Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 29th, '10

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Perhaps I was naïve. If I knew when the lawsuit started what I know now about the music industry, maybe we would have done something different." – Mark Gorton, LimeWire


"People only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn't make any money out of records because record companies wouldn't pay you! They didn't pay anyone!" – Mick Jagger



































May 29th, 2010




Congress Rebukes FCC on Net Neutrality Rules
Declan McCullagh

The Federal Communications Commission's plan to impose Net neutrality regulations just became much more difficult to pull off.

A bipartisan group of politicians on Monday told FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in no uncertain terms, to abandon his plans to impose controversial new rules on broadband providers until the U.S. Congress changes the law.

Seventy-four House Democrats sent Genachowski, an Obama appointee and fellow Democrat, a letter saying his ideas will "jeopardize jobs" and "should not be done without additional direction from Congress."

A separate letter from 37 Senate Republicans, also sent Monday, was more pointed. It accused Genachowski of pushing "heavy-handed 19th century regulations" that are "inconceivable" as well as illegal.

This amounts to approximately the last thing that any FCC chairman, at least one concerned with his future political prospects, wants to happen on his watch. Not only do Monday's letters inject a new element of uncertainty into whether the FCC will try to repurpose analog telephone-era rules to target broadband providers, but they also sharply increase the likelihood of the process taking not many months but many years.

"Questions about the FCC's legal authority should be decided by the Congress itself, and not by applying to the Internet a set of onerous rules designed for a different technology, a different situation, and a different era," AT&T's senior vice president for legislative affairs, Jim Cicconi, said Monday.

Last month, a federal appeals court unanimously ruled that the FCC's attempt to slap Net neutrality regulations on Internet providers--in a case that grew out of Comcast throttling BitTorrent transfers--was not authorized by Congress. The opinion called the FCC's claims "flatly inconsistent" with the law.

Supporters of Net neutrality say new Internet regulations or laws are necessary to prevent broadband providers from restricting content or prioritizing one type of traffic over another. Broadband providers and many conservative and free-market groups, on the other hand, say some of the proposed regulations would choke off new innovations and could even require awarding e-mail spam and telemedicine identical priorities.

For a day or so earlier this month, Genachowski seemed to be wavering, and perhaps even favoring an approach that would have left broadband services unregulated. But after pressure from liberal advocacy groups, the FCC announced plans on May 6 to resuscitate its Net neutrality rules through a legal dodge that, agency lawyers claim, stand a better chance of surviving an inevitable legal challenge.

It's true that President Obama campaigned on a platform that included Net neutrality, and through a representative recently reiterated that he is still "committed" to the idea.

It's also true that no FCC chairman ever starts a fight with Congress during the budgetary process unless there's a very good reason, and preferably very good odds of winning. Genachowski's private-sector experience as general counsel and chief of business operations for IAC/InterActiveCorp has presumably made him aware of when it's time to cut your losses and change the topic. How about those new iPhone early termination fees, for instance?

Which means that, unless something unexpected happens, the fight over Net neutrality will shift a few blocks down Independence Avenue from the FCC to Capitol Hill. (In an editorial Monday, The Washington Post called for just that.)

A shift to Capitol Hill

As if on cue, the Democratic chairmen of four different congressional committees or subcommittees announced on Monday a plan to "develop proposals to update the Communications Act," beginning with meetings in June.

Though the Senate and House chairmen--including Sen. John D. Rockefeller and Rep. Henry Waxman--didn't say what the update to the 1996 telecommunications law would include, lobbyists on both sides are assuming that Net neutrality laws will be a big part of it.

The news was met by a flurry of statements from advocacy groups. The OpenInternet Coalition, which includes Amazon.com, Google, and eBay as members, said: "We are pleased to see Congress working alongside the FCC to address the implications of the Comcast v. FCC decision." Free Press claimed, however, that the FCC should forge ahead regardless of the congressional rebuke: "We cannot wait for Congress to act to protect consumers."

That, liberal advocacy groups and their like-minded corporate allies fear, is the rub. Because of a longer than usual holiday schedule and campaigning for the November elections, Congress only has a solid month or two of legislating scheduled for the next half year. When an Elena Kagan nomination and financial reform are afoot, Net neutrality will hardly be a priority.

In theory, most Democrats favor Net neutrality. But theory doesn't always mesh with political practice. Rank-and-file Dems are clamoring for Net neutrality about as much as Bush-era Republicans were clamoring for limited government: it's a valuable talking point, but of course there's no need to do anything hasty. (Besides, even in this anti-incumbent year, how many single-issue Net neutrality voters are there?)

The last time there was a major rewrite of telecommunications laws, it took something like five years for Congress' internal mechanisms to spit out the Telecommunications Act of 1996. A push for national cable franchising legislation went on for years but died without a vote.

Which leaves pro-Net neutrality groups in an uncomfortable quandary. If they can't prod the FCC to grease the rails and slide some kind of regulation through soon, even if the legal underpinnings are anything but firm, Congress may not act until the iPhone 8G hits the streets in 2015. And by then, today's high water mark of Democratic political power may be just a memory.

So they need to crank up the public and private pressure on Genachowski and the other commissioners. "This appears to be the start of a long process," Public Knowledge said Monday. It claims the FCC must use its existing "authority to carry out its plan to set some rules of the road for the Internet."

There is a flaw in that argument. Even though there have never been explicit Net neutrality laws or regulations, actual examples of malfeasance by broadband providers have been as rare as George W. Bush being caught eating arugula. You can count them on one hand: Comcast v. BitTorrent and Madison River.

If Comcast or AT&T ever violates antitrust laws or consumer protection laws, existing law gives the Justice Department and state attorneys general ample authority to investigate and litigate. The lawyers staffing those agencies, hardly timid souls, have proven to be eager and willing to do just that. And fraud, of course, has been illegal for hundreds of years.

In addition, California law allows companies such as Amazon.com, Google, eBay, and Yahoo to sue broadband providers engaging in any "unfair" business practice that has caused "injury" to them.

So why is this urgent push for federal regulations so necessary? Genachowski might be asking himself that question right about now.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20005834-38.html





Ofcom Unveils Anti-Piracy Policy
BBC

Lists of Britons who infringe copyright are to be drawn up by the UK's biggest ISPs, under proposals from the regulator Ofcom.

The plan is contained in a draft code of practice it hopes will curb copyright infringement.

Names and the number of times individuals infringe will be logged.

Music firms and movie studios can request details from the list so that they can decide whether to start their own action against serial infringers.

However, any suspected infringers will be sent three warning letters before any action can be taken.

The letters will contain "easy to understand information on the nature of the allegations made against the subscriber and on what actions a subscriber can take, both to challenge the allegation and to protect their network from being hijacked for the purposes of infringement."

Jim Killock, executive director of the advocacy body the Open Rights Group (ORG) said the proposals left "huge unanswered questions".

The ORG joined forces with the Communications Consumer Panel Consumer Focus, Which and Citizens Advice to draw up a set of principles they believe should govern the code of practice.

The principles say sound evidence is needed before any action is taken and consumers must have the right to defend themselves.

"It is imperative that a system that accuses people of illegal online activity is fair and clear," said Anna Bradley, chair of the Communications Consumer Panel.,
Appeals process

The code initially only applies to big ISPs but could be extended, even to mobile networks, if infringement on smaller networks grows.

It tells ISPs under what circumstances they should inform customers that their accounts are allegedly being used to pirate copyrighted material.

Ofcom said the code should come into force in early 2011. The call for the creation of the code is contained in the controversial Digital Economy Act (DEA).

One of the most controversial elements of that act was its granting of powers to the Secretary of State to disconnect people or slow their connections if they ignore warnings.

However, the code says: "The Secretary of State has not indicated his intention to make use of these provisions at this time and this consultation is not concerned with this aspect of the DEA."

Technical measures such as these would require further legislation and Parliamentary approval.

Initially the code will only apply to ISPs that have more than 400,000 customers. This includes BT, Talk Talk, Virgin Media, Sky, Orange, O2 and the Post Office.

An independent appeals process will also be set up for those customers who believe they have been wrongly accused of copyright infringement.

Ofcom has begun a consultation exercise on the proposals which will conclude on 30 July.

The communications watchdog said the code would go alongside other work to educate customers about copyright infringement, promotion of legal alternatives to file-sharing networks and targeted action against the most persistent offenders.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10183820.stm





Eircom to Cut Broadband Over Illegal Downloads
John Collins

EIRCOM WILL from today begin a process that will lead to cutting off the broadband service of customers found to be repeatedly sharing music online illegally.

Ireland is the first country in the world where a system of “graduated response” is being put in place. Under the pilot scheme, Eircom customers who illegally share copyrighted music will get three warnings before having their broadband service cut off for a year.

The Irish Recorded Music Association (Irma), whose members include EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner, reached an out-of-court settlement with Eircom in February 2009 under which the telecoms company agreed to introduce such a system for its 750,000 broadband users.

The mechanism by which it operates was challenged in the courts by the Data Protection Commissioner.

Mr Justice Peter Charleton ruled in the High Court that a broadband subscribers internet protocol (IP) address, which Eircom will use to identify infringing customers, did not constitute personal information.

It is understood that, during the pilot phase, Eircom has agreed to process about 50 IP addresses a week. Irma is using a third-party firm, Dtecnet, to identify Eircom customers who are sharing, and not simply downloading, a specific list of its members’ copyrighted works on peer-to-peer networks. The operation of the scheme will be reviewed after three months.

Dick Doyle, director general of Irma, said his organisation could potentially supply Eircom with thousands of IP addresses a week but it was a matter of seeing what the internet service provider (ISP) was able to process.

Infringing customers will be initially telephoned by Eircom to see if they are aware of the activity on their broadband network. If the customer is identified a third time, they will have their service withdrawn for seven days. If they are caught a fourth time their broadband connection will be cut off for a year.

Mr Doyle said international research suggested 80 per cent of people will stop illegal file-sharing if they get a letter from their ISP warning them of the consequences. “We are trying to encourage people to go back to legitimate networks to get their music,” he said.

Record companies are lobbying to have a graduated-response mechanism enshrined in law in other jurisdictions.

Cable operator UPC has resisted requests from Irma to implement a “three strikes” system and the case is in the courts next month. Last night, a spokeswoman for UPC said it does not see any legal basis for monitoring or blocking its subscribers’ activities.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...271013389.html





'Hurt Locker' Downloaders, You've Been Sued
Greg Sandoval

Producers of Oscar-winning film "The Hurt Locker" have made good on a promise to file copyright lawsuits against people who have illegally downloaded the movie via file-sharing networks.

Voltage Pictures, an independent production company, filed a copyright complaint on Monday against 5,000 John Does in federal court in Washington, D.C. According to court records, next on the company's to-do list is to learn the names of each of the John and Jane Does with the help from their Internet service providers.

Attorneys for Voltage wrote in the complaint that unless the court stops the people who pirate "The Hurt Locker," then Voltage will suffer "great and irreparable injury that cannot fully be compensated or measured in money."

Voltage has asked the court to order anyone who downloaded the movie illegally to destroy all copies of "The Hurt Locker" on their computers or any other electronic device that they may have stored the film.

As for monetary damages, the movie's producers did not ask for a specific figure but want those found to have pilfered the movie to pay actual or statutory damages and cover the costs that went into filing the suits.

So, here we go again.

Some big hurt

The "Hurt Locker" producers aren't the first to kick off this new round of suits against individuals. A company calling itself the U.S. Copyright Group seems to be spearheading these efforts and has filed lawsuits on behalf of 10 other movies, including "Far Cry" and "Call of the Wild 3D."

But none of those have come close to earning the notoriety of "Locker." The film won six Academy Awards this year, including one for "Best Picture." The movie was a disappointment at the box office, however, grossing only $16 million domestically. Nonetheless, a film with an Oscar pedigree could potentially whip up a lot of sympathy among independent film makers in Hollywood for the idea of taking a stand against file sharing.

But the filing of a lawsuit does not a successful legal campaign make. Not when you're talking about the volume of file sharers Voltage has set its sights on.

This is well tread ground after all. The four top record companies attempted to use litigation as a deterrent for five years and were confronted by bad publicity, big legal costs, and this little nugget: the suits didn't slow illegal downloading.

And these were large corporations with lots of cash to fund these antipiracy operations. Voltage is relatively small. Conversely, the Motion Picture Association of America is the trade group representing the six largest film studios, such as Disney, Sony Pictures, and Paramount Pictures. The MPAA employs staff to help studio-backed film prevent leaks and track them down when they occur.

It appears the Copyright Group, which is private and has nothing to do with the government, is offering smaller film companies a means to fight back against piracy.

Your IP address

Whether Voltage can bankroll a legal campaign involving 5,000 people, or whether litigation can make up for lost profits remains to be seen. But two things are for certain: First, Nicolas Chartier, who founded Voltage, doesn't appear afraid of some bad publicity. On the contrary, he seems to welcome it. Not only did he get banned from the Academy Awards for lobbying judges to vote for his film, but he recently called those who disagree with his lawsuits "morons."

The second thing that "Locker" downloaders should know is that according to the filing, Voltage already has the Internet protocol addresses of the 5,000 John and Jane Does. There was some question whether companies such as Time Warner and Comcast would provide the information because the Copyright Group has filed so many requests for IP addresses; about 50,000 for a dozen or so films. The ISPs say they don't have the resources to chase down this many. Remember, in five years, the RIAA filed suit against less than 40,000 people.

"The plaintiff has identified each defendant by the IP address assigned to that defendant," Voltage's attorneys wrote. "The plaintiff believes that information obtained in discovery will lead to the identification of each of the defendant's true name."

Note to readers: If anybody out there is eventually accused of illegally downloading "The Hurt Locker," please contact me. It's news. Thanks. My e-mail is greg.sandoval@cnet.com.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20006314-261.html





Supreme Court Rules Pirate Bay Must Stay Blocked
enigmax

More than 2 years ago the IFPI and other copyright groups brought action against Danish ISP Telenor demanding that it should block its subscribers from accessing The Pirate Bay. Following a hearing which began a week ago, the Supreme Court in Denmark has just ruled that The Pirate Bay must continue to be blocked, upholding previous rulings by lower courts.

TPBFollowing a court case initiated by the IFPI, in early 2008 a Danish judge ruled that ISP Telenor (then Tele2) should block its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay. IFPI, representing the major recording labels, had successfully argued that Telenor was assisting in mass copyright infringement.

Later in 2008 the Eastern High Court upheld the earlier ruling but Telenor, with the support of other ISPs, said they would continue to fight. In April 2009 a Danish appeals body accepted a petition from the ISP to take the case to the Supreme Court.

“We are pleased that we now have the opportunity to find out whether it is Internet Service Providers’ responsibility to ensure the closure of a website,” noted Telenor’s regulatory chief Nicholai Kramer Pfeiffer. Representatives from the music industry believed a decision in their favor was required.

“The principle is extremely important in this case. If the Supreme Court unblocks The Pirate Bay, it means that people can abuse the Danish artists’ music again,” said Martin Arnoldsen, Executive Director of the Danish Musicians’ Union. “Many people may think that musicians are living a life with lots of money, but this is not the reality.”

The Supreme Court hearing began last week on May 20th, with Telenor making its final attempt to have the earlier decision overruled and therefore unblocking The Pirate Bay.

“The central legal argument of IFPI in this case is a statement in Danish copyright law: Any copying due to exceptions in copyright is illegal if the ‘original’ being copied is an illegal copy,” Ole Husgaard of the Danish Pirate Party told TorrentFreak last night.

“Because the ISP makes temporary copies of small fragments of the copyrighted work as IP packets pass their routers, the ISP violates copyright if one of their customers downloads an illegal copy. But this requirement of a ‘legal original’ is not allowed in the EU Infosoc directive in the case of ‘a transmission in a network between third parties by an intermediary’ (Article 5.1(a)). So here our local law violates EU law,” he explained.

Husgaard told TorrentFreak that the top civil servant in the Danish government responsible for copyright law at the time Infosoc was implemented in local law was Peter Schønning.

“Today he is no longer a civil servant. Now he is employed by IFPI, and is running the legal proceedings to get the Pirate Bay blocked for IFPI,” says Husgaard.

Today the Supreme Court announced its decision and the IFPI came out on top. Telenor – and by extension other ISPs – must continue to DNS-block The Pirate Bay so that Danish subscribers cannot access the site.

“With the Supreme Court upholding an ISP ban against providing customer access to The Pirate Bay it is clearly necessary to have legislative changes,” say the Pirate Party in a response to the ruling.

“Our copyright law should be addressed, so it is no longer in breach of EU law. And the Procedure Code should be amended so the rules on preliminary injunction can no longer be misused by, for example, IFPI to achieve a better position than they are entitled.”
http://torrentfreak.com/supreme-cour...locked-100527/





File-Swapper Appeals 'Innocent Infringer' Defense to SCOTUS
Mark Hefflinger

A convicted file-swapper is appealing her case to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that her defense of being an "innocent infringer" should have been accepted by an appeals court, and the damages amount reduced, according to the Copyrights & Campaigns blog. Whitney Harper was 16 years old in 2004, when she was sued by the recording industry for allegedly sharing songs on a file-sharing network.

Harper's innocent infringer defense rested on the idea that she believed file-sharing was akin to Internet radio, and not a violation of copyrights.

The lower court accepted this defense and granted summary judgment for the record labels, ordering her to pay $7,400 ($200 per song) for sharing 37 songs.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed this ruling, saying Harper should be liable for greater damages due to the copyright notices on CDs, and ordered her to pay $27,500 ($750 per song).

In their petition for a hearing before the Supreme Court, Harper's attorneys note that the digital files she was said to be sharing carried no copyright notice, as CDs do.
http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2010/05...defense-scotus





ACS:Law Asks Those Who Deny Infringing To Incriminate Themselves

ACS:Law, the UK-based copyright threat letter operation that has been called a "scam" by UK politicians and condemned by ISPs alike, is apparently using a new tactic. The operation, which is apparently being investigated for potential disciplinary action (like Davenport Lyons, whose lawyers have been disciplined for initiating the "pre-settlement" mass letter campaign, and which has some sort of connection with ACS:Law), seems to know that the "evidence" it has isn't enough to actually take anyone to court, so if you reply and deny the infringement, ACS:Law sends you a questionnaire effectively asking you to incriminate yourself.

