there was the utter delight of reeling in a far-away station late at night: from Montreal, from Wheeling, from Nashville. Even more bewitching were the otherworldly soundscapes to be found between station stops: eeps and boops, trills and squeals, shrill dronings from the ether that maybe signaled an alien invasion, or first contact with another galaxy.

And, to return to the blizzards of television, even better were the Saturday nights when Sis and I babysat for our little brothers. At 1 or 2 in the morning, we’d find a station that’d signed off (back when channels actually dared abandon the air for a few hours), that slept in snow mode. We’d then stare at the spectral black-and-white storm — giggling, trying to scare each other — seeking demons, poltergeists, radioactive beasts. All of it good, low-def fun, even better than counting the cars that zipped by on Route 125 or trying to make wooly-bear caterpillars race each other.

It makes me grin to think about those late nights now, and that’s why, when it comes to TV, I still say, “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/ar...-the-past.html





Fox Affiliate Edits Protest Chant to Sound Like ‘Kill a Cop’
Matt Wilstein

Three times over the last 24 hours, Baltimore Fox affiliate WBFF has played a misleadingly edited clip from last week’s National “Justice for All” March in Washington, D.C. to make it sound like protesters were calling on people to “kill a cop.”

“At this rally in Washington, D.C. participants chanted, ‘We won’t stop, we can’t stop, so kill a cop,’” WBFF’s Melinda Roeder said during a Sunday night report about the murder of two police officers in New York City, before playing a truncated version of a protest video from C-SPAN. “The anti-police sentiment reached a turning point this weekend in New York when two officers were gunned down in cold blood.”

As you can see from the video played on-screen, the source of the clip was a YouTube video posted last week with the title, “Sharpton’s ‘Go Kill A Cop’ march in Wash DC.” But when you watch past the point where WBFF cut off, you can hear the full chant had a different message:

We won’t stop.
We can’t stop.
‘Til killer cops.
Are in cell blocks.

Rather than calling for the murder of police officers, the protesters were simply calling for justice in the killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and others. But that message was either overlooked by the Baltimore station or deliberately obscured.

And it was not a mistake that was caught after the initial airing Sunday night. Twice Monday morning, the station played the same bit of edited tape, tying it to the police murders in New York.

The woman leading the chant in the video was identified by Gawker as Tawanda Jones, whose brother Tyrone West was killed by Baltimore City Police in 2013. Jones posted this response to WBFF on Facebook.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/fox-affil...ke-kill-a-cop/





Sony Hack Reveals Hollywood’s Bitter Civil War
Neal Gabler

Nobody ever plunked down 14 bucks to see a movie executive on screen.

That may be an odd takeaway from the Sony hacking scandal that has been wracking the company and the film studio it owns, Sony Pictures Entertainment. But the relative invisibility of these executives vis-a-vis their talent — and what looks like the executives’ anger about this — are among the biggest revelations in the document dumps.

What the most incendiary emails unveil is that Hollywood, for all its outward intramural amity, is a community deeply divided between those who are ostensibly in power — the studio execs and producers — and those who really hold power — the stars and major directors. All that “kiss-kiss” stuff between them belies the dysfunction and deep resentment the servants harbor against their social betters. Even though those resentful servants are moguls who make millions of dollars.

This is not the way most observers have interpreted the Sony hack. They have called it an object lesson in the fragility of privacy in the age of the Internet. Some, like writer Aaron Sorkin, have seen the publication of the emails by the general press as an abuse of the First Amendment and lashed the media for being “morally treasonous,” in a New York Times op-ed article.

These are worthy issues. But these emails are also important culturally. They are like an X-ray of the industry that is one of the most important forces in creating our images and values. That X-ray says a lot about Hollywood — and America.

First, Hollywood. Almost from its inception Hollywood fought a civil war. This was between the financiers headquartered back East, who doled out the money for production, versus the creative folks in the West, who actually supervised the making of the movies. The suits in New York thought studio heads spendthrift and foolish. The movie executives thought the moneymen tight-fisted and uncreative. You could say Hollywood was built on a fault line between commerce and creativity. It still is.

Now come the Sony emails to enlarge the picture and change it. Amid all the financial details — Jennifer Lawrence made less money from American Hustle than her male co-stars and the medical records and the gossip about who wants to star in the all-female sequel to Ghostbusters – are those now notorious emails in which executives gripe about the “talent,” the ironically contemptuous term that executives have always applied to stars, directors and writers.

Producer Scott Rudin calls Angelina Jolie a “minimally talented spoiled brat” because she has the audacity to want director David Fincher for her bio-pic of Cleopatra when Rudin wants him for his bio-pic of Steve Jobs. Even though Rudin insults Fincher as “difficult,” which, he writes, is like saying “Hitler may be anti-Semitic!!!” Comedian Kevin Hart, writes one Sony exec, is a “greedy whore.” Then there were the emails ridiculing Adam Sandler’s recent films or the email calling Leonardo DiCaprio “despicable,” or the one claiming that Sorkin is “broke.” (Sorkin refuted that in his op-ed article.)

The upshot is that the execs, who are so dependent on talent, appear to envy and resent it — even hate it — and the emails are the smoking gun of that hostility. Another irony is that Sony production head Amy Pascal has long been known for her good relationships with the talent.

This is, in some measure, a result of how the industry has changed since the Golden Age of the studios in the 1930s and 1940s. MGM head Louis B. Mayer, to cite one example, may have had a certain disdain for talent — but he didn’t envy or resent them. In the Hollywood of that era, he was bigger and more powerful than any star. He was the king.

