Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 6th, '10

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"P2P file-sharing remains popular in North America, but it has seen a dramatic decline on mobile networks. Even so, it still accounts for a whopping 53.3% of upstream capacity on fixed networks." – Sandvine


"You can see it in the way people walk around campus, texting on their cells, being completely oblivious to the hundreds of people surrounding them. We’ve become lazy with our speech and our social profiling of fellow human beings." – Lilly Kantarakias


"Kinect is clearly the most exciting, most important leap forward for interactive home entertainment since Nintendo introduced the Wii. Nothing approaches the ambition and technical achievement in potentially reshaping the mass home media experience." – Seth Schiesel


"Before Tuesday's midterm elections, there were 95 House and Senate candidates who pledged support for Net neutrality, a bill that would force Internet providers to not charge users more for certain kinds of Web content. All of them lost." – David Goldman


"They shaved off $420,000. Yea." – Jammie Thomas-Rasset


"Apple is a pain in the ass." – Inon Beracha



































November 6th, 2010





What Next for LimeWire and its Users
Fred Lipsey

LimeWire was shut down by court ordered injunction last week. The company was forced to disable its P2P file-sharing software. LimeWires’s digital media store remains open.

The big question is what will happen to LimeWire and it’s users? The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) says armed with the court ruling it “will start to unwind the massive piracy machine.” But will it?

The recording industry’s victory may be short-lived. Many users may simply move to similar peer-to-peer programs like FrostWire or BearShare and there are already indications this is happening. The problem users will face is that this open source technology was 80 percent powered by LimeWire. If there is no music who will use these services or will a totally new alternative be developed?

It is clear that these programs are very popular and Americans want to be able to share music freely, regardless of RIAA’s opinion. Napster, Kazaa and others have faced similar situations before LimeWire, whose success was ultimately its downfall.

LimeWire itself was found guilty of copyright infringement in May and still faces a January trial to determine punitive damages. Will the company survive like Kazaa did? The old LimeWire is certainly dead but it is likely to re-emerge as a copyright compliant company.

LimeWire is reportedly far along in the process of developing a new music service. LimeWire has seen the handwriting on the wall for some time, after being involved in the four-year legal battle. In June LimeWire developed its digital music store with the support of the record companies.

An agreement was struck that permitted the company to run until October 8, if at that point the new system was not ready LimeWire would shut down. An extension was granted but last Tuesday that ran out and the company was forced to disable its P2P file sharing network.

LimeWire issued a statement saying, “We’re hopeful that the music industry will seize the opportunity to work with LimeWire and bring a game-changing new music service to market.” The company says, ‘There are two pieces that will define the launch of our new service. One is the development of our new music experience, and the second is working with the music industry.”
http://rapiddaily.com/what-next-for-...-users/427829/






As LimeWire Shuts Its Doors, Other P2P Clients See a Surge in Usage
Audrey Watters

Less than a week since LimeWire was ordered to shut down its operations, almost all other major file-sharing applications are reporting a massive increase in downloads, arguably from those displaced LimeWire users.

A New York district judge last Tuesday issued a cease-and-desist order, demanding that LimeWire immediately close its doors. And while LimeWire has said it has plans to institute a redesigned service, based on legal and licensed music subscriptions, it seems like many of the site's users may have gone elsewhere for their torrents, rather than waiting for a revised version of what was once the most popular file-sharing app.

TorrentFreak reports that it has spoken with a number of developers from P2P services, all of whom have seen a "huge boost in download numbers following Tuesday's verdict." No developers were willing to go on the record and give TorrentFreak the raw data - for fear, no doubt, of incurring the same wrath of the courts that LimeWire has received.

The exception is BearShare. Much like LimeWire, BearShare was once a Gnutella-based application. But in May 2006, BearShare was ordered to pay $30 million in settlement with the RIAA. Following that decision, BearShare altered its offerings via the Gnutella framework, limiting file-sharing. And its current iteration is, as the site proclaims "100% legal."

Despite these restrictions, BearShare has seen a 780% increase in US downloads since Tuesday. And it reports its daily US downloads went up from 8000 to 62,400. The company does not say, however, whether or not these new sers are actually paying for their downloads. (That is, I believe, what the RIAA believes will save all those poor suffering record labels.)

Even though the LimeWire alternatives have seen an influx of traffic over the past week, the fallout from last week's decision - and the still-to-come decision regarding the dollar figure attached to the judgement - remains to be seen as to how it will impact file-sharing services and users.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...lients_see.php





RIAA Asks Court to Overturn Filesharing Fine Reduction
Eamonn Forde

The RIAA is seeking to overturn a court's reduction in the damages a filesharer in the US has to pay for mass copyright infringement.

Boston student Joel Tenenbaum was ordered to pay $675k (£420k) for illegally sharing 30 tracks online but this was reduced to $67.5k (£42k) on appeal in August after a judge deemed the initial fine to be “unconstitutional”.

Tenenbaum stated he was still unable to pay the reduced fine.

DigitalMediaWire reports the RIAA is pushing for the Boston District Court to reinstate the original fine, arguing its reasoning for the reduction was “hopelessly flawed”.
http://www.musicweek.com/story.asp?s...de=1043111&c=1





File-Sharing Damages Raised to $1.5 Million

A Brainerd mother of four reacted sardonically to a federal jury’s decision Wednesday on how much she owes the Recording Industry Association of America for copyright infringement damages.
Mark Stodghill

A Brainerd mother of four reacted sardonically to a federal jury’s decision Wednesday on how much she owes the Recording Industry Association of America for copyright infringement damages.

“They shaved off $420,000,” Jammie Thomas-Rasset said. “Yea.”

The Minneapolis jury determined Thomas-Rasset was responsible for $1.5 million in damages for distributing 24 songs on the KaZaA peer-to-peer file sharing network. She could have been liable for nearly $2 million.

In a June 2009 trial in Minneapolis, a jury found that Thomas-Rasset was liable for $1.92 million in damages to the recording industry, but U.S. District Judge Michael Davis reduced that award to $54,000. The court gave the recording industry the option of accepting the reduced damages or scheduling the third trial in the case solely on the issue of damages. That third trial was held this week.

In the nation’s first music downloading case to go to trial — held in Duluth in 2007 — jurors found Thomas-Rasset liable for $222,000 in damages to record companies. But Davis ruled that he had given jurors an erroneous instruction of law and granted Thomas-Rasset’s motion for a new trial.

It had already been proven in the first two trials that Thomas-Rasset willfully infringed the plaintiff’s copyrights. Jurors in this trial only had to decide the appropriate statutory damages for willful infringement ranging between $750 per work to a maximum of $150,000 per work.

After hearing two days of testimony, jurors needed only about two hours to decide that Thomas-Rasset should pay $62,500 for each of the 24 songs she illegally distributed.

Testimony at earlier trials indicated that more than 1,700 songs were found on Thomas-Rasset’s shared folder, which she was actively distributing to more than 2 million people on the peer-to-peer network KaZaA, but the music companies chose to sue on only 24 of those songs.

“We are again thankful to the jury for its service in this matter and that they recognized the severity of the defendant’s misconduct,” said Cara Duckworth, vice president of communications for the Washington, D.C.-based Recording Industry Association of America. “Now with three jury decisions behind us along with a clear affirmation of Ms. Thomas-Rasset’s willful liability, it is our hope that she finally accepts responsibility for her actions.”

But Thomas-Rasset said she will appeal with the help of her Houston, Texas, team of attorneys, Kiwi Camara and Joe Sibley.

“The very first thing Kiwi said as we were leaving the courtroom is that we’re going to appeal on constitutional grounds,” Thomas-Rasset said.

Camara has argued that even the minimum award of statutory damages permitted under the Copyright Act “so far exceeds the demonstrable harm to the plaintiffs that an award of that amount would be unconstitutional.”

Thomas-Rasset’s case is one of two in the country to have gone to trial out of the more than 30,000 lawsuits brought by the recording industry.

“It’s a very unjust law that they’re extorting to try to get a payday so they can try to stop file sharing, and it’s not working,” Thomas-Rasset said. “The one thing we noticed throughout the trial is that it isn’t just about me but all of the file sharing going on. But I’m the one being held accountable.”

Thomas-Rasset has four sons aged 2 to 16. She took this week off work from her position as a coordinator in the Department of Natural Resources and Environment for the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Indians.

What did she really think about having the damages reduced by $420,000?

“One of my attorneys said that’s a nice house and a nice car,” she said. “I know it sounds bad, but I can’t help but laugh.

“I’m sorry, this is ‘Ground Hog Day’ and the movie keeps repeating itself. It’s a shocking, monstrous verdict once again.”
http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/eve...cle/id/183096/





Hollywood Law Firm Forced to Ban BitTorrent
Ry Crozier

Allegedly leaked email reveals legal eagles swooped on P2P in own nest.

A partner from the law firm representing a film industry trade group in its battle against ISP iiNet has sent an email telling staff "not to ever use" BitTorrent on its corporate internet account.

Gilbert and Tobin partner Peter Leonard told iTnews that he "sent an email around the use of sites like BitTorrent" and told staff they were "not to ever use them".

The firm represented the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), which alleged in the Federal Court last year that iiNet authorised illicit copying of films, a case the WA ISP won in February.

News of the BitTorrent ban surfaced after legal news and gossip site Firmspy reported the contents of the email purportedly sent by Leonard to the rest of the law firm on October 19.

Leonard would not confirm that the email posted to Firmspy was the same as the one he told iTnews he sent to staff.

The blog said an employee of the firm was caught using BitTorrent on the corporate internet account.

"We recently had an instance of a person downloading from BitTorrent on the G+T account," read the email published to Firmspy.

"This is clearly contrary to G+T's Communications Policy. Even more importantly, it is illegal and (therefore) just plain stupid.

"There should be non peer to peer download activity using G+T resources."

The allegation - if proven - could be damaging because the film industry has repeatedly claimed that most uses of BitTorrent were illegal, despite evidence of legitimate uses for the peer-to-peer protocol.

Liz Tay contributed to this report.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/236775...ittorrent.aspx





UK Government Wants to Make ISPs Responsible for Third Party Content Online
MarkJ

The UK governments Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, Ed Vaizey, has ominously proposed that broadband ISPs could introduce a new Mediation Service that would allow them the freedom to censor third party content on the internet, without court intervention, in response to little more than a public complaint.

Vaizey anticipates that internet users could use the "service" to request that any material deemed to be inaccurate or privacy infringing is removed. However we suspect that genuine complaints would probably get lost in a sea of abuse by commercial firms trying to attack freedom of speech and expression.

Ed Vaizey, Speaking at a House Commons Debate on Internet Privacy, said:

Nominet, the charity that is responsible for internet domain names, runs an extremely effective mediation service, so that people who are disputing the ownership of an internet domain name may be involved in a low-cost process to discuss how to resolve that dispute.

It is certainly worth the Government brokering a conversation with the internet industry about setting up a mediation service for consumers who have legitimate concerns that their privacy has been breached or that online information about them is inaccurate or constitutes a gross invasion of their privacy to discuss whether there is any way to remove access to that information.

I am sure that many internet companies will say that that is almost impossible, but when one hears stories such as that told by my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North, one wants at least to attempt to give consumers some opportunity to have a dialogue with internet companies, as they would be able to do if a newspaper had inadvertently published that information.

We can't help but feel that Vaizey's final paragraph demonstrates a distinct lack of understanding, much as shown with his support for the controversial Digital Economy Act 2010 (DEA). Nominet's dispute system is relatively straightforward, where as asking an ISP to investigate any old gripe against something deemed by another to be "inaccurate" is immensely complicated and time consuming.

Ed Vaizey offered an example situation for his proposal:

I was struck by the comment from my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North about the women’s refuge centre whose address was put online, and it was then unable to persuade the organisation that was carrying that information to remove it. That organisation had not deliberately put the information online; it was simply the vehicle on which the information was available.

There may be all sorts of reasons why it was difficult to take that information down. It may be that having taken it down, the address simply popped up again elsewhere, but the fact that no meeting or dialogue could take place worries me greatly. I suspect that most hon. Members in the Chamber have had conversations with constituents who have seen information about them online and have simply not known where to turn.

Ironically Vaizey's argument also works against his proposal by recognising that such information could crop up again almost anywhere and would be very difficult to suppress and control. Physically trying to control general internet content in such a way simply isn't realistic and poses a serious danger to freedom of speech.

At the very least such power should not be placed in the hands of commercial ISPs and should only be used against dangerous content, such as child abuse images or terrorism material; the IWF already does this. In any case an ISP cannot physically delete such content because it does not exist on their networks and blocks are easily circumvented.
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/201...ed-online.html





3 Strikes Still On Agenda, But Only If Kiwis Keep On Pirating
enigmax

New Zealand’s Parliament Commerce Committee has reported back on the Copyright Infringing File Sharing Bill and it will now move to parliament for its second reading. The controversial 3 strikes provision is still included, but will now only be implemented if a letter writing scheme to educate citizens fails, and people continue to share illicit files during the next two years.

Following a review, New Zealand’s Commerce Select Committee has recommended changes to the Copyright (infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill, the proposed legislation aimed squarely at reducing instances of online infringement.

The Bill, which unanimously passed its first reading in Parliament in April and repeals section 92A of the Copyright Act, will put in place a 3 strikes-style regime, whereby Internet service providers will initially be required to send warning letters to alleged infringers at the behest of rights holders.

The Copyright Tribunal, which will be empowered to rule on cases of alleged infringement, will be given control over a streamlined, lost-cost system for dealing with cases and will be empowered to hand down fines up to $15,000 ($11,500 USD).

In a statement, Commerce Minister Simon Power welcomed the changes to the Bill.

“The Commerce Select Committee’s recommended changes to the bill will help it be more workable and effective,” said Mr Power.

The power for District Courts to disconnect Internet users for a period of up to 6 months remains in the Bill, but the Committee is recommending that the measure is not activated unless citizens fail to respond to the warning letters sent out by rightsholders and ISPs.

“This will enable the Government to work with stakeholders to monitor and review the situation and determine when a further deterrent may be needed,” notes Powers’ office.

That review is expected to come late 2012, which gives file-sharers around 2 years to mend their ways. Failure to do so would hand the decision to implement disconnections directly to Minister Power, who will be able to do so without further discussion.

“I am pleased that the Committee has recommended that account suspension not be introduced now,” says InternetNZ Chief Executive Vikram Kumar.

“We would have preferred no remedy of account suspension being included in the legislation. The decision to leave it in but not commence its application is a second best option, but is far better than the current law, and better than the initial draft,” he added.

However, Kumar was still critical of elements of the Bill, noting that it “still leaves account holders entirely responsible for another person’s use of their account even where they have no control over them.”

While critics remain skeptical that the warnings letters will have the desired effect, some feel that infringements could be reduced significantly.

“If done right, the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill will go a long way towards reducing the level of online copyright infringement, as research has shown that seven in ten people will stop upon receiving the first notice from their ISP,” said NZFACT executive director Tony Eaton.

In common with the UK, warning letters will not be sent out to users of cellular networks in the first instance and in New Zealand not until August 2013.

“This position is likely to change in the near future as technology advances and mobile broadband prices go down,” said Mr Power.

An additional recommendation by the government is to enable the District Court to refuse to implement an Internet disconnection “where it would be manifestly unjust to the account holder” to do so.
http://torrentfreak.com/3-strikes-st...rating-101103/





New Zealand P2P Proposal: Guilty Until Proven Innocent
Nate Anderson

Say you have a DSL connection at home. Should you be liable for big fines over infringements committed using your connection... even if you had nothing to do with them? And should rightsholder complaints carry the assumption of accuracy? New Zealand politicians say yes.

New Zealand is taking its second attempt at clamping down on illicit peer-to-peer file-swapping. The first time around, in 2009, the country's legislators had to scrap their Internet disconnection plans after a public outcry over its "Guilt upon accusation" approach. But their second attempt is already stirring up the same complaints.

This time, the anti-P2P regime is based on big fines of up to NZ$15,000. The fine isn't designed only to cover compensation; as a parliamentary committee report said this week, "For the regime to be effective as a deterrent against illegal file sharing, we believe it is essential that awards be designed not merely to recompense rights holders for the value of the song or movie illegally downloaded, but also to include a punitive element."

Such fines would be levied by a Copyright Tribunal after a particular account holder racked up several notices, and these notices would adopt a "guilty until proven innocent" approach. As the committee report puts it, "an infringement notice establishes a presumption that infringement has occurred, but this would be open to rebuttal where an account holder had valid reasons, in which case a rights holder would have to satisfy the tribunal that the presumption was correct. We consider that such a change would fulfill more effectively the aim of having an efficient 'fast-track' system for copyright owners to obtain remedies for infringements."

It's hard to argue with the logic of speed here; creating a presumption of liability certainly will "fast-track" the process, though concerns about accuracy remain. As a New Zealand legal blogger noted this week, almost one-third of all New Zealand copyright litigation fails because rightsholders can't actually show they own the copyright and that the copyright is governed by New Zealand law. And Google has previously indicated that large percentages of the infringement claims it routinely receives are defective in some way.

InternetNZ, which runs the top-level .nz Internet domain, said in a statement that the new presumption of liability "reverses the burden of proof in the regime by saying that rights owners' notices will be considered conclusive evidence of infringement, with alleged infringers having to prove they have not done so. This reversal of proof is not a welcome development, and our initial view is that it should not be passed by Parliament."

The new proposal applies to every Internet account holder, regardless of whether they actually did the deed. This is bad enough in household situations—see the recent German case where a 16-year old shared a couple of German metal songs and the music publishers went after him and his father—but it's far worse when applied to businesses, libraries, and colleges. Imagine your small business getting hit with a big fine because Bob in accounting installed a BitTorrent client on his machine during lunch hour.

