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Old 09-09-15, 07:00 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - September 12th, '15

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September 12th, 2015




Norwegian Pirate Party Provides DNS Server to Bypass New Pirate Bay Blockade

Pirate Party fights back against court-ordered blockade of file-sharing sites.
Sebastian Anthony

Following a court-ordered block of The Pirate Bay and a number of other file-sharing websites in Norway, the Norwegian Pirate Party (Piratpartiet Norge) has now set up free, uncensored DNS servers that anyone can use to bypass the block. While the DNS servers are based in Norway, anyone can use them: if your ISP is blocking access to certain sites via DNS blackholing/blocking, using the Piratpartiet's DNS servers should enable access.

A few days ago, TorrentFreak reported that the Oslo District Court had sided with several Hollywood studios and domestic Norwegian rights holders in a case that sought to block a number of sites, including The Pirate Bay, Viooz, and ExtraTorrent. The court ordered that the country's major ISPs, including Telenor, TeliaSonera, NextGenTel, and Altibox, must block the sites.

The Norwegian Pirate Party, as you can probably imagine, isn't happy with the court-ordered block. In response, it has set up an unblocked DNS server—dns.piratpartiet.no—and a website that shows you how to change your DNS server settings on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

The Party's co-chairman, Øystein Middelthun, gave TorrentFreak some choice sound bites about the manoeuvre, too. "We want a free and open Internet for everyone," Middelthun said. "The copyright industry’s fight for control over culture has put us in a situation where this is no longer the case in Norway."

He continued: "The blocking order is yet another sad step down the road towards the dystopic world imagined by George Orwell ... the dangerous thing about it is that it sets a precedent. It is easy to imagine how the scope could be expanded to include other websites somehow considered immoral, and while the current technical implementation is easy to circumvent, hardening it is equally easy once society has accepted censorship in the first place."

The UK Pirate Party tried to do something similar in the UK a few years ago, by offering a proxy service that bypassed a court-ordered block of The Pirate Bay. The proxy wasn't online for very long, however: facing a costly legal battle with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the UK Pirate Party decided it was "financially impossible" to keep the service running and pulled the plug.

The Norwegian Pirate Party, for its part, is confident that its DNS server will stick around: "Running a public DNS service is fully legal, so we do not expect any legal trouble," Middelthun said.

Other alternative DNS providers, such as OpenDNS and Google Public DNS, both appear to bypass DNS-based website blockades as well.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy...-bay-blockade/





Derry Film Pirate Who Cost Hollywood Millions Jailed for Four Years
Theresa Casey

A Derry film pirate who put the entertainment industry at risk of losing £120 million has been jailed for four years.

Paul Mahoney, who was described in court as a social recluse, admitted being responsible for a ‘highly sophisticated fraud’ which made him almost £300,000.

The 29-year-old, from Carnhill, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud, acquiring criminal property and concealing criminal property.

The offences were committed between April 2008 and April 2013.

Derry Crown Court heard Mahoney set up a website which allowed people to illegally view movies and TV shows which had only been recently released or had not yet been released.

It is estimated that movies were viewed over 12 million times and this had put the entertainment industry at risk of losing uo to £120 million.

He continued to run the website even after he was served a cease and desist order by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) and after he was initially arrested.

The court also heard he had made over £280,000 in advertising revenue and some £82,000 was found in his property when it was searched by police.

Passing sentence Judge Philip Babington said ‘these offences represent offending which undoubtedly put at risk very many millions of pounds as far as the greater entertainment industry was concerned.

‘Offending such as this affects everyone in society at the end of the day although primarily the interests f those involved in film production, the results of which we all enjoy’.

The judge said Mahoney had put together a very ‘sophisticated scheme which allowed you to view films on very many millions of occasions for nothing and at the same time allowed you to make money from advertising’.

Judge Babington added that criminal conduct of this nature ‘must be deterred’ and said there was no alternative to an immediate custodial sentence ‘to show that behaviour of this nature does not go unpunished’.

He imposed a determinate sentence of four years, two years of which will be spent in custody and two years on licence.
http://www.derryjournal.com/news/cou...ears-1-6946005





Summer Box Office: How Movie Tracking Went Off the Rails
Pamela McClintock

Projections said 'Jurassic World' would do 60 percent of what it made opening weekend. 'Terminator: Genisys' fell short by 25 percent. Meanwhile, poorly reviewed movies tanked as Twitter buzz and Rotten Tomatoes destroyed careful marketing campaigns and execs began to question prerelease surveys: "Maybe we need to re-examine the methodology."

Summer 2015 will go down as the box-office season of the haves and have-nots. Universal, which until this year had not released a billion-dollar-grossing film, opened three from April through July (Furious 7, Jurassic World and Minions). Meanwhile, Warner Bros. and Sony — the former kings of warm-weather hits — suffered a mostly chilly summer. The season's lone constant was that tracking, the prerelease radar of the movie business, malfunctioned weekend after weekend, appearing altogether broken. Summer domestic box-office revenue may hit $4.48 billion, making it the second-biggest summer of all time after 2013 ($4.8 billion), but it was an especially bumpy ride.

A slew of films opened to a third or half of what prerelease tracking suggested despite pricey marketing campaigns. Jurassic World, on the other hand, flew clear past domestic opening-weekend forecasts of $125 million. The lack of predictability can strain a studio's relationship with talent and prompt internal finger-pointing as to what went wrong.

Tracking has become increasingly unreliable during the age of social media, when poor reviews and buzz can derail even the most carefully calculated marketing campaign. But insiders say the problem has reached a tipping point. "This was a summer completely designed by reviews and word-of-mouth," says Megan Colligan, Paramount's president of worldwide distribution and marketing. "I would actually hear people in the grocery store talking about Rotten Tomatoes scores."

Indeed, many titles that failed to reach tracking projections had poor scores on review-aggregation sites. Paramount and Skydance's Terminator: Genisys was expected to clear $55 million during the five-day July 4 holiday; instead, Genisys, with a 26 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, opened to a disappointing $42.5 million. Warners was blindsided repeatedly as Entourage, Magic Mike XXL, Vacation, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and We Are Your Friends came in well behind tracking. None was particularly well received. Fox's Fantastic Four, savaged by reviews and its director's own tweet, lagged far behind initial tracking.

The opposite was true for movies with strong marks on Rotten Tomatoes, including Trainwreck (85 percent "fresh"), Straight Outta Compton (90 percent) and Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation (93 percent). Each came in well ahead of projections. Universal and Paramount promoted Rotten Tomatoes scores rather than individual critics in ads for Trainwreck and Rogue, respectively, a Hollywood first. "There is a point where traditional tracking can't tell you everything anymore because of word-of-mouth," says Universal domestic distribution chief Nicholas Carpou. Adds Fox domestic distribution head Chris Aronson: "We're seeing these wide swings because of immediacy of social media. Maybe we need to re-examine the methodology."

The main authority in tracking remains the National Research Group. MarketCast is another trusted firm, but on a smaller scale. (Both declined comment.) The two companies' main focus is testing marketing materials months and weeks out, although it is tracking that generates the headlines. NRG and MarketCast have changed their process during recent years, using the web and mobile phones to survey consumers rather than land lines. Now, facing pressure from studios, they intend to make more tweaks. For example, both survey only avid moviegoers, defined as those who attend six to eight films a year. But casual moviegoers could be more important than previously thought. "That's where the surprises come in, like Jurassic World," says a studio research executive. NRG is considering incorporating reviews into its final prerelease surveys.

"The inherent flaw with tracking is that they are using it to come up with a number to satisfy this need studios have to guesstimate what a movie will open to, but the unpredictability of the social conversation can change your fortunes," says Paul Dergarabedian of Rentrak, which in 2013 launched the social listening service PreAct, which can monitor a film a year out.

The hard lesson of the summer is that neither tracking, testing marketing materials nor social listening can capture word-of-mouth on opening night. Says Disney distribution chief Dave Hollis, "You don't have the luxury anymore of bad buzz not being immediately known."

Below is a look at which films and studios fared best. Since the summer box-office frame, commencing May 1, doesn't officially end until Sept. 7 (Labor Day), final numbers aren't yet in.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...acebook_150804





BMI to Announce It Surpassed $1 Billion in Revenue
Ben Sisario

The music industry may be struggling to make money in the streaming age, but one part of the business has been growing consistently: payments to songwriters.

BMI, one of the two big agencies in the United States that handle the licensing when songs are played on the radio or streamed online, plans to announce on Thursday that it exceeded $1 billion in annual revenue for the first time, led by rapid growth in digital music.