But by the late 1940s, the studio system was crumbling. And ever since the power of studio heads has declined while that of the stars and other talent has risen. That put executives in the talent-acquisition business.

It did something else: It made them subservient to talent. Only now are we seeing just how angry executives are about their predicament.

Which brings us to what these snarky emails say about the changes in America. Mayer wasn’t resentful not only because he was the master of talent rather than its servant, but also because he was never in competition with his talent. That’s because there were no social media, nor was there the idea of media status — gaining celebrity by getting written and talked about. The execs’ resentment isn’t just a function of star power. It is a function of star visibility.

We live in a society where public status is the grail, a society in which, at certain levels, one is measured by the media attention one receives, which puts everyone in competition with everyone else. You ever wonder about those endless lists of “The Most Powerful People in Hollywood”?

This also means that studio execs, desperate for attention — one of Pascal’s emails gushes over a story on her by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd — are also in competition with talent.

It is a competition they cannot possibly win, and they know it. The execs are the losers in the great American celebrity sweepstakes. From these emails, they appear to be sore losers.

So what we see is not just a squabble over privacy. What we see is a nation in thrall to status, and an industry deeply divided by it.

It’s civil war. And this time, the emails show, it’s personal.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debat...ter-civil-war/





Hacking at Sony Over ‘The Interview’ Reveals Hollywood’s Failings, Too
David Carr

Kim Jong-un, who appears to be America’s newly self-appointed minister of culture, has decided that it is not enough that “The Interview,” the Seth Rogen film about North Korea that includes Mr. Kim’s assassination, will not be released. On Thursday, a message from the Guardians of Peace, the hacker group that breached the computer systems of Sony Pictures and warned against releasing the film, said “we want everything related to the movie, including its trailers, as well as its full version down from any website hosting them immediately.”

My, that slope became mighty slippery pretty quickly. The hackers promised that if Sony scrubbed all traces of the comedy from the Internet — an impossible task — they would cease a campaign that has lasted almost a month and has threatened employees and their families, embarrassed executives and potentially unleashed 100 terabytes of private company data into the world.

Federal officials said Friday morning that they had extensive evidence that the North Korean government organized the attack. A few hours later, President Obama added his voice to the chorus of critics, including irate Hollywood actors, who say Sony and the nation’s theater operators should not have canceled the release. “We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States,” he said.

It was a remarkable and disorienting turn of events: a tiny, failing state that lacks the wherewithal to feed its own people was deciding which movies we can and cannot see, while the industry it had attacked watched silently from the sidelines, and the president of the United States felt compelled to step into an international confrontation catalyzed by a lowbrow comedy.

After weeks of embarrassing disclosures from Sony’s hacked files, the endgame for the movie began on Tuesday, when the hackers invoked the devastation of September 11, and said that anyone who attended the opening on Christmas Day would be risking their lives. “We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time,” they wrote in a rambling email to news organizations.

Theater chains quickly let it be known that “The Interview” would not be screened. Sony, saying it had no choice, withdrew the movie. Certainly, there were concerns about public safety, but make no mistake, other considerations factored in the decision, all involving dollar signs: the box office receipts of films that would be playing alongside “The Interview” during one of the biggest movie weeks of the year, and the holiday shoppers at the retail chains that surround so many theaters. Major cable players made it clear that they were unwilling to step in with a video-on-demand alternative, so short of hanging a bedsheet and screening the movie at its Culver City headquarters, Sony was cornered.

Once the film was successfully censored, you could count the days until other films were affected. Actually, it happened earlier in the same day, before “The Interview” was shelved, when New Regency announced that it would drop an untitled thriller about North Korea that was to have starred Steve Carell.

The threats and subsequent cancellation will become a nightmare with a very long tail. Now that cultural discourse has become the subject of online blackmail, it is hard to imagine where it will end. Documentaries, which have become increasingly important sources of news and information, could suddenly be in jeopardy. And if you’ve been watching the current season of “Homeland” on Showtime, you know that Pakistan’s more sinister operations have been on wide view.

This summer, HBO is planning to broadcast a comedy series starring Jack Black as a foreign service officer who takes on a rogue general who seizes control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Rogue states and their operatives could go after a Bond movie because they didn’t like its taste in villains. (The script for the next installment was released as part of the intrusion, by the way.)

And it doesn’t end with the entertainment. Some news outlets, including The New York Times, have found themselves under sustained digital attack after publishing articles that displeased various groups that had the resources to respond with intrusions. Many state-sponsored actors will no doubt be emboldened by the spectacular success of the Sony breach.

Things have gone so deeply wrong so quickly — the movie industry will look back at this crossing of the Rubicon with a deep sense of shame — it is hard to keep track of all the mistakes that led us here, but I’d like to take a crack at it.

Sony I happened to be with Howard Stringer, then chief executive of Sony, during a vast security attack on its PlayStation platform in 2011 — he looked as if he had been living inside a beehive for three days. That Sony did not harden as a target in a meaningful way afterward is inexplicable.

And while I am all for bold creative choices, was it really important that the head being blown up in a comedy about bungling assassins be that of an actual sitting ruler of a sovereign state? If you want to satirize a lawless leader, there are plenty of ways to skin that cat, as Charlie Chaplin demonstrated with “The Great Dictator,” which skewered Hitler in everything but name.