Of course, there's no legal obligation to reply, just as there's no legal obligation to pay, based on such a "pay up or we'll sue" letter. TorrentFreak notes that, despite all of this, people are still paying, even though not a single case has gone to court. No wonder we have multiple copycat operations showing up in the US. Extortion-like processes are apparently quite profitable. I'm sure that's exactly what the folks who created copyright law in the first place were thinking of in their creation: a system to send out thousands of threat letters demanding payment to avoid a lawsuit. It's all about promoting the "progress" of a few copyright lawyers, you see...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...35459585.shtml





The Fashion Industry As a Model For IP Reform
Scrameustache

In this 15-minute TED talk, Johanna Blakley addresses a subject alien to most here — fashion — but in a way sure to grab our attention. The lesson is about how the fashion industry's lack of copyright protection can teach other industries about what copyright means to innovation. And yes, she mentions open source software. There is one killer slide at 12:20 comparing the gross sales of low-IP-protection industries with those of films and books and music. If you want to know more, or if you prefer text, the Ready To Share project website should give you all the data you crave on the subject.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/05...-For-IP-Reform





Did Warner Bros. Pirate Antipiracy Technology?
Eriq Gardner

Warner-bros Warner Bros. has been sued for stealing an antipiracy technology patent.

The claim comes from a German company called Medien Patent Verwaltung. According to new infringement lawsuits filed against Warners, Technicolor and Deluxe in New York and Germany, MPV says that in 2003, it introduced the studio to a method of marking films with a distinctive code so it could track back sources of piracy to the exact theater in which an unauthorized copy originated. MPV says it has been trying to get Warners to pay for use of the technology since it allegedly began incorporating the invention in prints throughout Europe in 2004.

“We disclosed our anti-piracy technology to Warner Bros. in 2003 at their request, under strict confidentiality, expecting to be treated fairly," MPV says in a statement. "Instead, they started using our technology extensively without our permission and without any accounting to us. However, we had taken care to obtain patents to protect MPV's technology, and we are now in a position where we must assert our rights.”

Warner Bros. declines to comment on the dispute. But we've discovered that MPV made a little mistake in its New York lawsuit.

The patent that MPV cites in its complaint is 7,187,633, entitled "Motion Picture and Anti-Piracy Coding."

But our search of the patent records reveals that patent number has another title: "Marking of a Data Medium Material for Information Intended for Reproduction." There is another patent entitled "Motion Picture and Anti-Piracy Coding." The assignee? You guessed it: Warner Bros.

Did the Germans accidentally steal the title of Warners' own patent when suing the studio for stealing?

The answer appears to be yes. Reached for comment, New York attorney Richard Garbarini, representing the plaintiffs, admits the error and says he will file an amended complaint.

In the meantime, there's still the larger issue of whether a major studio stole technology to help it prevent people from stealing its movies.
http://thresq.hollywoodreporter.com/...echnology.html





SoundExchange Explains $200 Million In Unpaid Fees
FMQB

After it was reported last week that SoundExchange, the non-profit organization that collects and distributes royalties to performing artists, is holding unpaid royalties totaling more than $200 million, the organization has explained the unusually large sum. That royalty money has been collected from satellite and Internet radio providers for years as SoundExchange has struggled to locate the artists it owes, and SoundExchange spokeswoman Laura Williams says that most of the money is being held back with good reason.

Williams told Wired that 50 percent of that money is "workflow" — the amount that has recently been paid in and will go out as scheduled within a few months. This money is not being held, it is simply in transit through the system. Eleven percent is being held pending final court rulings on royalty rates or other related issues, and SoundExchange expects most of that money to be distributed later this year. Five percent is tied up for foreign PROs. These royalties belong to artists and copyright holders in other countries, but haven’t yet been claimed by foreign societies, and another 10 percent is in limbo for lack of data. These royalties were paid by services in accordance with the law, but the service didn’t provide playlist data to accompany them. Finally, another five percent is accounted for by "bad data," which means that services pay royalties but send incomplete or bad data which does not provide SoundExchange with enough information to figure out whom to pay.

The explanation accounts for over 80 percent of the $200 million. This leaves around $39 million that is still owed to artists and labels who have yet to register with SoundExchange, and some of them may not be unaware that they need to do so.

"Obviously, the $39 million number is still far too high, and we’re doing everything we can think of to help reduce it," Williams told Wired. "Our direct notification programs, including those through those social media and online music tools matches, have notified more than 34,000 artists in the past six months, representing over half of the total money which is unclaimed. Of those, only about five percent have registered so far — even [among] those who [have been] contacted six-plus times, that ratio doesn’t go up."
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1817381





LimeWire Asks Court to Reconsider Guilty Copyright Ruling
Mark Hefflinger

File-sharing service LimeWire, which earlier this month was found guilty in federal court of copyright infringement, has asked the court to reconsider its decision, arguing that it flawed in its legal analysis of the case, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The court found both LimeWire, and founder and majority shareholder Mark Groton guilty of copyright infringement.

LimeWire argues in its motion for reconsideration that the court "made errors in its analysis of liability, including whether the company had the ability to supervise copyright infringement," according to THR's coverage.

"LimeWire also says the court reached its conclusions for summary judgment without properly considering conflicting evidence and giving it the benefit of the doubt, as required at the summary judgment phase."

In the intervening weeks since the ruling, LimeWire has been working to apply a filter that would block copyrighted works, and CEO Zeeshan Zaidi told Wired.com the company has even been talking to labels about licensing their content for the service.
http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2010/05...pyright-ruling





Man Behind the Music Service
Joseph Plambeck

Mark Gorton is a confident guy. He’s confident about his ideas. He’s confident about his enthusiasms. And he’s confident that his successes — like making money on Wall Street and promoting alternative transportation in New York — provide a record that backs him up.

But that confidence faces a new test. Two weeks ago, a federal judge ruled that he and the popular file-sharing service he created, LimeWire, were liable for copyright infringement and could be forced to pay up to $450 million in damages.

Mr. Gorton, 43, says he did not think it would come to this point. He thought that the record industry, sometime since the lawsuit was filed in 2006, would come to appreciate his vision for the future of LimeWire — a paid subscription service providing unlimited downloads of licensed songs — and want to join forces instead of continuing litigation.

“Perhaps I was naïve,” Mr. Gorton said in an interview last week at LimeWire’s office near Chinatown in Manhattan. “If I knew when the lawsuit started what I know now about the music industry, maybe we would have done something different.”

Mr. Gorton, a successful Wall Street trader with a varied academic background that includes degrees from Harvard, Yale and Stanford, is not the sort of figure who springs to mind when the phrase “Internet pirate” is spoken. Nor is he one, he insists.

All along, Mr. Gorton said, he thought he was following the law, despite a series of earlier lawsuits that ended badly for file-sharing services like Napster and Grokster. And where there were doubts about the legality, he said, he tried to remove them.

He reached out to record labels, for example, to get information about their catalogs so he could build a filter that would block those songs from being traded free, he said. But that attempt turned against him, as the ruling from Judge Kimba M. Wood of Federal District Court in Manhattan said that the company’s plan to convert users to a paid service, in part by using such a filter, supported the industry’s argument that he knew files on the service were being traded illegally.

“It’s certainly frustrating,” he said. “We were trying so hard to reach an accommodation.”

The Recording Industry Association of America, the industry group that managed the lawsuit on behalf of 13 record companies, said it thought he had willfully skirted the law, motivated by the money generated by the millions of users of LimeWire. Total revenue increased to an estimated $20 million in 2006 from $6 million two years earlier, according to the court ruling, much of it from a paid service that allowed for faster downloads.

“He thought with his cleverness that he could get away with it,” Mitch Bainwol, the association’s chief executive, said. “He’s the Bernie Madoff of Internet crime. He was thumbing his nose at the rule of law to profiteer enormously.”

Yet Mr. Gorton’s foray into the music business was not part of any grand plan, either. In fact, he said, he consumes little music, and the bulk of his collection is from his college days. He does not own an iPod.

He does like to build things, though. In seventh grade, he and a friend built 4-by-6-foot scale model of their school in New Jersey. After getting two degrees in electrical engineering, one at Yale and the other at Stanford, he made a modem for a defense contractor that could work in the face of an enemy’s jamming systems.

In 1998, armed with a Harvard business degree and some Wall Street experience at Credit Suisse First Boston, he and a co-worker started a hedge fund, Tower Research Capital, that used quantitative trading and investment strategies. They created an automated trading program and then Lime Brokerage to handle the trades.

In 2007, Tower Research reportedly had $117 million in assets. Mr. Gorton would not give specifics about the performance of his financial companies in recent years other than to say that the brokerage house lost money last year.

Back in 2000, when Mr. Gorton jumped into the peer-to-peer network business with LimeWire, he envisioned it growing into a popular service for commerce, he said. Users could search the network for a new television set, for example, and get results from retailers across the country.

He was not alone. At the time, venture capital and talent poured into other peer-to-peer companies.

“People have a short memory, and they’ve gotten caught up in the mythology of P2P’s being run by ne’er-do-wells and eye-patch pirates,” said Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has represented some of the file-sharing services in copyright cases. (Mr. Lohmann was named in the ruling as having given legal advice to the company about how to protect itself from liability.)

“LimeWire was not a fly-by-night operation,” he said.

Around the time Mr. Gorton started Tower Research Capital, several people who have known him for quite a while said, he started to express his views a little more outwardly. “He really blossomed into somebody with tremendous amount of confidence in his ideas,” said Sean B. Hecht, a friend from Yale who heads the Environmental Law Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Many of those ideas, and his money, are going toward civic projects. Last year, Mr. Gorton said, he put about $7 million into another of his ventures, the Open Planning Project. That group promotes, among other things, bringing open-source technology to governments, which would allow a local government to build off a computer system used by another government instead of starting from scratch.

He has also been involved closely with Transportation Alternatives in New York, working with the city to increase the number of bike lanes (he rides his bike to work every day from his brownstone on the Upper West Side) and improve pedestrian life. In each of the last six years, he has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars and provided up to a quarter of the group’s annual budget.

“He brought us a new communications strategy,” said Paul S. White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives. “Before Mark, we were preaching to the choir. We weren’t talking in a language that other people could understand.”

Mr. Gorton says he has tried to take that same strategy to the record labels to explain the new service he is proposing.

“I tell them to think of Woodstock,” he said. “The first one was free, but it ended up making the industry a lot of money and was a huge success. The second and third ones were very expensive for fans and were failures.”

But before he can hope to make any progress with the labels on his paid service, he will need to get the lawsuit behind him. And given the heated rhetoric from Mr. Bainwol and the record association, the coming negotiations may not be easy.

At a minimum, the record association says, LimeWire needs to shut the current service and Mr. Gorton needs to pay for damages out of his own pocket. A status conference with Judge Wood is scheduled for June 7.

Mr. Gorton says he knows that the music industry needs to alter the behavior of a generation of people who have grown accustomed to getting their music free.

Still, he says that LimeWire has a relationship with that generation that can help make the change. And he says he remains optimistic that, in the end, his idea will triumph.

“I don’t want to be on my deathbed thinking that I kept a bunch of musicians from making money,” Mr. Gorton said. “I have a lot of work to do to get my karma scores up.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/bu...4limewire.html





Spotify Boost for Swedish Music Firm Coffers

Swedish online music service Spotify is starting to become a major revenue stream for Swedish music companies as digital sales are forecast to account for 25 percent of income in 2010.

"We can see a continued positive trend, and that is very exciting," said Per Sundin at Universal Music Sweden.

Sundin is referring to the development of the Swedish music market to date in 2010, after a 2009 which signalled a break in the negative trend with total revenues climbing in real terms for the first time since 2002.

While digital sales accounted for the greatest part of the increase, CD and vinyl remain popular and also recorded gains.

Income from so-called streaming climbed by a whopping 438 percent to 65 million kronor ($8.24 million), which a large part coming from Spotify.

Per Sundin expects over 25 percent of sales to come from digital sources in 2010, in comparison with 16 percent in 2009. He confirmed that "a large part" of the digital money comes from Spotify.

"Spotify has been incredibly successful and attracted even more paying customers, who pay 99 kronor per month," said Sundin.

He pointed out that Apple's iTunes and Nokia's equivalent have also shown positive sales development, with Universal expecting further alternatives to come onto the market.

"We are testing subscription models, advertising-funded models... We are trying everything at the moment as we want the consumer to decide how music should be consumed."

Rival firm EMI has also reported that digital revenues are on the increase. Stefan Blom at EMI forecasts that digital revenues will account for around 20 percent of sales in 2010.

"But I want to underline, that when we talk about streaming it is not only Spotify. There are in fact other up and coming services, and YouTube also accounts for a significant proportion of listeners and watchers, Blom said.

Stefan Blom at the same time pointed out that Spotify is starting to become a very important income source for the sector, thanks to the continual increase in the number of paying users.

"It is growing month by month. This means that future prospects are very good, for us and for the artists," he said.
http://www.thelocal.se/26894/20100527/





Ellen DeGeneres To Launch Record Label
FMQB

Talk show host/comedian Ellen DeGeneres is launching her own record label called eleveneleven with plans to find and sign new artists. Her first signee is 12-year-old YouTube sensation Greyson Chance, who was spotted by DeGeneres after posting a web video of himself playing the piano and singing Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" at a sixth grade music festival. He was invited to appear on DeGeneres' show on May 13, and he will be on the show again today (5/26) performing an original song as DeGeneres announces the new label.

"Greyson inspired me to start a record label called eleveneleven. He is my first artist and we are making a record together," DeGeneres says in a clip posted on her website.

DeGeneres also said she will continue to use her show as a platform to find new artists, whom she will sign to eleveneleven. The record label is being set up in collaboration with Telepictures Productions, according to Reuters.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1818732





Revisiting ‘Main St.,’ Rethinking the Myth
Ben Ratliff

A LESSER-KNOWN version of the Rolling Stones’ “Loving Cup,” found on the bonus disc of the new reissue of the band’s 1972 album, “Exile on Main St.,” seems to me the best thing the Stones ever did.

It’s country gospel gone lurid, and it seems to rise up out of a nap. Nicky Hopkins’s piano chords circle around a G at slow tempo in an echoey room. Charlie Watts starts pumping a bass drum at the third beat of the second bar; he’s either late or early, but finding his way. Piano and drums roll up to the D chord at the beginning of the first verse, and Mick Taylor bends two guitar strings under Mick Jagger’s opening line: “I’m the man on the mountain — yes, come on up.” Onward, Mr. Watts weaves around the beat, smashing down on his high-hat, forming weird and clattering snare-drum fills. He both shapes and follows the group’s euphoria and the music’s subtle acceleration. The Stones gather around the song like pickpockets, jostling and interfering with it. Keith Richards, playing rhythm guitar and singing backup, quits harmonizing and starts to shout.

This performance represents to me the sound of “Exile” in idealized form: a dark, dense, loosely played, semiconscious tour through American blues, gospel and country music, recorded in a basement in France. “Exile” was made around the Stones’ creative peak and in unusual circumstances: they were tax exiles, forced to live away from home.

It is often called one of the best rock records ever made, and framed as an after-the-fact concept album: a wise horror show, an audio diary of rock stars finally facing the rigors of marriage, children and addiction. (“ ‘Exile’ is about casualties, and partying in the face of them,” the critic Lester Bangs wrote in 1972. “The party is obvious. The casualties are inevitable.”) The notion of the record as story also comes from the strong documentary images around its creation— Dominique Tarlé’s black-and-white pictures of the Stones at Villa Nellcôte, shirtless and dazed in the stifling air of a basement in the South of France. These images dot the 64-page booklet and the DVD film included in the reissue’s deluxe edition and have been part of the avalanche of press around the reissue, released by Universal on Tuesday.

Recently, thinking about this alternate “Loving Cup” and why it’s not on the original album made me wonder what the ideal of “Exile” really is. I find most of “Exile” good, but not great. (That era of Stones music, fantastic. The album, not so much.) I can’t see it as a masterpiece, not only because I distrust the idea of masterpieces, but because I especially don’t want one from the Stones, who make songs and albums like birds’ nests — collaborative tangles with delicate internal balances — and have a history of great triage work, assembling bits and pieces recorded over a long period. But “Exile” remains the preference of the most judicious Stones fans. Why? What is its essence?

It’s a tricky question. “Exile” can seem like a unity of sound, place and time; much has been made of the fact that one of its greatest songs, “Ventilator Blues,” was inspired by the discomfort of the basement studio at Nellcôte, Mr. Richards’s rented mansion on the French Riviera, with its one small air vent. You can make yourself hear that heat, if you want.

But the recordings for “Exile” didn’t all happen in that basement. They stretched from 1969 to 1972, across the making of two other excellent and, to me, superior records — “Let It Bleed” and “Sticky Fingers.” It’s not always the band you know and, perhaps, love: there are a number of “Exile” tracks whose parts are not played by the usual suspects. (That’s Jimmy Miller, the producer, playing drums on “Happy” and “Shine a Light,” not Mr. Watts. That’s Mr. Taylor, or Mr. Richards, or Bill Plummer playing bass on about half the record, not Bill Wyman.)

As it happens, the “Loving Cup” described above was not recorded in Nellcôte’s basement but at Olympic Studios in London in the spring of 1969. (The album version — more laid back, not as good — comes from Los Angeles, after the French sojourn.) The Nellcôte experience was important to “Exile,” there’s no question. But the work of several Stones researchers indicates that more than half the album was recorded at other places, under more normal working conditions.

The new reissue both enshrines “Exile” and questions it. The first disc — a sharper version of the album itself, sounding far better than its last remastering in 1994, with deeper bass and greater detail — strengthens the idea of “Exile” as an inviolable document, dense and atmospheric and brilliantly post-produced, a thing unto itself. But the second bonus disc blows that idea apart, with new vocal tracks by Mr. Jagger over old instrumental tracks of “Exile”-related provenance, and other material that seems to come from the general era. So now you’re getting “Exile” from two perspectives: first as a finished 18-track entity, a masterpiece, if you want; then as something broader and more amorphous. If I’m reading the signs correctly, these two perspectives have some relation to how Mr. Richards and Mr. Jagger think about the album.

Mr. Jagger, who has criticized the album’s production over the years and wondered aloud about the strength of its songs, is more willing to dispense with Nellcôte as the album’s central force.

“You mean what is the album’s esprit?” he asked, rephrasing a question in a recent telephone conversation. The idea of Nellcôte as the album’s unifier is “three-quarters true,” he explained.

“It wouldn’t be the same record without Nellcôte,” he added. “But then it wouldn’t be the same record without what we did in London. Nellcôte was more hothouse, it was more living-in-the-studio. But what would the difference have been if we recorded ‘Ventilator Blues’ at Olympic or at Nellcôte? Who knows, and who cares?”

Miller, the album’s producer, died in 1994. So Mr. Jagger commissioned the producer Don Was to investigate extra studio material from the period. (“When Mick first called me about it,” Mr. Was said, “it was like he was asking me, ‘Can you do me a favor, man? Can you take the garbage out?’ ”) But then Mr. Jagger got caught up in the search himself, trying to determine what other tracks might qualify as extra matter for “Exile.” Mr. Jagger said he thought only in terms of time period, not by style, sound, location, or any other criterion. For him, “Exile” is less a specific sequence of tracks than an era of recording, starting with that “Loving Cup” at Olympic Studios.