BMI, whose full name is Broadcast Music Inc., collected $1.013 billion for the 12 months that ended in June, up almost 4 percent from the year before. That is slightly more than the $1.001 billion that its competitor Ascap took in last year.

In the number that will be scrutinized most closely by musicians — royalties — BMI paid slightly less than its rival. After deducting its operating expenses, BMI distributed $877 million to its thousands of members, including songwriters like Taylor Swift, Nile Rodgers and Adam Levine of Maroon 5. Last year, Ascap paid its members $883 million.

Liz Fischer, a spokeswoman for BMI, said that the organization’s expenses included significant legal costs, most prominently a lawsuit against Pandora over royalty rates that was decided in BMI’s favor.

Between them, BMI and Ascap represent the performing rights of more than 90 percent of the commercially released songs in the United States, and their income has been growing even as the industry has faced turmoil. Since 2005, BMI’s collections have increased about 40 percent.

Much of the focus lately in the music publishing world has been on digital music and streaming; musicians, publishers and rights groups like BMI complain about the royalty rates paid by services like Pandora and Spotify. In its most recent year, BMI received about $100 million from digital sources, up 65 percent from the year before.

The digital category now makes up about 14 percent of BMI’s $721 million in domestic revenue. As recently as 2010, it was just 3 percent.

The biggest chunk of BMI’s income came from cable and satellite sources, which made up 34 percent of its domestic collections. Broadcast radio and television, one of the biggest categories, made up 33 percent, while “general licensing” — payments from restaurants, hotels and other businesses that use music — made up 19 percent.

International sources contributed $292 million to BMI’s total, a decline of 5 percent, which BMI attributed to changes in foreign exchange rates.

A ruling on a federal lawsuit over royalty rates may help BMI’s digital income increase even more. In May, a federal judge ruled that Pandora’s rate for using BMI’s music should increase to 2.5 percent of its revenue from 1.75 percent. Pandora has appealed that decision.

BMI and Ascap are also asking the Justice Department for changes to the federal regulation that has governed them for decades. Both groups, along with several major music publishers, want more control over licensing, which they say could lead to higher royalty payments from online services.

“We don’t think that songwriters should have to fund the growth of these businesses,” said Mike O’Neill, BMI’s chief executive.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/10/bu...n-revenue.html





Survivor Did Not Grant Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis Rights to 'Eye of the Tiger'
Katie Atkinson

It might be Kim Davis' favorite hype-up song, but Survivor says it did not grant the embattled Kentucky county clerk the rights to use "Eye of the Tiger" at her get-out-of-jail rally.

Davis -- who was jailed for refusing to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples in her state -- stood alongside Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee at a rally in Grayson, Ky., on Tuesday (Sept. 8) as the Survivor anthem made famous by Rocky III played in the background.

Survivor founding member and "Eye of the Tiger" co-writer Jim Peterik sent a statement to Billboard making clear that the band did not authorize the song's use at Tuesday's rally.

"I was very surprised and dismayed at the misuse of the song I co-wrote with Frankie Sullivan for Rocky lll," he said. "The song has motivated thousands through the years to reach beyond their limits. Its use for the release of Kim Davis does not support my views or my politics. I have contacted my publishers to make sure this usage is stopped immediately."

Sullivan, meanwhile, took to Facebook to let his followers know he did not support Davis' crusade. "We did not grant Kim Davis any rights to use 'My Tune -The Eye Of The Tiger.' I would not grant her the rights to use Charmin!" he wrote.

See his full Facebook post below:

NO! We did not grant Kim Davis any rights to use "My Tune -The Eye Of The Tiger." I would not grant her the rights to...
Posted by Frankie Sullivan on Tuesday, September 8, 2015


TMZ is reporting that the group is considering a lawsuit over the use of their song.
http://www.billboard.com/articles/co...ye-tiger-rally





Patent Law Shouldn’t Block the Sale of Used Tech Products
THE EDITORIAL BOARD

American patent law should not be used to prevent consumers from reselling, altering or fixing technology products. A federal appeals court will soon hear a case that could clearly establish this principle.

Lexmark International v. Impression Products, which is before the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, involves toner cartridges produced by Lexmark for use in its laser printers. The company is suing Impression Products, which buys used cartridges, refills them with toner and sells them to consumers. The refilled cartridges cost less than new ones sold by Lexmark.

Lexmark argues that Impression is infringing its patents, because Lexmark’s cartridges were sold to consumers under the condition that empty devices be returned to the company. Lexmark also asserts that the cartridges sold in foreign countries cannot be resold in the United States without its permission. The company bases this argument on a previous Federal Circuit ruling in a another patent case.

This case raises important questions about the reach of American patent law and how much control a manufacturer can exert after its products have been lawfully sold. Taken to their logical conclusion, Lexmark’s arguments would mean that producers could use patent law to dictate how things like computers, printers and other patented goods are used, changed or resold and place restrictions on international trade. That makes no sense, especially in a world where technology products and components are brought and sold numerous times, which is why the court should rule in favor of Impression.

If technology companies want to restrict how their products are used, they can lease their goods or sign contracts with business customers. Some manufacturers already use contracts to restrict reselling when they want to offer similar products at different prices in different countries. But using patent law to enforce restrictions is fraught with problems. There is no reason patent owners should be allowed to demand royalties from second or third owners of products who may be unaware of any restrictions.

Public-interest groups like Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation and technology companies like Google, Intel and Dell have filed briefs in support of Impression, arguing that patent law should not be used to limit the resale of goods and restrict international trade.

Pharmaceutical and medical device companies have filed briefs supporting Lexmark, arguing that a ruling in favor of Impression would make it easier to import drugs into the United States from countries where their prices are lower. That concern is misplaced, because the Food and Drug Administration has the power to restrict drug imports, and federal law already prohibits the re-importation of medicines made in the United States by anybody other than the producer.

A 2013 Supreme Court decision also appears to support Impression’s position. In Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, a 6-to-3 majority said people should be able to import and resell textbooks that were first sold abroad.

To encourage innovation, the government gives inventors patents on their creations for a limited time. But patents should not give the manufacturer indefinite control over the product after it has been sold.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/07/op...-products.html





Google Chrome Reportedly Bypassing Adblock, Forces Users to Watch Full-Length Video Ads [Update]
Muhammad Jarir Kanji

Twitter is alit today, it seems, with news of Google neutralising AdBlock Plus. The popular extension, originally created by Wladimir Palant in 2006, is used by many to bypass ads hosted on the internet, including the video ads served by Google's video streaming site.

It has drawn the ire of many web publishers and websites alike for allegedly curtailing their revenues significantly. In an attempt to shore up the almost non-existent profits from YouTube, Google might have finally found a way of skirting the extension. Multiple Twitter users are now posting their accounts, including images, of Chrome circumventing the extension's ad-averse net:

So YouTube has finally clamped down on Adblock, if Adblock is active on the page, the pre-roll ad will play without a skip option.
— SteeScribbles (@SteeScribbles) September 6, 2015

A 3 min ad? Really? I have adblock also how is this even possible? pic.twitter.com/3BmqZAGzIr
— revVGC (@r4rev2) September 7, 2015

YouTube now treats ads as pre-videos on the site, and only the skip ad button is seen as an ad by adblock. GENIUS! Good job guys! :D
— Jordi v/d Bussche (@Kwebbelkop) September 5, 2015


Google's workaround seems to be applicable to all similar extensions and isn't exclusive to just AdBlock Plus.

The company has not stopped at just skirting the extension, however. Users with AdBlock enabled will now have to see full-length video ads with no option to skip them half-way through, a feature YouTube has offered for a very long time. The only way to get the option back is to disable AdBlock, or to whitelist YouTube.

Ever-industrious, the internet has already found a way of bypassing Google's own bypass, though:

Fixed it. It seems to be just a Chrome thing. According to Adblock, uninstalling the "YouTube" "app" resolves the issue.
— SteeScribbles (@SteeScribbles) September 6, 2015


This move is likely to please content creators and publishers, but is obviously a blow at users' ability to choose how they interact with the internet and what content they consume and what they don't. Blocking ads has always been a controversial issue and it will likely remain so in the future.

Update: We have been contacted by Rob Wu, a developer on the Chromium project - the open-source foundation for the Chrome browser - who has informed us that this change was not intentional but, rather, an unintended result of fixing a previous security issue (CVE-2015-1297). He confirmed that the issue will only be seen if the YouTube app is installed and that, at the moment, apart from disabling AdBlock or whitelisting YouTube, the only solution, as described above, is to uninstall the app. The problem is expected to be patched in the upcoming weeks or, at least, when Chrome 46 is released.
http://www.neowin.net/news/google-ch...ngth-video-ads





Adblock Plus Officially Lands on Android and iOS Today
Owen Williams

While Apple’s been working on system-level ad blocking for iOS 9, Eyeo, the creator of Adblock Plus has been building its own browser.