Hollywood If you are looking for courage on the lots of Hollywood, probably best to pack a lunch. Other studios were content to watch Sony dangle, saying nothing for fear that they, too, would end up on the Guardians of Peace’s naughty list. The Motion Picture Association of America, which represents the film industry, went into witness protection when the crisis erupted, with a spokeswoman telling Deadline, a trade website, on Dec. 11, “We have no comment at this time. We are not involved.” The association condemned the attack only once the devastation was writ.

The breach of Sony would seem to be exactly the kind of moment when an association has real value, when it can collectively respond to a fundamental threat to the industry. The organization and the studios it represents hid instead. As my colleagues Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply wrote, “The incident is likely to be remembered as a failure of Hollywood leadership.”

On Friday, George Clooney was even less polite about the widespread cowardice, telling Deadline Hollywood that when he circulated a petition of solidarity, he heard nothing but crickets in response. “As we watched one group be completely vilified, nobody stood up,” he said. When the novel “The Satanic Verses” was under attack, the book industry formed a united front. Exactly the opposite happened here.

The News Media After the hackers absconded with personal and corporate information from Sony, they put the data on a site called Pastebin. Trade publications and some mainstream news outlets took the bait and spent a great deal of time rummaging through the stolen goods, and highlighting juicy emails meant to cause maximum embarrassment. What public purpose was served by printing private correspondence? We discovered that studio executives are capable of being callous, and that producers can be churlish when they don’t get what they want. As Aaron Sorkin pointed out, that’s not exactly new or important information.

The data dump did reveal an industrywide effort to join forces against Google, but most of what was disclosed was intended to elicit clicks and smirks and the hackers knew enough to harness the base, competitive impulses of the press. News organizations mostly refrained from publishing material like passports and medical records, but in general, the news media served as last-mile delivery agents on information that was used to threaten Sony, the industry, and finally, the American public. The larger story about an unprecedented political attack on free speech took a back seat to titillating peeks at industry backbiting.

The list goes on, including politicians who engaged in bombastic, warlike rhetoric, but let’s just say the last few weeks in the American political and cultural narrative have been miserable. The merits of “The Interview” can be debated, but fundamental business imperatives and civic freedoms are clearly in play.

So what is the right response? Americans are good at sitting on a couch and watching all kinds of stuff, so why not harness that impulse? David Boies, a lawyer for Sony, told “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the film would eventually be distributed. “How it’s going to be distributed, I don’t think anybody knows quite yet, but it’s going to be distributed.”

The president — yes, it’s that important — should convene all the players who make billions from the free and unfettered display of content and broker a deal that gives Americans the opportunity to watch the film. Put “The Interview” on Hulu, on iTunes, on Google Play, on Netflix, on NBC and all the broadcast networks, on Showtime and all the cable stations, put it anywhere and everywhere that people can push a button and watch at the same time. Ubiquity and the lack of a discernible target would trump censorship.

The industry, old and new, digital and analog, should step across a line together, holding hands with consumers and letting the world know that we prize our goofy movies, along with the important ones, and the freedoms that they represent. If disparate competitors managed to set aside self-interest and acted for the common good, it
could be the social viewing event of the century. I’d do anything to do my bit for artistic freedom, including watching a buddy-movie comedy that stars Mr. Rogen and James Franco.

Play the movie.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/bu...lings-too.html





Sony Threatens to Sue Twitter Unless It Removes Tweets Containing Hacked Emails
Jason Koebler

Sony’s battle on people disseminating its hacked and leaked emails has extended from news outlets to random Twitter users to, now, Twitter itself. Sony’s lawyer has threatened Twitter with legal action if the social networking company doesn’t ban accounts that are sharing the leaks, according to emails obtained by Motherboard.

The letter—sent from David Boies, the lawyer Sony has hired to help guide it through the aftermath of the hack, to Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s general counsel—says that if “stolen information continues to be disseminated by Twitter in any manner,” Sony will “hold Twitter responsible for any damage or loss arising from such use or dissemination by Twitter.”

In the letter, Sony asked that Twitter share the legal threat with Val Broeksmit, a musician who has been posting screenshots of hacked Sony emails on Twitter. Broeksmit then forwarded the email to me. Twitter’s legal department told Broeksmit, who tweets from the account @bikinrobotarmy, that it “cannot provide legal advice. You may wish to contact your own attorney about this matter.”

Sony demanded that Twitter “comply with all future requests with regard to any other account holder seeking to disseminate the Stolen Information via Twitter. In addition, we ask that you provide the Account Holder with a copy of this letter, and request that the Account Holder cease publication of the Stolen Information on Twitter.”

A spokesperson for Twitter confirmed that the letter is authentic but declined to specifically comment about the company's response. When asked whether the company would be deleting Broeksmit's tweets, the spokesperson noted that, right now, the tweets are still live on the site.

The letter Sony sent Twitter is much like the letter Sony sent to Broeksmit, which was also similar to notices sent to journalists reporting on the information contained in the Sony hacks.

“SPE does not consent to Twitter’s or any Twitter account holder’s possession, review, copying, dissemination, publication, uploading, downloading, or making any use of the Stolen Information, and to request your cooperation in suspending the Account Holder’s Twitter account and the account of any other user seeking to disseminate the Stolen Information via Twitter,” the email said.

Earlier today, a Twitter spokesperson told me that the social media network doesn’t allow the posting of another person’s private information, but that it does allow linking to such information.