“It’s a good story to say that what was created at Nellcôte was a result of the incredibly decadent atmosphere,” Mr. Jagger said. “Well, yeah: it’s probably true that the atmosphere affected the feeling of the music, and the sound of the studio. But you’ve no idea how much or how little. And in the end, it’s just a sort of myth, really.”

Can he hear the sound of the Nellcôte studios when he listens to the album?

“I’ve no idea which is the Nellcôte stuff and which isn’t, to be honest.”

Ah.

Mr. Richards feels differently. “All of the bone and the muscle of the record was done down in that basement,” he said when asked the same question. The rest of the work he considers “fairy dust.”

It’s the opposite interpretation, but if you read the literature — particularly Robert Greenfield’s book “Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell With the Rolling Stones” (Da Capo Press) — it makes sense. Nellcôte was Mr. Richards’s house, and he was one of its mainstays that summer, with his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg and their son Marlon. The other band members came and went; Inasmuch as “Exile” has an esprit of place, Mr. Richards lived in it, and Mr. Jagger visited.

“I don’t think we were conscious of making a record that was gonna be about that place and the way we felt at the time,” Mr. Richards said in a phone interview. “But the word ‘exile’ does describe pretty much the atmosphere and the conditions that we were recording in. I mean, we’d all had to leave our places in England. Not that the Stones were particularly patriotic — I know better than that — but it was really a jerk, when you’re working with a team of guys and you all have to uproot at once.”

Mr. Richards contributed little to the extra tracks on the bonus disc and distrusted altering even the outtakes and unused tracks; as he said to another reporter earlier this year, “I didn’t want to interfere with the Bible.”

“My job was to enforce the no-fiddling rule,” he told me. “I didn’t want to play around with it at all. It’s all analog, and of course the remixing involved a change to digital, but otherwise, if anybody came up with a bright idea, I said no.”

It’s not clear that Mr. Jagger heard him. He put new vocals on four of the bonus tracks: “Plundered My Soul,” “Following the River,” “Dancing in the Light” and “Pass the Wine.” In “Plundered” — after some newly tracked guitar in the opening by Mr. Taylor — you hear a 66-year-old voice singing recent lyrics: an aging aristocrat describing a younger man’s appetites, over what appears to be the Stones sounding worn and wracked in their 20s.

Mr. Was believes that nobody, not even the Stones themselves, can remember when the backing tracks for “Plundered My Soul” were recorded.

The strange thing is that “Plundered My Soul” is very good: the most soulful and energetic Stones track I can think of in almost 30 years. Until recently, the Stones have been reluctant to release their unheard archives. Perhaps that’s because they’re so good at putting old scraps into new patchworks — the then-three-year-old songs retooled in 1972 for “Exile,” the then-nine-year-old songs ( “Tops” and “Waiting on a Friend”) given new vocals and new life in 1981 on “Tattoo You.”

The rest of the bonus disc is very good, too, patchwork, mysteries and all. According to Mr. Was, two tracks come from Nellcôte — a petulant shuffle called “I’m Not Signifying” and an alternate version of “Soul Survivor,” sung by Mr. Richards. One other, a nasty R&B instrumental called “Title 5,” came from a tape box marked “1969,” though Mr. Was suspects it was made earlier. So do I.

I don’t know if a great album must serve as an accounting of where the band members’ heads were at, or where they were geographically, or when they made it. But in the Stones’ case, I do want to hear the group sound, as much as possible. I want a minimum of detours, absences and static longeurs, with introductions and bridges and codas. The Stones wrote and arranged carefully, but this is a record that favors jamming over composing; though only one track is longer than five minutes, many quickly drag from indirection: “Happy,” “Casino Boogie,” “Stop Breaking Down,” “Shine a Light” — half the record, really.

Still, because of its rolling eccentricity, “Exile” always wants to be heard in full, or at least in small groupings, including the two great segues: the hard “Rocks Off” into the harder “Rip This Joint”; the angry gnarl of “Ventilator Blues” into the menthol drift of “I Just Want to See His Face.” Throughout, I love Mr. Jagger’s yapping voice, determined to be heard, feeling its way through cultural appropriation. I think Mr. Richards’s limping rhythm in “Tumbling Dice” is one of the great energies in popular music, even if I’ve never worked up much love for the song.

But back to the alternate take of “Loving Cup,” which still seems like the star of the whole enterprise.

I asked Don Was what he thought. “There’s a sound that’s identified with ‘Exile’ that’s become part of the vocabulary for every rock ‘n’ roll musician subsequently,” he said. “And this is the ultimate track of the style that characterizes ‘Exile.’ It’s not sloppiness; it’s width, in terms of where everyone feels the beat. You’ve got five individuals feeling the beat in a different place. At some point, the centrifugal force of the rhythm no longer holds the band together. That ‘Loving Cup’ is about the widest area you can have without the song falling apart.”

What leapt out was the phrase “the style that characterizes ‘Exile,’ ” especially in connection with a track that’s not actually on the record. For me, “Exile” works best as a suggestion, not a fact.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/ar.../23stones.html





Sir Mick Jagger Goes Back to Exile
BBC

Forty years ago, the Rolling Stones decamped to the South of France, living as tax exiles as they recorded their tenth album.

The sessions became notorious for their bacchanalian excesses, taking place amidst a nine-month, non-stop cocktail party in a sprawling villa that had supposedly once been a headquarters for the Gestapo.

The result was a sprawling double album, Exile On Main Street, which has gone down in history as one of the band's best.

Next week, they are re-releasing the record with 10 new tracks - including several recently rediscovered songs. An accompanying documentary, Stones In Exile, will premiere in Cannes, before screening on BBC One on Sunday, 23 May.

Frontman Sir Mick Jagger met up with BBC arts editor Will Gompertz to explain why the band had gone back to the archives - and whether the band would ever get back together.

The new tracks on Exile On Main Street have been promoted as "recently rediscovered". How lost were they?

Well, they weren't really lost. It was just no-one had really looked at them. There wasn't a bag at the bottom of someone's drawer.

Where were they?

They were in our tape store, mouldering away. Tapes don't have a very good shelf life - so you bake them in the oven, get them out, play them and transfer them to somewhere else.

And then the process started of listening to them and going, "that's really a good one".

What sort of state were the songs in?

They were mostly instrumental tracks with no vocals on them. They didn't have vocals, they didn't have melodies... because I wasn't there. I was playing maracas or I was playing harmonica or something.

But some of [them] were complete. There's a track called I'm Not Signifying and all I did was play harmonica on it. It's quite an early track.

It sounds early. It could fit onto the Beggars' Banquet album.

It might have been recorded for Beggars, but it was definitely re-recorded in the [Exile] period. A lot of these songs were done more than once.

Did you put them to one side because you didn't like them at the time?

We had so many tracks, and you can only do so much. You'd say, "we'll save that one, or put it aside" not knowing that we'd put it aside for 40 years!

So I just found some of these ones and finished them off - I wrote the words and the lyrics.

Would you describe these records as new ones or old ones?

They're both, really. [Record producer] Don Was, who's a real Stones aficionado, said, "you've got to do them in the mood of Exile". We had tremendous arguments late at night about whether that was correct, artistically.

How do you get yourself back into the mood you had in 1971?

By listening to Exile, of course! But it's not particularly difficult, technically. It's just an attitude in your head when you're singing. Don Was said that in those days there wasn't a tremendous amount of subtlety. You just started and then, wham, barraged on 'til you finished.

But what about writing the lyrics now, as opposed to where your head was then?

Now that's a different thing. Of course it's totally different. But you can put your head in a "mood". That's what any writing is like. You've got to be able to.

People say, "is a song written from your own experience?" The answer is "of course it isn't!" Bits of it are your experience, bits of things you've learnt off other people, bits you've nicked from other people's lives, and bits you read in a newspaper. And all this goes to make a song, a novel or a play.

And so with all this, you're playing a part. And in a way, I suppose, I was playing the part of myself in 1971.

How accurate is the mythology surrounding the recording of Exile On Main Street?

The wild nights, the orgies, the drug taking! I remember it well. Every bit of it!

I mean, it was a lot of fun - but there were a few bumps. It was a bumpy period, historically. There was a war going on, the Nixon thing was happening. Tax was through the roof. It was very difficult. The end of the '60s felt very strained.

But despite all the excesses, it was quite a creative period. When you're quite young, you can get away with that.

What was the environment like down at the house?

I think it was quite simple, really. The basement was for work, and nobody came in there who wasn't working.

Upstairs was quite a lot of socialising and carrying on. All day.

It was great fun and it got a bit out of hand, and then we left. It felt like forever, but actually it was only six or seven months.

How much did the environment contribute to the album?

It was very social, we had a lot of children. They weren't singing on the record, but there was quite a family thing.

If you record in that atmosphere, you're going to get a different kind of record. It's almost impossible to quantify how that is, but you just are going to get a different record. Every endeavour is influenced by its environment.

How was your relationship with Keith at that time? This was his house…

It was his rented house! He rented it for a year and he never went back!

What was the hardest point in those years?

It was really problematic getting into the United States. It was massively difficult. The uncertainty of knowing whether you could go to America to tour was one of the major uncertainties of that period.

Things have obviously changed a great deal since those sessions. What's your feeling on technology and music?

Technology and music have been together since the beginning of recording.

I'm talking about the internet.

But that's just one facet of the technology of music. Music has been aligned with technology for a long time. The model of records and record selling is a very complex subject and quite boring, to be honest.

But your view is valid because you have a huge catalogue, which is worth a lot of money, and you've been in the business a long time, so you have perspective.

Well, it's all changed in the last couple of years. We've gone through a period where everyone downloaded everything for nothing and we've gone into a grey period it's much easier to pay for things - assuming you've got any money.

Are you quite relaxed about it?

I am quite relaxed about it. But, you know, it is a massive change and it does alter the fact that people don't make as much money out of records.

But I have a take on that - people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn't make any money out of records because record companies wouldn't pay you! They didn't pay anyone!

Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.

So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn't.

What about the future. Are you going to get back together and write more music?

I think that would be a very good idea. I've been writing quite a lot of music.

Is Keith keen to get the guitar out?

I'm sure he is. And I'll be seeing him next week, so I'm sure we'll get together and start doing that.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...nt/8681410.stm





Bittorrent Inc Open Sources Protocol

Adopts P2P approach to development
Lawrence Latif

BIDDING TO APPEASE Internet service providers (ISPs), a leading developer of Bittorrent has open sourced an update to the widely used peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing protocol.

Bittorrent protocol designer Bram Cohen and his firm, Bittorrent Incorporated, have released the micro transmission protocol (µTP) enhancement under the MIT license, in the hope that it will foster improvement in the protocol and support it as the method of choice for sharing files over the Internet.

The protocol is implemented in the popular Bittorrect client µTorrent and aims to strike a balance between user service levels and adaptiveness to network conditions. The protocol tries to emulate and extend some congestion control policies, such as LEDBAT found in the transmission control protocol (TCP), by throttling down packet rates when the algorithm detects network congestion.

Since µTorrent became part of Bittorrent Inc. and the firm turned the client into closed source software, the development of µTP had proceeded without consulting developers within the greater Bittorrent community. Some subsequent arguments about µTP stemmed from the age-old network engineering design decision of whether to use UDP or TCP as its transport protocol.

A combination of closed source development and the protocol choice dilemma had left some developers sceptical as to whether µTP would make any difference to either users' or ISPs' attitudes to Bittorrent. So this move could turn out to be the sink or swim moment for the µTP protocol, as developers mull over whether it really is worth implementing µTP framing or whether it will be more conducive to use TCP.

The hope that this will somehow change the view ISPs have of Bittorrent is naive. The P2P protocol is used to shift vast amounts of data of varying legality, and while µTP might or might not be more efficient than its predecessor, any trimming of excess fat in the underlying protocol is likely to simply increase bandwidth consumption.

As Google has found out with Youtube, serving videos over traditional client-server network architectures is not a profitable venture. However Bittorrent is far from ready to serve up real-time video and improvements such as µTP are required in order to make it viable for video streaming, something that Bittorrent Inc. and Vuze are keen to push as a legitimate use of the protocol.

Thankfully Bittorrent Inc. has given the community a chance to look over and improve upon the protocol, which will hopefully see improvements in the way Bittorrent delivers content to users.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...urces-protocol





After Keeping Us Waiting for a Century, Mark Twain Will Finally Reveal All

The great American writer left instructions not to publish his autobiography until 100 years after his death, which is now
Guy Adams in Los Angeles

Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published.

The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.

That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.

Scholars are divided as to why Twain wanted the first-hand account of his life kept under wraps for so long. Some believe it was because he wanted to talk freely about issues such as religion and politics. Others argue that the time lag prevented him from having to worry about offending friends.

One thing's for sure: by delaying publication, the author, who was fond of his celebrity status, has ensured that he'll be gossiped about during the 21st century. A section of the memoir will detail his little-known but scandalous relationship with Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, who became his secretary after the death of his wife Olivia in 1904. Twain was so close to Lyon that she once bought him an electric vibrating sex toy. But she was abruptly sacked in 1909, after the author claimed she had "hypnotised" him into giving her power of attorney over his estate.

Their ill-fated relationship will be recounted in full in a 400-page addendum, which Twain wrote during the last year of his life. It provides a remarkable account of how the dying novelist's final months were overshadowed by personal upheavals.

"Most people think Mark Twain was a sort of genteel Victorian. Well, in this document he calls her a slut and says she tried to seduce him. It's completely at odds with the impression most people have of him," says the historian Laura Trombley, who this year published a book about Lyon called Mark Twain's Other Woman.

"There is a perception that Twain spent his final years basking in the adoration of fans. The autobiography will perhaps show that it wasn't such a happy time. He spent six months of the last year of his life writing a manuscript full of vitriol, saying things that he'd never said about anyone in print before. It really is 400 pages of bile."

Twain, who was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, had made several attempts to start work on autobiography, beginning in 1870, but only really hit his stride with the work in 1906, when he appointed a stenographer to transcribe his dictated reminiscences.

Another potential motivation for leaving the book to be posthumously published concerns Twain's legacy as a Great American. Michael Shelden, who this year published Man in White, an account of Twain's final years, says that some of his privately held views could have hurt his public image.

"He had doubts about God, and in the autobiography, he questions the imperial mission of the US in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. He's also critical of [Theodore] Roosevelt, and takes the view that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa. He said they had enough business to be getting on with at home: with lynching going on in the South, he thought they should try to convert the heathens down there."

In other sections of the autobiography, Twain makes cruel observations about his supposed friends, acquaintances and one of his landladies.

Parts of the book have already seen the light of day in other publications. Small excerpts were run by US magazines before Twain's death (since he needed the money). His estate has allowed parts of it to be adapted for publication in three previous books described as "autobiographies".

However, Robert Hirst, who is leading the team at Berkeley editing the complete text, says that more than half of it has still never appeared in print. Only academics, biographers, and members of the public prepared to travel to the university's Bancroft research library have previously been able to read it in full. "When people ask me 'did Mark Twain really mean it to take 100 years for this to come out', I say 'he was certainly a man who knew how to make people want to buy a book'," Dr Hirst said.

November's publication is authorised by his estate, which in the absence of surviving descendants (a daughter, Clara, died in 1962, and a granddaughter Nina committed suicide in 1966) funds museums and libraries that preserve his legacy.

"There are so many biographies of Twain, and many of them have used bits and pieces of the autobiography," Dr Hirst said. "But biographers pick and choose what bits to quote. By publishing Twain's book in full, we hope that people will be able to come to their own complete conclusions about what sort of a man he was."
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...l-1980695.html





A Search Wall for UK Times
Holly Sanders Ware

The UK's Times and Sunday Times are putting up search walls in addition to pay walls.

The papers, which plan to start charging users for access to their newly redesigned Web sites in late June, will prevent Google and other search engines from linking to their stories.

Although they are not the first papers to erect pay barriers around their content, the papers are going a step further by making most of their site invisible to Google's Web crawler. Except for their homepages, no stories will show up on Google.

The papers are betting that loyal readers will covet access to scarce content. Critics say the move will make it tougher to attract new readers who discover content by searching the Web.

The papers launched new, separate sites yesterday. Both papers, which, like The Post, are owned by News Corp., will make the sites free for registered customers until late June.

News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch has taken aim at Google in the past for profiting from publishers' content on the Web without paying for it. The British papers are the first within the News Corp. fold to jump off the search bandwagon.

The Times' move will be closely watched in publishing circles. The Wall Street Journal, also part of News Corp., and The Financial Times charge readers for access but let Google link to their stories.

The New York Times is going back to a pay model in 2011 after ending TimesSelect, a service which charged for access to some content such as columns, in 2007.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/busines...Xq1RPPUIPSPLbJ





More Than 90% of Consumers Would Not Pay £2 a Week for Times Online

Most consumers (91%) would be unwilling to pay £1 a day or £2 a week to access the Times Online, according to research, with only 5% saying they would fork out £2 for a week's digital subscription.

Another 4% said they would pay £1 for a day's access, which is the other price point News International will introduce along with paywalls around its online content in the next month.

The research, conducted by Entertainment Media Research on behalf of media law firm Wiggin, found that it was not just The Times that the public would be unwilling to pay for.

Give or take one or two percentage points, the proportion unwilling to pay was the same for The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and The Independent.

Interestingly in the case of the Financial Times, which has attracted paying subscribers, 3% said they would pay £1 per week and 4% said they would pay £2 per week. The site charges either £171 or £260 per year depending on the extent of access it offers.
The Sun, which is expected to be next title News International will put behind a paywall, got the same response as the FT.

The survey also asked respondents what they thought was a reasonable price to pay for a week's unlimited access to a 'respectable' newspaper website, offering a series of price points between 50p and £10 per week.

£1 a week was the only price point which more people thought reasonable (52%) than unreasonable (48%). Only 41% of respondents thought that £2 was a reasonable price to pay,

The research also looked into the magazine market. Findings suggested that consumers are far from relinquishing paper magazines in favour of their digital counterparts, with only 4% of men and women saying they only wanted online magazines.

The data showed that 43% of the sample saying they still wanted paper magazines, 46% saying that they would prefer to read paper magazines but with access to additional online content.

Paper-only magazines are more popular among over-45 males and females over 35. Online-only mags proved unsurprisingly more popular with teenage girls and males under 25.

The research was conducted amongst 1,592 UK respondents representing the national demographic.
http://www.mediaweek.co.uk/news/bull...ediaPMBulletin





Through Soldiers’ Eyes, ‘The First YouTube War’
Noam Cohen

WHEN the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks released a classified video taken in 2007 showing an American Apache helicopter crew killing 12 civilians in Iraq, including two Reuters journalists, it rang a bell with Hayden Hewitt.