Available today for both iOS and Android, Adblock Plus’ browser is free. It’s not actually entirely built in-house, instead based on top of an extensible iOS browser called Kitt which made it easy to port the Chrome extension from desktop.

The company is loudly trumpeting that it has “beaten” Apple to releasing its content blocking tools, but it’s unlikely Adblock Plus will be as efficient as Apple’s upcoming tools.

Adblock Plus blocks advertising as its loaded by the browser using JavaScript, unlike iOS 9’s content blockers which can block it before it’s loaded at all at a system level, which offers further performance improvements.

We’ve published extensive data on how efficient iOS 9’s content blocking is in practice, sometimes saving over 50 percent in page load time alone.

On the Android side, the browser has been in beta since late May and saw 300,000 downloads in the first week. Adblock Plus was previously banned from the Play Store for “interfering with” other services, but has managed to successfully re-list the app on the store.

If you’re dying to block advertising on your phone, you can download Adblock Plus now, though you’ll need to switch your browser to take advantage of it.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/0...and-ios-today/





Apple’s Privacy Policies Repel the Data Scientists it Needs to Create ‘Predictive’ Smartphones
Martin Anderson

Just for once, it seems that Apple ‘can’t get the staff’. According to a Reuters exclusive, the Cupertino-based global device giant is falling behind in the race to create ‘predictive’ services for smartphones because its privacy policies are too protective of the end-user.

The report has crunched numbers on Apple job openings and talked to various industry insiders, many of whom agree that Apple lacks the best conditions to attract the very limited supply of data scientists necessary to leverage cloud-based services and anticipate the most minute demands of smartphone users.

The reason for the company’s difficulty in challenging the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon for the brightest and the best new minds in data science and analysis seems to lie with its commitment to protect the privacy of its users. The report notes that data retention policies on user-centric information gathered into its Siri ‘personal assistant’ product is a reasonably generous six months, whilst information retained from the user’s exploration of Apple Maps expires after only 15 minutes.

As a consequence Apple’s smartphones attempt to crunch a great deal of user-data locally rather than in the cloud. Despite the high specs of iPhones and other Apple devices relative to the market average, this inevitably means not only a certain amount of local CPU drain but also a circumscribed access to all the possible data that the user may have generated.

The case with Apple Maps’ limited data retention is fairly telling, since this is precisely the kind of information that is likely to turn up in a suggestion-stream with rival services such as Microsoft’s Cortana virtual assistant or Google’s ‘Google Now’ service – both far more enticing employers for data-hungry scientists and analysts, according to the Reuters report, due to the longer duration of available user-data for analysis.

However University of Washington professor and CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence Oren Etzioni claims that Apple is determined to make up the shortfall, a fact that the piece contends is demonstrated by its recent spate of ads for data scientists and analysts: “In the past,” says Prof. Etzioni “Apple has not been at the vanguard of machine learning and cutting edge artificial intelligence work, but that is rapidly changing. They are after the best and the brightest, just like everybody else.”
https://thestack.com/cloud/2015/09/0...e-smartphones/





Apple and Other Tech Companies Tangle With U.S. Over Data Access
Matt Apuzzo, David E. Sanger and Michael S. Schmidt

In an investigation involving guns and drugs, the Justice Department obtained a court order this summer demanding that Apple turn over, in real time, text messages between suspects using iPhones.

Apple’s response: Its iMessage system was encrypted and the company could not comply.

Government officials had warned for months that this type of standoff was inevitable as technology companies like Apple and Google embraced tougher encryption. The case, coming after several others in which similar requests were rebuffed, prompted some senior Justice Department and F.B.I. officials to advocate taking Apple to court, several current and former law enforcement officials said.

While that prospect has been shelved for now, the Justice Department is engaged in a court dispute with another tech company, Microsoft. The case, which goes before a federal appeals court in New York on Wednesday and is being closely watched by industry officials and civil liberties advocates, began when the company refused to comply with a warrant in December 2013 for emails from a drug trafficking suspect. Microsoft said federal officials would have to get an order from an Irish court, because the emails were stored on servers in Dublin.

The conflicts with Apple and Microsoft reflect heightened corporate resistance, in the post-Edward J. Snowden era, by American technology companies intent on demonstrating that they are trying to protect customer information.

“It’s become all wrapped up in Snowden and privacy issues,” said George J. Terwilliger III, a lawyer who represents technology companies and as a Justice Department official two decades ago faced the challenge of how to wiretap phone networks that were becoming more digital.

President Obama has charged White House, Homeland Security and cybersecurity officials, along with those at the Justice Department, the F.B.I. and the intelligence agencies, with proposing solutions to the technology access issue. They are still hashing out their differences, according to law enforcement and administration officials.

Some Justice and F.B.I. officials have been frustrated that the White House has not moved more quickly or been more outspoken in the public relations fight that the tech companies appear to be winning, the law enforcement officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the private conversations.

The White House, after months of study, has yet to articulate a public response to the argument that a victory in the Microsoft case would provide authoritarian governments, particularly those of China and Russia, with a way to get access into computer servers located in the United States.

“Clearly, if the U.S. government wins, the door is open for other governments to reach into data centers in the U.S.,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said in a recent interview. Companies and civil liberties groups have been sending in briefs of their own, largely opposing the government’s surveillance powers.

Tensions between American technology leaders and the government over access are hardly new: The Clinton administration was forced to abandon plans to require technology manufacturers to build a small “clipper chip” into their hardware systems to allow the government to unlock encrypted communications.

Still, the nation’s phone companies ultimately supported legislation requiring them to build access points into their digital networks so they could comply with legal wiretap orders. (Tech companies like Apple and Google are not telecommunications firms and not covered by the wiretap law.)

The politics today are far different. Stung by Mr. Snowden’s revelations about how the National Security Agency had secretly breached company networks — often without the companies’ knowledge — Apple, Google and Microsoft are working to reassure customers around the world that they are fighting efforts to give the United States government access to their communications.

The businesses say they are seeing greater demand than ever for built-in encryption — including the new operating system Apple introduced last year for the iPhone, which James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, and other government officials have denounced as endangering efforts to thwart criminals and terrorists.

“It’s important that we do not let these technological innovations undermine our ability to protect the community from significant national security and public safety challenges,” Sally Q. Yates, the deputy attorney general, told Congress this summer.

At issue are two types of encoding. The first is end-to-end encryption, which Apple uses in its iMessage system and FaceTime, the video conversation system. Companies like Open Whisper Systems, the maker of Signal, and WhatsApp have adopted such encryption for stand-alone apps, which are of particular concern to counterterrorism investigators.

With Apple, the encryption and decryption are done by the phones at either end of the conversation; Apple does not keep copies of the message unless one of the users loads it into iCloud, where it is not encrypted. (In the drug and gun investigation this summer, Apple eventually turned over some stored iCloud messages. While they were not the real-time texts the government most wanted, officials said they saw it as a sign of cooperation.)

The second type of encoding involves sophisticated encryption software on Apple and Android phones, which makes it all but impossible for anyone except the user of the phone to open stored content — pictures, contacts, saved text messages and more — without an access code. The F.B.I. and local authorities oppose the technology, saying it put them at risk of “going dark” on communications between terrorists and about criminal activity on city streets. The American military is more divided on the issue, depending on the mission.

The Justice Department wants Apple and other companies that use end-to-end encryption to comply with the same kind of wiretap orders as phone companies. Justice and some former law enforcement officials argue that consumers want investigators to have the ability to get wiretaps in the mobile, digital world if it means solving crimes.

“If you ask about wiretap functionality in the broad privacy context, you get one answer,” Mr. Terwilliger said. “If you ask it in the context of a guy with a loose nuke, or some kind of device, you get a different answer.”

Officials say a court fight with Apple is still an option, though they acknowledge it would be a long shot. Some object that a legal battle would make it harder for the companies to compromise, the law enforcement officials said. They added that Apple and other companies had privately expressed willingness to find common ground.

Apple declined to comment on the case for this article. But company officials have argued publicly that the access the government wants could be exploited by hackers and endanger privacy.