“We review all reported content against our rules, which prohibit posting another person's private information. Please note that this only applies to content (text or images) posted within a tweet; we do not follow links to apply our rules to other sites. If a user or company (e.g., Sony) submits an actionable DMCA takedown request to us, we'll disclose that to Chilling Effects,” the spokesperson said, referring to a website designed to catalog government and company social media takedown requests.

The letter sent from Boies to Twitter is not a DMCA takedown request, however—it appears to be a pure legal threat. We’ve reached out to Sony and will update this post if we hear back.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/son...-hacked-emails





Is Sony's Crackdown a Bigger Threat to Western Free Speech than North Korea?
Trevor Timm

The Interview may be released after all, but just because a Hollywood studio got hacked doesn’t mean it can censor Twitter, the news media and sites across the web

After a pre-Christmas week full of massive backlash for caving to a vague and unsubstantiated threat by hackers supposedly from North Korea, Sony has reversed course and decided it will allow The Interview to be shown after all – thus all but ending what Senator John McCain absurdly called “the greatest blow to free speech that I’ve seen in my lifetime probably”.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s unequivocally good news that North Korea (or whoever hacked Sony) won’t succeed in invoking a ludicrous heckler’s veto over a satirical movie starring Seth Rogen, but there are far greater threats to our freedom of speech here in the United States. For example, Sony itself.

Lost in the will-they-or-won’t-they controversy over Sony’s potential release of The Interview has been the outright viciousness that Sony has unleashed on some of the biggest social-media sites and news outlets in the world. For the past two weeks, the studio has been trying to bully these publishing platforms into stopping the release of newsworthy stories or outright censoring already-public information contained in the hacked emails, despite a clear First Amendment right to the contrary.

On top of Sony’s worrying and legally dubious threats, the most explosive and under-read story inside the hacked trove involves Sony and its close allies at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) attempting to censor the internet on a much larger scale, by reviving a re-tooled version of a highly controversial bill known as Sopa that was scuttled back in 2011 because of widespread fears that it would destroy online free speech as we know it.

Sony’s latest censorious move arrived on Monday, when Vice reported that the studio’s high-priced lawyer David Boies (of Bush v Gore and anti-Prop 8 fame) sent a threatening letter to Twitter warning it to delete a specific Twitter account that was tweeting TMZ-friendly emails about Brad Pitt and others found in the “Guardians of Peace” data. Sony also demanded that Twitter stop every other account from publishing anything from the emails whatsoever.

The letter cited various laws, most of which could not possibly be used to censor online content. Several intellectual property and free expression lawyers openly mocked Sony’s demands, and Twitter has commendably not bowed to them – at least not yet. But that doesn’t mean the Hollywood threats won’t ultimately have their intended chilling effect upon anyone else with credibility in America threatening to speak freely about Hollywood.

Sony sent a similarly threatening letter to several news organizations that reported on the hacked emails a week and a half ago, saying the movie studio “would have no choice” but to hold the media companies “responsible” for whatever happened – whatever that means. Sony didn’t even bother to cite any law that these news organizations were allegedly violating, most likely because Boies knew full well there weren’t any. The US supreme court ruled unequivocally more than a decade ago that news organizations have the First Amendment right to publish stolen information – even if they know it was originally obtained illegally.

As the Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone reported, New York Times lawyers supposedly told their reporters specifically not to look at the Sony emails posted online by the unknown hackers. Despite Times executive editor Dean Baquet defending some of the emails as newsworthy, Times reporter Jeremy Peters said this on MSNBC’s Morning Joe:

As our lawyers are telling our reporters at the New York Times, we are not to open these emails. We are not to actively look at them. We are only allowed to report on what has been out there because this is stolen material and trafficking in it is in itself a criminal act.

This is quite a worrying statement and hopefully not the actual legal opinion of lawyers inside America’s newsrooms, the Times or otherwise. Imagine how the news landscape over the past few decades would be different if journalists were told they couldn’t publish “stolen information” any of the other thousands of times they’ve been given corporate or government materials that they weren’t supposed to have in the first place. One person’s “stolen information” is another person’s source.

Sadly, the Times is not alone. I’ve heard from reporters at multiple US news organizations that the paper’s letter made their legal departments very nervous, despite their clear First Amendment rights to report on stories like pay discrimination and racism, and yes, even gossip. (We can lament sites like TMZ or certain blog posts at Gawker, but that doesn’t mean the stories they publish based on already-public information can or should be outlawed.)

It’s unclear if Sony actually thinks their threats will scare news outlets into submission, but it’s possible at least some of the news Sony would like to stop is about as far from gossip as it can get: a formerly secret plan, code-named “Project Goliath”, hatched by the MPAA, Sony and five other major movie studios to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars convincing state attorneys general to pressure Google into censoring all sorts of websites in the name of anti-piracy – without a judge involved at all. The Verge, which was first to report on this covert plan, described it like this:

Documents reviewed by The Verge detail the beginning of a new plan to attack piracy after the federal SOPA efforts failed by working with state attorneys general and major ISPs like Comcast to expand court power over the way data is served. If successful, the result would fundamentally alter the open nature of the internet.

As EFF’s Parker Higgins wrote, “The clear aim of that campaign … is to achieve the goals of the defeated SOPA blacklist proposal without the public oversight of the legislative process.”

Since the Goliath story was first reported earlier this month, Google has sued Mississippi’s state attorney general after he sent the company harassing subpoenas, and in an unusually strong public statement, the tech giant accused the MPAA of “trying to secretly censor the Internet”.