"We considered carefully whether some account holders—for example, libraries and universities—should have an exemption or defense on the grounds that they did not have control over an infringer," said parliament. "We rejected such an approach as we consider it important that all account holders take measures to ensure that infringing file sharing does not occur on their account."

Internet accounts won't be disconnected, though, at least for now. If the fines don't have the desired effect, the law does allow the government to implement disconnections in the future.

The Green Party objected to this idea on the grounds that termination is "disproportionate to the problem and would not solve it," and the new bill "is just a delay in implementation of this ill-considered remedy... Citizens are not denied the right to use their telephones because they happened to be used in the commission of a crime, and this legislation should not set any precedent."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/n...n-innocent.ars





Ministry of Sound Suspends Filesharing Action

Record label drops plan to send warning notices to more than 25,000 BT broadband customers after ISP deletes their details
Josh Halliday

Ministry of Sound is suspending plans to send warning notices to more than 25,000 BT broadband customers suspected of illegal downloading, claiming that the internet service provider has deleted their details.

BT had agreed to retain the personal details of 20,000 of its customers earlier this year, so that Ministry of Sound could pursue them once an injunction on the court order was lifted. However, the record label today said that BT had "failed to preserve" the details.

The telecoms company was granted an injunction on the original court order, submitted by law firm Gallant Macmillan on behalf of Ministry of Sound, on 4 October. The broadband provider argued that it would continue to challenge such orders – known as "Norwich Pharmacal orders" – until the rights holder and law firm can prove that accusations of illegal filesharing have "some basis".

Ministry of Sound claims that Gallant Macmillan, and the technology company DigiRights Solutions had identified more than 150,000 UK IP addresses sharing the label's copyrighted content.

The Ministry of Sound chief executive, Lohan Presencer, said: "It is very disappointing that BT decided not to preserve the identities of the illegal uploaders. Given that less than 20% of the names remain and BT costs have soared from a few thousand pounds to several hundred thousand pounds, it makes no economic sense to continue with this application. We are more determined than ever to go after internet users who illegally upload our copyrighted material.

"We will be making further applications for information from all ISPs. Every time that a track or album is uploaded to the web it is depriving artists of royalties and reducing the money which we can invest in new British talent."

A BT spokesman responded: "We're surprised at this claim since we provided a similar number of customer details to comply with a court order earlier this year for Ministry of Sound and there was no suggestion then that this was a problem for them.

"All such information is automatically deleted from our systems after 90 days in accordance with our data retention policy; the Ministry of Sound and its solicitors are well aware of this. Upon request from Ministry of Sound we saved as much of the specific data sought as we reasonably could and any not preserved must have been too old. Our door remains open to Ministry of Sound and any other rights holder who wants to enforce their rights in a fair way through an established legal process."

The spokesman added that BT would now write to law firms ACS:Law and Gallant Macmillan seeking their agreement to a revised approach to granted court orders. He said that any rights holder seeking future disclosure of customer details through court orders would have to agree to this approach.

"Ministry of Sound's decision is clearly a matter for them. It's a shame though that, in this instance, our concerns over the current process will not be examined by the court," the spokesman added.

"However, it remains our intention to ensure our broadband customers are adequately protected so that rights holders can pursue their claims for copyright infringement without causing unnecessary worry to innocent people.

"BT believes that with appropriate safeguards to protect customers' rights, confidence in the Norwich Pharmacal process can be restored so that rights holders can feel able to use it to seek redress for online copyright infringement.

"The safeguards we aim to establish via the court are on the security of data handling, a threshold for providing a customer's details based on a minimum number of separate incidents, the tone of contact with broadband subscribers and a reasonable approach to financial compensation sought."

The process of identifying and pursuing internet users suspected of illegal filesharing was called into question earlier this year following the online leak of personal details of thousands of UK broadband users from ACS:Law.

ACS:Law attracted the ire of online activists for its method of tracking and pursuing those it suspects of sharing copyrighted material. Hundreds of internet users ordered to pay a fine by the company complained that they had been wrongly identified and are now looking to form a class action lawsuit against the firm.

The law firm's website was targeted with a coordinated attack in September, knocking it temporarily offline. But the information it held about thousands of internet users was uploaded online in the aftermath of the attack. The information commissioner is now investigating the data breach.

If it is determined that the exposure was the result of ACS:Law's own data security shortcomings, rather than the fault of external hackers, the information commissioner could levy a £500,000 fine on the law firm.

Solicitors acting on behalf of rights holders gain the contact details of broadband customers they suspect of sharing copyrighted content by applying for a court order against the relevant ISP. Most, if not all, of the ISPs subjected to these orders have now said they will contest them until the security of customer data is assured.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...filesharing-bt





Accused 'Hurt Locker' Pirates Turn to Law School
Greg Sandoval

Confused, angry, and scared is how the accused film pirates come to Robert Talbot.

As of last week, Talbot, a law professor at the University of San Francisco, was representing 23 people accused by independent film studios of copyright violations. In lawsuits filed against thousands of people from across the country, the filmmakers allege that the defendants distributed unauthorized copies of their movies, such as the Academy Award-winning "The Hurt Locker," across file-sharing networks.

Talbot guesses that no other copyright lawyer in the country defends as many accused file sharers. His program's allure is obvious. He possesses more resources than many law firms, since students help defend clients. Talbot and USF's Internet Justice Clinic also offer legal assistance for the right price: free.

"We try to go into situations where something wrong is done to someone and part of our mission is to help them," said Talbot, who has been at USF for 40 years. "We try to combine all that while at the same time teaching students."

Handling this many cases puts Talbot at the center of the most sweeping antipiracy litigation since 2003. That was the year the Recording Industry Association of America began suing individuals for downloading music illegally. The RIAA sued at least 18,000 people before abandoning the strategy two years ago.

While there's no telling how long the indie studios will continue litigating, they have filed complaints against thousands and have created a sort of assembly-line process to churning out suits and collecting money. At the rate they are suing people, the film companies will quickly surpass the number of people sued by the RIAA. The filmmakers say they have little choice, arguing that movie piracy has cost them millions and threatens their livelihoods.

So lots of people now must lawyer up.

A few of those accused by the studios have contacted CNET, typically right after receiving a letter from their Internet service providers notifying them their records have been subpoenaed by one of the studios. Some acknowledge that they shared the movies. Others say they are innocent. The one thing most have in common is that they don't know what to do.

Many eventually find their way to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for Web users and tech companies. EFF offers a long list of attorneys who offer legal help to accused file sharers. Talbot has worked with EFF for years.

Last week, for a separate story, I spoke with numerous attorneys on EFF's list. Not all of the lawyers had the same view about how to handle the suits. Some seemed to favor settling. According to several lawyers, the minimum settlement amount the studios have accepted is $1,000.

Talbot said he doesn't believe innocent people should have to pay a dime. He says some who have contacted him have open Wi-Fi connections and don't know who in the neighborhood may have shared the movies. Others suspect the films were shared by a visiting relative or guest.

"I feel like that this is a good cause, Talbot said. "I'm always looking for ways to motivate students. They are incensed about what is going on."

Talbot said he's close to maxing out the number of cases he can take but he's also on the lookout for those that sound like winners. He said he doesn't think the law will support the studios' legal arguments and wouldn't mind testing them in court. He said: "I have a couple of cases that would be good to take all the way."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20021307-261.html





Chasing Pirates: Inside Microsoft’s War Room
Ashlee Vance

AS the sun rose over the mountains circling Los Reyes, a town in the Mexican state of Michoacán, one morning in March 2009, a caravan of more than 300 heavily armed law enforcement agents set out on a raid.

All but the lead vehicle turned off their headlights to evade lookouts, called “falcons,” who work for La Familia Michoacana, the brutal Mexican cartel that controls the drug trade. This time, the police weren’t hunting for a secret stash of drugs, guns or money. Instead, they looked to crack down on La Familia’s growing counterfeit software ring.

The police reached the house undetected, barreled in and found rooms crammed with about 50 machines used to copy CDs and make counterfeit versions of software like Microsoft Office and Xbox video games. They arrested three men on the spot, who were later released while the authorities investigate the case. “The entire operation was very complicated and risky,” says a person close to the investigation, who demanded anonymity out of fear for his life.

The raid added to a body of evidence confirming La Familia’s expansion into counterfeit software as a low-risk, high-profit complement to drugs, bribery and kidnapping. The group even stamps the disks it produces with “FMM,” which stands for Familia Morelia Michoacana, right alongside the original brand of various software makers.

The cartel distributes the software through thousands of kiosks, markets and stores in the region and demands that sales workers meet weekly quotas, this person says, describing the operation as a “form of extortion” on locals.

The arrival of organized criminal syndicates to the software piracy scene has escalated worries at companies like Microsoft, Symantec and Adobe. Groups in China, South America and Eastern Europe appear to have supply chains and sales networks rivaling those of legitimate businesses, says David Finn, Microsoft’s anti-piracy chief. Sometimes they sell exact copies of products, but often peddle tainted software that opens the door to other electronic crime.

“As long as intellectual property is the lifeblood of this company, we have to go protect it,” Mr. Finn says.

Microsoft has adopted a hard-line stance against counterfeiting. It has set up a sophisticated anti-piracy operation that dwarfs those of other software makers; the staff includes dozens of former government intelligence agents from the United States, Europe and Asia, who use a host of “CSI”-like forensic technology tools for finding and convicting criminals.

But the hunt for pirates carries with it a cost to Microsoft’s reputation.

The company’s profit from Windows and Office remains the envy of the technology industry, and critics contend that Microsoft simply charges too much for them. In countries like India, where Microsoft encourages local police officers to conduct raids, the company can come off as a bully willing to go after its own business partners if they occasionally peddle counterfeit software to people who struggle to afford the real thing.

“It is better for the Indian government to focus on educating its children rather than making sure royalties go back to Microsoft,” says Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia Law School and a leading advocate of free software.

Mr. Finn argues that Microsoft has no choice but to be aggressive in its fight, saying its immense network of resellers and partners can’t make a living in areas flush with counterfeit software. He says consumers and businesses are being coaxed into buying counterfeit products that either don’t work or do serious harm by clearing the way for various types of electronic fraud.

And, crucially, the counterfeit software cuts into Microsoft’s potential profit. A software industry trade group estimated the value of unlicensed software for all companies at $51.4 billion last year.

The most vociferous critics of Microsoft and the overall proprietary software industry describe the anti-piracy crusade as a sophisticated dog-and-pony show. They say the software makers tolerate a certain level of piracy because they would rather have people use their products — even if counterfeit — than pick up lower-cost alternatives. At the same time, the critics say, the software companies conduct periodic raids to remind customers and partners that playing by the rules makes sense.

“It has always been in Microsoft’s interests for software to be available at two different prices — expensive for the people that can afford it and inexpensive for those that can’t,” Mr. Moglen says. “At the end of the day, if you’re a monopolist, you have to tolerate a large number of copies you don’t get paid for just to keep everyone hooked.”

Microsoft has demonstrated a rare ability to elicit the cooperation of law enforcement officials to go after software counterfeiters and to secure convictions — not only in India and Mexico, but also in China, Brazil, Colombia, Belize and Russia. Countries like Malaysia, Chile and Peru have set up intellectual-property protection squads that rely on Microsoft’s training and expertise to deal with software cases.

As Mr. Moglen sees it, these efforts underscore a certain level of desperation on the part of American companies and the economy of ideas on which they have come to rely. “This is the postindustrial United States,” he says. “We will make other governments around the world go around enforcing rights primarily held by Americans. This is a very important part of American thinking around how the country will make its living in the 21st century.”

MICROSOFT’S pursuit of software counterfeiters begins in Dublin, at one of the company’s 10 crime labs.

Donal Keating, a physicist who leads Microsoft’s forensics work, has turned the lab into an anti-piracy playpen full of microscopes and other equipment used to analyze software disks. Flat-screen monitors show data about counterfeit sales, and evidence bags almost overflow with nearly flawless Windows and Office fakes. Mr. Keating serves as the CD manufacturing whiz on what amounts to Microsoft’s version of the A-Team, clad in business-casual attire.

The undercover operative of this group is Peter Anaman, a lawyer who was born in Ghana and educated in England; he taught hand-to-hand combat to soldiers during a stint in the French army and then taught himself how to write software. Mr. Anaman has applied his software skills and training to explore a shift in piracy from groups that make CDs to those that offer downloads online.

Through three online personas — two female and one male — Mr. Anaman chats with and sometimes befriends hackers in Russia and Eastern Europe who use stolen credit card numbers to set up hundreds of Web sites and offer products from Microsoft, Adobe and Symantec. “It is part of gathering human intelligence and tracking relationships,” Mr. Anaman says.

Through an artificial intelligence system, Microsoft scans the Web for suspicious, popular links and then sends takedown requests to Web service providers, providing evidence of questionable activity. “The Web sites look professional,” he says. “And some of them even offer customer support through call centers in India.”

The counterfeiters, however, have automated systems that replace links that Microsoft deep-sixes. So the company has turned up the dial on its link-removal machine.

“We used to remove 10,000 links a month,” Mr. Anaman says. “Now, we’re removing 800,000 links a month.”

He describes the groups behind these sites as “part of the dark Web,” saying they have links to huge spam, virus and fraud networks. Microsoft’s tests of software on some popular sites have shown that 35 percent of the counterfeit software contained harmful code.

Anthony Delaney, who started at Microsoft 25 years ago — driving a forklift to move boxes of its products for shipment — has worked his way up to become its piracy data guru.

On one of the flat screens, Mr. Delaney brings up a world map that lets users zoom into a city just as they would if hunting for directions online. But instead of highlighting landmarks and popular stores, the map illuminates Microsoft’s retail partners. Hover a mouse over a shop in San Francisco, for example, and you can see how much software it sells, how often Office is sold in tandem with Windows, the failure rate for authentication codes and how many cease-and-desist letters have gone to suspicious sellers in the area.

According to the map, the area within a 50-mile radius of New York City accounted for more than 200 “actions” last year, including 165 cease-and-desist warning letters to companies suspected of selling pirated software.

“We can see that only 5 percent of your sales have Office attached to Windows,” Mr. Delaney says. “If that’s below the average for the area, we may go have a chat or conduct a test purchase.”

This rather eclectic bunch is joined by about 75 other people, including former agents of the I.R.S., F.B.I., Secret Service and Interpol, and former prosecutors — all of whom work under Mr. Finn.

A former assistant United States attorney in New York, Mr. Finn directs this squad from a Paris office. He says Microsoft spends “north of $10 million” a year on its intelligence-gathering operations and an estimated $200 million on developing anti-piracy technology.

Mr. Finn talks at length about Microsoft’s need to refine the industry’s equivalent of fingerprinting, DNA testing and ballistics through CD and download forensics that can prove a software fake came from a particular factory or person. And his eyes widen as he thinks about advancing this technology to the point that Microsoft can emphasize the piracy issue directly to customers.

“Imagine the day when a consumer finds a link that says, ‘Click here if you would like a forensic examination of your disk,’ ” Mr. Finn says. “You put the disk in, the computer reads it and suddenly you see a map of everywhere that counterfeit has been seen all over the world. If people see it in a graphic and visual way, I think they are more likely to help.”

THE software thieves monitored by Microsoft come in various shapes and sizes.

College students, grandmothers and others have been found selling cheap, copied versions of software like Windows, Office, Adobe’s Photoshop and Symantec’s security software on eBay and other shopping Web sites.

And people unwilling to pay for discounted software, meanwhile, can find free versions of popular products online that offer downloads to all manner of copyrighted material.

Microsoft’s investigators, however, spend much of their time examining how large-scale counterfeiters produce copies at factories and then distribute their wares around the globe.

The biggest counterfeit software bust in history occurred in July 2007 in southern China. The Public Security Bureau there and the F.B.I. found a warehouse where workers assembled disks, authentication materials and manuals and prepared them for shipping. All told, investigators found $2 billion worth of counterfeit Microsoft software, including 19 versions of products in 11 languages. Software produced by this syndicate turned up in 36 countries on six continents.

As one means of trying to tell the genuine article from a fake, Microsoft embeds about an inch of a special type of thread in each “certificate of authenticity” sticker found on boxes of software and computers. The investigators spotted dozens of spools of counterfeit thread — 81 miles worth — at the Chinese warehouse.

Microsoft has found that operations of this scale tend to include all the trappings of legitimate businesses. Workers spend years building up contacts at software resellers around the globe, offering them discounted versions of software. Then they take the orders and send them off via shipping services, Mr. Keating says.

Many Microsoft products make users enter an activation code to register the software and have it work properly. The syndicates trade in stolen versions of these codes as well, and sometimes set up their own online authentication systems to give people the feeling they have a legitimate product. Groups in Russia and Eastern Europe, with various cybercrime operations in play, now use money gained from credit card fraud schemes to buy activation codes.

About a decade ago, only a few companies had the expertise or the $10 million needed to buy machines that could press CDs and DVDs. Today, someone can spend about $100,000 to buy second-hand pressing gear, says Patrick Corbett, the managing director at a CD plant owned by Arvato Digital Services, which produces Microsoft’s retail software in Europe.

“Just five years ago, there were five sites in China that supplied the whole country,” Mr. Corbett says. “Now these machines are commonplace.”

A prized object in the factory is the stamper, the master copy of a software product that takes great precision to produce. From a single stamper, Arvato can make tens of thousands of copies on large, rapid-fire presses.

Crucially for Mr. Keating, each press leaves distinct identifying markers on the disks. He spends much of his time running CDs through a glowing, briefcase-size machine — and needs about six minutes to scan a disk and find patterns. Then he compares those markings against a database he has built of CD pressing machines worldwide.

This system allows Microsoft to follow the spread of CDs from factories like the ones in China. The company conducts test purchases of software — online and in stores — and receives copies from some of the 300,000 people who have complained about running into counterfeits over the last four years.

Microsoft keeps tight controls over its partners that produce CDs. But counterfeiters get around these measures by stealing stampers and presses, presenting factories with fake paperwork from Microsoft or printing in a factory when it isn’t doing official business — a practice known in the industry as producing “cabbage.”