“There’s another attack on our civil liberties that we see heating up every day — it’s the battle over encryption,” Timothy D. Cook, the company’s chief executive, told a conference on electronic privacy this year. “We think this is incredibly dangerous.”
Echoing the arguments of industry experts, he added, “If you put a key under the mat for the cops, a burglar can find it, too.” If criminals or countries “know there’s a key hidden somewhere, they won’t stop until they find it,” he concluded.

The Microsoft case centers on whether the fact that data is stored around the world relieves American firms of turning it over. The government, which won in Federal District Court, has argued in its brief to the appeals court that where the data is stored is irrelevant because the company still has control of email records. The White House declined to comment because the case is in litigation.

“People want to know what law will be applied to their data,” Mr. Smith of Microsoft said. “French want their rights under French law, and Brazilians under Brazilian law. What is the U.S. government going to do when other governments reach into the U.S. data centers, without notifying the U.S. government?”

Chinese firms already have plans to build facilities on American soil that would store electronic communications, so the question may be more than hypothetical. In its brief, Microsoft argues that Congress will ultimately have to weigh in on the issue, since it is as much a political matter as a legal one: “Only Congress has the institutional competence and constitutional authority to balance law enforcement needs against our nation’s sovereignty, the privacy of its citizens and the competitiveness of its industry.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/us...data.html?_r=0





U.S., Tech Industry Fight Over Email Privacy Heads to Appeals Court
Joseph Ax

A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday will consider whether U.S. law enforcement can make American technology companies hand over customers' emails held overseas, in a case closely watched by privacy advocates, news organizations and business groups.

Microsoft Corp is challenging a U.S. search warrant seeking the emails of an individual stored on a server in Ireland as part of a drug investigation. Details of the probe, including the identity of the person, have not been made public.

The case is the first in which a U.S. corporation has fought a warrant seeking data held abroad.

Last year, a federal judge said Microsoft must turn over the information. U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska said the issue was whether the company controlled access to the emails, rather than the location where they are housed.

In recent years, tech companies have begun building servers in foreign countries to speed up service for overseas customers.

In friend-of-the-court briefs to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, companies such as Verizon Communications Inc and Cisco Systems Inc warned their business could be harmed if users fear their private data is subject to seizure by U.S. investigators regardless of where they live.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government would be unable to object if foreign governments used warrants to force corporations to hand over emails held in the United States, Microsoft argued.

"The power to embark on unilateral law enforcement incursions into a foreign sovereign country – directly or indirectly – has profound foreign policy consequences," the company wrote. "Worse still, it threatens the privacy of U.S. citizens."

In response, the Obama administration said the request in question is more akin to a subpoena for records than a warrant requiring a physical search, since U.S. employees of Microsoft can access the emails.

"A corporation cannot resist compliance with a subpoena merely on the ground that the responsive records are stored abroad," the government wrote.

The appeal has drawn supporting briefs from nearly 100 organizations and individuals. Groups that are typically legal adversaries – the American Civil Liberties Union and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for instance - are backing Microsoft's position.

News organizations from The Washington Post to Fox News have also filed papers in support of Microsoft, expressing concern that U.S. law enforcement could gain access to journalists' private notes anywhere in the world.

(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Andrew Hay)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/0...0R80C720150908





Tech Companies May be Our Best Hope for Resisting Government Surveillance
Ryan Calo

Over the last year, the FBI has had harsh words for Apple, accusing the tech giant of endangering human lives and aiding criminals by turning on encryption by default on the iPhone. When Google announced it would add the feature to Android, meaning that smartphone users would need to unlock their phones for police to be able to go through them, government officials and law enforcement representatives similarly freaked out.

But this move by tech giants to make government surveillance harder reflects public opinion. A significant number of Americans think the government is overreaching: in a recent Pew survey, 65% of respondents said they think the limits on government surveillance are inadequate. Tech companies usually stand accused of violating privacy thanks to business models dependent on amassing and mining data from their millions of users, but Apple and Google are not the only tech companies building features into their products to make it harder for government agencies to do the same.

Both Google and Yahoo have announced that they are working on end-to-end encryption in email. Facebook established its service on a Tor hidden services site, so that users can access the social network without being monitored by those with access to network traffic. Outside of product design, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft have sent their formidable legal teams to court to block or narrow requests for user information.

Encryption tools have traditionally been unwieldy and difficult to use; massive companies turning their attention to better and simpler design, and use by default, could be a game changer. Privacy will no longer be accessible only to tech-savvy users, and it will mean that those who do use encryption will no longer stick out like sore thumbs, their rare use of hard-to-use tools making them a target.

There are other avenues protecting privacy as citizens of a constitutional democracy. But in a world where protecting the privacy of our communications, movements and activities is increasingly challenging, our data custodians designing against mass surveillance is the most promising development that we’ve seen.

Americans have ways to resist and reform surveillance on paper: We can vote for privacy-protective politicians. We can challenge surveillance practices in court when the government conducts unreasonable searches. We can adopt technology that hides our identity or scrambles our communications.

As I argue in a forthcoming essay in the University of Chicago Law Review, however, we face serious hurdles in seeking to resist and reform surveillance in practice:

Politics

Perhaps the most obvious way for Americans to resist and reform surveillance is at the ballot box. There are a few privacy-minded politicians out there. In the Senate, you think of Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rand Paul (≈ R-KY). In the House, there’s Representative Justin Amash, Chairman of the House Liberty Caucus and an outspoken advocate for surveillance reform. (And, disclosure, a former classmate of mine.) Given the ambivalence of many Americans about surveillance we might not expect a privacy movement. But perhaps we can move the needle by electing more Wydens and Pauls.

The problem with this approach, according to various law professors and political scientists, is that even officials who care about privacy are not in a position to conduct oversight. These officials often lack the access to provide a check on the enormous, quixotic intelligence community. As Representative Amash puts it:

You don’t have any idea what kind of things are going on. So you have to start just spitting off random questions. Does the government have a moon base? Does the government have a talking bear? Does the government have a cyborg army?

(Answers: “no,” “no,” and “probably.”)

Even given access, officials do not necessarily have the expertise to challenge intelligence orthodoxy. Amy Zegart’s work is particularly instructive in this regard. “Expertise is critical,” writes Zegart, “and always in short supply.”

Meanwhile, effective oversight takes place behind the scenes. Compare an act of terrorism, which is always breaking news, and is likely to be used against the politician who reined in the surveillance powers. And just because a reformer is elected, doesn’t mean he or she will stay in office. Former Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) opposed and helped limit the USA PATRIOT Act. Civil libertarians may applaud Feingold, but if they don’t live in his district, he could (and did) wind up out job.

In short, we can elect privacy-minded politicians, but how will we furnish them with the access, expertise, or incentives needed to pursue reform?

Law

I said earlier that Americans have the ability to resist surveillance “on paper.” This includes a very old piece of paper called the Constitution. Even if citizens cannot collectively achieve political reform through the ballot box, they ought to be able to challenge surveillance practices individually in court.

Once again, the reality is different. The problem has to do with who can challenge surveillance. To challenge surveillance under the First Amendment as an infringement of free speech and assembly, you have to show that your speech has been “chilled.” This is a high bar—even the act of suing tends to suggest you’re not cowed.

To challenge surveillance under the Fourth Amendment, which protects us from unreasonable governmental searches and seizes, you have to be a criminal. I’m overstating a bit, but Fourth Amendment doctrine has limited who can challenge an unlawful search or seizure in court. If I’m keeping drugs at your house and the police enter without a warrant, prosecutors can still enter the drug evidence at my trial. Your remedy is to file a lawsuit and, if the violation was egregious, perhaps get some damages.

A lot of evidence is stored with “third parties” in the so-called cloud. In that case, depending on the jurisdiction, law enforcement may be able to get at the information without a warrant.

Some legal scholars—like Yale Law School’s Akhil Amar—have argued that criminals make bad surrogates for our Fourth Amendment rights. Meanwhile, all this assumes that you know about the surveillance in the first place. It turns out to be hard to show standing to challenge surveillance no one can know about.

Technology

Let’s say politics and law are getting you nowhere. There’s always technology. Technology is a big part of the problem—it makes collecting, processing, and storing information much cheaper. But it also affords the means by which to resist surveillance. Technology like Tor and Bitcoin can hide the identity of an individual surfing the Web or making purchases while encrypted email, texts and phone calls can scramble what a person says to make it very hard, maybe impossible, to monitor.

But much of this technology can be hard to use, and ill suited to the tasks users are trying to accomplish. Alma Whitten—who spent a decade working on privacy at Google—has written extensively on the poor usability of encryption. Her 1999 work Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt, with J.D. Tygar, is a classic in the field.