The familiarity was not just because it was yet another “Apache video,” thousands of which are available on LiveLeak.com, the video-sharing site Mr. Hewitt helped to found in 2006.

Videos taken from Apache helicopters can indeed be as stylistically consistent as dollar bills: there is the bird’s-eye view of an Iraqi city captured in infrared “negative,” accompanied by the clipped banter of the crew members.

Everything usually ends with “a group of people on a FLIR camera being killed,” Mr. Hewitt said, referring to infrared equipment made by FLIR Systems.

But in this case, Mr. Hewitt meant there was something familiar about that exact WikiLeaks video, which documented 38 minutes of flying above Baghdad punctuated by gun bursts that ended in carnage, including the deaths of the two journalists, whose cameras were mistaken as weapons.

“We were racking our brains — there was some sort of takedown issue,” Mr. Hewitt said in an interview by telephone on Thursday from England, explaining why the video was not currently available on the site.

A number of trusted, longtime visitors to LiveLeak distinctly recalled seeing it about a year earlier, he said.

After a day of searching, Mr. Hewitt reported that he could not find any record of the original tape behind LiveLeak’s firewall, where he expected it would be. Maybe the idea of an earlier leak of the WikiLeaks video is “urban legend,” he conceded.

If you want to see the horror of war, you do not need to look far. There are sites aplenty showing the carnage, and much of the material is filmed, edited and uploaded by soldiers recording their own experiences.

“There are many more types of recording devices, mounted in different ways,” said Jennifer Terry, an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine, who produced a study of military videos from Iraq and Afghanistan for the multimedia journal Vectors. “The way these videos circulate on the Internet is unprecedented, in all these different leaky ways. That is why I like to say this is the first YouTube war.”

The one commodity that is exceedingly rare, however, is context. The Internet is overrun with footage from the United States military in Iraq and Afghanistan. What can be found on sites like YouTube and LiveLeak reflects the lives of soldiers in a war zone, from boredom to the highest drama.

On the silly side is a YouTube phenomenon, the remake of the Lady Gaga song “Telephone” by burly soldiers in Afghanistan, which has been viewed more than five million times.

And then there are videos of deadly firefights and aerial bombings.

But even the violent material posted by soldiers usually comes in highly packaged form, Mr. Hewitt and Professor Terry said, resembling nothing so much as a music video.

Certain songs have become established scene-setters, particularly the heavy-metal song “Bodies” by Drowning Pool, with its mantra: “Let the bodies hit the floor, let the bodies hit the floor.”

In sum, Professor Terry says in her study, these soldier-generated videos are “radically decontextualized.”

“There is a multivalent quality to this stuff — it can be heroic, the ‘real deal,’ a techno-fetish,” she said. “It doesn’t speak for itself. There are so many different ways of interpreting.”

A Flip camera may have the potential to create a citizen journalist, but why, exactly, would you expect that from soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan?

“The bottom line is that people forget how young these guys are,” said Tommy Blacha, a TV writer and former soldier who was stationed in Germany in the 1980s. For viewer and video creator alike, he said, there is “a vibrant feeling you get that this is kind of the wrongest thing I could do.”

While his fellow soldiers in Germany had no ability to create videos, he said, they did their share of goofing around with a Polaroid camera.

Mr. Blacha said he remembered seeing the WikiLeaks video a year ago on LiveLeak, but that it only became special because of the story. “There are graphically worse videos, but this is a journalist who was killed,” he said.

Assuming the 2007 video was indeed available on LiveLeak in 2009, it clearly had none of the impact that the WikiLeaks version has generated. It may have simply delivered a familiar message that the United States had awesome means of dealing with its opponents.

“These videos will have a strong impact, but it is hard to tell what it will be,” Mr. Hewitt said. “Some people watch it and think, ‘That is grotesque, how can we do it?’ Others will say, ‘Hell yeah, go team.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/bu...ia/24link.html





The Future of Surveillance? When Automated Brains Keep Watch 24/7

Unblinking camera eyes need brains to look for real-time threats#—but what if those brains are automated?
David Hambling

Surveillance technology provides a vital shield against terrorism, and cheap modern electronics make it easy to fill the city streets with closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg recently toured London's ring of cameras, seeking information on how to bring it to the Big Apple to thwart terrorist attacks. But unless the feeds from those cameras are constantly monitored, they only provide an illusion of security. Finding enough eyeballs to watch thousands of screens simply isn't practical, yet modern automated systems can fill the gap with a surprising degree of intelligence.

The Automated Warning and Response Engine (AWARE) from Abeo Technical Services is one such system. It replaces the traditional banks of screens with a single view, combining the images from many cameras to give a picture across the entire area under surveillance. It makes it possible to zoom in to a single room, or zoom out to a bird's-eye view. And instead of relying on humans to scan for potential threats, the software will actually analyze the video itself.

The Times Square Example

Let's look at how this type of system would deal with an event like the failed car-bomb attack in Times Square: The vehicle involved was parked in a No Parking area, the emergency warning flashers were going, and smoke was pouring out of it. All of these were potential warning signs. If the system issued an alert every time a car was parked illegally, there would be a lot of false alarms. But AWARE can cross-check all illegally parked cars without human intervention.

"Should a vehicle be detected parked illegally, AWARE would aim a local camera at the license plate, and License Plate Recognition software would interpret the number," says Robert Allen of AbeoTS. "AWARE would submit the data to the appropriate DMV and the result would be analyzed for threat potential. In the Times Square incident, this would have triggered a threat as the license plate did not match the vehicle."

AWARE can detect other anomalies such as flashing lights and smoke. Any event or combination of events can be set to trigger an alert. The system is not limited to video cameras but can be networked to other sensors. These can be anything from radar motion sensors to explosives sniffers or radiation detectors. And just as it can link to license plate recognition, the system can plug into facial-recognition systems or even iris recognition if suitable image databases are available.

Having detected an anomaly, AWARE uses all available resources. This would typically involve recruiting other sensors, such as PTZ (pan, tilt, zoom) cameras which can get a more detailed look and confirm what was happening. The software is trained to recognise common events which might be mistaken for threats to cut down on false alarms.

If the threat is determined to be real, the system moves on to the next stage, sending out alerts to responders' cellphones, radio, pagers and other receivers. It can follow this with further updates if the event escalates. With this sort of setup, the responder's role is shifted from being just a screen-watcher to being a decision maker, whether this is a false alarm or time to start calling out the emergency services.

Camera imagery can then be sent to smartphones, PCs or tablets. Any HTML-capable device can view everything that could be seen in the control center. It also means that a responder can be moving around with an iPhone rather than stuck in the control center.

But Is AWARE Better Than Human?

How good is AWARE at spotting threats? The company says that when it is set up correctly, the software "has a higher probability of detection than a human observer." Allen accepts that it's a bold claim, but says that it's largely a matter of arithmetic. At a big site, even in a control room "wallpapered with monitors," there are only enough screens for a tiny fraction of the hundreds of cameras in place. And those dozens of monitors will only be assigned three or four human watchers, whose rate of spotting threats will be correspondingly low.

Much of AWARE's current workload involves areas with a high volume of pedestrian traffic such as airports. The automated overwatch comes into its own when it has to keep an eye out across multiple cameras for possible threats, such as unattended objects. "The application's rules processor is looking for articles which are stationary in locations where there should be no unattended articles which are stationary for certain periods, typically minutes," Allen says. "The technology also monitors camera systems for persons suddenly in the prone position which might indicate an accident or an assault."

Two other popular features are being able to watch for unusual crowding in an area, and a "follow me" capability which allows individuals to be tracked as they move from the field of view of one camera to another. This would be used to follow anyone who, for example, came the wrong way through an exit-only door, though Allen says in practice offenders tend to be apprehended before they get very far.

These features amount to a substantial automated surveillance capability, making it possible to protect much larger areas than human observers can manage.

And as processors get more powerful, cameras gain in resolution and algorithms get smarter, this type of system will continue to get even better. When you next look up at a security camera, there could be only a machine staring back.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...llance-cameras





ID Card Scheme 'Axed in 100 Days'

The National Identity Card scheme will be abolished within 100 days with all cards becoming invalid, Home Secretary Theresa May has said.

Legislation to axe the scheme will be the first put before parliament by the new government - with a target of it becoming law by August.

The 15,000 people who voluntarily paid £30 for a card since the 2009 roll out in Manchester will not get a refund.

Ms May said ID card holders would at least have a "souvenir" of the scheme.

TIMELINE
# July 2002: Plans unveiled
# November 2004: ID cards bill
# March 2006: Act becomes law
# November 2009: Cards available
# May 2010: Scheme scrapped

The Labour scheme was aimed at tackling fraud, illegal immigration and identity theft - but it was criticised for being too expensive and an infringement of civil liberties. The cards were designed to hold personal biometric data on an encrypted chip, including name, a photograph and fingerprints. The supporting National Identity Register was designed to hold up to 50 pieces of information.

The cards already in circulation will remain legal until Parliament has passed the legislation to abolish them and the register. The short abolition bill will be pushed through Parliament as quickly as possible with the aim of cards being invalid by 3 September.

Anyone who has a card or has to deal with them, such as airport security officials, will be told the termination date in writing. Once the cards are illegal, the National Identity Register will be "physically destroyed", say ministers. Some 60 people who were working on the scheme for the Identity and Passport Service in Durham have lost their jobs.

Ms May said: "This bill is a first step of many that this government is taking to reduce the control of the state over decent, law-abiding people and hand power back to them. With swift Parliamentary approval, we aim to consign identity cards and the intrusive ID card scheme to history within 100 days."

£800m saving

Officials are renegotiating two contracts worth £650m with companies who had agreed to deliver parts of the scheme. It's not clear how much the government will need to pay compensation, but officials say there is no "poisoned pill" in the deals and they expect to save £86m once all exit costs are met.

Some £250m was spent on developing the national ID programme over eight years and its abolition will mean the government will avoid spending a further £800m over a decade.

Former Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett unveiled plans for an identity card scheme in July 2002. By February 2010, the scheme's costs over its lifetime had ballooned to an estimated £4.5bn.

Despite the demise of the national identity card, a separate but technically similar scheme for some foreign nationals will continue.

That scheme, run by the UK Border Agency, is still being rolled out. Immigration minister Damian Green said the scheme was an EU obligation and that the previous Labour government had rolled it into the main ID card programme.

Some 200,000 of these cards, now known as biometric resident permits, have already been given to migrant workers, foreign students and family members from outside the European Economic Area.

British passports are about to be upgraded to a new international security standard but additional proposals to put more biometric information on in the future have also been axed.

UK NATIONAL ID CARD: KEY FEATURES EXPLAINED
# 1. Symbol meaning a chip is embedded in the card
# 2. ID card number
# 3. Citizenship. Foreign nationals in the UK are being given different cards.
# 4. Place of birth
# 5. Signature - digitally embedded in the card
# 6. Date of card issue and date it becomes invalid
# 7. Photo taken to biometric standards
# 8. Biometric chip holds fingerprint record
# 9. Swipe zone. Information which can be automatically read by computer

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...cs/8707355.stm





Facebook CEO: Privacy Controls "Missed the Mark"
Alexei Oreskovic

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the Internet social network will roll out new privacy settings for its more than 400 million users, amid growing concerns that the company is pushing users to make more of their personal data public.

"Many of you thought our controls were too complex," said Zuckerberg in an opinion piece published on Monday in The Washington Post.

"Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark," said the 26-year-old Zuckerberg, who co-founded Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004.

In the coming weeks, Zuckerberg promised, Facebook will add privacy controls that he said would be much simpler to use.

Facebook will also give users an easy way to turn off all third-party services, Zuckerberg said.

It was not clear whether the third-party services referred to applications designed to be used within Facebook, such as games from companies like Zynga and Electronic Arts Inc's Playfish, or to separate websites which have recently begun to incorporate Facebook data.

The comments come a few weeks after Facebook, the world's largest Internet social network, unveiled several changes to its service that have prompted sharp criticism from privacy advocates and spurred a few high-profile Facebook users, such as tech commentator Jason Calacanis, to delete their accounts in protest.

A feature called "instant personalization" automatically imports Facebook users' personal profile information to the music site Pandora and the user-review site Yelp.

Another recent change forced Facebook users to make some of their profile information, such as education, hobbies and hometown, tied to public pages devoted to those topics.

And many users decry the service's byzantine privacy settings, which one blogger has called the modern-day equivalent of the notoriously complex task of programing a VCR.

Palo Alto, California-based Facebook is a private company and does not disclose financial data, though analyst estimates for its 2009 revenue range from $500 million to $650 million, primarily from selling online ads targeted at users based on their activity and profile information on Facebook.

The service is expected to reach half a billion users in the next several weeks, up sharply from 150 million users in January 2009.

Zuckerberg also noted in his opinion piece in The Washington Post, whose chairman, Donald Graham, is a member of Facebook's board of directors, that Facebook will always be kept as a free service for everyone.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic, editing by Matthew Lewis)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64N3T820100525





Rivals Seize On Troubles of Facebook
Jenna Wortham

It sounds like a kamikaze mission: an upstart with a meager number of users and no capital squaring off against Facebook, a social networking juggernaut with more than 400 million members and a $15 billion valuation.

But despite those odds, a handful of start-ups are eyeing the social networking industry with renewed interest.

The newfound infusion of confidence comes, in part, from the recent scrutiny focused on Facebook over revisions to its platform and privacy policy that encourage its members to make personal information accessible to anyone on the Internet.

“Right now is the perfect time for us,” said Leo Shimizu, co-founder of a company called Pip.io, which he describes as a social operating system. “People are starting to understand the limitations of Facebook while we’re showing off a product with features that everybody is wanting and didn’t know existed.”

Pip.io is similar to Facebook and Twitter in that it allows its members to post status updates, send messages and connect with friends. But unlike its counterparts, the service allows its users to keep more of the information private.

The service, which completed a test phase in February, has just 20,000 registered members — a drop in the bucket compared with Facebook. But Mr. Shimizu remains undaunted.

“The market opportunity is one of a kind, and it’s up to us to capitalize on it,” he said.

Analysts and industry experts are quick to point out that Facebook has dealt with a number of user protests in its six-year history and emerged unscathed each time, continuing to add new users at a record clip. For many users, the Web site is an irreplaceable nexus of friends, relatives and colleagues online, making it difficult to abandon.

But while there may not yet be any notable challengers to Facebook’s momentum, said Ray Valdes, an analyst at the research firm Gartner, the company could be accumulating enough damage to its reputation that if a worthy opponent emerges, it will have a ready base of people willing to jump ship.

“Facebook is pushing to the edge of users’ comfort zone,” he said. “It has certainly planted a seed in some users’ minds to look for an exit door.”

Also offering a note of courage to hopeful entrepreneurs is the fickle taste of Web denizens. A service that is in vogue one year can just as easily be out of style the next.

“There’s always a cycle of what’s popular in Silicon Valley,” said Mr. Shimizu, citing the decline of services like MySpace, Friendster and AOL. “The Facebook experience can be better, and if we can do that, we can open up a new market.”

A primary reason that Facebook grew to become a central hub of the social networking world is its continuous effort to improve the service by adding new features, said Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, a professor at the Harvard Business School who studies social networks.

“When you look back at how little MySpace changed between 2005 and 2007, it’s staggering,” Mr. Piskorski said. “For Facebook to be taken over, there would need to be a drastic slowdown in the rate of innovation. It would take a lot of work to undermine what Facebook has achieved so far.”

Michael Chisari, a developer in Chicago, said the escalating privacy concerns around Facebook spurred him to resurrect Appleseed, an open source project to develop free software that would allow users to set up their own social networking hubs.

“In the past month, there has been a sea change in the number of people looking for alternatives,” he said. “A year ago, nobody was interested in my project, and now I have about 80 supporters signed up.”

Mr. Chisari, who estimates that Appleseed is six months away from opening to the public, is not the only one trying to create an open alternative. There’s Diaspora, the brainchild of four New York University students who raised more than $180,000 in seed money through Kickstarter, an online site that helps creative people find support. And there are several networks already up and running, like OneSocialWeb, Crabgrass and Elgg, to name a few.

Evelyn Castillo-Bach, an entrepreneur in Florida who created a small, subscription-based site exclusively for students called Collegiate Nation, said she was quickly introducing a version of the platform that anyone would be able join.

“As the drumbeat and awareness for Facebook’s disregard of privacy increased, I realized I shouldn’t delay this,” she said. “Clearly the time is now.”

Ms. Castillo-Bach said she was well aware of the challenges her site, which is called UmeNow and is scheduled to start this month, faces against a behemoth like Facebook.

“We’re a little David,” she said. “My goal is not to become the next Facebook or Twitter but to provide a platform for people who do value their privacy but still want to connect and share information.”

It is difficult to quantify how many Facebookers are frustrated enough to hit the delete button and go searching for greener pastures. One measure is a Web site called QuitFacebookDay, which is calling for Facebook users to close their accounts en masse on May 31 and has attracted nearly 13,000 commitments so far. Another site, called FacebookProtest, which is asking disgruntled users to boycott the Web site on June 6 by not logging in, has drawn roughly 3,000 supporters. In addition, a group on Facebook created to protest recent changes has swelled to more than 2.2 million members.

Matthew Milan, co-creator of QuitFacebookDay.com, said he was so disturbed by the company’s rapidly evolving privacy policy that he had decided it was time to close his account.

“I’m not interested in having my data somewhere I can’t trust what is going to happen to it,” he said.

Mr. Milan said that in lieu of Facebook, he planned to use Flickr for photo uploading and sharing, LinkedIn for business contacts and Twitter for news and updates.

“For all my important contacts, I’ve got their e-mails and phone numbers,” he said. “Those still seem to work.”

According to Facebook, there has been no change in the rate of deactivations in the last few weeks.

Andrew Noyes, a spokesman for the company, said the site had added 10 million users since late April. It is widely expected to announce soon that it has reached half a billion members.

Perhaps in an effort to tamp the growing chorus of complaints, the company has announced plans to simplify its complex menu of privacy controls, which currently includes more than 170 options.

“The messages we’ve received are pretty clear,” Mr. Noyes said in an e-mailed statement. “Users appreciate having precise and comprehensive controls but want them to be simpler and easy to use.”

Others have concluded that it is futile to try to lure users away from Facebook but see an opportunity to appeal to the community already on the site by offering private features they think are missing from Facebook.

Austin Chang, a New York entrepreneur, is testing a Web site called The Fridge that allows people to invite friends from Facebook and Twitter to join a private “fridge” or group to chit-chat and share photos. That way, he said, users can trade inside jokes or last night’s party pictures with their online friends without having to worry that their boss or grandparents may see it.