Nobody but the criminals who originally hacked Sony’s emails really believe that truly private information like Social Security numbers or medical information should be published by news organizations. And it hasn’t. We should also acknowledge that Hollywood executives, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt deserve privacy like the rest of us. But that doesn’t mean Sony gets to unilaterally decide what gets censored on the internet and what doesn’t.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...-the-interview





North Korea Denies Sony Hack But Warns U.S.: Worse is Coming
Josh Levs

• North Korea warns it will go after the White House, Pentagon and "whole U.S. mainland"
• It insists it was not involved in the Sony hack
• President Obama says the attack was "cybervandalism," not war
• But he says the U.S. will review whether to put North Korea back on list of terrorism sponsors

North Korea is accusing the U.S. government of being behind the making of the movie "The Interview."

And, in a dispatch on state media, the totalitarian regime warned the United States that its "citadels" will be attacked, dwarfing the hacking attack on Sony that led to the cancellation of the film's release.

While steadfastly denying involvement in the hack, North Korea accused U.S. President Barack Obama of calling for "symmetric counteraction."

"The DPRK has already launched the toughest counteraction. Nothing is more serious miscalculation than guessing that just a single movie production company is the target of this counteraction. Our target is all the citadels of the U.S. imperialists who earned the bitterest grudge of all Koreans," a report on state-run KCNA read.

"Our toughest counteraction will be boldly taken against the White House, the Pentagon and the whole U.S. mainland, the cesspool of terrorism," the report said, adding that "fighters for justice" including the "Guardians of Peace" -- a group that claimed responsibility for the Sony attack -- "are sharpening bayonets not only in the U.S. mainland but in all other parts of the world."

'Act of cybervandalism'

The FBI on Friday pinned blame on North Korea for a hack into Sony's computer systems.

In an interview broadcast Sunday on CNN, Obama called it "an act of cybervandalism," not war.

He said the United States is going to review whether to put North Korea back on a list of states that sponsor terrorism.

"We've got very clear criteria as to what it means for a state to sponsor terrorism. And we don't make those judgments just based on the news of the day," Obama said. "We look systematically at what's been done and based on those facts, we'll make those determinations in the future."

The Republican National Committee urged cinema chains to show the movie.

In a letter to their CEOs, RNC chairman Reince Priebus wrote: "As a sign of my commitment, if you agree to show this movie, I will send a note to the Republican Party's millions of donors and supporters urging them to buy a ticket -- not to support one movie or Hollywood, but to show North Korea we cannot be bullied into giving up our freedom."

'Dishonest reactionary movie'

While the film was the work of private individuals, North Korea insisted otherwise in its statement. "The DPRK has clear evidence that the U.S. administration was deeply involved in the making of such dishonest reactionary movie," it said.

"The Interview" is a comedy, with plans for an attempted assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a central plot point.

In a CNN interview on Friday, Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton said the studio had not "given in" to pressure from hackers and was still considering ways to distribute the movie.

But that's not what the company initially said after canceling the film's release.

On Wednesday night, a studio spokesperson said simply, "Sony Pictures has no further release plans for the film."

But in its latest statement, released Sunday, the company said: "No decisions have been made. Sony is still exploring options for distribution."
http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/21/world/...ony/index.html





We Spoke To A North Korean Defector Who Trained With Its Hackers — What He Said Is Pretty Scary
Eugene Kim

Whether North Korea was responsible for the Sony hack or not, the consensus is that North Korea has some of the best hackers in the world.

There have been some reports recently about North Korea’s special cyber warfare unit, known as Bureau 121. The North Korean government has made grooming its “cyber warriors” a top priority for decades, and has given first class treatment to its hackers.

Jang Se-yul, a North Korean defector who now leads an organization called North Korea People’s Liberation Front in Seoul, could have been one of them.

Before defecting to South Korea in 2007, Jang went to Mirim University, the country’s top engineering college, which is now called the University of Automation. Although he wasn’t a hacker — his major was War Game Strategy, focused on cyber warfare simulations — Jang took classes with the hackers that are now in Bureau 121. After graduation, Jang worked at North Korea’s General Bureau of Reconnaissance, the intelligence agency that Bureau 121 is a part of. He says he still keeps in touch with some of those hackers.

Business Insider had a chance to speak with Jang and hear more about the inner workings of North Korea’s elite hacking force. Here’s what he told us:

How they’re trained: Mirim University produces most of the hackers that get placed in Bureau 121. It’s a highly competitive program, with each class accepting only about 100 students out of 5,000 applicants. They take six 90-minute classes every day, learning different coding languages and operating systems, from C to Linux. Jang says a lot of time was spent dissecting Microsoft programs, like the Windows operating system, and how to attack the overall computer IT systems of enemy countries like the US or South Korea.

But the core principle is to develop its own hacking programs and computer viruses without having to rely on programs already built in the outside world. Jang says he believes North Korean hackers are as good as the top programmers at Google or CIA, if not already better. “Especially in terms of coding, I’m confident they’re better because they’ve invested in it for so long,” he says.

What it’s like to work for Bureau 121: They’re all very sophisticated professional hackers, with almost nine years of intense training by the time they get hired. They’re split into different focus groups based on countries to attack, like the US, South Korea, and Japan. Once they’re placed in their respective groups, they spend nearly two years traveling to their assigned country, learning the language and culture. The ability to travel outside of North Korea and make US dollars is part of the reason so many North Koreans want this job. Jang estimates there are about 1,800 cyber warriors in Bureau 121.