More recently, an interdisciplinary team out of the University of Washington and the Columbia Journalism School examined whether journalists possess the technical tools they need. Journalists are often cited as the very population that require information security to do their important work. And yet, the team found that available tools were not usable and even interfered with the journalistic mission.

Meanwhile, because so few people wind up adopting tools for hiding, their very use can make those people a target for government surveillance.

***

There are some bright spots. This year, facing both a sunset and a successful court challenge, Congress scaled back the NSA’s surveillance powers, taking away the organization’s ability to collect Americans’ phone call records en masse ETC. There have also been some positive developments in Fourth Amendment law at the Supreme Court—notably, the requirement (announced in Riley v. California) that police get a warrant before searching a smart phone incident to arrest and the decision (in City of Los Angeles v. Patel) to allow parties to challenge statutes themselves, rather than individual applications of those statutes. Russ Feingold is running for Senate again.

But practically speaking, the most promising changes may come from corporations responding to market forces. There seems to be no substitute for a motivated intermediary who can encode privacy with the force of politics and law as a backstop.

The strategy is not without pitfalls. As Jack Balkin, Jon Michaels, and others point out, corporations have historically been complicit in, even enabling of, mass surveillance. Some have argued that corporations make bad “avatars” or stand-ins for citizens in court. And if a company promises to fight for its users, who will enforce that promise if broken? Not the same government asking for the information in the first place.

So, as ever, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Keep on top of Apple, Google, Microsoft. Follow what they do and don’t let them let up. They may be our best chance out of this surveillance mess.
http://fusion.net/story/193583/tech-...-surveillance/





EFF Applauds Apple’s Refusal of Government Demand for iMessage Backdoor
Bill Budington and Nate Cardozo and Andrew Crocker

Earlier this summer, when FBI Director James Comey made his case for backdooring strong encryption, he told us that he wanted to hash out the policy considerations surrounding encryption, law enforcement, and security in public: “Democracies resolve such tensions through robust debate.” This week, we learned that Comey apparently actually meant that he wanted the debate resolved in secret, before a judge known only to the government, by way of a sealed wiretap order.

In a brief article in Monday’s New York Times, the paper confirmed a rumor that has been circulating since the beginning of this summer. Apple has been involved in a dispute with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding iMessage encryption, with the DOJ demanding that Apple give them plaintext copies of iMessages in real time, pursuant to a wiretap order. Because iMessage uses end-to-end encryption, where only the users hold the keys, Apple is unable to comply with such an order unless it compromises its system and implements a backdoor for the U.S. government. This would compromise the security of every iMessage user, something that Apple has steadfastly refused to do.

According to the Times report, the DOJ obtained a sealed order from an unknown federal district court (not the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) ordering Apple to turn over a suspect’s iMessages. After Apple informed the government that it couldn’t comply with the order, the government backed down rather than seek sanctions or an order holding Apple in contempt.

There’s still much we don’t know about this showdown, but it is far from the robust public debate Director Comey promised. It’s no answer to point to the secret or urgent nature of the case that led the DOJ to seek its wiretap order. Even in the context of ultra-sensitive drug or national security investigations, courts can partially unseal dockets in order to inform the public and allow the participation of interested parties (like EFF!). It’s a technique we’ve seen in important cases concerning cell phone location tracking and even NSA surveillance.

The first “Crypto Wars” of the 90s were largely fought in public over specific technical and policy proposals, such as the Clipper Chip. These proposals couldn’t bear scrutiny, and the pro-backdoor crowd lost. Today, rather than accepting that outcome, the government has instead relied on scary anecdotes and vague calls for the companies themselves to engineer a “golden key” that allows “exceptional access” to encrypted communications—a backdoor, in other words. This allows the government to simply raise the specter of widespread encryption as an overall threat to society without subjecting their demands to the very public debate that Director Comey claimed to welcome. Their endgame is worrying: either a secret court order forcing companies to reengineer their systems and never speak about it, or possibly worse, a backroom deal with the government that achieves the same thing.

In addition to the questionable legality of any "exceptional access" requirement, experts in the field of cryptography have raised major concerns as to how such a system would implemented without putting the public at significant risk. Without any solid technical requirements proposed by the DOJ, at this point we can only guess as to how exceptional access might be granted to law enforcement.

Mandated key escrow seems like one real possibility. Key escrow is a system by which a message is encrypted not only to a key belonging to the intended recipient (as with classic public-key cryptography), but also a key held by law enforcement (or potentially one key held by law enforcement and one by the company, with both necessary for decryption—known as a “split key” system). But as a group of computer security experts noted, such a schema would expose the public to a greater risk in two ways. Firstly, mandating the inclusion of escrow capabilities increases the complexity of software, and more lines of code means more opportunities for the inclusion of security vulnerabilities. Secondly, as the expert report continues, the buildout of a centralized data collection hub makes it a salient target for hackers:

Building in exceptional access would substantially increase system complexity. Security researchers inside and outside government agree that complexity is the enemy of security - every new feature can interact with others to create vulnerabilities.

We’ve seen this in the past with the buildout of wiretapping capabilities: in an notorious case in 2004 and 2005, a hundred top officials in the Greek government were illegally surveilled for a period of ten months by parties unknown when Greece implemented a lawful access program that was subsequently compromised. And the U.S. is no exception. As described in the expert report, an audit conducted by the NSA discovered that all telephone switches intended to comply with government demands for wiretapping were found to have security flaws.

The deployment of Clipper chip hardware to intercept communications went wrong within well-funded, centralized, and highly organized telecommunications infrastructure. We have every reason to believe that the problem will only get worse when the onus is put on the plethora of end-to-end encryption providers (often developed by startups, small teams, or independent developers) to build mandatory backdoors in their software.

Finally, government demands to access users private communications raises major policy and regulatory questions. Can any government force a U.S. corporation to fork over user data stored outside the U.S.? Will an app developer in the United States with users in Russia be forced to build in a Russian backdoor? Are companies operating in multiple countries forced to build in separate decryption keys for each of the countries they operate in?

These questions should be discussed in a public forum with public participation before any such system is built out, and not as a result of secret court decisions and under a gag order. We applaud Apple’s resolve in standing firm, and we strongly urge the government to bring this debate out in the open where it belongs.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/0...ssage-backdoor





Time to Patch Your Firmware! Backdoor Discovered into Seagate NAS Drives
Mark Wilson

If you have not recently updated the firmware for your Seagate wireless NAS drives, now is the time to do so. Researchers at Tangible Security have discovered a series of vulnerabilities in a number of devices produced by Seagate that could allow unauthorized access to files and settings.

An undocumented Telnet feature could be used to gain control of the device by using the username 'root' and the hardcoded default password. There are also other vulnerabilities that allow for unauthorized browsing and downloading of files, as well as permitting malicious files to be uploaded. Tangible Security says that Seagate Wireless Plus Mobile Storage, Seagate Wireless Mobile Storage, and LaCie FUEL drives are affected, but there may also be others.

The security issues are confirmed to exist with firmware versions 2.2.0.005 to 2.3.0.014. The problems were discovered way back in March, but a patch has only recently been published, along with an advisory notice from US CERT. Tangible Security issued a warning of its own:

With products from large vendors such as Seagate, there tend to be numerous product names for basically the same product under the same vendor’s name or another vendor. Tangible Security cannot enumerate all of the named products as well as Seagate. Other named products may be affected.

The research group also shared details of the vulnerabilities:

Use of Hard-coded Credentials

• Vulnerability Description: The affected device firmware contains undocumented Telnet services accessible by using the default credentials of 'root' as username and the default password
• Impact Description: an attacker can covertly take control of the device, not only compromising the confidentiality of files stored on it but use it as a platform to conduct malicious operations beyond the device
• CVE-2015-2874
• CWE-798

Direct Request ('Forced Browsing')

• Vulnerability Description: The affected device firmware provides unrestricted file download capability
• Impact Description: Attackers can gain access all files stored in affected devices. This vulnerability requires attackers to be within range of the device’s wireless network
• CVE-2015-2875
• CWE-425

Unrestricted Upload of File with Dangerous Type

• Vulnerability Description: The affected device firmware provides a file upload capability to the device's /media/sda2 file system, which is reserved for the file sharing
• Impact Description: this vulnerability requires attackers to be within range of the device’s wireless network, who can upload files onto it. If such files were maliciously crafted, they could compromise other endpoints when the files are opened
• CVE-2015-2876
• CWE-434

Anyone with an affected device is advised to update to firmware version 3.4.1.105 which addresses the issue.
http://betanews.com/2015/09/07/time-...te-nas-drives/





License to Connive: Boston Still Tracks Vehicles, Lies About it, and Leaves Sensitive Resident Data Exposed Online
Kenneth Lipp

Prior to two weeks ago, when this reporter alerted authorities that they had exposed critical data, anyone online was able to freely access a City of Boston automated license plate reader (ALPR) system and to download dozens of sensitive files, including hundreds of thousands of motor vehicle records dating back to 2012. If someone saw your shiny car and wanted to rob your equally nice house, for example, they could use your parking permit number to obtain your address. All they had to do was find the server’s URL.