To make life harder for the counterfeiters, Microsoft plants messages in the security thread that goes into the authenticity stickers, plays tricks with lettering on its boxes and embosses a holographic film into a layer of lacquer on the CDs.

To the untrained eye, the counterfeit software in Microsoft’s labs appears to be exact replicas, right down to the boxes. Chinese counterfeiters mimic the built-in hologram simply by placing a holographic sticker across the entire surface of a CD; then they use other machines to erase some of the unique identifiers found at microscopic levels.

Such tactics have pushed Microsoft to create a new type of digital fingerprinting technology that scans a disk’s software code for special defects. The same techniques allow Microsoft to find malicious code that may have been injected in its products.

THE grand question surrounding Microsoft’s anti-piracy razzle-dazzle is whether it’s worth the cost.

The piracy problems tend to run highest in regions where there is less money to pay for Microsoft’s products. Backers of free software like the Linux operating system take aim at these areas, and Microsoft also faces growing competition from Google, which gives away its Office rival to consumers and sells a business version at prices far below what Microsoft typically receives.

“We love Microsoft’s heavy-handedness,” says Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization. “We want 100 percent of the people using Windows to pay for it, because in those places where you have a lot of pirated use of Windows, we don’t have any cost advantage.”

Microsoft’s critics portray its behavior as reactionary, saying the company is trying to protect old business models as new devices and services arrive.

“If people are going to steal something, we sure as hell want them to steal our stuff,” says Michael Simon, the chief executive of LogMeIn, a company whose software is used in smartphones and tablets. “When you have a saturated market like Microsoft and have no growth in these devices, then it might be different.”

The anti-piracy tactics employed by Microsoft rub many people in the software industry the wrong way as well.

The Business Software Alliance, which is financed in part by Microsoft and conducts audits and investigations on its behalf, spends about $50 million a year going after counterfeiters and offers rewards to people who report the use of pirated software in their companies. The alliance also finances the oft-cited annual study performed by the research firm IDC that comes up with a dollar amount tied to piracy losses.

Robert J. Scott, a lawyer at Scott & Scott in Dallas, contends like many others that the alliance’s figure is too high and that the group draws imprecise conclusions about the purchases that people would have made if they weren’t pirating software.

“I don’t put much stock in those reports,” says Mr. Scott, who advises businesses being audited by the alliance and other software companies.

The alliance defends its numbers, and Mr. Finn at Microsoft says the group’s figures are accurate. He plays down the central accusation that Microsoft would face less of a piracy threat if it just lowered prices. “We have seen no connection between piracy rates and price,” he says, citing the company’s own pricing experiments. “I think it’s a canard.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft-sponsored raids and customer audits sometimes have a public relations fallout.

Two years ago in India, Microsoft hired Anup Kumar, a 10-year veteran of the Central Bureau of Investigation, in part to teach the company how to push software piracy cases through the local bureaucracy. When raids followed, many local software sellers chided the government in the local press, saying it bowed to Microsoft’s will.

And, last month, Microsoft altered its policies in Russia after a spate of incidents in which local security services seized computers of advocacy groups and opposition newspapers, using the pursuit of stolen software as justification. Microsoft said it would provide a blanket software license for advocacy groups and media outlets, and offer legal aid to such groups caught up in software inquiries.

The protection of intellectual property has become a high-stakes political game where countries that do Microsoft’s bidding expect some kind of return on their effort, according to Joseph Menn, author of “Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet.”

“It’s part of the geopolitical process,” he said, “and Microsoft has a level of clout that a lot of other folks don’t in Washington and in other countries.”

Mr. Finn argues that Microsoft’s anti-piracy efforts and training of law enforcement are a benefit to countries that want to build out their tech sectors and show they value intellectual property.

“Intellectual property is a critical engine of economic growth,” Mr. Finn says. “That’s not just for large companies, but also for small businesses and entire countries. We work with governments that are realizing this is in their best interests.”

Miguel Helft contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/te.../07piracy.html





Going to the Movies? Prepare to be Watched While You Watch
wconeybeer

Gaining entry to some movie theaters lately gives patrons an experience that is on par with going through a TSA security checkpoint at the airport. Then once you’ve gained access, there are cameras strategically positioned that record your every move. Unfortunately, the extent to which these companies monitor movie-goers is only going to get worse.

In an effort to further combat piracy, some cinemas have incorporated the use of an infrared scanning system that detects recording devices in the audience and if detected, sounds an alarm to alert management. Now the company that offers those services, Aralia Systems, is working to enhance the system by incorporating technology which will scan and read the audiences’ physical expressions and emotions.

Aralia Systems is teaming up with Machine Vision Lab of the University of the West of England to develop the technology to turn their anti-piracy devices into a dual-purpose system that will gather data about how the crowd reacts to what they’re seeing at any particular moment.

“Within the cinema industry this tool will feed powerful marketing data that will inform film directors, cinema advertisers and cinemas with useful data about what audiences enjoy and what adverts capture the most attention. By measuring emotion and movement film companies and cinema advertising agencies can learn so much from their audiences that will help to inform creativity and strategy,” Dr. Abdul Farooq from Machine Vision Lab told TorrentFreak.

Personally, I’m growing tired of everything that I do being monitored for the benefit of some company’s marketing research. With the increasing digitization of media along with the use of social networking, it’s becoming more difficult to escape the intense data mining that seems to be everywhere you turn. Now, rather than using sales numbers, the movie industry wants to scan our physical reactions too? The idea seems overly invasive to me, and I wonder just how much the data would allow the industry to improve the experience, if at all.
http://www.myce.com/news/going-to-th...u-watch-36138/





You Can Hide, But in Europe You Can’t Watch Hulu
Eric Pfanner

Who says €5 won’t buy you anything these days?

For €5, or $7, a month in France, you can supplement your Internet connection with a virtual private network, or VPN, which disguises the location of your computer. Thousands of people have reportedly signed up for VPN’s in recent weeks in hopes of evading a crackdown in France on digital piracy. The authorities had begun sending out warnings to suspected file-sharers, telling them they risked losing their Internet connections if they continued downloading.

Or, for a centime less, music fans can go legit; €4.99 a month, for example, buys a basic subscription to Spotify, a popular online music service. There is even a free version of Spotify, though that interrupts a user’s listening to play advertisements.

Spotify is not yet the perfect alternative to piracy. For now, it offers only music, while anybody younger than 30 with a rudimentary knowledge of file-sharing and a disregard for copyright laws can also quickly download free movies, television shows, video games or other media from unauthorized sources.

But Spotify says it has attracted 10 million users, an estimated 650,000 of them paying customers. Most of these splurge on Spotify’s premium service, priced at €9.99 a month.

Spotify has grown so rapidly because it borrows many of the most attractive features of pirate bsites. Instead of paying for individual downloads, as with Apple’s iTunes, users can listen to an unlimited amount of music from Spotify’s library of eight million songs. Users can share playlists with others, giving them a bit of the rush of piracy without risking the appearance of cease-and-desist warnings in their e-mail in-boxes.

Best of all, from the music industry’s perspective, is the one feature of Spotify that does not resemble piracy: It pays royalties to record labels, musicians and other rightsholders. In the first eight months of 2010, these totaled €30 million, the company said. In several countries, including Sweden, industry executives say, Spotify has become the biggest revenue earner for the record labels.

But there is a catch. Spotify is still available in only a handful of European countries, including France, Britain, Spain and the Netherlands.

Spotify has been trying to get into the United States for months, but it lacks licensing deals with the major record labels, and it has missed several planned start-up dates.

The Web is rife with talk that Spotify is about to sign U.S. rights agreements. There is also plenty of speculation that the company and the labels will never reach agreement, either because Spotify is unable to meet their terms or because music executives are cooling to the idea of free, ad-supported music. There have been unsourced reports that Apple is trying to sabotage the talks in an effort to protect iTunes and a possible music streaming service of its own, or even that Apple might want to buy Spotify.

Spotify says it has “absolutely no intention” of selling to anyone.

“We’re working hard to build the best music service we can and are in this for the long haul,” it said in a statement, adding that it hoped to introduce a U.S. version by the end of the year.

Regardless of the reason for the delays, Spotify’s U.S. travails provide an interesting twist on international licensing issues. Often the roadblocks work the other way around, stymieing the plans of U.S. digital media and entertainment companies to expand to Europe.

That has been the case for Hulu, a popular online TV service in the United States, as well as Netflix, which offers online movies. The Kindle electronic book reader from Amazon, while available in some parts of Europe, has little local content available, because Amazon has been unable to sign licensing deals with European publishers.

So here is my challenge to the global media and technology industries: Introduce Spotify to the United States and Hulu to Europe. Or hand over the lost revenue to VPN vendors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/bu...a/01cache.html





Captcha Adverts Capture Your Attention

IT IS an online advertiser's dream. Some ads on the websites you visit could soon be impossible to ignore, as they will be integrated into the "captchas" used to check whether site visitors are human.

With many web users using tools to block online adverts, companies must find new ways to get their message across. Software firm NuCaptcha, based in Vancouver, Canada, believes the answer lies in captchas, as they require a user's full attention to solve.
The firm has created NuCatpcha Engage to exploit this. Instead of the traditional squiggly word that users have to decipher, the new system shows them a video advert with a short message scrolling across it. The user has to identify and retype part of the message to proceed. Companies including Electronic Arts, Wrigley and Disney have already signed up.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...attention.html





Copyright Infringement and Me
Illadore

The tl;dr version of this post: My 2005 Ice Dragon entry, called "A Tale of Two Tarts" was apparently printed without my knowledge or permission in a magazine and I am apparently the victim of copyright infringement.

The story:
I was contacted early last week by a friend of mine who lives in the Northeast about my "As American as Apple Pie - Isn't!" article that was published in Cooks Source magazine, mostly to inquire how I had gotten published. This was news to me, as I hadn't ever heard of this magazine before.

However, some basic Google-fu lead me to find them online and on Facebook. In fact, after looking at the Cooks Source Facebook page, I found the article with my name on it on on "Page 10" of the Cooks Source Pumpkin fest issue. (No worries, I have screencaps.) The magazine is published on paper (the website says they have between 17,000 and 28,000 readers) as well as being published on Facebook as well.

So. I first phone the magazine then send a quick note to the "Contact Us" information page, asking them what happened and how they got my article. (I thought it could have been some sort of mix-up or that someone posted it to some sort of free article database.) Apparently, it was just copied straight off the Godecookery webpage. As you can see from the page, it is copyrighted and it is also on a Domain name that I own.

After the first couple of emails, the editor of Cooks Source asked me what I wanted -- I responded that I wanted an apology on Facebook, a printed apology in the magazine and $130 donation (which turns out to be about $0.10 per word of the original article) to be given to the Columbia School of Journalism.

What I got instead was this (I am just quoting a piece of it here:)

"Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was "my bad" indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.
But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free!"

I got nothing.

Scratch that. I sure as heck do. Let's go over the major points:

• At this point, I am mad as hell. It is now the principle of the thing -- and I also can not quite believe that my copyright was violated -- and then I was informed that I should *pay them* for editing it for me!

• The web is NOT public domain! Don't believe me? Try the University of Maryland -- or just Google it.

• I should be thankful because I wasn't flat out plagiarized? Don't college students get, oh, I dunno, tossed out for being caught for plagiarism? How is this a valid argument?

I have some ideas of where to go from here but I am more than willing to listen to other suggestions.
http://illadore.livejournal.com/30674.html





The Loan Arranger
G.F.

AMAZON.COM says soon you will be allowed to lend out electronic books purchased from the Kindle Store. For a whole 14 days. Just once, ever, per title. If the publisher allows it. Not mentioned is the necessity to hop on one foot whilst reciting the Gettysburg Address in a falsetto. An oversight, I'm sure. Barnes & Noble's Nook has offered the same capability with identical limits since last year. Both lending schemes are bullet points in a marketing presentation, so Amazon is adding its feature to keep parity.

Allowing such ersatz lending is a pretence by booksellers. They wish you to engage in two separate hallucinations. First, that their limited licence to read a work on a device or within software of their choosing is equivalent to the purchase of a physical item. Second, that the vast majority of e-books are persistent objects rather than disposable culture.

If you own a physical book, in much of the world you may sell it, lend it—even burn or bury it. You may also keep the book forever. Each of those characteristics is littered with footnotes and exceptions for e-books. We are granted an illusion of ownership, but may read only within the ecosystem of hardware and software supported by the bookseller with sometimes additional limitations imposed by publishers. Witness Amazon's remote deletion—since abjured—of improperly sold copies of George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" in 2009. This Babbage recalls an Apple executive, Phil Schiller, extolling to him in 2003 the virtues of purchasing downloadable music when that company's iTunes Store launched, and the dominant model was for recurring subscriptions. Mr Schiller described buying a song as owning it. Asked if one could therefore sell the song, Mr Schiller said no. He explained:

I do think of it as ownership, and it really does fit the definition of legal ownership. [There are] certain boundaries on your rights, just as on everything I own. I can own a car but that doesn’t give me the right to speed 100mph in it.

That was as tendentious then as it is now, and applies just as directly to Apple's current e-book offerings. True, Apple removed digital rights management (DRM) protection from its music when the recording industry decided its best tool to fight Apple's near-total ownership of digital downloads was to make it possible for music to be played on devices other than iPods. But the licensing terms for music didn't change, and books and video remain locked down, however ineffective such protection is.

But the reason for restricting lending, even with the sham of offering it in Amazon's or Barnes & Noble's form, is to distract people from the fact that buyers are spending real money to buy a book they may read just once. To judge from the information Amazon provides, the long tail applies to e-books as it does everywhere else. Many different titles are flogged, but the most disposable and ephemeral have the lion's share of units sold. Dan Brown's epics are rarely re-read, judging by how many copies are available for one penny or given away in free book bins weeks after release. Allowing the loan of "The Lost Symbol" by any purchaser to any other e-book hardware or software user worldwide turns each buyer into a one-person lending library. Publishers don't much like libraries, either, despite the chin-wagging otherwise. (In the US, the public lending right or remuneration right doesn't hold; the first-sale doctrine allows library lending of physical media without additional fees.)

With a physical book, the afterlife of a disposable read is to hand it off to another party: a library sale, a friend or relative, or the free bin outside a used bookstore. Such books are also purchased in the millions and sold for one penny plus shipping online partly as a marketing effort by booksellers who can then include their own catalogs with each sale. An e-book, however, lives in limbo. Neither moving on to the next life, nor returning to this one, it can never be freed.

That will change. Just as with music, DRM will be cracked. As more people possess portable reading devices, the demand and availability for pirated content will also rise. (Many popular e-books can now be found easily on file-sharing sites, something that was not the case even a few months ago, as Adrian Hon recently pointed out.) The end-game is unclear. Authors can't turn to touring to obtain revenue in the way musicians can, though some can charge steep speaking fees. Nor can authors produce their work in 3D, only readable in certain special theaters. (McSweeney's has a proposal in that regard.)

All is not lost, however. Despite fewer adults reading fewer books, billions are still sold worldwide each year, with an increasing portion being digital. Publishers and booksellers need to get non-readers to pick up a device and buy books, and existing readers to read more. Lowering the risk of purchasing a book that a reader may not like would reduce the friction between considering a title and clicking the buy button.

In fact, Barnes & Noble and Starbucks are experimenting with a sort of loan in their bricks-and-mortar shops. The bookseller allows its Nook hardware owners to read books willy-nilly on its stores' Wi-Fi networks for up to an hour a day. Starbucks has partnered with several publishers to allow full access to some titles, but only while a browser is in the store. Barnes & Noble's effort is a year old and Starbucks' was launched just a few days ago.

In other words, they are finally doing with digital books what they have long practised with the printed sort. After all, most bookshops nowadays let you pick a book off the shelf and read it at your leisure, sometimes providing comfy armchairs. Cafés have been making books and newspapers available to patrons for centuries, to entice them to stick around for another cuppa.

The college-textbook market provides another replicable business model. Students pay through their noses for new textbooks at the start of term only to resell them at the end to other students or back to the original bookshop at a discount. Alternatively, they rent books for a fee while leaving a deposit which is returned when the book comes back to the shop. Creating a legitimate digital resale market along similar lines ought to be possible. If, that is, publishers can be convinced to let what are in effect mint-condition digital copies to go at a lower price.

Introducing either de facto rental (purchase and resell at prices set by the bookseller) or the actual sort (read a book in a set period of time for a lower fee) would expand general and specialist readership alike, while discouraging a turn to piracy by breaking the appearance of immutable, high prices. At the same time, it would enable publishers, booksellers and authors to sidestep the first-sale doctrine of physical media, and to rake in revenue each time a "used" digital copy passes from hand to hand.
The music and film industries fought a decade-long losing battle for the digital realm that only put them at odds with their best customers. The book business may yet be able to avoid recapitulating all that pain and disruption, not least by pinching ideas from the off-line world.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babba.../10/steal_book





Times and Sunday Times Readership Falls after Paywall
BBC

Sunday Times newspaper van The Times newspapers went behind an online paywall four months ago

More than 100,000 people have paid to go behind the Times and Sunday Times' new online paywalls but visits to their websites have fallen by about 87%.

Times Online was registering about 21 million unique users a month to its front page earlier this year but the figure fell to 2.7 million last month.

The papers said in addition 100,000 people had a joint subscription to read the newspapers in print and digitally.

Times editor James Harding said the papers were "hugely encouraged".

Publishers of the Times and Sunday Times have revealed for the first time how many people are paying to read their newspapers online or on mobiles. They said that figures stood at 105,000.

The subscription figures have been eagerly awaited by publishers and advertisers since the two papers went behind an online paywall four months ago.

The figure for unique users for their websites comprises two million for the Times and 700,000 for the Sunday Times.