Their living conditions are much better than most North Koreans': they receive high salaries, a free apartment over 2,000 sq ft in downtown Pyongyang, and their family can move to Pyongyang as well, which is a big privilege. They’re among the top 1% who are happy with their lives in North Korea. In fact, with free access to the internet, these hackers are all aware of what’s going on in the outside world and how reclusive their country is — but they still won’t leave their country. “No matter how hard you try to convince them, they won’t leave — even if you offered them a job at the Blue House (the official residence of the South Korean president),” Jang says.

The ultimate goal: North Korea realizes they have no chance fighting their enemies in conventional warfare. But in cyber space, they can create chaos with relatively few resources. It’s why the North Korean government has spent so much effort in this area since the 1980s. They call it the “Secret War.” Jang says the ultimate goal is to attack the central IT infrastructure of enemy countries, primarily the government, and steal as much information as possible while also causing social pandemonium.

According to Jang, the North Korean hackers say attacking South Korean government servers is like “swimming while touching the ground.” Although he wouldn’t be able to say for sure how advanced their skills are, Jang says the hackers could probably “easily” crack into company servers, too.

He also said he’s “absolutely sure” North Korea is behind the Sony hacks. The fact that people are still skeptical of North Korea’s involvement is the very reason North Korea is so focused on cyber attacks: they can cause massive confusion without being definitively fingered.

The bigger problem is this is only going to get worse. “The US is definitely not in a safety zone. North Korea’s prepared for this for over 20 years. The U.S. shouldn’t take them lightly,” he said.
http://www.businessinsider.com/north...ackers-2014-12





Sony, in About-Face, Will Screen ‘The Interview’ in a Small Run
Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply

“The Interview,” the raucous comedy that became the center of a dispute over cybersecurity between the United States and North Korea, will be released in a small number of theaters on Christmas Day after all, Sony Pictures said on Tuesday. The development gave new life to a film that Sony had pulled from distribution last week, after hackers threatened violence against any theater that played it.

Sony also left open the door to video-on-demand availability of the movie, either simultaneously with its debut in theaters, or nearly so. In announcing the new plan on Tuesday, Michael Lynton, Sony Pictures’ chairman, said his studio was continuing efforts “to secure more platforms and more theaters so that this movie reaches the largest possible audience.”

“Freedom has prevailed! Sony didn’t give up!” Seth Rogen, who co-directed, co-wrote and co-stars in “The Interview,” wrote on Twitter.

A comedy about the assassination of North Korea’s ruler, Kim Jong-un, “The Interview” was withdrawn by Sony last week after theater chains refused to play it in the face of a terror threat. Though Sony was privately searching for new outlets, the aborted release led to a chorus of protest, as irate Hollywood stars, free-speech advocates and even President Obama complained that Sony had capitulated to extortionist demands to cancel the release.

On Friday, hours after the Federal Bureau of Investigation identified North Korea as “centrally involved” in a cyberattack of Sony and the subsequent terror threat, Mr. Obama elevated the issue from a serious industry problem to one involving national security and artistic expression. “We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States,” Mr. Obama told reporters.

Following Mr. Obama’s rebuke, Sony stepped up its campaign to secure a release. Mr. Lynton, who had already been searching for alternatives, insisted to CNN and NPR last Friday that the studio had not caved, and that it was scrambling to find new distribution. David Boies, a Sony lawyer, delivered the same message on “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

Over the last day Sony reached out again to the big multiplex operators asking if they would rebook the film, according to people briefed on the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because negotiations were continuing.

Sony on Tuesday had so far patched together release of “The Interview” in about 200 smaller theaters, including the Plaza in Atlanta and roughly 20 venues operated by Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, a chain based in Texas. Some theaters reported near-instant sellouts for Thursday screenings. Still, a run of that size would be largely symbolic in financial terms for Sony, which spent $44 million to make the film and had planned to release it on more than 2,000 North American screens.

It appeared unlikely on Tuesday that major exhibitors would come back on board, as security concerns were compounded by anger over Sony’s handling of “The Interview.” North America’s four largest chains — Regal, AMC, Cinemark and Carmike — either declined to comment or did not respond to queries.

Advertising will largely take place on social media.

Though modest, the new release plan is a positive turn of events for Mr. Lynton and Amy Pascal, Sony Pictures’ co-chairwoman, who were battered for canceling the release. But the decision to move ahead with limited distribution begins a new period of disquiet for the studio and its partners. The hacker group that digitally ransacked Sony and threatened theaters with violence had warned that a digital assault would resume if new distribution plans were made.

In addition to the furor over “The Interview,” Sony has suffered the disclosure of tens of thousands of emails, personnel files and other private data since Nov. 24. Mr. Obama said the United States would take action in response to the Sony attack, leading North Korea, which has denied responsibility, to warn of “serious consequences” if the United States made any such move.

Theater owners and government officials have been trying to assess the credibility of the terrorism threat, which came on Dec. 16 and warned of 9/11-scale violence if “The Interview” was released. Initially, the F.B.I. had guided theaters to treat the missive like a bomb threat — credible until it could be proved otherwise. But law enforcement agencies have in recent days softened that assessment, according to people briefed on the matter.

The art-house theaters showing the film might still take unusual security measures, perhaps by banning backpacks or packages or posting signs advising customers of added risk, said people briefed on their plans.

Even so, the theaters taking “The Interview” face security issues less severe than any that multiplexes would have come up against. Many of America’s 500 or so art houses, for instance, are located away from shopping malls; mall operators initially objected to the showing of a film under explicit threat.