The open online server was a file share, primarily used for municipal parking enforcement to transfer and store vehicular permit information and nearly one million license plate numbers. This was all waiting to be discovered by anyone spelunking Google for terms including “Genetec,” the name of a Canadian surveillance company that owns the popular AutoVu brand of license plate readers.

Boston was among the first cities to deploy ALPRs and began beta-testing such devices more than 10 years ago. AutoVu had just obtained multiple patents for the technology, and the Boston Transportation Department (BTD) outfitted vans with pairs of cylindrical cameras alongside bright sodium lights and with them commenced extremely conspicuous surveillance of parked cars. ALPRs were eventually noticed by watchdogs, and in 2004 spurred a public records request, which was denied by the BTD on the grounds that the database was privately owned and “on loan” from AutoVu.

That was more than 10 years ago, and the pitfalls of using third-party outfits for these kinds of operations appear to have become more treacherous. Back then, few people were talking about the liability of having private companies store privileged and potentially compromising metadata. But even though the vulnerability of these systems has since been noted by privacy rights groups, cities all around the world still trust businesses like Genetec. A global provider of state-of-the-art surveillance and security products, the company began its acquisition of AutoVu in 2005, and to this day still sells government spy gear under the legacy brand name.

While Xerox and Genetec executives contribute to several pols on Beacon Hill, including Gov Charlie Baker, most of their Massachusetts money is made at the municipal level. Boston, for one, has been a trusty Genetec customer—in 2013, the surveillance behemoth even furnished free “testing” software licenses, which are otherwise valued at thousands of dollars, for a facial recognition program carried out over the first two Boston Calling concerts. Unbeknownst to attendees, all concertgoers were recorded and categorized according to searchable info based on criteria ranging from their race and height to the time and place they were taped.

On the ALPR front, Genetec shirks all responsibility for the aforementioned open portal, even though a remote desktop client terminal, which was also left exposed, shows they had direct access. Reached by email for this story, the company’s Vice President of Marketing and Product Management Andrew Elvish wrote that the server in question was a “location used by a customer to transfer data to be used in a parking or law enforcement patrol car, equipped with a Genetec system.” The data, Elvish added, was “not gathered by a Genetec AutoVu ALPR system … [which is] automatically encrypted.”

Digging deeper, further investigation of the IP address where the ALPR system was located revealed that Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), a Xerox subsidiary, owns the server. This reporter contacted Xerox upon making this discovery, and within two hours, the portal was removed from public view.

The following week, a Xerox spokesperson responded to an inquiry about the Boston matter in an email, claiming that, after an initial review, the company determined that the contents of the server included “publicly available information used to enforce residential parking regulations such as license plate numbers.” In any case, a 1994 federal law, the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, is supposed to prevent non-governmental third parties from accessing a person’s name, home address, or telephone number through a motor vehicle database. For safety reasons, plate numbers are not personal information, but federal safeguards have for some reason not extended to Xerox, which sells “comprehensive name and address acquisition services” that toll and parking providers use to locate and ticket violators.

“[This is] just the most recent problem with Boston’s license plate tracking program management,” says Kade Crockford, director of the ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project. A regional authority on privacy and a harsh critic of ALPRs, Crockford was shocked by the magnitude of this apparent user error. Upon being alerted to the exposed data, one ACLU employee discovered his own plate number and address in the database, as did other Boston residents who park and drive around the city. Presented with that information, Xerox referred additional questions to the Boston Transportation Department. In turn, a BTD spokesperson wrote in an email that the agency is investigating the matter, and declined to offer any explanation for the server’s insecurity.

This is not the first time Hub authorities have been caught with their guard down on this matter. As journalist Shawn Musgrave, working with the public records news site Muckrock, reported in 2013, the Boston Police Department “inadvertently released to the [Boston Globe] the license plate numbers of more than 68,000 vehicles that had tripped alarms on automated license plate readers over a six-month period,” triggering “immediate doubts about whether the police could reliably protect the sensitive data.” Yet the coverup continues.

As members of the ACLU and others who track so-called smart surveillance in Boston recall, at a recent City Council hearing, BPD officials claimed that the police actually stopped using license plate readers because of concerns about privacy violations. (In 2013, the department announced that it was indefinitely suspending ALPR use.) Meanwhile, files in the BTD database that Xerox and the city left exposed logged several hundred daily emails to the BPD between early 2013 and last month, indicating that police are, as Crockford explains, “still engaged in the tracking of our license plates, albeit using data collected by the transportation department.”

In collecting data, the BTD patrols city blocks—in some cases, both literally and figuratively sweeping the street with ALPR-equipped sanitation trucks—and not exclusively in search of plates belonging to scofflaws. Files obtained in our investigation reveal that as the BTD’s software searches databases, it alerts department operators if a plate is connected to a “convicted person on supervised release,” or to someone pegged to a “protection order.” Commonly called hotlists, these compendiums are created by fusing criminal intelligence from sources like the FBI’s National Crime Information Center and the AMBER Alert program, as well as from data furnished by banks, collection agencies, and the civil court system.

It’s not clear whether or how the public is any safer when authorities use massive watchlists. In Boston, a city of approximately 600,000 people, parking enforcement has one hotlist with 720,000 hits, each of which notes a plate number, location info, and available make and model data. Among the targets listed in August: 19 license numbers classified as “immediate threats,” nearly 4,000 affiliated with “wanted persons,” 25 plates linked to bad checks, 75 tied to payment defaults, and 468,617 flagged for cancelled insurance. Also exposed were 2,500 hits on a “Gang/Terrorist Watch,” which Crockford says is “problematic from both public safety and civil liberties perspectives.”

Regardless of the claims made by officials, none of this prying is likely to end soon, as plate surveillance has become routine over time. The relationship between Boston and Xerox goes back decades, and a 2013 company case study even quotes former BTD Parking Clerk Director Gina Fiandaca praising the enterprise. “Xerox is always protective of the city, our data, and our integrity,” Fiandaca said. The same company research found that, through the convenience and accuracy of automated ticketing, Xerox helped create a “culture of compliance.”

If Boston’s deployment of ALPR, be it by the police, parking clerks, or Xerox as a proxy, seems reckless, it’s also not unique. Rather, it reflects a national law enforcement addiction to big data. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls this warehousing of vehicle info a “public records act nightmare,” and warns that the risk of compromise or misuse grows as data is retained for long periods of time. In any place where authorities hold records indefinitely, mislead the public and reporters about retention, and fail entirely to secure data, said nightmares are bound to get darker before there is significant sunshine. Fortunately for the people of Massachusetts, Big Brother let its guard down this time, and was exposed.

If not for incompetence, we’d have no transparency at all.
https://digboston.com/license-to-con...xposed-online/





Cruising Toward Oblivion

America’s once magical – now mundane – love affair with cars
Marc Fisher

Chuck Mecca plops his lawn chair down in the parking lot of the Chick-fil-A at the Dulles Town Crossing shopping center, smack behind his lipstick-red 1956 Ford F-100 pickup, primped and polished for its turn under the Friday night lights.

Mecca, his beard long since gone white, is a regular at the Cruise-In, a weekly gathering of guys whose enduring love is a set of wheels that delivers them back to the time when customizing and showing off your car was the ultimate expression of self.

Now 72, Mecca was 18 when he worked the biggest newspaper delivery route in McLean to amass the cash to buy his first car, a ’53 Ford that didn’t have a working second gear. He pumped gas at Tuthill’s Texaco to pay for wheels to cruise over the bridge to Georgetown or impress the girls at Tops Drive Inn in Falls Church.

Back then, he could name the make and model of anything that zipped by. Even now, cars speak for him: “When my wife beat ovarian cancer,” he says, “I bought her her dream car,” a ’56 Chevy Nomad station wagon.

On Friday evenings at the Cruise-In, Mecca and his buddies cluster behind the ’72 Dodge Challenger and the electric-blue ’65 Corvette. They check under the hoods and trade stories about cars and women and where the years have gone.