BBC media correspondent Torin Douglas said many people in the industry had been sceptical about the paywall move, and that there would be intense analysis and debate over the significance of the figures.

'Suicidal economics'

Times executives said they had expected to lose 90% of the papers' online readers when they started charging £2 a week, or £9.99 for a four-week iPad subscription.

Mr Harding told the BBC: "It's very early days but we're hugely encouraged by what we've seen.

"We're seeing that those people who are reading the digital editions of the Times and the Sunday Times really like them, if they sign up for a trial they tend to stick with us.

"We'd engaged in a quite suicidal form of economics - which was giving our journalism away for free. We knew that if we continued to do that we couldn't invest in reporting.

"Our concern was would we be cut off from the 'internet conversation', and the truth is we haven't been."

'Very pleased'

The publishers now say the total paid audience so far is close to 200,000, allowing for duplications in subscriptions.

About 50,000 are paying a monthly subscription, either for the website editions or to read the papers on an iPad or Kindle. Many others are buying a £1 day pass.

The figures include subscribers to the print version of the papers who receive an online subscription as a result.

Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of Rupert Murdoch's News International, said: "We are very pleased by the response to our new digital services.

"These figures very clearly show that large numbers of people are willing to pay for quality journalism in digital formats."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11671984





Will Netflix Destroy the Internet?

American broadband capacity might not be able to keep up with everyone who wants to stream movies.
Farhad Manjoo

On Sept. 22, Netflix began offering its streaming movie service in Canada. This was Netflix's first venture outside of the United States, and because the company wasn't offering its traditional DVD-by-mail plan to Canadians, its prospects seemed questionable. How many people would pay $7.99 per month (Canadian) for the chance to watch Superbad whenever they wanted?

A lot, it turns out. According to Sandvine, a network management company that studies Internet traffic patterns, 10 percent of Canadian Internet users visited Netflix.com in the week after the service launched. And they weren't just visiting—they were signing up and watching a lot of movies. Netflix videos quickly came to dominate broadband lines across Canada, with Netflix subscribers' bandwidth usage doubling that of YouTube users.*

It's not just Canada. Netflix is swallowing America's bandwidth, too, and it probably won't be long before it comes for the rest of the world. That's one of the headlines from Sandvine's Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report, an exhaustive look at what people around the world are doing with their Internet lines. According to Sandvine, Netflix accounts for 20 percent of downstream Internet traffic during peak home Internet usage hours in North America. That's an amazing share—it beats that of YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, and, perhaps most tellingly, the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent, which accounts for a mere 8 percent of bandwidth during peak hours. It wasn't long ago that pundits wondered if the movie industry would be sunk by the same problems that submarined the music industry a decade ago—would we all turn away from legal content in favor of downloading pirated movies and TV shows? Three or four years ago, as BitTorrent traffic surged, that seemed likely. Today, though, Netflix is far bigger than BitTorrent, and it seems sure to keep growing.
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Sandvine has been publishing annual reports on broadband usage since 2002. When you study previous editions, you notice that Netflix's dominance over BitTorrent fits into a larger story about how our Internet use is changing. Over time, we've shifted away from "asynchronous" applications toward "real-time" apps. Every year, that is, we're using more of our bandwidth to download stuff we need right now, and less for stuff we need later. Sandvine's 2008 report showed that all the applications that saw big increases in traffic were dependent on real-time access: online gaming, Internet telephone programs like Skype, instant messaging, Web video, and "placeshifting" devices like Slingbox that let you watch TV shows you record on the Internet. Peer-to-peer file-sharing is asynchronous; you spend hours downloading a movie or game that you'll watch or play later. In Sandvine's 2008 report, peer-to-peer use was essentially unchanged from the previous year. By 2009, peer-to-peer traffic had declined by 25 percent.

That makes sense—once we come to expect immediate access to videos, BitTorrent's download-now, watch-later model seems outdated. That's what happened for me. In a column last spring, I admitted my affection for illegally downloading movies and TV using BitTorrent. I had what I thought was a good excuse for going over to the dark side—there wasn't a good way to get movies and TV shows legally online. Yes, Netflix offered a streaming service called Watch Instantly, but I wrote that the company's streaming service "often feels like Settle-For Instantly, since many of the titles are of the airline-movie variety."

In the last 18 months, though, Netflix has gotten much better in two main ways. First, it signed deals with TV networks and movie distributors that let it add a lot more movies and shows. It certainly doesn't have everything—or even most things—that I want, but I rarely feel like I'm wasting my time watching garbage. Second, Netflix's streaming service is now available on a wide range of devices—you can watch with your computer, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Blu-ray and DVD players, Wii, PlayStation 3, Xbox, and a range of Web-connected TVs. This is one of my favorite things about Netflix: I can start a movie on my TV, watch a bit of it later on my PC, and then finish it on my iPad before bed. Every time I switch to a new device, the video starts right where I left off. No other movie-delivery system—not DVDs, not BitTorrent, not iTunes, not Hulu—allow for this kind of flexibility. And as long as Netflix keeps expanding its library and the number of devices you can get it on, I don't see how it can lose.

Well, maybe there is one dark cloud: Will there be enough available bandwidth for Netflix to keep growing? Wired.com's Ryan Singel points out that in the hours when Netflix hits 20 percent of broadband use, it's being used by just under 2 percent of Netflix subscribers. That stat has huge implications for how ISPs manage their lines. If 2 percent of Netflix customers account for one-fifth of the traffic on North American broadband lines, what will happen when more and more Netflixers begin to watch movies during peak times?*

The outcome might actually not be that dire. Theoretically, broadband capacity isn't fixed—as people begin using bandwidth-hogging services like Netflix more often, they'll subscribe to faster Internet lines, and that will push ISPs to build out their capacity. Still, as I've pointed out in the past, American broadband is pretty crummy. Unlike in other countries, our Internet plans haven't been getting faster, cheaper, and more widespread. In a presentation that it published online earlier this year, Netflix predicted that its shipments of DVDs would peak in 2013—after that, the number of discs it sends out will begin to decline. The future of Netflix, then, is the Internet. It's an open question whether the Internet can keep up.
http://www.slate.com/id/2273314?nav=wp





Proclaimed Dead, Web Is Showing New Life
Eric Pfanner

Twenty autumns ago, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, came up with a catchy name for a revolutionary project that aimed to open the Internet to the masses. “The World Wide Web,” he called it, and the image proved to be so evocative that, for many people, the Web has become synonymous with the Internet.

But now, two decades after Mr. Berners-Lee had his brainstorm, some people are predicting the demise of the Web. Even though the Web is merely one of many online applications, they add, this could be the end of the Internet as we know it.

“The Web is dead,” Wired magazine declared in a recent cover story. “The golden age of the Web is coming to an end,” wrote Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research. The Atlantic monthly warned of “the closing of the digital frontier.”

The argument goes something like this: After falling in love with the openness of the Web, consumers are recoiling from its chaos and embracing the sense of order offered by walled-off digital realms. These include applications for mobile devices like the Apple iPad and iPhone and password-protected social networks like Facebook, where much of what people do takes place beyond the reach of search engines and Web browsers.

Meanwhile, advocates of openness fear that telecommunications companies want to build separate, Balkanized “Internets” of their own, where they control the content and collect tolls for traffic that passes through them. Some media companies are already putting more of their content, once freely available, behind “pay walls,” and lobbying governments to crack down on the free-for-all of illegal file-sharing.

Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard professor of Internet law, says that the growth of walled gardens like Apple’s applications store have threatened the “generative” character of the Internet, which has permitted users to build on what is already there, as with Lego toys.

“The serendipity of outside tinkering that has marked that generative era gave us the Web, instant messaging, peer-to-peer networking, Skype, Wikipedia — all ideas out of left field,” he writes in a recent book, “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.” “Now it is disappearing, leaving a handful of new gatekeepers in place, with us and them prisoner to their limited business plans and to regulators who fear things that are new and disruptive.”

Are matters really so dire? For the doomsayers, there are some inconvenient truths.

Every day, about a million new devices — computers, mobile phones, televisions and other things — are hooked up to the Internet, according to Rod Beckstrom, chief executive of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees the Internet address system. The total number of Internet users worldwide, about two billion, is growing by 100 million to 200 million a year.

Most of this growth is occurring in developing countries, where the Web is dominant and applications stores and the like have made fewer inroads. The number of Web pages has grown from 26 million in 1998 to more than one trillion today, according to Google.

The Web has been better equipped to reach new corners of the world since the recent opening up of the domain name system to non-Western languages. North America, which once dominated the Internet, now represents only 13.5 percent of its users, according to Internet World Stats, a Web site that compiles such data, compared with 42 percent for Asia and 24 percent for Europe.

“Reports of the death of the Web have been greatly exaggerated,” Mr. Beckstrom said. “It’s going to be alive and kicking for a long time.”

While the Web is merely one of many applications that operate over the Internet, along with e-mail, instant messaging, peer-to-peer file-sharing services and other tools, it is the most familiar one for many people; almost anyone, anywhere with an Internet connection and a little bit of knowledge can view a Web page.

So as other kinds of Internet traffic have started to grow more rapidly than Web use, some open-Internet campaigners see a threat to the Web and, more generally, the Internet as we know it. Yet the distinctions are growing less relevant. When you visit YouTube, for example, you are using the Web to sort through the available videos, while the video stream is delivered outside the Web, but still via the Internet.

Even if the supposed threats have been overblown, it is clear that the Web and the Internet are changing.

Mobile devices increasingly come with Internet access as a standard feature. Within a few years, analysts predict, more people will connect to the Internet from smartphones than from deskbound computers.

The popularity of applications for smartphones, often with content or features similar to those available on open Web sites, could steer more toward private digital gardens, like those that existed in the heyday of online services like CompuServe and Prodigy.

“A walled garden is a place where everything looks beautiful, it works well, and there are flowers everywhere,” said Frédéric Donck, director of public policy at the Internet Society in Brussels. “But it’s not the Internet.”

Why? Applications available for Apple devices are subject to approval by the company, which rejects, among others, those that do not meet its guidelines for taste or decency. Some European newspapers have had to censor racy photos to make their applications conform with Apple’s rules, which prohibit displays of bare female breasts.

“People don’t think of their use of devices as a political act,” said Mr. Bernoff, the Forrester analyst. “They just think about whether they are having an elegant, seamless experience. But do I really want Apple deciding what kind of content is appropriate?”

For Internet users in countries like China or Iran, the idea that there are limits to online freedom is nothing new. There, governments routinely block access to Web sites that feature dissenting political views.

Advocates of an open Internet worry that official oversight is on the rise elsewhere. In Australia, the government has proposed a system through which the Internet would be filtered to block access to sites containing child pornography or other material that is illegal or deemed to be highly offensive.

Movie and music companies, meanwhile, have lobbied governments to crack down on digital freeloaders who engage in unauthorized sharing of their content. Countries like France, Britain and South Korea have established laws authorizing the suspension of persistent copyright pirates’ broadband connections, in an effort to get more of them to become paying customers.

For advocates of openness, the nightmare scenario is one in which telecommunications companies, allied with other corporate partners, seize control of the Internet and run it in a way that maximizes profits, rather than openness. This concern has fueled calls for governments to impose rules to enforce “network neutrality,” or equal priority to all Internet traffic, regardless of the content.

“The Internet has become a truly global space where everyone, almost everywhere, has access to the same information,” said Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net, a group based in Paris that campaigns against restrictions on Internet use. “I think this is one of the most precious things we have ever built as a civilization, and this is what is at stake now.”

Others say network neutrality is a largely American issue, rooted in a lack of competition among broadband providers, which fuels fears that these companies might abuse their monopoly positions.

There are other signs that competition can keep openness alive. One of the most successful of the closed systems, Apple’s iPhone, is already showing signs that it might be eclipsed by other, more interoperable rivals. In the United States, sales of smartphones using Google’s more open Android platform recently overtook sales of iPhones. Android phones also use applications, but unlike Apple, Google does not screen them, and Android is open to competing applications stores, like one planned by Amazon.

Even the idea that the desktop and the mobile Internet exist in two different spheres may turn out to be merely a temporary phenomenon, some analysts say. Much of the content in mobile applications is scoured and repackaged from the Web — so, for now, at least, it is difficult to argue that users of applications are really turning their backs on the Web.

“If you go with the Web, the potential mobile audience is in the billions. If you go with any of the smartphone operators in a closed environment, it’s a small fraction of that,” said Jon von Tetzchner, chief executive of Opera Software, a Norwegian company that develops Web browsers. “To me, it seems like the Web has been winning fairly big time.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/te...1webwalls.html





World Wide, Web Surfing Down as Entertainment, P2P Dominate Global Internet Usage
Audrey Watters

Sandvine's Fall 2010 report on global Internet trends gives a glimpse into Internet usage in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. In addition to examining geographic differences, the report also points out some of the differences between mobile and "fixed" usage, it also makes clear that "To subscribers, the Internet is the Internet, whether it's accessed through a wire or over wireless spectrum."

Although there are certainly variations between regions, some of the trends the report finds are global: Real-time entertainment dominates data consumption on both mobile and fixed networks worldwide, constituting about 43% of total Internet traffic. And social networking services make up a significant and growing percentage of mobile Internet traffic, doubling in Latin America just over the last 8 months.

As people look more to real-time entertainment and social networks, web browsing is on the decline everywhere, except in Europe - the only part of the world, according to the study, that also saw a decline year-over-year in P2P traffic.

North America

Real-time entertainment is the largest contributor to data consumption in North America on both fixed and mobile networks, accounting for 43% of peak period traffic on the former and 41% on the latter. This is up from 30% less than a year ago. And as we've reported here before, Netflix alone constitutes more than 20% of downstream traffic during that time-frame.

P2P file-sharing remains popular in North America, but it has seen a dramatic decline on mobile networks. Even so, it still accounts for a whopping 53.3% of upstream capacity on fixed networks. In other words, we leave our PCs on at home for P2P, and don't bother with file-sharing on our smartphones.

Latin America

Although Latin America still has a relatively low level of Internet penetration, many new subscribers are opting for mobile, rather than fixed network access. Unlike the North America market, where these two methods of accessing seem to lead to slightly different Internet usage, in Latin America Internet users seem to behave similarly whether they're wireless or wired.

Asia-Pacific

The median monthly data consumption in this region occurring over fixed networks is roughly 12 GB. That's compared with about 4 GB per month in North America.

Europe

The top four applications driving European upstream traffic are BitTorrent (30%), HTTP (23%), PPLive (12%), and Skype (9%). The latter is significantly higher than in North America and the Asia-Pacific, where Skype is roughly 3% of upstream traffic.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...ment_p2p_d.php





CSIRO Introduces Wi-Fi to Your TV Antenna
Josh Taylor

The CSIRO will tomorrow unveil a breakthrough in wireless technology that will allow multiple users to upload content at the same time while maintaining a data transfer rate of 12 megabits per second (Mbps), all over their old analog TV aerial.

The technology, named Ngara, allows up to six users to occupy the equivalent spectrum space of one television channel (7 megahertz) and has a spectral efficiency of 20 bits per second per hertz. Ngara can handle up to three times that of similar technology and maintains a data rate more than 10 times the industry minimum standard, CSIRO ICT centre director Dr Ian Opperman revealed.

"Someone who doesn't live near the fibre network could get to it using our new wireless system," Oppermann said in a statement. "They'd be able to upload a clip to YouTube in real time and their data rate wouldn't change even if five of their neighbours also started uploading videos."

The Federal Government's National Broadband Network project will deliver fibre services to 93 per cent of the population, while another 4 per cent are expected to be covered by wireless broadband services. NBN Co recently released a consultation paper calling for industry views on proposed wireless services.

The Federal Government is currently switching off analog TV signals across the country, with the deadline for the switch-off to be completed by 2013. The spectrum currently used for analog TV is expected to be auctioned off by the Australian Communications and Media Authority shortly after that. Optus and Telstra have been calling for a quick release of the spectrum so that they can use it for their planned Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile networks.

The Ngara technology could also utilise this spectrum, according to Gartner wireless research director Robin Simpson.

"This means any rural property or business that can currently receive TV signals could in future connect to high-speed internet just by using a new set-top box," he said.

Simpson told ZDNet Australia that the technology was specifically designed for rural areas but could also potentially compete with LTE in metropolitan areas.

"What I'm most interested in about it is that it is an ideal technology for remote and rural areas provided they already have TV, which a lot of them do. Wherever there's a broadcast tower, they can pop antennas for this new technology on that tower and reach the homestead through the existing tower," he said.

"What appeals to me about it is that it re-uses existing infrastructure, all of the competing wireless technologies tend to use high frequencies and therefore require new base stations, new spectrum and new receiving antenna infrastructure as well," he added. "The fact that they're re-using the analog TV stuff gives them a much easier market entry strategy."

The CSIRO was the first to develop Wi-Fi technology that is widely used across the world today and currently holds the patent for the technology. It has instigated a number of legal cases in recent years to protect this patent and retrieve royalties owed to the organisation.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/csiro-introd...-339307025.htm





WiGig Teams Up With VESA For Wireless Display Standard

A standards deal by WiGig could send HD video between smartphones and screens - without wires
Tom Jowitt

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The Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) Alliance has signed a deal with a leading video standards body, which could let smartphone connect to HD screens without having to plug in any wires.

WiGig has been defining Gigabit-speed wireless links for computers peripherals and consumer equipment, using short-range 60GHz radio freqencies for the last two years. It has signed a deal with the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA), which has been defining display standards since SVGA in 1989, to add multi-gigabit wireless capabilities to VESA’s DisplayPort standard.

Essentially what this means is that in the future, devices such as smartphones or computers, could be connected to a HD television, monitor, or projector, but without wires.

Wireless Displays

The trend nowadays is for consumers to be able to view their content anywhere and anytime. For example, the long awaited Nokia N8 which finally began shipping in late September, offers users the ability to record HD movies thanks to its 12 megapixel camera, and the ability to play them back on a television, but currently this only be done via an HDMI cable and not wirelessly.