“I can’t count the number of people who say they’re a different person on Facebook or have a duplicate account,” said Mr. Chang, who hopes to offer his site to the public in a few months. “There is an audience out there looking for options. We’d love to address that, and the timing is just great.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/te.../24social.html





Who Needs Friends Like Facebook?

Not me. Why Mark Zuckerberg and his social network should stop invading our privacy.
Daniel Lyons

Mark Zuckerberg won't say he's sorry, but the 26-year-old CEO and founder of Facebook does promise to change his ways—a little. His nonapology came after weeks of outrage over Facebook's recent changes to its privacy (actually, antiprivacy) policy, and was delivered in the form of an op-ed in The Washington Post. In his essay, Zuckerberg put on his best innocent-little-boy voice and claimed Facebook only changed its policies in order to help people share more information, because "a world that's more open and connected is a better world." In addition to that bit of risible rubbish, Zuckerberg also said Facebook intends to amend its privacy policy to address complaints. I doubt these changes will be substantive, but even if they are, as far as I'm concerned, it's too little too late.

Facebook's current troubles began in April, when it rolled out new rules that push members to share more information about themselves. Facebook also said it would start sharing info with some partners like Yelp, Pandora, and Microsoft. Tech pundits howled. Some vowed to quit Facebook. Government officials in Europe, Canada, and the United States threatened to take action.

Facebook responded by deploying spinmeisters who ludicrously claimed there was nothing wrong with the new policy—Facebook just hadn't explained it well enough. When that didn't wash, Zuckerberg hunkered down with his advisers to figure out how to dial back the changes. (Among his inner circle is Facebook boardmember Donald E. Graham, who is chairman of the Washington Post Company, which is NEWSWEEK's parent corporation.) From this came Zuckerberg's promise to make its privacy controls simpler to use, which will address complaints that Facebook's controls are impossibly complicated—intentionally so, some argue.

So now we're all set then? Well, no. The problem now is that Facebook has shown its hand. Now we know what we're dealing with. If you really expect this company to suddenly become trustworthy, you've lost your mind. Over the past five years Facebook has repeatedly changed its privacy policy, always in one direction, and every time this happens, the same movie plays out.

People complain. Facebook stonewalls, then spins, then pretends to be contrite, then finally walks things back—but only a little. Nobody seems to notice that after the walk-back Facebook is still grabbing more personal info than it was before. When the storm dies down, Zuckerberg strikes again, with new rules that grab yet more personal data. And the kabuki drama of complaint-and-false-contrition gets played out all over again.

The truth is, Zuckerberg needs your data. His business is built upon it. The most important thing to understand about Facebook is that you are not Facebook's customer, you are its inventory. You are the product Facebook is selling. Facebook's real customers are advertisers. You, as a Facebook member, are useful only because you can be packaged up and sold to advertisers. The more information Facebook can get from you, the more you are worth. In response, a FB spokesman told me: "I'm sorry you feel that way."

In 2005 Facebook's privacy policy was one sentence long and said that none of your information would be shared with anyone who wasn't in one of your groups. Today the policy is longer than the U.S. Constitution and requires a lawyer to parse its meaning. Why doesn't Facebook just use its original one-sentence policy? I'll take a wild guess and say advertisers, not members, were the driving force here.

Enough is enough. I've deactivated my account. I never used Facebook much anyway, so it's not such a big deal. A lot of others are leaving too. A friend of mine, a longtime software executive, told me over e-mail: "It creeps me out how they try to turn my personal info and interests that were private to me and my friends into public info. I interact on FB a lot less now because I don't trust them at all."

That last bit—I don't trust them at all—is the key part. It's not only because Facebook always seem to be trying to pull a fast one on us. The company also seems to have an incomplete grip on its business. Just a few weeks ago, Elliot Schrage, a top Facebook executive, insisted to me that Facebook never shares data about individual members with advertisers. A week later it emerged that Facebook had been doing exactly that. I don't think Schrage was lying. I think the data leaks were inadvertent. Which is, of course, even scarier.

To be sure, none of this will hurt Facebook. The company is expected to rake in $1 billion in revenues this year. The site has 500 million members, up from 400 million only four months ago. Most members are likely not aware of the recent privacy fiasco, and even if they were aware of it, they wouldn't care. People love Facebook. Many spend hours each day on it. This scandal will be nothing more than a blip on Facebook's inexorable march toward a multi-billion-dollar payday. And it's all thanks to a sweet, idealistic kid who just wanted to make the world a better place, and who communicates with the outside world via canned statements in his friend's newspaper. Gosh, it gives you shivers, doesn't it?
http://www.newsweek.com/id/238371





Google Balks at Turning Over Data to Regulators
Kevin J. O'Brien

Google has balked at requests from regulators to surrender Internet data and e-mails it collected from unsecured home wireless networks, saying it needed time to resolve legal issues.

In Germany, Google said it was not able to comply with the Hamburg data protection supervisor’s Thursday deadline to hand over data the company had collected — inadvertently, it says — while roving cars were compiling its Street View photo map archive.

Ironically, the company implied that German privacy laws were preventing it from turning over the information, even to a government agency.

“As granting access to payload data creates legal challenges in Germany which we need to review, we are continuing to discuss the appropriate legal and logistical process for making the data available,” Peter Barron, a Google spokesman in London, said in a statement. “We hope, given more time, to be able to resolve this difficult issue.”

The Hamburg data protection supervisor, Johannes Caspar, expressed his disappointment. In a statement, he said the state prosecutor, Lutz von Selle, had assured him that complying with the request would not constitute “criminal behavior” by Google.

“Therefore there is no apparent reason to still withhold the data from us,” Mr. Caspar said, while noting that prosecutors in Hamburg, where Google has its German headquarters, have opened a criminal investigation.

Mr. Caspar did not specify what steps he might take next.

Meanwhile, the privacy commissioner in Hong Kong, Roderick B. Woo, threatened unspecified sanctions after Google did not respond to his request to inspect data collected in the territory by the roving cars. Mr. Woo said Google had ignored a Monday deadline to turn over the information.

“I am dismayed by Google’s apparent lack of sincerity in its handling of this matter,” Mr. Woo said in a statement. “I do not see that Google is taking the matter seriously enough. Unless some remedial measures are taken by Google promptly, I shall have to consider escalating the situation and resort to more assertive action.”

A Google representative in Hong Kong could not be reached immediately for comment Thursday.

The standoffs increase the chance that Google may face fines and legal action in Europe and Asia.

The company has said its cars collected 600 gigabytes of “fragmentary data” from unsecured Wi-Fi networks in 33 countries and Hong Kong. It has declined to describe the data in more detail, and says it was gathered inadvertently because of a programming error.

Criticism of the search company’s privacy practices has been mounting in Europe, where on Wednesday an advisory panel to the European Commission accused Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, which are all U.S. companies, of violating European Union data retention rules by keeping information typed into their search fields from individual computers for more than six months.

Although fines and administrative sanctions in privacy cases tend to be limited — in Germany the maximum penalty is €50,000, or $61,500 — one privacy expert said Google’s lack of compliance with regulators’ requests could damage its reputation.

“Google’s refusal to hand over the data will be seen as a declaration of war by European regulators,” said Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International, a London organization representing data protection groups in 40 countries. “This is about sovereignty and a country’s right to determine on its citizens’ behalf what is right and what is wrong.”

Google, based in Mountain View, California, has offered to destroy the data, but has not allowed regulators to see and verify what it has collected. Google has destroyed data collected in Denmark, Ireland and Austria at the request of local regulators.

But eight other European countries — Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Belgium — have asked Google to retain data collected in those nations, which may be used as evidence in future legal proceedings.

In the United States, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Jon Leibowitz, told Congress last week that his agency would look into Google’s actions.

Some have questioned Google’s assertion that it gathered the data inadvertently.

“If the company is fighting this so hard, it suggests there is more to this than meets the eye,” said Mr. Davies, of Privacy International. “The real question is: What was Google collecting from unwitting individuals and why? So far, nobody really knows.”
One privacy lawyer said Google might be wagering that paying fines and enduring negative publicity was preferable to giving regulators insight into its data collection practices.

“Remember that Microsoft’s reputation took a hit for a decade in Europe while it faced its antitrust suit here,” said Ulrich Börger, a privacy lawyer in Hamburg at Latham & Watkins, a U.S. law firm. “But at the end of the day, the negative publicity did not affect the company’s business bottom line in Europe.”

Regulators and prosecutors may be hard-pressed to compel Google to relinquish hard drives that are not being kept in their countries.

“Our understanding is that the data collected, including Wi-Fi data, is held overseas in the United States,” said Karen Curtis, the Australian privacy commissioner.

Prosecutors in Hamburg may also have difficulty bringing charges because Germany has no legal concept of corporate criminal liability. Hamburg prosecutors would have to prove that individuals working for Google deliberately broke wiretapping laws.

Proving that the driver of a Street View recording vehicle had such knowledge and intent may be difficult, said Ulrich Börger, a privacy lawyer in Hamburg at Latham & Watkins, a U.S. law firm.. “This is not going to be an easy prosecution,” he said.

A Chinese novelist’s lawsuit against Google over its online library is going ahead in court after settlement talks failed, The Associated Press reported from Beijing.

The novelist, Mian Mian — known for lurid tales of sex, drugs and nightlife — filed suit in October after her latest book, “Acid House,” was scanned into the library. Google says it removed the work after receiving Ms. Mian’s complaint, but the author is suing for damages of 61,000 renminbi, or $9,000, and a public apology.

A Beijing court held a hearing Wednesday after talks ordered by the judge failed to produce a settlement, said Sun Jingwei, Ms. Mian’s lawyer. The next court date has not been set, Mr. Sun said. A Google spokeswoman in Beijing, Marsha Wang, declined to comment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/te.../28google.html





The Privacy Machiavellis
Chris Jay Hoofnagle

Imagine being followed in a shopping mall by a marketer who watches what you browse and buy and then recommends products. You might find this useful at times, but some consumers might never want to be followed.

Ubiquitous consumer tracking is the reality in the online world. Your browsing is being followed on almost all Web sites by a single company: Google. In a study published last year, my colleagues found Google trackers on over 88 percent of 393,000 unique Web sites. Only governments have the ability to monitor individuals this expansively.

Yet, you have no way to ask Google to stop this tracking. Instead, you can merely opt-out of the targeted advertising - the product recommendations. Exercising your privacy options creates a worst-case-scenario outcome: If you opt out, you are still tracked, but you do not receive the putative benefit of targeted ads.

An illusory opt-out system is just one of the increasingly sophisticated sleights of hand in the privacy world. Consider Facebook's privacy options. Regulators in the United States have long called for companies to give users choices to control personal data. Facebook can proudly proclaim that it offers these choices - more than 100 of them. Therein lies the trick; by offering too many choices, individuals are likely to choose poorly, or not at all.

Facebook benefits because poor choices or paralysis leads consumers to reveal more personal information. In any case, the fault is the consumer's, because, after all, they were given a choice.

Machiavelli taught that individuals lack tools to assess political leaders, thus politicians can manage their perception through public relations alone. This is particularly apt in the technology field, where even expert users cannot effectively assess a company's privacy practices. Our survey research shows that users falsely believe that privacy policies create strong legal protections and limits on data use. Thus, just talking about privacy can create cover for tracking while consumers believe that they are protected.

The privacy Machiavellis are masters of the bait and switch. But unlike the unsophisticated old-school scammers who simply replaced one product with another, Facebook and Google change the product slowly so that consumers are less likely to perceive the switch.

Facebook became a trusted brand by presenting itself as a private club of peers. Meanwhile, the site was changing settings and revealing more personal information to more people.

Google used to tout its search engine advertising as privacy friendly, because it focused upon users' interests per-transaction, rather than through an analysis of past searches and browsing. But in 2007, Google quietly began behavioral profiling, tracking searches, and, with the acquisition of DoubleClick, nearly all browsing behavior.

Privacy "messaging" is masking the actions and goals of companies such as Google and Facebook. These for-profit companies have business models that depend upon increasing the collection of personal information, yet they tell us that "privacy is important." The real question is: How important?

As informed citizens, we are wise to the public relations tactics of the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries. It's time to recognize similar manipulation among information-intensive companies.

Chris Jay Hoofnagle, a professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, is a director of the Digital Trust Foundation, formed from the proceeds of privacy lawsuits against Facebook. This piece is based upon a longer article, "Beyond Google and Evil," at sfg.ly/cfAvwQ.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...ED101DJPE1.DTL





Mobile Data: A Gold Mine for Telcos

A snapshot of our activities, cell phone data attracts both academics and industry researchers.
Tom Simonite

Cell phone companies are finding that they're sitting on a gold mine--in the form of the call records of their subscribers.

Researchers in academia, and increasingly within the mobile industry, are working with large databases showing where and when calls and texts are made and received to reveal commuting habits, how far people travel for public events, and even significant social trends.

With potential applications ranging from city planning to marketing, such studies could also provide a new source of revenue for the cell phone companies. "Because cell phones have become so ubiquitous, mining the data they generate can really revolutionize the study of human behavior," says Ramón Cáceres, a lead researcher at AT&T's research labs in Florham Park, NJ.

If you were an AT&T subscriber and were near Los Angeles or New York between March 15 and May 15 last year, there's a 5 percent chance that your data was crunched by Cáceres and his colleagues in a study of the travel habits of the company's subscribers. The researchers amassed millions of call records from hundreds of thousands of users in 891 zip codes, covering every New York borough, 10 New Jersey counties, as well as Los Angeles, Orange, and Ventura counties in California.

The data set is a collection of call detail records, or CDRs--the standard feedstock of cell phone data mining. A CDR is generated for every voice or SMS connection. Among other things, it shows the origin and destination number, the type and duration of connection, and, most crucially, the unique ID of the cell tower a handset was connected to when a connection was made.

That let the AT&T team know the location of a phone to within a mile radius at the time each CDR was generated, making it possible to determine the distance traveled from home by each cell phone every day. The group found that, on average, people living in Manhattan travel 2.5 miles most days, compared to five miles in Los Angeles. "But we also found that when you look at the longest trips people make, people that live in New York go significantly further, 69 miles on a weekday compared to 29 in Los Angeles," Cáceres says.

Cáceres hopes to work with city planners, who would usually have to resort to expensive and limited surveys to gather such information. "This kind of data can help them decide how to invest resources, for example if they want to know where to build a new train or subway station," he says. The AT&T work was presented at a recent workshop in Cambridge, MA, earlier this month as part of the NetSci conference on network science.

For now, Cáceres's group is looking to collaborate rather than commercialize. But cell phone networks are thinking about monetizing their data, says Jean Bolot, a researcher at network operator Sprint. This means a "two-sided" business model where they not only serve end users but also make money through relationships with other businesses. "This is new in the telco space but not in other areas--look at Google, for example," he says.

Since almost everyone has a cell phone, the scale of the data is immense compared to other sources. Mobility patterns might, for example, be used to adjust property or billboard advertising prices. "Just about every operator on the planet is probably thinking about this right now," says Bolot.

Another study, presented by Francesco Calabrese, a research scientist at MIT, and colleagues correlated location traces from roughly a million cell phones in greater Boston with listings of public events such as baseball games and plays, showing how people traveled to attend these events. "We could partly predict where people will come from for future events," the team wrote in a report on their work, suggesting it could be possible to provide accurate traffic forecasts for special events.

The surge of research in this area has been enabled by the development of algorithms that can efficiently handle large networks consisting of millions of links, says Vincent Blondel, a professor of applied mathematics at Université Catholique de Louvain, near Brussels, who organized the Cambridge workshop.

Blondel's research includes an analysis of connections between two million cell phone users in Belgium. It revealed that the French-speaking and Dutch-speaking populations of the country are barely connected by calls and texts. "This is interesting, since there are already discussions within Belgium about splitting the country in two," says Blondel.

Research in this area is typically focused on aggregate information and not individuals, but questions remain about how to protect user privacy, Blondel says. It is standard to remove the names and numbers from a CDR, but correlating locations and call timings with other databases could help identify individuals, he says. In the MIT study, for example, the team could infer the approximate home location of users by assuming it to be where a handset was most located between 10 p.m. and 7a.m., although they also lumped people together into groups by zip code.

"I feel the scientific community should take responsibility for finding out how to trade off having useful data and protecting privacy," says Blondel. He is investigating the effect of techniques like using approximate rather than exact location information, or blurring the exact time stamps of calls from a data set.
http://www.technologyreview.com/comm...ons/25396/?a=f





Devious New Phishing Tactic Targets Tabs

Most Internet users know to watch for the telltale signs of a traditional phishing attack: An e-mail that asks you to click on a link and enter your e-mail or banking credentials at the resulting Web site. But a new phishing concept that exploits user inattention and trust in browser tabs is likely to fool even the most security-conscious Web surfers.

As Mozilla Firefox creative lead Aza Raskin describes it, the attack is as elegant as it is simple: A user has multiple tabs open, and surfs to a site that uses special javacript code to silently alter the contents of a tabbed page along with the information displayed on the tab itself, so that when the user switches back to that tab it appears to be the login page for a site the user normally visits.

Consider the following scenario: Bob has six or seven tabs open, and one of the sites he has open (but not the tab currently being viewed) contains a script that waits for a few minutes or hours, and then quietly changes both the content of the page and the icon and descriptor in the tab itself so that it appears to be the login page for Gmail.

In this attack, the phisher need not even change the Web address displayed in the browser’s navigation toolbar. Rather, this particular phishing attack takes advantage of user trust and inattention to detail, or what Raskin calls “the perceived immutability of tabs.” Then, as the user scans their many open tabs, the favicon and title act as a strong visual cue, and the user will most likely simply think they left a Gmail tab open.

“When they click back to the fake Gmail tab, they’ll see the standard Gmail login page, assume they’ve been logged out, and provide their credentials to log in,” Raskin explained. “After the user has enter they have entered their login information and sent it back your server, you redirect them to Gmail. Because they were never logged out in the first place, it will appear as if the login was successful.”

Raskin includes a proof-of-concept at his site, which is sort of creepy when you let it run. In fact, at least once while composing this blog post in Firefox I went to click on the tab that had my Gmail inbox open, only to discover I’d accidentally clicked on Raskin’s page, which had morphed into the fake Gmail site in the interim.

It’s important to keep in mind that this attack could be used against any site, not just Gmail. Also, Raskin includes a few suggestions about how this attack could be made far sneakier — such as taking advantage of CSS history attacks.

Of course, if you are browsing with the excellent “Noscript” add-on and this is a site you have not allowed to run javascript, the proof-of-concept won’t work until you allow javascript on the page. It did not work completely against the Safari browser on my Mac (no favicon), and the test page failed completely against Google Chrome.