For nearly all of the first century of automobile travel, getting your license meant liberation from parental control, a passport to the open road. Today, only half of millennials bother to get their driver’s licenses by age 18. Car culture, the 20th-century engine of the American Dream, is an old guy’s game.

“The automobile just isn’t that important to people’s lives anymore,” says Mike Berger, a historian who studies the social effect of the car. “The automobile provided the means for teenagers to live their own lives. Social media blows any limits out of the water. You don’t need the car to go find friends.”

Much of the emotional meaning of the car, especially to young adults, has transferred to the smartphone, says Mark Lizewskie, executive director of the Antique Automobile Club of America Museum in Hershey, Pa. “Instead of Ford versus Chevy, it’s Apple versus Android, and instead of customizing their ride, they customize their phones with covers and apps,” he says. “You express yourself through your phone, whereas lately, cars have become more like appliances, with 100,000-mile warranties.”

At the Cruise-In, 30 miles outside Washington, Mecca and a cluster of other collectors, all men past the half-century mark, trade laments — for the days when cars had more fanciful designs, for what they fear will be the loss of the Washington Redskins’ team name, for their children’s lack of interest in cars.

“The world’s changing too fast for me,” Mecca says. “I’d like to be back in the ’50s.” The old guys’ conversation turns to blemishes — not on the sparkling cars before them, but on their own, less painstakingly preserved bodies. “It’s benign, thank the Lord,” Mecca says of the spot on his scalp.

“This is what we talk about,” says Gary Fanning, 58. He tried to give his son his ’65 pickup. Gift declined; not interested.

Across the parking lot, though, a few much younger men take a stand for their generation. Kevin Kurdziolek, 26, and his friend Conner Walsh, 25, match their elders in passion. Their Mustangs — Kevin’s ’03 SVT Cobra and Conner’s ’04 Mach 1 — are buffed to a showroom gleam. They, too, have dewy memories of how their love of cars began. Walsh grew up collecting Hot Wheels, and Kurdziolek’s father was into drag racing. They, too, know how to rebuild a suspension. They, too, believe a cool car is a fast track to a woman’s heart.

“There’s something to be said about picking up a chick in this car,” Kurdziolek says. “It’s cool and loud and aggressive. You don’t even have to hear her. You don’t even need music.”

The young guys realize they are the anomalies in their generation. Coming up behind them are people like Kurdziolek’s younger brother, who is 21. “He can’t afford most cars,” Kevin says. “He’s looking for something that has a long warranty on it, good fuel efficiency, Bluetooth, all the odds and ends for his phone. It’s just about utility for him.”

Kurdziolek and Walsh don’t quite fit with Mecca and the old regulars, and they’re already nostalgic for a time when teenagers rushed to get their licenses. As car buffs, their road forward looks lonely, and the way back is crowded with another generation’s memories.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sty...g-car-culture/





Testing Old Tapes For Playability

Analytical Chemistry: Noninvasive infrared spectroscopy could help archivists prioritize tape recordings for digitization
Katharine Gammon

Audio recordings are a huge part of the world’s cultural history—and some are in danger of degrading so much that they’ll be lost forever. Now researchers report that infrared spectroscopy offers a quick, noninvasive way to separate magnetic tapes that can still be played from those that can’t. This could help archivists know which tapes need special handling, and soon, before they get any worse. (Anal. Chem. 2015, DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.5b01810).

The Cultural Heritage Index estimates that there are 46 million magnetic tapes (VHS, cassette, and others) in museums and archives in the U.S. alone—and about 40% of them are of unknown quality. Many of these tapes are reaching the end of their playable lifetime, and given the limited number of studio-quality tape players available for the digitizing process, not all the tapes will be digitized before the world loses them.

The sound information on tapes is encoded in magnetic particles, commonly disbursed within a polyester-urethane binder. Exposed to heat and humidity, the ester groups react with water to form a carboxylic acid and alcohol, making the tapes sticky. Eventually the tapes start to shed pieces of polyester-urethane, which can stick to the heads of the tape player, damaging both the tape and the machine. The only remedy currently is to bake the tapes at a low temperature, which sometimes makes them playable for a short time—long enough to digitize them.

“You might ask why not automatically bake the tapes, but no one has enough time,” explains Stephen L. Morgan, a chemist at the University of South Carolina and coauthor of the new work. “Our goal was to develop an easy, noninvasive method to identify the tapes that are in the most danger, so that they can be prioritized for digitization.”

In the new work, Morgan, Eric M. Breitung of the Library of Congress, and collaborators first randomly selected 133 quarter-inch audio tapes from a Library of Congress collection acquired in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. They then used attenuated total-reflection Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to analyze small sections of the tapes. They found that the presence of spectral peaks characteristic of polyester-urethane degradation products, among others, could be used to identify the tapes that were nonplayable—which the researchers confirmed by observing them on a headless reel-to-reel tape player—with 92% accuracy. These would be candidates for baking and prompt digitization.

The researchers have embedded their statistical model and methodology in user-friendly software to make the process easy for conservators, who often don’t have a background in analytical chemistry, Morgan says. They’ve written software that will let conservators train the program to their particular tape collection, because different brands and ages of tapes have slightly different tape chemistry.

George Blood, an audio and video preservationist in Philadelphia who was not involved with the work, said that he would welcome a tool to prioritize recordings—but others in his field may be harder to convince. “I think the technique has a high potential, but there’s not a cultural history within the preservation trade of people using this level of scientific discovery,” he says. If the tool could be made to be cheap and easy enough to use, he thinks it could be accepted.

But there’s a lot recorded on tape that’s in danger of being lost, Blood says. “It’s definitely a race against time, and in around 20 years we won’t be able to play back anything,” he says. “Anything that expedites the process will have a significant impact on the volume of the cultural record that does get digitized.”
http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/web/2...ayability.html





Verizon to be First to Field-Test Crazy-Fast 5G Wireless

It expects "some level of commercial deployment" to begin by 2017 for next-generation wireless. That's much earlier than the common industry belief that 2020 will mark the start.
Roger Cheng

Verizon is getting ready to kick its wireless network up another notch.

The nation's largest wireless carrier will begin field trials on so-called fifth-generation, or 5G, technology within the next 12 months, Roger Gurnani, chief information and technology architect for Verizon, said in an interview last week. He expects "some level of commercial deployment" to begin by 2017. That's far earlier than the time frame of 2020 that many in the industry have pegged for the initial adoption of 5G technology.

The trials would make Verizon the world's first carrier to seriously move into 5G. It also represents an initial step toward the broader telecom industry radically transforming wireless service by adding significantly higher speed and responsiveness. Just as the move to today's 4G wireless technology drove an explosion of smartphone adoption and mobile services, 5G could similarly drive its own tech revolution.

"The future is going to bring more stuff that I can't really describe," Gurnani said. "We can't possibly envision the full range of disruptive products and services. But we have some possibilities."

How fast is 5G? Verizon's tests have shown a connection speed that is 30 to 50 times faster than our current 4G network, or higher speeds than what Google Fiber offers through a direct physical connection into the home, Gurnani said.

With 5G, that copy of the movie "The Guardians of the Galaxy" would zip to your device in 15 seconds instead of 6 minutes via 4G.

There are other key benefits. It's far more responsive, so the precise hand movements of a surgeon in Tokyo could be transferred to New York in real time. It's supposed to be more power-efficient, so devices are expected to last 10 times as long. Carriers will also be able to send more data across a fatter pipe, so a hit TV show like HBO's "Game of Thrones" will stream just fine even if millions of other people are watching too.

But it's still early for 5G -- so early that few can agree on what the technology will actually look like. The increased speed and responsiveness may supercharge today's emerging tech trends: the Internet of Things, or the idea that everyday objects like your refrigerator or bed can talk to each other; self-driving cars; and virtual reality, which employs supersharp imagery to place you in another world.

For all the whiz-bang capabilities of 5G, Gurnani is grounded by his responsibilities in the now. "At this time, our focus is on the technology field trials and accelerating the technology," he said.

There's a global race to get to 5G first, and Verizon intends to maintain its pole position. The New York-based company was one of the first carriers in the world to employ 4G technology back when it announced it would begin trials in 2008. By late 2010, it was ready to launch the service in 38 markets.

"It's a very aggressive timeline," said Rima Qureshi, chief strategy officer of telecommunications equipment supplier Ericsson.

Verizon isn't alone in its early embrace of 5G. South Korea hopes its wireless carriers can deploy a trial 5G network in 2018, in time for the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. Japan hopes to have a 5G network running in time for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. The Chinese government, meanwhile, has also pushed for the aggressive deployment of 5G technology.