“The WiGig-VESA collaboration will deliver a wireless display capability with image quality and I/O experience equal to that of wired interfaces,” WiGig said. “This agreement will spur the development of a new ecosystem consisting of interoperable wireless display products, providing an effective wireless alternative to cables, docking stations and adapters.”

A certification program for wireless DisplayPort products will be developed in parallel.

“This builds on previous announcements by the WiGig alliance,” said VESA chairman Bruce Montag, speaking to eWEEK Europe UK. Montag is also a board member of the WiGig Alliance.

Winning Receipe

“We looked to develop a program for the certification for wireless display connections, and WiGig is an ideal basis to do that,” said Montag. “DisplayPort provides the multi-gigabit bandwidth and is packet based and allows for bidirectional data connections. It also supports USB connections, so really WiGig does it all: Wi-Fi at multi-gigabit speeds, wireless USB, and wireless DisplayPort.”

WiGig’s technology is made up of a triband radio that operates over the 60GHz spectrum. For out of sight connections, beam forming and beam steering is needed.

There will be a couple of years before the technology reaches consumers’ hands and pockets, said Montag: “It is up to each manufacturer’s roadmap, but in general we should start see this capability sometime in the 2012 time frame.”

The benefits also go beyond HD TV signals to the mundane needs of ordinary device synching, Montag added: “The advantage of this technology is that it is a mobility enabler. Today a smartphone needs a USB cable for synching, but this technology allows everything to done wirelessly with no cables. This includes docking, device to device data transfer, or simply the ability to also take advantage of other display capabilities to quickly connect to a TV or projector, without having to connect a cable.”

“It really is a winning receipe and we are continuing to gain momentum,” he told eWEEK Europe UK.

The WiGig Alliance has announced the completion of the WiGig version 1.0 A/V and I/O protocol adaptation layer (PAL) specifications. The specifications will be published in early 2011.

60GHz Push

The WiGig Alliance was formed to unify the next generation of multi-gigabit wireless products by encouraging the adoption and widespread use of 60GHz wireless technology worldwide.

Back in May this year the WiGig Alliance signed a partnership deal with the Wi-Fi Alliance, in order to encourage the development of products supporting 60 GHz technology. The IEEE 802.11ad working group which is one of two working towards Gigabit Wi-Fi, has agreed to use WiGig’s 60GHz technology.
http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/wi...standard-11054





A New Search Engine, Where Less Is More
Claire Cain Miller

Start-ups and big companies alike have tried to take on Google by building a better search engine. That they have failed has not stopped brave new entrants.

The latest is Blekko, a search engine that will open to the public on Monday.

Rich Skrenta, Blekko’s co-founder and chief executive, says that since Google started, the Web has been overrun by unhelpful sites full of links and keywords that push them to the top of Google’s search results but offer little relevant information. Blekko aims to show search results from only useful, trustworthy sites.

“The goal is to clean up Web search and get all the spam out of it,” Mr. Skrenta said.

Blekko’s search engine scours three billion Web pages that it considers worthwhile, but it shows only the top results on any given topic. It calls its edited lists of Web sites slashtags. The engine also tries to weed out Web pages created by so-called content farms like Demand Media that determine popular Web search topics and then hire people at low pay to write articles on those topics for sites like eHow.com.

It is also drawing on a fruitful category of Web search — vertical search engines that offer results on specific topics. Many companies assume that Google won the contest to search the entire Web, so they have focused on topical search. Bing from Microsoft has search pages dedicated to travel and entertainment, and Yelp is a popular choice for searching local businesses.

People who search for a topic in one of seven categories that Blekko considers to be polluted with spamlike search results — health, recipes, autos, hotels, song lyrics, personal finance and colleges — automatically see edited results.

Users can also search for results from one site (“iPad/Amazon,” for instance, will search for iPads on Amazon.com), narrow searches by type (“June/people” shows people named June) or search by topic. “Climate change/conservative” shows results from right-leaning sites, and “Obama/humor” shows humor sites that mention the president. Blekko has made hundreds of these slashtags, and users can create their own and revise others.

Mr. Skrenta, who has been quietly building Blekko since 2007, has spent his career trying to improve Web search by relying on Web users to help sift through pages.

He started the Open Directory Project, a human-edited Web directory that competed with Yahoo in the 1990s and was acquired by Netscape in 1998. He ran three search properties at AOL and helped found Topix, the human-edited news site that was acquired in 2005 by Gannett, the Tribune Company and Knight-Ridder.

In some cases, Blekko’s top results are different from Google’s and more useful. Search “pregnancy tips,” for instance, and only one of the top 10 results, cdc.gov, is the same on each site. Blekko’s top results showed government sites, a nonprofit group and well-known parenting sites while Google’s included OfficialDatingResource.com.

“Google has a hard time telling whether two articles on the same topic are written by Demand Media, which paid 50 cents for it, or whether a doctor wrote it,” said Tim Connors, founder of PivotNorth Capital and an investor in Blekko. “Humans are pretty good at that.”

Still, for many other queries, the results are quite similar. Blekko’s challenge is that most people are happy with Google’s search results, which comScore says account for two-thirds of search queries in the United States.

“Most people aren’t saying, ‘I’m just overwhelmed with content farms,’ ” said Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Land and an industry expert.

Google also enables people to easily search individual Web sites or set up a custom search of a group of Web sites, though it is a more complicated process.

Blekko is also taking aim at Google’s opacity about its algorithm for ranking search results. Blekko offers data like the number of inbound links to a site, where they come from and when Blekko last searched the content of a site.

Blekko has raised $24 million in venture capital from prominent investors like Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway and U.S. Venture Partners. It plans to sell Google-like search ads associated with keywords and slashtags.

Some start-ups that have taken on search have been folded into the big companies, like Powerset, which Microsoft bought in 2008. Others, like Cuil, a search engine started by former Google engineers in 2008, were flops. Blekko’s slashtags could be subject to spam since anyone can edit them, but Blekko says it will avoid that with an editor and Wikipedia-style policing by users.

“They have an interesting spin,” Mr. Sullivan said about Blekko. “It might take off with a small but loyal audience, but it won’t be a Google killer.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/te.../01search.html





Alternative Search Engine Blekko Launches to Eliminate Spam in Search
Jennifer Van Grove

Blekko’s alternative search engine — a $24 million venture-backed project that’s been three years in the making — is today launching its public beta. With the official rollout, Blekko is also releasing several new features designed for both mainstream and the site’s super users.

As you may recall, Blekko is designed to eliminate spam search results, allowing users to search just a subset of the web through its proprietary slashtag technology.

The most significant upgrade to Blekko’s search engine is the addition of slashtags that auto-fire for queries that fall into one of seven categories: health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipes and hotels. Every time a Blekko user’s query is determined to be in one of these categories, Blekko will automatically append the associated slashtag to the query and limit results to just the subset of URLs that fall under that slashtag.

The auto-fire functionality is designed with passive searchers in mind and aims to eliminate friction for first-time users. The technology that powers these auto-slashtags was developed through an extensive research and development phase that involved analyzing the relationship between queries and the type of spam results they typically generate.

Blekko plans to introduce auto-slashing for additional categories moving forward, but selected to launch with ones that represent a high volume of search traffic and are typically laden with spammy results. Health, lyric and financial queries on Google or Bing, for instance, will return results dominated by poor quality content farms or malware-hosting sites. Those same searches on Blekko yield results only from high quality sites.

Blekko’s slashtag formula works because of passionate users who take the time to add and edit URLs for category slashtags. As such, the company has released new features to enable users to apply to be editors for slashtags as well as share their comments and feedback on individual slashtags. Think of this as the Wikipedia formula but applied to search, so a small percentage of users will work together to build out slashtags for the majority of Blekko searchers.

Blekko has been testing its solution to search with roughly 8,000 beta testers who have created more than 3,000 different slashtags. Blekko tells us that 11% of its existing user base come back to the site on a weekly basis. CEO Rich Skrenta and founder Mike Markson have modest projections for the immediate future, but believe that once the site hits 1 million to 2 million queries per day, it can be profitable.

Blekko is currently available on the web or as a mobile-optimized site, but mobile applications are also said to be in the works.
http://mashable.com/2010/10/31/blekko-launch/





Google Earth and iPhone Trouble Israeli Security Chief

Civilian Internet applications now offer militant groups access to intelligence that rivals what government spies can get, Israel's domestic security chief said on Monday.

Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin, in a rare public address, identified cyber technologies as an ascendant international security threat.

"Intelligence once enjoyed only by countries and world powers can now be obtained through Internet systems like Google Earth, Internet cameras that are deployed all over the world and linked to the Web, or applications for IPhone devices that allow for quality intelligence to be received in real-time," he told a homeland security conference in Tel Aviv.

In what appeared to be an allusion to two parcel bombs found on U.S.-bound planes on Friday, he said such a tactic had featured in "mounting debates" among Islamist militant groups over the Internet on how to exploit international aviation.

(Writing by Dan Williams, Editing by Matthew Jones)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6A01DC20101101





Google Gaining on Booming Smartphone Market
Tarmo Virki

Google's Android software platform rose to No. 2 spot globally on the booming smartphone market in the third quarter, research firm Canalys said on Monday.

Nokia's Symbian continued to lead the market with a 37 percent share, while Android had 17 percent of the market. It has surpassed Research In Motion, Apple and Microsoft this year.

Growing popularity of Android phones -- made by companies including Motorola Inc, HTC Corp and Samsung Electronics -- puts Google in a good position as handsets look set to surpass computers for browsing the Web.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in September he expects mobile searches to generate most of the firm's revenue eventually, but it could take a long time, despite growing at a rapid clip.

Android software, offered free to cellphone vendors, has experienced dramatic growth since coming to market two years ago. Last quarter it saw a 14-fold growth from very low levels a year ago, Canalys said.

Helped by the surge of Android phones, cheaper smartphones are becoming increasingly the growth engine of the overall smartphone market, the researcher said.

"We are seeing more volume going into the mid- and lower-tier. We have reached a tipping point, smartphones are no longer the high-tier product," said analyst Pete Cunningham.

"Operators are looking to push smartphones into prepay market as these phones are generating a lot of data traffic revenues," Cunningham said.

This opens a new, large market for smartphones which have been sold on many developed markets mostly with monthly contracts.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6A01LU20101101





Microsoft Details Windows Phone 7 Kill Switch
Stewart Mitchell

Microsoft has outlined how it might use the little publicised “kill switch” in Windows Phone 7 handsets.

A kill switch is a tool that allows software controllers to remove certain apps or software from handsets if they pose a security or privacy risk, such as a Trojan planted in an app.

Apple's iPhone and Google's Android phone software also have kill switches built-in to cover the evetuality that they need to remove malware, or even just apps that break guidelines, but talk of a kill switch on Windows Phone 7 handsets has been muted since the platform launched last month.

“We don't really talk about it publicly because the focus is on testing of apps to make sure they're okay, but in the rare event that we need to, we have the tools to take action,” said Todd Biggs, director of product management for Windows Phone Marketplace.

“Market Place is a complex operation and we need to have the capability for dealing with different situations.”

According to Biggs, Microsoft's strict testing of apps when they are submitted for inclusion in Marketplace should minimise kill switch use, but he explained how the company would react if an application was deemed unsafe once it had been approved.

“If in the Marketplace an app does get through and goes rogue there are a couple of things we can do about it, depending on what it was,” he said.

“We could unpublish it from the catalogue so that it was no longer available, but if it was very rogue then we could remove applications from handsets - we don't want things to go that far, but we could.”

Rather than pushing out an instant zap the kill switch would be activated when handsets “checked in” with Marketplace as part of routine maintenance.

“From a high-level perspective, phones check in to see if there are any downloads or updates available and it will also check if there are any apps that shouldn't be on there,” he said. “There might be instances where we would remove the app.”

Microsoft was reluctant to give examples of situations that would warrant app deletion, but agreed privacy and security concerns would be on the list.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/security...-7-kill-switch





Music Apps Among Most Popular On iPads
FMQB

A new study from Nielsen breaks down the most popular apps downloaded by iPad users, and music apps ranked as the third-most-popular, coming in behind games and books. Out of the iPad owners surveyed, 50 percent said they had paid for music-related apps. Surprisingly, 32 percent of those surveyed had never downloaded any apps, while five percent said they only install free applications.

Nielsen also compared iPad and iPhone users, surmising that iPad owners are using their device's larger screen for reading and watching TV, while iPhones are slightly more likely to be used for radio and music.

When asked what content they regularly accessed with their device, 51 percent of iPhone users surveyed said music, compared to 41 percent of iPad users. However, 22 percent of iPhone users said they use it for radio, compared to 21 percent of iPad users.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=1995036





Taylor Swift Bracing For Monster Sales Week
FMQB

Everyone knew that Taylor Swift would have a big sales week when her new album, Speak Now, was released on October 25, but now some projections are saying it could be the biggest sales week since 2005! While Nielsen SoundScan's official tally won't be released until Wednesday morning, hitting the milestone of 1 million album sales in the first week is almost a certainty for Swift, according to Billboard.com. If Speak Now starts with 1 million copies sold, it would instantly be the best sales week for a single album since Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III bowed with 1,006,000 in June of 2008. It's also possible that Speak Now could have the biggest sales week for an album in over five years if it surpasses the total of 50 Cent's The Massacre, which shot to #1 by moving 1,141,000 units in March of 2005.

Meanwhile, Swift was on the Ellen DeGeneres Show yesterday to promote the album, and she talked about the pressure of writing all the songs by herself. "It took two years to make this album, and at some point in the process, I made the conscious decision to write it by myself," she explained on the show. "And then a little more than halfway through, I was like, 'I can do this by myself really, maybe.'... With this album, it's been such an emotional process. I'd have nightmares in the middle of the night that Rolling Stone hated it. I was really nervous about it, because taking this on, you're taking a lot of ownership of whether people like it or don't."

In other Swift news, the singer/songwriter has inked a deal to release her own fragrance line via Elizabeth Arden, and the first scent is due in fall 2011. "I have always loved how fragrance can shape a memory the way certain scents remind you of events and people that are imprinted in your thoughts," said Swift about her latest venture. "Lately I've been having fun experimenting with combining some of my favorite scents, so I'm really excited about working with Elizabeth Arden to develop my own unique fragrance."

Last but not least, Swift has revealed a number of overseas tour dates for early 2011. Swift will play Singapore, South Korea, Japan, The Phillippeans, Hong Kong, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Germany, France, Spain, the U.K. and Ireland in February and March.
http://www.fmqb.com/article.asp?id=2006483





Taylor Swift Album Is a Sales Triumph
Ben Sisario

In the diminished world of the music business, where album sales have plunged by more than 50 percent in the last decade, genuine blockbusters are an endangered species. But this week the recording industry got a rare bit of good news with the unmitigated triumph of Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now.”

The album, the third and latest by Ms. Swift — still a month shy of her 21st birthday — sold 1,047,000 copies in the United States in its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan, making it the fastest-selling new record in five years. It is also the first to get opening-week sales of a million since Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III,” which squeezed over the line in 2008 with 1,006,000.

On Wednesday, after several days of uncharacteristic silence on her Twitter feed, Ms. Swift wrote to her 4.5 million followers: “I ...Can’t... Believe ... This ... You guys have absolutely lit up my world. Thank you.”

Selling a million records in one week has always been big news; according to Billboard it has happened only 16 times since 1991. But Ms. Swift’s tally was orders of magnitude greater than anything else now in stores. Last week “Speak Now” sold more than the next 61 titles on the chart combined, and almost 11 times more than its nearest competitor, Sugarland’s “Incredible Machine” (Mercury Nashville), which had 89,000. “Speak Now” accounted for 18 percent of all album sales last week, and individual tracks from it have been downloaded 2.5 million times.

Ms. Taylor’s success has capped a notable year for country music, with a streak of recent No. 1’s on the Billboard album chart and Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now” the second-best seller of the year so far. But as many in the music industry see it, “Speak Now” proves that Ms. Swift has transcended the limitations of genre and become a pop megastar, period, with even apparent setbacks — like Kanye West’s outburst at the MTV Video Music Awards last year — ultimately working to expand her celebrity.

“Her songwriting appeals to the broadest demo of music buyers right now: teens,” said Ken Ehrlich, the longtime producer of the Grammy Awards. “And she’s incredibly positive and nonthreatening. Having Kanye confront her added millions of people on her side, even people who didn’t see the incident on MTV but saw it repeated endlessly after the show.”

Ms. Swift deserves most of the credit for her success of course. This year she won four Grammys, including album of the year, and critics have mostly praised her new album, calling it canny, catchy country-pop about growing up in public. A master blogger and Twitterer, she has established herself as a prime star for the social media age.

“She’s writing her life story with a series of songs, carrying us from her teenage years into her 20s,” said Jim Donio, president of the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, which represents music retailers. “She has made herself accessible, utilizing all the tools of the modern marketplace. It’s an interesting creative story and an interesting marketing story.”

To promote the album Ms. Swift’s label, Big Machine, had an extensive and high-profile marketing campaign, parts of which were in the works for as long as two years, said Scott Borchetta, the label’s president. Target offered a deluxe version of the album at its stores, supporting it with television commercials, and she held a literacy event that was broadcast to 25,000 classrooms. Last week Ms. Swift blitzed through the network TV talk shows, gave a private performance for contest winners that was broadcast online, and even played a semiprivate show at a JetBlue terminal at Kennedy International Airport in New York.

In an interview on Tuesday, as news of the album’s sales spread through the industry, Mr. Borchetta praised both his marketing plan and his artist. “It’s one thing to have a plan,” he said. “But we have the artist and the music to back it up.”

Perhaps the clearest sign that the music industry as a whole — and Nashville in particular — has embraced Ms. Swift as a new force to be reckoned with is that competing record labels have scheduled a wave of high-profile country releases for the last few months of the year, hoping that some of the popularity of “Speak Now” will rub off.