Keeping “The Interview” away from multiplexes would also reduce any collateral damage for Sony competitors, some of whom aggressively pushed exhibitors to drop the film to protect ticket sales for their holiday releases. Competing studios had privately argued that, even if the threat was not credible, having “The Interview” on theater marquees could prompt ticket buyers to stay away, hurting films playing in the same complex.

A new facet of Sony’s discussions with theater owners is any simultaneous video-on-demand effort. Studios typically give theaters an exclusive monthslong window to play new movies. Most theaters, worried about the impact on ticket sales, remain adamant about refusing to open their doors to any film that is showing or about to show through other channels.

It remained unclear, however, whether any on-demand service would take “The Interview.” According to people briefed on the matter, Sony had in recent days asked the White House for help in lining up a single technology partner — Apple, which operates iTunes — but the tech company was not interested, at least not on a speedy time table. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

On Tuesday, Eric Schultz, a White House press secretary, said that Mr. Obama welcomed the decision to release the film. “As the president made clear, we’re a country that believes in free speech and the right of artistic expression,” he said.

Finding a new delivery route has been complicated. Satellite operators, cable systems and online platforms worried that they would become hacking targets if they picked up the film.

The studio early on ruled out its own video site, Crackle. That streaming service is free, and Sony has a contractual financial obligation to various profit participants in “The Interview” to exhaust all paid options. YouTube was eliminated as an option for the same reason, among others.

A spokesman for LStar Capital, which helped finance “The Interview,” declined to comment.

Unclear on Tuesday was precisely how Sony arrived at the decision to mount a limited theatrical release. A group called Art House Convergence may have played a role; on Monday it told Sony it had found about 250 small theaters willing to play the film.

Amy Chozick contributed reporting from Kailua, Hawaii.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/24/bu...after-all.html





Crowds Gather as ‘The Interview’ Begins Screening in 331 Theaters
Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply

Carolers dressed in Dickensian costumes sang “Silent Night” at 11:45 p.m. on Wednesday here, as a woman with a strip of shiny gold garland tied around her head handed out hot cider.

“I could think of no place better to be on Christmas Eve than here, with like-minded people, coming together for something we strongly believe in,” said Julia Paredes, a bookstore manager.

This was not a midnight Mass. It was one of the first screenings of Sony’s “The Interview,” which improbably became a symbol of free speech in the last week as hackers who attacked the studio first got the movie withdrawn from distribution, then, after a groundswell of support for releasing it that reached the White House, watched it open after all.

As moviegoers lined up at the 331 scrappy, independently owned theaters that played “The Interview” on Christmas, it was obvious that many, like Ms. Paredes, 28, were there to make a political stand. They turned out in red, white and blue attire. At one theater in California, a ticket taker dressed up as “Uncle Sam-ty Claus.” A manager at Cinema Village in Manhattan introduced the film by reciting “America,” also known as “My Country ’Tis of Thee.”

The number of tickets sold was not immediately available. Sony said only that it would disclose results on Friday. The studio similarly declined to report sales figures or estimates for online rentals and sales. But there were indications of strong interest: Many theaters reported sellouts, and “The Interview” was listed as the No. 1 seller on YouTube Movies and the Google Play store on Thursday morning.

The small theaters playing the film — art houses that only rarely get such a hot ticket — appeared to be doing well while doing good. Some theaters started selling souvenir soft drink cups shaped like rockets for a $6 premium over the standard drink price. Individual tickets in spots ran as high as $24.

“It’s been gangbusters,” said Christian Parkes, chief brand officer of Alamo Drafthouse, which showed “The Interview” in 19 theaters across multiple states. “Christmas Day is sold out across the chain.”

Many of the theaters playing “The Interview” did not have showtimes until midday in their various time zones. But the Cinefamily Theater — a 174-seat cinematheque here still identified on its purple neon marquee as the Silent Movie Theater — held a 12:30 a.m. screening, which is the one Ms. Paredes drove an hour from her home in Santa Ana, Calif., to attend.

As the lights came down in the 72-year-old theater, two men appeared with microphones to make an introduction: Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. They directed “The Interview,” a raunchy comedy about the assassination of North Korea’s ruler, Kim Jong-un. Mr. Rogen, who also stars in the film, gave a profanity-laced warm-up.

“We live near here,” Mr. Rogen said. “We just wanted to say thank you.”

“The Interview” has received mixed-to-negative reviews. (“A goofy, strenuously naughty, hit-and-miss farce,” wrote A.O. Scott in The New York Times.) But curiosity about the controversy surrounding the film at least in some instances trumped taste. “I’m just here for the hype,” said Pam Silverthorn, 49, a defense contractor, who turned out for a matinee at Williamsburg Cinemas in Brooklyn.

Noel Rodriguez, 21, made a first-time visit to the Regency theater in Commerce, Calif., in part to participate in an unusual chapter of Hollywood history. “I just wanted to be able to say I saw it,” he said.

Sony made its initial theatrical retreat after a threat — traced by the F.B.I. to the North Korean government — of 9/11-style violence against theaters that showed the film. The smaller theaters Sony eventually lined up to present it promised heightened security. Weezie Melancon, president of the Crest Theater in Los Angeles, said she had been in contact with the Los Angeles Police Department and the county sheriff’s department, both of which had promised an extra presence. Officers huddled with a ticket taker shortly before showtime.