"It'll be interesting to see what the reaction is," Qureshi said of the potential ripple effect of Verizon's move.

As it did when it started its 4G work, Verizon has lined up partners including Ericsson, Nokia (and recently acquired rival Alcatel-Lucent), Cisco, Qualcomm and Samsung. Last month it set up its first Verizon 5G Technology Forum. The company has also created "sandboxes," or small testing areas utilizing 5G technology, in its innovation centers in Waltham, Massachusetts, and San Francisco.
Ericsson showed a wireless radio link with prototype 5G networking technology at Mobile World Congress in March. Stephen Shankland/CNET

In a nod to the potential opportunity that stems from the Internet of Things, Verizon's forum also includes a group of venture capitalists working on emerging technologies that can take advantage of the speedier connection.

While Gurnani is calling for commercial deployment in 2017, don't expect to pick up a 5G smartphone then. Prior to its wider 4G launch in 2010, Verizon had set up networks in Boston and Seattle largely to test 4G data-based phone calls and other mobile applications. How the commercial deployment of 5G will look in 2017 will depend on the kinds of applications and devices that emerge from the testing stage.

Gurnani declined to say how many markets would launch in 2017, saying it's too early to discuss the company's rollout plans.

While Verizon wants to maintain its leadership position in the world's wireless race, Gurnani conceded that other countries are further ahead when it comes to their policies on spectrum, or the invisible airwaves that are responsible for ferrying our data and voice calls to our mobile devices. To enable this next-generation technology, Verizon and the rest of the industry will need more of those airwaves.

"For technical trials themselves, we have what we need," Gurnani said. "Beyond that, 5G will require big bands of spectrum," he said.

Gurnani and Verizon will be speaking more about its 5G plans at the upcoming CTIA Wireless trade show, which officially kicks off Wednesday in Las Vegas.
http://www.cnet.com/news/verizon-to-...sts-next-year/





Philippines to Roll Out Nationwide Free Wi-Fi Service by 2016
Siegfrid Alegado and Cecilia Yap

The Philippines is planning free Wi-Fi services to half of its towns and cities this year and nationwide coverage by end-2016, limiting the data revenue prospects for Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. and Globe Telecom Inc.

The free Internet service will cost the government about 1.5 billion pesos ($32 million) a year and will be available in areas such as public schools, hospitals, airports and parks, said Monchito Ibrahim, deputy executive director of the Information and Communications Technology Office.

“If subscribers move to using free public Wi-Fi, telecoms may need to lure them into getting higher-end services,” Ibrahim said in a Sept. 4 interview in Makati City, referring to the country’s two main phone companies. The government’s “focus is on areas that absolutely don’t have access.”

The new service is expected to push data charges lower in the Philippines. Access to the Internet costs about $18 a megabit per second in the country, more than three times the global average of $5, according to research firm International Data Corp. or IDC.

For the country’s two biggest phone companies, that means more expenses to boost their network for services offering higher speeds.

Service Improvement

“The free Wi-Fi service would compel improvement of service of both telecoms,” said Lexter Azurin, research head at Unicapital Securities Inc. “Definitely, they might need more capex for that, which would impact earnings at the end of the day.”

The government’s free Wi-Fi service has its limitations. Speed is capped at 256 kilobits per second, enough for basic Internet searches or access to Facebook, Ibrahim said. The government’s initiative comes as lawmakers investigate slow and expensive Internet connection in the Philippines, where broadband connectivity is only ahead of Afghanistan in Asia, according to IDC.

By contrast, Singapore started a free wireless service in 2006 that now offers speeds of as much as 2 megabits per second -- eight times faster than the one planned in the Philippines. That’s enough for phone calls on the data network or video streaming, with the access offered at public places such as the airport, malls, hospitals and schools.

Diverging Performance

The ability to drive data usage has separated the performance of the two Philippine phone companies. Globe, owned by Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. and Ayala Corp., posted a 27 percent jump in first-half profit with services such as free Facebook access in October 2013. PLDT, which reported a 6.5 percent drop in earnings, took more than a year to counter with free mobile Internet access.

Globe shares slumped 1.5 percent to 2,512 pesos at the close in Manila, the biggest drop in more than two weeks, narrowing gains this year to 45 percent. PLDT declined 0.3 percent to 2,384 pesos, the lowest in more than three years, extending the slide this year to 18 percent.

PLDT has been asked to participate in the network and is looking at it, spokesman Ramon Isberto said.

“As more people get into the data traffic, they will understand and eventually appreciate the ease of using mobile Internet,” Yolanda Crisanto, a spokeswoman at Globe, said in a response to a query. “That will induce usage.”

While offering free Wi-Fi access is a step forward, what the country needs is a longer-term plan to improve Internet connectivity, Senator Bam Aquino, who heads the Senate trade and commerce committee, said last month. “What I’m looking for is really a major broadband plan,” he said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...ervice-by-2016





First Library to Support Anonymous Internet Browsing Effort Stops After DHS Email

A library in a small New Hampshire town started to help Internet users around the world surf anonymously using Tor. Until the Department of Homeland Security raised a red flag.
Julia Angwin

Since Edward Snowden exposed the extent of online surveillance by the U.S. government, there has been a surge of initiatives to protect users’ privacy.

But it hasn’t taken long for one of these efforts — a project to equip local libraries with technology supporting anonymous Internet surfing — to run up against opposition from law enforcement.

In July, the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was the first library in the country to become part of the anonymous Web surfing service Tor. The library allowed Tor users around the world to bounce their Internet traffic through the library, thus masking users’ locations.

Soon after state authorities received an email about it from an agent at the Department of Homeland Security.

“The Department of Homeland Security got in touch with our Police Department,” said Sean Fleming, the library director of the Lebanon Public Libraries.

After a meeting at which local police and city officials discussed how Tor could be exploited by criminals, the library pulled the plug on the project.

“Right now we’re on pause,” said Fleming. “We really weren’t anticipating that there would be any controversy at all.”

He said that the library board of trustees will vote on whether to turn the service back on at its meeting on Sept. 15.

Used in repressive regimes by dissidents and journalists, Tor is considered a crucial tool for freedom of expression and counts the State Department among its top donors. But Tor has been a thorn in the side of law enforcement; National Security Agency documents made public by Snowden have revealed the agency’s frustration that it could only identify a “very small fraction” of Tor users.

The idea to install Tor services in libraries emerged from Boston librarian Alison Macrina’s Library Freedom Project, which aims to teach libraries how to “protect patrons’ rights to explore new ideas, no matter how controversial or subversive, unfettered by the pernicious effects of online surveillance.” (The Library Freedom Project is funded by Knight Foundation, which also provides funding to ProPublica.)

After Macrina conducted a privacy training session at the Kilton library in May, she talked to the librarian about also setting up a Tor relay, the mechanism by which users across the Internet can hide their identity.

The library board of trustees unanimously approved the plan at its meeting in June, and the relay was set up in July. But after ArsTechnica wrote about the pilot project and Macrina’s plan to install Tor relays in libraries across the nation, law enforcement got involved.

A special agent in a Boston DHS office forwarded the article to the New Hampshire police, who forwarded it to a sergeant at the Lebanon Police Department.

DHS spokesman Shawn Neudauer said the agent was simply providing “visibility/situational awareness,” and did not have any direct contact with the Lebanon police or library. “The use of a Tor browser is not, in [or] of itself, illegal and there are legitimate purposes for its use,” Neudauer said, “However, the protections that Tor offers can be attractive to criminal enterprises or actors and HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] will continue to pursue those individuals who seek to use the anonymizing technology to further their illicit activity.”

When the DHS inquiry was brought to his attention, Lt. Matthew Isham of the Lebanon Police Department was concerned. “For all the good that a Tor may allow as far as speech, there is also the criminal side that would take advantage of that as well,” Isham said. “We felt we needed to make the city aware of it.”

Deputy City Manager Paula Maville said that when she learned about Tor at the meeting with the police and the librarians, she was concerned about the service’s association with criminal activities such as pornography and drug trafficking. “That is a concern from a public relations perspective and we wanted to get those concerns on the table,” she said.

Faced with police and city concerns, library director Fleming agreed to turn off the Tor relay temporarily until the board could reconsider. “We need to find out what the community thinks,” he said. “The only groups that have been represented so far are the Police Department and City Hall.”

Fleming said that he is now realizing the downside of being the first test site for the Tor initiative.

“There are other libraries that I’ve heard that are interested in participating but nobody else wanted to be first,” he said. “We’re lonesome right now.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/l...fter-dhs-email

















Until next week,

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