This week Brad Paisley released a hits collection, next week comes a new one from Reba McEntire, and the week after brings two more big country names, Keith Urban and Rascal Flatts (also on Big Machine). In recent weeks, much-awaited titles by Sugarland, the Zac Brown Band and Toby Keith have also come out.

“The reality is, when you have a hit album, it brings people into the stores,” said David Ross, editor and publisher of the country trade magazine Music Row. “When the traffic is going to grow, you want to be there.”

How long Ms. Swift can dominate the chart, though, is unclear. Healthy numbers are predicted for the new Susan Boyle album, out on Tuesday, and on Nov. 22 there are great expectations for Ms. Swift’s old nemesis: Kanye West.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/ar...04country.html





Popular Porn Site Hacked by Prudes
Iain Thomson

Hackers yesterday shut down one of the most popular porn sites on the internet..
Redtube.com is in the top 100 most visited websites, and was temporarily shut down by a 'Turkish cyber-terrorist' group calling itself 'Hacked Netdevilz'.

"No porn!" the site read. "We're not the first but we're the best."

The site, which attracted four million visitors last month, is now back up and running on a different server, but experts are poring over the site's logs to find the vulnerability that allowed the security features to be bypassed.

Redtube posts submitted videos, in the same way as YouTube, and attempts are now underway to discover whether the security hole is common to other web 2.0 sites.
http://www.securecomputing.net.au/Ne...by-prudes.aspx





Adobe Accelerates Patch Schedule for Critical Flash Bug
Dennis Fisher

Adobe has moved up the release date for the patch for the critical bug in Adobe Flash Player revealed last week, and now plans to have a fix ready on Thursday. The company still plans to patch Reader two weeks from now.

The vulnerability in Flash also exists in Reader and researchers said last week that attackers had already begun exploiting the bug in Reader by the time that Adobe acknowledged the problem and published an advisory. At the time of the initial advisory, Adobe officials said they planned to release a patch for Flash on Nov. 9 and for Reader on Nov. 15.

On Tuesday, the company updated its guidance, saying that the patch for Flash on Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris will be pushed out on Thursday, Nov. 4, and that the fix for Flash on Android will still be published Nov. 9. The schedule for the Reader patch remains the same.

A security researcher identified the Flash bug last Thursday and published a short explanation of it, which Adobe confirmed later in the day.

"A critical vulnerability has been identified in Flash Player 10.1.85.3 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris; Adobe Flash Player 10.1.95.2 and earlier versions for Android; and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader 9.4 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX, and Adobe Acrobat 9.4 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows and Macintosh. This vulnerability (CVE-2010-3654) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system," Adobe said.

There were reports on Wednesday that another unpatched bug in Adobe's Shockwave software had been found, as well. Secunia posted an advisory saying that there's a new use-after-free bug in Shockwave that can be exploited in certain Web-based attack scenarios.

"The vulnerability is caused due to a use-after-free error in an automatically installed compatibility component as a function in an unloaded library may be called," the Secunia advisory said. "Successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code, but requires that a user is tricked into opening the "Shockwave Settings" window when viewing a web page."

Adobe patched a previous vulnerability in Shockwave last week.
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/ad...ash-bug-110210





Amazon's 3G Kindle Leaps 'Great Firewall of China'

Amazon's Kindle 3G e-reader is being snapped up on China's grey market as it has an extra special advantage for customers - it automatically leaps the so-called "Great Firewall" of state web censorship.

Sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which are blocked by the Beijing authorities, can be accessed without interference by the Kindle's internet browsing function, the South China Morning Post has reported.

Amazon says it is not able to ship the Kindle to mainland China or offer content in the country, which has the world's largest internet community at more than 420 million web users, the Post reported.
Advertisement: Story continues below

But a seller in Beijing told the paper he slipped them into China a few at a time after having them delivered to an address outside the mainland. He has sold 300 in the past month.

AFP found dozens of Kindles available on web auction site Taobao, China's answer to eBay, with prices ranging from a special offer of 700 yuan ($105) to 5,000 yuan ($755).

Several Chinese bloggers are recommending the device, according to the paper, largely due to the fact it can "scale the wall automatically".

"I still can't believe it. I casually tried getting to Twitter, and what a surprise, I got there," the paper quoted a mainland blogger as saying.

"And then I quickly tried Facebook, and it perfectly presented itself. Am I dreaming? No, I pinched myself and it hurt."

The 3G Kindle uses global system mobile (GSM) communication technology, which gives Wi-Fi coverage in more than 100 countries, including China. The Wi-Fi-only Kindle would rely on a local internet connection.

Professor Lawrence Yeung Kwan, of the University of Hong Kong's electrical and electronic engineering department, told the paper that mainland internet patrols might have overlooked the gadget.

"Every Kindle device is pre-registered to a personal account, so every user's information is clear," he said.

"In addition, Kindle has a book-buying focus, so the censors may think these connections are relatively safe."

The Kindle has its own network, called Amazon Whispernet, to provide wireless coverage via AT&T's 3G data network in the US and partner networks in the rest of the world.

A 3G wireless coverage map on Amazon's website includes numerous Chinese cities, suggesting its 3G link involves a Chinese carrier, the paper said.
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/d...102-17amz.html





Germany's New e-ID Cards Raise Hackles Over Privacy
Michelle Martin

Germany has introduced electronic identity cards that store personal data on microchips, raising fears over data protection in a country especially wary of surveillance due to its Nazi and Stasi past.

The so-called eIDs enable owners to identify themselves online and sign documents with an electronic signature, which the government says should "increase the safety and convenience of e-business and e-commerce."

Yet many Germans fear the eIDs -- which store the owner's date and place of birth, address and biometric photo, with fingerprints voluntary -- could expose them to data theft.

In a country where historical memories of the Nazi Gestapo and old Communist East Germany's Stasi security police linger, there are also worries about an invasion of privacy.

Johannes Caspar, head of Hamburg's data protection agency, said some of the fears about the eIDs were no doubt the result of German history, in which the state twice acted as a kind of "Big Brother" collecting and storing data about its citizens.

Under Hitler's Nazi dictatorship, the Gestapo secret police kept close tabs on its citizens and under the Communist regime in East Germany the Stasi infiltrated nearly every aspect of life. It collected so much information about citizens that its files would stretch 112 km (70 miles) if laid out flat.

Cultural Issue

Small wonder, then, that Germans take data collection so seriously, as if it were part of their cultural identity, Caspar told Reuters.

"If you want to -- and only if you want to -- you can use a PIN number to make this data available to firms or authorities when you're doing business over the Internet," said Rainer Orell from Frankfurt's citizen center. "It's always for you to decide how much of your data you want to make accessible to whom."

Orell said there had nonetheless been a 10 percent increase in ID card applications in recent weeks, as wary Germans rushed to get another old-style one before authorities switched to issuing the electronic ones.

Around 44 percent of Germans remain skeptical about the eIDs, according to a survey by German tech industry body Bitkom.

Some have raised concerns about the security of the new card. Members of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), a European organization of hackers, say issuing authorities are "insufficiently prepared" for the new ID cards and that electronic data could be more susceptible to criminal abuse.

"The high degree of protection against forgery which German identity cards have enjoyed up until now is being unnecessarily undermined by the overhasty introduction of a large-scale project which is both conceptually weak and technically dubious," said Dirk Engling, spokesman for CCC.

Cornelia Rogall-Grothe of Germany's Interior Ministry has rejected these criticisms, saying both the cards and reading devices "use the latest technology on the market."

"But the new ID card obviously can't make an infected computer safe," she said. "Citizens have a duty to ensure they have the latest anti-virus protection, firewalls and suchlike."
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6A147M20101102





Firesheep, a Week Later: Ethics and Legality

In only one week, Firesheep has captured the attention and interest of hundreds of thousands of people around the world, and has spurred a lot of great discussion. This is the first in a series of posts highlighting and responding to topics I found most interesting.

I’ve received hundreds of messages from people who are extremely happy that the issue of website security is receiving attention. Some, however, have questioned if Firesheep is legal to use. I’d like to be clear about this: It is nobody’s business telling you what software you can or cannot run on your own computer. Like any tool, Firesheep can be used for many things. In addition to raising awareness, it has already proven very useful for people who want to test their own security as well as the security of their (consenting) friends. A much more appropriate question is: “Is it legal to access someone else’s accounts without their permission?”.

While the answer to this question is likely dependent on many variables and will almost certainly be debated for months or years to come, it should not matter to anyone reading this. It goes without saying that harassing or attacking people is a terrible thing to do. To suggest Firesheep was created for this purpose is completely false; Firesheep was created to raise awareness about an existing and frequently ignored problem. As I’ve said before, I reject the notion that something like Firesheep turns otherwise innocent people evil.

Reports have been trickling in that Microsoft’s anti-virus software is now detecting Firesheep as a threat, despite the fact that Firesheep poses absolutely no threat to the integrity of the system it’s installed on, and as mentioned earlier, has many legitimate uses. By installing anti-virus, you grant a third party the ability to remove files from your system trusting that only malicious code will be targeted. Microsoft and other anti-virus vendors abuse this trust and assert what they think you should or should not be doing with your computer. This is dangerous, but unfortunately not unprecedented. The same thing has happened over and over with Apple’s iOS App Store.

Firesheep has brought a discussion about very important issues into the limelight. Censorship does not offer a solution to these underlying issues, and will only cause further problems. For many people, code is a form of speech, and the freedom of speech must remain protected. If Microsoft wants to improve security with censorship, it would be more appropriate to block the insecure websites that are exposing user information in the first place.

Mozilla understands being a dictator is not their role and instead offers information about new features coming in the next version of Firefox that companies can use to further protect their users. Of course, companies have to care, and that remains a big problem.

In addition to questioning Firesheep’s legality, some people have questioned the ethics of its release. Similar tools have existed for years, so big companies, especially Facebook and Twitter, cannot claim they are unaware of these issues. They have knowingly placed user privacy on the back burner, and I’d be interested to hear some discussion about the ethics of these decisions, which have left users at risk since long before Firesheep.
http://codebutler.com/firesheep-a-we...d-legality?c=1





Google Bans Sale Of Android Spying App

Google is not letting a handset application that spies on someone's text messages be sold at its Android App Store.

The Secret SMS Replicator developed by DLP Mobile to help lovers find out if their partners are cheating on them violates company policy, according to Google.

The app works by secretly duplicating incoming text messages and forwarding these to another mobile phone number. The app is invisible when installed so a cellular phone user will not know that his text messages are being received and read by someone else.

The Secret SMS Replicator was only 18 hours old on Google's app store when the search engine giant decided to suspend its sale. The developer tried to defend it by saying it has a useful purpose to no avail.

DLP Mobile also tried to sell the app on Apple's iPhone app store but was rejected.
http://www.dbune.com/news/business/1...pying-app.html





Zeus Attackers Deploy Honeypot Against Researchers, Competitors

Phony administrative panel posts fake data on recent electronic quarterly federal tax payment attacks, fake 'new botnet' malware
Kelly Jackson Higgins

Attackers turned the tables on both their competitors and researchers investigating a recent Zeus attack, which targeted quarterly federal tax payers who file electronically, by feeding them a phony administrative panel with fake statistics.

The massive and relatively sophisticated spam campaign last month posed as email alerts to victims, notifying them that their electronic federal tax payments had failed and sending them to a link that both infects the victim with the Zeus Trojan and sends victims to the legitimate Treasury Department website, eftps.gov, for filing quarterly taxes.

Brett Stone-Gross, a researcher with The Last Line of Defense, discovered that attackers had set up a ruse for those trying to hack or access its administrative interface for the malware after studying the back-end malware server used in the EFTPS attack. The purpose appeared to be all about providing false information. Stone-Gross says the toolkit used in the attack came with an administrative interface that acts as a hacker's honeypot of sorts, gathering intelligence about the researchers or other users who try to access the console login or hack into it.

The login system to the "admin panel" practically begs to be hacked: It accepts default and easily guessed passwords as well as common SQL injection strings, according to Stone-Gross.

Most exploit toolkits come with an admin interface that manages exploits and payloads, and tracks exploit success rates, but this fake one was a new twist, Stone-Gross says. He found the fake panel while browsing the gang's source code. "It had a directory called 'fake admin' where they stored the logs of all of the IP addresses of people who tried the console and tried to access it," Stone-Gross says. There were also comments in Russian, he says.

"The faked admin panel serves two purposes: leading the researchers looking at their infrastructure, and they want to see who their competitors are," he says. They can then blacklist the researchers or use the information to DDoS or attack security vendors trying to investigate their malware campaigns, he says.

Joe Levy, CTO at Solera Networks, one of the first researchers to spot the EFTPS attack last month, says his team didn't see any honeypots during their investigation, but the appearance of such traps aren't surprising. "It is well-known that we are in an evolutionary arms race with cybercriminals. We've seen such signs of maturation as copycat malware, cybercrime ring wars, and even collusion and consolidation," Levy says. "Naturally, they have used and will continue to use honeypots for all the same reasons that the research community uses them: to better learn about their adversaries, as a tactic of deception, and to spread misinformation and uncertainty ... We need to keep mindful of this, but we can't permit such deceit to stifle or thwart our progress."

The attackers also offered what they advertised as "new botnet" malware, which rather than providing a peek at their next-generation bot instead gave the attackers a way to gauge what their competitors were up to, such as launching a fake AV campaign, Stone-Gross says.

Thorsten Holz, senior threat analyst at LastLine and assistant professor of computer science at Germany's Ruhr-University Bochum, says he thinks the "new botnet" button could have been for collecting new samples. "As an attacker, I would also love to learn what competitors would like to install on my infected machines. Brett found that the attackers logged a lot of information related to the login attempts, maybe to track more closely who wants to hack their back end," he says.

This helps them glean other details about their visitors, such as the browser version being used by the researcher and other "fingerprints" of their software, Stone-Gross says.

And the statistics on infected machines the attackers provided on their fake admin console were inflated. Stone-Gross was able to get a peek at their real database for brief intervals to see the real numbers, and they were far lower, he says.

Such anti-forensics activity by the bad guys is likely to become more common in the future, the researchers say. This, of course, poses problems for researchers and investigators trying to get a handle on the number of infections or the sizes of botnets. "Measuring the actual size of a botnet is already hard; it now gets even harder since we cannot trust the logging data without analyzing it in detail," Holz says.

Any data accessible via a Web interface should be considered suspect, says Stone-Gross, who blogged about his findings today. "Unless you have the back-end source code, it's hard to say what's really going on," he says.

Paul Henry, security and forensic analyst at Lumension, says disinformation tactics will continue. "In some respects, this smells like a marketing tactic by the malware author. It is important to remember that malware is big business today," Henry says. "We can expect that they will adopt marketing tactics that legitimate software providers have used historically to sell their wares."
http://www.darkreading.com/insiderth...leID=228200070





Military Ready for War in Cyberspace

The military's new Cyber Command, responsible for shielding 15,000 military computer networks from intruders, has become fully operational, the Defense Department said on Wednesday.

More than 100 foreign intelligence organizations are trying to break into U.S. networks, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn wrote in the September/October issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Some already have the capacity to disrupt U.S. information infrastructure, he said.

Gates ordered the new unit's creation in June 2009 to address the growing threat of cyber-attack.

It consolidates offensive and defensive operations under Army General Keith Alexander, who also heads the National Security Agency, the Defense Department's intelligence arm that protects national security information and intercepts foreign communications.

"Cyberspace is essential to our way of life and U.S. Cyber Command synchronizes our efforts in the defense of (Defense Department) networks," Alexander said in the Pentagon announcement.

Lynn declared the unit, based at Fort Meade, Maryland, fully up and running in a memorandum dated October 31, said Colonel Rivers Johnson, a Cyber Command spokesman.

The new unit began work in May, establishing a joint operations center and transitioning personnel and functions from the old structures.

It is part of the Offutt Air Force, Nebraska-based Strategic Command, the organization responsible for U.S. nuclear and space operations as well as information warfare and global military intelligence.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6A27T820101104





YouTube Withdraws Cleric’s Videos
John F. Burns and Miguel Helft

Under pressure from American and British officials, YouTube on Wednesday removed from its site some of the hundreds of videos featuring calls to jihad by Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born, Yemen-based cleric who has played an increasingly public role in inspiring violence directed at the West.

Last week, a British official pressed for the videos to be removed and a New York congressman, Anthony Weiner, sent YouTube a letter listing hundreds of videos featuring the cleric. The requests took on greater urgency after two powerful bombs hidden in cargo planes were intercepted en route from Yemen to Chicago on Friday, with the prime suspect being the Yemen-based group Mr. Awlaki is affiliated with, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

In an e-mail, Victoria Grand, a YouTube spokeswoman, said that the site had removed videos that violated the site’s guidelines prohibiting “dangerous or illegal activities such as bomb-making, hate speech, and incitement to commit violent acts,” or came from accounts “registered by a member of a designated foreign terrorist organization,” or used to promote such a group’s interests.

Ms. Grand said that Google, YouTube’s owner, sought to balance freedom of expression with averting calls to violence. “These are difficult issues,” she wrote, “and material that is brought to our attention is reviewed carefully. We will continue to remove all content that incites violence according to our policies. Material of a purely religious nature will remain on the site.”

In an interview, Mr. Weiner said that YouTube gave him a “bureaucratic” response at first, but seemed to take his request more seriously after the bombs were found. “It has become increasingly clear that this guy is an international terrorist that is using their service to do illegal things,” he said.

Britain’s concern over Mr. Awlaki and his group rose sharply on Wednesday with two developments. A young woman who had embraced his cause and watched dozens of hours of his videos was sentenced to life in prison for the attempted murder in May of a prominent legislator, and a top official in the government of Prime Minister David Cameron announced that a member of the Yemeni Qaeda group had been arrested earlier in the year in a previously undisclosed bombing plot against the country.