I’m left wondering what this new form of phishing will be called if it is ever adopted by the bad guys. Tabnabbing? Tabgrabbing? See if you can coin a better phrase in the comments below.
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/05/d...-targets-tabs/





Android App Aims to Allow Wiretap-Proof Cell Phone Calls
Andy Greenberg

Worried about the NSA, the FBI, criminals or cyberspies electronically eavedropping on your private phone calls? There may be an untappable app for that.

On Tuesday, an independent hacker and security researcher who goes by the handle Moxie Marlinspike and his Pittsburgh-based startup Whisper Systems launched free public betas for two new privacy-focused programs on Google's Android mobile platform: RedPhone, a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) program that encrypts phone calls, and TextSecure, an app for sending and receiving encrypted text messages and scrambling the messages stored in their inbox.

Marlinspike says the apps will interface with users' contact lists and other functions on the phone to take the hassle out of making calls and sending texts that can't be eavesdropped by third parties. "Our main aim is to make this as easy as possible," he says. "We want it to be a secure and anonymous drop-in replacement for the normal dialing system on your phone."

RedPhone uses ZRTP, an open source Internet voice cryptography scheme created by Phil Zimmermann, inventor of the widely-used Pretty Good Privacy or PGP encryption. When a caller dials another RedPhone user, the app uses the two users' keys to create a simple passphrase ("flatfoot eskimo" or "slingshot millionaire," for example) and display it on each phone, allowing the speakers to verify that the codes match, and that there's no man-in-the-middle intercepting the call.

TextSecure uses a similar scheme developed by cryptographers Ian Goldberg and Nikita Borisov known as "Off The Record" to exchange scrambled text messages. Both apps automatically generate a new key and delete the old one with every communication so that even if a user's key is stolen, none of his or her past calls or texts can be deciphered.

The two apps will likely remain free even once they leave beta, Marlinspike says, though he also plans to offer a premium, paid version of the programs.

Whisper Systems' apps aren't the first to bring encrypted VoIP to smartphones. But apps like Skype and Vonage don't publish their source code, leaving the rigor of their security largely a matter of speculation. Marlinspike argues that because those apps interface with the traditional telephone network, they may also be subject to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, (CALEA) which requires companies to build backdoors into their technologies for law enforcement wiretaps.

Since the passage of CALEA in 1994, the number of those law enforcement wiretaps has exploded. There were 2,376 wiretaps by law enforcement agencies in 2009, 26% more than the year before, and 76% more than 1999.

Marlinspike, whose past work has focused on SSL vulnerabilities and thwarting Google's data collection, says his apps are meant to offer privacy in an age of overzealous legal wiretaps, as well as those that may be using vulnerabilities created by CALEA for illegal surveillance.

He points, for instance, to the Athen Affairs, a situation in 2005 when legal intercept capabilities in Ericsson equipment were used to spy on Greek politicians including the country's prime minister. "We've entered this really problematic situation where we have insecure infrastructure everywhere, communications being broadcast in the air around us, and anyone with a bit of radio equipment can reach out and intercept communications," says Marlinspike. "Individuals need to start taking steps to protect their privacy and the confidence of their communications."

If the new apps see widespread adoption, the usual criticisms of wiretap-defeating encryption may follow. Since the 1990s, opponents of encrypted communication technologies have argued that scrambling messages would give free rein to criminals and terrorists. FBI director Louis Freeh argued in 1997, for instance, that "uncrackable encryption will allow drug lords, spies, terrorists and even violent gangs to communicate about their crimes and their conspiracies with impunity."

But Marlinspike points out that criminals today can use other means to avoid wiretaps, such as anonymous, prepaid "burner" phones, like the one used by the Times Square attempted bomber. "This matters much less to criminals than it does for everyone else," he says.

Of more concern to Marlinspike may be another statistic published by the judicial system last month. Last year, law enforcement officials only encountered encryption in one case, and in that case, the technology "did not prevent officials from obtaining the plain text of the communications," according to the courts' report, raising questions of why encryption has failed to stop the expansion and success of wiretaps.

Better encryption technology like Marlinspike's could change the technology's seeming ineffectiveness. But University of Pennsylvania Computer Science professor Matt Blaze says that the report may also demonstrate that law enforcement can find its way around even strong encryption by planting spyware on the target's phone. "If I were law enforcement, intelligence, or a bad guy, I would waste very little time trying to defeat the encryption and instead install my software on your phone to simply see the key," says Blaze. He points to the trial of alleged mafia member Nicky Scarfo, whose computer was revealed to have been bugged by the FBI with spyware to log his keystrokes.

In Whisper Systems' defense, Android malware is hardly widespread, and planting spyware on a target's phone is still far more work than traditional wiretaps, which involve simply asking the user's carrier to bug the phone.

One way to reduce that remaining vulnerability, however, may be moving the apps to Apple's more tightly controlled iPhone platform. Whisper plans to submit RedPhone and TextSecure to Apple for review, though Marlinspike admits he has doubts about the company's review process. "Getting this approved by Apple," he says, "might be challenging."

In the mean time, Android users can download both apps here.
http://blogs.forbes.com/firewall/201...l-phone-calls/





Mobile Phone Number Suspended after Three Users Die in 10 Years

A mobile phone company has suspended the number 0888 888 888 – after every single person assigned to it died in the last 10 years.

The first owner Vladimir Grashnov – the former CEO of Bulgarian mobile phone company Mobitel which issued the number – died of cancer in 2001 aged just 48.

Despite a spotless business record there were persistent rumours that his cancer had been caused by a business rival using radioactive poisoning.

The number then passed to Bulgarian mafia boss, Konstantin Dimitrov, who was gunned down in 2003 by a lone assassin in the Netherlands during a trip to inspect his £500 million drug smuggling empire.

Dimitrov, who died aged 31, had the mobile with him when he was shot while eating out with a model.

Russian mafia bosses – jealous of his drug smuggling operation – were said to have been behind the killing.

The phone number then passed to Konstantin Dishliev, a crooked businessman, who was gunned down outside an Indian restaurant in Bulgaria's capital Sofia after taking over the jinxed line.

Dishliev, an estate agent, had secretly been running a massive cocaine trafficking operation before his assassination in 2005.

He died after £130 million of the drug was intercepted by police on its way into the country from Colombia.

Since then, the number is understood to have been dormant while police maintained an open file on Dishliev's killing and his smuggling ring.

Now phone bosses are said to have suspended the number for good. Callers now get a recorded message saying the phone is "outside network coverage."

A Mobitel spokesman would only say: "We have no comment to make. We won't discuss individual numbers."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...-10-years.html





AT&T, Verizon Dominate Wireless... Is it Time to Regulate?
Matthew Lasar

The government's latest annual report on the state of mobile wireless competition is out, and its conclusions are not what the wireless sector wanted to hear. Over the last half-decade, concentration in the industry has gone up—way up, in fact. The Federal Communications Commission says that the two dominant providers, AT&T and Verizon, now enjoy a 60 percent chunk of revenue and subscribers, "and continue to gain share."

Their nearest rivals, T-Mobile and Sprint, serve most of that remaining 40 percent. T-Mobile enjoyed some growth over the last two years. Sprint lost subscribers.

As a consequence, the antitrust measurement gauge that the FCC uses, the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, has jumped by almost 700 points since the agency first began using it in 2003. That's a 32 percent increase. Some of this newer concentration is a consequence of mergers over the last few years: AT&T/Aloha, T-Mobile/Suncom, Verizon Wireless/Rural Cellular, and Verizon Wireless/Alltel.

So the wireless sector HHI is now at 2848, the agency says, which doesn't mean diddly until you know that the Department of Justice regards a market to be "highly concentrated" if, following a merger, the HHI in a given industry throttles past 1800. The FCC typically starts to eyeball the situation after a post-merger calculation of 2880.

Ask any American

We predicted that, urged on by reform groups and under new management, the FCC would produce a more critical analysis of the wireless industry than it has in the past. It wasn't a tough call, given that last year's report blandly proclaimed that there was "effective competition" in the market.

But sensing possibly hurt feelings, FCC Chair Julius Genachowski tried to make nice about the new 237-page survey's findings.

"This Report does not seek to reach an overly-simplistic yes-or-no conclusion about the overall level of competition in this complex and dynamic ecosystem, comprised of multiple markets," Genachowski gingerly declared in response to the data.

CTIA - The Wireless Association wasn't pleased; its lawyers obviously hit the ceiling when they got to the sentence noting that the report "provides data that can form the basis for inquiries into whether policy levers could produce superior outcomes."

CTIA believes the FCC "missed an opportunity today to truly highlight one of the few glowing examples of investment, innovation and consumer choice in the US economy."

"Ask any American," CTIA president Steve Largent continued. "Whether based on HHI, the raw number of competitors in each market, investment, handset and network innovation, price or consumer choice, the US wireless market is the envy of the world. That is why the lack of a finding is so troubling."

And furthermore: "We are very concerned... about the potential misuse of 'policy levers' that are referenced in the Report and believe that any attempt to add regulation to wireless as a result of this Report would be both misguided and harmful to consumers."

Bright lights

What kind of "policy levers" could we be talking about here? Setting aside the prospect of blunt antitrust lawsuits, the FCC has been running wireless-related inquiries for months about exclusive handset deals, the iPhone's refusal to carry Google Voice, jumbo-sized early termination fees, "bill shock," and the rates at which smaller telcos can buy network access to the big carriers.

The agency could use this report as the basis for moving these probes to the proposed rulemaking stage, something FCC Commissioner Michael Copps rather broadly hinted at in his response statement.

That 2848 HHI number "sticks out like a sore thumb," Copps warned, and flashes "a bright caution light for this Commission as we go about the business of advancing competition and consumer well-being in the Broadband Age. We are going to need an extra dose of vigilance going forward and use whatever policy levers we have available to ensure good outcomes for American consumers."

To which Copps' Republican colleague questioned whether it was ever the business of this survey, mandated by Congress since the 1990s, to get into the "policy lever" area. "This point in particular is outside the scope of our statutory mandate to produce the report, and appears to lay the foundation for more regulation," Robert M. McDowell noted.

And McDowell emphasized the document's more positive findings, among them that almost three-quarters of consumers can now pick from five or more mobile services. As for wireless broadband, the served percentage has gone from 51 to 76 percent, with almost 90 percent enjoying access to two mobile broadband carriers.

"These numbers illustrate that the vast majority of consumers have a meaningful opportunity to change providers if they cannot withstand a 'bill shock' or are unhappy with their mobile broadband experience," McDowell concluded.

"Meaningful," of course, depends on how affordable consumers find the $175 to $350 ETFs attached to various smartphone plans these days.

Extraordinarily high

Still, apropos of McDowell's point, the FCC's competition report—which is more detailed than past surveys—highlights a range of interesting and positive trends that go beyond the competition question. Among them:

Less talking: By the end of 2008, 90 percent of Americans owned a wireless device, and they used this gadget for 709 minutes a month, on average. But they talked less, "perhaps due to increased reliance on text and multimedia messaging," the FCC notes.

Text messaging is now "extraordinarily high," the report observes, with one study indicating that teenagers now send 3,146 text messages per month, equal to over ten messages for every hour they're aren't sleeping or in school (less per hour, of course if, as is typical with teens these days, they're busy texting away during class lectures).

Transition to a "data centric" market: AT&T says its network has sustained 18 times more mobile data traffic over the two-and-a-half years of its iPhone service. The data rate has jumped by a factor of four between June 2008 and June 2009. This is not surprising, since "the average iPhone user consumes twice the monthly bandwidth of the average smartphone user and five to seven times the monthly bandwidth of the average wireless voice subscriber," according to the FCC.

Lots more mobile gizmos: The big four providers unveiled almost 70 new smartphones between 2008 and 2009 over a variety of platforms (e.g., Apple iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Palm, Windows Mobile). By December of 2009, consumers could choose from over 100,000 applications on the Apple Store and 15,000 via the Android Market. And they're choosing like crazy. The mobile and smartphone market is enjoying an upsurge in the first quarter of this year.

But this should come as little consolation to the over 900,000 rural residents whom the report says are still left out in the wireless cold, with no mobile service at all. Another 2.5 million get coverage from only one provider. Just 39 percent of rural consumers enjoy that aforementioned quintet of competitive wireless carriers in their region.

And not everybody in the wireless business thought the FCC's report was completely off base.

“While the wireless retail market remains competitive and has brought unimagined innovation and value to American consumers over the past decade," Sprint's Government Affairs Vice President Vonya B. McCann told us, the company "remains concerned that for competition to continue to flourish, changes must be made to the underlying regulatory structure which govern the USF system, switched access and special access."
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/...o-regulate.ars





With Bandwidth Demand Booming, a New Kind of Optical Network Is Born
Stacey Higginbotham

Allied Fiber said today it’s begun construction of a nationwide wholesale fiber network that will span 11,548 miles. The New York-based company will build out the network in six phases, linking undersea cable landing points, data centers, colocation interconnection facilities, rural networks and wireless towers in order to feed the increasing demand for broadband capacity resulting from everything from the ever-growing number of cellular towers to cloud computing (we’ll talk about the bandwidth needs for cloud computing at our Structure 2010 conference next month).

A New Model to Meet Broadband Demand

But Allied’s effort isn’t just aimed at boosting overall capacity — it’s aimed at changing the underlying business model of providing long-haul telecommunications networks. Hunter Newby, CEO of Allied Fiber, wants to connect the U.S. with an open fiber network comprised of the three disparate systems that essentially make up the backbone of the Internet, and is targeting data centers, high-bandwidth sites, rural ISPs, wireless companies and long-haul networks providers as customers. But it remains to be seen if Allied’s model will compete, not just with offerings from backbone providers such as Level 3 Communications, but also with colocation companies and the tower industry.

Newby, who was the chief strategy officer at colocation provider Telex, is pretty impassioned about his plan to bring wholesale fiber to places where existing backhaul providers may not go. It’s a plan similar to Google’s experimental fiber network for consumer broadband, but enacted on a much larger scale, and for businesses. Newby believes that in underserved areas where Allied Fiber will have a presence, the cost of bandwidth will be driven down significantly because Allied will be willing to sell access to the long haul network, at competitive rates, to anyone who wants them — something the incumbents aren’t inclined to do.

Competition Drives Costs Down

The construction of Allied’s network is a big deal for small ISPs, which can find themselves having to pay more than $100 a megabyte for bandwidth, and may mean they don’t have to implement bandwidth caps as a means to keep their own costs down. It’s also a big deal for cellular carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile, as it will give them access to less expensive backhaul without having to pay the likes of AT&T or Verizon.

As Newby explains, rural providers or cellular providers needing rural coverage will be able to buy transport at wholesale rates from a colocation provider in the middle of field somewhere along a railroad right of way (Allied has a deal with some railways companies for access to their ducts). Such an approach could provide access for a single provider near the colocation facility or other regional providers could build off the Allied network. It would also open up the opportunity to locate data centers in rural areas, perhaps near renewable energy projects.

“The incumbents have control and have made it quite clear they’re not willing to make any significant capital investments in rural areas and are selling off rural assets,” Newby told me. “But you need to change the economics, and if these buyers can buy at even $15 per megabyte…the number of gigs and terabytes will eclipse the current rate because right now it’s so expensive.”

Building a High-Fiber Network

The first phase of the Allied network will cost $140 million, will connect New York, Chicago and Ashburn, Va. and will be completed by the end of this year. Newby said the second phase (from Atlanta to Miami) will cost $180 million, and the third phase connecting Chicago to Seattle could cost as much as $350 million. However, he added that potential customers are willing to go in with him on the cost of the connection to Seattle because big bandwidth providers like NTT Corp. need a shorter route to get their traffic to Asia. The final three projects aren’t budgeted yet, nor is there a definitive time frame.

The first phase will provide a combined 648 dark fibers, 19 colocation facilities and 300 tower sites. From the press release:

Allied is deploying a 432-count, long haul cable coupled with the 216-count, short-haul cable that will be a composite of Single-Mode and Non-Zero Dispersion Shifted fibers. Allied Fiber has implemented a new, multi-duct design for intermediate access to the long-haul fiber duct through a parallel short-haul fiber duct all along the route. This enables all points between the major cities, including wireless towers and rural networks, to gain access to the dark fiber. In addition, the Allied Fiber neutral colocation facilities, located approximately every 60 miles along the route, accommodate and encourage a multi-tenant interconnection environment integrated with fiber that does not yet exist in the United States on this scale.

If Allied Fiber can build an open fiber network that spans the country and includes colocation and towers, it could provide a way for municipal fiber networks and rural ISPs to get online and connect to backhaul for less, while bypassing their potential competitors (for example, a muni fiber network might compete against AT&T but may also have to buy access back to the Internet backbone from AT&T because it’s the only provider in the area). We’ve long argued that open networks are the way to go when it comes to big infrastructure, something with which Newby agrees. “I believe in the power of open networks,” he said, “but instead of talking about it or writing, about I want to do it.”

He went on to say that: “I encourage other people to copy our model and philosophy of neutrality. It drives growth and it’s what drives the innovation and bridges the islands of broadband we have in this country.”
http://gigaom.com/2010/05/24/with-ba...twork-is-born/





Revenge of the Cable Customer
Deborah Yao

For far too long, cable customers fumed as they waited in vain for the cable guy to show up. When he did come, sometimes it took multiple visits to fix outages. Some customers grappled with billing mistakes that took months to resolve. And cable prices went up every year.

Now it may be the cable customer's turn for revenge.

Cable TV operators are trying to treat their customers better. Consumers now can get a 30-day money-back guarantee from at least two major cable companies. Soon subscribers might set specific times for technician visits and get their orders confirmed in writing.

These sound like simple or even obvious steps, but they address longtime complaints about the cable TV business.

Cable companies are forced to do it because of intensifying competition from satellite TV and phone companies that offer video — and from people disconnecting subscription TV services altogether to watch videos online.

And people are leaving. In 2006, cable TV companies had 68.5 million video customers. The number fell to 63.3 million in 2009, according to research firm In-Stat.

"People have a bad opinion of their customer service," said Mike Paxton, principal analyst at In-Stat. "Until (cable) started losing customers, there was no pressure."

It won't be easy to change a poor reputation that was captured in a 1996 "Seinfeld" episode in which Kramer retaliates against his cable company by telling the technician he'll be home between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. but then doesn't show up. In 2007, a Virginia woman was so upset at Comcast Corp.'s customer service that she smashed a keyboard with a hammer in a Comcast service center.

Cable's customer satisfaction ratings have been among the worst of any industry. In the American Customer Satisfaction Index, based on surveys of U.S. households, the four largest cable TV providers — Comcast, Time Warner Cable Inc., Cox Communications Inc. and Charter Communications Inc. — have averaged 59 on a scale of 1 to 100 since 2004, even with some improvement in this year's figures. In the last comparable rankings, cable TV came in below airlines, a business with byzantine fare rules, new fees for baggage and horror stories of passengers trapped for hours on planes.