Noah Elgart, 28, the manager at Williamsburg Cinemas, said his staff would be checking bags as a precaution but did not expect any problems despite the threats against the film.

Toby Leonard, programming director at the restored Belcourt Theater in Nashville, said he had been in touch with a local representative for the F.B.I. and was told “in so many words that there really isn’t much of a credible threat here.” Mr. Leonard said he also checked with the Belcourt’s insurance company, which responded “by asking if they could buy a block of tickets.” In a rare move, Sony made “The Interview” available for rental or sale online Wednesday. Among the Internet services that offered it were the Google Play store, Google’s YouTube and Microsoft’s Xbox Video. Sony began showing the film on a website of its own.

On Wednesday night, Sony’s hastily assembled online release of “The Interview” hit bumps. Some early would-be viewers could not load or pay for the film on Sony’s SeeTheInterview.com site, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Separately, users of Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox Live game services — in an episode apparently unrelated to the film — complained of service problems.

In addition, digital pirates were already offering “The Interview” online. One link had been downloaded more than 20,000 times as of Thursday morning. Although Sony has not yet made “The Interview” available overseas, it was also widely available for streaming on Chinese video-sharing sites, with an unofficial version with English and Chinese subtitles. The Chinese title for that version of the film translated as “Assassinate Kim Jong-un.”

But gratitude and patriotism ruled the day in theaters.

“The fact that they’re showing this movie shows that America still has a backbone regardless of the critics,” said Jay Killion, a golf pro who caught a screening at Tower City Cinemas in Cleveland.

At Alamo Drafthouse, screenings began with a recorded video message of thanks from Mr. Rogen to members of the Art House Convergence, an alliance of small theaters that was instrumental in reviving the film.

“Thank you, America,” Mr. Rogen added in the recording, to cheers from one audience at Alamo’s Lubbock, Tex., location.

Reporting was contributed by Alan Feuer from New York; Adam Gold from Nashville; Lucinda Holt from Lubbock, Tex.; Andrew Jacobs from Beijing; Ameera Butt from Los Angeles; and Carlo Wolff from Cleveland.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/26/bu...-theaters.html





Yoon Mi Rae to Take Legal Action against Sony Pictures for Using Her Song in “The Interview” without Permission
kiddy_days

Yoon Mi Rae has revealed that the Hollywood film “The Interview” used her song without permission, and that she will be taking legal action.

Yoon Mi Rae’s agency, Feel Ghood Music, said on December 26 that “There were initial discussions for using ‘Pay Day‘ in the movie, but at some point, the discussions ceased and we assumed that it would not follow through. However, after the movie was released, we learned that the track had been used without permission, legal procedure, or contracts.”

They added, “We will be taking legal action against Sony Pictures as well as DFSB, the agency that had been carrying out the discussion regarding the use of the track.”

“The Interview” is a comedy film that deals with the assassination of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. The track “Pay Day” was used in the scene in which Kim Jong Un engages in hedonism.

“The Interview” has been in danger of not being released as it was under hacking attacks and threats. However, it is now receiving even greater attention with both online and offline distribution.
http://www.soompi.com/2014/12/26/yoo...ut-permission/





Pirates Swarm Over ‘The Interview’ After Sony’s Digital Release
Todd Spangler

Shortly after Sony Pictures Entertainment released “The Interview” on digital services Dec. 24, high-quality copies of the movie turned up on multiple piracy sites — and in less than 24 hours, it had already been downloaded by about 900,000 torrent users worldwide.

On Wednesday, the studio announced the launch of “The Interview” on Google Play, YouTube Movies, Microsoft’s Xbox Video and its own website, SeetheInterview.com, for $5.99 rental or $14.99 purchase. That came ahead of Sony’s planned U.S. theatrical release of the film to more than 300 independent theaters on Christmas Day.

However, Sony’s digital release of the movie is currently available only in the U.S. As such, it’s unsurprising that “The Interview” was quickly pirated, particularly given worldwide interest in the movie after the devastating hack on SPE and allegations by U.S. government that North Korea was responsible for the attack.

Poached copies of “The Interview” had been downloaded by 904,237 clients worldwide as of about 4 p.m. ET Thursday after being uploaded less than 24 hours earlier to file-sharing services, according to piracy-tracking firm Excipio. Of those, 28% were in the U.S. — representing the country with the largest base of pirates — where the film is legally available through digital services.

The surge in piracy for “The Interview” comes even after the Pirate Bay, the world’s best-known piracy outfit, was shut down in Sweden by law-enforcement officials in a raid confiscating its servers and equipment Dec. 9.

The cyber-terrorists who attacked Sony stole copies of DVD screeners of four unreleased movies — including the studio’s “Annie” holiday release — and uploaded them to pirate sites, along with “Fury,” the war pic starring Brad Pitt. But until this week, legitimate copies of “The Interview” had not surfaced on pirate sites.

“The Interview,” starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, is a geopolitical satire centering on two American TV journalists enlisted by the CIA to kill North Korea’s leader. Major U.S. theater chains dropped plans to show the film after hackers threatened terrorist attacks, leading Sony to previously pull all distribution. Then, earlier this week, Sony reversed course with the digital-video partnerships and a limited theatrical run.

For Sony’s legal digital distribution of “The Interview,” no figures are available for rentals and purchases of the movie at this point. However, the film is listed as the No. 1 title in the Google Play store and YouTube’s movies section as of Thursday.
https://variety.com/2014/digital/new...se-1201387196/

















Until next week,

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