Britain’s security agencies have wrestled with dozens of terrorist plots in recent years, successfully foiling most but suffering deeply from the attack on the London transit system in July 2005, which left 56 people, including four suicide bombers, dead.
In recent months, top security officials here have issued a series of warnings, saying that an increasingly dire threat came from groups inspired by Osama bin Laden based in Yemen, Somalia and North Africa.

Jonathan Evans, chief of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, said recently that Mr. Awlaki and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were “of particular concern” in the light of their role in the attempted bombing on Dec. 25 of an American trans-Atlantic airliner approaching Detroit, and “because he preaches and teaches in the English language, which makes his message easier to access and understand for Western audiences.”

Scotland Yard detectives who investigated the attack on the legislator said outside the court that 21-year-old Roshonara Choudhury, a theology student, watched YouTube videos that showed sequences from sermons by Mr. Awlaki in Yemen in which the preacher urged Muslims everywhere to join in a worldwide holy war against the West. In a transcript of her interrogation published by The Guardian, she spoke of watching hundreds of hours of his videos. She said her motive was to “punish” the legislator, Stephen Timms, for voting in 2003 for Britain’s participation in the invasion of Iraq.

Her lawyer told the court that Ms. Choudhury, whose parents immigrated to England from Bangladesh, had been a Muslim moderate “of exemplary character” with no links to terrorist groups until she began browsing militant Muslim Web sites.

When she attacked, as Mr. Timms met with constituents at his office in a London suburb, she was wearing a black floor-length gown and a head covering that revealed only her eyes. She pulled out a knife and stabbed him twice in the abdomen.

Ms. Choudhury refused to attend the trial, saying she did not recognize the legitimacy of the British court system. But she appeared by video link from a prison in London for Wednesday’s sentencing, when the judge, Sir Jeremy Cooke, said that she would have to serve a minimum of 15 years before applying for parole. He described Ms. Choudhury as “an intelligent young woman who has absorbed immoral ideas and wrong patterns of thinking,” and added: “You do not suffer from any mental disease. You have simply committed evil acts coolly and deliberately.”

YouTube has faced other periods of pressure to remove videos linked to radical Islamists. Jeffrey Rosen, a professor of law at George Washington University who has written extensively about YouTube’s policies, including in The New York Times Magazine, said that in 2007, the Labour Government in Britain called on YouTube to block terrorist recruitment videos featuring Islamic fighters with guns and rockets.

Last May, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman’s staff asked Google to remove about 120 terrorist recruitment videos from YouTube. Google removed some videos that showed gratuitous violence or hate speech, but refused to take down others.

“YouTube and Google deserve credit for trying to distinguish videos that are merely offensive from those that show graphic violence or hate speech or risk inciting imminent violence, which is the line American courts have drawn in free speech cases since the 1960s,” Professor Rosen said.

John F. Burns reported from London, and Miguel Helft from San Francisco. Robert Mackey contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/world/04britain.html





Kidnapping, Theft and Rape Are Not "Cyber" Crimes
Neil Schwartzman

Kidnap. Rape. There are no lesser words that can be used to describe what happened to the daughter of an anti-spam investigator in Russia.

His daughter was recently released, according to Joseph Menn's recent article on Boing Boing, after having been kidnapped from her home five years ago, fed drugs, and made to service men, as a warning to ward off further investigations.

The criminals behind these vicious acts were also responsible for large spamming organization associated with Russian Mob activity.

Note that we say "also."

When someone is mugged, harassed, kidnapped or raped on a sidewalk, we don't call it "sidewalk crime" and call for new laws to regulate sidewalks. It is crime, and those who commit crimes are subject to the full force of the law.

For too long, people have referred to spam in dismissive terms: just hit delete, some say, or let the filters take care of it. Others—most of us, in fact—refer to phishing, which is the first step in theft of real money from real people and institutions, as "cyber crime." It's time for that to stop.

Some of these crimes involve technology. So what? Criminals have used technology before.

Some of these crimes cross borders. So what? Crimes have crossed borders before.

Spam isn't illegal everywhere yet. So what? Spam 2.0 (spam, malware & spyware) is the leading edge of far worse activities, often things that have been illegal as long as we've had laws.

It is high time that governments and law enforcement stop thinking of computer crime as that perpetrated by teenagers in their parent's basement. It is the Russian Mob and other organized criminals that are doing this.

While we are at it, we should mention 'cyber-warfare', something often conflated with cyber-crime. Cyber-crime is not "cyber-warfare." There may be state or terrorist agencies copying the tactics and methods of these criminals, but that does not mean that the criminals must be left alone until new cyber-warfare agencies have been created and funded.

As Purdue computer science professor 'Spaf' Spafford was recently quoted as saying in a note-worthy piece 'Cyberwar Vs. Cybercrime' on the GovInfo Security blog

"Why aren't we seeing the investment and prioritization being made in law enforcement, first? Why is all the publicity, funding and prioritization being given to the military—with efforts such as the build-up of the military cyber command—when so much of the clear and present threat is from the criminal element and not from other nation-states?"

Just so, Prof. Spafford!

As we have said repeatedly on this site, these are criminal gangs who have found an incredible loophole in the justice systems of the world: they can rob banks and people, with little chance of getting caught, let alone going to jail. This is not because they're doing things that aren't illegal; they've just found a new way to hide.

David Black, manager of the RCMP's cyber infrastructure protection section recently said to CAUCE Executive Director Neil Schwartzman "we don't do spam". OK, but why not? Spam is no longer, and hasn't been for some time, about simply sending unwanted emails. Spam is now a delivery mechanism for malware, which in turn threatens infrastructure, and facilitates theft. We have seen precious few cases filed using existing Federal computer intrusions laws in Canada, and none, to our knowledge have been filed under the renovated anti-phishing law, S-4, passed in September 2009.

Governments and law enforcement agencies need to begin to treat online theft with the same seriousness as they do other physical crimes. It is time to bring this up to the diplomatic level, or seriously consider refusing packets from places that treat the Internet, and innocent victims, as their personal ATM.

CAUCE is made up of people who care about email qua email. We understand it, we love it. It is still the 'killer app'. Furthermore, we understand why some folks in law enforcement or the judiciary might ask, "When there are people stealing millions or hurting people in the commission of violent crimes, why are you wasting our time with 'just' a spam case?" Here's why:

1. Most spam is sent by organized criminal gangs, just like other organized crime.
2. Those gangs intentionally operate trans-nationally, in an effort to frustrate investigation and prosecution.
3. Money laundering of the proceeds from spam is routine, and that money directly fuels official corruption and other social ills.
4. Some spammers are actually selling something. Their favorite product? Counterfeit pharmaceuticals. In many cases these may be scheduled controlled substances, sold in bulk, and available to minors; in other cases, critical medicines needed to properly treat cancer and other serious illnesses may be counterfeit placebos, with potentially tragic results.
5. Spammers operate by compromising tens or hundreds of thousands of end-user PCs, violating those users' privacy and sometimes steal sensitive personally identifiable information such as individuals' and even corporate access to financial services at the same time they're using their systems to spam. Computer 'phishing' is no less a crime than bank robbery, home invasion, and mugging.

Cyber criminals consider cyber crime to be a virtually riskless offense; they're unlikely to be identified; if identified, they're unlikely to be investigated; if investigated, they're unlikely to be charged and prosecuted; if prosecuted, they're unlikely to be convicted; if convicted, they're unlikely to do jail time.

The courts need to make it clear that that's wrong in all respects. If you commit cyber crimes, you will be identified, investigated, charged, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to serious time and we will seize your assets.

This will not happen so long as crime, which involves the Internet, is dismissed as "cybercrime" and either scoffed at, or used to justify ever-increasing cyberwarfare budgets.

This isn't just email. This isn't a war. This isn't "cyber." This is crime. It is time to call a cop, and expect a response.

This post was co-authored by CAUCE Executives J.D. Falk and Neil Schwartzman.
http://www.circleid.com/posts/kidnap..._cyber_crimes/





When a Camcorder Becomes a Life Partner
Anne Eisenberg

YOU can shoot compelling video these days even when you have your hands full.

Small, lightweight, hands-free cameras — worn on a headband, for example, or tucked over an ear — will record life’s memorable moments as they unfold, even if you are busy holding your infant son or erupting in cheers at your daughter’s basketball game. And by attaching one of these cameras to your snowboard, you can even capture your own amazing race down a mountainside.

Cameras worn on helmets or harnesses have been popular during the last decade for specialized uses like skydiving or auto racing. But a new generation of devices that cost around $200, some of them recording in high-definition, may move wearable cameras into the mainstream, offering a new dimension in first-person documentation.

The cameras are likely to be very popular for both business and recreational use, said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard Law School and a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “People will put them on and wear them everywhere,” he predicted.

Police officers and building inspectors, for example, may don wearable cameras to document their interactions and observations. Autobiographers may use them to capture all that they see as they wander about each day, and the absent-minded may find them helpful in recalling where they left the car keys.

The GoPro HD Hero 960 ($179.99), introduced in late September, records high-definition video at 1,280 x 960 pixels and 30 frames a second. This small cube of a camera — it’s less than two inches high — snaps into a waterproof case. Combined, the camera and case weigh less than six ounces, said Nicholas Woodman, founder and chief executive of GoPro in Half Moon Bay, Calif. The lens can capture photos or video at an ultrawide, 170-degree angle, and the camera comes with a headband as well as plastic plates that can attach it to flat or curved surfaces.

The initial GoPro cameras were marketed for sports, beginning with a wrist-worn, film-based version for surfers in 2004. But since then, GoPro’s evolving line has proved to have hundreds of other applications that the company never imagined, Mr. Woodman said.

“We usually learn about them when we see the videos on YouTube or on CNN,” he said. Recently, for example, the staff clustered around a laptop to view video captured by a GoPro camera fastened to the elevator rescuing the trapped Chilean miners.

The Looxcie ($199), a small wearable camcorder introduced recently, loops over the ear. The camera is built into a Bluetooth headset that streams digital images wirelessly to Android phones that use a free Looxcie app. From there, the clips can go directly to e-mail, said Romulus Pereira, chief executive of Looxcie, which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. Soon the company will offer apps that make the camera compatible with other smartphones, he said.

The Looxcie is not a high-definition camera. It records at a resolution of 480 x 320 pixels at 15 frames a second. But it has a special button that makes it ideal for taking video of unexpected moments, Mr. Pereira said. When the camera is running in continuous-capture mode, and the wearer suddenly sees a goal scored at a hockey game, for instance, a quick push of the button will tell the camera to automatically save a clip of the preceding 30 seconds. Then the footage of the puck sailing into the net can be preserved and automatically e-mailed to friends. The camera weighs about an ounce and stores up to five hours of video, he said.

Michael Duplay, the technology director at the Stark County Park District in Ohio, recently tucked his Looxcie over his ear so it could record his first-person views of a walk in the woods. He also shot a video while he was driving, then sent the evidence of his car’s veering motion to his father for an expert analysis. (Dad diagnosed an alignment problem.)

As wearable cameras gain popularity, and as some amateur auteurs capture candid images of people with no wish to star on the Internet, the devices are sure to raise privacy and other issues, said Professor Zittrain of Harvard. “What will we do then?” he asked. “Ban them at basketball games and recitals?”

With proper procedures, though, the cameras could yield a trove of valuable evidence, helping future historians analyze what life was like in 2010. “We have painstakingly reconstructed ancient civilizations based on pottery and a few tablets,” he said. “I would love to leave this legacy instead.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/business/07novel.html





People Have "Right to be Forgotten" Online, Says EU
Stewart Mitchell

The European Commission wants to strengthen data protection rules to give more power to consumers – including the right to be forgotten online.

In a seemingly contradictory statement, the commission set out its strategy for strengthening data protection while at the same time making data more freely available.

"The protection of personal data is a fundamental right," said Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship.

"To guarantee this right, we need clear and consistent data protection rules. We also need to bring our laws up to date with the challenges raised by new technologies and globalisation," Reding said.

“The Commission will put forward legislation next year to strengthen individuals' rights, while also removing red tape to ensure the free flow of data within the EU’s single market."

Informed consent

In light of ongoing behavioural advertising activity and all-too-frequent privacy gaffes from the likes of Google and Facebook, the most relevant aspect of the proposals was an outline of how the EC could strengthen consumer protection.

The commission said it would look to keep personal data collection and use to a minimum, with transparent notification on how, why, by whom, and for how long data was used.

“People should be able to give their informed consent to the processing of their personal data,” the commission said in a statement. “They should have the 'right to be forgotten' when their data is no longer needed or they want their data to be deleted.”

The other key areas under consideration are tighter guidelines on how the police and criminal justice departments are able to store data, international recognition of European procedures, and more effective enforcement from data watchdogs such as the UK's Information Commissioner's Office.

After a period of consultation, the EC plans to push legislation through next year.

The UK Government is still facing the threat of court action from European lawmakers for its ongoing failure to make UK laws comply with the 1995 Data Protection Directive that should give Britons the same protection enjoyed in the rest of Europe.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/362527/p...online-says-eu





Creeper! Rando! Sketchball!
Ben Zimmer

When Liana Roux, a junior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was reading a Facebook event page for her friend’s birthday party recently, she noticed a terse proviso at the end of the announcement: “No randos.” The friend wanted only people she knew to come to her party and thus sought to bar any random strangers, or randos, in collegiate parlance.

Roux is keeping track of words like rando for an assignment in a class she is taking on the grammar of current English, taught by Connie C. Eble, the resident linguist in U.N.C.’s English department. Since 1972, Eble has asked her students to compile lists of slang that they encounter in their everyday interactions, and this semester, rando is going on Roux’s list.

Rando is one of a surprisingly large number of words that U.N.C. students use to refer to unfamiliar, suspicious or anxiety-producing outsiders. Skimming the lists that Eble has collected from recent classes, I kept spotting a familiar pattern: along with rando, there are nouns like creeper, sketcher and sketchball and adjectives like dubious, grimy, sketchy, sketch and skeazy. Sketchy and sketch have, in fact, been among the most frequently attested words culled from Eble’s students for the past several semesters.

These treacherous terms have been percolating for years on many American campuses. A list of slang compiled from students at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, published in the journal American Speech in 1975, included sketch as an adjective meaning “dangerous, risky” (“I think we’re in a sketch situation”). By 1996, one of Eble’s U.N.C. students offered sketch as a noun meaning “someone who is hard to figure out.” The variations sketchball, sketcher and sketchmaster followed thereafter, all sharing an air of suspicion and possible danger or at least discomfort.

The creep family is much older, originally describing people you can’t trust because they’re always “creeping around.” In early-20th-century America, a creep or creeper could refer to a sneaky thief, a cheating lover or a despicable person more generally. In later years, the annoying or shady creep begat creepo, creepazoid and creepshow. (And just as you can be creeped out by a creepy person, you can be sketched out by a sketchy person.)

We can thank the fine minds at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for moving random into the realm of the weird. As early as 1971, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, M.I.T.’s student paper, The Tech, was using random as an adjective meaning “peculiar, strange” or as a noun to disparage people outside a community, particularly the community of computer hackers. (The 1991 New Hacker’s Dictionary provides the example “The audience was full of randoms asking bogus questions.”) Eventually it could refer to unfamiliar faces in any social situation, like a party or a bar, with rando as a slangy 21st-century shortening.

Even if these terms describing creepy outsiders aren’t necessarily novel, the question remains: Why do they occur in such profusion on the U.N.C. slang lists? Eble points out that the words are typically used by women, who currently make up nearly 60 percent of U.N.C.’s student population. Compared with past generations, Eble said, “female students are putting themselves into more dangerous situations than they did in my day,” especially when it comes to dating and partying. Terms like creeper, rando and sketchball come in handy as women deal with men who may try to give them unwanted attention.

In interviews I conducted with Eble’s students, one recurring theme that emerged was the impact of technology and social media on the need to patrol social boundaries. “With Facebook and texting,” Natasha Duarte said, “it’s easier to contact someone you’re interested in, even if you only met them once and don’t really know them. To the person receiving them, these texts and Facebook friend requests or wall posts can seem premature and unwarranted, or sketchy.”

Facebook in particular lends itself to “stalkerish” behavior, Christina Clark explained, and indeed the compound verb Facebook stalk (meaning “excessively or surreptitiously peruse another’s Facebook profile”) shows up in the latest slang lists. “People put things on Facebook a lot of the time to show off pictures of themselves and to meet new people, but some of these new people are undesirables,” Clark said. “Unfortunately, it can be hard to filter these people out without feeling unkind, so this information is available to them, and often it is alarming if they seem to be looking through pictures or constantly trying to find out what you’re up to. These people then become stalkers or ‘creepers.’ ”

Lilly Kantarakias said she believes that the shift to technologically mediated exchanges among students is leading to a “loss of intimacy” and that this failure to engage in human contact is responsible for the rise in all of the “sketchy” talk. “People have lost both their sense of communication and social-interaction skills,” Kantarakias said. “We know only how to judge people off of a Facebook page or we easily misinterpret texts or e-mails. You can see it in the way people walk around campus, texting on their cells, being completely oblivious to the hundreds of people surrounding them. We’ve become lazy with our speech and our social profiling of fellow human beings.”

Roux observed that “as college students, we navigate through an enormous social landscape every day.” The slang words for suspicious outsiders “create a distance between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ between our clique and the creepers.” These “terms of exclusion,” as Roux sees them, don’t just separate an in-group of students from potentially dangerous people but also from “people we just dislike or people who are perceived as different or weird.” And that type of behavior, even if it is complicated these days by new technology, new social pressures and new slang expressions, is surely as old as the hills.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/ma...anguage-t.html





A Home System Leaves Hand Controls in the Dust
Seth Schiesel

I had just started trying Microsoft’s new Kinect system for the Xbox 360 the other day when my friend Lee knocked on my front door.