First cable TV companies tried appealing to customers with discounts. Although overall cable service prices were rising, the companies offered bundles of TV, Internet and phone plans, and threw in some freebies and other promotions. But that only slowed customer defections and didn't halt them.

Now cable companies are trying to do more.

Comcast, the nation's largest cable TV provider, is making incremental changes that it hopes will collectively improve its reputation. It's offering a 30-day money-back guarantee on all services to unhappy customers and a $20 credit if the technician shows up late, even if he had called to say he'd be late. It also is testing a service that lets customers call to get the technician's estimated time of arrival.

Embarrassing snafus such as the hammer incident prompted Comcast to undergo a top-to-bottom assessment of its customer service. Tina Waters, who was named Comcast's first senior vice president of human performance last November, says one-quarter of service agents' performance reviews are now devoted to customer feedback.

Cox, the country's third-largest cable company, is testing the idea of letting customers set service appointments at specific times rather than two-hour windows. The trial is limited to New England and only for the first appointment of the day, at 8 a.m. If successful, the service will be rolled out nationally and eventually to cover the entire day.

This year, Charter Communications Inc. will start giving customers a written confirmation of their orders by e-mail, upon request. The e-mail will spell out the cost of the order, explain the installation process and describe other services. Usually, customers wait for their first bill and hope they don't have to dispute charges.

"No more scribbled notes on a pad by the phone," said spokeswoman Anita Lamont.

That would be welcome news to Marc Pachtman, a lawyer in Boothwyn, Pa., who tussled with Comcast for about 10 months over several issues, including charges on his bill that were higher than the cable package he thought he ordered.

Pachtman said he was charged $51 for cable TV and $46 for Internet after being told it would be $45 for TV and $35 for Internet. He also paid $42 a month for phone service, but Comcast got that right. Eventually, after several calls to Comcast, he got a refund and a six-month promotional plan that combined TV, Internet and phone services for $94 a month, down from around $140 he had been paying.

"I had to do a lot of jumping up and down," Pachtman said. "If they would be forced to confirm things in writing, it should standardize their programs to the point so there's no variation to what customer representatives can say."

It doesn't help that while there are Federal Communications Commission standards for cable customer service, other cable regulations vary based on who is enforcing them. Depending on the location, that could be a state commission, a city council or another body.

Such inconsistent standards, and a near-monopoly on TV service in the areas that cable companies serve, have let them get away with treating customers indifferently for years. The FCC requires cable companies to tell customers if their rates are going up — but that can come in a notice in a local newspaper.

"Practically speaking, nobody reads that stuff," said Ken Fellman, president of the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, which represents local officials.

Recently, though, cable companies such as Comcast, Charter and Time Warner Cable have been reaching out to customers through Twitter and other social networking sites to find complaints and resolve problems.

That impressed Steve Curtin of Denver, who tweeted about his Comcast Internet service conking out last spring before calling the cable company. A cable agent reached out to him and got him back online within half an hour.

"I was quite surprised," he said.
http://skunkpost.com/news.sp?newsId=2449





F.C.C. Begins Review of Hotly Debated Regulations on Media Ownership
Edward Wyatt

The Federal Communications Commission said on Tuesday that it would begin soliciting public comments as part of a review and possible revision of its media ownership rules, which set limits on the ownership of multiple television and radio stations and newspapers in a single commercial market.

The commission said its review, which by law takes place every four years, would focus on whether the current rules promoted the agency’s goals of competition, localism and diversity.

The ownership rules have been the subject of fierce debate in each of the two previous reviews under the Bush administration. They drew the ire of cable television companies, public interest groups and some members of Congress, including then-Senator Barack Obama.

Julius Genachowski, who was appointed chairman of the F.C.C. by President Obama, said the agency was seeking feedback that would “help ensure that our media ownership rules continue to protect consumer interests in today’s marketplace.”

Even as the commission undertakes its latest survey, it is still awaiting a federal appeals court ruling on the steps it took after the last review. The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit is considering an appeal of the F.C.C.’s decision in 2007 to relax its ban on cross ownership of a daily newspaper and a television station in the same market.

Also in 2007, the F.C.C. tightened the reins on the cable television industry, stipulating that no single company could control more than 30 percent of the market. That rule was struck down by a federal appeals court last August.

In its request for public comments, the F.C.C. said it was seeking opinion on whether its current ownership rules were necessary or in the public interest to promote competition in the media business.

But the agency also noted that it would look closely at the impact of consolidation of ownership on competition in media markets. Since the 1996 Telecommunications Act was put into effect, the number of commercial radio stations and commercial television stations has increased by 10 and 15 percent, respectively. But the number of owners of those media outlets has fallen by more than 30 percent in each case.

The F.C.C. also is seeking opinion on the impact of the Internet on consumers’ use of television and radio, as well as their ability to gain access to sources of news. As newspaper circulation has declined, the agency noted in its release, the number of people who say they get news online has increased.

But the agency also noted that 20 of the 25 most-visited news Web sites shared corporate owners with other television or newspaper companies.

Two F.C.C. commissioners who were part of the last review issued statements on Wednesday commenting on the effects of the agency’s recent actions. Michael J. Copps, a Democratic commissioner who opposed loosening the ownership rules, said that “fewer and fewer voices do not an informed electorate or robust democracy make.”

Commission Robert M. McDowell, a Republican commissioner, lamented that the agency had continued over the last eight years to put in place “burdensome rules” that impeded broadcasters and newspapers and which demonstrate the agency was “unable to fully adapt its regulations to the new realities” of the Internet age.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/bu...dia/26fcc.html





New King of Technology: Apple Overtakes Microsoft
Miguel Helft and Ashlee Vance

Apple, the maker of iPods, iPhones and iPads, overtook Microsoft, the computer software giant, on Wednesday to become the world’s most valuable technology company.

In intraday trading shortly after 2:30 p.m., Apple shares rose 1.8 percent, which gave the company a value of $227.1 billion. Shares of Microsoft declined about 1 percent, giving the company a market capitalization of $226.3 billion.

The only American company valued higher is Exxon Mobil, with a market capitalization of $282 billion.

This changing of the guard caps one of the most stunning turnarounds in business history, as Apple had been given up for dead only a decade earlier. But the rapidly rising value attached to Apple by investors also heralds a cultural shift: Consumer tastes have overtaken the needs of business as the leading force shaping technology.

Microsoft, with its Windows and Office software franchises, has dominated the relationship most people had with their computers for almost two decades and that was reflected in its stock market capitalization. But the click-clack of the keyboard has ceded ground to the swoosh of a finger across a smartphone’s touch-screen.

“It is the single most important turnaround that I have seen in Silicon Valley,” said Jim Breyer, a venture capitalist who has invested in some of the most successful technology companies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/te...y/27apple.html





U.S. Inquiry on Apple Music Tactics Reported
Brad Stone

The Justice Department is examining Apple’s tactics in the market for digital music and has sent staff members to talk to a number of major music labels and Internet music companies, according to several people briefed on the conversations.

The inquiry is in the very early stages, these people say, and the conversations have revolved broadly around the dynamics of selling music online.

But people briefed on the inquiries also said investigators asked in particular about recent allegations that Apple uses its dominant market position to persuade music labels to refuse to give another online retailer, Amazon.com, exclusive access to soon-to-be released music.

All these people spoke on condition of anonymity, since the matter is sensitive. Representatives from Apple and Amazon.com declined to comment. Gina Talamona, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, also declined to comment.

In March, Billboard magazine reported that Amazon.com was asking music labels to give it the exclusive right to sell certain soon-to-be-released songs for one day before the songs go on sale more widely. In exchange, Amazon promised to include those songs in a promotion on Amazon’s Web site called “MP3 Daily Deal.”

Representatives from Apple’s music service, iTunes, were asking the labels not to take part in Amazon’s promotion, and Apple punished those that did by later withdrawing marketing support for those songs on iTunes, the magazine reported,.

Apple is by far the largest seller of online music in the United States, with 69 percent of the market, according to data from NPD Group, a marketing consultancy. Amazon’s MP3 store was in second place, with an 8 percent share. Apple is also the largest seller of music over all, with 26.7 of the overall market, up from 12 percent in 2007.

Though the Justice Department’s inquiry is by all accounts preliminary, it represents additional evidence that Apple, once the perennial underdog in high tech, is now viewed by government regulators as a dominant company with considerable market power. The iTunes store is also the venue for the company to sell electronic books and applications for its iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad hand-held computing devices,

“Certainly if the Justice Department is getting involved, it raises the possibility of potential serious problems down the road for Apple,” said Daniel L. Brown, an antitrust attorney at the law firm Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton. “Without knowing what acts or practices they are targeting, it’s difficult to say exactly how big a problem this is. But it’s probably something Apple is already concerned about.”

The inquiry is one of several by the federal government involving Apple. The Federal Trade Commission is also moving ahead with a separate inquiry into Apple’s rules for developers who create applications for its iPhone operating system, according to a person familiar with that discussion. That inquiry, prompted by a complaint from Adobe Systems, the maker of the Flash format for Internet video, is said to be in its early stages as well.

The Justice Department has also reportedly been investigating the hiring practices at Apple and other top technology companies, including Intel, I.B.M. and Google, asking whether they have improperly agreed to avoid hiring each other’s employees.

The music investigation also signals the elevated scrutiny for technology companies under the antitrust agencies of the Obama administration.

The Federal Trade Commission recently spent six months reviewing Google’s proposed acquisition of AdMob, a mobile advertising start-up. Although it said the combination created “serious anti-trust concerns,” it ultimately approved the deal, noting Apple’s own entry into the market for mobile advertising.

Apple first released its iTunes software in early 2001, giving people an easy way to organize their music collections on a Macintosh computer and later, a PC. It opened the iTunes store in 2003 and has since sold more than 10 billion songs, providing a significant source of revenue for the beleaguered music industry.

While iTunes persuaded many people to pay for music, rather than download pirated copies of songs, the music industry has also chafed because Apple sets prices and controls the relationship with the music buyers.

Apple has encouraged new kinds of competition in the online music marketplace by allowing new kinds of streaming music applications on its devices from companies like Pandora and Rhapsody.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/te...y/26apple.html





U2 and Aguilera Postpone Summer Tours
Ben Sisario

Between the time most pop music fans ended their workdays on Monday and clocked in the next morning, two of the summer’s biggest tours vanished from the calendar: U2 postponed 16 shows, and Christina Aguilera put off 20.

Cancellations and postponements happen every year. But the loss of two prominent tours prompted a quick response from fans, gossipmongers and even Wall Street analysts. Live Nation, the promoter of both tours, merged with Ticketmaster earlier this year, and as it begins its first summer season as a combined company, it is facing scrutiny from every angle.

For most companies the loss of a tour like U2’s would be devastating. Last year the band grossed about $310 million in concert tickets worldwide, according to Live Nation, and industry analysts say that this year it was expected to add at least another $200 million to that figure. U2’s reason for putting off its 16 North American stadium dates until next year is to let Bono recover from emergency back surgery. (It still plans to play 22 shows in Europe, starting Aug. 6.)

Analysts say that Live Nation’s size — last year it sold 140 million tickets to 21,000 shows around the world — minimizes the damage that any one tour, no matter how big, could cause.

U2’s postponement “is not as material to Live Nation’s 2010 results as may seem at first blush,” Ben Mogil of Thomas Weisel Partners, an investment consulting firm, wrote in a research opinion on Tuesday. “The real gauge of the health of the concert business is the strength of the 25 to 75 top shows, not the top 10 shows alone.”

U2’s ties to Live Nation go far beyond tour promotion. Two years ago it signed a 12-year contract that also covers merchandise and other promotions.

It may be too soon to predict accurately how well the overall business will fare this summer, but many in the concert industry have been reading sales disasters into the tea leaves of some of Live Nation’s biggest tours.

Ms. Aguilera, who in addition to having Live Nation as her promoter is managed by Irving Azoff, the company’s executive chairman, blamed a busy schedule for putting off her tour, which was supposed to start on July 15 at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Connecticut; she is about to release an album and is also acting in a movie. But some found the timing of her decision suspicious.

“Any time a tour gets postponed four days after it’s on sale, you have to wonder whether it’s because of less-than-spectacular sales,” said Gary Bongiovanni, editor of the concert industry trade magazine Pollstar.

Ticket sales for the Eagles, Mr. Azoff’s most famous client, have also been the subject of speculation. Although the band has historically been one of the industry’s biggest earners, it has canceled some dates on its stadium tour this summer. Rolling Stone recently reported that Tom Petty, Lilith, Rihanna and other Live Nation tours have been suffering from weak early sales.

Live Nation declined to comment on the impact of the cancellations or on advance ticket sales for its concerts. Its practice is to report grosses for most of its concerts after they take place.

Arthur Fogel, an executive at Live Nation who has been U2’s longtime tour promoter, said the important question was not lost sales in the short term as much as how soon the band can make up the dates to its fans.

“A postponement of a couple of months in the context of a long-term deal is really insignificant,” Mr. Fogel said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that we’ll get these dates slotted back in. It may delay the process by a couple months, but ultimately this is going to end up being the most successful tour in the history of this business.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/ar...ic/26tour.html





Traditional DJs 'Will Survive Internet Radio Revolution'

Music conference hears there will still be a role for radio-style DJs despite wealth of online streaming programmes

From the late 60s until his death in 2004 John Peel was the undisputed king of new music, a trusted voice that led thousands of people to buy their first records.

But, thanks to digital advances, a new wave of bedroom DJs, with little more than a laptop and a broadband connection, could shape our musical tastes in the future, according to industry professionals.

Much of the "generic noise" of traditional radio could be replaced by online and streaming programmes specifically aimed at people's individual tastes, said Dave Haynes, a vice-president of SoundCloud, a platform that allows musicians to easily share audio over the web.

Speaking on a panel about the future of radio at the Great Escape, a music conference and festival in Brighton this weekend, he added that strong guiding voices leading people to the best new music would be more important than ever, as listeners' choice widened.

"John Peel was not just a radio presenter but the leader of a tribe, and I think in the future what we will see is not one but lots of mini John Peels leading their particular tribe," he said.

A growing range of radio services are being launched, which can be listened to on demand and encourage listeners to be more interactive and vote to hear their favourite songs on air, or create their own shows.

New start-ups like Playdio – a combination of playlist and radio – let anyone try their hand at being the next big name radio DJ. The service lets users create their own radio shows by making song playlists interspersed with spoken links, which can then be listened to on streaming services such as Spotify.

Last year Absolute Radio, formerly Virgin, launched Dabbl, a online and digital station which allows listeners to vote on what songs they want to hear, encouraging more audience control over material.

Speaking before the Great Escape, Clive Dickens, chief executive of Absolute Radio, said radio was well placed to face the digital revolution: "The most downloaded apps are radio apps, the most downloaded podcasts are radio shows. Dabbl is an example that if you are growing up in a digital economy you expect more interaction."

Another new service, Mixcloud, claims it is "making radio more democratic" by allowing anyone to upload a "cloudcast", which range from radio shows, podcasts and DJ mixes, with listeners deciding who gets exposure. Friends recommend cloudcasts to each other, and the site – which bills itself as YouTube for radio – shows what its users are listening to, commenting on and uploading.

Danny Ryan, founder of Playdio, which launches next month, said that the future of radio was not on digital radio (DAB), which he said was already "old and tired", but would be almost exclusively online. "The great switchover at 2015 will probably see domestic internet radio become more commonplace. It is simply a superior platform," he said.

Phill Jupitus and Phil Wilding have signed up to make shows for Playdio, while other less well-known names such as Talc – whose day job is as a backing band to the stars – are also getting involved.

But despite his excitement about new forms of radio, Ryan insisted that services like his will not supersede "live" music and conversation, provided by people who are passionate about music and the medium.

"People don't only want just a playlist of good music, they also want to be led through it by characters who entertain, and who's taste they trust."

That appears to be borne out by Rajar figures, which track radio consumption. They show high-profile radio personalities like Radio 2's Chris Evans and Radio 1's Chris Moyles both increasing their listeners. Evans's breakfast show attracted 9.53 million listeners since replacing Terry Wogan at the beginning of the year, up from Wogan's last audience of 8.1 million.

Radio audiences are also at an all-time high, with 90.6% of the British population tuning into a radio station every week, and the number of people listening to digital radio up 19%. Even the future of 6Music looks more hopeful, as figures revealed that the threatened BBC station has doubled its listenership to more than a million.

John Kennedy, a DJ on XFM and also on the Great Escape panel, said DJs were still vital to help people discover music from different genres. "That random factor is very special," he said. "People like not thinking sometimes, they can just switch on the radio and not think about it ... it is very important for both the BBC and commercial radio to embrace change and discover how new technology can work for them. But I think radio still has a vital role as a companion for people."

Sean Adams, from Drowned in Sound, a music webzine, said strong radio personalities were vital to counteract the ghettoisation of music – where because of digital radio services people only listen to the type of music they already enjoy. "We now have a billion ways of getting our music. That can be massively damaging because people aren't listening to music that they may not like on first listen, and there is this problem of the web making everything bland," he said.

"The web has enabled everyone to be a DJ and in some ways that has diluted the need for [them] but people are still looking for direction and gatekeepers. The need for an established medium has changed but that doesn't mean we don't still need people like John Peel."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-rad...ion?CMP=twt_gu





Fritz Sennheiser, 98, Executive, Dies
Margalit Fox

Fritz Sennheiser, the founder and longtime chairman of Sennheiser Electronic, a leading maker of high-end audio equipment like microphones, headphones and infrared listening systems, died on May 17 at his home in Wedemark, Germany. He was 98.

The death was announced on the Web site of the Sennheiser Electronic Corporation, the company’s United States subsidiary, which has headquarters in Old Lyme, Conn.

Founded in 1945 in Wedemark with a staff of seven, Sennheiser now employs more than 2,100 people around the world. The company, which is wholly owned by the Sennheiser family, has manufacturing plants in Germany, Ireland and Albuquerque.

In 2008, Sennheiser recorded sales of about $500 million, according to its Web site.

Sennheiser professional equipment has long been ubiquitous in the fields of communications and entertainment, used by radio, television and recording engineers worldwide. Its personal audio accessories, including wireless and noise-canceling headphones, are routinely well reviewed in consumer-electronics publications.

Today, Sennheiser microphones are used by recording artists including Pink, Beyoncé and the Jonas Brothers.

Among the innovations with which the company is credited is the invention, in the 1950s, of the shotgun mike, a slender, highly sensitive directional microphone now widely used in film and television production.

Fritz Sennheiser was born in Berlin on May 9, 1912. As a boy, he was fascinated by radios and built a simple crystal receiver. His first love was horticulture, however, and he dreamed of becoming a landscape gardener.

The deep economic depression then affecting Germany made job prospects in landscaping slim, so the young Mr. Sennheiser studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Berlin instead. In 1940, he earned a doctorate from the Heinrich Hertz Institute, where he later worked as an engineer.

In World War II, Mr. Sennheiser helped the Germany Army with the radio transmission of coded messages.

After the war, Mr. Sennheiser started the company that would bear his name. Begun as a small electronics laboratory, the young company had a stroke of luck when its first product, a tube voltmeter, was bought in quantity by Siemens, the electronics giant. This led to the development of Sennheiser’s first microphone, also for Siemens, in 1947.

Later Sennheiser products include among the first open headphones. Introduced in 1968, the headphones had flat disclike earpieces that sat atop the ears instead of the traditional deep cuplike ones that encased the ears completely.

After retiring as Sennheiser’s chairman in 1982, Mr. Sennheiser was succeeded by his son, Jörg.

Mr. Sennheiser’s wife, the former Hertha Greiser, died last year. Besides Jörg Sennheiser, who remains chairman, he is survived by a daughter, Karin Sennheiser; three grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/te...ennheiser.html





Dennis Hopper, 74, Hollywood Rebel, Dies
Edward Wyatt

Dennis Hopper, who was part of a new generation of Hollywood rebels in portrayals of drug-addled misfits in the landmark films “Easy Rider,” “Apocalypse Now” and “Blue Velvet” and then went on to great success as a prolific character actor, died on Saturday at his home in Venice, Calif. He was 74.

The cause was complications from metastasized prostate cancer, according to a statement issued by Alex Hitz, a family friend.

Mr. Hopper, who said he stopped drinking and using drugs in the mid-1980s, followed that change with a tireless phase of his career in which he claimed to have turned down no parts. His credits include no fewer than six films released in 2008 and at least 25 over the past 10 years.

Most recently, Mr. Hopper starred in the television series “Crash,” an adaptation of the Oscar-winning film of the same title. Produced for the Starz cable channel, the show had Mr. Hopper portraying a music producer unhinged by years of drug use.

During a promotional tour last fall for that series, he fell ill; shortly thereafter, he began a new round of treatments for prostate cancer, which he said had been first diagnosed a decade ago.

Mr. Hopper was hospitalized in Los Angeles in January, at which time he also filed for divorce from his fifth wife, Victoria Duffy, with whom he had a young daughter. Mr. Hopper issued a news release citing “irreconcilable differences” for the filing.

“I wish Victoria the best but only want to spend these difficult days surrounded by my children and close friends,” he said in the release.

Mr. Hopper first won praise in Hollywood as a teenager in 1955 for his portrayal of an epileptic on the NBC series “Medic” and for a small part in the film “Rebel Without a Cause,” which starred James Dean, who was a friend of his.

Mr. Hopper confirmed his status as a rising star as the son of a wealthy rancher and his wife, played by Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, in “Giant” (1956), the epic western with Dean.

In those years, he was linked romantically with Natalie Wood and Joanne Woodward.

Yet that success brought with it a growing hubris, and in 1958 Mr. Hopper found himself in a battle of wills with the director Henry Hathaway on the set of “From Hell to Texas.”

The story has several versions; the most common is that his refusal to play a scene in the manner that the director requested resulted in Mr. Hopper’s stubbornly performing more than 80 takes before he finally followed orders.

Upon wrapping the scene, Mr. Hopper later recalled, Mr. Hathaway told him that his career in Hollywood was finished.

He soon left for New York, where he studied with Lee Strasberg for several years, performed onstage and acted in more than 100 episodes of television shows.

It was not until after his marriage in 1961 to Brooke Hayward — who, as the daughter of Leland Hayward, a producer and agent, and Margaret Sullavan, the actress, was part of Hollywood royalty — that Mr. Hopper was regularly offered film roles again.

He wrangled small parts in big studio films like “The Sons of Katie Elder” (1965) — directed by his former nemesis Henry Hathaway — as well as “Cool Hand Luke” (1967) and “Hang ’Em High” (1968).

And he grew close to his wife’s childhood friend Peter Fonda, who, with Mr. Hopper and a few others, began mulling over a film whose story line followed traditional western themes but substituted motorcycles for horses.

That film, “Easy Rider,” which Mr. Hopper wrote with Mr. Fonda and Terry Southern and directed, followed a pair of truth-seeking bikers (Mr. Fonda and Mr. Hopper) on a cross-country journey to New Orleans.

It won the prize for best first film at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival (though it faced only one competitor, as the critic Vincent Canby pointed out in a tepid 1969 review in The New York Times).

Mr. Hopper also shared an Oscar nomination for writing the film, while a nomination for best supporting actor went to a little-known Jack Nicholson.

“Easy Rider” introduced much of its audience, if not Mr. Hopper, to cocaine, and the film’s success accelerated a period of intense drug and alcohol use that Mr. Hopper later said nearly killed him and turned him into a professional pariah.

Given nearly $1 million by Universal for a follow-up project, he retreated with a cadre of hippies to Peru to shoot “The Last Movie,” a hallucinogenic film about the making of a movie. It won a top prize at the 1971 Venice Film Festival, but it failed with critics and at the box office.

Mr. Hopper edited the film while living at Los Gallos, a 22-room adobe house in Taos, N.M., that he rechristened the Mud Palace and envisioned as a counterculture Hollywood.

It was there that his drug-induced paranoia took full flower, including a period in which he posted armed guards on the roof.

“I was terribly naïve in those days,” he told The New York Times in 2002. “I thought the crazier you behaved, the better artist you would be. And there was a time when I had a lot of energy to display how crazy that was.”

Mr. Hopper was seen mostly in small film parts until he returned to prominence with his performance in “Apocalypse Now” (1979).

In a 1993 interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, Mr. Hopper credited Marlon Brando, a star of the film, with the idea of having him portray a freewheeling photojournalist, rather than the smaller role of a C.I.A. officer, in which he was originally cast.

But Mr. Hopper’s after-hours style continued to affect his work; in “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” a documentary about the making of that film, the director, Francis Ford Coppola, is seen lamenting that Mr. Hopper cannot seem to learn his lines.

After becoming sober in the 1980s, Mr. Hopper began taking on roles in several films a year, becoming one of the most recognizable character actors of the day.

He earned a second Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for his role as the alcoholic father of a troubled high school basketball star in “Hoosiers” (1986), and he honed his portrayal of unhinged villains in films like “Blue Velvet” (also in 1986), “Speed” (1994) and “Waterworld” (1995), as well as in the first season of the television series “24” (2002).

Mr. Hopper had several artistic pursuits beyond film. Early in his career, he painted and wrote poetry, though many of his works were destroyed in a 1961 fire that burned scores of homes, including his, in the Los Angeles enclave Bel Air.

Around that time, Ms. Hayward gave him a camera as a gift, and Mr. Hopper took up photography.

His intimate and unguarded images of celebrities like Ike and Tina Turner, Andy Warhol and Jane Fonda were the subject of gallery shows and were collected in a book, “1712 North Crescent Heights.” The book, whose title was his address in the Hollywood Hills in the 1960s, was edited by Marin Hopper, his daughter by Ms. Hayward.

He also built an extensive collection of works by artists he knew, including Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Julian Schnabel.

Born on May 17, 1936, in Dodge City, Kan., and raised on a nearby farm, Dennis Lee Hopper moved with his family to San Diego in the late 1940s.

He studied at the Old Globe Theater there while in high school, then signed a contract with Warner Brothers and moved to Los Angeles.

Mr. Hopper’s five marriages included one of eight days in 1970 to the singer Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. He is survived by four children, all of the Los Angeles area: Marin Hopper; Ruthanna Hopper, his daughter by Daria Halprin, his third wife; a son, Henry Lee Hopper, whose mother is Katherine LaNasa; and Galen, his daughter by Ms. Duffy.

On March 26, surrounded by friends like Mr. Nicholson and David Lynch, the director of “Blue Velvet,” Mr. Hopper received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Looking frail, he began his brief acceptance speech by sardonically thanking the paparazzi for supposedly distracting him and causing him to lose his balance and fall the day before. He continued, “Everyone here today that I’ve invited — and obviously some that I haven’t invited — have enriched my life tremendously.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/movies/30hopper.html





Blizzard Boss Says DRM is a Waste of Time
Stewart Meagher

Blizzard founder, Frank Pearce reckons that fighting piracy with DRM is a losing battle.

His company - which is responsible for the biggest videogame of all time, the worryingly-addictive online fantasy role player World of Warcraft - is to release Starcraft 2 on July 27th and Pearce has told Videogamer that the title won't be hobbled with the kind of crazy copy protection schemes which have made Ubisoft very unpopular in gaming circles of late.

Starcraft 2 will require a single online activation using the company's Battle.net servers, after which players will be allowed to play the single-player game to their hearts' content, without being forced to have a persistent Internet connection.

"If we've done our job right and implemented Battle.net in a great way, people will want to be connected while they're playing the single player campaign so they can stay connected to their friends and earn the achievements," said Pearce.

The Blizzard boss is resigned to the fact that, how ever many people and man-hours you throw at anti-piracy measures, it can never be enough. "If you start talking about DRM and different technologies to try to manage it, it's really a losing battle for us, because the [cracking] community is always so much larger, and the number of people out there that want to try to counteract that technology, whether it's because they want to pirate the game or just because it's a curiosity for them, is much larger than our development teams."

And the pragmatic game designer's final words on the matter is a mantra which many other game houses would do well to adopt: "We need our development teams focused on content and cool features, not anti-piracy technology."
http://www.thinq.co.uk/news/2010/5/2...waste-of-time/





Starcraft 2 to be Region-Locked
By Speed, source: IncGamers

There will be no playing with your American or South-Korean buddies in StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. At least, not if you're European.

Blizzard Entertainment's VP of product development, Frank Pearce, has confirmed that the game will not allow people to play across regions.
"It'll be structured very similarly to World of Warcraft, where you've got the European region and players matched against the other players within their region,"

"if you're a European player and you've got friends that are in another region that you want to be able to connect with, we definitely want to support that," although "it might mean that you have to access it through the US client."

So if you want to play against people in different regions, be prepared to buy multiple versions (one for each region you want to play in) and multiple battle.net accounts.

Hey! It's another way to make more money!
http://www.fragland.net/news/Starcra...-locked/23357/





Internet Addicts Guilty of Starving Baby to Death
Sangwon Yoon

A South Korean couple were convicted Friday of abandoning their newborn daughter, who starved to death while they addictively played an online game raising a virtual child.

The husband, a 41-year-old taxi driver, and his 25-year-old wife were sentenced to two years in prison, but the woman's term was suspended because she is pregnant.

The couple played at Internet cafes on average 10 hours every day and bottle-fed their baby only once a day, prosecutors said in an affidavit.

The girl, who was born prematurely and weighed 5 pounds (2.25 kilograms), was often fed rotten formula and was beaten when she cried out of hunger, the affidavit said.

They found her dead when they returned to their home in Suwon, just south of Seoul, after an all-night gaming session last September, the ruling said. They hid at a relative's home after a autopsy found the baby died of malnutrition.

"This constitutes an inhumane crime where the defendants abandoned even the most basic responsibilities as parents, and is unforgivable beyond any excuse or reason," the Suwon District Court said in the ruling.

The mother will avoid jail time if she stays out of trouble for three years. The couple, who have only been identified by their surnames, Kim, have seven days to appeal.

The case shocked South Korea and raised concern over the severity of online gaming and Internet addiction in the nation of 49 million. The government says there are 2 million "Internet addicts" in the nation considered one of the world's most technologically wired.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/articl...ath-503822.php





Do Video Games Equal Less Crime?
David Leonhardt

The fact that crime has continued to fall is one of the more surprising aspects of the Great Recession. The F.B.I. reported the latest numbers today: violent crimes fell 5.5 percent last year and property crimes declined 4.9 percent.

One factor for the decline seems to be the sheer number of people who have been locked up in recent decades. Some, no doubt, are being kept in prison even though they present little danger; but other prisoners would probably be committing crimes if they were free. Another factor is the spread of smart, data-driven police strategies.

Lawrence Katz, a labor economist, has an intriguing item to add to the list of potential causes: video games. When I spoke to him recently, he was very careful to say it was only an idea. He is far from sure that it’s correct. But, as The Economist put it, “Larry Katz, a Harvard economist, suspects that video games and Web sites may have kept the young and idle busy during this recession, thus explaining the surprising lack of an uptick in crime.”

Video games can not only provide hours of entertainment. They can also give people — especially young men, who play more than their fair share of video games and commit more than their fair share of crimes — an outlet for frustration that doesn’t involve actual violence. Video games obviously have many unfortunate side effects. They can promote obsessive, antisocial behavior and can make violent situations seem ordinary. But might video games also have an upside? I’m willing to consider the idea.

One piece of economic research, looking at violent movies, seems to offer some support for the idea. It found: “violent films prevent violent crime by attracting would-be assailants and keeping them cloistered in darkened, alcohol-free environs. Instead of fueling up at bars and then roaming around looking for trouble, potential criminals pass the prime hours for mayhem eating popcorn and watching celluloid villains slay in their stead.” That quotation is from my colleague Peter Goodman, who wrote about the research in 2008. The full study, by Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, was eventually published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/20...al-less-crime/





Swede Charged in US Over 'Scareware' Scheme

A 31-year-old Swede is among three people indicted in the United States in connection with a Ukraine-based internet fraud scheme that netted $100 million for its architects.

Internet users in more than 60 countries purchased more than one million bogus software products from the three defendants, two Americans and a Swede, the Justice Department said in a statement.

Björn Daniel Sundin, 31, a Swedish citizen believed to be in Sweden, and Shaileshkumar Jain, 40, a US citizen believed to be living in Ukraine, were each charged with 24 counts of wire fraud and one count each of conspiracy to commit computer fraud and computer fraud.

James Reno, 26, of Amelia, Ohio, was charged with 12 counts of wire fraud and one count each of conspiracy to commit computer fraud and computer fraud and is expected to appear before a US District Court in Chicago.

"These defendants allegedly preyed on innocent computer users, exploiting their fraudulently induced fears for personal gain," said FBI special agent Robert Grant.

Sundin and Jain were the owners and operators of a company called Innovative Marketing located in Kiev that purported to sell anti-virus and computer repair software. Jain was IM's chief executive while Sundin served as chief technology officer.

They are accused of placing fake advertisements on legitimate company websites which led internet users to falsely believe that their computers had been infected with a virus or had critical errors.

The internet users were then induced to buy software products with names such as "ErrorSafe" and "DriveCleaner" to fix the purported problems, paying online by credit card to bank accounts in Europe controlled by the defendants.

The scheme employing what is commonly known as "scareware" is considered one of the fastest-growing and most prevalent types of fraud on the web.

Each count of wire fraud carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
http://www.thelocal.se/26902/20100528/





Sality, the Virus that Turned into the Ultimate Malware

Computer threats are continuously evolving, and there is who would even pretend that they did the leap from the machine to man by infecting RFID microchips installed under the skin. But even though they remain a “simple” IT issue, some malicious codes are a problem difficult to tackle because of their inherent complexity and an intelligent design capable of constantly putting security companies under pressure. A remarkable “intelligent” threat is for instance Sality, the new generation file virus that according to Symantec has practically turned into an “all-in-one” malware incorporating botnet-alike functionalities as well.

At first appeared during 2003 in Russia, Sality has eventually changed from a traditional file virus - an “historical” type of malware which uses an executable vector like a program file to spread - to a complex menace provided with features including virus, trojan, backdoor, keylogger, rootkit, downloader types. Recently Sality gained one of the features it was still lacking, when variants of the virus appeared showing botnet functionalities and the ability to communicate on a peer-to-peer decentralized network.

Symantec investigated those new variants identifying their pyramid structure, where the botnet component serves to provide an encrypted and always up-to-date URLs list from which the downloader can get new malicious code - that is Sality’s final goal, the USA company says. Sality’s botnet protocol, Symantec senior software engineer Nicolas Falliere writes, contacts an initial peers list with 1000 entries at most embedded within the virus body, searching for an active client able to correctly communicate with the bot.

Once it has set up a communication channel, Sality checks for the availability of updated “packages” of URLs to give to the downloader component, otherwise it provides its own URLs list if the local package is newer than the one of the contacted peer and instructs the peer to send the IP address and the port of another client available on the botnet. This way Sality is able to constantly update (and transfer in every single infected executable file) both the remote addresses list from which to download payloads and the active bots list.

The P2P mechanism employed by Sality uses the UDP protocol and listens directly on network interfaces, two features that greatly decrease its effectiveness in the not so uncommon case where the infected system is behind a firewall or a router. Even considering this important fault, Symantec says, “Sality is a complex and complete threat” equipped with almost every malicious code feature, incorporating an “advanced file infector, efficient security products disabler, and flexible and decentralized P2P capabilities to propagate URLs and avoid static DNS or IP lockdown by authorities“.

From an analysis performed with a “rogue P2P client” coded to become part of the malicious network, Symantec has determined that the Sality botnet covers something like 100.000 computers. It’s a bots figure below the one achieved by giants like Conficker but similar in size to other botnets as Storm, Pandex and Rustock. What remains clear is the demonstration of Sality’s unique threat, a malware floating around since seven years that shows no intention to quickly disappear from the net.
http://kingofgng.com/eng/2010/05/29/...imate-malware/





Industry Gears Up for Random Hacks of Kindness in June

Industry gears up for Random Hacks of Kindness in June
Iain Thomson

Some of the IT industry's biggest names are lending their support to Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), a weekend of hard coding where volunteer engineers seek to solve real-world problems..

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Nasa and The World Bank are founding partners in RHoK, which this year takes place on June 4-6. The 'hackathon' will kick off in Washington, DC, with global satellite events going on around the world in Jakarta, Sydney, Nairobi and Sao Paolo and there's a special two day workshop at the Microsoft Offices in Maryland.

“We start with problem definitions created through consultations with NGOs, governments and experts in the field from around the world, then we invite hackers to a come together to organize and go to work putting their skills to use to solve those problems with software solutions that make a difference on the ground,” said Google in a blog posting.

“At a RHoK hackathon, new technologies are born, existing platforms are built upon, and innovative new ideas attract attention and support. At the close of the hackathon, teams present the technologies they have developed and prizes are awarded.”

The event started last year with a Crisis Camp held in Washington DC, where Google, Microsoft and Yahoo pledged their support and the organisers are hoping to draw in expertise from around the world, from both professional programmers and also from students looking to get more coding experience.

“At a RHoK Hackathon, benevolently-inclined hackers will listen to a keynote speech presenting the challenges we are facing. Then they’ll churn out some of the most important open source code on the planet — code that saves lives and mitigates human suffering,” they said.
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/1...s-in-june.aspx


















Until next week,

- js.



















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