Inviting him in, all I said was, “Welcome to the future.”

Thirty seconds later we were on my couch, sitting across the living room from my television with the sleek black Kinect sensor perched unobtrusively beneath the screen.

“Check this out,” I told him, then commanded, “Xbox, ESPN.”

The screen responded, “Launching ESPN...” before blooming into a live broadcast of a tennis tournament in Switzerland. “Xbox,” I said again, and the bottom of the screen displayed a menu including the options “Live Events,” “On Demand Events” and “Highlights.”

“Highlights.” An incredulous grin began to fight its way across his face.

A menu of basketball, football and baseball recaps appeared. “Video 2,” I said, and there was Tim Lincecum of the San Francisco Giants talking about the World Series. “Xbox, fast forward,” I decreed, and the video became a blur. “Faster,” I said, and the pace accelerated to four times real speed. I urged it on, saying again, “Faster,” bringing up a little “8x” icon.

Suddenly I barked, “Play,” and the picture immediately snapped into perfectly synced focus as the interview continued. Lee, a tech-savvy 20-something who is rarely impressed by my various electronic wonders, turned to me and said his first words since sitting down perhaps three minutes earlier, “Are you kidding me?”

Kinect is clearly the most exciting, most important leap forward for interactive home entertainment since Nintendo introduced the Wii four years ago. Nothing since the Wii, certainly not Sony’s imitative Move system for the PlayStation 3, approaches the ambition and technical achievement of Kinect in potentially reshaping the mass home media experience.

Seven hours later we had fired up some rocking Phish tracks from Microsoft’s Zune online service. We had played soccer by actually standing up and kicking and had played beach volleyball by actually digging, setting, jumping and spiking in Kinect Sports. We had boogied down to Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” and “Don’t Sweat the Technique” by Eric B. & Rakim in MTV Games’ Dance Central. We had ridden ultrafast futuristic skateboards in Sega’s Sonic Free Riders. We had plugged virtual leaks (more fun than it sounds) and had navigated river rafts through the rapids in Kinect Adventures.

It was only then that we realized we had not touched any buttons or actually held any sort of remote control or electronic device all day; my traditional Xbox controller, festooned with 17 different buttons, triggers and sticks, sat dormant on the coffee table. We had done everything by either speaking to the system, waving an arm or actually moving our bodies in front of the screen. The Wii brought console gaming back into the mainstream by creating a controller that you could just move around. Kinect is bringing console gaming into the future by doing away with the controller altogether. Nope, not kidding.

The system has limitations, but Kinect is truly inspiring because it is easy to see that Microsoft is only beginning to take advantage of what this system can do. With Kinect, Microsoft has packaged the fruits of many years and many hundreds of millions of dollars (if not more) of research and investment into a product that may finally get the company into the millions of living rooms it has been craving for so long.

And that is the big picture, so to speak. Over the years Microsoft has spent untold fortunes trying to make the leap from a computer software company to a mass consumer entertainment company. Home media server and television set-top box initiatives have come and gone and none have made Microsoft a living-room fixture. (In fairness, Microsoft’s rival Apple has not had significant success there either.)

With Kinect, Microsoft is finally getting it right. And that is because Kinect, while it incorporates ridiculously advanced technology and software, is not about technology or software. It is about delivering an immediately accessible and understandable new way of having fun at home, one that no other company or system can even dream of providing.

As I threw a virtual ball with my real arm to my black panther cub running around a forest glade on the screen in Kinectimals, I had the same thought as when the system tracked my entire body so I could master a yoga pose in Your Shape: Fitness Evolved by Ubisoft.

What kept echoing in my mind was the famous dictum of the author Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Most of the time Kinect simply feels like magic. You stand in front of the screen with this footlong black sensor bar glinting at you from beneath or above your TV, and the thing can tell where you are and what you are doing. More often than not it can even tell who you are; using facial recognition it can automatically sign you into your Xbox Live profile.

To navigate menus with Kinect, just wave your arm, even if you are sitting. Leave your hand-controlled pointer on a menu item for a few seconds, and it opens. Or simply talk to the system, not by yelling but with the direction and volume you might use for a dog.

Does the system recognize every voice command exactly the first time? Of course not. But it works consistently enough that I never wanted to reach for those relics of the past: a plastic controller or remote control. One potential issue is that the system does require a fair amount of space to operate properly; you’re going to want to stand about eight feet from the screen, and while that shouldn’t be a problem in suburban homes, this is not going to work effectively in dorm rooms or cramped studios. Another nit: Kinect controls don’t work when playing normal DVDs. A more far-reaching deficiency is the absence of any 3-D games for Kinect, though I’m sure Microsoft is working on that.

But over all the Kinect experience is so captivating that I found myself looking at my other electronics with scorn. I don’t want to have to remember channel numbers. Why can’t I just say, “DirecTV, CNN” or “DirecTV, Fox,” and have that work? Why can’t I just say, “Stereo, radio,” or “Stereo, iPod”?

I suspect that one day you will. But with Kinect on Xbox 360, one day is now.
http://tv.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/art.../04kinect.html





How Apple Almost Got Microsoft’s Kinect Game Controller
Leander Kahney

In June 2008, on a flight home from Europe to San Francisco, I was given a fascinating demo of some jaw-dropping technology.

I was sitting next Inon Beracha, CEO of Israeli company PrimeSense, which had developed a low-cost chip and software to do 3D machine vision.

The system used a pair of cameras and an infrared sensor to highlight people and track their movements.

On his laptop, Beracha showed me videos of people waving their hands in the air to control Wii-like games. He showed people controlling TV programming menus by gesturing their hands in the air. And, most impressive of all, someone flipping through a photo slide show like they were Tom Cruise in Minority Report. It was so slick, I asked him if it was CGI. It was real, he said, and so cheap, the technology could eventually be found everywhere in the home, office and car.

Of course, PrimeSense’s system is at the heart of Microsoft’s new Kinect game controller, which is getting rave reviews and looks set to be a monster hit. It’s a “crazy, magical, omigosh rush,” says the New York Times‘ David Pogue.

And it almost belonged to Apple.

On the plane, Beracha told me the technology had the potential to revolutionize all kinds of interfaces. Wii-like gaming was the most obvious example, but Beracha believed it would also replace remote controls completely and inspire all kinds of new automation systems for homes and workplaces.

The technology had been developed by a bunch of engineers in the Israeli military. They had recently hired him to shop it around Silicon Valley and find partners to commercialize it. It was hot. He had back-to-back meetings at all the big companies in the valley, and had already signed some leading names in gaming, tech and consumer electronics.

In fact, he’d already had several meetings at Apple. It was the first place he and his engineers thought of. “It was the most natural place for the technology,” he said.

Apple has a history of interface innovation, of course, and had recently introduced the iPhone with its paradigm-shifting multitouch UI. PrimeSense’s system went one step further: It was multitouch that you didn’t even have to touch. Apple seemed like a natural fit.

Yet the initial meetings hadn’t gone so well. Obsessed with secrecy, Apple had already asked Beracha to sign a stack of crippling legal agreements and NDAs.

He shook his head. Why didn’t he want to do a deal with Apple? No need. The technology was hot. He could sell it to anyone.

“Apple is a pain in the ass,” he said, smiling.
http://www.cultofmac.com/how-apple-a...ntroller/67951





Capital One Made Me Different Loan Offers Depending On Which Browser I Used
Phil Villarreal

Devin says Capital One's online car loan rates differ depending on which browser you use to go loan-hunting. Apparently the bank's loan-offering robot doesn't think much of Firefox users.

Devin writes:

So this is a new one. Not sure if you've seen it before. I just put my order in for my Nissan Leaf and received the total price for it so decided it'd be a good idea to take a look and see what auto loan rates were. I checked my credit union first and they currently are offering 3.99%. Not bad, but about a week ago Capital One had sent me an email advertising a 3.10% rate. I went to check the website using my default browser (Firefox 4 Beta 6) and noticed it was at 3.5%.

I figured it had just gone up since I received the email. I tried to use their little payment calculator but the flash based widget wouldn't work properly in the Firefox Beta so I loaded up Safari to try and funny enough the rate offered was 2.7%. I checked in Chrome and Opera to see if it was maybe just something wrong with the Firefox beta and Chrome's rate was 2.3% while Opera's was 3.1%.

I'm not sure why Capital One would choose to offer Chrome users a lower rate than Firefox users, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Devin installed fresh versions of the browsers in order to make sure the changes didn't result from different cookie settings. It seems those looking for a Capital One loan should apply through Chrome.
http://consumerist.com/2010/11/capit...er-i-used.html





Boucher Defeat a Loss for Tech Policy World
Gigi Sohn

Whatever the final results of this election night, nothing will be more shocking or sad for Public Knowledge and me personally then the defeat of Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va), the current Chair of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology & the Internet. Rep. Boucher, widely recognized as one of the most tech-savvy and intelligent members of Congress, has long been an advocate for consumers on a wide variety of communications and intellectual property issues.

Public Knowledge owes a debt of gratitude to Rep. Boucher for many reasons. First and foremost, he has been the best friend of fair use on Capitol Hill. In 2002, 2003 & 2007, he introduced legislation to allow consumers to break digital locks for lawful purposes - a fair use exception to the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And while the odds against that legislation passing were always great, Boucher understood the symbolic importance of standing up for consumers' rights to use technology lawfully. As important, he served as a moderating force both on the House Energy & Commerce and Judiciary Committees against those many members of Congress willing to give large media companies virtually everything on their copyright wish lists. Whenever I testified in front of the generally hostile Judiciary Committee, I know I could count on Rick Boucher and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) to come to my rescue and ask tough questions of the copyright maximalists.

Rep. Boucher was also a good friend to Public Knowledge and its goals during his two-year chairmanship of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology & the Internet. He weighed in on behalf of consumers in urging the FCC to promote competition in the market for cable set-top boxes. He had the right instincts in working to fix the broken Universal Service Fund and protect consumer privacy online. And while PK might have preferred that he be a stronger advocate for network neutrality, he did not interfere with FCC efforts and those of Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Henry Waxman (D-CA), and indeed was sympathetic to our calls for open Internet principles to be applied to wireless Internet access providers.

Above all, two things stand out for me in the 9+ years I've had the pleasure of working with Rick Boucher. The first are the conversations/debates I, my staff and colleagues had with him. Rapid fire, back and forth, it was clear he knew the law, the policy and the technology as well or better than you did. The second was his willingness to meet with me and my staff at any time. Though I am a mere public interest advocate, Rick Boucher's door was always open, and he was extremely generous with his time, even after he became subcommittee chair.

So Public Knowledge and I will miss Rick Boucher terribly. It is a loss for us, for technology policy and for the country.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gigi-s..._b_778037.html





Final Nail in Coffin for Net Neutrality?
David Goldman

Before Tuesday's midterm elections, there were 95 House and Senate candidates who pledged support for Net neutrality, a bill that would force Internet providers to not charge users more for certain kinds of Web content.

All of them lost -- and that could mean the contentious proposal may now be all but dead.

The Federal Communications Commission tried to implement Net neutrality rules but got smacked down in April by a court ruling saying it did not have the authority to do so. As a result, it is preparing a proposal asking Congress to give it new authority to regulate broadband Internet service.

If passed, the Net neutrality law would require Internet providers like phone and cable companies to treat all Web content equally. They would prevent providers from restricting access to certain sites or applications, or collecting fees to deliver some sites faster than others.

Content creators -- including Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500), Amazon.com (AMZN, Fortune 500) and eBay (EBAY, Fortune 500) -- have largely supported Net neutrality. Internet providers -- most notably Comcast (CMCSA, Fortune 500) and Time Warner Cable (TWC, Fortune 500) -- have argued against it.

The debate over Net neutrality has been fiercely fought on both sides, and experts say the FCC's proposed legislation had little chance of passing even in the current Congress.

The way the FCC is considering implementing the new regulations is vehemently opposed by cable and telecom companies, as well as many Republican and Democratic lawmakers.

The FCC has proposed that broadband be reclassified as a "Title II" telecommunications service, similar to other telephone companies. Opponents say this is a nuclear option, since it could potentially prevent broadband providers from implementing legitimate controls over their service, such as curbing massive downloads that swallow up bandwidth for users.

Critics also argue the legality of reclassification to Title II is questionable, and the FCC would open the door to a sea of unnecessary court battles.
0:00 /3:59Why Diller pushes for net neutrality

The FCC had planned on bringing its proposal to a vote in September, but delayed it until after the election, given the opposition. Even a more relaxed compromise bill drafted by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., failed to gain enough traction to pass.

Republican lawmakers largely oppose the idea of Net neutrality. Though a majority of Democratic lawmakers support the issue -- all of the 95 candidates that said they would support Net neutrality on the left-leaning Progressive Change Campaign Committee's website were Democrats -- they have been divided on whether to pass the FCC's proposed legislation.

The widespread Democratic losses made an already uphill battle even tougher. More than a dozen incumbent congressmen who had voted for a similar Net neutrality bill in 2006 were voted out of office on Tuesday, most notably Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., a 28-year House veteran.

Now, experts say the FCC needs to regroup and weigh its options.

"Obviously, the election results mean the FCC has to go about it alone or work out some sort of deal," said Ron Gruia, principal consultant at Frost & Sullivan. "That's not an easy balancing act. With change in the composition of House, the momentum for legislative change and the likelihood of changing broadband to Title II is gone."

The FCC declined to comment for this story.

Rey Ramsey, CEO of technology lobby group TechNet, said he believes the FCC will take up the legislation during the lame duck session. TechNet supports Net neutrality and has lobbied for the Waxman compromise bill.

But other experts said a lame duck vote was unlikely. Another option is for the FCC to reclassify broadband on its own, without Congress' support.

"The FCC will move forward eventually, because it has no other choice," said Sascha Meinrath, director of the left-leaning New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative. "The FCC wanted Congress to move forward with its rules, but that amounted to an abdicating of its authority to Congress."

Though changing broadband to Title II on its own is arguably within the FCC's power, such an action would set it up for a series of legal battles, similar to the one it lost in April.

A third option is to try another compromise. Tired of inaction both in Congress and from the FCC, Google and Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) hashed out a compromise proposal that they hoped would bridge the gap between the two sides and propel the legislation forward. But the FCC was ambivalent about the plan, and some big names like Facebook lobbied against it.
http://money.cnn.com/2010/11/03/tech...tion/index.htm





Bogus Grass-Roots Politics on Twitter

Data-mining techniques reveal fake Twitter accounts that give the impression of a vast political movement.
Kurt Kleiner

Researchers have found evidence that political campaigns and special-interest groups are using scores of fake Twitter accounts to create the impression of broad grass-roots political expression. A team at Indiana University used data-mining and network-analysis techniques to detect the activity.

"We think this technique must be common," says Filippo Menczer, an associate professor at Indiana University and one of the principal investigators on the project. "Wherever there are lots of eyes looking at screens, spammers will be there; so why not with politics?"

The research effort is dubbed the Truthy project, a reference to comedian Stephen Colbert's coinage of the word "truthiness," or a belief held to be true regardless of facts or logic. The goal was to uncover organized propaganda or smear campaigns masquerading as a spontaneous outpouring of opinion on Twitter—a tactic known as fake grass roots, or "Astroturf."

The researchers relied largely on network-analysis techniques, in which connections between different members of a network are mapped out. Long used in mathematics and the sciences, network analysis is increasingly being used to study the Internet and social networks. The team received tips from Twitter users about suspicious messages and accounts, and then conducted network analysis to understand how these accounts were linked. They also tracked "memes"—keywords or Web links—that suddenly saw a big spike in usage. If the memes came from many otherwise unconnected accounts, they were likely to be legitimate. But if they came from relatively small, tightly connected networks of accounts, they were more likely to be Astroturf.

Menczer says the research group uncovered a number of accounts sending out duplicate messages and also retweeting messages from the same few accounts in a closely connected network. For instance, two since-closed accounts, called @PeaceKaren_25 and @HopeMarie_25, sent out 20,000 similar tweets, most of them linking to, or promoting, the House minority leader John Boehner's website, gopleader.gov.

In another case, 10 different accounts were used to send out thousands of posts, many of them duplicates slightly altered to avoid detection as spam. All of the tweets linked back to posts on a conservative website called Freedomist.com.

"If you hear the same message from many different sources that you think are independent who are saying the same thing, you're much more likely to believe it," says Bruno Gonçalves, a research associate on the project. Repeated messages can also show up as "trending" topics on Twitter, and can even influence Google's search results. Gonçalves says the researchers are now working to automate the process of identifying suspicious content solely by studying network topology.

The inspiration for the project was a paper published by Panagiotis Takis Metaxas and Eni Mustafaraj of Wellesley College in July 2010. They studied the 2008 special election for a Massachusetts Senate seat between Democrat Martha Coakley and Republican Scott Brown, and found that many Twitter accounts repeated the same negative tweets, apparently in a successful attempt to influence Google's Realtime search results for either candidate's name.

In one case, a network of nine Twitter accounts, all created within 13 minutes of one another, sent out 929 messages in about two hours as replies to real account holders in the hopes that these users would retweet the messages. The fake accounts were probably controlled by a script that randomly picked a Twitter user to reply to, and a message and a Web link to include. Although Twitter shut the accounts down soon after, the messages still reached 61,732 users.

Bernardo Huberman, who studies social computing at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, isn't sure such dirty tricks will accomplish much. In a study that successfully predicted the popularity of movies based on Twitter activity, he found that legitimate movie studio Twitter campaigns were largely ineffective compared to honest mass opinion. To truly influence opinion, you have to reach millions of people, not just a few thousand, he says. "Yes, indeed, people are doing this. So what's new?" he says.

But Menczer thinks Twitter Astroturfing could motivate like-minded readers to get out and vote, discourage political opponents from voting, or influence swing voters. "The cost is almost zero," he points out. "For the cost of one ad on TV, you could pay 10 people to spend all their time doing this."
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/26666/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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